I’ve been busily organising the speaker schedule for the next few months, and am keen to share the details of an exciting programme.
Minimum Wage with Sam Bowman
Sam Bowman
Sam Bowman is a well-known figure at the Adam Smith Institute and recently appeared as the “right-leaning think tank” bogeyman on a somewhat biased BBC World Service programme to debate the minimum wage with “principal of Hertford College in Oxford” Will Hutton. Despite the anchor woman’s best efforts Sam made it clear that the empirical evidence is stronger than some believe and that imposing a minimum is also a moral problem. This will be a great opportunity to hear his arguments in full.
March 6th at the Rose and Crown
Political Marketing on Social Media with Rob Waller
Rob Waller
Rob is the social media entrepreneur who invented the “Fakers App” which embarrassed Barack Obama (and host of other well-known figures) who all seemed to have a larger twitter following than they rightly should. His particular thing is making interesting use of data to produce better business outcomes. He’ll be explaining some of the basic (and not so basic) ways to use social media marketing and how they apply to the field of politics.
Rob also founded this Meetup, obviously, so remember to buy him a drink!
April 3rd at the Rose and Crown.
The Libertarians of the English Revolution 1647-1649 with Richard Carey
Richard Carey © Brian Micklethwait
Richard Carey is a regular at the Rose and Crown, a Libertarian Home author, a passionate historian and a very smart guy. This talk has been trialed at Brian’s Fridays and I found it to be a fascinating and detailed account of the time, it’s epistemological fancies, the political debate and a fateful regicide.
May 1st at the Rose and Crown.
Summer Social
No speaker, but an opportunity to enjoy the sunshine in the beer garden with like-minded company. If you have any unused books or other literature that you are done with and wish to pass on, then bring them along to the Rose and Crown on June 5th.
As usual, all the speaker events will be video recorded and made available here, where the discussion can continue. I am also working on ways to make Q&As available. These are considerably more work to edit and it may involve changes to how the Q&As are run. I don’t like to mess with a winning formula but people have made it quite clear that the Q&As are interesting to them so a bit of experimenting will be going on.
Libertarian Home 
It is POSSIBLE for a minimum wage law not to increase unemployment – if the minimum wage (i.e. the price at which labour is sold – wages being prices, and minimum wage laws being a form of minimum price control) is set at, or below, the level the market would have established anyway – by the supply and demand of labour.
However, what would be the point of a minimum wage law that did not increase the wages of anyone?
As for the moral problem. That is obvious – the state is threatening violence if private employers offer potential employees a wage below X level. It is morally wrong to threaten violence to get private parties (employers and potential employees) to do what one wants them to.
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Your words are a lot more flattering than that picture!
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Yes, Richard Carey has become a Roundhead since that photo was taken. I believe I can supply another picture which proves this.
(I’m talking hair, you understand.)
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