It is short book, with each fallacy generating two to four pages of discussion. Mr Worstall’s humorous style emanates, laughing the way through the dismal science. Also, these fallacies are not exclusively taken from a particular political view. Mr Worstall has written a concise and incisive book: it is pertinent since many of these fallacies drive contemporary policy.
The Fair Tax Mark is what Russell Brand’s Revolution should look like
What?
Britain would become a safe haven for rapists, murderers and child molesters if it leaves the European Arrest Warrant, senior Tories warned today.
Home Secretary Theresa May claimed opting out of the pan-European extradition deal risks Britain becoming a ‘honeypot’ for European fugitives.
Which prompts a related thought. What most of us accepted until a few decades ago in terms of privacy and comfort is less acceptable today. And this relates not just to hotels, but to establishments such as hospitals and care homes … shouldn’t it? The quite scandalous phenomenon of mixed-sex wards may be on its way out, but even many new hospitals – designed with extravagant public spaces – have retained old-fashioned assumptions about communal sleeping, bathrooms and catering. Many patients are still admitted to wards where there are between 10 and 20 other patients, with just one or two private alcoves. Privacy is a diaphanous curtain that pulls around the bed.
If it’s the State providing it then what it provided will be what it is convenient for the State to provide, not what the consumer might actually want.
Of all the various industrial strategies that could be tried:
His debut in British public life came in 1966, when he was asked by the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson and his minister for economic affairs George Brown to become managing director of the newly announced Industrial Reorganisation Corporation.
Based on an Italian model, the IRC was intended to drag British industry into the modern era by writing blueprints for industrial sectors and promoting mergers to create “national champions”.
Why in buggery adopt an Italian one?
After all, it’s not as if there isn’t a selection of ethical stances that one can take:
A place on a clinical trial is being advertised for $2 million in what is believed to be a world first which medical practitioners hope could transform a funding gap in researching rare cancers.
The trial place is being offered by a research team at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute in Ottawa, led by Dr David Stojdl, to be part of the first human use of the Farmington Virus (FARV) to help combat brain tumours.
Dr Stodjl has said any donor who provides $2 million to enable this trial to go ahead will be guaranteed a place, either for personal use – providing the donor meets the inclusion criteria – or for any suitable patient of the donor’s choice.
His offer is believed to be the first time in medical history that such an attempt to sell a clinical trial place has been made.
Kate Law, director of clinical and population research at Cancer Research UK said the approach “looks to be a major cause of concern” and would not be possible in Britain because of ethical constraints.
Ethics being only, according to the moral principles that I hold, this should not happen. But other people can and do have different morals and thus different ethical stances.
I’m not, btw, commenting upon whether a place on a trial should or should not be auctioned in this manner. Rather, pointing out that “I don’t think this should happen” is not the trump card that it’s being played as.
It’s an alarming thought that Obama is correctly viewed as the most intellectual president the US has had in living memory and that he admires Tom Friedman.
Just for a change, let’s stop obsessing about impoverished obese people and their alleged heaving KFC buckets and look at some of the expensive lengths better-off people go to in the pursuit of “slim”.
Personal trainers, gym memberships, exercise classes, slimming clubs, home gym equipment, running gear, yoga gear, gym gear, (whatever the gear!), dieticians, nutritionists, diet food delivery services, electronic wristbands, books, DVDs, downloads, vitamins supplements. The list is endless before you even get to the food, because what says healthy more than a “simple peasant stew” made from an organic seasonal veg box, which is far beyond the reach of an ordinary family’s food budget?
There will always be some tedious blow-hard insisting that all they do to keep fit is run up and down on the spot, wearing their old school plimsolls – these people really should shut up. Most would concede that fitness, or regaining fitness, is an expensive and complicated business. Despite this, your average middle-class professional would probably argue that they need all this help to keep in shape. Fair enough, but then why criticise overweight people who couldn’t dream of affording it?
Given that, over the past 8 months, I’ve lost a number of stone (not been weighing myself but waist is at least three inches smaller, the moobs have gone and I seem to have only one chin for the first time in 30 years) this gives me the opportunity to be a tedious blowhard. It’s been done by eating less and exercising more and that’s it. No, no special diets, just less. Borrowed a bicycle, the local swimming pool is £1.50 a time and that’s really it.
Losing weight is not expensive and it’s not something that only rich people can do. Barbara Ellen is simply wrong here.
Oh, and she thinks that obesity will cost the NHS money so she’s doubly wrong.
Priests who moonlight as bar tenders, post naked photos of themselves on gay websites and run off with the church coffers: welcome to the diocese of Albenga-Imperia on the Italian Riviera.
When the bishop in charge decided that the hand of forgiveness, and a second chance, should be offered to “black sheep” priests from across Italy, it must have seemed the charitable thing to do.
The consequences, though, suggest that recidivism is as much a feature of clerical as prison life.
Pope Francis last week ordered an investigation into a diocese run for 24 years by Bishop Mario Oliveri, 70, who has earned a reputation of welcoming in aspiring priests, even those expelled from seminaries for misconduct.
Some of the cases are rather eye openers. And I can think of more than one case in the English Church where such behaviour has led only to a move of parish rather than anything else. But a whole diocese full of them is more than we have…..
Weirdly it can be the traditionalists who are worse at the blind eye bit. The thought being (no, not all of them are simply hypocritical toads) that a priest is ordained, is touched by divine favour in some manner, and while they may then do things they shouldn’t (running a bar with the live in girlfriend in the next village over say, then turning up on the Sunday to say Mass) they are still ordained and touched by that favour.
Odd, but there it is.
So good that it made I larff even though:
This Changes Everything? OH Naomi Klein, NO
It’s not capitalism that’s broken here, it’s publishing
By Tim Worstall, 25 Oct 2014Worstall @ the Weekend
So that’s the various headlines. But when bits and pieces get stripped out to make the Twitter alert to my glorious essay it actually comes out as:
This Changes Everything? OH Naomi Klein, NO: It’s not capitalism that’s broken here, it’s publishing Worstall …
There really is a certain joy to that, isn’t there?
Myself I think it’s absolutely fucking marvellous actually. Memo: make sure that sub has an extra drink at Crimble.
UK consumers currently pay about 40% of the entire level of alcohol duty across the whole European Union.
The IFS is focused on the idea that taxpayers’ money is being wasted on childcare. What the thinktank doesn’t seem to understand is that this wise and sensible investment is actually generating taxpayers, now and for the future.
Whatever the rhetoric here this is still current spending. It could even be desirable current spending, something that a decent society does. But it is still current spending, not investment.
Guido has a good bit:
“Oddly, the person I feel sorriest for isn’t Brand himself – although he certainly comes across as a rather pitiable figure, projecting his own brokenness on to the world around him – but Johann Hari. Drummed out of Fleet Street for plagiarism, the former Independent columnist has washed up as “my mate Johann, who’s been doing research for this book”. For a genuinely talented polemicist, it would have been a humbling experience to have to treat this sub-undergraduate dross as the scintillating wisdom of a philosopher-king.”
But I think these two are better:
Brand does grandly proclaim that its new democratic-empowered managers could carry on making cars, but only as long as they didn’t export any. After all, the Germans and that make their own, don’t they? You feel like grabbing him by the shiny lapels and shouting: “Adam Smith! David Ricardo!”, and hoping he doesn’t get them confused with the West Ham midfield.
And this:
In the end, this book is a huge wasted opportunity. The breaking point for me – apart from the two passages suggesting 9/11 was an inside job – came when, after hundreds of pages of egocentric meandering, Brand lists his conclusions so far: “We have shown that…” he grandly and repeatedly intones. But you haven’t shown, Russell. You’ve told. And you’ve done a really, really bad job of it.
In short, it’s shite.
I was asked today by a journalist why there might be problems with a zero rate corporation tax – which is an idea many on the right are now promoting. I replied that zero corporation tax creates many problems.
The first is that companies would then make no contribution at all to society despite the enormous privileges they enjoy, including limited liability, which literally means they can dump their losses on the rest of us.
Sigh. Tax Research LLP makes no corporate tax contributions to society at all. Yet I am sure that there are those out there who insist that Tax Research LLP contributes to society. The NHS pays no corporate tax of any kind: yet I’m absolutely certain that the value of the NHS does not depend upon that fact. Further, while I may not think that the NHS is quite the right way of doing this, I would argue that the provision of health care services to 65 million people is something of value.
The value that Google provides is that we get to Google, the value of Amazon is that we get cheap books, the value of Starbucks is bad coffee. It is the production of an organisation that is the contribution to society that an organisation provides. What they pay in tax is fuck all to do with it.
Man’s mad.
At the ASI.
Polly Toynbee’s complaining that wages not rising means the people can’t be taxed enough.
If you’re going to discuss, complain about, the Catholic theology concerning sex and homosexuality then it would seem sensible that you actually know what the Catholic theology concerning sex and homosexuality is:
The west already has. Rome’s teaching on homosexuality is in big trouble in Britain, Australia and North America. According to the excellent Pew Research Center, most Catholics in the US don’t even see homosexuality as a sin. Barely half thought it was in 2003 and a decade later that’s dropped to a third.
The Catholic church doesn’t think that homosexuality is a sin either.
What the church does say (whether you or anyone else believes it, whether I do or not, is entirely beside the point, but this is what the church does say) is at root that any form of sex which is not open to the possibility of conception is sinful. There’s other bits too, marriage, man and woman all that, but at root that really is it: must be open to the possibility of conception.
Homosexuality, the preference for, desire for, innate compulsion to, whatever you want to call it, same sex sexual activity is no more (or less) sinful than than the preference for, desire for, innate compulsion to, heterosexual sex.
Monica’s blowjob on Bill Clinton was no more, and no less, sinful than whatever Jimmy Somerville might get up to on Hampstead Heath.
It’s the act, not the prediliction, that is the sin.
That we all might think this is the most glorious cock and bull (my personal view) is entirely beside the point. The Catholic church simply isn’t going around stating that homosexuality is a sin. And if you’re going to start discussing the Catholic view on homosexuality it would probably be a fairly good idea to work that out before doing so.
EU leaders agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030
They’ve agreed on a target to do so. Something rather different.