Utopia, you are standing in it!

The more you think times have changed, the more they remain the same. Amazing econ history is..

I came across this paper by Atlanta Fed econs — Stephen Quinn and William Roberds.  It is  just amazing to note how similar things were way back in 1763.  One had pretty similar financial instruments in 1763 whose drying up led to the crisis. And yes you had pretty similar instis like  Lehman Brothers which did not have access to retail deposits but relied on a form of wholesale financing.

This is a 2007 essay economist Don Boudreaux wrote that was published during 2007 in the Pittsburgh-Tribune Review. It is now posted at Mr. Boudreaux’s website.

The Environmental Creed

Careful observers often and correctly note that, for many of its adherents, environmentalism is a religion.

Too many environmentalists disregard inconvenient truths that would undermine their faith that calamities are percolating just over the horizon. It might well be that humans’ “footprint” on the Earth is larger than ever; it might even be true that this larger footprint creates some health risks for us modern humans that our pre-industrial ancestors never encountered.

But it is undeniably true that we denizens of industrial, market economies live far better and far healthier than did any our pre-industrial ancestors.

Compared to those ancestors, our life expectancies at birth today are about three times higher. Our bodies are cleaner and more free of disease…

I’m on my way back to the United States from England. My election-week coverage (starting here and ending here) is finished, but I’m still in the mood to write about the United Kingdom.

Yesterday, I shared some “Great Moments in British Government” and today I want to look at the U.K.’s single-payer health scheme.

The National Health Service (NHS) is inexplicably popular. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn basically competed over who would dump the most money into the system.

This near-universal affection is a mystery. There’s a lot of data suggesting the system doesn’t work.

Consider these details from a column by a British doctor.

One of the most curious political phenomena of the western world is the indestructible affection in which the British hold their National Health Service. No argument, no criticism, no evidence can diminish, let alone destroy, it. …Yet again, however, the NHS is…

The Labour Party’s reluctant acceptance of the IHRA Working Definition of antisemitism in 2018 didn’t occur without a fight.  There was one notable dissenter to the proposal to adopt, in full, the IHRA definition: Jeremy Corbyn, who claimed that it would stifle criticism of Israel.

As we noted at the time, the Guardian shared Corbyn’s dishonest interpretation of IHRA, in the following sentences of an official editorial:

The Palestinian narrative of dispossession and expulsion could be stifled, if not outlawed, by interpretations of the IHRA. Punishing political speech would stir more discord. If Jews have a right to define what oppresses them then Palestinians should also have the same right.

They’re at it again.

The Guardian, which recently endorsed Corbyn for prime minister, published an article by US correspondent Ed Pilkington (“Trump signs antisemitism order amid concerns it targets critics of Israel”, Dec. 12) that includes a…

One of the things that became abundantly clear in a previous post is how incredibly easy it is replace past failed predictions by a brand new one, even when incompatible with the failed prediction. There was the example of a Belgian activist who in 2008 claimed that we only had ten year left to avert tipping points by limiting the temperature increase to 2 C, but in 2018 -when we horribly failed to reach that target- he made a new prediction that we now had another ten years to prevent tipping points by limiting the temperature increase to … 1.5 C.

In that post, I also noticed the similarity between this prediction and the prediction by Andrew Simms and his onehundredmonths campaign. Both claimed that 2 C had to be averted otherwise we were in for tipping points, pointed to the authority of the IPCC to justify their claim…