Tim Worstall

more animals

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I’m not all that sure I do support the occupations. The US in Iraq, Israel in the West Bank, not sure that I do. Not sure that I don’t either, for I steer well clear of Middle East issues. But I do have to admit a touch of surprise at seeing Lenin supporting illegal occupations. [...]

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but the fact of course remains that there is no such thing as a ‘government-funded charity’; the new and politically correct term is ‘quango-with-a-licence-to-beg’.

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The outstanding fact of intellectual history of the last hundred years is the struggle against economics.

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“In soup kitchens, food pantries and universities across the country, activists are planting the seeds for an overhaul of the way America feeds its more than 35 million hungry people….” Umm, isn’t that actually, "overhaul of the way America feeds 35 million people who would be hungry if we weren’t already feeding them"?

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Most amusing. Davide Boni, a councillor in Milan for the Northern League, which also opposes the building of mosques in Italian cities, said that kebab shop owners were prepared to work long hours, which was unfair competition. Sadly, that view, while amusing, isn’t limited to odd Italian politicians. This is also fun: There is confusion, [...]

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So, some private schools are going bust and thus thinking of applying to become academies. That is, become state schools. Opponents of the academy scheme said it was a major shift. Academies were devised to target children in the poorest areas. John Bangs, of the National Union of Teachers, said: "It’s bail-out for those schools. [...]

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It’s hard to believe, given the news, that GM is still the world’s largest car manufacturer, producing 9.4m cars to No 2 Toyota’s 8.5m in 2007. Whatever GM’s problems, low productivity is not one of them. If someone’s going to confuse gross production with productivity there’s not all that much point in listening to them [...]

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Polly’s on the warpath about corporate taxation. In fact, The Guardian is going to have a major report on it on Monday. And from what I can see they’ve swallowed the Richard Murphy view hook, line and sinker.  Which means that the whole research is going to be most interesting. There will be, for example, [...]

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At the ASI. Why do we taxpayers get fined when the government screws up?

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Is that there’s something different about this recession. America’s struggling newspaper industry suffered another blow from the financial turmoil as the Los Angeles Times announced on Friday it was cutting hundreds of jobs and downsizing the paper in the fight against "economic realities". The paper, one of 12 owned by the media giant, The Tribune [...]

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The second would be a state-funded programme to build 100,000 houses a year, which would provide homes for those who need them and create 50,000 jobs in the construction industry. Is John Cruddas seriously trying to say that each house built requires 6 man months of labour?

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Although January may have the reputation as the peak month for relationships break up, new statistics show Saturday night is due to be the year’s biggest night for first dates. People tend not to stay at home too long mourning the last relationship these days, do they? Thus the peak month for breakups is going [...]

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….a bloody disgrace, even by the standards of the unprincipled oafs infesting Whitehall. Guess what that’s about?

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Oliver Tickell is a strange bloke, isn’t he? But the carbon market also has to provide a secure, long-term price signal if it is to attract private investment in clean energy infrastructure on the scale we need – and the current carbon-price yoyo is failing entirely in this respect. Wild fluctuations create a risk that [...]

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Seumas Milne: That is the process which this week saw Bolivians vote, in the land where Guevara was hunted down, to adopt a sweeping new constitution empowering the country’s long-suppressed indigenous majority and entrenching land reform and public control of natural resources – after months of violent resistance sponsored by the traditional white ruling class. [...]

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Anyone floating around central London might like to come to Queen Anne’s Gate at 11 am ish this morning……

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Do you remember, just those few short months ago, when we had people screaming for a windfall tax upon the oil companies? You know, people like those frothing lefties, Compass? And there were a few people around who were pointing out (modesty doesn’t permit identification) that this was an artefact of rising crude prices and [...]

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And, yes, we’re back! And as we come back I find that Microsoft has actually released some interesting and useful software. When the vocals of famous songs are run through the software, the backing tracks it adds are so unlikely that the end results often turn out as surreal reinventions of the originals. Dozens of [...]

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When it comes to reviving the economy, tax cuts do not work as well as smart public spending. This might even be true. But where are we going to get *smart* public spending from given the dullards, pecksniffs and plain idiots that go into politics? In other news, those disposed to higher public spending suggest [...]

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