Tim Worstall

If Peter Mandelson (or Blair, Brown, Darling, Cable, Benn etc) were, when in government such economic and business hot shots that they knew where all of our money should be invested, then why haven’t they all made industrial fortunes as economic and business hotshots in retirement? And it will never dawn on any of these [...]

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Kohr’s claim was that society’s problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called “the human scale”: a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But [...]

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That we’ve not had boffins from CERN gurning at us while holding large lottery cheques shows that the boffins at CERN have a measurement error, not FTL.

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So says Peter Preston. The illusion, for us outsiders, is that economics is at least a bona fide social science – not an actual science (in Einstein ways) or an argumentative science (in Greenland glacier mode) but at least quasi-scientific in its disciplines and rules of thumb. Reality, in a world of competing prescriptions and mounting adjectival excess, [...]

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At the ASI. Just to pound the point home. Companies do not pay tax, ever.

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So they’ve found some uranium in Libya: The powder they contain appears to be yellowcake uranium from neighbouring Niger. …….There are at least 10,000 drums with a total capacity of two million litres,…….. The International Atomic Energy Agency says it knew that Col Muammar Gaddafi had stockpiled yellowcake uranium near Sabha – a relic of [...]

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Flapship reforms of the welfare system Sometimes the typos are rather appropriate really. Images of IDS flapping around in a panic over the lumpenproletariat…..

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A long term reader sends me a piece from the NYT which includes this line: ClientEarth, a nonprofit law firm with offices in Brussels, Law firms are partnerships: in the technical sense there is no profit, ever. Just incomes for the partners. Who would like to bet that as ClientEarth gets more business, the partners [...]

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Something that certain people would do well to remember: In general, the lesson from the above analysis is that tax burdens always tend to get shifted onto whoever has the fewest options—a result that is often at odds with the intention of lawmakers crafting tax policy.

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At the ASI. On the next big political fight. Between the Greens, saying no more exploration for shale gas and everyone else.

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It’s a perfect example of the man’s working methods. He gave evidence in the Brighton UKUncut trial and in explaining why he did so he states: As a result it is clear that the Coalition is choosing to leave money with the tax crooks and cheats instead of collecting it to pay pensions, educate children, [...]

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Every graduate in England and Wales will pay 9% of their income above £21,000, for up to 30 years, just as they would a graduate tax; below that, they will pay nothing. Irrationally from the government’s point of view these income-contingent loans are much less efficient than a proper graduate tax; at best, 70% of [...]

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In measuring human violence, Steven Pinker (Profile) appears, understandably, to favour a per capita rate of homicides over the centuries. A revealing alternative would be killings as measured against their time span, ie how many humans are actually slaughtered in the shortest-possible time. In this case, our era is by far the bloodiest and most [...]

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Thousands of house prices could fall by a third or more if Coalition Government proposals to change planning rules in favour of developers become law, knocking hundreds of thousands of pounds off some of the most desirable homes in the green belt. Yup. Just what the policy is meant to be doing. The horrifically high [...]

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This is dire: Are wealth taxes back in fashion? OK, excellent, let’s talk about taxing wealth. What wealth taxes are being proposed? One of Labour’s last acts was the introduction of the 50p tax on high earners. Despite the hopes of the Tory Right, the Coalition hasn’t abolished it. Income tax, at whatever rate, is [...]

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And maybe the sad decline of Fiji and, to a lesser extent, Tonga as rugby powerhouses is not surprising. The sides these countries put out in this World Cup are third or fourth teams at best, the top players having long ago relocated to countries who can offer attractive wage packets. There are eight Islanders [...]

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It’s not just Blackpool you know: Widespread in the Craven Basin, including the Lancaster, Garstang, Settle, Clitheroe and Harrogate districts, south Cumbria and the Isle of Man; also in North Wales, Staffordshire and the East Midlands. It is, to use a technical term, friggin’ huge mate. I’ve also found out something interesting (well, at least [...]

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My husband’s business partner, an IT whizz, was offered a consultancy on the NHS project as soon as it began in 2002. It’s a painful memory: “I was getting £2,000 a day. After four weeks, I resigned.” Wait, wait, wait: £2,000 a day is £400,000 a year for a 40-week year. “I resigned because it [...]

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At the ASI. In which I answer the question: why are tax systems so awful?

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BT denies it is sitting on a ‘copper mine’ worth £50bn Tee hee. This all started with my piece for The Register. But Friday when BT was faced with claims its copper wires could be worth £50bn – an attractive prospect for thieves – the company was forced to start furiously downplaying the value of [...]

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