The satire writes itself these days. For the past 16 months, ever since voters said No to the EU, the supposed liberal set has been signalling its virtue over migrant workers. These Remainer types have filled newspaper columns and dinner-party chatter with sad talk about foreigners losing the right to travel to and work in Britain. Yet now these same people have chortled as London mayor Sadiq Khan and his pen-pushers at Transport for London (TfL) have refused to renew Uber’s licence in the capital. Which means 30,000 people will lose work. Many of them migrants. They cry over migrant workers one day, and laugh as they lose their livelihoods the next.
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Not paying corporation tax is an advantage to those who don’t pay it as against those who do. Which is what we’ve been saying about corporate and capital taxation all along. If you tax corporations then there will be less investment in them in your economy. This makes everyone poorer – the deadweight costs are high. This is indeed exactly the same reasoning which leads us to insisting, as a result of optimal tax theory, that we shouldn’t be taxing the corporations at all. Which is interesting, even amusing, don’t you think? The EU’s justification for why they just must tax companies is the very reason basic theory says we shouldn’t be taxing corporations at all. September 24th, 2017 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
 There is an important law of which government bureaucracies would take cognisance if good government were their aim: that once a method of measurement is used to set a target, it becomes so corrupted that what it measures bears no relation to what it is supposed to measure. […] A further force for corruption is the accelerating overproduction of people with higher degrees compared with the number of opportunities there are to employ them in their field. This increases yet further the pressure to publish, the majority of what is published consequently being of doubtful quality. September 22nd, 2017 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Commenting on the case, Sue Hemming, head of the CPS’s special crime and counterterrorism division, said: ‘People should not assume they can hide on social media when stirring up hatred and violence.’ Evidently, they cannot. But to what end? What is the benefit to society of banning the expression of bad and hateful ideas? Surely we want these ideas out in the open so that we can combat them with better ideas and better arguments. Censorship won’t change anyone’s mind. September 17th, 2017 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
University is not a training centre to teach young people ‘correct’ ideas – that would be an indoctrination camp, not a university. Richardson understands that academics have a duty to challenge conventional wisdom. You might say that academics have a duty to offend, and to make their students intellectually uncomfortable. It’s only through challenging what we believe that ideas change and knowledge progresses. September 16th, 2017 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“We might practice nailing the colors to the mast rather than engaging in a permanent dress rehearsal for masochism and the lachrymose.” September 15th, 2017 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Seen online:
September 14th, 2017 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve noticed a concerted effort on the part of the mainstream media over the past few weeks to get everyone interested in the plight of the Rohingyas, a minority Muslim group in Myanmar who are being hounded by the majority ruling Buddists. I have also noticed that nobody seems to give a shit. It might be tempting to put this down to the fact that westerners don’t generally care about brown people being killed in fat-off lands with no oil underneath, but I suspect there is something else at work as well: people in the west are getting a little bit tired of hearing how Muslims are suffering. There is also a perception, one which is easy to understand, that various western political establishments pander too much to Muslims. Whether it be councils and police ignoring the systematic abuse of children in Rotherham, the British courts jailing a man for leaving bacon outside a mosque, Australian prime ministers taking part in Iftar suppers, newspapers promoting the likes of Linda Sarsour, or police charging people with hate crimes for making Islamaphobic comments on Twitter, there is a growing number of people in the west who believe Muslims are a minority who have got a large chunk of the state apparatus working on their behalf to the detriment of the majority. Whether this perception is valid or not scarcely matters: perceptions in themselves matter. September 13th, 2017 | 103 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money. September 12th, 2017 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you’re a UK taxpayer, don’t bother donating to the British Red Cross for the relief of Hurricane Irma. You’re already giving. About £13bn a year of tax. Not all to the Red Cross of course – they get only a fraction of this. The bulk of it goes to teaching Ethiopian nomads how to play electric guitar, setting up pedicure shops in Sudan and sending top British hat-designers to Basutoland to show the natives how to fashion Crêpe De Chine and ostrich feathers into women’s headgear. In other words, the bulk of this money is wasted on hopeless schemes that don’t develop anything by one iota. – Raedwald September 11th, 2017 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
That’s terrible economics. It’s a classic application of a well-known fallacy called the Lump of Labor — the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs in the world, and those jobs get divvied up among people. How do we know this is a fallacy? It’s obvious that the number of jobs in the world isn’t fixed. Imagine if the United States deported every single American except for Jeff Sessions. Would Sessions then have his pick of any job? No, he’d be in the forest trying to eat berries to survive. Kicking people out doesn’t just reallocate jobs from one person to another. It also destroys them. September 10th, 2017 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
Black markets are the most underutilized tool for alleviating poverty. These underground markets are often portrayed in a negative light by governments because they are untaxed, unregulated, and therefore are a hazard to public safety. A more sinister description often involves black markets as a cesspool of organized crime, overflowing with drugs and weapons, and a source of income for terrorist groups. Such portrayals are completely dubious. Ninty percent of India’s workforce is employed in the informal sector, which includes everything from agriculture to small scale manufacturing and services September 9th, 2017 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
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