Tim Worstall

Employers are just so beastly, aren't they? Attempting to get around their responsibilities to the workers. Why, some of them even decide to hire temporary workers instead of loading up on full time long term peeps that they have to pay extra costs to employ!

This example comes from the US:

Sam and I have been patting ourselves on the back for working out that the best and simplest way of increasing the incomes of the poor is to stop taxing them so bloody much. Raise the income tax and NI limits so as to pull all of those we define as poor out of such tax nets. We were thinking around the level of the minimum wage, around the £12,000 a year sort of level. And now I find out that we're being outflanked by people even more liberal than we are:

The recent exciting events in the wider economy have brought cries that clearly, obviously, we must throw away some of the basic building blocks of neoclassical theory. You know the sort of thing: the Crash proves that the efficient markets hypothesis must be wrong so therefore we should ditch using markets. This one suffers from the problem that those critiquing it don't understand what the EMH actually says.

If I might make a modest moral suggestion? One that I'm hesitant to advance: for of course different people have different morals and ethics. That's why we want a free and liberal society, so that we can each live according to our own code of what is indeed moral: as long as everything is among consenting adults and fist swinging stops short of another's nose then chacun a son gout.

I think we'd all agree that Britain's banking sector is not exactly covering itself in glory at present? From going bust (variously, from excessive lending to mortgages, from overpaying for a rival bank, by being caught in a wholesale banking run, no, no one went bust because of doing silly things in their investment banks) through to what I'm sure will turn out to be everybody fiddling Libor, it's not been a great few years. Yet let us not forget that there is no problem, no situation, which government cannot make worse.

Having lots of shiny new infrastructure sounds like a really cool idea. Put the unemployed to work and get some asset that will enrich us all for the next 50 years or so. However, whatever it is that we do we do have to do a cost benefit analysis. How much is it going to cost us to do something and what is the benefit we get from having done so? And it is here that the case for HS 2 fails I'm afraid.

I've never really understood what Paul Mason of Newsnight is for. On which subject here is a good example. He complains bitterly about how the young people of today have been betrayed by their elders, how today's graduates are going to be poorer than their parents (an insane idea if there ever was one) and then comes to this point:

It has long been one of my contentions that I am a lefty: further, that all of us here at the ASI are in fact on the left. As the Classical Liberals that we are this was of course obvious in the past: but it is still true now. Here is one recent definition of what it means to be on the left economically at present:

I have to admit to never really having been a great fan of the PFI idea. I can recall conversations in the early 90s as it first arrived and thinking, no, come on, it's not going to work out that way. I thought that the combination of people who write contracts for a living interacting with civil servants would lead to some, umm, negotiating inequality. Further, allowing politicians to get now something that the next lot woud have to pay for after the election was going to end in tears.

Assuming, of course, that there actually is an intelligence somewhere in the Guardian that has a mind that can be made up, could they try and give it a go on this when we all get to die thing?

But the next campaign for better public health is in a different league. Alcohol and obesity – what we eat and how much we drink – these are the stuff of our very souls.