Tim Worstall

At the ASI. Idiots misunderstanding speculation again. Yes, looking at you Tom Bower.

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And as you would expect, it’s not looking good. Hayek’s legacy, which now lies in ruins all around us, is still brightly promoted, but its claims to fairness and freedom have been utterly discredited. Given that we’ve not had a Hayekian order the current problems cannot be blamed on Hayek nor can they be used [...]

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Government officials have drawn up secret plans to tax electricity consumers to subsidise the construction of the UK’s first new nuclear reactors for more than 20 years, the Guardian has learned. This is hardly surprising. Solar is subsidised, wind is subsidised….so why not nuclear? For the point is that fossil fuels are still the cheapest [...]

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The FSA’s Mortgage Market Review is expected call for an end to self-certification mortgages, which were granted without proof of income. I can understand why few people would want to grant one, sure. I cxan understand why people might be leery of them. But to ban them? To say “no, you may not lend your [...]

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But entirely futile: The research released to mark Alcohol Awareness Week this week coincides with another report which found that alcohol is being sold for as little as 9p per unit. It means that three pints (six units) could be bought for 54pence, approximately the cost of a Mars bar. Professor Martin Plant, lead author [...]

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Here.

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The French tried this. Called Poujadism. You probably wouldn’t like it.

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Yes, it’s our favourite retired accountant again. It has been commonplace for tax to be charged in accordance with “law”. For example, it was decided in a legal opinion given in the House of Lords in the United Kingdom in 1869[1] that: If the person sought to be taxed comes within the letter of the [...]

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Something you need to know: the writers of pieces do not write the headlines nor do they write the little bits underneath them. That is done by the sub editors of the paper. And sadly, they’re not always entirely accurate. We must agree to halt deforestation and curtail air travel now if the Copenhagen summit [...]

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No, not Posh. The one on his face. What I’ve not seen mentioned as yet is that it falls foul of the naval rules on beards. If you wish to be a bearded Jolly Jack Tar then you go to the Captain at the beginning of some reasonably lengthy cruise (a couple of weeks before [...]

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The number of hospital staff who are receiving private healthcare treatment paid for by the NHS has prompted accusations that the health service is paying for its staff to queue-jump and raised questions about its ability to provide adequate treatment. Freedom of information requests sent out to all NHS trusts and hospitals in England reveal [...]

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Forgive me for working from memory here: A government sting operation targeting hundreds of employers across Britain has uncovered widespread racial discrimination against workers with African and Asian names. Researchers sent nearly 3,000 job applications under false identities in an attempt to discover if employers were discriminating against jobseekers with foreign names. Using names recognisably [...]

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At the ASI. Why is it that the very same people complaining about public costs and private profits in the banks are the same people who argue that we should have private profits and public costs in solar cells?

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What I hadn’t realised was that the UK’s debt market is peculiar. In the US, average length of the existing Treasury bonds was, at recent count, 4.7 years and falling. Because this is such a short maturity, it means the debt has to be rolled over far more often, and at every point the government [...]

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The study concluded that GM crops are needed to prevent a catastrophic food crisis by 2050. But the report has sparked a backlash from opponents of GM foods who say they present a threat to the livelihood of small farmers. Quite why small farmers would be damaged by GM crops I’m not sure. The only [...]

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Ministers are drawing up plans for a tax raid on Britain’s banks worth hundreds of millions of pounds, The Sunday Telegraph has learned. Are there no adults left in government? Assume that everything that is said about the banks is true. That they’re being propped up by government money, that they don’t have enough capital, [...]

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Quite glorious today, as usual: This is outright abusive planning deliberately engineered by a bank. The answer is simple: such accounts must be assessed on an arising basis, not a payment basis as is used for interest now. The law has to be changed in the Pre-Budget Report. Well done Ritchie, you’ve just killed zero [...]

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For me, women are like horses – nice to look at, interesting to ride, but too much trouble to keep.

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Sigh. Liberalism does not, cannot, consider the possibility that restrictions on certain human behavior might sometimes be appropriate. Sure it does: whenever your freedoms and liberties lead you to do something which either damages another or their own freedoms and liberties and their exercise restrictions are not just considered but actively supported. And for the [...]

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Ritchie’s idea about multinationals is that we should insist that they report their accounts as if they are a series of independent and separate organisations: that is, that they are contractors in a market not integrated companies. From this year’s Nobel for economics: Williamson’s theory of vertical integration clarifies why firms are essentially different from [...]

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