Tim Worstall

The next step for the single currency will be for world commodity prices to be fixed in euros rather than dollars, a development that would also strengthen the arguments for UK membership. At present, manufacturers in Britain and, indeed, the eurozone are hostages to fluctuations in the US economy that have nothing to do with [...]

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Here and here.
Can they, will they, pull our irons from the fire?

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That 10 p tax rate thing? VED?

more cat pictures

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A very Froggie way to do it.

Now country and western has become so big in France that the country’s bureaucrats have decided to bring the craze under state control.
The French administration has moved to create an official country dancing diploma as part of a drive to regulate the fad. Authorised instructors who have been on [...]

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Volunteers with no experience of social work are successfully being used in a groundbreaking scheme to help the families of children on the at-risk register.
Two trials conducted over the past three years have led to the removal from the register of all the children involved, The Times has learnt. Crucially, the children have remained off [...]

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I’m not sure that the Guardian is doing itself any favours here.

In a response to a series of points prompted by the Private Eye story, a Tesco spokesman declined to address details. He said: "The Guardian has already admitted a serious libel against Tesco after the last time it conducted an inept investigation into our [...]

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If well told.
I can’t quite remember where I first saw it. In the Joy of Yiddish? A collection of Milton Berle stories? Anyway, US seaman and his "Kluge" machine.

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At the ASI.
There really are free lunches in economics. Just stop the politicians from continuing with the damn fool things they are already doing.

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This is an excellent piece which deserves to be read in full. By shifting manufacturing offshoe Hornby has been able to reduce manufacturing costs, of course. But in the process it’s raised total employment in the UK and those jobs here are in hte design side, the high wage end of the business. Oh, and [...]

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Dawn Primarolo, the public health minister, said: "Protecting children from smoking is a government priority and taking away temptation is one way to do this.
"If banning brightly coloured packets, removing cigarettes from display, and removing the cheap option of a pack of 10 helps save lives, [...]

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The B.
Idiot Guardian columnists, no, scientists are not competent to talk about what we should do about climate change.

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The GI.
It’s development itself that leads to the emancipation of women.

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Johnny Porritt asks a question:

"Moreover, the less well-off are being disproportionately hammered, and the hikes in fuel taxes are far from fiscally neutral and never have been.
So, economically, socially, ethically, what are the implications of all that?
Your thoughts really welcome. As the Government’s official advisers on such matters, what do you think the SDC’s advice [...]

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Giggle, splurt, snort.

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He sleeps in pyjamas, paints his walls yellow and over a year drinks 540 glasses of alcohol and has sex with his wife 117 times, as well as having erotic dreams 15 times a month.
She wears nighties to bed, likes baking, orchids and piling cuddly toys on the back of the sofa. She also has [...]

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Slightly alarming, don’t you think?
That the entire global cooling of the 1940s turns out to have been based on errors in measurement (and yes, this does make me change my mind about that part of the story)?
What other parts of the narrative are down to such errors?

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Mr Oaten insisted that he had not, as yet, secured another job. “There’s no offer on the table that I’m chewing my leg off about,” he said.

Just gets weirder, doesn’t it, after the coprophilia?

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This man is at the least economically illiterate and probably innumerate as well:

Going down the renewables and efficiency route will give us more jobs, more power and more security and, in the long term, for less money.

Creating jobs is a cost of such schemes, not a benefit. I think you’ll find that when people turn [...]

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Belongs to Alexander Chancellor.

One argument for taxing the rich heavily is not so much to narrow the wealth gap as to liberate them from their enslavement.

We’re taxing you for your own good you know!
Sheesh. God forbid that we should have the Puritans back, running your life for you for your own moral improvement.

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Dark days call for direct measures, which perhaps explains why Gordon Brown has taken to cold-calling members of the public who write him letters of complaint.
Although the majority of queries and complaints written to the prime minister get a polite, generic letter in reply, as many as two dozen people a week get a personal [...]

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