Tim Worstall

At the ASI. Apparently Tim Cook is gay, something we should all rather ignore.

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But what a very strange thing to sue about: His contract with Phaidon is, he claims, a restraint of trade because it seeks to ban him from working on other projects with different publishers. The owner of the Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea says he made two agreements with Phaidon in 2009 for books provisionally called [...]

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Obama has made some mistakes, to be sure, but at least he ended the wars and has the government on a sound financial footing.

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The Guardian ensures that purported authors at least read and approve of what goes out under their names. Rilly? I myself have ghosted pieces for this very newspaper when working as a press officer. When Mr. Seaton was running CiF in fact. And while I’d have been caught very quickly indeed if I’d said something [...]

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You either think that encouraging an unlevel playing field for business so that the cheats get an unfair competitive advantage by not paying tax is fair, or you don’t. Aren’t we continually told that taxing business activity isn’t a damaging thing to do? In which case, not being taxed on business activity cannot be a [...]

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And what is Hislop’s principal message? Week in and week out, it is that most pretty much all politicians are corrupt, deluded, incompetent, second-rate and hypocritical. Seriously, in a world that contains John Gummer, Tim Yeo and Chris Huhne, to mention just those on the current Coalition side on matters climate change, who could argue [...]

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No, leave aside the hypocrisy and look at the logic here: A regular punter who tried to make his tax payments conditional on a guarantee of anonymity from officialdom and a reduced tax rate wouldn’t get far. But where the punter in question has serious cash in some Alpine hideaway, then HMRC is suddenly reduced [...]

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Health experts blame passive overeating for global pandemic, warning in the Lancet that governments must tackle obesity now “Passive overeating“. What, you mean the pokers aren’t putting the food into their own mouths? Digesting it to produce flobbling rolls of glutinous fat? They’re just absorbing the over-weightness from the passing air? Swinburn’s paper comes up [...]

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Fraud cost the British economy more £38 billion in the 2010/11 – just £2 billion less than the entire defence budget. More than half of all fraud in Britain – around £21 billion – involves public sector money. Tax fraud accounts for £15 billion a year while around £1 billion in benefits are illegally claimed. [...]

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Research has shown that one in three women leave the shower running while they shave their legs, wasting around 50 billion litres of water a year. You might think that women are wasting the globe’s precious razor blade reserves by shaving their legs at all. You might think, as Thames Water seems to, that women are [...]

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We’ve got the CoOp telling us that even food sales are falling: Peter Marks said that for the first time people have been cutting food budgets – normally an area that is relied upon as “recession-proof”. “People are spending less on food – that’s a first,” said the Co-op’s chief executive. He added that he [...]

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A while back we were told that the heavens were falling because there were tax debts: money legally owed but which HMRC couldn’t collect. This was of course proof perfect that HMRC should get lots more money to hire more people to collect it all. When the total outstanding debts now owing to HMRC are [...]

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But investors can too often also be speculators, seeking profits on bond trades affecting millions of families and jobs. An investor is seeking a profit on his bond trade. A speculator is seeking a profit on his bond trade. So, umm, what’s the dividing line? In Guardianspeak it’s obvious of course: an investor is someone [...]

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We had a pretty good warning earlier this year, when the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused an even bigger tragedy when the Fukushima nuclear power plant suffered a meltdown. 20,000 people being crushed to death or drowned is a tragedy. A few piles of very expensive scrap metal with no one killed is [...]

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It’s The Guardian, of all places, who actually managed to get this story correct in its opening lines. The value of holding a degree has been eroded as the share of the population with a university education has more than doubled over two decades, a study shows. Glory be, that straight old supply and demand [...]

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But that sense of relief is exactly the reason why GCSEs should be abolished – because they perpetuate the idea that 16 is the gateway to adulthood. Umm, but 16 is the gateway to adulthood. Sure, 16 year olds aren’t the finished mature item but that can be said about 48 year old men like me. [...]

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Try this from Clive Aslet: Well, no. If there were a demand for new housing, builders would be putting up properties left, right and centre on their massive land banks. As it is, the rate of building has slowed to little above zero. Umm, there’s “litte above zero” and there’s “little above zero” Mr. Aslet. [...]

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The number of degree students ending up in low to lower-skilled jobs has grown from 9pc to 17pc over the past 18 years, a fresh analysis by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has revealed. The increase is largely due to the number of people with a degree rising at a faster rate than the [...]

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Council workers could be forced to take a week’s unpaid leave each year as part of radical plans to minimise job losses, it emerged yesterday. They’ll whine about it at the same time as they praise Germany’s reaction to the recession: making lots of people work part time for less money. It’s exactly the same [...]

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Wasn’t there a Robert Redford film about this sort of thing? Hiring out prisoners as labour to the local politicians? Perhaps this is the second episode in the tragedy/farce circuit?

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