Tim Worstall

So, knowing that drugs are bad for human beings is not a compelling reason for advocating their prohibition. Actually, the prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that the global drug markets can be eradicated. We would not believe such a statement if it were applied to alcoholism or tobacco addiction, but somehow we assume it's right in the case of drugs. Why?

I was slightly puzzled to see this piece stating that the Club of Rome's predictions about the Limits to Growth have been updated. Further, guess what, civilisation is still going to fall over around 2030. For, you see, we're going to run out of everything just like they said and billions will die, empires tumble into the sea and Gaia will be displeased.

This is slightly disturbing, finding myself agreeing with Francis Maude on something. But he's absolutely correct here:

“I recollect twenty years ago as a financial secretary I was taking a finance bill through parliament, a Labour MP said indignantly to me: ‘You are just trying to turn Britain into a tax haven’. To which my response was: ‘Thank you very much, I appreciate the compliment.’

Is, as we know, all that is required to lift a nation from the lowest barbarism to, well, to riches untold by earlier standards in fact. However, once we've got rich we can't just sit back and assume that we'll continue to do so as Italy shows us. Contrary to many reports on the economics of the place it's not actually grossly overindebted. Most of the public debt is owed to Italian households for example, something that is always much easier to deal with than those pesky foreigners. However, what the place really doesn't have in any noticeable form is economic growth.

There are two standard answers to this question of who carries the cost of the minimum wage. The first is our one, the one from the economic realists, that the true pain is felt by those who cannot get a job at all as a result of employers economising on the newly higher priced labour. The second is the answer from the woolly dreamers that of course it is the capitalist running pig dogs who just have lower exploitative profits as a result of having to pay for the sweat of the workers' brows.

A very odd paper has just been published by a couple of sociologists concering the outcome of the various different privatisation regijmes at the end of communism.

I'm afraid that I don't struggle at all, like Sam did, to find something to say about minimum alcohol pricing. This is the most monumentally insane, stupid and illiberal nonsense that we've had imposed upon us in years. There have been things more illiberal, yes, but not insane at the same time. I'll leave you to fill in the (...)s in the title there for I'm afraid that my carpet biting outrage at this silliness might lead me to become intemperate in my language.

The standard economic reaction to an externality is to tax it so as to include it into the price system. We'll then get the appropriate amount of said externality, a balanacing of the costs and benefits of it. In economic terms the argument is well nigh unassailable but I am beginning to reconsider my support for the idea. For taxes, by definition, have to be imposed by politicians and there's almost no good idea that a politician cannot screw up.

An near endless number of loons are insisting that we must have greater State direction of bank lending in this country. We've even loons light in the current Government insisting that this should be so: to say nothing of the true loons further left whose mantra seems to be "Forward to Five Year Planning!".

One little story from a place where they really do have state directed banking:

There's a rather odd idea common among lefty and greenish types about markets and their scale. Partially based on the ideas of Karl Polanyi, the thought is that if we restrict our trade, the market we deal in, to those we know and with whom we have a web of mutual obligations then somehow everything will be fairer. More lovely even.

The problem with this is that, well, it just doesn't seem to be true: