Tim Worstall

11 responses so far ↓

• 1 Dennis The Peasant // Feb 16, 2009 at 4:14 pm

  How about finding a successful head teacher to tend to Dickie?

• 2 Johnathan Pearce // Feb 16, 2009 at 4:26 pm

  Goodbye Mr Chips!

• 3 Ed // Feb 16, 2009 at 4:28 pm

  Isn’t there better things for successful head teachers to be doing, like perhaps running schools? I doubt we have a glut of successful head teachers such that we have to find them other jobs.

• 4 Richard Murphy // Feb 16, 2009 at 4:47 pm

  Bankers think they can run schools, and yet it’s been proven they can’t even run banks

  The reverse scenario has candidly a great deal more going for it

  If you know good headteachers (and I do) their management skills are phenomenal

  Open your eyes Tim, that’s what I say

  Richard Murphy

• 5 ChrisM // Feb 16, 2009 at 4:59 pm

  Great idea. We should also get doctors to fly planes, chefs to perform operations, firemen to design computer chips, and accountants to serve big macs. When will people realise this “specialisation” nonsense just is not going to work.

• 6 David Gillies // Feb 16, 2009 at 6:39 pm

  I think by ‘run banks’ he means the man who approves you for a mortgage could be a teacher. He’s obviously not suggesting that someone who knows bugger all about investment banking should be drafted in to run HSBC.

  Oh, wait. He is suggesting that. He’s suggesting NHS managers (!) should step in. What a maroon.

  Just think: if you got Dickie Boy, Polly and Georges Moonbat in a room together, the concentration of wrongheadedness would probably cause a rip in the spacetime continuum.

• 7 dearieme // Feb 16, 2009 at 8:39 pm

  What an idiot. Obviously, eight years ago was the time to appoint successful head teachers to run banks.

• 8 AntiCitizenOne // Feb 17, 2009 at 1:07 am

  Maybe we could just appoint people who understand conservation of energy (i.e. you can’t get something for nothing) to run the currency?

  You never know, they might even have raised reserves enough to stop a credit bubble.

• 9 Johnathan Pearce // Feb 17, 2009 at 11:27 am

  If banks did not operate on a fractional basis, and did not operate also in a world where the supply of money was issued by government, then maybe banking might be easier to do, but then that is not quite the world that Mr Murphy is thinking about, I reckon.

  The Marxists, remember, thought that running a business was a purely administrative matter, and had no appreciation of, or respect for, the risk-taking nature of entrepreneurship. Hence all the various disasters of collectivism whenever it has been imposed.

• 10 gene berman // Feb 17, 2009 at 1:07 pm

  JP

  And you could say they had an easier time of it, not having customers who could quit buying and had to take what they were given.

• 11 jonathan // Feb 17, 2009 at 1:54 pm

  Head teachers can not even manage the financial side of running a school – hence the prevalence of bursars. Funnily enough, often retired bankers.

  My mother was headteacher of a very succesful grammar school winning a hatful of awards in the process. The thought of her crossing over to run an investment (or even a retail) bank is frightening.

  The interesting part of these observations by Richard is that they show just how little he really understands of the subjects on which he writes. They are more damaging to his credibility than any refutation by Tim. As another example, the more Richard writes about tax incidence (or economics generally), the more damaging it is to his claims to expertise.

  Give a man enough rope…

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