Tim Worstall

FC United of Manchester. Well done lads, you don’t like the big corporate takeover of sport, bugger off and do it yourself. No one said it would ever be easy but damn, it can be fun. And that, actually, really is what it’s all about. You don’t like factory food? Fine, there are hillside bothys [...]

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Years ago, more than I really care to remember, I was working as a waiter in a restaurant and there was one partiular track on the music tape that I thought was just astounding. No, not a tape you could take out and look at, this was one of those centrally made tape loops that [...]

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Not sure whether I can get all that outraged about this: The third is Nicole Minetti, a 25-year-old former showgirl and dancer turned dental hygienist who helped treat the prime minister after a mentally ill assailant smashed a statue into his face. Earlier this year Mr Berlusconi put her up for election to the Lombard [...]

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In the most radical clampdown on the work-shy yet, Iain Duncan Smith will announce that the unemployed will be found compulsory 30 hour-a-week work placements and if they fail to turn up they will lose their Jobseekers’ Allowance for at least three months. So they’ll be working for nothing.  However, one of our major problems [...]

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The Rev. Scott Moore said he knows who had a hand in the deciding vote that kept Rogersville dry Tuesday. “I told my wife if we win by one vote, that means God cast a vote in this decision,” the Rogersville First Baptist Church pastor said after learning the town voted 219-218 against legalizing alcohol [...]

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When the American nomenklatura rouse themselves from their featherbedded tuffets and gather to try to mock the kulaks

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Wha? the JEL code for “Monetary Systems; Standards; Regimes; Government and the Monetary System; Payment Systems.” That JEL code is E 42. Making the meaning of life, the universe and everything, the Economics of Monetary Systems; Standards; Regimes; Government and the Monetary System; Payment Systems. Not quite what I would have thought to be honest.

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The UKIP leadership results are as follows: Nigel Farage – 6085 Tim Congdon – 2037 David Campbell Bannerman – 1404 Winston McKenzie – 530 We’ve 530 members who voted for Winston? Nice bloke n’all, but Eeeek!

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We might have solved one of the great linguistic mysteries of our time (OK, one of the terribly minor linguistic controversies of our time): the origin of the word “posh”. As we all get told this stands for “port out, starboard home” for this is how the richer, posher, people travelled out to India back [...]

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Via, some Paul Krugman: It strains credibility to assert the truth, which is that the main lesson one really learns from those 473 pages is how easy it is for an intelligent, earnest man to trip over his own intellectual shoelaces. The number of books on economics of which this is true is really quite [...]

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At the ASI. In which I answer Neal Lawson’s question: “When will the centre-left learn and stop being idiots?”

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From the Mirror: The Channel Tunnel was sold by the Government yesterday for £2.1billion. It would certainly be news if they had: for the government doesn’t own the Channel Tunnel. What they did sell was the Channel Tunnel rail link. Interesting bit here: The line allows speeds of 230 to 300 kilometres per hour (143 [...]

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That is the paradox of the Chess story. The brothers were not musical visionaries; they were small-time “indie” record men making a quick buck from the poorest, least respected people in America. But their cheaply recorded, bread-and-butter discs of local street musicians and bar bands still sound as fresh today as they did 60 years [...]

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Yes, we all know the answer, don’t we? Harriet Harman, the party’s deputy leader, said his legal challenge would not be supported and added: “It is no part of Labour’s politics to try to win elections by telling lies.” This isn’t to pick on HH or Labour particularly, but what in hell does she think [...]

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This is for you to say, not them, so up to you.

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Anyone else notice that Cab Calloway seems to have predicted the King of Sweden sex scandal?

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The first point to make here is that money is not, as orthodox economics would have us believe, a natural phenomenon. Contrary to what you will read in most the textbooks, modern money did not naturally ‘emerge’ through market forces as a more effective tool for exchange than bartering. Whilst it’s true that money does [...]

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The Liberal Democrat leader need only look as far as Tony Blair to see where a disenchanted left will leave his party In power for 13 years?

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see more Lolcats and funny pictures

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To fight furiously to keep the gigantic Bush tax cuts for the elite richest two percent of Americans, even though this alone will add two trillion dollars to the deficit over the next decade. That is, I think, an estimate of the entirety of the Bush tax cuts if they were extended. Letting President Bush’s [...]

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