Tim Worstall

I will give him this: he’s raised an interesting point: My research shows that this may be the wrong question. The most important question is not the incidence of the tax on these transactions, but the incidence of the cost of these transactions. If, as the opponents of the tax argue, the tax charge will [...]

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At CiF. On the Robin Hood Tax.

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Yes, he does get it wrong. Tax incidence that is. He wibbles about what the incidence of Stamp Duty is (“more research called for”!) and then claims that the other FTTs, on currency and derivatives won’t have anything like that incidence, they’ll fall solely on bankers. Not the most logical of bits of logic really.

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Ritchie flags up this in the FT. The report, entitled Taxing Banks, proposes a global 0.005 per cent tax on currency exchanges and derivatives. The report, authored by the Trades Union Congress, Christian Aid, Tax Justice Network, Tax Research UK and the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development, A hugely impressive list I [...]

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This couple who have won a fortune on the euro lottery. A couple who live near Cirencester. I know a couple who live near Cirencester. Wonder if it’s them? Now, before you deride me as being entirely lunatic, the possibility that the winners are the couple I know who live near Cirencester is a great [...]

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Well, yes, one can see the point: The Valuation Office Agency insisted it was working closely with petrol retailers to reach an agreement on its new rates. “In recent years, the rental value of petrol filling stations has grown considerably and it is only fair to all ratepayers that this is reflected in the rateable [...]

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A poll for popular newspaper Bild am Sonntag found that 53pc of Germans wanted Greece to be expelled from the euro if necessary in the coming months. Two-thirds were adamantly against German money being put towards a bail-out of the troubled country, the paper also found. Will of the people or will of the euro-elite? [...]

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“My brother, Merrick, and I are, of course devastated by the loss of our father, but we rejoice in having been the sons of such an extraordinary man.” Felix Francis Not a bad way to be remembered after 89 years on the planet, is it?

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At the ASI. We’re not running out of things.

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Following the defeat of Egypt and other Arab armies by Israel in the 1967 war, Nasserism, a k a Arab nationalism, the abiding ideology of the day, was demolished. Err, it was “pan-Arab nationalism” that was defeated. The idea that all Arabs should be brothers together, rather than fighting for their own national interests.

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Or if you prefer, here’s today’s Ritchie! Developing countries are losing approximately $100 billion dollars every year due to trade mispricing, according to a new report from Global Financial Integrity (GFI). Ooooh, my! So, what does the report actually say? Well, they measure the amount of trade they think is mispriced, then look at corporate [...]

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At the ASI. We really might have a debt crisis coming….

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This looks fascinating. Especially since you don’t have to buy the book, you can just read the original papers. The question being asked is of course the most important one in economics: and quite possibly in all of the social sciences. Why are some places shitholes and some places not, given that we all started [...]

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A sensible environmentalist. Now Ofgem says that a range of government interventions, even renationalisation, are needed if new investment is to be secured. I think everyone accepts that the market needs reform to incentivise investment but what we need is a better designed market, not state direction. That is a recipe for electricity that is [...]

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Hutton really is such a statist that he cannot even make the correct distinction between ownership by hte State and ownership by citizens of that State. Britain owns a fifth of Greek bonds. Britain does? The State? I can imagine that in our foreign exchange reserves held by the State there are a few Greek [...]

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Strange that a philosopher should not know this. Falling and being in love is a glorious feeling. We need a different word to describe our love for our neighbour We have two perfectly good words which make this distinction. Eros and agape. True, we simply nicked ‘em from the Greeks but then we’ve done that [...]

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Ritchie says we should look at this. So we do. And the example given of how neoclassical economics has a stranglehold on the Nobel is Gunnar Myrdal. Since our societies claim to be democracies, the exclusion of competing perspectives at university departments of economics means that such departments take a stand for some ideological orientations [...]

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In the index of hymnwriters, I see ‘Swann, Donald Ibrahim’. ‘Eh?’ I think, ‘the Donald Swann?’ The hymn tune listed is called ‘Flanders’. Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it.

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Two years ago the film director Roman Polanski and the writer Robert Harris set out to make a film of Harris’s novel The Ghost, a gripping fiction of a British Prime Minister — reminiscent of Tony Blair — holed up in a foreign country to avoid prosecution for a war crime. Just so you don’t [...]

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Err, no: If the next stage of the purchase process seems onerous — the islanders have to raise £1.4million by the end of May to meet the price — the generous support of the Scottish government means there is little doubt they will achieve their goal. Bute islanders vote for me and you to buy [...]

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