Tim Worstall

Netroots UK has sold out I was sure Sunny would wait a bit before applying for a safe Labour seat…..

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“I am bound to say that it is our interest to buy cheap, whether other countries will buy cheap or no.” Unfortunately, that was a long time ago.

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Its cheerleaders may deny it (even as they argue passionately against such horrors as a living wage), but global- isation tends to close the poverty gap between countries, and promote such a gap among the populations within countries. Yup, quite right. ‘N’ ain’t it grand? Hundreds of millions, billions, rising up out of the destitution [...]

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For the vast majority of people life has become relentlessly anxious, stressful and exhausting as we desperately try to keep up on the treadmill of a learn-to-earn-to-spend culture in which there is no time for the things and the people we really value; no time even for ourselves. Life just feels like a relentless slog [...]

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I have mixed feelings about the government’s proposed new two-thirds pint measure – just don’t call it a schooner Of course not. We already have a word for a third of a pint: stoup. Thus the new glass size is a “double stoup”. Or possibly a “large stoup”. Which will add greately to the gaiety [...]

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Officials at UK Trade and Investment, the Whitehall body that flies the flag for British business abroad with a little help from the Duke of York, have been instructed to burn through a spare £1m. Sir Andrew Cahn, the quango’s chief executive, sent an email to staff saying that the Foreign Office had failed to [...]

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Dick King-Smith has died. However many times I see it I still roar with applause at the end of Babe: and there has been known for there to be a manly glisten in the corner of an eye or two. Even if that’s the only thing one manages in life (which most certainly was not [...]

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Striking out the word nigger every time it appears in Huckleberry Finn is a kind of ethnic cleansing, a pretence that in the land of the free no one referred to black people by a demeaning term once the Civil War had been won. For while the novel was written well after the Civil War [...]

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You remember what CDOs were? Collaterialised Debt Obligations? Take some dodgy debt, stick a nice guarantee on top of it, bit of financial alchemy and then call it an AAA bond? The Commission’s €60bn bail-out fund (EFSM) raised its first €5bn to cover the Irish loan package, paying 2.59pc on five-year bonds. The cost is [...]

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You will recall that their explanation (and a rubbish explanation it was too) for the bounce in food prices 2006/8 was that lots of speculative money went into speculating on food prices. Hmm. According to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, food prices have surpassed the previous high they hit during the global commodities [...]

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Today is … … the first Kennedy free day of my life.

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You will recall that I’ve been shouting about how Ritchie’s estimations of the corporate tax gap are rubbish, yes? For he takes the headline tax rate and the actually paid tax rate and says that the difference between the two must be the tax gap. Entirely ignoring that some/part/most/all of this gap will be corporations [...]

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I have a little feeling here. Just a suspicion. That a goodly chunk of the fall in the national debt post WWII was to do with screwing over those who held the gilts which made up the national debt. The best way, if you can manage it that is, of getting the government out of [...]

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And the result is, as you would expect, not pretty. Let’s talk absolute cash – it’s value changes over time. In percentage terms our deficit is way below the level in the 50’s and 60’s. If we were to be talking “absolute cash” then we might talk about nominal amounts of cash: and our deficit [...]

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Thanks to the intervention of one Dr. Alan Gribben, American kids will no longer be racist after reading Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and timorous teachers will now feel comfortable assigning a book that once featured 219 instances (according to Gribben) of the word “nigger.” Gribben’s new edition of Huckleberry Finn will excise all those [...]

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At the very least, I expect my articles to be noteworthy enough that within a few days Brad DeLong will call me a moronic hypocrite. A question for the crowd. Is this better or worse than finding out that Brad DeLong agrees with what you’ve written?

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Here. And yes, that does extend to the fatuous nitwittery of the nef on local economies and local currencies as well. They’re just stone plain out wrong.

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But on trade policy formulation, it seems that the right hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing. Last year, while magnesium imports from China were subject to U.S. antidumping duties, the Obama administration launched a WTO case against China for its restraints on exports of raw materials, including magnesium. That’s right. The [...]

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Don Boudreaux: If being a collection of shrewd political compromises justifies a document’s text being interpreted loosely, why stop with the Constitution?  Extend this principle to all legislation.  And let’s begin with history’s greatest collection of shrewd political compromises, the U.S. tax code. Interpreting that code as a living document, it strikes me that the [...]

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Oxfam’s rightly proud of Wastesaver. Innovative, even at its 1974 inception, the facility is still unmatched by any other major UK-based charity for size and ambition. The warehouse is a maze of conveyor belts that wind across and around several levels. It’s “festive Friday” when I visit on the last Friday before Christmas and many [...]

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