Tim Worstall

It seems the government has moved on from higher education and on to our higher feelings: it is proposing to measure our happiness. The first and most important thing is to deal with the Easterlin Paradox. this is the contention that above a certain level, happiness does not increase as GDP does. So, once we’ve [...]

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The retention of control orders poses a lasting threat to justice and civil liberties, says Mary Riddell. I actually agree with Mary Riddell. But then perhaps that’s because I really is a liberal: one for whom liberty and freedom are the defining values, not things to be traded against ephemeral visions of security.

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Kinder Scout, one of the most famous mountain tops in Britain, is to be fenced off in a controversial effort to return the bleak plateau to natural moorland after 200 years of pollution and overgrazing. It’s not in fact pollution and overgrazing which is the problem: “Kinder Scout is one of our most iconic landscapes [...]

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Looking to buy a new (ish) laptop online in the UK. Manufacturers refurbs are fine: not all that keen on properly second hand ones. Want a 15 inch (ish) screen DVD player with some version of Windows. 500 MB. WiFi. Other than that it doesn’t really matter, simple games, email, browsing machine. Anyone got any [...]

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So much to like about this: We demand: a. That the government stop the cuts b. That all job cuts at H M Revenue & Customs be cancelled c. That 20,000 new staff be recruited at H M Revenue & Customs to tackle the tax gap That’ll please Mr. Serwotka, won’t it, the head of [...]

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There are plenty people out there (I’ve just seen a documentary on Channel 4 presented by one) who don’t believe in Keynesian economics, but who think that the Great Depression was ended by the Second World War. In other words, paying men to dig holes and fill them in again is a ridiculous policy, compared [...]

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So – just to hammer home the point with an outsized mallet – for every pound we earn, the government spends 53 pence of it, leaving us with just 47 pence.

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Now we want to take it one step further and let people of other parties join Compass. Let’s have more members to pay my salary! Whassa matter Neal, donations falling?

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Later, however, he became a prominent critic of Yeltsin’s “shock therapy”, which he said had concentrated wealth in the hands of oligarchs and undermined the middle class. There is indeed a sense that this is true. However, there’s also a sense in which it isn’t. Certainly, not in Moscow. The Soviet system of housing was [...]

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Lake District, Norfolk Broads and New Forest ‘could be lost due to budget cuts’ What, trees fall over, lakes dry up and land disappears without a generous dollop of taxpayers’ money every week?

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They never do manage to get this value of drugs right, do they? In Argentina and Brazil, police seized a total of 3.4 metric tonnes of cocaine ready for shipment across the Atlantic. The drugs were wrapped in sealed one kilogram packets bearing Donald Duck logos, each worth £42,000 at street level – a total [...]

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At the ASI. Default’s not as bad as people make it out to be.

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Ritchie says: This is quite extraordinary. Until the TUC published my report entitled ‘The Missing Billions’ in February 2008 we know from published documentation that HMRC paid almost no attention to this issue. That published documentation being the report that shows that HMRC had estimates of the tax gap from 2004. Four years before Ritchie’s [...]

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New, advanced techniques for drilling oil have revolutionized the domestic oil industry in North Dakota in ways that couldn’t have even been predicted just a few years ago, and will likely also open up new oil production in other parts of the world in the near future (like the Alberta Bakken in Canada) that also [...]

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Webb believes in a two-pronged approach. First, the development of government-backed alternatives for investment outside the housing market. Secondly, the introduction of a safe and reputable rental sector, possibly by encouraging well-respected businesses such as John Lewis to invest in housing. “I started thinking one day that if I were 32, living with mum and [...]

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But if you were stuck in a hotel in Lagos, which type of banjo would you learn? Which should you? Tenor (ie, jazz rhythm) or country (pickin’)? Mebbe Mento? Who knows, the banjo introduced into Nigerian music?

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Meanwhile, a coalition government with no mandate for what they are doing They’re the people who could assemble a majority in the House of Commons. They’ve a mandate to do whatever they can pass through said House of Commons. That’s just what the system is. We don’t have a political system where those who can [...]

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I see The Guardian has decided to declare war on the finances of Schloss Worstall. In Britain, we have flooded the night with sodium orange: even away from towns lights shine out across the landscape and the sky, though it may be starless, is almost never the Bible-black of Dylan Thomas’s imagination. How much we [...]

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If you’re going to write columns on economics could you please make sure that you understand the economic processes you are writing about? And it is interesting to see them getting some attention, after the media ignored, for example, the fact that an overvalued dollar was the main cause of the United States’s loss of [...]

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