Ban football, not video games
Lots of people (especially American politicians like Hillary Clinton) are worried about the effects of violent video games, despite the complete lack of evidence that there is any effect. Perhaps the regular calls for restrictions on children’s exposure to corrupting material should instead focus on team games, now that there is evidence that watching American Football makes people violent. (more…)
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The gospel according to neo-conservatives
Here is my attempt to bring the Bible into line with modern values. I am particularly trying to help neo-conservatives and neo-liberals who have an exceptionally hard time in reconciling what they know to be right with Jesus’s old fashioned ideas.
Immigrants: less criminal than native borns and essential
In the last few days I have seen two solid pieces of evidence emerge for my views on immigration. The first is research showing that immigrants are more law abiding than the native born (found via Unintended Consequences). The other is the experience of American towns which cracked down on illegal immigrants, only to rethink after seeing how damaging this could be to their economies (thanks to Brad De Long). (more…)
Free speech is dead
Alisher Usmanov’s shut down of Criag Murray’s blog is yet another example of how British law makes it easy for the rich to shut down less well heeled critics with the threat of legal action. They do not need to actually convince a court that they have been libelled. (more…)
Abolish planning laws; solve housing “crisis”
Imagine that the UK had enough housing that every single household occupied a detached or semi-detached house (two thirds of them in detached houses) and all the country’s 12 million currently occupied terraced houses, maisonettes and flats were empty. You might think that to provide so much housing we would need to “concrete over the countryside”, in fact we would need to switch just 2.5% of the UK’s land area to urban residential use. Switching much less would provide a more than adequate supply. (more…)
The City and the tax haven
Richard Murphy has a good definition of a tax haven, but I disagree with his idea that having a large financial services sector is an important characteristic, although I do agree with his view that the UK and Ireland are both tax havens. (more…)
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Don’t eat killer fruit!
One of the reasons given by The Guardian for the failure of a scheme to encourage children to eat more fruit, is that schools are reluctant to give children fruit with stones because they might choke. What is even more amazing is that the journalist writing it could let this idiocy, and the disturbing reasons for it, pass with absolutely no comment. (more…)
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Tax and government
I sympathise with the Tax Justice Network’s aims, but I think their latest publication may have got the relationship between tax and good government (found via Richard Murphy’s blog) wrong. I also think I can explain why there is so little pressure to improve tax collection. (more…)
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Fixed rates will not make housing affordable
I find it hard to believe that encouraging long term fixed interest mortgages, as the government plans to, will really make housing more affordable. Here is why: (more…)
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Middle class revolution
One of many interesting ideas in the Ministry of Defence’s Strategic Trends study is that the middle class may become revolutionaries: taking on the role Marx expected of the proletariat. My instinctive reaction to this is that it is implausible, but, on reflection, it is more likely than it first appears. (more…)
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