Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

Over the past few months, I’ve written a 7-part series on Bidenomics, reviewing the president’s record on issues such as subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, red tape, and employment.

Regarding the last item, a big problem is that the share of the population with jobs (measured by either the labor-force participation rate or the employment-population ratio) has not recovered.

It hasn’t recovered to where it was before the pandemic and it hasn’t recovered to where it was before Obama took office.

That’s bad news. Our economy’s output (and our national income) depends on the quantity and quality of both labor and capital.

This does not reflect well on Biden.

But not everyone agrees. Paul Krugman has leapt to the President’s defense. He even claims that American workers are enjoying a “Biden boom.”

President Biden has presided over a huge employment…

Electricity is one of those things that is only fully appreciated when a hopeful user is deprived of it. Across Europe, the cultlike fixation on wind and solar has provided precisely the environment in which households and businesses are coming to sense just how important having power as and when they need it, really is.

Germany set the tone by squandering billions of euros on subsidies to wind and solar, trashing their forests and rural heartland, as well as their hitherto reliable and affordable power supply. What could possibly go wrong?

Power prices are rocketing into the stratosphere and, even before winter drives up demand, are being deprived of energy in a way that was unthinkable barely a decade ago. But such is life when you attempt to run on sunshine and breezes.

Here are a couple of reports on the inevitable renewable energy transition from the frontline.

Energy Shortages…

Following her appointment as Prime Minister yesterday, Liz Truss has become the third Prime Minister in a row to take office directly as a result of a party leadership election. Ben Worthy explains that taking office in the middle of a parliament has historically not gone well for the incoming Prime Minister, with none of the last three ‘takeover Prime Ministers’ able to complete a full parliamentary term in office.

There are two routes to becoming Prime Minister in the UK. You can either win a general election or triumph in a party leadership election to become head of the largest parliamentary party when a predecessor leaves. As section 2.18 of the Cabinet Manual puts it:

Where a Prime Minister chooses to resign from his or her individual position at a time when his or her administration has an overall majority in the House of Commons, it is for the…

Chilean lithium deposits [image credit: travelandleisure.com]
By a big majority, the people said no – that’s it. Ideology overload?
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Chile rejected a new constitution on Sunday which, if accepted, would have significantly expanded environmental rights and recognised the urgency of climate action, says Climate Home News.

In a referendum, the South American nation rejected the proposed constitution by 62% to 38% in favour. Voting was mandatory.

As home to the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a key component of batteries for electric vehicles, Chile is of strategic importance in the global clean energy transition. This comes with social and environmental tradeoffs.