Utopia, you are standing in it!

There’s a political party in the United States – the Democrats – that represents rich people and it is trying very hard to cut taxes for those rich people.

Since I don’t resent rich people (indeed, I applaud them if they earn their money honestly), I generally want lower taxes for upper-income taxpayers. But I don’t want special tax breaks for rich people. Instead, I want to cut their taxes in ways that promote greater national prosperity so that I’ll benefit as well.

• Lower top income tax rates.
• Lower tax rates on capital gains.
• Lower tax rates on dividends.
• Lower death taxes.

Sadly, those aren’t the options the Democrats are choosing.

They are putting all their energy into a dramatic expansion of the state and local tax deduction. This is the tax break that rich people get when they use state and local tax…

The big wind drought in Europe has acolytes ranting about giant batteries saving the day. It’s a typical but delusional response to wind power’s hopeless intermittency.

True enough, at the margins, it is possible to store electricity. But, the cost of doing so on any kind of scale is simply out of this world. Then there’s the way giant batteries are developing a habit of spontaneously exploding into giant, toxic fireballs (see above and below).

Eric Worrall reports on the latest ‘batteries will save us’ wheeze, this time it’s the US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen taking us down the rabbit hole.

Treasury Secretary on European Wind Drought: “Energy Storage … Can Be Deployed”
Watts Up With That?
Eric Worrall
4 October 2021

If Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has calculated how much must be spent on energy storage to stabilise a 100% renewable grid, she does not seem keen to share.

For a party so long invested in White Racism you’d think they’d understand it better now that they claim to be on the other side from it.

But the results from Tuesday’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, and the subsequent fallout from Democrats and the MSM allies tearing their hair out in frustration at their losses and near losses, show that rather than asking why they lost they’re convinced that they already know why:

Ms Hill is a former sports journalist who now makes a living as a race-grifting writer at places like The Atlantic. Among the talking heads she was not alone in this. The best response was from the newly elected Virginia Lt. Governor-Elect, Republican and former US Marine, Winsome Sears:

This followed some pathetic Democrat attempts to derail the Youngkin campaign along the same lines by trying to recreate the infamous Charlottesville “Tiki Torch” event…

Claims to the French Throne

When King Charles IV of France died on February 1, 1328 without a surviving male heir, it ended the direct line of the Capetian Dynasty which had ruled France since the election and accession of King Hughes Capét on July 3, 987 by the prelate of Reims.

King Charles VI of France

Twelve years prior to the death of Charles IV, a rule against succession by women, arguably derived from the Salic Law, had been recognised – with some dissent – as controlling succession to the French throne. The application of this rule barred Charles’s one-year-old daughter Mary, by Jeanne d’Évreux, from succeeding as the monarch, but Jeanne was also pregnant at the time of Charles’s death.

Since she might have given birth to a son, a regency was set up under the heir presumptive Philippe of Valois, son of Charles of Valois and a…

Josh Hendrickson and Brian Albrecht have just posted our conversation about UCLA economics and economists, price theory vs. microfoundations, and my new book on their new Economic Forces Podcast. It was a really interesting conversation. Below are links to the podcast and to my book, which is now available online, and can be pre-ordered. The print version should be available in December.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-83426-5

Joe Biden’s presidency has taken a near-mortal blow after significant  defeats in two key state elections for governor with Republicans pulling off unexpected victories.

Glenn Youngkin won a stunning victory in Virginia on Tuesday, snatching the governor’s mansion away from the Democrats in a state that President Biden won by 10 points just a year ago.

In New Jersey, Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy was locked in an unexpected dogfight with Republican state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli that stretched into the early hours with the latter inching ahead.

Youngkin, a businessman in his first campaign for public office, defeated Terry McAuliffe, a past governor and close ally of the Clinton family who has been a fixture of Democratic politics for decades. It was the first Republican victory in the commonwealth since 2009.

At 11am the New Zealand Initiative released their latest report, by Bryce Wilkinson and Leonard Hong, under the title “Walking the Path to the Next Financial Crisis”. It comes complete with a Foreword from former Reserve Bank chief economist (and former Board chair) Arthur Grimes, under the title “A short walk?”, foretelling doom and repeating his recent attacks on the Reserve Bank’s conduct of monetary policy over the last 20 months, ending with the ominous – and printed in bold – declaration “This time is not different”.

The Initiative was kind enough to send me an embargoed copy yesterday. Perhaps the first thing that rather surprised me – in a document that is really quite critical of both monetary and fiscal policy and aspects of the way the Bank does other things – is that the acknowledgements include thanks to a Reserve Bank MPC member (Bob Buckle) for “valuable feedback…

I’ve shared several videos (here, here, here, and here) that use rigorous data to show that grinding poverty and severe material deprivation was the norm for humanity – until capitalism gained a foothold a few hundred years ago.

Fortunately, as free enterprise has gradually spread around the world, there’s been a remarkable increase in living standards, leading to a stunning drop in poverty.

For today’s column, let’s look at some new academic evidence about the link between capitalism and poverty reduction.

Here the abstract of a new study by Colin Doran and Thomas Stratmann of George Mason University.

We study the relationship between economic freedom and poverty rates in 151 countries over a twenty–year period. Using the World Bank’s poverty headcounts of those living on less than $1.90 per day, $3.20 per day, and $5.50 per day, we find evidence that…

In the wake of announcements from the Labour government yesterday I put forward some ideas from history that may be useful.

Courtesy of the Berlin Wall Museum, which I visited in the 1990’s, just a few years after it all came tumbling down.

This one would take too long and Auckland lacks even unemployed miners.

The following may be the most appropriate in my case.

Readers are encouraged to put forward other ideas.

Ahead of the launch event for their new book on the continuing constitutional pressures of Brexit, Oran Doyle, Aileen McHarg and Jo Murkens summarise the book’s introductory essay. They conclude that, five years on from the seismic constitutional event that was the 2016 referendum, it is clear that Brexit is exerting pressure on various aspects of the constitution, but it remains too early to tell the full impact of Brexit on the UK constitution.

The United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union was clearly a development of major significance that affected the UK constitution and its three legal systems, and brought about a series of political crises. But the prolonged process of negotiating the terms of withdrawal and the future UK-EU relationship also imposed and exposed a range of other constitutional tensions and pressures. This is true not only in respect of the UK itself, but also for the…

Wind and solar zealots may have scored own goal with their push for net-zero carbon dioxide gas emissions targets. The reason being is that nuclear power is the only stand-wind power generation system capable of delivering electricity 24 x 365 – irrespective of the weather, without generating carbon dioxide gas, in the process.

The Big Calm that struck Western Europe last month – when wind power output amounted to a doughnut for weeks on end – has sharpened thinking about the benefits of having a power source that’s available, come what may. Much to the horror of the wind and solar acolyte.

The climate cult apparently promotes net-zero on the basis that wind and solar are the only solutions in town; renewable energy rent-seekers are salivating at the prospect. The pathetic performance of wind power in Europe is helping to put paid to that cozy notion.

Despite Boris Johnson’s bluff…

“I’ am a tired man”, US President Abraham Lincoln once confessed to a friend, “Sometimes I think I’m the tiredest man on earth”.

But he said that in 1865 and had every reason to feel that way after four years of leading the nation through the most brutal war in its history and then facing the prospect of trying to pull it together again when the bitter conflict ended and 600,000 bodies lay in the ground.

By contrast the only reason the current POTUS is tired is that he’s an old man placed in a job he is simply not capable of performing, and never was.

Painful to watch. Xi Jinping, Putin and a host of others are watching this and know they have three more years…