I rarely bother with the vitriol right-wing blogger Tim Worstall. But every now and again it's worth noting just how mad the right-wing commentariat that still makes it to the UK airwaves really is. Take this from Worstall on Forbes:
It's worth looking to the Founding Father of economics, Adam Smith. It has been said, and not purely in jest, that all of economics is either footnotes to Smith or wrong—and as I'm a Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute I'm rather likely to agree with that line.
Let's ignore the fact that Worstall has clearly not read Smith properly, second has not understood him and third is just making excuses for the fact that his reading ends in 1776. Let's instead note what he then concludes based on this premise:
I routinely make fun of tax justice campaigners for example—insisting that people cheating on their taxes is a good idea. Tax avoidance, and yes even tax evasion, serves the public purpose by placing a limit on how much government can try to squeeze out of the rest of us.
It's not just that Smith said nothing like that, in fact arguing for something that can reasonably be called the exact opposite; what's really shocking is that here we have a Senior Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute promoting law breaking and I am sure that there will be no hint of him being sacked as a result.
Which tells you all we need to know about the UK's right wing.
But only on tax, of course.
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Tim Worstall is the Katie Hopkins of economics. Their livelihoods depends on saying increasingly stupid things to generate uproar and with it drive clicks. To steal/paraphrase Stewart Lee talking about Jeremy Clarkson’s career as a columnist, Worstall writes down his deliberately outrageous, unresearched opinions every week to a deadline set by the website…… it is almost as if they aren’t real.
I always try to read both sides of any debate, but it’s clear this person has a problem. I’ve seen horrible accusations of you benefitting from structures to avoid tax, recommended tax avoidance schemes, betlittling you as 0.2 of a professor, being an appointed professor like Angelina Jolie, being funded to provide biased reports for unions, hanging onto the coat tails of others in business and being economically illiterate.
Best to rise above it.
The man does appear to have a problem with me
I take comfort that I seem to be in good company
You appear to have answered your own question.
I could not do that
Only they can
I can guess though, and did
Perhaps it is as well to remember there is such a thing as the oxygen of publicity. I deny it to some myself; I won’t say who.
‘But only on tax, of course.’
What is this supposed to mean Richard ? Or is this your usual excellent sense of humour ?
You were meant to read in that a very different attitude would be taken on benefits
I clicked the link and he appears to be critical of tax evasion in India, on the grounds it leaves an uneven playing field. It is a point you have made yourself, if I have understood you.
The point he was making about tax evasion (as I read it) is to say that there are limits on the laws which the population will accept in regulating behaviour. If the state oversteps those limits, people will break the law in significant numbers. This places restraint on the state. It is an empirical point, not a value judgement.
We saw that with alcohol prohibition in the US in the 20s, and we see it today with soft drug use. We saw it with sexual activity between men when it was a criminal offence. I don’t think he is making a particularly controversial point.
I think you need to read him a little more widely
OK thanks, will do.
Poor old Adam Smith………….to have his keenly observed writing turned into wishful thinking.
A warning though: we must never under estimate how attractive this looks to certain people and how it is used by people like Worstall to distort the truth.