Utopia, you are standing in it!

There are numerous biographies of Sigmund Freud, the best ones I have read include Peter Gay’s FREUD: A LIFE FOR OUR TIMES, Joel Whitebrook’s FREUD: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY, and an earlier work, Ronald W. Clark’s FREUD: THE MAN AND THE CAUSE.  The latest monograph SAVING FREUD: THE RESCUERS WHO BROUGHT HIM TO FREEDOM by Andrew Nagorski is not a complete biography but one that focuses on how Freud and fifteen of his followers managed to escape Austria in 1938 as Hitler and his Nazis achieved their Anschluss with Austria triggering a wave of anti-Semitic violence.  While Nagorski provides biographical details of Freud’s life, his main thrust is the years leading up to World War II.  Nagorski tells an engrossing tale of how there was little margin for error for Freud as he escaped Nazi persecution.

Nagorski a former Newsweek correspondent has written a number of…

“September ’77Port Elizabeth weather fine It was business as usual
In police room 619.” This is the first line from a Peter Gabriel song titled “Biko” .

When I first heard it, I didn’t know who Biko was or what the context of the song was. Because I liked the song I made it my business to find out. What I discovered shocked me. I will not go too much inti the life of Steve Biko, but I will go into his final hours on earth.

He was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he was at the forefront of a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known as the Black Consciousness Movement during the late 1960s and 1970s. His ideas were articulated in a series of articles published under the pseudonym Frank Talk.

On August 18, 1977, he and a fellow activist were seized at a…

Last week Liz Truss’s cabinet decided to shelve the proposed British Bill of Rights. Quite a lot has been said about the Bill since it was announced and many have welcomed the quiet demise of what was perceived by some to be a dangerous inroad into our human rights protection. Others have suggested that the Bill would never have been able to make good on the hopes of those who wish to see the U.K. unshackled from the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court. Rajiv Shah, a former special advisor in the Ministry of Justice and the No 10 Policy Unit, argues that the Bill was presented as containing a lot of red meat – to encourage ECHR sceptics and dismay ECHR advocates – while in reality being little more than a vegan steak. On reflection this is a fairly accurate description. One area of concern, however, was the potential repeal…

Britain and Germany are the star players in Europe’s self-inflicted renewable energy calamity. Faced with power rationing and crippling power bills, Germans and Brits must be thanking their lucky stars that their governments had the wit and foresight to destroy their coal-fired power plants and give nuclear power the flick.

Banning the exploitation of Britain’s abundant gas reserves has also done great service for their daily energy needs. The Germans had long ago outlawed fracking too, but had banked on Vlad Putin maintaining his supply of Russian gas, ad infinitum. Well, that didn’t pan out.

Who’d have thought that attempting to run exclusively on sunshine and breezes could cause so much trouble? [Note to Ed: we did!]

The team from Jo Nova give a little more insight into the inevitable consequences of the ‘inevitable transition’.

Energy Hyperinflation Ship launching from UK in 3, 2, 1… prices so high there is…

Necessity is the mother of energy policy reinvention, and safe, reliable and affordable nuclear is at the heart of it.

In Britain, thanks to its obsession with heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar, power prices are already at astronomical levels. Its political betters are ruing the day they determined to trash their coal-fired power fleet and snub nuclear, altogether.

It wasn’t always thus. Indeed, in 2005, then Labour PM, Tony Blair mocked his Conservative opponent, David Cameron about the need to maintain Britain’s existing nuclear fleet and to build more of the same.

As Judith Sloan details below, power-starved Brits would not be in the disastrous predicament they’re in now, had Blair’s prescient advice been put into action, back then.

A lesson as UK struggles to keep the lights on
The Australian
Judith Sloan
6 September 2022

It was British prime minister Tony Blair who suggested to opposition…

It official! Bob Hetzel’s book “The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure” is finally out. Buy it! Needless to say I ordered it long ago.

We all know it – Bob Hetzel has a Market Monetarist explanation for the Great Recession. It was caused by overly tight monetary policy – what Bob calls the Monetary Disorder view of the Great Recession.

John Taylor has a favourable review of the book here.

David Beckworth comments on Taylor here.

Scott Sumner comments on Hetzel, Taylor and Beckworth.

And finally Bill Woolsey also has a wrap-up on Hetzel, Taylor, Beckworth and Sumner (and Marcus Nunes for that matter).

Do I need to add anything? Well no, other than just buy that book NOW!!

Here is that official book description:

“Since publication of Robert L. Hetzel’s The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve (Cambridge University Press, 2008), the intellectual consensus…

I have been a bit too busy to blog recently and at the moment I am enjoying a short Easter vacation with the family in the Christensen vacation home in Skåne (Southern Sweden), but just to remind you that I am still around I have a bit of stuff for you. Or rather there is quite a bit that I wanted to blog about, but which you will just get the links and some very short comments.

First, Brad DeLong is far to hard on us monetarists when he tells his story about“The Monetarist Mistake”. Brad story is essentially that the monetarists are wrong about the causes of the Great Depression and he is uses Barry Eichengreen (and his new book Hall of Mirrors to justify this view. I must admit I find Brad’s critique a bit odd. First of all because Eichengreen’s fantastic book “Golden Fetters” exactly…

Guest post by Julie Hardwick, 9 September 2022.

In July, 1725, Justine Gantier walked along the streets in Lyon, France’s second city, to the greffe (the building that served as the depository of legal documents and evidence) for the royal court of first instance (a sénéchausée). There she handed a court official a bundle of seven letters she had received from her intimate partner, Louis Delagard.Perhaps in consultation with her lawyer, or perhaps on her own initiative because seemingly women did not usually provide such evidence, she deposited them as evidence in support of her paternity suit against him. Gantier was six months pregnant and Delagard had reneged on his repeated promises to marry her. Her actions transformed those letters, the material culture of intimacy that originally embodied the connection and commitment between them, into legal evidence of betrayal.

Queen Elizabeth II sadly died yesterday, bringing to a close the longest reign in British history. Robert Hazell and Bob Morris offer a brief guide to what happens next, as King Charles III prepares for both the funeral of his predecessor and his own coronation. They also explore how the new king will have to adapt to his changed constitutional status.

At the age of 96 and after a record-breaking reign of 70 years, Queen Elizabeth II has died. A life of service to which she committed herself as a young woman has ended:

I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.

But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me, as I now…

And so the United Kingdom has a new Prime Minister, replacing one who, having besmirched the office, had been forced out.  The Conservatives took almost eight weeks to choose Liz Truss.  That saga resembled a presidential election, not least in the televised debates that were occasionally as unedifying as they were uninformative, and notoriously in some of the vicious briefings given by unnamed allies of the candidates about their opponents.  Not for the first time the British parliamentary system surrendered the choice of premier to a small section of the British electorate.  But their preference was not the same as that of Tory MPs, who had consistently voted for Rishi Sunak as their first choice.    

It is for the political parties to decide how to elect their leaders. But should the votes of others than MPs be part of their electoral systems? I think not, and I never have…