Tim Worstall

BERKELEY – Neville Chamberlain is remembered today as the British prime minister who, as an avatar of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s, helped to usher Europe into World War II. But, earlier in that fateful decade, relatively soon after the start of the Great Depression, the British economy was rapidly returning to [...]

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Start with taxing all incomes at the same rate – a worker on an average £26,000 is taxed £5,981, but someone earning the same in dividends pays zero. Those on the 50% tax band only pay 36% on their dividends. Bleedin’ ‘ell Polly! Don’t you know that (in effect) basic rate income tax is collected [...]

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Here. To say that that is the mistake that Marx made is a mistake: for he made more than one. Got quite a bit right too, obviously. The bits he cribbed off Smith are just fine for example.

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Trying my hand at Seeking Alpha. A possible answer to what happened to the MF Global money

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Figures show that the gender pay gap has dramatically narrowed, leaving young women marginally ahead of their male counterparts for the first time. Female workers aged between 22 and 29 earn just over £10 per hour on average, while men in the same age bracket are paid just under £10, the study found. Given that [...]

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An art project (I think this is what it is called? Performance art? Inclusive art? Participatory art?) being done by a beloved cousin. Here. If any of my readers who actually know about such artistic things (clearly, the familial art genes did not acumulate in me) would care to track down the project in London [...]

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Ritchie’s new report goes to great lengths to try and insist that corporation tax rates don’t have very much effect on growth. Something which is true, no one has ever said otherwise, but then he takes the great leap into nonsense: Mike’s trouble is I did not say it did not affect growth: read the report and [...]

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Back Weds evening

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I’ve read this paper for 23 years and I hate the bloody pretension. You can be left-wing and socialist – possibly even clever – without being a preening, righteous fool. If only more of them were, eh?

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Huhne will say: “If the oil price doubled, as from $80 last year to $160 this year, it could lead to a cumulative loss of GDP of around £45bn over two years. This is not just far-off speculation: it is a threat here and now.” And of course your own plans to douple, triple*, the [...]

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United Russia, the Russian prime minister’s all-powerful party, has already pencilled in Miss Chapman as the next MP for the Volgograd region in southern Russia according to the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper which said it had seen the list. The former spy is all but guaranteed electoral success as Russia is a de facto one-party [...]

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What is needed is policy and a body which will support films that can secure European co-funding. Not Hollywood sell-outs but commercially successful British films with their own distinctive audience. If they’re commercially successful then they won’t need taxpayer subsidy then, will they? Numpties.

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Sigh. Some people live in houses with more bedrooms than they need. Therefore we must force people to take in lodgers. As is commented: Sounds a bit Soviet to me … everyone to live in a kommunalnaya kvartira (shared flat). Quite.

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Hmm, I’ve been wondering for ages what happened to my old bartender/tenant. Wikipedia is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? And I’d forgotten that both he and Bill Bailey were at school with one who became a Tory MP.

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A Moscow court Monday found tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty of embezzling and laundering billions of dollars worth of oil from OAO Yukos, the company he once controlled, confirming widely held expectations of a conviction in a case that has come to define the rule of Vladimir Putin. Couldn’t see that one coming, could we?

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I’ve been contacted by a very major investor type who wants to know more about thorium reactors. Before I go back to him with what I know (essentially, they work, but it’s a regulatory thing….that’s about as much as I know) I want to throw it out to you guys. Details and specifics of thorium [...]

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Il Papa reveals his leisure activities: And then we like to watch Don Camillo and Peppone [a series of 1950s films featuring a priest constantly at odds with the communist mayor, below]. I didn’t even know there were films of the stories but here they are. The books might be a better bet: certainly, that’s [...]

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At El Reg again. How to work out what will be said at a press conference by not going to the press conference. Read last year’s report! Actually, there is a more important point here: I would lay a goodly chunk of money that most reports about this, umm, report, in the papers tomorrow do [...]

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This is an odd thing for an economist to say: If houses could be bought relatively cheaply, it was because local councils once provided “social housing”. Council houses were sold off by Margaret Thatcher – leaving housing entirely to the market, Flogging off council houses increases the supply of houses that can be purchased. Other [...]

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Quite marvellous. So, our favourite retired accountant notes that crime is increasing in the Cayman Islands. OK. To Ritchie this is clearly to do with the fact that the whole place is simply a bunch of gangsters, Vampire Squids sticking a straw into the bloodstream of the global economy. Only occasionally, but persistently none the less, [...]

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