Utopia, you are standing in it!

Oh Dear.

Labour leader Andrew Little still wants to stiff-arm banks:

. . . ‘I stand by the stance I took, which is to get very heavy-handed with the banks. Because the truth is when the banks fail to follow the signal that the Reserve Bank is sending, that’s keeping money out of the back pockets of ordinary Kiwis, and I will always fight for their interests and for their rights. If the banks don’t want to play ball when it comes to the way we run our monetary policy, actually, there’s only one outfit that can really take them on, and that’s the government.’. . .

The Reserve Bank is independent because it’s not the government’s role to set interest rates.

Retail banks are independent businesses and it’s not the government’s role to tell them what interest rates they should charge.

Interest rates are at historically low…

It appears that the Communist censors of China are concerned about more than just discussion of the absence of civil liberties. It appears that one of the greatest concerns for Communist censors is any proof that its Communist leaders are capitalists. Networks like Sina Weibo and Wechat has deleted all discussion of the Panama Papers leak which names several members of China’s elite, including President Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law, as hiding huge amounts of money in foreign accounts. Mao warned that “There is a serious tendency towards capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.” It appears that the well-to-do peasants have discovered foreign bank accounts.

This is a guest post by Marko Grdesic, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin. Marko’s research focuses on social movements and political sociology. You can learn more about Marko at his website.

What do economists think of Karl Polanyi? For sociology, Polanyi is a classic. His book The Great Transformation is part of the sociological canon and is of special relevance to economic sociologists. Polanyi’s agenda has recently received an important update by two well-known sociologists. But what do economists think of his work? Have they read it? If so, what do they think of it? The motivation behind this small research project was to investigate the disciplinary differences between economics and sociology, by looking at an author who is arguably relevant for both fields. In order to do this, I sent a bunch of emails to economists. I wrote to a randomly chosen 10…

Earlier this year, I had some fun when it was revealed that the President’s new Treasury Secretary had a lot of money in the Cayman Islands.

After all, leftists want us to believe tax havens are rogue regimes that should be eliminated. Some of them even want military intervention against these low-tax jurisdictions!

Much to my amusement, Mr. Lew even pretended he was financially illiterate to justify making sensible decisions to invest via the Cayman Islands.

And unlike the President’s first Treasury Secretary, Mr. Lew didn’t break the law and cheat on his tax return.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Secretary Lew wasn’t the first Democrat to utilize tax havens. Lawmakers such as John Kerry, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and others on the left also have utilized tax havens to boost their own personal finances.

And it appears that Mr. Lew won’t be the last…

Three years ago, thieves stole a bunch of information from “offshore” service providers in the Cook Islands and British Virgin Islands. This was supposed to be a ground-breaking exposé with huge ramifications, but it turned out to be a tempest in a teapot. As I pointed out at the time, all that we really learned is that people who use offshore services are generally honest and law-abiding. And they definitely had far more integrity than the politicians who routinely attack the offshore world.

Well, here we go again. We’ve learned that thieves have now obtained client data from a global law firm based in Panama, and leftists once again are making this seem like a giant story.

But here’s what you really need to know. This is simply another chapter in the never-ending war by high-tax governments against tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial…

Review of Gridlock: Why we’re stuck in traffic and what to do about it. by Randal O’Toole. Cato Institute Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-935308-23-2
Gridlock by Randal O’Toole is one of a slew of recent books and reports about transportation that has been released in anticipation of federal surface transportation reauthorization, the “highway” bill that is passed every five or six years by Congress which sets federal spending limits and establishes policies for both highway and urban public transit in the United States. This book identifies major problems with US transportation policy, pinning problems on planning and planners, and what it considers their misguided emphasis on rail and land use-based solutions to a variety of problems that would be better addressed without what is dubbed “social engineering” and instead focusing on technology and sound principles of economic efficiency. Reading this book in one-sitting, I found I could not dispute most of…

There are many players in the world of transport policy these days. On net, this influx of new actors into the policy, advocacy and planning realms is likely a benefit, but does offer some concerns. One thing that I see again and again is that new entrants and existing players in the world of urban transport policy too often don’t know or have forgotten lessons learned in the past. On one level this is just a nuisance, and it is good that old knowledge is rediscovered. On another more troubling level this is like health professionals having to rediscover penicillin every other generation.

Here are two recent examples where existing knowledge is ignored or not known or marginalized.

In a recent Vox piece the concept of induced demand was discussed with reference to recent empirical work by the economists Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner (a few months ago Wired also…

Laura Bliss writes in CityLab: To Ease Traffic, L.A. Needs Much More Than Trains: Metro’s $120 billion rail proposal alone won’t transform how Angelenos get around. I get quoted:

Which leads to a final point: Transit doesn’t have to reduce traffic to be successful. Indeed, its central aim probably shouldn’t be serving the people who don’t actually use it. Transit’s best selling point is that it offers mobility to those who, for any number of reasons, can’t or choose not to drive. It also underpins bustling economic activity, pushes people into job centers, and improves long-term sustainability. The transportation scholar David Levinson wrote in 2015 about the warped notion that the goal of public transit funding should be to benefit non-transit users:

Transit today is, in almost all U.S. markets, slower than driving. People who depend on transit can reach fewer jobs than those who have automobiles available. Some people use…