Utopia, you are standing in it!

When I finished yesterday’s post I realised there was plenty else that could have been said.

First, of course, is the way that the Reserve Bank’s housing graphic feeds a narrative that a fall in house prices would itself be a bad thing, at an economywide level. After all, presumably their mental model is symmetrical.

As I noted yesterday, their framing totally ignores the context in which house prices change. Were a government ever to summon up the intestinal fortitude to free up land use, we would expect to see house/land prices fall, and fall a long way. This would, of course, be tough for some individuals, but their losses would be largely offset by gains to others (the young, the poor, the renters), and for many people – owner-occupiers with modest or no mortgages – it would really make no difference at all. Speaking personally, I would cheer the…

Counting the House, that is, establishing that a quorum existed for the conduct of Commons’ business, was described by Henry Lucy in 1886 as ‘perhaps one of the most useful agencies in Parliamentary procedure’. From 1640 a quorum of the House of Commons consisted of 40 members, including the Speaker. This was said to have coincided with the number of counties into which England was divided at that time. However, it was not until 1729 that the House was first ‘counted out’.

The Speaker was responsible for ascertaining whether a quorum was present before he took the chair to open the sitting; if not, he called ‘no House’ and the sitting was adjourned. Once a sitting had begun, however, the Members themselves were responsible for maintaining a quorum, a privilege that was ‘rigidly guarded’. At the same time, it was widely recognised that a great deal of routine business could…

By Paul Homewood

Full story here.

I didn’t really read the housing section of last week’s Reserve Bank MPS – housing isn’t their responsibility and their analysis of it has rarely been up to much, often lurching unpredictably from one story to another. And their new material on house prices in each MPS only stems from the Remit change Grant Robertson foisted on them early in the year, knowing it would make no substantive difference to anything, but designed to look as though the government cared.

So it was only when the Herald’s Thomas Coughlan tweeted this chart yesterday that I noticed it.

The chart is prefaced with this text

The MPC sets monetary policy to achieve its inflation and employment objectives in the Remit. It considers the outlook for the housing market because house prices can influence broader economic activity, employment, and consumer price inflation (figure A5).

So we are presumably supposed to take this…

The title above must seem like a trick question. The current Israeli coalition government consists of eight parties–or perhaps more accurately, seven parties that have cabinet ministers plus a formally committed support party. It bridges left and right, and includes a party of the Arab minority (the support party, without which the parties around the cabinet table lack a majority). So that would seem to fit the definition of a “consensus” government pretty well, per definitions like that of Lijphart.

On the other hand, it has just about the narrowest majority possible (61 seats, or on a good day 62, out of 120). The concept of consensus democracy, per Lijphart, is that governance encompass as wide a range of representatives of social and political groups as possible. This new Israeli government is thus both “broad” and “narrow” at the same time!

We might expect a government that has such…

Recently, the regulators have compared private stablecoins to US private banks which issued their own currency. Some of these banks got intro trouble by overissuing currency and were called as wildcats.

George Selgin in this article says firstly stablecoins are not comparable to private currencies. Second, US banks were hardly wildcat banks as they are made to be. Some were which is natural to happen but not all:

The comparison has by now been made so often that it may qualify as a platitude. I mean that between stablecoin issuers and “wildcat” banks, the fly-by-night scams that supposedly flooded the antebellum United States with notes nominally worth some stated amount of gold or silver, but actually worth little more than the rag paper they were made of.

Such disreputable stuff, we keep hearing, is what “private” currency always tends to be like. The paper sort survived until Federal authorities nationalized…

Almost immediately Villa lost his temper and began ranting at Obregón… Obregón replied in kind and both men seemed on the point of drawing their guns.
(Description of a typical political discussion between ‘revolutionary’ leaders, page 253)

In the autumn of 1913 the young American journalist John Reed spent four months embedded in the army of Mexican ‘revolutionary’ Pancho Villa. He was present at the general’s meetings with fellow leaders, met ordinary soldiers and peasants fighting for change, and rode into battle with the villistas. During one conversation Villa suddenly asked Reed: ‘And the war in America? How is that going?’ Puzzled, Reed replied that there was no war in America. ‘No war,’ exclaimed the amazed Villa. ‘Then how do you pass the time?’

Exactly. Fighting was a full-time activity for Villa and the various bandits, rebels, criminals, psychopaths, idealists, chancers and mercenaries he led in the so-called Army of…

Frank McLynn

McLynn, 80 this year, has made a very successful career as an author, biographer, historian and journalist, having written some 30 books. He clearly aims to produce enjoyable, accessible and non-scholarly histories and biographies for a wide audience. This is suggested, among other things by his use of casual and rather boys’ own adventure story diction:

• It was the Moors who had done for Major Houghton. (p.16)
• His plight was grim. His horse was on its last legs. (p.16)
• The Landers shook the dust of Badagry off their shoes with gusto and plunged into the wilderness… (p.27)
• The master of the Thomas proved to be a blackguard. (p.30)
• Speke would not have to fear the supercilious basilisk eye from a superior beetling brow, as with Burton, every time he wandered off to slaughter a few dozen of Africa’s wildlife.
• Once again the expedition came within an ace of…

Ronald Reagan must be turning over in his grave.

• A Republican president is pushing protectionist policies that hurt American consumes and taxpayers.
• A Republican president and Congress are spending like drunken sailors (apologies to drunken sailors).
• Now some Republican politicians are promoting a version of central planning called “industrial policy.”

This newfound flirtation with industrial policy, mostly from nationalist conservatives, is especially noxious since you open the door to cronyism and corruption when you give politicians and bureaucrats the power to play favorites in the economy.

I’m going to cite three leading proponents of industrial policy. To be fair, none of them are proposing full-scale Soviet-style central planning.

But it is fair to say that they envision something akin to Japan’s policies in the 1980s.

Some of them even explicitly argue we should copy China’s current policies.

In a column for the New York Times, Julius Krein…