Tim Worstall

Britain’s women control over £400m more expenditure every week than men do. Rather puts the kibosh on the complaint that women earn less than men, doesn’t it? Who the hell cares who makes it ….who gets to spend it is what counts.

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Yes, community there is indeed. It means scraping a living from the animals you keep and the patches of vegetables you’ve always grown. It means cabbage soup or beans and potatoes smothered in olive oil, plus chorizo made from every last bit of the pig you slaughtered yourself, washed down with the light red wine [...]

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I still remember Stoke’s very own Indira Gandhi Family Planning Clinic.

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An education minister has claimed that the reason independent schools achieve such high grades at A-level is the “narrow focus” of their curriculum compared with that of state schools. That’s right, indpendent schools spend so much less time on sports, music, drama, and all the other extra-curricular stuff, don’t they. No wonder the State education [...]

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Any of my financial market readers want to comment? The Pibs, which were issued in 1994 at 100p, are now worth just 20p, having seen their price fall by 65pc from 57p following Northern Rock’s announcement earlier this week that it would suspend interest payments on various debt securities whose terms and conditions allowed it. [...]

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Unfortunately, Robert S Meuller III seems not to know what he’s talking about.

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But Lord Mandelson has just had an operation on his prostate on Praed Street? This will mean nothing to those who have not heard of Tom Driberg but still….forgive me for it did cause a snigger.

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Gordon Brown has broken the contract he made when he arrived in No 10 that promised easier access to university: Blair’s promise of 50% graduates by 2010 could have been achieved this year. Instead Brown’s short-lived Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills bungled its costings. I can get no costing for the rise and fall [...]

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Mr. We Must Protect the Environment himself, George Monbiot, writes an article praising the hunter gatherer lifestyle of fishing from a sea kayak. That hunter gatherer lifestyle which if all 6 billion of us tried it would have the planet stripped of everything edible in about three months.

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The NHS has higher sickness rates than the rest of the public sector and enjoys the most generous terms and conditions while off work. You know, I think there might be a connection. If you pay people to be inactive, there will be more inactivity. Lord (Professor, Richard) Layard Gosh, interesting, eh?

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Here.

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Now Mackey, the face of the company, is not only at odds with a central tenet of progressivism, but a supporter of free-market evangelism that has no space for the community-based, egalitarian solutions his customers support. It means that the founder and CEO of Whole Foods, that store which supplies exactly what you want, can [...]

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Dan Brown tops Oxfam’s chart of most-donated books… Think this through a moment: more Dan Brown books are sold new than of any other (well, damn nearly any other). Thus we would expect to see more Dan Brown books in second hand shops than any other, more donated to charity shops than any other. Yes? [...]

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Briefly put, higher corporate taxes reduce the after-tax rate of return on investment, and this in turn reduces investment, employment and income below what they might otherwise have been. Of course, we might be prepared to pay this price if increasing corporate taxes reduced inequality, and there are apparently people who believe that this is [...]

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It’s not so much that the American people have turned against Obama’s health-care reform effort as they’ve turned against the legislative process in general. Which, when you see what the legislators actually get up to, makes perfect sense.

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but nowhere more so than in China, the world’s second-biggest oil consumer, whose policymakers fully expect their currency to have to be revalued, hitting cheap energy-guzzling producers, Err, a revaluation of the currency would make imported oil cheaper for those paying in domestic currency…..

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Most immediately, banks should be made to increase their lending to businesses and homeowners substantially. M4 lending, which measures this, has fallen from a growth rate of 19.8% in February 2007 to just 0.3% in May this year, and it may well be negative by now. Top management in the part-nationalised RBS and Lloyds should [...]

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Naughty, naughty, says Jonathan Steele. But the issue matters as it marks an unpleasant effort by many Baltic and central European politicians to equate Stalinism and Nazism or claim Stalinism was worse. No, no, mustn’t do that. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact certainly showed Stalin to be as cynical as Hitler. But to jump from that to [...]

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It is true that countries run by megalomaniac theocrats ban costumes like the bikini. Justifying the move, Mr Buonanno added: “Imagine a western woman bathing in a bikini in a Muslim country. The consequences could be decapitation, prison or deportation. We are merely prohibiting the use of the burqini.” The reason we do not ban [...]

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We actually have someone sensible in government? “We’ll never sell a low-carbon future to the public if it depends on a deprivation model. I’m convinced that there’s no necessary trade-off between a low carbon future and more or less transport,” he said. “The critical factor is the deployment of technology and the intelligent use of [...]

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