Tim Worstall

Here.

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I normally have a lot of time for Peter Tatchell. Of course his economic ideas are away with the fairies but he’s very sound on civil liberty and free speech matters. But this is absurd: There could be multi-member constituencies representing the different nations and regions that comprise the UK, with alternate/preferential voting (1, 2, [...]

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From Dan Roberts at The G. Essentially, a quick economic recovery would be a bad thing because it would reduce the pressure for a fundamental change to the system. To which hte logical response is, if we have a quick recovery then we don’t need a fundamental change to the system. What we had was [...]

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While earlier talk of an EU super-regulator has been dropped, the same goal is being achieved by other means. The plan is to create three “authorities” with a permanent staff and powers to impose “binding” decisions on states. Appeals go to the European Court. There is to be a European Banking Authority in London, an [...]

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WHAT’S the first sign of Madness? Suggs walking up your drive.

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Tolerance has declined, bigotry is on the increase…. What? Are these people living in the same country as the rest of us? 50 years ago homosexual acts could put you in prison. We now have had gay ministers, an HIV positive Cabinet Minister, a married lesbian (although the lesbian part was never illegal, the married [...]

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Shouting about how really awful the Lega Nord is contains this shocker: It’s not surprising that with a cultural background like this, worthy of the Ku Klux Klan, the government has just passed a new law making it a crime to enter or stay in Italy illegally. No, really, that’s very like the KKK isn’t [...]

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Here.

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Shoppers should be able to return empty coffee jars and detergent bottles to supermarkets for a refill under Government plans to reduce packaging waste. Consumers would get a discount on product prices as they would not pay for the container. Has anybody, anybody at all, thought this through? Think of instant coffee alone. There are [...]

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Productivity across schools, hospitals, police and other services dropped by 3.2 per cent between 1997 and 2007, according to research by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Gosh! You mean that shovelling money at political client groups with gay abandon, refusing to challenge the extant structure, means that it’s necessary to pay more to get [...]

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Labour has run out of steam and of ideas. Its supporters are turning to the Liberal Democrats. Seriously amazing. Clegg manages to write a whole piece about the recent elections without once mentioning UKIP. Labour is turning to the Lib Dems…..without mentioning that UKIP beat them both?

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The New Economics Foundation, a thinktank, has called for the government to adopt a US-style community reinvestment act, which would force the banks to offer services to poor communities in return for the capital injections they have received from the taxpayer. Now I don’t go as far as some, insisting that the Community Reinvestment Act [...]

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Having licences for medicines when they’re going to be handed out to homeopathic remedies? Prof Colquhoun said that the claims could contravene consumer protection laws which ban “falsely claiming that a product is able to cure illnesses”. The pills are labelled “a homoeopathic medicinal product used with the homoeopathic tradition for the symptomatic relief of [...]

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Shouting “off our streets Nazi scum”, the demonstrators chased him down the street to his car. Mr Griffin, who has been elected an MEP for the North West of England, was guided to his vehicle by his bodyguards and quickly drove off. It is amusing, it has to be said. However, the police have a [...]

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The British ­government is almost alone among big EU countries to take a heavy hit. Nor is it a simple sweep to the right: Merkel and Sarkozy won by taking more ­radical social ­democratic action than Brown did, by nationalising the banks, with higher social protection for the ­unemployed and more state intervention, ­squeezing parties [...]

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I believe that the current political crisis has little to do with the expenses scandal, still less with Gordon Brown’s leadership. It arises because our economic system can no longer extract wealth from other nations. For the past 300 years, the revolutions and reforms experienced by almost all other developed countries have been averted in [...]

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Councils warned the cost would be passed to taxpayers unless they are allocated additional funds Where in buggery do they think additional finds would come from if not the taxpayers?

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No, I didn’t get elected but yes, I did help some very good people to be so. Victory!

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A double at the ASI.

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At the ASI. On public choice economics

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