Freelance classical liberal around and about. Substack at https://xitter.cf/t.co/U6iYpigGfh
Sao Joao de Negrilhos Portugal
Joined October 2009
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Tim Worstall retweeted
If you make things like alcohol or tobacco (or any other drugs, honestly) too expensive and/or illegal you will get huge black markets and the resulting organised crime that comes with them. Well, yes. This has always happened everywhere.
Tim Worstall retweeted
Anthropic is likely to be one of the most significant businesses in history.
And yet if the CEO, Dario was British and the company was founded in the UK - he would not qualify for the government’s new Founders Relief scheme.
That’s how bad it is.
Tim Worstall retweeted
Given all the talk of reparations for slavery, it is useful (as it usually is) to take a look at what Adam Smith said on the matter. He thought it morally reprehensible, but his more interesting analysis lay in the economics: slavery was simply an inefficient economic institution. It reduced the size of the overall economic pie. While some could enrich themselves by its practice, many would be worse off and the net balance would be negative (because the size of the economic pie (think GDP as an approximation) would be smaller). Thus, while it is correct to think that involvement in the slave trade enriched some in Britain, it was negative for the Wealth of the Nation as a whole, and the growth thereof.*
As to why such inefficiency has been a favoured practice so widely for so long, his answer was: "The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen."
Tim Worstall retweeted
Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.
Tim Worstall retweeted
If an oligarch had used the Metropolitan Police and Carter Ruck to silence a journalist, would that be similarly brushed over and forgiven?
Tim Worstall retweeted
Who have I been fired by?!
a) I don't work for the Telegraph
b) I work for News UK. You know, the company that fired YOU? 🙃
Tim Worstall retweeted
The Health and Social Care visa is such a miserable failure
We gave out hundred of thousands of visas to fill tens of thousands of jobs
60% went to dependents
50% were issued by fraudulent employers
We don't know how many actually do the job and won't check
Tim Worstall retweeted
"My old job consisted of telling White people they were evil, and then giving $200m/yr to Somalian NGOs with no strings attached. I did this for 20 years. The private sector, for some reason, does not value these skills and I'm struggling to find a job.
This is Trump's fault."
please read this piece, it was so good. it’s about dei officers in the federal government being cleaned out and many being unable to find new jobs because they were put on “dei watchlists” that come up in google searches in the exact same way it did for right wingers who had their lives ruined by journalists. then he starts applying for dei jobs in the private sector but can’t get one because no one wants to hire someone with dei shit all over their resume. then they find a conservative activist and ask him if he’s happy with all of this and his response is “these people are all anti-white, of course I’m glad they can’t find jobs.”
washingtonpost.com/nation/20…
Tim Worstall retweeted
Halloween is wild. As kids, our parents made us inspect every piece of candy for drugs. As adults, we realize nobody is out here spending good money on drugs just to give them away to somebody’s kid for free
Tim Worstall retweeted
Part of Nigel Biggar’s article in The Sunday Times today, reminding us that a careful reading of history, by an historian who know what he’s talking about, is a big improvement on what too often passes for debate about slavery reparations.
Tim Worstall retweeted
“But Britain compensated the slave-owners” really isn’t the burn that so many respondents seem to think it is. The fact that ordinary people were prepared to make a material sacrifice in order to hasten abolition is a cause for pride, not shame.
Tim Worstall retweeted
The Nakba tragically did happen--in 1948 Palestinians started a war that killed 1% of Israel's population, most of whom were Holocaust survivors.
Palestinians ethnically cleansed every single Jew from East Jerusalem and the West Bank (the Etzion bloc) and massacred the doctors and nurses of the Hadassah hospital and Hebrew University.
It could have all been avoided had they not started a war and accepted the UN's peaceful two state solution.
Tim Worstall retweeted
Here's an astonishing stat: Just over half of all visas granted to care workers in 2023 were sponsored by employers that have since lost their licences, mostly due to fraud or abuse. That’s ~200,000 people once you include dependants. None of them have had their visas revoked.
Tim Worstall retweeted
Or the evidence of their eyes. The number of academics claiming there was no finding of plagiarism while looking at pages and pages of plagiarism is doing untold damage to their own reputation and the public trust in universities.
Tim Worstall retweeted
Feargal lying again.
It's an extension to the creditors' own emergency loan from last year. Ofwat told the courts Thames is barred from recovering these financing costs from billpayers.
"Thames Water creditors to vote on emergency £2.4bn loan as cash runs low."
Meanwhile in the Walter Mitty world that is Thames Water customers are about to get screwed for another £2.4 BILLION.
theguardian.com/business/202…
Tim Worstall retweeted
Somewhere out there, an entrepreneur is trying to figure out how to produce something for $5 that currently costs $50.
Not because they're particularly generous.
Because doing so could make them filthy rich.
Capitalism is beautiful.
Tim Worstall retweeted
In the the budget's context, note *the ENTIRE justice system (which many people might consider the key function of the state) costs less than an annual increase in pensions, or health, or defence; little more than twice an education budget increase on falling school rolls.
