Tim Worstall

If they think this is a good method for rationing GP visits, perhaps they will like this idea for rationing food. Nationalise supermarkets, set the price of all food to zero, then eliminate the problem of wasteful overconsumption by educating people that they should take only the food they need rather than what they want. [...]

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Like any traditional quiz show, “Le jeu de la mort” (The Game of Death) has a lively audience, a glamorous hostess, and a list of trivia questions for contestants. However, unlike typical game shows, punishment for wrong answers is a 460-volt electric shock. To chants of “punishment” from the studio audience, contestants zap their victims [...]

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E&Y and Lehman show that he’s been right all along of course. Thus accounting and auditing should be changed to suit his interests. Slightly sad that he sets off with this: …and it was used thereafter without further question arising to deliberately misrepresent the true nature of the balance sheet of the entity. That sounds [...]

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For most assuredly we’ll hang separately. Yes, Harry’s Place, hit by another idiot libel claim from the same set of solicitors that have failed dismally with the last three. How many more such things before being able to get them judged as vexatious litigants? Something which, I assume, would be bad for business for a [...]

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The UK has £28 billion of unpaid tax debt. I estimate tax avoidance (legal but unacceptable abuse of tax law) to run at £25 billion a year and tax evasion (fraudulent law-breaking) at £70 billion. Tackling these issues could close the fiscal deficit. The joy of this is that he doesn’t even realise that he’s [...]

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Are you saying that the scientific community, through the IPCC, is asking the world to restructure its entire mode of producing and consuming energy and yet hasn’t done a scientific uncertainty analysis? Yes.

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One for Ritchie and points left. A central tenet of public finance, however, is that the entity that has the legal obligation to pay a tax is not necessarily the one that bears the burden. For example, payroll taxes are levied on firms, but we know that they are mostly borne by workers. Raise payroll [...]

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Underlying the dispute, of course, is a series of corporate failures under Walsh’s stewardship, the impact of recession and the threat from low-cost airlines that have led the way in driving down labour costs and standards across the industry. That BA cabin crew should be condemned for attempting to halt the race to the bottom [...]

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According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”. Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the [...]

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Rum lot really: In postwar London, Beauclerk worked for the Central Office of Information until 1964, when he succeeded his second cousin, “Obby”, as 13th Duke of St Albans. He had been no less than ninth in line at the time of his birth (fewer D’Ascoynes stand between Louis Mazzini and the dukedom of Chalfont [...]

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It’s in Brazil so it might have both beer and titties.

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Ed Balls, in his infinite fucking wisdom, has decided that Latin is a useless subject in schools. Like Boris Johnson, I am outraged, not least because this is my livelihood at stake. The joy and value of Latin being taught in schools and the defence of it being of course entirely separate from this Libertarian’s [...]

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Paul Krugman (yes, Paul friggin’ Krugman) is advocating a trade war. In 1971 the United States dealt with a similar but much less severe problem of foreign undervaluation by imposing a temporary 10 percent surcharge on imports, which was removed a few months later after Germany, Japan and other nations raised the dollar value of [...]

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At the ASI. In which I solve the Greek debt crisis.

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At the ASI. Why murder rates aren’t the gold standard of measuring crime.

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There’s a PR Agency just hugging themselves with glee today. Ugg Boots have got themselves a bargain: HEALTH experts have blasted cheap Ugg boots as disastrous and warn they are harming the feet of a generation of young women. Hey, it may even be true but what a glorious thing to get into the newspapers. [...]

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Seems that she’s getting a bit of a bollocking this morning: Persistent claims that only six per cent of rapes end in conviction was seen as a useful “campaigning tool ” by some but was “extremely unhelpful”, warned Baroness Stern, the cross-bench peer who carried out a six month review in to tackling rape. She [...]

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At The Times. Of much greater importance, though, is what such lower limits will do to our opinion of the law in general. A pint at lunchtime could put you over that 20mg limit in the evening commute. A law that punished a man for driving after a pint of shandy would be regarded widely [...]

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Looks like it’s internationally agreed: 2. Service discrimination by race?  (Warning: Daily Mail story)

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Fun fact of the day: MIT releases its undergraduate admission decisions at 1:59 pm today.  (That is, at 3.14159).

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