Tim Worstall

Someone working for the Great Beast of retail tells me that the word’s gone out for people who fancy a bit of overtime to come in early Wednesday evening and take all the tat and bunting down: every bit of it, from deely boppers to vuvuzelas, though I suppose all those crappy t-shirts will be [...]

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Lordy be, there’s famine in Niger again. And we’ve the usual nonces at Comment is Free shouting about how awful the free market is. My response, C&P from there: Oh dearie, dearie, me. Right, famine. Horrible: we should do something about it. As, indeed, we do. As mentioned above, there’s nothing in any free market [...]

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Yet more on “healthy” eating. We all eat too much salt and thus salt in the diet should be reduced. Ignoring the fact that for almost all of us the body has a perfectly good method of getting rid of excess salt. It’s called a kidney. We all eat too much fat and …well, you [...]

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Well, OK, what is the greatest depends upon personal taste but how about the chance to win 365 nights in a Radisson Blu Hotel which you can take in any of 200 locations over the next five years? You can check out the rules for such a hotel win in full here: http://www.greatestholiday.radissonblu.com/ The basic [...]

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This time his same old report goes out under the banner of the Green Party, with Caroline Lucas headlining. First up is the Green New Deal: they’ve still not grasped that by making energy more expensive you destroy more jobs than you create in making energy more expensive. 2:1 according to that Spanish report. Now [...]

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Nice little piece here about attempts to fill up the Dead Sea from the Red Sea. Most of it’s pretty good actually, it is something of a worry and yes, the best solution would probably be to abstract less water from the Jordan. However, it being The Guardian they can’t help themselves but snarl at [...]

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This is fun: The development of the Olympic site in east London after the Games have finished could be in jeopardy because of radioactive waste buried beneath the site, experts have warned. The actual thing seems to be: In July 2008, the ODA told the Environment Agency that it had found 40 cubic metres, about [...]

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What’s also being tarred daily by the gushing oil is the very notion that government can accomplish anything. What we’re actually seeing is that government can make things worse. Take, for example, the shortage of oil skimming ships in the Gulf. There’s a whole flotilla of them on offer from a variety of European sources. [...]

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Via you know who, a letter to The Guardian. Calling for a Robin Hood Tax to tax banks. There then follows the list of signatories….very useful information really. For it’s a list of those who haven’t managed, however eminent they are, to grasp the concept of tax incidence. Thus a list of those we can [...]

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One of the most annoying, indeed enraging, things about politicians is their habit of speaking with forked tongue. You know, lying. Saying one thing and doing another. So, let us all praise Chris Huhne: ENERGY Secretary Chris Huhne is leaving his wife of 26 years after confessing to an affair, the News of the World [...]

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This is interesting I think: Barber also states that we want people to “believe that public sector wages have overtaken those in the private sector”. He then rather bizarrely states that they have. Public sector hourly wages overtook the private sector in 1984 and have been higher every year since. He fails to mention, however, [...]

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On a piece commending Rick Astley for having given up his pop “career” to be a stay at home father, we get this: Personally I think Paul Gadd gave up a lot more for children

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The Archbish of Westminster (that’s the left footed one) says, re the banking system, that: But the ethical judgment, which has to be transmitted right through the organisations concerned, is that profit must only be a means to this end, and not an end in itself. Ah, no. Something of the cart before horse there: [...]

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At the ASI. How to really solve our economic problems: leave the EU and adopt unilateral free trade.

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Didn’t the boys do well! Mmm, what? No, no, the important game, this one.

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I don’t see why the British lower classes deserve part of the wealth created by the City, merely because their homes are located closer to the City than those of Swedish workers. Why do they?

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Well, well, what an interesting idea. Lord Adair Turner, chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (pictured), has – we are told – written to the energy secretary asking that the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) competition be extended to include gas as well as coal projects. The committee is saying that efforts to tackle [...]

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At the ASI. On the TUC’s latest paper about capital gains tax. Their researcher seems not to know anything about either economics or data. Remind you of anyone?

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At The Register. About minerals in Afghanistan and the EU’s latest plans for mineral commodity colonialism.

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Congressional Democrats are pushing hard for legislation to rein in the power of special interests by requiring more disclosure of their roles in paying for campaign advertising — but as they struggle to find the votes they need to pass it they are carving out loopholes for, yes, special interests. The only way out of [...]

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