Tim Worstall

Yes, he’s absolutely correct that we should legalise drugs. No doubt about it. Then he puts in absurdities like this: You can see this any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 per cent profit margins [...]

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And because they also, by and large, worked locally they had the knowledge to react locally. Tax inspectors that is. Because just as centrally organised, target driven, big business does not understand entrepreneurial spirit – which is the preserve of the more effective small enterprise that as a result makes better returns on almost all [...]

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George David Weiss was born in Manhattan on April 9, 1921. He wanted to be a musician. His mother wanted him to be a lawyer. The ensuing emotional battle, he later said, drove him to consult a doctor. As Mr. Weiss recounted in a 1995 interview with The Miami Herald, the prescription was simple. The [...]

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Corruption is rife: today, Russian educators put the cheat in учитель.

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I believe the dignity of parents, donors and the unborn would be threatened by introducing marketplace values. And without marketplace values there won’t be those unborn to have their dignity threatened. When are we English going to get over this distaste for “trade”?

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Ethical clothing company not so ethical actually. The confusing thing about Charney is his combination of out-of-control carnality and progressive social liberation. One industry insider calls him an “odious character about whom I have heard nothing but bad things, particularly concerning his recruitment techniques and the way he treats female employees”. There is, he adds, [...]

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I don’t really understand this. OK, that’s nothing unusual, there’s lots I don’t understand. Especially about accounting for banks. But the point of a newspaper article is, at least I assume it is, to inform one so that one can understand the point being made. And that point just isn’t made. Sure, there’s lots of [...]

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Asil Nadir is back! I don’t even know what the charges are against him let alone whether he did any of the things alleged so I’ll not pass comment on any of that. What was fun though was what was going on in Polly Peck. It was all entirely legal even if a tad misleading. [...]

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Ian Cowie, really: Regular readers will be familiar with the mathematics because I have been banging on about this since the Budget of March, 2007. Here’s one example of how the poverty trap works. Anyone entitled to claim tax credits – and that includes nearly half of all pensioners – whose annual income exceeds about [...]

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Look, yes, comparative advantage is one of those things that’s really hard to grasp. It is counter intuitive. But, but, et tu Dave? This (lovely and interesting) map isn’t showing comparative advantage. It’s showing absolute advantage. A country which is “best” at something has an absolute advantage. Comparative advantage is about that we do (whether [...]

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This is an odd thing for an economist to say: If houses could be bought relatively cheaply, it was because local councils once provided “social housing”. Council houses were sold off by Margaret Thatcher – leaving housing entirely to the market, Flogging off council houses increases the supply of houses that can be purchased. Other [...]

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….man of power has child by own wife. Very weird.

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A CLOSE-knit community has clubbed together to pay £122,500 to keep a favourite beauty spot out of the hands of housing developers. Fourteen residents joined forces to buy a 13-acre field at auction because they feared it would otherwise be built over. Don’t want land developed or built upon? Get your chequebook out and buy [...]

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A number of points I’ve made myself over time. If you have to ration then rationing by price is the best way to do so….and if there are those too poor to afford the good or service and you wish to make sure that no one is too poor to afford the good or service [...]

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Low-income households of working age lose the most from the June 2010 Budget reforms because of the cuts to welfare spending. Those who lose the least are households of working age without children in the upper half of the income distribution. This is because they do not lose out from cuts in welfare spending and [...]

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The Future of Rural Energy England (FREE) – a new energy efficiency scheme funded by energy company Calor – has matched fuel poverty data with areas of England that are off mains gas, showing Forest Heath in Suffolk, Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northumberland, and Bassetlaw in Nottinghamshire contain the highest proportion of fuel-poor households in off-mains gas [...]

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Britain’s leading independent tax experts today flatly rejected the coalition government’s claims to have shielded poor families from five years of austerity when they described George Osborne‘s emergency budget as “clearly regressive”. In a direct challenge to Treasury claims that the package of spending cuts and tax increases announced in June was fair, the Institute [...]

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Around one in five large British businesses has considered relocating abroad for tax reasons, a report commissioned by HM Revenue & Customs found. In the same way that the generals have a written plan for war against absolutely everyone stuffed away in a filing cabinet somewhere, I’d expect every business to have at least looked [...]

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SIR – Those with experience of the old Stock Exchange floor will readily recall some of the nicknames (Letters, August 22) bestowed upon its habitués. Among them were two brothers, both with highly distinguished military careers and both winners of the Military Cross, one with bar and one without. The latter acquired the sobriquet of [...]

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Two in a day on Ritchie. Discussing the normal distribution: Yes, that’s the normal distribution – a widely recognised statistical phenomenon. As Wikipedia says of this diagram: Dark blue is less than one standard deviation from the mean. For the normal distribution, this accounts for about 68% of the set (dark blue), while two standard [...]

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