Welcome to the Brian Micklethwait Archive. We are slowly adding writings to this site. For progress on this see the news section.

  • Do not bully the reader with nags to the effect that he is either a libertarian of exactly our type or a worm. Distinguish between telling him what libertarians think and telling him that he also should think that.

    Preaching to The Unconverted
    1982

  • I believe that cutting the top rate of income tax from 40% to 0% would be a huge improvement to Britain, even in the total absence of any changes to the taxes paid by lower paid people, or to taxes collected by other means.

    The Top Rate of Income Tax Should be Cut to Zero
    1996

  • Do some jippering. Buy some pluggles, and become a wadgellist. Try to be a rich wadgellist. If your parents object, tell them that this is what will make you most happy.

    Reflections and Recollections of an Occasional Career Counsellor
    2000

  • The famous Manhattan skyline is a sky line because land values vary continuously rather than discontinuously, not because any one person ever drew that line.

    Freedom, Order and Architecture
    1983

  • No matter how “extreme” is the opinion I may read in a pamphlet or magazine, I am never, so to speak, at its mercy. I can stop reading it at any moment, and so in the meantime I need not feel threatened or even discomforted by it.

    How to Win the Libertarian Argument
    1990

Archives

Latest Update

New Libertarian Alliance pamphlet: Design As Outcome

I have added another of Brian’s Libertarian Alliance pamphlets to the archive: Design As Outcome.

In it, Brian discusses the nature of design and knowledge. From his experience doing graphic design for the Libertarian Alliance pamphlets, he discovers that design is iterative. As a software developer, I notice that in fact his description of the process is remarkably similar to processes discovered by software developers: we iterate because the nature of the problem becomes more clear with successive attempts.

The designer does not know everything about the job he faces. He does not, to revert to the crossword analogy, have all the clues in front of him. Nor can he ever be sure that he has got any particular clue right, the way you usually can with crosswords. He merely makes a succession of design decisions, each on the basis of very different and very incomplete knowledge, and he hopes that these decisions will later turn out okay and that he won’t have to retrace too many of his steps.

Brian argues that, while Hayek said spontaneous order is, “the result of human actions, not of human design”, the process of design as discovery of how to achieve outcomes has more in common with spontaneous order than Hayek perhaps imagined.

Highlights

In this video, Steve Baker MP recounts how Brian introduced him to books about freedom.

On 25th January 2020 Mal McDermott interviewed Brian Micklethwait on the subject of the history of the libertarian movement in Britain.

Elsewhere

Here is a collection of other places on the internet where you may find writings by Brian.

Video