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Technology is crushing traditional jobs. The command-and-control factory is being replaced by robots. Banks are rapidly removing pen-pusher jobs by the tens of thousands!!! For those with an economic bent, the Milton Friedman-type assumptions about how an economy operates are dead!

What’s taking over is the ‘gig’ economy. But what is it?  It’s pretty simple really.  More...

Some claim that freelancing, self-employment, whatever you want to call it, is surging in developed economies. For example: More...

ICA Executive Director Ken Phillips spoke at a ‘Liberty’ conference in Sydney over the weekend. With over 350 people in attendance and with more than 70 speakers it was a stimulating, ideas-packed weekend. Not everyone agreed with each other, but all present agreed on the right to speak freely.

Ken talked about how we at ICA have used the Australian Constitution to defend individual liberty, specifically the right of people to be self-employed. You might recall last year our:  More...

Owner-drivers
You’ll recall the mess last year in the attempts to destroy the businesses of owner-drivers in Australia.

However, the Victorian government is now reviewing its owner-driver laws, laws that we say are pretty good as they stand. We don’t think the review is looking to set up price-fixing as happened under the disbanded federal law. But Federal Labor voted to keep the disbanded laws. Who knows what the Victorian Labor government’s agenda might be? We urge owner-drivers to keep a close eye on this. More...

On Friday ‘The Trump’ becomes US President leading to, who knows? Meanwhile, Putin outmanoeuvres everyone as the master puppeteer of the Syrian ‘solution’. Ultimately it’s about oil? Chinese President Xi Jinping is the star attraction at the Davos capitalist soiree. That’s unsurprising! Based on purchasing power comparisons, China is now the world’s largest economy. The British pound is travelling south due to Brexit. Several pending elections in European countries could well see further disintegration of the EU.

From these snapshots the only thing we can say about economic certainty is that we live in a period of economic uncertainty! So do global forces make us powerless? No! More...

Last week, our Executive Director, Ken Phillips, contemplated some ‘revolutionary’ thoughts around self-employment as part of the summer break ‘think’ process.  

Trump
But those thoughts are minor compared with President-elect Donald Trump’s proposals for self-employed people in the USA. According to Forbes magazine and CBSNews,  Trump is going to open the tax floodgate for the self-employed, allowing them to access the 15 per cent tax rate he intends to apply to companies.  More...

Against a backdrop of 'revolutionary' social and political developments in 2016, ICA Executive Director Ken Phillips has posted a new blog which looks at the prospects for the new world of work in the year ahead. Noting the seemingly unstoppable growth of all forms of self-employment, Ken also examines some of the adverse reactions to self-employment and surveys some recent (and quite diverse) academic discussion about the value of 'being your own boss'. You can read Ken's full blog post here. More...

At ICA, we come across all sort of weird attacks on the self-employed. But one of the strangest is that we ‘screw over ourselves’. That was the argument mounted in California’s self-described ‘premier monthly business publication’, Comstock.

The ‘save us from ourselves’ argument was essentially the justification for Australia’s recent (fortunately failed) attempt to destroy the businesses of 35,000 owner-drivers. Lawyers are preparing the case for the class action to recover losses. Info here.  More...

The debate never seems to stop about whether being an independent worker is a good or bad thing.

Californian regulators and the Teamsters Union seem intent on forcing ride-sharing workers to be employees. There’s a $12 million lawsuit against Lyft  and Uber is involved in long drawn-out Californian litigation. Further, Californian lawmakers are looking to make it very difficult to work in the ‘gig’ economy.  More...

Even a casual observer of US politics would be aware of the wild circus happening around Donald Trump. The core of the Trump ‘issue’ is the rejection of party political ‘machines’ stomping on the will of the people.

Even Trump’s most likely (fellow) Republican contender, Tea Party Congressman Ted Cruz, is an anti-Republican machine person. He’s led the Tea Party in pushing for smaller (no deficit) government against both Republicans and Democrats. But even the Tea Party describes Trump as a ‘narcissistic demagogue’. Could Trump win the Republican nomination? Here’s an excellent New York Times article explaining the Republican Convention voting process. Now there’s confusion! More...