Utopia, you are standing in it!

Sometimes you get into a Twitter argument when you least expect to. It was after 11pm two Saturday nights ago when I saw this tweet by Gabriel Mathy (@gabriel_mathy)

Friedman says if there had been no Fed, there would have been no Depression. That’s certainly wrong, even if your position is that the Fed did little to nothing to mitigate the Depression (which is reasonable IMO)

Chiming in, I thought to reinforce Mathy’s criticism of Friedman, I tweeted the following:

Friedman totally misunderstood the dynamics of the Great Depression, which was driven by increasing demand for gold after 1928, in particular by the Bank of France and by the Fed. He had no way of knowing what the US demand for gold would have been if there had not been a Fed

I got a response from Mathy that I really wasn’t expecting who tweeted with seeming annoyance

There already…

I’ve been arguing against Biden’s proposed increase in business taxation by pointing out that higher corporate taxes will be bad news for workers, consumers, and shareholders.

Everyone agrees that shareholders get hurt. After all, they’re the owners of the businesses. Higher corporate taxes directly reduce the amount of money available to be paid as dividends.

But we also should recognize that higher corporate taxes can be passed along to consumers, so they also lose. Even more important, we should recognize that higher tax burdens also reduce incentives for business investment, and this can have a negative impact on worker compensation.

A 2017 study from the Tax Foundation, authored by Steve Entin, thoroughly explored this question and included a table summarizing the academic research.

Alex Durante updated the Tax Foundation’s summary of the research in a just-released report.

Here are the results of two new studies.

In a…

Joe Biden and his Squad are eager to carpet America wall-to-wall with solar panels built by thousands of Uighur slaves under the control of the CCP.

The reason that China is able to dominate the market for solar panels isn’t about superior manufacturing techniques or Confucian ideals. No, it’s about very cheap wages. So cheap in fact, apparently no money changes hands between the ‘employer’ and ‘employee’, at all.

The robots in America’s mainstream press are hooked on Biden and his ‘Green New Deal’, so don’t expect to hear or read much about the subject.

Helen Raleigh, on the other hand, is quite apparently eager let the world know about Biden’s Big ‘Green’ Dirty Secret.

The Dirty Secret of ‘Clean’ Energy
National Review
Helen Raleigh
1 June 2021

President Biden pledged to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. An estimate shows that to…

I noticed over the weekend that the highly-regarded Pew Research Center had released the results of public opinion surveys undertaken in a range of advanced countries on various questions around Covid and Covid policy, and that New Zealand was included among the countries surveyed. Some of the results were totally unsurprising, some interesting even if unsurprising, and for a couple of questions I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the questions or answers.

This was the first set of results reported

New Zealand (closely followed by Taiwan) was the country in which the largest share of respondents reckoned that over the full course of the coronavirus outbreak the level of restrictions on public activity were “about right”. Of the remainder of the New Zealand respondents, opinion was fairly evenly split between those who say they’d have favoured fewer restrictions and those who claimed they’d have favoured more. That split…

The predecessor of this blog was named after the famous comedy character from the Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister TV series of the 1980’s, Sir Humphrey Appleby.

I was reminded of yet another aspect of him the other day when reading one of Chris Trotter’s latest missives, They Say We Want A Revolution – But Do We?.

The article is about both the proposals from the Climate Change Commission and the He Puapua report, but it was this part that caught my eye:

As a “free-marketeer” of no mean ability (the man has a PhD from the prestigious Wharton School of Business) Rod Carr could contemplate the installation of cash registers in public hospitals without flinching.

I’d forgotten about that long-lost tidbit from Rod Carr, back when he looked like this:

Yep. Every inch the 1980’s/90’s Rogernome businessman on the make, expensive business suit and cool tie with the…

The significant role played by the United States Secret Service in American history cannot be denied.  Be it the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the failed attempts on the lives of Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan, few doubted the commitment of its agents to their craft and maintaining the safety of those in their charge.  However, during the last decade or two questions have arisen over its job performance and as Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post reporter, Carol Leonning points out in her new book, ZERO FAIL: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECRET SERVICE the actions or inaction of the agency question their effectiveness and how lucky they have been with the numerous mistakes and coverups that have come to light that no major disaster can be laid at its doorstep. 

Leonning’s monograph examines the decline in the agency’s readiness and for some supervisors and agents a cavalier…

Following reports that the UK government is considering abolishing the ‘English Votes for English Laws’ procedures in the House of Commons, Daniel Gover and Michael Kenny argue that, although EVEL has some flaws as a solution to the ‘West Lothian Question’, abandoning it will also leave open bigger questions about how England should be represented within British parliamentary government.

According to a recent report in The Times, the UK government is preparing to abolish the ‘English Votes for English Laws’ standing orders in the House of Commons. This suggested that ministers have already been consulted on the move and look set to lend it support. The change would also need to be approved by MPs, but only a single vote in the Commons would be needed to make this important constitutional change.

That such a move is being considered by the current government is surprising and unexpected in equal…

In another thought-provoking post on Facebook (does the guy ever write mediocre stuff, I wonder?) Barry raised the question of the relation between classical liberalism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. He wrote the following:

“On the capture of classical liberal/libertarianism by anti-cosmopolitans. This is very influential at the heart of the ‘leave’ ‘elite’ in the UK, and can only be destructive of classical liberalism/libertarianism. The immediate political consequence of Leave is the elevation of Theresa May to Tory leadership/Prime Minister’s office on a much more ‘Red Tory’, communitarian, corporatist foundation than existed under Cameron. ’To the extent to which the current wave of populism maps into a conflict over national versus transnational identity (Dan Drezner is unconvinced), the problem is not an excess of cosmopolitanism but rather its absence, especially on the conservative, free-market right.”

He seems to take a positive relation between classical liberalism and cosmopolitanism as the default position…

This week Kevin Vallier published a new entry on neoliberalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:Neoliberalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It is a well-written, well-researched piece. However, it is also symbolic for the greatest deficiency of American classical liberals: they are unable or unwilling to defend the name, or label if you like, of the ideas they are associated with. Given the influence of American academia and thinks tanks on the rest of the world this is especially important. It has happened before, and it is happening now. It sucks.

This is how Vallier starts his entry:

“Though not all scholars agree on the meaning of the term, “neoliberalism” is now generally thought to label the philosophical view that a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state. Recent work on neoliberalism, thus…

When a mass blackout thrusts your State onto the international stage, as an outrageous possibility, there just could be a little something wrong with your energy policy. Here’s the view from the USA.

Australia Has Serious Problems With Green Energy Triggering Blackouts
The Daily Caller
Andrew Follett
23 November 2016

South Australia is still struggling to figure out how to keep green energy from triggering blackouts and crashing the electric grid, according to an article published by Inverse Tuesday.

The Australian state invested heavily in solar and wind power, but those power sources’ inherent reliability issues place a massive strain on the state’s power grid, according to the article.

Australia’s Energy Council noted in early September that increasing use of solar and wind power in the state “has not only led to a series of technical challenges” but “also increased wholesale price volatility as the state rebalances its supply from dispatchable plant to…

There’s nothing innately predictable about the weather, so trying to rely on it for your power needs doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Sure, solar panels might deliver somewhere between 4-6 hours of useful power on a sunny day. But, don’t expect much during periods of heavy rain and overcast conditions. Oh, and desert dust storms have been known to knock out solar supplies, as Californians experienced last summer.

And as any kite flyer or sailor knows too well, breezes have a mind of their own.

As Viv Forbes points out below, it might not be too much of a stretch to think that those peddling chaotically intermittent wind and solar have their very own agenda.

The Blackout Agenda
The Richardson Post
Viv Forbes
16 June 2021

Solar power fails every day from sunset to sunrise as well as during rain, hail, snow or dust storms. No matter…

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The Ardern government is weakening many of the pillars of the free market reforms implemented in the 1980s and 1990s, including undermining the Reserve Bank and Fiscal Responsibility Acts.

 More alarming is its failure to learn that bestowing privileges on a few results in enormous costs for the many.

So says Nicholas Kerr, son of the late Business Roundtable executive director Roger Kerr.

A marketing consultant in Dallas, Texas, Nicholas Kerr delivered a  speech last month to the Dallas chapter of the Bastiat Society, an organisation established by the American Institute for Economic Research as a forum for business professionals to help advance peaceful trade and human flourishing.   

The speech (the full version can be read here) was headed Unleashing New Zealand’s Potential and Suppressing Washington State’s — Lessons for Texas.

Here’s an edited version: –  

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While the New Zealand I grew up in during…