Tim Worstall

When Obama set us all up for environmental disaster by refusing to put the brakes on his country’s unprecedented and unmatched emissions of climate-destabilizing gases, we switched over to watch will.i.am’s YouTube rejig of the President’s “yes, we can” speech. And when a week from now he is beaten at the mid-term elections – Umm, [...]

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When was the last time Britain’s public spending was slashed by more than 20 per cent? Not in my mother’s lifetime. Not even in my grandmother’s lifetime. No, it was in 1918, when a Conservative-Liberal coalition said the best response to a global economic crisis was to rapidly pay off this country’s debts. Well, as [...]

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For over two centuries, Haiti has been effectively controlled from outside. The French enslaved the entire island in the eighteenth century… Err, no. The island is called Hispaniola and has been divided between the (originally French) Haiti and the Spanish (originally) Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic, since 1697. To continue his sentence: ….and worked [...]

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Blindingly wonderful piece of hyperbole from Johann Hari this morning: and there are now 20,000 unidentified corpses in Baghdad morgue alone, Err, no. There are not 20,000 rotting corpses in the Baghdad morgue. There are also not 20,000 carefully refrigerated or even 20,000 frozen corpses, not even 20,000 skeletons. We can see where he got [...]

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Yes, he’s absolutely correct that we should legalise drugs. No doubt about it. Then he puts in absurdities like this: You can see this any day on the streets of a poor part of London or Los Angeles, where teenage gangs stab or shoot each other for control of the 3,000 per cent profit margins [...]

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It’s quite lovely to see Johann meeting some numbers he doesn’t understand. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on him for of course we all do this. Stray off the reservation of our own knowledge base and end up misunderstanding the technicalities of what the numbers mean. Not note or even realise that there are [...]

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