Tim Worstall

The WSJ: In restricting alcohol, as in war, the U.K. need only ask: ‘What would Churchill do?’ Open another bottle of course. Right, that’s that solved, next!

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Here is Ritchie telling us all what is wrong with the current world economic order. Which is great. But I presume he knows this means abandoning just about everything that is taught in undergraduate economics as a result, which underpins the flawed logic of Anglo-Saxon capitalism as a whole – not just banking? Let’s start with what goes: Profit maximisation. This is [...]

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At the ASI. On the Citizen’s United case.

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This is making waves. However, according to my man who knows (Hi Professor!) it really was just a typo. And a typo that once corrected does not change the calculations whatever the other problems with the Stern Review. The correct number was used in the sums n’ stuff while the incorrect one was printed in [...]

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Quite simply, we cannot have economic growth because it’ll cause climate change. Thus we must stop economic growth. In slightly more detail, economic growth necessarily means that we’ll go over 2 oC of warming and thus Flipper will boil as the oceans evanesce into the atmosphere. Thus we should stop economic growth. I refute it [...]

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A seven-year-old boy has raised more than £50,000 for survivors of the Haitian earthquake in one day after seeing images of children being pulled alive from the rubble. Charlie Simpson set out to raise £500 for the Unicef Haiti Appeal by riding his bike five miles around his local park. Instead his efforts inspired hundreds [...]

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“For as long as I can recall, sociologists and economists have made a connection between levels of corruption and prosperity. For a long time this seemed to be borne out by the rankings. Squeaky-clean societies such as Sweden, say, had high per-capita GDPs.” Erm, might be worth finding out what economists actually say about corruption [...]

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On the horrors of having to do a day job while trying to be an artist: What a day job inevitably means, of course, is spending the majority of your waking hours not doing the thing you love: Just like everyone else then, eh?

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“Investment banking has spread into everything we do in business. Company executives spend more and more time with investment bankers,” he writes in the Guardian…….Insisting that he wants a vibrant City to contribute to GDP, Myners says his intention is to promote discussion and debate. “I think this is a suitable subject for a major [...]

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A Venezuelan cable television channel critical of President Hugo Chavez has been taken off the air after refusing to air footage of the president’s speeches. Radio Caracas Television, an anti-Chavez channel known as RCTV disappeared from TV sets shortly after midnight after the government cited noncompliance with new regulations requiring that Mr Chavez’s speeches be [...]

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The Southern Baptists that is. People really shouldn’t have sex, it might lead to outbreaks of dancing.

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Women looking for a Mr Right should give up after 30 and settle for a Mr ­Second Best or a Mr Right Now. Lori Gottlieb, author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough, which is published in the UK next week, believes women who refuse to commit unless they find a [...]

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One of the things that I’ve been ragging Ritchie about is his insistence that corporations and companies do so too pay tax. I say they don’t, that it’s some combination of workers, customers and shareholders that do. When I present something that show sthat economists are absolutely certain about this he usually mutters something about [...]

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Sad to see a Nobel Laureate mangling the numbers so: With median household income already down some 4pc from 2000, Now on the headline number of course he’s correct. That is the published number. But we rather expect the giants of the economic world to tell us the truth, not simply repeat the government number. [...]

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At the ASI. Why we shouldn’t (indeed can’t) inflate out way out of the debt burden.

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At the back of my mind has always been the thought that technology will make the whole low carbon thing entirely redundant. We’ll move away from fossil fuels because we find something better, not because we want to stop emitting CO2. No doubt this is the result of too much science fiction consumed as an [...]

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It’s great this is: As you can see in the graph atop this post, a majority of people who voted for Martha Coakley and a plurality of non-voters support the bill. Brown voters, however, are brutally opposed. Therefore we should do what those who couldn’t be bothered to vote say they want. Which happens to [...]

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* Silly sometimes, but great.

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The great unasked question is the incidence of bank and other financial institution profits – who is losing to ensure bankers profit in other words. Yes, it’s our favourite retired accountant again. The economy is zero sum. If one person is to make profits then someone else must be losing that money. Positive sum transactions are therefore [...]

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