Tim Worstall

California has effectively outlawed the building of new fossil fuel plants. If the rest of the US follows suit, the big oil companies will have to move rapidly or risk running out of customers for their ageing infrastructure. Why would the oil companies need to change anything? No one uses oil to generate electricty in [...]

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Road traffic has fallen for the first time in 30 years after high fuel prices You mean prices and incentives matter?

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Anyone want to start making a little list? Of people that should be sent off to do something socially useful? Salt mines stretched to the limit as council stocks start to run low We’ve got a government obsessed with tractor production statistics so why not start sending people to the salt mines? They rather go [...]

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One of Labour’s biggest financial backers has begun donating to the Conservatives… Really? You mean that when those in power look like not being in power much longer then rich people give money to those who will come to power instead? But, but, that’s almost an allegation that people give money so as to have [...]

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I wrote a letter to my Council yesterday, complaining about the exclusively white nature of the snow we had received so far. Diversity, that’s what’s important.

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Up until this time, nation-states had complete control over their economies and finances. What? No nation state has ever had complete control over their economy. Even the Soviets couldn’t control everything in their economy. When someone starts out a piece talking about the global economy by making that claim then, well, it’s something of a [...]

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Why will a man sleep with a woman, when he won’t marry her or tell her he loves her? Is there really an adult woman asking that question seriously?

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Green gold should not be funnelled through the IMF but rather through some new entity with an appropriate overseer, such as the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). Its authoritative scientific committee, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), should certainly play a major role in setting criteria and evaluating the results. We’re to give a [...]

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Young people could also be banned from wearing items of clothing such as balaclavas or gang colours, Now the government is to determine what clothes you can wear? Gang colours? What, like a blue rosette?

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But in any case I suspect the powers that be are, as usual, barking up the wrong tree. I mean, if you were an Islamist nutjob intent on martyring yourself for your brothers in Gaza or Kashmir, you would surely have to be exceptionally gullible to imagine that you were going to be rewarded with [...]

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Mr Doherty will tell MPs: "There is no economic reason that rail companies should increase fares every year by inflation plus 1% in an industry which receives £5 billion a year from the taxpayer. Err, yes there is. So that the taxpayer gets gouged less so that other people can live in the country but [...]

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Perhaps then, I might finish by putting in a word for modern individualism. We are social animals because, as we evolved, reciprocating favours from others in our community assisted our survival and the passing down of our genes. We learn to pick out those who we think will return our favours, and therefore have a [...]

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Brown has rediscovered an earlier hero, John Maynard Keynes, an advocate of government spending during recessions – and, less cited by Brown, budget surpluses during boom times. Snigger.

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Is kill all the quangos. Sir Simon tells us why: I served for five years on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and resigned with one conclusion ringing in my ears. If you want to deny women control over their bodies, you can rely on liberal-minded women (who dominated the authority) to do it for [...]

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So, err: But that claim was shaken by revelations of Daschle’s failure to pay some $128,000 in taxes owed for use of a driver and limousine provided to him by a media firm. Daschle was chairman of the firm’s advisory board. Daschle said his failure to pay the taxes was a mistake, and paid $140,000 [...]

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A chance gathering in my kitchen: three people. My wife, who has some gypsy blood. Eddie. A friend who is Jewish. And the realisation that, under Hitler, all three would have been bound for the ovens. Down’s syndrome, any more than Jewishness or gipsyhood, is not something that needs to be wiped out for the [...]

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Clearly I’m getting under the man’s skin. Good. I note that Tim Worstall is persisting in his claims that my methodology used in the TUC report,  The Missing Billions, is flawed. It is flawed. Worstall’s argument appears entirely dependent upon rhetoric. If ever there was a man to split hairs it is him. I am [...]

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The Guardian’s major investigation into corporate tax. They appear to have closed the comments sections. Closing them on pieces already published and not opening them on new ones. So, it’s not possible for me to point out over there that their blathering about copyrights and patents being in low tax jurisdictions is just that. Blather. [...]

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The study shows that corn-based bioethanol, which is produced extensively in the US, has a higher combined environmental and health burden than conventional fuels. And of course corn ethanol is what the politicians subsidise while they tax the cleaner conventional fuels. Idiocy in action, but then that’s politics.

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Will this quango creation never stop? Every hospital and care home to have a dementia ‘tsar’

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