Utopia, you are standing in it!

Infrastructure often is a good thing. Government-financed infrastructure is a questionable thing. Infrastructure financed by Uncle Sam is a bad thing. Those three rules guide my thinking and make for a perfect introduction to this must-watch video from Reason on high-speed rail.

The core message from the video is that Californian’s disastrous experience with high-speed rail should be a warning for the entire nation.

Simply stated, the government is incapable of doing infrastructure without jaw-dropping cost overruns.

But even if – by some impossible miracle – the government spent the money wisely and efficiently, long-distance rail doesn’t make sense.

Why? Well, if I do a tweet-of-the-year contest for 2021, this entry from Rory Cooper would be an early favorite to win the prize.

Instead of expanding the federal government role, it’s time to end Washington’s involvement.

That means shutting down the entire Department of Transportation.

But…

As a matter of sensible public policy (and well as fealty to the Constitution), the federal government should not be involved in transportation.

But since I don’t expect the current crowd in Washington has any interest in getting rid of the Department of Transportation, perhaps we should have a more modest goal of eliminating subsidies for mass transit.

After all, there’s no reason why taxpayers across the nation should be subsidizing the cost of railway, bus, and subway travel in a handful of cities.

Getting rid of these handouts would save a decent chunk of money. Here’s a chart from Downsizing Government, which shows the history of pre-pandemic spending by the Federal Transit Administration.

But that chart is now out of date since politicians have used the pandemic as an excuse to dramatically increase the burden of federal spending. Including big handouts for mass transit.

And now…

Tony Heller dismantles more climate junk science and fraud from The Washington Post.

When I was a young economics graduate student at UCLA in the early 1970s during the heyday of that wonderful department, convinced, like most of the other UCLA grad students, that I was in the best graduate program in the country (and therefore the world), where the deepest, most creative, economic theorists in the world, under the relaxed and amiable leadership of Armen Alchian — whose failure to win a Nobel Prize is really the failure of the Nobel selection committee — would eventually succeed in unifying economic theory by reformulating macroeconomics on correctly specified microfoundations, I naively entertained for a while the idea that I would write a Ph.D. dissertation on some aspect of the problem of price rigidity. However, I never could do more than formulate some general observations about the theoretical role of price rigidity in macroeconomic models and compose a superficial survey of the empirical literature…

E-truck test route in Germany [image credit: transport-online.de] Another one from the Department of Bad Ideas? Before they rush into anything, they might want to note the assessment of a writer for Mass Transit magazine 10 years ago, on the subject of overhead (catenary) lines. Here’s the opening paragraph in full: ‘They are expensive. They are dangerous. They are unsightly.’ Much more here, but let’s quote a few other comments:
‘Overhead lines require a lot of maintenance given the direct contact of the pantographs and their constant exposure to weather’
‘Winter storms play havoc with overhead wire systems’
‘Loose wires in the summer and wire breaks in the winter as a result of lines contracting and expanding with the temperature also create maintenance headaches’
‘A catenary line is a live wire suspended in the air. Weather issues therefore become serious safety concerns.’

Did somebody mention climate change as a…

UPDATE: Re-upping this slightly revised post from July 11, 2011

Paul Krugman recently gave a lecture “Mr. Keynes and the Moderns” (a play on the title of the most influential article ever written about The General Theory, “Mr. Keynes and the Classics,” by another Nobel laureate J. R. Hicks) at a conference in Cambridge, England commemorating the publication of Keynes’s General Theory 75 years ago. Scott Sumner and Nick Rowe, among others, have already commented on his lecture. Coincidentally, in my previous posting, I discussed the views of Sumner and Krugman on the zero-interest lower bound, a topic that figures heavily in Krugman’s discussion of Keynes and his relevance for our current difficulties. (I note in passing that Krugman credits Brad Delong for applying the term “Little Depression” to those difficulties, a term that I thought I had invented, but, oh well, I am happy to share the credit…

For almost a century, electricity generation and distribution were treated as a tightly integrated system: it was designed and built as one, and is meant to operate as designed. However, the chaotic delivery of wind and solar have all but trashed the electricity generation and delivery system, as we know it. Germany, California and South Australia are only the most obvious examples.

Unable to fend off their critics, the narrative among renewable energy rent-seekers quickly shifted their narrative to “grid-scale storage”, like they’d forgotten the bread and milk on their way home from work.

For wind and solar acolytes, physics and economics are boring impediments. However, the colossal cost of giant lithium batteries means that – between now and kingdom come – their contribution to our electrical supply will remain laughably trivial. Rafe Champion provides a helpful description and analysis of why battery storage will never save wind and solar from…

The Parliament of the United Kingdom is set to start debate on legislation that seeks to revive the Queen’s power to dissolve parliament that was formerly exercised by virtue of the royal prerogative.
A. V. Dicey, a constitutional theorist from the 19th century, described the royal prerogative as “the remaining portion of the Crown’s original authority, and it is therefore … the name for the residue of discretionary power left at any moment in the hands of the Crown, whether such power be in fact exercised by the King himself or by his Ministers”.

Alison Young argues that the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill transfers power from parliament to the government, and not to the people, and that it is wrong to place the blame for the extraordinary events of 2019 on the provisions of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 (FTPA) has not had a good press. So much so, that a promise to repeal the Act was included in the 2019 manifestos of both the Labour Party and the current Conservative government. However, as the second reading of its replacement, the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill demonstrates, the apparent consensus ends there. There appeared to be two strong themes to the debate. First, how far does the FTPA’s replacement transfer power from parliament back to the government, or from parliament back to the people? Second, to what extent did the FTPA cause the difficulties – however…

More to come? [image credit: thecount.com] Futile climate obsessions over 0.01% of the Earth’s atmosphere have clouded the political world so badly that thinking straight seems to have gone out of the window. Bad news for voters, left with no-one sensible to turn to.
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Boris Johnson has always tried to take a ‘cakeist’ position on Net Zero, says the Telegraph (via The GWPF).

We can drastically cut carbon emissions while boosting living standards, he claims.

But the truth is, the sacrifices being demanded of us in the name of Net Zero are incompatible with democracy, and the PM knows it.

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis in this interestung voxeu post point how the pandemic has impacted the work patterns in US (perhaps forever).

They show via a survey that employees prefer to work for home and will switch jobs if they are asked to return full-time to office: