Tim Worstall

So, I asked her, where does this come from? in the past decade the average bonus for FTSE 350 directors rose by 187% while share prices declined by 71%. And I am told that it is here. In the past 10 years, the average annual bonus for FTSE 350 directors went up by 187 per [...]

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Bitrix24 is giving away a Kindle Fire tablet. The rules for the contest are very simple. 1. Register at Bitrix24.com 2. Send the following information to did@bitrix24.com: – your Bitrix24 ID – the feature you liked (used) the most – what you found difficult/disliked the most (could be an existing problem or something lacking). If [...]

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The late 70s saw the most equal time in British history, but since then the rich have got richer and the poor poorer. Does anyone at all want to try and back up that assertion? That the poor in Britain are now, by any absolute standard that you want to use, poorer than the poor [...]

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Neoliberals claim that we are best served by maximising market freedom and minimising the role of the state. The free market, left to its own devices, will deliver efficiency, choice and prosperity. The role of government should be confined to defence, protecting property, preventing monopolies and removing barriers to business. All other tasks would be [...]

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There are better legal minds around here than mine but: But they will also ask for a writ of habeas corpus freeing him from custody. The common law procedure developed in medieval times and is Latin for “you may have the body”. Umm, doesn’t it mean “we have the body” or perhaps “here is the [...]

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Ebola is one of the most feared infectious diseases in the world and there is no specific treatment or vaccine. But despite being extremely virulent the disease is containable because it kills its victims faster than it can spread to new ones. Not entirely and wholly true. Yes, it does kill people quickly and thus [...]

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The optimal organization for a family is communist, but this doesn’t generalize to large societies, a point that most leftists can’t fathom. But as with any other organisational method scale does matter.

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It’s only going to delay the inevitable. “The united coalition group together with united dairy farmers, supported by the media and general public, have taken us up the first step towards a sustainable dairy industry, for the future of the next generation of dairy farmers.” Already the number of dairy farmers in the UK has [...]

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Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson had set the date and mailed invitations but, the day before their wedding, the pastor of the predominantly white First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs said the ceremony would not go ahead. The pastor told them a small number of church members had virulently opposed holding the event at the church, [...]

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Planning laws could be watered down again in a desperate Treasury move to rescue the UK economy from recession. Not that it’s likely to happen soon nor be very radical when it does. I’ll agree that supply side changes are unlikely to have much short term effect on the growth rate of the economy. But [...]

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At the ASI. Trade’s about consumers, not producers. Sigh.

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At the ASI. Mechanising the lives of the poor to make them rich.

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I sincerely believe the same is true right now. My favourite newspaper columnist, Tom Friedman of the New York Times, We can therefore safely dismiss anything at all Puttnam says about anything other than camera angles. Friedman performs much the same function that Willy and Polly do here: forming the butt end of the compass.

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Ever since the early 1960s, successive governments had tried to create a high investment, high innovation economy in which the quid pro quo was an acceptance by a strong trade union movement of wage restraint via incomes policies. Healey believed passionately in this model – it is what happens in Scandinavia and Germany. I think [...]

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I know this will get blown up into some massive number but think for a moment: British clients of an HSBC-owned private Swiss bank that is the focus of a major HM Revenue & Customs investigation are alleged to have evaded tax by an amount likely to exceed £200m, the Observer has learned. Note that [...]

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Between 2000 and 2010, public spending as a share of output rose by a whopping 14 per cent (to more than 50 per cent of gross domestic product) – most of it before the 2008 recession. And that doesn’t include the bank bail-outs. There are two ways that this can happen: spending rises or GDP [...]

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You know how Murphy continually tells us that the stock market really doesn’t do it? That everyone should be investing in bonds, not shares? The pulling power of dividends is constantly highlighted by Barclays in its Equity Gilt Study published every spring. Its latest survey showed that £100 invested in shares in 1899 would today [...]

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Raw materials and basic services need to be valued more, manufacturing skill needs to be valued more and, oddly, “things” need to be valued more. You don’t get to determine what value is nor what is valued nor how. We’ve got this market thing you see? Which, at root, is simply all of us, all [...]

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Usual nonsense from someone inside the cartel about relaxing the entrance rules to the cartel: The news today that the education secretary is to remove the requirement for academies to employ qualified teachers sent a shudder down my spine. For a teacher like me, who has taught for more than 20 years in various comprehensives [...]

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From what I understand from the papers we have both a Queen and a method of health care in this country. Who knew?

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