Tim Worstall

The parentals are fixing up the house: and I’ve just been looking (a few days back) at the results of the Baedekker Raids on Bath. One stick of bombs went across the avenue where the ancestral spires are: haveing looked at where the bombs fell, you can now see it, if you see what I [...]

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Boy did the Gini coefficient decline from 1934 to 1945! As Lew Rockwell said of Hitler’s economics: Proto-Keynesian socialist economist Joan Robinson wrote that “Hitler found a cure against unemployment before Keynes was finished explaining it.” What were those economic policies? He suspended the gold standard, embarked on huge public works programs like Autobahns, protected [...]

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I knew him well enough to ask why he was crying and he said it was because he had just been to see his mother and she had been crying. It was the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, and she always cried on the anniversary of that battle. Her three brothers had [...]

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How to properly deal with Frogs, Spics, Dagoes and assorted other swarthy foreigners. Here. “Rule Britannia”, “Britons never shall be slaves” etc, etc. So, when do we sail upon The Berlaymont m’ hearties?

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Oh dearie me. A slight confusion of cause and effect here. Psychologists believe that traits such as selflessness and altruism have become part of our genetic make-up because they were attractive to mates. Mebbe. “The expansion of the human brain would have greatly increased the cost of raising children so it would have been important [...]

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David Friedman would like your views.

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Even more astonishing is the way the musicians have shut themselves off from pop’s recent past. You might have thought at least the Beatles’ oeuvre had swiftly attained standard status, that Yesterday or Something might be precisely the kind of thing the balladeers with the shag-pile sideburns would gravitate towards, but no: it’s still clearly [...]

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the 55-year-old sail maker who served in the Navy at Trafalgar and the Army at Waterloo, Blimey.

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My grandfather’s stepfather, Bill Wilcox, “shot” oil wells in West Virginia and Southeastern Ohio from the 1890s to the 1920s.  Back in the day, fracking meant drilling a hole, filling a coffee can with nitroglycerine, lowering it very carefully down the hole, and then detonating it (hence the term “shooting” the well).  We have family [...]

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Jonathan Freedland has problems with the Baltic States: Even if the authorities were rigorous in maintaining a balance, and telling both stories honestly, I would still reject this “double genocide”. For the symmetry here is false. No one wants to top the persecution league table, but nor can one accept that those who were “arrested, [...]

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The Reverend Robin Roe. Irishman, Church of Ireland priest, British military chaplain, MC, Ireland and British Lions rugby international (plus Barbarians, London Irish etc). Rugby led directly to his Army duties as, when England played Ireland at Twickenham in 1952, Roe was one of two novice priests – both Protestants – in the Irish team. [...]

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And sometimes it’s great for Stephen Fry going on a rant about something. For instance, during a discussion of Witchcraft he discusses how most witches put on trial in England were acquitted – and fewer than 500 hundred were killed for being witches, he says this about The Da Vinci Code… “We were much gentler [...]

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“By the early 1800s, however, with the publication of David Ricardo’s landmark work on free trade and the adoption of his ideas by Adam Smith, the British state had embraced global liberalism, and the British-dominated world economy that emerged after the Congress of Vienna of 1815 was defined almost entirely by these values.” Umm, Adam [...]

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The man’s sure up on his British political history, ain’t he? Before the election it amazed me that some from the same Manchester School of economics- like Giles Wilkes of Centre Forum were being called “progressives”. He wasn’t – he’s now a ConDem adviser. The positions are simply irreconcilable – and I bet he’s loving [...]

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Not a bad thing to strive for either: “You will die for this and it will all have been for nothing,” said Willy Pueschel, the Gestapo inspector who interrogated him three times. “Not for nothing,” replied Otto, “I didn’t become one of you.”

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General Fugh wasn’t the first Chinese flag officer in the US military. That was Brigadier Uzal G Ent, who led the raid on the Ploesti oilfields in 1943 and personally selected Paul Tibbets as pilot of the Hiroshima mission. Brigadier Ent’s grandfather was one of two ethnic Chinese Thais who settled in South Carolina in [...]

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Yes, it’s Our Dennis: There is a deeper rightwing revisionism at play. Stalin’s crimes are being elevated to a par with the exterminations of Jews by those who want to banalise or relativise the Holocaust and reduce its historical centrality to just another example of wartime mass murders. Stalin’s famines of the 1930s or his [...]

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Following the defeat of Egypt and other Arab armies by Israel in the 1967 war, Nasserism, a k a Arab nationalism, the abiding ideology of the day, was demolished. Err, it was “pan-Arab nationalism” that was defeated. The idea that all Arabs should be brothers together, rather than fighting for their own national interests.

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On how bureaucracies just keep on operating. I’ve heard (but cannot prove) that the US Post Office was delivering across the lines until 1863…..

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But 10,000 years of crooks who innovate so that they could continue to steal more efficiently eventually gave rise to what we call modern capitalism… Hey, works for me.

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