Tim Worstall

OK, the report itself is obviously true. Unions get taxpayers’ money fed to them through the government, unions then donate large sums to the Labour Party which happens to be the peeps in charge of government. A gross and vile corruption of the body politic. It’s illustrated with a picture of a man in a [...]

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Note the exciting new ad format!

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Now Harry’s Place is being sued by George Galloway as well! As David T puts it, this might well be one of those David Irving moments (or even Oscar Wilde). Prosecuting for libel with a very weak case can backfire you know…

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At CiF. On why petrol prices are what they are.

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This is either absolutely appalling, in that you didn’t get it: This was in happier times, before Hunter professed herself to be shocked by the magazine’s pictures of her lying on a bed wearing pearls and no pants, since she was sure the photographer would be interested only in face shots. Or it’s absolutely superb [...]

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Mirror headline. The story is much less interesting.

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You want to know how to control the abusers of children who patrol the internet? Bring back the death penalty for murder. That’s the Mirror. So it’s not “right wing” to be baying for snapped necks then really. I don’t of course, agree myself. But if they were to bring it in for the use [...]

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….of articles written purely and solely to provide the lead up to the pun in the final line: Hitler has only faced one ball.

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Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society, said: “It is unfortunate that the court has enabled Catholic Care to exploit what was obviously an error in the drafting of the equality legislation. The loophole this created was never intended to be used this way.” Now that’s about adoption and whether an agency can discriminate [...]

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Tonight, Hilary Benn, the environment secretary, said the ban would have both financial and environmental benefits. It would cut greenhouse gas emissions from landfill sites and from manufacturing new products such as cans and bottles from virgin materials. It would also save councils money on the landfill tax charged for every tonne of waste, and [...]

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Michel Barnier, the European commissioner in charge of financial market regulation, said he would propose controls to curb speculative trading in credit default swaps, (CDS) a form of debt insurance that has been blamed for worsening Greece’s economic problems. His measures will target so-called naked selling of CDS, where insurance contracts are sold to buyers [...]

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Dick Olver, who was speaking to The Daily Telegraph at an event designed to boost children’s interest science and engineering, said: “We need more of the very good engineering graduates to go into engineering rather than the financial services.” . There’s a simple answer to this. A quick skip through the BAE Systems jobs page [...]

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“But I’m a relaxed person, so I don’t give a shit what people think.” Perhaps temporary marriage ain’t the best thing ever but as long as a country has women who think and act that way it’s going to get better.

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R. Murphy Esq: Brussels’ logic is that by betting against the euro, hedge funds are driving its value down, so making it harder for hard-pressed states like Greece to balance their books, as the market is demanding. This then creates a vicious cycle of more government spending cuts being required in Greece, in anticipation of [...]

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I do like this line: Corporations can be big, they can be profitable, and they can be big and profitable. But they cannot be wealthy, for the simple reason that corporations are not people. Corporations are not wealthy; they are a form of wealth.

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The global economy has shattered. No it hasn’t you silly little man. Global GDP will be around $60 trillion this year as it was around that last year. The new understanding goes hand-in-hand with discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuro-cognitive science and child development that reveal that human beings are biologically predisposed to be empathic. Our [...]

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I rather said this over here. Originally written for a conference of the Federal Reserve, Gary Gorton’s “The Panic of 2007″ garnered enormous attention and is considered by many to be the most convincing take on the recent economic meltdown. Now, in Slapped by the Invisible Hand , Gorton builds upon this seminal work, explaining [...]

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She lives hundreds of miles into the countryside, thousands of miles above sea-level I don’t think so Sonny, I really don’t think so. Thousands of feet possibly, thousands of metres even but not miles. One thousand miles above sea level is near the upper bound of low earth orbit…. As to the rest of it, [...]

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Hamish McRae: Do fewer things but do them better That clearly is how to deal with the deficit, government spending, taxation rates and all the rest. However Hamish doesn’t really go far enough. It isn’t that we should simply be looking at what we already do and vow to do perhaps a little less of [...]

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The most common response to this complaint is the current terms can’t go on, because Easyjet and Ryanair pay their staff much less. And it’s not fair if some people are being treated horribly, so the answer is to treat everyone horribly and then no one feels bad. Maybe charities should work like this. Oxfam [...]

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