Tim Worstall

Speccie.
The perils of self-sufficiency and why we should abolish national pay scales.

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Helps that he’s one of ours, too.

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Don’t say this blog doesn’t guide you to the truth….

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Our Stevie:

Forgive me, Ms Gadian, but you’re missing the point. You’re not being discriminated against. You’re being weeded out. It’s quite deliberate. If you can’t read or write sufficiently well to pass a multiple-choice test, you shouldn’t be a doctor.

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So, a private school goes bust as a result of the credit crunch.
The Times manages to find some most toothsome totty (down boy, down, you’re way too old) to photograph about it.
It’s important to give people a visual to empahsise the horrors of such a story, isn’t it?
 

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Good man here, talking good sense.

The contemporary reality that certain drugs can only be purchased from unregulated, untaxed and uncontrolled criminals is the result of policy choices. By treating the debate on alternatives to maintaining organised crime’s monopoly as a no-go area, this report helps entrench the view that the basic tenets of prohibition cannot [...]

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Neil McKeganay is the Professor of Drug Misuse Research at the University of Glasgow. Fortunately he’s not the possessor of Adam Smith’s old chair in logic.
For here is his argument:

We used to count the number of addicts in the hundreds; we now count them in the hundreds of thousands. The UK Drug Policy Commission’s report [...]

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You know there’re those screaming for a windfall tax on the huge profits of the energy companies? Tony Woodley was one calling for it I think….Polly another.
Hmm.

Centrica will today announce a near 30pc fall in profits as the surge in wholesale gas prices sent earnings at British Gas tumbling.
Despite pushing up prices to households earlier [...]

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Well, quite:

Grant Thornton senior tax partner Mike Warburton said: "Guardian Media Group has enjoyed a tax holiday courtesy of some very helpful rules introduced by their friend Gordon Brown. They are taking full advantage of the relief legally available to them, which all businesses should do. That’s fine, but don’t knock people who do exactly [...]

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The Arts Council has "lost respect" from most of the bodies it helps fund as a result of a botched attempt to "shake-up" England’s cultural institutions, an official report has found.

Wonderful, now we can abolish it, yes?
That’s what, half a billion that we don’t have to tax the dustmen to pay for the pleasures of [...]

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No, not the results here:

Babies conceived through IVF are much more likely to die at birth than those conceived naturally, the results of a new study show.

The death of babies is never to be considered excellent.
No, rather, we’ve got a perfect example of two things: the state of science reporting and the much better state [...]

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Labour was plunged into open warfare as Gordon Brown’s allies launched a series of highly personal attacks on leadership rival David Miliband.

Who’s making the popcorn then?

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Via Iain, this.

Internet users will be protected from abusive bloggers and malicious Facebook postings under proposals to set up an independent internet watchdog, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.
The body, made up of industry representatives, would be responsible for drawing up guidelines that social networking sites, the blogosphere, website owners and search engines would be expected [...]

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Speccie.
Doha collapses and the hypothecation of green taxes.

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The Liberal Democrats‘ biggest donor, who was due to face a multimillion-pound fraud trial within weeks, is on the run.
Michael Brown, 42, who gave the Liberal Democrats £2.4million in 2005, was on bail and expected to face trial in September, charged with 18 offences relating to money laundering, theft, perverting the course of justice [...]

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OK, so, yes, NAFTA isn’t in fact free trade, it’s simply freer trade than what went before. Still, this is a pretty odd argument to use about it:

In agriculture, until the recent price spikes, cheap US corn flooded Mexican markets,

Consumers eat cheaper and are thus richer. And this is bad?

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Last year, Tesco sold £107.2 million of books. We may think of it as a grocer, but in reality it’s a behemoth, carrying the nation on its vast back like the turtles in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

One turtle, four elephants.

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We can expect the Guardian to be all over this, can’t we? Outraged squeals from Larry Elliott, Will Hutton and yes, our own beloved Polly? No?
Look what’s happening! A charity sells out of a productive UK business and then parks the money. No, they don’t invest again in UK jobs, they’re not supporting our economy, [...]

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For the last hour and a half or so all sorts of sites (including this one, the site for the hosts, the Speccie, Bishop Hill, various US sites as well) have been coming up as 503, or can’t find, various types of "nope, you can’t go there sonny".
Other sites (the newspapers say) have been coming [...]

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Gideon Rachman writes a column on China, deliberately using only cliches.
Why bother? Everyone knows that you can get that just by reading the Guardian when Martin Jacques is writing, don’t they?

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