Tim Worstall

And it does not mean I do not understand any of these issues. Far from it: what worries me greatly is that the Right – which influences the Tories far more than most presume – do think the market is the solution to all problems. Like it or not, it isn’t. And unless we’d had [...]

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At the ASI. The use of markets in the English NHS reduced waiting times more than the not use of markets for more money in Scotland and Wales. Markets work….who knew?

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Height of folly: Sarkozy accused of ordering 20 short people to stand behind him to make him look statuesque

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One of Britain’s biggest unions — which has campaigned fiercely against government cutbacks to public sector pensions — is to cut back its scheme for its own staff, The Times has learnt. Unison, which represents 1.3 million local government and NHS workers, can no longer afford its final-salary scheme for employees and has set out [...]

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So, new day, new report out and they make the same old mistakes. As a whole, the finance sector has one of the highest overall gender pay gaps in the UK economy – with women working full-time earning 55 per cent less annual gross salary than men. This compares to a pay gap of 28 [...]

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You’ve shown those bastard market lovers what for there eh? Let’s try that on the following for which there is undoubtedly market demand: · Slavery · Child labour · Prostitution · Drugs I could go on. Do I need to do so? Well, yes actually. Markets are about “voluntary” exchange. If it ain’t voluntary it [...]

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So, a question. The widow of Ferdinand Marcos disclosed last week that she is pushing her son Ferdinand Jr, 51, known as “Bongbong”, to stand for president next year. … He was educated at Worth, a Benedictine boarding school in West Sussex. I remember, when I was at the prep school there, seeing the limo [...]

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Anyone help with this? For the past couple of days it’s been difficult to load a page. Keep getting “Connection reset” page. “connection reset while this page was loading”. Is this something on my machine? Or further down the line at my ISP? Hitting “try again” four or five times usually loads the page. Any [...]

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Oh dear, Our Willy has some ideas about banks and bonuses. Now as the global economy stabilises and the IMF lifts its growth forecasts for 2010, conservative voices are calling for a so-called exit strategy – freezing the stimulus and beginning a programme of retrenchment to allow the private sector to resume its starring role [...]

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At the ASI. Obesity does not cost the taxpayer money: it saves the taxpayer money. Taxing fast food so as to reduce obesity and thus save the taxpayer money does not therefore work.

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That the International Monetary Fund must prepare itself to help co-ordinate the so-called “exit strategy” from the stimulus, ensuring that in future years countries around the world start to raise interest rates and taxes in lock-step. What if, for example Britain, decides that higher taxes is not the way to go? That perhaps current or [...]

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At the newly married’s request. A new local currency (there are any number of them around the country) called the Brixton Pound. Great, lovely idea, use whatever you wish as the intermediary in your exchange of goods and services. Cowrie shells, cows on the hoof, local scrip, whatever. There are a few problems of course: [...]

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Would you buy a used treaty from these men?

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Gary Barlow The musician and song-writer around whom the band was initially built, his was the most anticipated solo career. Instead he would recall “watching with horror” as Williams shot into the stratosphere while he earned a living writing songs for Donny Osmond.

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Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has urged non-Muslims to fast for a day during Ramadan and then to break their fast at a mosque to improve their understanding of Islam. Why not? And we can then go on to where everyone has only one meal and no meat on Good Friday as with old [...]

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Shell will announce the next stage of its global restructuring on Monday, which will result in thousands more job losses. If “creating jobs” is a good thing, if “protecting jobs” is a good thing, why aren’t we subsidising Shell?

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Geoffrey Lean: Reducing consumption of fossil fuels saves money Sadly it’s all a little more complex than that: if that’s all there were to it then we’d all be cutting our consumption of fossil fuels and there wouldn’t be any problem, would there? We can reduce our consumption of fossil fuels, of course: if we [...]

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The World Trade Organisation is understood to have ruled that subsidies provided by European countries for Airbus’s A380 superjumbo were illegal. Anyone ever really think different?

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On the new Swedish Government funded porn film, “Dirty Diaries”: Cissi Elwin Frenkel, a spokesman for the Swedish Film Institute – the government body that backed the film – insisted that it was not “regular porn”. “Everyone in the films is over the age of 18, no one is doing anything against their will, everyone [...]

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There’s something to this: “The flip side, for me at least, is that I was born into a position of privilege and am therefore not corruptible.” Although you can already hear the squeals of indignation over that one I’m sure. The real point though is that corruption is not just about gaining advantage. There’s also [...]

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