Tim Worstall

Ultimately, the whole book reads like an extended lesson in how to commit the fallacy of the excluded middle.

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Something that’s always interested me: just how many people do enjoy the fruitier flavours of human sexuality? No, not because I’m looking for a date, rather as a political question. For as we know, every political grouping (using “politics” in its wider sense) will deliberately over estimate the number who are, could, would or will [...]

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Ms. Orr gets dreadfully confused about capitalism and markets here and you can see a nice little Marxist assumption rearing its ugly head: Capitalism, unregulated, is a beast that eats itself, killing the impulse that creates it. Competition is healthy until an undisputed, unbeatable winner emerges. Then the game is over, and monopoly dictates. How [...]

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“Ode To Joy” by Beethoven, lyrics by Schiller. The Romantic composers 1785 piece was written to inspire revolution but was used to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday and is now the EU’s official anthem. Those damn Nazis get everywhere, don’t they?

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Happily I can report that earlier this week in a little bar in a little village I know in rural France the locals saw me coming and moved outside. So they could tell I was English? I asked the barowner, “Non mon ami, ils fument dans mon bar, mais vous etes un visiteur. They wish [...]

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Brad DeLong asks: What is the most likely outcome for the U.S. budget come 2060? 1. We will have raised taxes to pay for government health spending. 2. We will have cut doctors’ wages and enslaved them by drafting them into a socialist national health service. 3. We will have abandoned our commitment to providing [...]

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Richard is going to tell us all why productivity will naturally fall as the state sector gets larger as a portion of the economy. This will be good, won’t it? To explain, let me explore for a moment why it is inevitable that state sector productivity falls as the scale of state sector spending rises [...]

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Something of a rum do here. By the numbers: Approximately 45 million Americans were living in poverty in 2009. 2009 saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959. The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst (above only Turkey and Mexico) among [...]

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Apparently this is a direct quote: monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. Monopolists are made from competition; competitors become monopolists … monopoly can only maintain itself by continually entering into the struggle of competition Methinks Karl was having a bad day with the housemaid or the boils perhaps when he wrote that. And it leads [...]

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Serious safety problems have been exposed at a dockyard in Cumbria that makes nuclear submarines after an emergency exercise revealed “confusion” and “extremely poor” procedures, according to a report by government inspectors. Britain’s biggest arms company, BAE Systems, is being forced to rerun the exercise to prove that it can cope with a serious nuclear [...]

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There really are things which we would very much rather do in large organised factories rather than having some William Morris Arts and Crafts movement trying to do them. An unprecedented outbreak of lead poisoning linked to a gold rush has killed at least 200 children in northern Nigeria this year, with a further 18,000 [...]

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This is going to be fascinating to watch: Now Suffolk county council is taking an even more radical approach to public sector reform by proposing a “virtual” authority that outsources all but a handful of its services. The Tory-controlled county’s “new strategic direction”, set for approval tomorrow, could see virtually every service outsourced to social [...]

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Yes, he did favour maximum interest rates: In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith often condemned “projectors”, as speculators were called in his own time. For example, he favoured a legally-imposed maximum interest rate of 5 per cent at a time when the market rate was about 4 per cent. If the legal rate of [...]

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Little lament for a vulnerable MP Published: September 22 2010 03:44 | Last updated: September 22 2010 03:44 Messines, Portugal // 0){if (nl.getElementsByTagName(“p”).length>= paraNum){nl.insertBefore(tb,nl.getElementsByTagName(“p”)[paraNum]);}else {if (nl.getElementsByTagName(“p”).length == 3){nl.insertBefore(tb,nl.getElementsByTagName(“p”)[2]);}else {nl.insertBefore(tb,nl.getElementsByTagName(“p”)[0]);}}}} // ]]> From Mr Tim Worstall. Sir, Tristram Hunt’s lament for the Britain that will be lost through the scrapping of the 50 smallest constituencies (Comment, [...]

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Via Dave, let’s just be serious for a moment about climate change. As is usual around here, we’ll start with the assumption that the IPCC is correct. So, what is it that we need to do? Tear down the current structure of society? Rip up everything we’ve already built and start again? Nope. We’re going [...]

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That’s the new e-book from a left think tank. It certainly opens in fine form: Labour made the mistake of buying the snake oil of neo-classical economics. It must now discard it, and develop ideas for the economy that are both practical and humane – based on the principles of environmentally sustainable wealth creation, durability, [...]

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So he’s said to say: Steve Cram: I’m a socialist so I don’t mind taxes Well, what he actually says is: Strangely, I don’t mind paying my taxes because, being a bit of a socialist, I can see the value of the services that they go towards. That’s hardly socialist: you could run anyone on [...]

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It depends upon which of the two meanings he, umm, means here. His fetish for demonising bankers and executives of any type is surpassed only by his attack on capitalism itself. “Capitalism takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can,” Cable plans to say today. Any sane business secretary would know capitalism encourages competition [...]

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Their report about what we should all be doing. What went wrong: Although the government suggests that the state is the problem, most economists would support the view that the real cause of the recession is the drying up of liquidity in financial markets. So, what should we do about this? Seventh, introduce a financial [...]

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Mainstream accounts of poverty deliberately avoid a historical understanding of how the poor came to be poor, This is to get the question entirely bass ackwards. Poverty (unless you get a truly moronic leader like Mugabe or Castro) isn’t something which is created. It just is. From the Roman Empire to 1700 average global GDP [...]

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