Utopia, you are standing in it!

What the US government thinks wind power ‘could’ do
If Oregon is modelling its electricity supply policy on South Australia, it should know what to expect, as Hot Air reports.

If you live in Oregon and rely on certain fancy, high tech features of the industrial revolution such as having lights in your home and refrigerated food, you might want to start stocking up on candles and non-perishable goods.

The green energy warriors have pretty much taken over the state legislature in the Beaver State for more than the past decade and they’ve managed to pass all sorts of interesting laws. One of them was a rule which says that all coal fired power will be eliminated by 2020… a deadline which is pretty much right around the corner.

It took the wind power disaster to unfold in South Australia before mainstream media started to notice the bleeding obvious: these things don’t work – on any level. Slowly, but surely the press have pounced – attacking the causes and consequences of pouring $billions in subsidies at a power generation system which can only be seen as a proven failure. Here’s The Daily Bell joining the chorus.

Australia Finds Out Wind Power Doesn’t Really Work
The Daily Bell
17 August 2016

Trust in public power companies misplaced … Former Labor minister Patrick Conlon urges carbon price to fix electricity system … A SENIOR Labor figure is urging a carbon price on electricity to lower household bills by kickstarting investment in new-generation power plants. – The Advertiser

Australian politicians have been obsessed with taxing carbon ever since the tax was briefly imposed and then repealed in mid-2104 by former prime minister…

Tim Gill is a CIPR fellow at Tulane University. His research addresses political sociology and globalization. This guest post addresses the candidacy of Donald Trump.

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In May, I taught my final course at the University of Georgia as I finished up my dissertation: a three-week long seminar on political sociology. Before the course, I was certain that Trump would be the most sought after topic of discussion by the students, regardless of what topic we broached. The Great Depression and issues of tariffs? Trump. The civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter? Trump. And, finally, how performances matter within US politics? Well, of course, Trump.

I admit. When I teach political sociology and use books and articles concerning US politics, my head tends to wander back to Venezuela, where I do most of my research. This didn’t happen though nearly as monolithically this summer. Along with the students, my…

The Left, as is usual, smells opportunity in statistics  that they can use to win votes and attack the other side. Yahoo chimed in today: “THE ISSUE: The rich keep getting richer while more Americans are getting left behind financially. The average income for the top 1 percent of  households climbed 7.7 percent last  year to $1.36 million, according to tax data tracked by Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at the university of California, Berkeley. That privileged sliver of the population saw pay climb at almost twice the rate of income growth for the other 99 percent, whose pay averaged a humble $48,768.

“The” Income Inequality” critic’s faculty salary puts him in the top 1%. Decrying the iniquities of the American capitalist system pays off. Emmanuel Saez’ total wages in 2014, came to $549,350,” in case you were wondering why tuition at major universities is so high.

Yahoo accompanied the…

Marriage and Poverty

The five policies are:

• higher minimum wage rates
• opposition to school voucher programs
• releasing criminals from jail
• affirmative action
• single mother welfare

This article is by Jason L. Riley, and it appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

At the urging of labor unions, President Obama has pushed for higher minimum wages that price a disproportionate percentage of blacks out of the labor force. At the urging of teachers unions, he has fought voucher programs that give ghetto children access to better schools.

Both policies have a lengthy track record of keeping millions of blacks ill-educated and unemployed. Since the 1970s, when the federal government began tracking the racial achievement gap, black test scores in math, reading and science have on average trailed far behind those of their white classmates. And minimum-wage mandates have been so effective for so long at keeping blacks out of work that…

Other than Ayn Rand, there’s a very special person who has greatly influenced my thinking and writing. That person is none other than the economist I frequently refer to- Thomas Sowell. This article is based on The Man of Letters which is a pun for great scholar but it is also a collection of his letters.

Thomas Sowell was born in 1930, he was adopted as an infant and lived in Harlem. He left his home when he was 16 and found a job at Washington at the age of 19. He was later drafted to participate in the Korean War, his status as a former marine allowed him to study in college thanks to the G. I. Bill. He initially studied at Howard University while he worked but he was later admitted to Harvard to study economics. He then went on to study his masters at Columbia and his PhD…

Last week I wrote a post about criticism by some left-wing liberals of Tim Kaine. My post elicited a series of comments from Peter Schaeffer. I responded to his first comment in the comment section, and he has followed up with some further comments, which raise a number of important issues, partly historical and partly philosophical. While his comments are in some respects insightful, I think that are also very misguided. But it is certainly the case that many of the positions he takes are rather widely held, including by some well-known public figures, so I think that they are worth responding to. So even though some of what Peter and I disagree about are fairly obscure matters of British and American history, I think that it is worth taking the time to respond to most of Peter’s comments.

Peter begins by challenging the main point of my previous…