Tim Worstall

At the ASI. On repugnant transactions.

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FT.com / Europe – Financial regulation plan faces UK obstacles. The UK and Europe in conflict again. Sometime we’re going to have to accept that London is not the centre of the world. Would help too if we remembered that London is the centre of the world’s international financial system.  

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MPs second home allowances. How to deal with it once and for all. …the best solution I’ve heard yet regarding the controversial Second Homes Allowance. Just make MPs eligible for housing benefit in London. It is, after all, enough. Isn’t it? Even socialists have good ideas sometimes……

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Here. Now she’s actually correct. Yes, the ACA has grown because no one was willing for MPs to have the pay rises the salary review boards suggested over the years. It was felt that MPs should not get whacking great pay rises, for the public would not wear it. Thus have expenses instead which the [...]

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Now I am biased against all regional food, regardless of the region. Though I am a convinced regionalist in matters of literature and art, I am unapologetically metropolitan when I eat. This is because regional food is almost invariably peasant food and I am not a peasant. Neither, as a rule, are the people cooking [...]

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At the ASI. So why are women getting unhappier?

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….my readily admitted occasional use of private aviation fuel as well as many (less reported) flights on scheduled commercial flights……Of course I use aeroplanes…….Each year I fly thousands of miles to campaign for environmental change……. But don’t you dare do the same you grotty little oiks. Don’t you know who I am?

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see more Fail Blog

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So, erm, MPs are not not thought either competent enough or trustworthy enough to rule themselves. So why does anyone at all, let alone the MPs themselves, think they are competent or trustworthy enough to rule us?

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Was at an NFU hustings last night and there was a great sense of outrage on display. People kept saying that the subsidy was £3 billion a year and the total output was £3 billion a year. This therefore proved that farmers were hard done by. Erm, no it doesn’t, it shows that farming offers [...]

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Have to say that I agree with Dan here. Parliament is supposed to be independent, free of outside influences. Better a gang of crooks and thieves which has the power to tell the buggers where to go than one cowed into total impotence.

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Here.

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Or, umm, Scaletrx? Scale…..no, I don’t know how to spell it either. Anyway, those of who were indeed boys at one point will remember the joy of being the junior petrolhead. The placing together of the track, the creation of impossible hairpin bends and the like. And. of course, those who weren’t those boys and [...]

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The Observer: At the root of our economic problems is the bankruptcy of a political idea: that an individual’s drive to get rich is also an engine of social progress; I’m not convinced that anyone has ever even imputed that let alone made it the cornerstone of a political idea. The individual’s drive to enrich [...]

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At the ASI. On Rhineland capitalism.

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Apologies for reproducing this in full but: *The BNP would kick out all those people who were not born in Britain. What if every other country in the world kicked out the Brits? A staggering 5.5 million people would be sent back here – far more than would leave our shores. This includes 800,000 from [...]

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This is glorious from Compass: Less than a fifth of low-paid adults earn enough to lift their household out of poverty through their wages alone (compared to more than three-quarters of non-low-paid workers). Low paid people get paid less than not low paid people. Who’d a’ thunk it?

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Full marks to her here: Rumblings suggest they may, as the latest poll has Labour at 19%, neck and neck with Ukip for fourth place. We’ve had so many snide remarks and references from the columnar classes. Michael White wrote about a council by election in Hartlepool and said we came fourth. We came second. [...]

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Labour has been the heavy loser in this horrible saga. Better is expected of them by their incandescent poorer ­constituents – and they are the ­government. They had the power and authority to reform every aspect of parliamentary custom and practice, but – like so much else left undone – they didn’t, and many took [...]

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Fascinating numbers here. Proof yet again of the economist’s saw that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. The subject here is the always contentious one of abortion…..and Down’s and testing for it. The tests themselves, specifically amniocentesis to confirm the diagnosis, carries a risk of causing miscarriage. A total of 366,000 women in England had [...]

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