Utopia, you are standing in it!

Sir Charles “Charlie” Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977) lived a tragic life. He was essentially abandoned by his parents as a child. When he grew up, he married four different women who were each much younger than Chaplin. He sired no less than eleven different children (many of whom he apparently treated poorly) and he entertained a long list of romantic affairs. Chaplin became a sympathetic socialist/communist despite being a wealthy millionaire and, as punishment for his political leanings, he was ultimately exiled from the U.S. and forced to live in Switzerland for the remainder of his life, returning to the U.S. only once in 1972 to accept an honorary Oscar.   

Charlie Chaplin’s life was one of the greatest tales of rags to riches. Almost as if mirroring a Horatio Alger novel, Chaplin was born in the rowdy, impoverished region of South London on the cusp of collapsing Victorian society. South…

Earl is a rank of the nobility in the United Kingdom. The title originates in the Old English word eorl, meaning “a man of noble birth or rank”. The word is cognate with the Scandinavian form jarl, and meant “chieftain”, particularly a chieftain set to rule a territory in a king’s stead. After the Norman Conquest, it became the equivalent of the continental count (in England in the earlier period, it was more akin to a duke; in Scotland, it assimilated the concept of mormaer).

In modern Britain, an earl is a member of the peerage, ranking below a marquess and above a viscount. A feminine form of earl never developed; instead, countess is used.

It is important to distinguish between the land controlled directly by the earl, in a landlord-like sense, and the region over which he could exercise his office. Scottish use of Latin terms provincia and comitatus…

Most people have heard of the Laffer Curve, which shows that there is a non-linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenues (for instance, doubling tax rates won’t produce a doubling of tax revenue because people and businesses will have less incentive to earn and report income).

There’s something similar on the spending side of the budget. I call it the Rahn Curve and it shows there is a non-linear relationship between government spending and economic performance.

The concept is not controversial, just like the concept of a Laffer Curve is not controversial.

What does trigger disagreement, however, is figuring out the shape of the curve, especially the growth-maximizing size of government (or, in the case of the Laffer Curve, the revenue-maximizing tax rate).

Much of the academic literature suggests that is maximized when government spending consumes about 20-plus percent of economic output.

But I’ve questioned whether…

From the Emperor’s Desk: This is an updated and expanded article I wrote in 2012 at the start of my blog when Elizabeth II was Queen.

Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

I am a bit of a stickler for correct and proper usage of styles and titles. So it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine when these are used improperly. The main one that bugs me is calling Charles III, King of England. That bothers me because “King of England” is not his correct title! His correct title, simplified here, is King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. England has not been a separate sovereign state since 1707.

Wales

The country of Wales was once an independent Principality. The conquest of Wales by Edward I of England was completed by 1283, though Owain Glyndŵr…

Since he entered the Democrat Primaries for the Presidential nomination in 2019, I’ve documented Joe Biden’s slow decline into a state of senile dementia, usually with numerous video clips where you can’t deny what your eyes have just seen or what your ears have just heard.

Admittedly even before senile dementia set in Biden made gaffes. In one infamous clip from 2008, then-Senator Biden, who by that point was also Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate,urgeda Democrat member of the Missouri state senate to “Stand up Chuck, let ’em see you.” The man was in a wheelchair. But that’s probably just ignorance and a failure of his staff to brief him.

I was hardly alone in making this assessment; during the 2019-2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign season, a number of his Democratic opponents and even some in the mainstream mediaraised questionsabout Biden’s fitness to serve as…

It is tempting to liken the political hacks of the mainstream news media to piranha, rather than ever-vigilant watchdogs of the Fourth Estate.

With the exception of the NZ Herald, they have lamentably ill-served the voting public by failing to muster a whimper, let alone a snarl or a warning bark, about issues raised by the awarding of contracts to family members of Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta.

The hacks were aroused from their indifference to those contracts only when another watchdog – the Public Service Commission – announced it is looking into government departments’ management of the contracting process.   

On the other hand, the imagery of piranha seems apt when they engage in a feeding frenzy of the sort that followed the hapless Kelvin Davis’ derogatory – and racist – remarks about ACTs Karen Chhour.

Davis told Chhour (a Māori) she must look at things from a Māori…

Getty images.

Brendan O’Neill writes at Spectator The trouble with ‘bourgeois’ environmentalism.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. HT John Ray

The left needs to shake off its ‘bourgeois environmentalism’. It needs to distance itself from the ‘bourgeois environmental lobby’ and make the case for fracking and the building of new nuclear power stations.

Who do you think said this? Some contrarian commentator? A right-winger irritated by eco-loons? Nope, it was Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB trade union.

In an explosive intervention in left-wing discourse, Smith has accused Labour of a ‘lack of honesty’ and of ‘not facing reality’ on the energy question. We are living through a severe energy crisis and yet still Labour is sniffy about fracking and down on nuclear power, he says. All because it is in thrall to bourgeois greens who just don’t like industry and modernity…

Spend less than 5 minutes watching this clip, demonetized by Youtube. Just to understand the hypocrisy.

At the risk of understatement, I’m not a fan of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The international bureaucracy is the “Johnny Appleseed” of moral hazard, using bailouts to reward profligate governments and imprudent lenders.

The IMF also is infamous for encouraging higher tax burdens, which is especially outrageous since its cossetted employees are exempt from paying tax on their lavish salaries.

In recent years, the IMF has been using inequality as a justification for statist policies. Most recently, the lead bureaucrat at the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, cited that issue as a reason for governments to impose higher taxes to fund bigger welfare states.

…inequality has become one of the most complex and vexing challenges in the global economy. Inequality of opportunity. Inequality across generations. Inequality between women and men. And, of course, inequality of income and wealth. …The good news is we have tools to address these issues… Progressive taxation is…

Starts with the host saying, “Let’s talk about whether the right has lost their balls, whether they are dying out, I mean, what is happening here?”

Farage: “No, look at Italy! Giorgia Meloni is going to become the Italian prime minister. Look at Sweden, 2 weeks ago; that country, ruled by Social Democrats since 1945, until now. There’s going to be a conservative majority leading Sweden.”

Helen Clark’s head must be exploding. She was always a die-hard, Sweden fan.

Farage: “Actually, all over the world, we are seeing a move against Globalism. Because what’s Globalism done? It’s made the rich, richer, and disadvantaged absolutely everybody else.”

Farage: “But somehow, somehow in our countries at election time we get people who masquerade as conservatives, don’t have the courage to stand up and fight for our values.”

Farage: “People are just coming up and talking to me. People are desperate for…

A marquess is a nobleman of high hereditary rank in various European peerages and in those of some of their former colonies. Marquess (from the French marquis, march). This is a reference to the Marches (borders) between Wales, England and Scotland.

The German language equivalent is Markgraf (margrave). A woman with the rank of a marquess or the wife (or widow) of a marquess is a marchioness or marquise. The children’s titles are the same as those of a duke’s children (Lord and Lady). These titles are also used to translate equivalent Asian styles, as in Imperial China and Imperial Japan.

A marquess is addressed as ‘Lord followed by thier first name.

United Kingdom

In Great Britain, and historically in Ireland, the correct spelling of the aristocratic title of this rank is marquess (although on the European mainland and in Canada, the French spelling of marquis is used in English).

It is disappointing that the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund routinelyadvocate for higher taxes and bigger government in nations from all parts of the world (for examples, see here, here, here, here, here, and here).

It is disturbing that the IMF engages in bailouts that encourage bad fiscal policy by governments and reckless lending policies by financial institutions.

And it is disgusting that those IMF bureaucrats get tax-free salaries and are thus exempt from the damaging consequences of those misguided policies.

One set of rules for the peasants and one set of rules for the elite.

The latest example of IMF misbehavior revolves around the bureaucracy’s criticism of recently announced tax cuts in the United Kingdom.

A BBCreport by Natalie Sherman and Tom Espiner summarizes the controversy.