Tim Worstall

This truly takes the biscuit: The core issue of significance today is the draft legislation that will enable communities  to call a binding referendum if a local authority wants to increase council tax by more than the cap set by the communities secretary. As the FT notes: Eric Pickles, the communities secretary, will outline initiatives [...]

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But perhaps most important is the fact that a limited liability company gives its shareholders in whose interest Roger Carr says it must be run the most phenomenal economic privilege: they cannot be sued for the debts the company incurs if all goes wrong even though they get all the benefit if things go right. [...]

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Amazon review of it: This noisy polemic is by Tim Worstall, member of the Adam Smith Institute, press officer for the UKIP and commodity trader. He’s not a climate scientist, so it’s safe to ignore him. Except… he’s an economist, and a good one. And here he examines the recommendations of the global warming lobby [...]

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Feminists to grow bushy eyebrows for feminism. Can’t help feeling it’s just a tad redundant as a gesture.

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Britain is now more Thatcherite than when Margaret Thatcher was in power, with people much less supportive of the welfare state and the redistribution of wealth than in the 1980s, according to an authoritative study of the country’s mood. New Labour oversaw the biggest recorded shift to the right in public attitudes on those measures, [...]

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Snooty Europhiles should be forced to crawl in penitence The ‘blimpish Little Englanders’ who opposed monetary union were right all along, says Boris Johnson. And we don’t seem to have seen any of those necessary mea culpas yet, do we?

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Not a bad piece and the quotes are pertinent. But this line jars a bit: Trapped in the Westminster kettle, it was ultimately the words of Thomas Hobbes I recalled most clearly: Really? The full quote ran through your mind in the middle of the kettling of a demo? Not, well, when I got home [...]

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In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising. It is a remarkable achievement, yet for a government fixated on stability such figures are also a cause for concern. The [...]

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At the ASI. Something of a blow for our lefty friends. The majority of capital income does not go to the rich. Thus taxing capital income more is not taxing the rich more.

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It was the most enjoyable couple of hours I had last night.

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Why Frome is still cashing in on the Romans Last April, a man who hated history at school unearthed the largest coin hoard ever found in Britain. But why had it been buried in a field in Somerset? As a West Country boy myself I can answer this. Because, whatever the century, you certainly don’t [...]

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Do lesbian mums make the best parents? According to research released earlier this year, children raised by two mothers do better academically, have higher self-esteem and are less likely to have behavioural problems than peers who have been brought up in a family with two heterosexual parents. That might indeed be true. Could be, certainly. [...]

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A new UN climate fund to be run largely by developing countries Hmm. And just who is going to be auditing this fund?

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Asks Jemima Khan. Because you’re a) rich and b) grandstanding?

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5,520 and counting…… (yes, I know, this means about 5 sales or something)

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Does bathing a baby make it wet?

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Lord Stern, that high priest of the international warmist establishment, proposed that Britain should raise an extra £15 billion a year in “green taxes”, on petrol, flights and domestic energy, to punish people with a “high-emission lifestyle” for the damage they do to the environment. The thing is, if you actually believed and went along [...]

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This judge doesn’t sound very happy at the ruling he’s just made: Mr Justice Briggs said he regretted having to make the ruling, which he blamed on “a legislative mess”. “Parliament might wish to consider a suitable amendment,” he added. “The conferring of super-priority as expenses on the financial liabilities arising from the FSD regime [...]

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The FSA code, which will be published before the end of the year, will say that at least 40pc of bonuses should be deferred if the amounts are below £500,000, rising to 60pc if the bonus is above that figure. An early draft of the code, published in the summer, also said that at least [...]

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Here. Page 1321, at the bottom: It is a robust result of optimal tax theory that economies that are small in world capital markets should set a marginal effective rate of corporation tax- that is, a rate on the investment that just breaks even after tax- of zero. That is essentially a production efficiency argument, [...]

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