Tim Worstall

Good grief.

To do the latter denies the fact that tax paid is a dsitribution to society out of profit for the licence given to an enterprise to operate. It is not a cost.

Tax is not a cost? Barmy.

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At Pajamas Media.
About trade and tariffs n’ stuff.
My original final line was something like: "Barriers to trade are therefore made up of both the costs of transport and tariffs and quotas. We’re told that if we raise tariffs and quotas we’ll become richer: if someone told you that raising the cost of transport would make […]

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At the GI.
It appears that the more socialism and equality you’ve had forced upon you the less socialism and equality you actually desire.

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At the Business.
A surprising answer to the question of what women really want (as told to me by a feminist no less) and an interesting medieval pope.

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Funny old thing, the free market. It acts like a bullshit detector for the false prophets of consumer research.

Martin Samuel.

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You’ve really got to stop listening to Richard Murphy you know, he’s making you look very foolish.

"Check out the recent report The Missing Billions from tax expert Richard Murphy, for the TUC, who identified £25bn of tax lost from the exchequer. He lists major companies whose tax payments don’t begin to reflect the size of […]

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A very neat little story from Frank Field showing where the problem really lies:

The guy I buy my coffee from in the morning has run the franchise also for ten years. Every day during this time at least two and may be as many as five young people come in asking for a job. Not […]

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Via, this. An Early Day Motion.
EDM 982

FIDEL CASTRO
20.02.2008
Burgon, Colin

That this House commends the achievements of Fidel Castro in securing first-class free healthcare and education provision for the people of Cuba despite the 44 year illegal US embargo of the Cuban economy; notes the great strides Cuba has taken during this period in many fields such […]

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At The Business.
Alistair Darling doesn’t understand tax incidence either and fining Microsoft.

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How can you trust a country to have a serious vote when its citizens have recently voted to have a puppet turkey represent it in the Eurovision song contest?! I joke of course…

But of course, the European Parliament was not joking when it voted to ignore the result now, was it?

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A Conservative administration would increase health spending by up to an extra £28 billion a year, a leading moderniser has told The Times. Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, gave a long-term commitment that under the Tories health spending will rise to take up an extra 2 per cent of GDP.

Is Lansley still under […]

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The idea that companies are "overtaxed" is difficult to sustain when leading companies are systematically avoiding tax.

When companies are going to great lengths, involving no little cost and a lot of hard work, to avoid taxation that is of course prima facie evidence that they are indeed being "overtaxed". If they were not being overtaxed […]

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Guardian leader today:

The most worrying thing about tax avoidance is the corporate thinking it illustrates. Listen to Tesco’s defence of its hunt for tax havens: it is already paying a lot in taxes, and avoiding giving any more is "our duty to shareholders and customers alike". That philosophy is becoming ever more widespread. Tax avoidance […]

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In the Telegraph? What next? Polly and Mahdi following her?

…our big-bonus City bosses provide awful role models.

So, people who work all the hours God gave to finance industry, the thing which creates the wealth which is dragging hundreds of millions up out of destitution, who pay themselves a percentage of the value they create rather […]

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The "yummy mummy" is an unattainable ideal that puts too much pressure on modern mothers, a study has revealed.

You mean you can’t have it all?

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Gotta love this:

Under the new contract, responsibility for out-of-hours care automatically went to primary care trusts and as a result GPs, including part-time doctors, now work an average of 36.3 hours a week.

The piece has all sorts of numbers in it: £250k a year pay! and then that 36.3 hours a week. But look at […]

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Samir Shah, the former head of current affairs, said previous BBC efforts to employ black and Asian managers had been "dire".

I assume he means that those black and Asian managers hired had been dire? Bit of an odd thing to say when you’re an Asian manager who has been booted upstairs isn’t it?

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Ministers have been accused of "rank hypocrisy" after it emerged that a third of Gordon Brown’s Cabinet are campaigning against Government plans to axe post offices in their own constituencies.

This is entirely rational: it’s because they are working in two roles.
On the one hand they are constituency MPs, beholden to that small subset of the […]

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Time was when the left was well aware of the dangers of people seeking to use elected office for their own financial gain, and raised the demand that MPs should be paid no more than the average wage of their constituents.

No, truly. Inspired. So your average Labour MP, representing some chavvy gehtto would be paid […]

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At the GI.
Ron Bailey and George Monbiot agree on something. Can doom be far behind?
 

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