Utopia, you are standing in it!

What accounts for Switzerland’s “improbable success“? How did a small, land-locked nation with few natural resources become so successful?

Switzerland routinely ranks very high in international comparisons of economic liberty, so that means that there are many good policies.

But since I’m a public finance economist, I think this map from the Tax Foundation helps to explain why Switzerland is a role model. As you can see, the tax burden on workers is dramatically lower than in other European nations. Indeed, Switzerland is almost 10 percentage points lower than the next-closest country.

The map shows the tax burden on a single worker with no dependents, but you find a similarly large gap when looking at the tax burden on a four-person household.

By the way, Switzerland’s value-added tax is far lower than any other European nation, so ordinary workers aren’t being indirectly pillaged (and tax “progressivity”…

Robert Bryce explains in his Real Clear Energy article Carbon Capture Didn’t Make Sense 12 Years Ago And It Doesn’t Make Sense Now.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

It appears the reconciliation bill that includes some $370 billion in energy-related spending is going to become law. The measure includes a panoply of tax credits for alternative energy technologies, including incentives for electric vehicles, hydrogen, energy storage, and of course, billions of dollars in tax credits for wind and solar energy.

The measure also includes, according to the Congressional Budget Office, some $3.2 billion in tax credits for carbon capture and sequestration, a technology that has plenty of supporters but precious little in the way of commercially successful projects. Back in 2018, Al Gore blasted CCS, calling it “nonsense” and an “extremely improbable solution.”

The new tax credits for CCS remind me that I…

Political commentator CHRIS TROTTER writes ….   …  

Louis Philippe I (October 6, 1773 – August 26, 1850) was King of the French from 1830 to 1848, and the penultimate monarch of France.

Early life

Louis Philippe was born in the Palais Royal, the residence of the Orléans family in Paris, to Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans and Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, who was the daughter of Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon, Duke of Penthièvre and Princess Maria Teresa d’Este of Modena.

At the death of her brother, Louis Alexandre, Prince of Lamballe, Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon became the wealthiest heiress in France prior to the French Revolution. She was descended from Louis XIV of France through a legitimized line.

Louis Philippe I, King of the French

As a member of the reigning House of Bourbon, Louis Philippe was a Prince of the Blood (Prince du sang), which entitled him the use of the style…

What does the ‘inevitable’ wind and solar transition look like? Try power-starved Britain, where power prices are out of control, with much, much worse to come.

Last October, the average annual energy bill was £1,400 ($2,400). Energy industry analyst Cornwall Insight forecasts that the British price cap will skyrocket and the average annual bill will reach £3,582 ($6,177) in October this year. By January, it predicts it will be £5,000 (almost $10,000) a year.

By February, in the depth of a no doubt bitter winter, the average household will be spending £150 a week trying to keep the lights on and, perhaps, warming up a single room in their dimly lit homes. Householders will have the make the cruel choice between heating and eating. So far, so Third World.

None of this comes as a surprise to STT; we’ve been spelling it out on these pages for nearly a decade.

The headline says it all. Despite claiming ‘The original error was not with the science of climate change’ – well, we disagree there – the article charts the real course of the current energy fiasco quite well. Climate obsession has a lot to answer for.
– – –
Putin may be the proximate cause of this crisis, but the reason we were vulnerable was an intentional policy to crush fossil fuel investment, says The Telegraph.
. . .
And now? Well, now, as “big oil” might say: “We just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face.”

Europe needs gas. It is pleading for gas.

Instead of flying media to gas fields to court capital, the oil and gas men are being flown to the capitals of Europe and begged to invest.

Disappearing glaciers for a century or more – so why wasn’t the crashed plane visible on the surface the whole time? We’re told: ‘The bodies of the three passengers were recovered by authorities at the time, but police say they didn’t have the capabilities to remove the plane from such a remote area.’ A video about the same story says ‘the glaciers have lost half their volume in less than a century’. Did they mean less than half a century? Something seems amiss here.
– – –
In a helicopter high above the Swiss Alps, we see climate change in action, asserts Sky News.

The glacial ice is melting at an unprecedented rate, revealing items frozen long ago.

A scar suddenly appears in the bright white snow. A crumple of silver and red.

“That’s the plane,” says our guide, Dominik Nellen, pointing.

Aftermath

The Holy Roman Empire, an institution which had lasted for just over a thousand years, did not pass unnoticed or unlamented. The dissolution of the empire sent shockwaves through Germany, with most of the reactions within the former imperial boundaries being rage, grief or shame.

Even the signatories of the Confederation of the Rhine were outraged; the Bavarian emissary to the imperial diet, Rechberg, stated that he was “furious” due to having “put his signature to the destruction of the German name”, referring to his state’s involvement in the confederation, which had effectively doomed the empire.

From a legal standpoint, Franz II’s abdication was controversial. Contemporary legal commentators agreed that the abdication itself was perfectly legal but that the emperor did not have the authority to dissolve the empire. As such, several of the empire’s vassals refused to recognize that the empire had ended. As late as October 1806…

Many people give great credit to the USSR for their pivotal in the allies defeat of the Nazi regime. They say if it hadn’t been for the Soviets, the war could have lasted a lot longer and could have gone Germany’s way.

However, it can be argued that because of the USSR the war lasted longer. The did aligned themselves with the Nazis a few weeks before the start of WW2. For the first year and a half or so they fought along with the Nazis, in Poland.

On August 23, Germany and the USSR signed a non aggression pact.

The German-Soviet Pact was an agreement signed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It was negotiated by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Commonly called the German-Soviet Pact or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, it is also known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact or the Hitler-Stalin…