Tim Worstall

At CiF. Yes, of course we should freeze the minimum wage. The piece got cut a bit so here’s the full version.     We’ve been asked, should we freeze the national minimum wage? (NMW) Given that, sadly, we’re not going to abolish it any time soon the answer is yes, of course. For three [...]

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A request from an academic who often helps me in my searches for bits and bobs. Anyone know of a decent treatment of the economics of post WWII rationing in the UK? OK, we now regard it all as pretty much foolish nonsense (or at least, I do) but is there anyone who has written [...]

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"However, Hojatoleslam Ghasem Ebrahimipour, a sociologist, told Shabestan news agency that the trend was due to the availability of premarital sex, and feminism among educated women. "When a woman is educated and has an income, she does not want to accept masculine domination through marriage," he said." You’ve got your rise in the age of [...]

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I know, I know, we’re used to all that trope about how some want to ban Christmas. But I have to admit I’d not known that it was actually compulsory. Three young girls were found home alone and apparently abandoned on Christmas Eve, it emerged yesterday. The youngsters had been left with no presents to [...]

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What with all this monitoring of the internet, all this recording of emails: A missionary couple from Britain have been sentenced to a year’s hard labour in an African prison for calling the Gambian President a madman. David Fulton, a former army major, and his wife, Fiona, were convicted of sedition after sending critical e-mails [...]

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I don’t know any of the Steven Gerrard alleged assault details. He is innocent until proved otherwise, but I know how anyone can be stretched beyond normal endurance. Of course he’s innocent until proved otherwise. Everyone is. *   * Except for those offences where the bastards** have reversed the burden of proof, like ownership [...]

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There are also honours for the comic fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett, who is knighted, Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant is given the CBE. Very happy about the CBE, but you’re "appointed" a CBE.

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Hurrah! Hurrah! I know, I know, his Discworld novels are pap for sad geeks, still hungering after Dungeons and Dragons (err, like me, although I never did do D&D). And certainly, some of them are on the very light side of comic fantasy. However, there are some of them that climb very much higher on [...]

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Ritchie: But Tim comes from a very different part of the political and, might I say it, social spectrum. Social spectrum? What’s that all about then? Is he calling me an oik or something? A little weird to be sure. Murphy’s degree was Economics and Accounting. So was Tim Worstall’s. OK, so I wasn’t an [...]

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There is, however, another reason for not engaging further. I note some of the rather offensive comments on Tim’s blog. I am quite sure neither Dennis or I would allow such ad hominem attacks, all unfounded. But Tim comes from a very different part of the political and, might I say it, social spectrum. Tim [...]

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A council has begun legal action to recover more than £750,000 from its former chief executive. Christine Laird, 50, spent 18 of the 36 months that she was employed by Cheltenham borough council as its £75,000-a-year managing director off work suffering from stress. Her employment with the council was terminated in August 2005. The council [...]

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I was a Boots girl, myself. We rather fancied ourselves because we got 10 per cent off our Rimmel make-up and felt that put us above the supermarket lot in some obscure way. We’ve recently had a Waitrose employee in the family who got frightfully grand. "Ah," she said, on seeing the John Lewis chairman [...]

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At the Register. Different economic theories shed light on certain different parts of our problems and their solutions. Austrians and entrepreneurs for example, in the end, hold the key to the end of the recession.

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It was breath-taking and depressing to observe the transformation of New Labour after 1997, from the party of open government, human rights and civil liberties into an increasingly paranoid group of power-hogging and repressive political control freaks, who have done more damage to fundamental human rights in the past 11 years than any other (sequence [...]

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Here.

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Back at Takimag.

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Don’t know whether this comment will get through, given that "The debate is over". "But the policy is based on the simple model that the market rules, that there is a stable equilibrium, that the gifts of nature are free (and should be free) and that profit maximising (or ‘greed is good’) is what business [...]

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Now this is a bit of a surprise. Yet as the respected New York Venture Capitalist, Fred Wilson writes on his blog, whilst the downturn is the main cause of many of the recent business failures, something more fundamental is happening: “Clearly the economic downturn is the direct cause of most of these failures but [...]

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Maddie dear, I really think that this is stretching things a tad. An attempt to do just that will be in one of the most important of the new crop of Darwin books: Darwin’s Sacred Cause, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, published next month. They argue that Darwin was driven by a moral impulse [...]

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OK, perhaps a decent outline of the problem that I have with the left. This year the British left has a particular reason to mourn, for three substantial writers have gone – Harold Pinter, Adrian Mitchell and Bernard Crick. All reached out far beyond the world of politics – to theatre lovers, children, literary addicts [...]

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