Tim Worstall

George Monbiot says we should abolish the BERR. He’s right, or course, we should. But could this be the first time that Monbiot has picked up and approved of an Adam Smith Institute policy proposal?

[Read more →]

Every landlord renting out a property must register and get a licence. To protect tenants apparently. This could make it easier for the Inland Revenue to identify tax evaders. That’s what it’s about. Sigh. At the same time that everyone is screaming about the need for more affordable rental housing they’re going to make it [...]

[Read more →]

The OECD has released research on trends in leisure time. Skipping through it it shows what we pretty much all know already (at least, those who have been paying attention know this already). Working hours are falling and have been over time. Leisure hours are rising. In the UK at least there’s no great gender [...]

[Read more →]

Here.

[Read more →]

It’s the way ‘e tells ‘em. Man’s a comic genius: We have been losing jobs in industry even before the credit crunch at a rate of nearly 100,000 a year, which, even given the advances in technological productivity, is unsustainable for a country whose future will remain dependent on industrial success and cannot rely on [...]

[Read more →]

The sheer folly of thinking that the Royal Mail could be privatised was always madness. It is a utility. These need to be in public ownership. And yes, that does mean I think water, gas, electricity, much of public transport, basic banking and the telecoms infrastrcxutrue does also need to be publicly owned. What’s missing [...]

[Read more →]

OK, it’s from Sweden but still: 6 women died in 2005 in connection with complications during pregnancy and child birth. 101 346 children were born that year. The death rate in "natural" childbirth (ie, zero modern medicine) is thought to be 1,000 to 1,500 per 100,000 births. It’s certainly close to that in much of [...]

[Read more →]

Apologies, but your article is bunkum. A sea change. When Hillary Clinton was considering law schools in 1969, she was famously told by a Harvard ­professor that "we don’t need any more women" at Harvard. She went to Yale. By the time she graduated, about 15% of law school grads were female. Now, the New York Times [...]

[Read more →]

Aid doesn’t do all that much good a lot of the time but it’s cheap so we should still do it. In The Life You Can Save, Singer acknowledges that some aid goes astray, and that some aid is not very effective. But he turns that argument on its head: so what, if the cost [...]

[Read more →]

At the ASI. Nicking an idea from a Nick Cohen column to describe the modern world.

[Read more →]

In the Telegraph: SIR – It will be interesting to read the published diary of Gordon Brown. Tuesday. Woke up. Saved the world. Went to bed. Wednesday. Dealt with Prime Minister’s Questions brilliantly, to deafening applause from both sides of the House. Thursday. Explained to world leaders how I’d saved the world earlier in the [...]

[Read more →]

The head of the eurosceptic Libertas party said Friday it had registered a million members ahead of the European Union’s June election. Actually, that’s not snigger, that’s laugh out loud guffaw! No, that ain’t the number of party members. Not even across the EU. According to Mr Ganley, Libertas have "about 16,000 activists" across Europe, [...]

[Read more →]

He starts by saying this: Too many on the left assume that preferences for more equity and proportionality are so widely shared that support for liberal policies is semi-automatic. Which is true. If you say something like, as I am wont to do, that I don’t care much about inequality. It’s the eradication of absolute [...]

[Read more →]

Snout caught in the trough again! A LABOUR peer who lives in the East End of London has claimed about £100,000 in parliamentary expenses on a flat in Kent that neighbours say has been unoccupied for years. …. Residents from the five other flats in the same block as Uddin’s property all say they have [...]

[Read more →]

At the ASI. On the Greens and making good use of a crisis like swine flu.

[Read more →]

I have to admit, there are times when I feel terribly middle aged, past it, outside the zeitgeist. Which of course I am. Our new Poet Lareaute (ummm, I belive actually it is Lizzie’s new one, but let that pass) is, so I am told by varied newspapers, a lesbian. I am also told by [...]

[Read more →]

At the ASI. One problem with Keynesian demand management is political, not economic.

[Read more →]

I was trying to remember what the word for a virus that starts in animals but then becomes infectious to humans is. So I searched for "zoonovirus" which is what I thought the word was. Apparently not, for Google reports no entries at all for the neologism. Until this one of course.

[Read more →]

In 2007, 1.26 million fixed penalties were issued, down 370,000 or 23 per cent, from the previous year, according to figures in a Home Office document. Until April 2007 police and local authorities kept a proportional share of fines in order to pay for more cameras. Since this period however, they have received a fixed [...]

[Read more →]

What was not fully understood at the time was that East Germany’s whole economy was value-subtracting and cost-unconscious. World Bank. Socialism in another sentence: The final output was worth less than the sum of the inputs.* Socialism in a third sentence: The Trabant operation was value-subtracting: valuable material, labor, and capital inputs went in at [...]

[Read more →]