Utopia, you are standing in it!

Biden’s spending bill will lavish over half a $1 trillion on projects geared to combating human-caused climate change. In reality, environmentalist groups will be given most of the money to continue their political activities. Two years ago, climate scientist Patrick Michaels was on the Laura Ingraham Show on Fox News to discuss what the program is really all about and doom and gloom predictions.

I regularly cite data about Europe’s sub-par economic outcomes in hopes of driving home the point that the United States should not copy that continent’s approach of onerous fiscal burdens.

Which is now a very relevant topic with Biden pushing for a big expansion of the welfare state.

This is not a good idea. Americans are richer than their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. Even more remarkably, lower-income people in the United States often have living standardsequal to – or even greater than – middle-income Europeans.

Another way of making this point is to compare economic outcomes in American states compared to European countries.

I first did that back in 2015, citing data to show that all be the very-richest European nations would be considered poor if they were part of the United States.

I want to augment that comparison today. I’m motivated by a

A few weeks ago I wrote a fairly discursive post on the losses the Reserve Bank had run up on its Large Scale Asset Purchase programme. I know some readers found the basic point a little hard to grasp (no doubt a reflection on my storytelling), so today I’m going to do a very stylised representation of what has gone on.

But first, as I noted in that post, as market interest rates rise losses mount. The Bank has now released its end-October balance sheet and this is the line item representing their claim on the Crown (the Minister of Finance indemnified the Bank for losses incurred).

So the losses have now reached $5.7 billion (roughly 1.6% of annual GDP). Market interest rates fluctuate each day, but as of yesterday’s rate current losses are likely to be very similar to those as at 31 October. Perhaps Covid has inured us…

In the general election of 1747 Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales again campaigned actively for the opposition but Pelham’s party won easily. Like his father before him, the Prince entertained opposition figures at his house in Leicester Square. When Prince Frederick Louis died unexpectedly in 1751, his eldest son, Prince George, became heir apparent.

The king commiserated with the Dowager Princess of Wales (Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha) and wept with her. As her son would not reach the age of majority until 1756, a new British Regency Act was passed to make her regent, assisted by a council led by Frederick Louis’ brother, Prince William, Duke of Cumberland, in case of George II’s death.

The king also made a new will, which provided for Cumberland to be sole regent in Hanover. After the death of his daughter Louisa at the end of the year, George lamented, “This has been a…

Europe’s great wind drought has focused attention on the unassailable fact that wind power is an utterly meaningless power source.

The demand for electricity is, always and everywhere, a ‘here and now’ kind of thing. Households and businesses couldn’t care less if there’s a roaring gale and plenty of wind power at 2 in the morning. But the absence of electricity at the point when power consumers (of all shapes and sizes) need it, is always noticed rather keenly – the experience of freezing or boiling in the dark during mass blackouts tends to collect in the subconscious.

The response to Europe’s wind power debacle has been a series of backflips that would do a Russian gymnast proud.

Despite lots of bluff and bluster from Boris Johnson about his country’s all wind ‘powered’ future, Johnson is now openly committed to building nuclear power plants, including a fleet of new small…

When Queen Victoria died on January 22, 1901, Edward became King of the United Kingdom, Emperor of India and, in an innovation, King of the British Dominions. He chose to reign under the name of Edward VII, instead of Albert Edward—the name his mother had intended for him to use—declaring that he did not wish to “undervalue the name of Albert” and diminish the status of his father with whom the “name should stand alone”.

The numeral VII was occasionally omitted in Scotland, even by the national church, in deference to protests that the previous Edwards were English kings who had “been excluded from Scotland by battle”. J. B. Priestley recalled, “I was only a child when he succeeded Victoria in 1901, but I can testify to his extraordinary popularity. He was in fact the most popular king England had known since the earlier 1660s.”

As king, Edward played a…

Yesterday, I shared part of an interview that focused on Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s scheme to give more subsidies to colleges, thus transferring money from poorer taxpayers to richer taxpayers.

Here’s the other part of the interview, which revolved around a very bad idea to copy nations that impose price controls on prescription drugs.

In some sense, this is a debate on price controls, which have a long history (going all the way back to Ancient Rome) of failure.

But my comments focused primarily on the adverse consequences of Pelosi’s approach.

And if you want more details, Doug Badger explained how Pelosi’s approach would backfire in a report for the Heritage Foundation. He starts with an explanation of the legislation.

The Lower Drug Costs Now Act of 2019 (H.R. 3), introduced last week with the backing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would double down on the failures of…

There are some issues – such as class-warfare tax rates and the minimum wage – where intelligent people on the left will privately admit being wrong (or at least they will admit adverse consequences).

Another example is rent control.

Indeed, it’s so obvious that imposing price controls on housing will create shortages that some folks on the left even admit publicly that it’s a bad idea.

Yet leftist politicians are drawn to the policy for the simple reason that renters outnumber landlords.

Simply stated, they’re willing to impose considerable damage so long as they can grab a few extra votes.

Let’s look at some evidence about the folly of rent control, and we’ll start with a hot-off-the-presses column by Ryan Mills for National Review.

Democratic leaders in Minnesota’s capital city are scrambling for solutions after developers put several large projects on hold across St. Paul in the wake…

One of the (many) disillusioning aspects of the Covid response of the New Zealand government (politicians and public service) has been the apparent total absence of any use of cost-benefit analysis techniques to help inform thinking about policy responses. No cost-benefit analysis on any aspect of the policy response has ever been published (or hinted at), on the couple of occasions I’ve OIAed any such analysis (just to be sure) agencies have been quick to deny any such analysis exists, and when one independent agency (the Productivity Commission) did do a little exercise along these lines at one point last year it was shunned as almost “unclean”. And if there had been any slight excuse early last year about “no time” – not convincing even then – officials have had 22 months now to get toolkits in place. But they (and their political masters) seem to prefer seat-of-the-pants thinking, all…

Diagram showing solid-body rotation of the Earth with respect to a stationary spin axis due to true polar wander. [Credit: Wikipedia] The researchers say their finding ‘challenges the notion that the spin axis has been largely stable over the past 100 million years.’
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We know that true polar wander (TPW) can occasionally tilt whole planets and moons relative to their axes, but it’s not entirely clear just how often this has happened to Earth, says ScienceAlert.

Now a new study presents evidence of one such tilting event that occurred around 84 million years ago – when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

Researchers analyzed limestone samples from Italy, dating back to the Late Cretaceous period (100.5 to 65.5 million years ago), looking for evidence of shifts in the magnetic record that would point towards an occurrence of TPW.

Bacteria fossils trapped in the rock, forming chains of…

Charles, Prince of Wales (Charles Philip Arthur George; born November 14, 1948), is the heir apparent to the British throne as the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II.

Charles was born in Buckingham Palace on November 14, 1948, during the reign of his maternal grandfather King George VI, as the first child of Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He was baptised there by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, on December 15, 1948.

The death of his grandfather and the accession of his mother as Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 made Charles the heir apparent. As the monarch’s eldest son, he automatically inherited the titles Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. Charles attended his mother’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953.

Prince Charles was created Prince…