Tim Worstall

At the ASI. Markets really do solve problems.

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Tucked away in last month’s Low Pay Commission report is research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, estimating that for every 10% the minimum wage rises, the state saves between £560m and £680m in credits and benefits. With the minimum at a puny £5.91, the taxpayer is subsidising employers such as those signatories to pay [...]

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If they make this compulsory, as I have no doubt they will do, I’m going to have to go and have children just so they can jail me when I refuse to let them be kidnapped by it. Yes, the current wife will be mightily pissed off at such a turn of events but a [...]

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Your metals trivia of the day. OK, so everyone knows that the rare earths are used as phosphors. For they luminesce. Yes, everyone does know that, yes? Quite, everyone does, for example, europium, terbium and so on have been used for decades to make up the coloured dots on the inside of cathode ray tubes. [...]

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Here.

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Those who hanker for the long-held principle of trial by “12 good men and true” are caught in a time warp. Just as equality has made such a twee saying redundant, patterns of criminal offending are making the jury system redundant for certain trials. This week’s case has shown that a judge-alone trial is quicker, [...]

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Speaking in 2007, she said that, despite not being paid, she was proud of having one of the world’s most famous bottoms.

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John Band notes that because people living in Victoria or Western Australia don’t get to vote on who runs New South Wales therefore there should not be an English Parliament.

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Woolworths.co.uk have launched the world’s first ever calorie negative sweet – the Diet Cola Bottle. The sweet, part of its Pic n’ Mix range, burns more calories when eating and digesting than the sweet actually contains. Matthew Jacques, Head of brand at Woolworths.co.uk, says “The Diet Cola Bottle looks almost identical and tastes equally as [...]

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Finally, there’s taxation. Obama wants the banks to self-finance the cost of the next bailout, but his plan is flawed. The existence of such a fund would merely encourage banks to take even bigger risks, while the proposed charge on banks would not be nearly big enough to cover the full economic costs of a [...]

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I’ve mused before that inequality is high in the UK because of regional variations in incomes. London and the SE dominate the economy in a way that I’m not sure is true of most other countries. The high pay there means that inequality of income is therefore higher than in most other countries. And I [...]

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A high-fat breakfast of bacon and eggs may be the healthiest start to the day, a new university report showed. I don’t think this is one of the April Fool stories….just the usual dieticians have been getting it wrong for 80 years one.

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