Utopia, you are standing in it!

Rent-seekers and the MSM keep telling us the transition to an all-wind and sun-powered future is not only inevitable, it’s a cinch.

The power pricing and supply calamity playing out in renewables-obsessed Germany and Britain stands as a pretty fair counterpoint, to that nonsense.

Then, we’re told, it can all be done, provided it’s “done right”; which, in doublespeak, means more of precisely the same; even more $billions in subsidies gifted to crony capitalists, offering nothing but even more hopelessly intermittent wind and solar, in return.

Call it scaling up on an avoidable calamity, or doubling down on an inevitable disaster.

What’s overlooked in their starry-eyed and far-reaching promises about a ‘green’ Utopia, is the volume of mineral and other resources required to get there.

Every wind turbine and solar panel is the product of scarce resources, and not just the rare stuff mined by 9-year-olds in the Congo.

As…

The Laffer Curve is a very straightforward concept.

It graphically illustrates why politicians are wrong if they think you can double tax revenue by doubling tax rates (or that revenues will drop by 50 percent if tax rates are cut in half).

Simply stated, you also have to look at what happens to taxable income.

In cases where taxpayers have a lot of control over the timing, level, and composition of their income, changes in tax rates may cause big changes in taxable income (or “tax base” in the jargon of economists).

None of this should be controversial. Even Paul Krugman agrees that the Laffer Curve exists.

Today, we are going to see that the pro-tax International Monetary Fund also admits there is a Laffer Curve.

Indeed, a new study authored by David Amaglobeli, Valerio Crispolti, and Xuguang Simon Sheng openly states that politicians should be…

Buzz from the Beehive

Uh, oh.  Earlier this afternoon there was nothing doing in the Beehive.  Or rather, there was nothing doing that they wanted to tell us about.

We therefore drew a blank when we checked the Beehive website to find what our servants are up to.

Nor (when we checked with Scoop) could we find anything new from the Nats or the Greens, although the Nats since then have posted a statement on the rising expense of hiring government  consultants.

ACT was given a free kick,  in effect, and scored with three statements.

First, ACT’s Firearms Reform spokesperson Nicole McKee was braying that relentless pressure from her party has resulted in the Government making much-needed changes to firearms licensing.

Another moral panic against the Notwithstanding Clause has broken out and gripped the salons and cafes of Toronto in a repeat of the previous Panic of 2018;  Andrew Coyne outed himself yesterday as the Geraldo Rivera of this second wave.

Introduction

The constitution cannot be unconstitutional. It follows therefore that one part of the constitution cannot be used to strike down or nullify another part of the constitution. This tautology, fittingly, sounds very obvious and simple – yet it still bears repeating with respect to the Constitution of Canada, a confounding Cherub (like that in the Book of Ezekiel) composed of disparate, even contradictory, parts that ought not fit together yet must fit together and reconcile with one another.

On 10 September 2018, Justice Belobaba of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice struck down the provisions of the Better Local Government Act reducing the size of Toronto City Council by half and using the federal and provincial electoral districts as the basis for the City of Toronto’s new wards, as unconstitutional; Premier Ford, in turn, announced that the government will introduce a bill re-acting these provisions under the Notwithstanding Clause…

The insane cost of the wind and solar ‘transition’ is starting to bite; the wind and sun cult are struggling to shift the blame. While Vlad Putin may be a seriously thuggish dictator, he can’t seriously be held responsible for rocketing power prices in the UK, Europe and Australia, where power prices have been surging northwards for years, and long before the Russians stormed their way across Ukraine.

No, the answer in each case lies much closer to home and rests with the lunacy of attempting to run first world economies on sunshine and breezes.

The Australian’s Nick Cater is, as usual, on the money with this article, albeit that he confuses efficient to operate combined cycle gas turbines with highly inefficient open cycle gas turbines, a minor error that we resolve below.

Labor could pay the ultimate price from electricity shock
The Australian
Nick Cater
30 October 2022

The…

Yes, the headline is a rhetorical question. Because if there’s one thing the 50+ years since “Bullitt” has proven, it’s that most every big screen cop thriller has been in many if not most ways a remake of this Steve McQueen/Peter Yates classic.

We’ve had half a century of the “renegade” “outsider,” “goes his own way” cops, hunting for justice in a broken and/or corrupt system. There have been hundreds of films in which the cop hero drove a “car with character,” and any car buff or film fan knows what you mean when you say “Bullitt Mustang.” The “GT” is understood, the image iconic.

But let’s take that headline literally, shall we? Watching the film again for the umpteenth time last night, I gave it a hard, unsentimental pass for the first time in years.

The story — Lt. Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is tasked by his boss (the…

The votes are not yet final from the 1 November 2022 Israeli general election, but the outcome is quite clear. The right-wing bloc of parties supporting current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu will have won a manufactured majority.Media are calculating the bloc’s combined seats at 65 out of 120. Yet the bloc currently has just 48.1% of the votes. That is actually lower than the clear majority of the vote they got in April, 2019, yet at that election the result was deadlock while this one will produce a majority coalition government. What explains the difference? Coordination.

The reason for the manufactured majority in this election, despite a nationwide proportional representation electoral system, is coordination failure. The strategic choices of political leaders and voters in both the left and the Arab political camps have made Netanyahu’s impending return to government possible. On the left, Labor has barely cleared the…

If you believe thesmoke signals from the Treasury– and you probably should – the Budget on 17 November will have to include big increases in tax in order to plug a ‘black hole’ in the public finances. But is it inevitable that taxes will have to rise and, if so, what’s the best way to do it?

The obvious starting point is the ‘black hole’ itself. Different numbers are regularly tossed about here, with recent estimates ranging from around £30 billion to more than £70 billion. However, few people understand what these mean. The size of the ‘black hole’ depends on two main factors.

The first is the set of fiscal rules against which the public finances are assessed. The ‘black hole’ is the difference between the forecast path for public sector borrowing on current policies and where borrowing needs to be to hit the government’s targets. The…

Bush fire
Hardly a surprising conclusion in this research. A classic example of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
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Southeast Australia’s bushfire crisis culminated in the devastating bushfire season of 2019 and 2020 that burnt nearly 25 million hectares of bush, says Phys.org.

Our new research demonstrates how the scale of this disaster blew out due to legislation introduced in the 1970s, which was based on idea that nature should be left to grow freely without human intervention.

We investigated the bushfire history of one of the worst hit areas: Buchan on Gunaikurnai Country in Victoria.

We found no bushfires burned there for almost a century until the mid 1970s, following the establishment of the Land Conservation Act of 1970—legislation that sought to protect the Australian bush from humans.

This legislation banned farmers from mimicking Aboriginal burning practices by using frequent fires to promote grass…

Ah, yes, we are doing this again: Another Israeli general election. I am not going to pretend to know what will happen. As I type this, ILTV is making it seem as if the right-wing bloc has a majority with 61 or 62 seats. That would be a government of Likud, the two Haredi parties (Shas and UTJ), and the Religious Zionist list, returning Benjamin Netanyahu to the prime ministership.

HOWEVER, this is based on exit polls. These have been off before. It is downright misleading of media to treat these as if they are indicative of real results. On the other hand, it would be in no way a surprise if the final results were to confirm these exit polls. We just don’t know yet.

I won’t get into other possible coalition scenarios till we have actual results, other than to note that there are interesting possibilities…

I’ve expressed opposition numerous times to so-called industrial policy because I don’t want politicians and bureaucrats to provide special favors to certain businesses or industries at the expense of everyone else.

That’s a practice known as cronyism, and it is absurd to think that selfish, election-focused politicians somehow correctly identify and subsidize the technologies of tomorrow.

But there are still people who think government should try to steer the economy – including some supposed conservatives.

Let’s remind ourselves why this is a bad idea. Samuel Gregg of the American Institute for Economic Research has a new article about the topic for National Review.

…several polling outfits have indicated an uptick in the number of Americans who say they are disillusioned with capitalism and willing to consider socialism as an alternative. This, however, isn’t the most immediate threat to American capitalism. …It is best labeled “corporatism.” …Examples of…

Try to cover up the chronic energy policy mistakes made in the name of climate theories by doling out vast sums of borrowed money to the struggling customers. That’s the current UK approach. Why should anyone be content with putting the exchequer ever further in the mire to keep futile net zero dogma alive?
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Often I have referred to the situation that the UK, Germany, California, and others have set themselves up for as “hitting the green energy wall,” says Francis Menton (via Climate Change Dispatch).

But now that the UK has actually gotten there and has begun to deal with the consequences, I’m not sure that “hitting the wall” is the best analogy.

A better analogy might be “driving into the green energy cul-de-sac.” After all, when you hit a wall you can probably just pick yourself up and turn around and be on your…

Still so profoundly sad that Dolores died so young, This is one of their best songs, although there is no such thing as a bad Cranberries song.

The song was written in response to the death of Johnathan Ball, 3, and Tim Parry, 12, who had been killed in the IRA bombing in Warrington, northwest England, when two devices hidden in litter bins were detonated. Ball died at the scene of the bombing as a result of his shrapnel-inflicted injuries and, five days later, Parry lost his life as a result of head injuries.56 others were injured, some seriously. Parry died in his father’s arms in Liverpool’s Walton hospital. The two boys had gone shopping to buy Mother’s Day cards on one of the town’s busiest shopping streets.

“There were a lot of bombs going off in London and I remember this one time a child was killed when a…

The forecast lithium demand to meet the Net Zero targets look to be completely unachievable. That is an enormous amount of new mining that would no doubt be opposed by self described environmentalists. The story of global growth and prosperity from the industrial revolution is tightly entwined with use of energy starting with coal, other fossil fuels and nuclear. It seems to me the underlying socialist green agenda is happily to take us all back to an agrarian lifestyle. They decry growth and seem happy to leave the undeveloped nations where they are and take the world down to their level, rather than encourage the use of fossil fuels to bring everyone forward.