Tim Worstall

More than 1,500 square miles of land — more than twice the area of Greater London — needs to be earmarked for new homes to solve Britain’s housing crisis, the planning minister will say today. Gosh, that is a lot, isn’t it? As much as 1% of the country. “In the UK and England we’ve [...]

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Prompted by this, another in our series of idiot questions. Umm, isn’t the point of the system that those who are making the best profits, those profits reflecting their delivery of the most value with the least use of inputs, expand, while those losing money, reflecting their production of less value with greater use of [...]

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A comment I left on a CiF piece about kidney transplants: “the issue certain CiFers here have with the Iranian system is possibly the additional payments a recipient can make, in addition to one made by the state – this for obvious reasons could inform a decision on who gets an organ. There is no [...]

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We can actually see the value of being a monopoly supplier. According to the NHS drugs price list, in October last year a 125ml course cost the NHS around £4 a bottle. Now, the NHS price – which includes the wholesale cost set by the drugs company and a built-in profit for High Street chemist [...]

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No, not the idea, but the place it’s seen. What we need is a good idea. Lots of good ideas. In this regard, we just may be in luck, because we are higher primates, with enormous frontal lobes, capable of dazzlingly complex thought. And while we wouldn’t even be able to make a pencil if left to our own [...]

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Its certainly a valid objective. Raising the wages of manufacturing workers….I’m all for it, assuming that it’s not at the expense of others. You know, like price policies that benefit the urban worker at the expense of the rural (like, say, price caps on farm outputs). So, how might you go about raising those industrial [...]

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Senators Carl Levin and Dianne Feinstein intend to close the "London loophole" by empowering the CFTC to impose speculative limits on US traders who use London exchanges. The move is aimed at helping to prevent price manipulation and excessive speculation in the oil market. The senators’ aim goes one step further than the CFTC’s current [...]

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There are only 364 shopping days before Christmas! This has been a public service announcement.

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So, err: With those contracts due to expire at the end of this month the writers, who can earn anything from $10,000 to $200,000 per episode are arguing for a share of both income streams. …. Tim Adler, editor of TV magazine Screen Finance says one of the concerns will be that with many top [...]

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How glorious this is and how silly of me not to have seen it coming. So, the allegation is that the supermarkets are doing two things. Firstly, that they’re oligopolists of a kind, carving up the shopping market between them and there’s not enough competition. The second is that they’re driving the smaller retailers out [...]

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