Tim Worstall
2:49pm
A burst of applause and a resounding cheer for someone who is rather an intellectual hero: simply for telling it like it is.
Paul Collier:
In response to 19th-century industrialisation the British aristocracy rediscovered medieval chivalry. The romantic fashion was in part comic: jousts, castles and armour. But it had darker consequences; the privileging of honour over intelligence, which became the bedrock vision of the English gentleman, had its apotheosis in the heroic stupidities of the first world war. Now, in response to modern agriculture, the aristocracy, with Prince Charles in the vanguard, has rediscovered organic peasant farming. Again...
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Tim Worstall
2:41pm
If you're going to compare things then you've got to compare like with like: there's no point in comparing the weight of a pencil to the length of a pygmy, it just doesn't tell you anything.
When we start getting into economic statistics it can often be a bit more difficult: for people often aren't aware that they are comparing unlikes. As today:
Be not sanctimonious. Debt, both personal and public, is what the United States and the United Kingdom now share far more than a mere common language. The American government owes a little over £4 trillion. Yet...
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Laura Staples
10:58am
Britain's economy stagnated in the three months to June as the country moves closer to recession. Year-on-year the rate of growth improves slightly to 1.4 per cent, but still misses analyst forecasts of 1.6 per cent. With the PMI haven recorded three successive months of contraction too, it’s no wonder the British Chambers of Commerce came out earlier this week warning of 300,000 job losses. So it looks like the economy really is under the wretched August weather.
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Tim Worstall
9:09am
Sounds like things are all well and good in Britannia's realm:
Britons lack "national purpose" according to a study which found that most people prefer to spend their Bank Holiday watching television or surfing the internet rather than celebrating the country's heritage.
Excellent, there's nothing more repellent than a "national purpose". We hire the State to do for us the things that must be done both collectively and with coercion. To solve free rider problems more than anything else.
This doesn't mean that said State is then invested with all our hopes and dreams, nor that there...
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