Tim Worstall

We need bigger solutions: bring back rationing for fish immediately, end the majority of advertising for highly processed foods, introduce the compulsory teaching of cooking in schools, reverse the rise in meat consumption, legalise much higher welfare standards for animal husbandry, ban GM foods. Turn over common land for people to grow food on, limit [...]

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This is really rather amusing. George Monbiot writes to Noam Chomsky about denialism over Srebrenica and the Rawandan Tutsi genocide. The back and forth has to be read to be believed. Chomsky is taking the Russian defence one step further. That defnece used to be that, whenever the Soviets were accused of wiping out a [...]

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It plans to invest an unspecified amount in solar generation capacity sourced from SunPower Corp, plus solid oxide fuel cell technology from Bloom Energy. The fuel cells will supply stored power generated from the sun, when it isn’t shining, and use a ceramic powder instead of platinum to produce electricity with greater efficiently than traditional [...]

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Gender equity, income inequality, state control, bastard banks, more power to the UN. Mix and match the various phrases as many times as necessary to produce the required number of paragraphs. Do not, whatever you do, ponder on the charitable status of an organisation publishing a call for the imposition of global social democracy. Because [...]

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A significant expansion of efficient public banks, And unicorns that poop rainbows no doubt. The problem being that no one has ever worked out how to have state owned (which is what they mean by public) and efficient. It is oxymoronic to demand both, they are mutually exclusive.

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the financial sector, which has been under-taxed (indeed the financial sector does not pay Value Added Tax). Err, yes, the financial sector does pay VAT. It pays VAT on al of its vattable inputs. The financial sector does not charge VAT to its customers: this means that the financial sector cannot claim back the VAT [...]

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The extreme inequality in the distribution of the world’s income should make us question the current development model (development for whom?), which has accrued mostly to the wealthiest. Strangely, this current neoliberal trade laissez faire fuck off politicians we don’t need you model is: a) Reducing global poverty faster than anything else ever has done [...]

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A century ago, Henry Ford paid his workers a wage that would allow them to buy the cars they were making;it worked, it was a good measure to build prosperity. Sigh.

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From their new report. Despite fast economic growth, however, inequality between households widened, Because, you morons, not despite.

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The French president is proposing a EU-wide financial transaction tax (FTT) that could raise up to €57bn a year that could be used to stimulate the 27-nation bloc. Hasn’t he, or at least his advisors, actually read the damn proposal itself? You know, the one from the EU? The one that says that the FTT [...]

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I was asked today if I’d like to speak at a conference. Couldn’t do it as I’m not in the right country. But the basic attitude of the conference organisers puzzled me. There was no mention at all of money on offer. How does this work then? They charge for entrance to a conference then [...]

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This really is slightly odd. I’ve actually written for the Staggers. They even say this: Tim Worstall (yes, when he’s not trolling he’s quite good) When I try to comment my IP is banned. We’ll go with the usual socialists suppressing free speech shall we? Sure, their property, their right to do what they want. [...]

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And to think that this bloke used to actually write a good chunk of the government’s drivel on the subject. These are, please note, consecutive sentences from his blog post. I have not just collected the worst parts: The paper uses scientific analysis to calculate the world’s total subsidies to oil, coal and gas companies [...]

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Corporate organisations are “stupid” in that they don’t learn very effectively (pdf) and in most cases, improvements to productivity and new innovations tend to come from new firms entering the marketplace with new ideas, not incumbents making incremental improvements. To what extent this is true will vary by sector: in the UK during the 1980s, [...]

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Ikea is facing allegations that it used Cuban prisoners to make its products in the 1980s. The claims follow allegations this week that East German political prisoners were forced to make furniture for the Swedish retailer from the 1970s. According to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a deal to make Ikea furniture in [...]

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Richard Drayton is Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London Hmm, so what’s he got to say about Argentina then? YPF, under Repsol, paid extraordinarily high dividends to its foreign owners – some 9% in 2011 – which it paid for by borrowing. So while YPF debts soared and Argentina’s oil went undrilled, [...]

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Three principal criticisms can be made of our proposal for a 15% cap. First, this is just an arbitrary figure. No, actually, it isn’t. It’s very carefully chosen. UK media businesses, including computer games and book publishers as well as TV, radio and press, have revenues of about £32bn a year. The enlarged News Corp [...]

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equally predictably, talk of policy, as ever during this race, has struggled to get a look in. Take transport, for example, one of the key battlegrounds in the contest. Please note, I’ve not elided anything there. That really is the next sentence. No one’s talking about policy in this race but transport policy is the [...]

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Sigh. Barclays has huge and growing operations in the developing world. Last year it declared almost £1 billion of its £5.9 billion profit were made in Africa. This should be good news for developing countries, which need to increase their tax revenues to invest in their teachers, doctors and much needed infrastructure. Eventually it’s these [...]

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Firstly what do we mean when we say ‘capitalism’? Well there are many perspectives on this but most cohere around certain key constructs which themselves drive capitalism’s core growth requirement. It is an economic system in which specialised producers produce commodities for markets but not for their own subsistence. Capitalists have a monopoly of ownership [...]

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