What are economists good for?
The Guardian runs a piece today about congestion charges about to start up in London.
“I was initially sceptical about the congestion tax,” Livingstone began. “I was aware of the origins of the tax. It comes from the Thatcherite right. Milton Friedman and others argued for [it]… It is a flat-rate tax, like the poll tax. It would not be my tax of first choice.” However, he continued, London’s traffic was so bad, and the means of alleviating it that had been granted to the capital’s mayor were so limited, there was “wide public acceptance that something like a congestion tax must be introduced”. Two years later, in July 2001, when Livingstone was established as mayor and was formally unveiling his congestion charging scheme to journalists, he was clearer still about its intellectual origins: “I nicked the idea off Milton Friedman.”