Tim Worstall

Another one of those Guardian pieces about Cuba (not all that bad a one actually) and I spot this in the comments. No Rory, for its achievements against the odds the revolution is respected. A better life expectancy than the vastly richer US is no mean feat, not to mention the educational methods which are [...]

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Wasn’t this, well, a bit of a worry? I asked (in the Bank of England understatement is the modus operandi – or at least it was then). The faces that stared back looked drawn, fearful and rather weary. They pointed me towards another set of figures, even more worrying. They implied that if there was [...]

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As Mr Obama and his young family moved into a luxury hotel opposite the White House, it was announced that Bill Richardson, his nominee for commerce secretary, was stepping down amid allegations of wrongdoing. A federal grand jury in New Mexico is investigating accusations that Mr Richardson, the state’s governor, gave lucrative contracts to a [...]

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So I write about the campaign against prostitution. In the comments is this. Anyone who’s ever seen Julie Burchill’s likeness, or Jacqui Smith’s or Harriet Harman’s for that matter, know that it comes down to sheer jealously. All three know that if they went on the game they’d starve. Well, no, I didn’t say it, [...]

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Here.

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At The Register. About prostitution. Not quite sure why I’m writing for geeks about prostitution really: Linux has made that entirely unnecessary*.   * Such a bad joke that Microsoft actually used it in an advertisement in New Zealand.

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Michael Lewis has a great piece on sub prime. This leaps out at me. In retrospect, pretty much all of the riskiest subprime-backed bonds were worth betting against; they would all one day be worth zero. But at the time Eisman began to do it, in the fall of 2006, that wasn’t clear. He and [...]

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THE Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant. The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of [...]

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And into the Labour Party. A CHARITY that has had more than £840,000 of loans quietly written off by a government fund has made two unlawful donations to the Labour party. Catz Club, which runs after-school clubs for children, paid £30,000 to attend two Labour fundraising events at Wembley stadium. Charity law bans the use [...]

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We start from the observation that politicians do what benefits politicians, not necessarily what benefits the populace. It’s hardly a shocking assumption: we’re quite happy in all other areas of life to think that self-interest rules. We’re also quite happy, or at least some of us are, to note that this pursuit of enlightened self-interest [...]

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Named after the two Democrat senators who sponsored it, Glass-Steagall prevented commercial banks – which take deposits from ordinary households and firms – from engaging in the high-risk speculative activities undertaken by investment banks. Legislation in the US is not usually named after "two senators". Rather, after one Representative and one Senator: the names of [...]

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The definition of lunacy is continuing the same actions over again and expecting a different outcome. Gordon Brown was reported to be preparing to pump billions more pounds into the banking system amid mounting evidence that his £37 billion part-nationalisation has failed to get credit flowing to home-owners and businesses. As banks continue to restrict [...]

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At the ASI. Why the NHS spends so much on agency staff, why it’s so dangerous and what we can do about it.

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Sorry, more Ritchie. His comment at his place. Tim I’ll quote this from a review of On Kindness by Adam Philips & Barbara Taylor, Hamish Hamilton, £14.99 in the Guardian today: “Kindness was mankind’s “greatest delight”, the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. But today many [...]

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Mr. Murphy today. FT.com / Companies / Financials – Danger of persistent deflation is seen as low – I agree on one condition: which is that we print a lot of money That will permit quantative easing Of course, it’s quantitative easing, not quantative. But it’s a straight monetarist argument. MV equals PQ of course [...]

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At the ASI. I agree with James Hansen on climate change.

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and from an NHS that swallowed the GDP of a small country That got me thinking. Just what country should we compare the NHS to? Equaiting spending on the NHS to GDP isn’t really quite right. For GDP is value added, not value consumed (yes, of course, the NHS does produce things of value, but [...]

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Quite aside from the question of why she was even carrying a gun (to defend herself, she said, even though in Austin, a city of just under 750,000 people, there were just 30 murders last year, compared to, say, the London borough of Lambeth, population 273,000, where there were 23), at least she’d left it [...]

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Hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions, have been lost because of a stupid idea, promoted by stupid people. Applies just as much to economic stupidities. In fact, it might apply even more strongly to them.

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KayTie asks an interesting question. Where does nef get its money from? The accounts are here. Unfortunately, it’s not actually all that clear. They’ve got four subsidiary operations which themselves don’t seem to file accounts with the Charities Commission. Income from those four are simply listed in the nef accounts as "income from charitable activities". [...]

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