Utopia, you are standing in it!

In addition to being a contest over expanding the burden of government spending, the Democratic primary also is a contest to see who wants the biggest tax increases.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have made class-warfare taxation an integral part of their campaigns, but even some of the supposedly reasonable Democrats are pushing big increases in tax rates.

James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute opines about the anti-growth effect of these proposed tax hikes, particularly with regard to entrepreneurship and successful new firms.

The Democratic presidential candidates have plenty of ideas about taxes. Wealth taxes. Wall Street taxes. Inequality taxes. And probably more to come. So lots of creative thinking about wealth redistribution. Wealth creation? Not so much. …one way to look at boosting GDP growth is thinking about specific policies to boost labor force and productivity growth. But there’s another way of approaching the issue: How many fast-growing growing new…

The statists are making a big issue out of income inequality, hoping to convince ordinary Americans that redistribution is their only hope for a better life.

I’ve explained with a pizza analogy that this is horribly misguided because it falsely assumes the economy is a fixed pie.

Simply stated, it doesn’t make sense – or help anybody – if inequality is reduced by policies that hurt everyone, but happen to hurt upper-income people more than lower-income people.

Moreover, redistribution tends to create a “poverty trap” as people get seduced by dependency.

That’s why I’ve argued that economic growth is the best way of helping the less fortunate.

But I have to admit that Margaret Thatcher does a much better job of eviscerating the left’s agenda on this issue.

While it’s inspiring to watch Thatcher in action, it’s also painful to realize that the current crop of GOP presidential candidates…

Whether or not Scotland can legally hold a referendum without the consent of Westminster is a question that has provoked much debate. Ciaran Martin argues that the answer to this question does not really matter: regardless of the legality of any referendum, it is unrealistic to think that Scotland will leave the Union without the consent of Westminster. This makes the key question a political one, which the courts cannot resolve.

In mid-August I spoke at the Edinburgh International Book Festival about Scotland and the future of the United Kingdom. My theme was that when the constitutional debate resumes (which it will) after the post-Holyrood election lull, there could, and in my view should, be a debate not just on what independence means, but on what remaining in the Union means. This is a fundamentally different proposition than it was in 2014, and not just because of Brexit.

In 2014…

Heinz Brandenburg on Twitter walks readers through a very useful explainer on how the current Germany version of MMP deals with overhangs through a multi-layered compensation mechanism, and why it could mean the new Bundestag will top out at more than 800 seats!

It is best to read it in its native Twitter, but following is the text of most of it (courtesy of the ThreadReader app) . The starting point, not quoted here, is a poll of current party standing in the state of Bavaria.

[the remainder of this text is not mine, but Brandenburg’s; numbers correspond to tweets in the thread]

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Last time around, the CSU won 38.8% of the vote but all of the constituencies in Bavaria (they even swept all of Munich). That results in so-called overhang and compensatory seats.
How are these calculated?

1/Well, there are 93 regular seats allocated to Bavaria, 46…

At the end of last week, I came across a SolarQuotes article about Snowy Hydro 2.0 being more expensive than batteries. Snowy Hydro 2.0 is a pumped hydro project in Australia (New South Wales and Victoria) and is currently under construction. The brunt of the article is that pumped hydro is too expensive compared to (grid sized) batteries and makes the plea to halt the project in favor of batteries.

That was new to me. As far as I know, pumped hydro is the cheapest way of dispatchable backup in order to counter intermittency and definitely cheaper than batteries. Yet, the author of this article argues that it is the exact opposite.

The name of the author of the article, Ronald Brakels, rings a bell. Not even a year ago, I wrote a post on his claim that South Australia has the second cheapest electricity in Australia, despite…

CO2 is not pollution
Irrational fears about essential carbon dioxide in relation to the Earth’s climate have long since degenerated into superstition or old wives’ tales, for which we’re all paying the price, as discussed here.
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Last year a student at a nearby university complained she couldn’t focus in class; she was convinced high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) were the cause, says Dan Nevert @ CFACT.

The entire building was immediately evacuated and tested for “toxic levels of this dangerous gas.” After determining the CO2 levels were less than 500 parts-per-million (ppm), the classroom air was considered “safe” and classes again resumed.

Recently, this same school advertised that you can now “offset carbon emissions from previously completed university-funded ground-transportation and air travel trips” — by filling out a “travel carbon offsets” form, available in their “Sustainability Office.” Plus, this school is offering a course on…

In 2009, Vernon Bogdanor wrote about The New British Constitution. His thesis was that a decade of New Labour reforms had produced a shift in the nature of the constitution, from one based on parliamentary sovereignty, to one based on the ‘sovereignty of the constitution’. Since 2009, further constitutional reforms have been implemented by governments of various political stripes, apparently consolidating the legalisation of the constitution, and the dispersal of power from the institutions of central government to Parliament, the devolved institutions, and the courts. The New British Constitution appeared to be firmly established. Recent events, however, demonstrate the shaky foundations of this new constitutionalism, with a growing trend towards a weakening of both legal and political checks on Governmental power. This blog post draws attention to this worrying trend, focusing on three key examples. It is based on the findings of the first report of the Constitutional Monitoring Group…

Aileen McHarg and Alison Young believe that the new British constitution, which I wrote about in my book of that name published in 2009 is less securely based than I suggested.

The pillars of that new constitution were, I argued, the Human Rights Act, the devolution settlement, the referendum, and the new arrangements for the government of London which provided for Britain’s first directly elected mayor.

All of these pillars remain in place. Indeed, as McHarg and Young acknowledge, two of them have been strengthened. The devolved bodies in Scotland and Wales have gained new powers since 2009, most notably the power in effect to determine income tax rates in the Scotland Act of 2016 and the Wales Act of 2017. Devolution and directly elected mayors have been extended to England by means of the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act of 2016. Around one-third of the people of England…

The climate cult’s true colours are revealed when it actively agitates against nuclear power; bad enough that they won’t promote it, worse still when they seek to sabotage nuclear power’s prospects, altogether.

This is the crowd out to convince us that man-made carbon dioxide gas is “pollution” which, unless you stop generating it, will result in an inevitable Armageddon, where all life on earth perishes. The naturally occurring kind doesn’t trouble them, apparently.

If, however, these characters were in earnest, they would be berating governments to start building nuclear power plants as fast as humanly possible. Nuclear power is the only stand-alone power source that does not generate carbon dioxide emissions during that process and that’s also available on demand, whatever the weather or time-of-day.

Just why those who jump up and down about human-generated carbon dioxide gas refuse to promote ever-reliable, safe and affordable nuclear power is hard to…