Tim Worstall

At the ASI. Companies hate competition: which is why we don’t want any regulatory or licencing barriers to such competition arising.

[Read more →]

It also stated: “Despite the impression given by the media, the actual number of homosexuals is quite small. Essentially all surveys show the number of homosexuals to be only 1-3% of the population.” Drugs charities and experts yesterday expressed surprise that someone of such stringent opinions could be appointed to the committee. Some of his [...]

[Read more →]

Children are to be taught about homosexuality in maths, geography and science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to “celebrate the gay community”. Notably this one: Maths – teaching statistics through census findings about the number of homosexuals in the population, Because that could be an extremely interesting set of lessons in how careful [...]

[Read more →]

Blimey, the trivial everyday commonalities that make newspaper headlines these days.

[Read more →]

Another one of those things you find out when the wife’s away. I know that I sometimes make short planks look clever but I am struggling to believe that I’m quite this dim. I can’t work out how to turn on the TV. When she left she said, look, press this one on the Sky [...]

[Read more →]

But who are these rich who should pay? The economists reckon (based on tax-filing data) that an income of around $107,540, excluding realised capital gains, puts an American household in the top 10% of American families. To get into the top 5%, you need to earn less than $150,000. To me, it’s something of a [...]

[Read more →]

A surrogate mother is said to exercise “choice”. Of course, she is entitled to rent out her womb to whomsoever she likes. However, choice presupposes that we live in a society in which there are no serious differences in power, income and authority between individuals. And we don’t. But I’m not sure that that is the [...]

[Read more →]

So, there’s a new film out about the devadasi: temple prostitution in India in effect. The devadasis have a multilayered story, a story in which poverty, deprivation and injustice against women is central – but what has happened to them is absolutely an outcome of imperialism and the impact of British rule in India. Gosh, [...]

[Read more →]

The head of the civil service has ordered an inquiry into the government’s localism reforms amid growing concerns that its “big society” plans risk eroding the basic democratic principles of transparency and ministerial accountability, the Guardian has learned. There are fears by those at the top of Whitehall that parliament’s fundamental right to hold the [...]

[Read more →]

So our Geoffrey Lean gets all excited about the Wadebridge Renewable Energy Network. For today it will launch an attempt to become Britain’s first solar town. Backed by the local MP and chamber of commerce, the scheme aims to generate a third of the electricity used by the town’s 10,000 people from renewable sources – [...]

[Read more →]

At the ASI. It seems that hundreds of our finest academic minds don’t know what they’re talking about.

[Read more →]

The cost of sending a child to a senior independent school has soared from around £6,000 to almost £30,000 in 25 years, it was disclosed. In the last six years alone, fees have increased by around a third at some schools, figures show, quicker than the rise in earnings. OK, but perhaps these peeps are [...]

[Read more →]

I believe that the best solution to end homelessness is to abolish private property.

[Read more →]

But I do know my economic history, which means that I know how often governments refuse, sometimes for many years, to do the obviously right thing Which is why it’s always so puzzling hearing you talk about all the other and more things that government should be doing said wrong things about.

[Read more →]

A college student is suing a stripper-referral service, saying the assigned dancer engaged in an illegal act of prostitution with him but did not stay the full hour as promised. That’s what you’re paying them for, to leave afterwards rather than stay around for a cuddle and a chat.

[Read more →]

There are things that good taste and the law will simply not let you say in print. My current favourites are “Murderer acquitted” and (in a report of an Easter religious play) “Paul Myers, who played Jesus Christ, emerged as the star of the show.” Try and work out which one has the taste problem, [...]

[Read more →]

Greed, avarice, and envy were among the deadly sins. Usury … was an offense against God. It was only in the eighteenth century that greed became morally respectable. Quite. It’s exactly at the point that what were formerly thought to be sins became regarded as the bourgeois virtues that we started to have sustained economic [...]

[Read more →]

Andrew Simms tells is that the huge effort made to recycle led to 111,000 tonnes a week of scrap metal being collected. According to the Reportlinker report, the volume of scrap metal consumed in 2008 stood at 5.6 million tonnes Oh, so you mean the same amount that the market unadorned now recycles then? A [...]

[Read more →]

A report from Caroline Lucas: The changes now underway in our climate, if unchecked, pose probably the greatest threat to Britain that we have ever faced. Our health and security, our society and way of life, our natural environment, even our coastline, are all at risk from uncontrolled natural forces – disease, drought, flood and [...]

[Read more →]

Labour’s future in England is conservative. The country’s radical traditions are rooted in the political struggle for the liberty that Edmund Burke describes as “social freedom”. There is a powerful strain of rebellious individualism in English socialism that helped to create a politics of liberty, virtue and democracy and a vast popular movement of voluntary [...]

[Read more →]