Tim Worstall

Legend had it that he was once been consulted by a Ladbrokes manager who had been asked to make a book on the name of the next Archbishop of Canterbury, but did not know where to start. “You want a start, I’ll give you a start,” Stein replied. “The Chief Rabbi’s 1,000 to one.”

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But true for a certain value of “true”. Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, described the advertisement as “grossly offensive to women and minorities”. “This billboard simply doesn’t belong in New York City,” said Mr de Blasio. “Common decency demands it be taken down.” Christine Quinn, the Speaker of New York city council, said: [...]

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Global warming, doh! If the sun shines for another hour a day then this will melt more ice and warm the planet up more. Simples.

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Alan Rusbridger tells us it is all very complicated. Which, of course, it is. I do have to say that I am amused that there is no possibility of commenting upon the piece as yet. However, here’s the question that we (or I) would really love to have an answer to. Scroll forward nearly 80 [...]

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A speculative and harsh one, true, but a possible one: But general practitioners must do more to identify those suffering from the rapid increase in immune disorders, which now affect one in 20 young people in Britain, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) warns. The vogue for complementary cures may be a consequence of [...]

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Despite promising to protect health budgets, Lansley, the health secretary, has secured just 0.1% rises to the NHS budget You mean a politician has actually kept his word? What a surprise!

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United Russia, the Russian prime minister’s all-powerful party, has already pencilled in Miss Chapman as the next MP for the Volgograd region in southern Russia according to the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper which said it had seen the list. The former spy is all but guaranteed electoral success as Russia is a de facto one-party [...]

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The massacres in Libya are a deeply shocking outrage. Hundreds of Libyans have been killed by armed forces acting under the orders of the government. This unfeeling brutality from the Libyan government towards its own people is something that the whole world should condemn in the strongest language. Hmm.

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It’s just so amazingly surprising! Woman who designs educational buildings says that government should spend much more money on designing educational buildings. Where do people get these novel and exciting ideas from?

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see more Very Demotivational

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My word. The Treasury select committee will consider asking the banks to extract payroll taxes from the wider tax bill, the Telegraph has reported. This followed reports over the weekend about Barclays paying £113m in corporation tax out of a total tax bill of £2bn in 2009. The bank made £11.bn profits that year. Mr. [...]

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In October 2008 it was announced that the trust was being wound up and its assets transferred to a new limited company named The Scott Trust Limited.[2] The purpose of this change was to facilitate the avoidance of a capital gains tax liability arising on the disposal of the trusts interest in AutoTrader. Not being [...]

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I can’t see it here.

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Alerted by Duncan there’s a new paper by them. They want to show, as good little Keynesians, that you must spend your way out of debt. Now perhaps there’s some detail, some cuteness, to their numbers that I’ve not got. But just as an example, they say that in 1918, government expenditure was 35% of [...]

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I’m not normally a fan of Ha Joon Chang, but this is good: The microfinance industry has always boasted that its operations remain profitable without government subsidies or contributions from individual donors, except perhaps in the initial teething phase. [...] However, it turns out that, without subsidies from governments or international donors, microfinance institutions have [...]

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We’ve got Polly going nuclear here: This is it, the last veil ripped away. In the Daily Telegraph today, David Cameron penned his preview of the long-delayed white paper on public services. The paper’s editorial saw the light: “For the first time he explains the full scope of his ambition to roll back the boundaries [...]

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Yunus, the managing director of the Grameen Bank, which has lent small sums to millions of deprived people to help them start or run their own businesses as a first step out of poverty since being created in 1983, has been caught in a bitter political battle in his homeland of Bangladesh. The campaign to [...]

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Your comment is absurd If you genuinely think that there is no room for misunderstanding in the interpretation of the written word you’re either a) naive or b) deceiving yourself In which case perfect legsilation is not possible – but the spirit of the law remains intact none the less So how are we to [...]

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Oh my, this is just too precious: Guardian readers seem to be under the illusion that it is owned by a not-for-profit charity. The Scott Trust was wound up in October 2008 and the Guardian is a for-profit-privately-owned business, the well paid directors of which confirm in their annual accounts that they operate tax strategies [...]

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Rent free remember: A Stakhanovite prime minister might have thought the nation would pay for his bacon rolls when he was toiling on its behalf to steady the world’s economy. Sarah Brown‘s diary of life in No 10, serialised in the Daily Mail, shows that when her husband was at work, officials asked her to [...]

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