Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’ve written columns about wonky economic concepts such as “deadweight loss” and “public goods.” Today’s topic is “rent seeking,” which is part of “public choice” and is described by Professor Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University.

To elaborate, here’s a video from Professor Michael Munger from Duke University.

The basic message of both videos is that “rent seeking” occurs when interest groups manipulate the political system to obtain undeserved riches.

And there are all sorts of examples of policies that exist solely because interest groups get politicians to tilt the playing field – including trade barriers, farm subsidies, occupational licensing, and bureaucrat salaries.

As pointed out in the videos, these rent-seeking policies reduce prosperity.

But what’s the origin of the term? In the modern era, it’s often associated with Gordon Tullock, one of the founders of public choice…

A few days ago on Twitter, Nathan Robinson made the claim that global capitalism wasn’t reducing poverty. In fact, it appears that poverty, using the threshold of $10/day (rather than the usual lower numbers) has increased from 1981 to 2017:

While there were a lot of critical responses to him on Twitter, he’s not wrong about the data: in 2017, there were 1.3 billion more people living on less than $10 per day (we’re going to assume in this post that the underlying data is basically correct, and correctly…

Carpetbaggers profiting from hopelessly intermittent wind and solar still claim that mega-batteries are the solution to their obvious lack of reliability.

But it only takes a moment’s reckoning to appreciate that the grid-scale storage electricity generated by wind or solar is a perfect nonsense.

It hasn’t occurred anywhere in the world; nor will it.

David Wojick explains why below.

VCEA makes Virginia’s electric grid dangerously unreliable
CFACT
David Wojick
21 January 2022

The oddly named Virginia Clean Economy Act or VCEA mandates the phaseout of fossil fueled power generation by 2045, with deadlines all along the way. Dominion Energy, Virginia’s primary electric utility, recently filed what is called an Integrated Resource Plan. In their recent IRP, Dominion’s Alternative Plan C is designed to comply with the VCEA.

This design is not sufficient to maintain reliability. The inevitable result will be price spikes and blackouts.

The basic problem with the Plan…

I’m yielding to no one in my low view of the Reserve Bank Monetary Policy Committee. I’ve been writing about the problems – structural and personal – since the new Potemkin-village model (designed to look shiny and new, but to change little) was set up three years ago, and it was (for example) one of my Official Information Act requests that got the written confirmation that the Minister, Governor and the Bank’s Board had formally agreed that no one with ongoing expertise in monetary policy or macroeconomics, or likely future interest in researching such matters, would be appointed (as an external member) to the new Monetary Policy Committee (three relevant posts here, here, and here). It was a simply extraordinary exclusion, which reflected very poorly on all involved, but which never seemed to get the scrutiny from media or MPs that it deserved. In no other modern…

An immensely popular, chubby-cheeked, convivial man, Edward VII was in all truth a mostly unremarkable man with hardly a moral fiber in his insubstantial body. He was known as a frivolous “Prince of Pleasure,” a man all-too familiar with the sin of gluttony. His reign represented a minor nine-year epilogue to the Victorian Age, as if to offer the Ancien Régime one final sip of fine wine and a cigar before the long dark shadow of war crept over Europe. While personally he was a rather silly man, Edward VII still managed to transform the British monarchy from the cloistered and stoic brand of Queen Victoria, into the showy offering of public pageantry we see today.

Christened Albert Edward and known to his family as “Bertie,” the future Edward VII was a self-indulgent, intransigent young man. He rebelled against his father Albert’s strenuous educational curriculum and often landed himself in…

Following a Biden Executive Order, in April 2021 several states went to Louisiana District Court to stop implementation of Social Cost of Carbon with respect to federal regulations.  The Memorandum Ruling regarding that case is State of Louisiana et al Versus Joseph R. Biden Jr. et al.  The Plaintiff States are Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.  H/T Francis Menton

The Issues

The Plaintiff States seek injunctive and declaratory relief on three grounds.First, they assert that the SC-GHG Estimates violate the procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) as a substantive rule that did not undergo the requisite notice-and-comment process. See 5 U.S.C. § 553.

Second, the Plaintiff States claim that President Biden, through EO 13990, and the IWG lack the authority to enforce the estimates as they are substantively unlawful under the…

The key learning from the entire book is that the secret of Rome’s success can be summed up in one word: assimilation. Already, by the 300s BC, Romans had perfected a system which was unprecedented in the ancient world and was to give them unparalleled power and success. It was that they did not conquer and destroy their enemies then retire to their core territory: they assimilated both the people and the territories they defeated into the Roman state. They extended Roman-ness to the conquered peoples, thus extending Roman territory and Roman population, eventually to a vast and unparalleled extent (page 67).

1. An endless supply of soldiers

Instead of setting Roman administrators over a defeated tribe, the only tribute the Romans asked for was for the defeated to provide soldiers for the Roman army, to be funded by local taxation. These soldiers, regardless of tribal affiliation or…

The looming uncertainty around Johnson’s term in office is not just a perfect setting for political intrigue, but may also have something to offer to students of constitutional law. It should draw our attention to one of the fundamental questions of the UK constitutional process – how should we choose or remove a Prime Minister between general elections? The constitutional theory is straightforward. To become a Prime Minister, an MP must enjoy the confidence of the majority of the members of the House of Commons. Constitutionally, therefore, Parliament, not the electorate, selects the PM for appointment by the Queen. Hence, the House of Commons as a whole should remove and select the PM. According to this theory, then, Johnson would be removed if he loses a vote of confidence on the floor of the House of Commons.  The classical formulation is neat but incomplete. Most importantly, it does not take…

Recently on the Australian “Sunrise” TV program co-presenter David Koch said: “There have only been 3000 deaths from COVID, far less than that from influenza in the same period, so we should oppose the lockdowns”. This statement ignored the fact that prior to and during the vaccination rollout, lockdowns are likely to have prevented many thousands more deaths.

Similarly, some people argue against counter-terrorism measures on the grounds that there have been relatively few successful terrorist attacks in Australia, ignoring the fact that counter-terrorism has deterred and disrupted many more terrorist plots than those that have been carried out.

Several years ago, I was working as a regulatory consultant helping to remake sunsetting Victorian water regulations. Amongst other things, these regulations require the installation of backflow prevention devices on the customer’s water service pipe, just after the water meter. Backflow can result in contaminants being drawn into the drinking water…

Rocketing power prices were inevitable once Europe decided to put all its energy eggs in the wind power basket. Europe has squandered billions on subsidies to construct tens of thousands of turbines both onshore and off – the Germans managed to spear more than 30,000 across their homeland and are paying a hefty price.

By giving grid preference to the erratic and occasional delivery of wind and solar, the owners of reliable on-demand generators are pushed to the back of the queue, rendering many operators uneconomic, which is all part of the plan.

The Germans, however, went further by effectively banning nuclear power generation (the plan is to shut down all of their nuclear plants) and sought to shut down their coal-fired power plants too, only to restart them in a dreadful hurry when wind power output collapsed for weeks last winter.

But it’s the chaos in the power market…

The inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic is due to start work in the spring, chaired by Baroness (Heather) Hallett, a former Court of Appeal judge. It will be one of the most complex inquiries in legal history, and highly charged politically, with over 150,000 deaths so far, and the pandemic far from over. In January, the UCL Political Science Department hosted an expert panel discussion to pool advice on how best to set up a complex inquiry to ensure that it works speedily and efficiently, victims feel they have been heard, and the findings are accepted as legitimate. Ioana Măxineanu summarises their contributions.

On January 13th, the UCL Political Science Department hosted an online seminar entitled Setting Up the Covid Inquiry. The event was chaired by Robert Hazell, and brought together three distinguished panellists previously involved in high profile inquiries: Lord (Nicholas) Phillips, chair of the BSE Inquiry