Utopia, you are standing in it!

Empress Matilda (c. February 7, 1102 – September 10, 1167), also known as the Empress Maude, was one of the claimants to the English throne during the civil war known as the Anarchy. Empress Matilda was the daughter of King Henry I of England by first wife Matilda of Scotland, daughter of Malcolm III, King of Scots.

Henry I’s two eldest surviving children were William Ætheling and Matilda. William Ætheling (1103 – 1120), commonly called Adelin, sometimes Adelinus, or Adelingus or other Latinised Norman-French variants of Ætheling. William was married to Matilda of Anjou the eldest daughter of Count Fulk V of Anjou. The couple were married when William Ætheling was 16 and Matilda of Anjou was only 8. Needless to say, that when William drowned in the English channel in 1120, a year after their marriage, when his ship, The White Ship, sank, there were no children from the…

The Scottish Government’s Case for a Second Independence Referendum

On 19 December 2019 – a week after the Westminster General Election at which the SNP, again, won an overwhelming majority of Scottish seats – the Scottish Government published its long-awaited case for a second independence referendum: Scotland’s Right to Choose: Putting Scotland’s Future in Scotland’s Hands. 

The document does three main things, aimed at four distinct audiences. First, the bulk of the discussion is devoted to setting out the democratic case for holding a second referendum by the end of 2020. This is based on three claims: that the people of Scotland, as members of a multi-national Union based on consent, have the sovereign right to determine their own constitutional future; that there has been a material change in circumstances since the 2014 referendum; and that the Scottish Government has a mandate to hold a referendum. The material change…

Alex Salmond has been a controversial figure (to say the least) in Scottish politics for quite some time. Recently, he sparked further controversy when he introduced his newly founded Alba Party alongside a strategy to secure a supermajority for Scottish independence in the upcoming 2021 Scottish Parliament election. While it is not clear what exactly makes a supermajority in Salmond’s understanding, how he aims to achieve it is.

The Scottish election system is different from that of Westminster. Instead of a pure first past the post system(FPTP) Scotland uses the Additional Member System(AMS). Scots elect a Member of the Scottish Parliament(MSP) in their constituency just as they do for Westminster elections, but additionally they vote within their electoral region to send seven further MSPs to Holyrood. While the MSPs in constituencies are chosen according to FPTP, MSPs within the region are not. This is what Alex Salmond and his AlbaParty…

(Born around 1532- Died April 6, 1590)
Son of William Walsingham and Joyce Denny.
Married to Anne Barne and Ursula St. Barbe.
Father of Frances Devereux, Countess of Essex and Mary Walsingham.
Sir Francis Walsingham was Elizabeth I’s “Spy Master” and was one of her primary secretaries. It was Walsingham and his men who discovered the Babington Plot and were able to stop it and protect Elizabeth.

Sir Francis Walsingham was born around 1532 to William Walsingham and his wife Joyce, probably at Foots Cray, near Chislehurst, Kent. His father was a very wealthy lawyer who died in 1534 when Francis was around two years old. After William’s death, Joyce married the courtier Sir John Carey in 1538; Carey’s brother William was the husband of Mary Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s elder sister. In 1548 Walsingham enrolled at King’s College, the most Protestant and reformist college of the University of Cambridge, and…

When we think about spies, we often think of modern examples like the ones we see in movies. However, spies and their spymasters have been working hard to protect their countries and their rulers for centuries. For Queen Elizabeth I, the only man she could trust to be her spymaster was Sir Francis Walsingham. But is it fair to call Walsingham as only Elizabeth’s “spymaster”? That is the question that John Cooper tries to answer in his book “The Queen’s Agent: Sir Francis Walsingham and the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England”. Who was Sir Francis Walsingham and what did he do to help his queen and his country?

First and foremost, Walsingham was a Protestant. This is very important to understand because, in this time, your religion determined where you stood on certain political and international issues. Walsingham would flee to universities in other countries while Mary I was…

Have you ever read a history book and wondered what life was really like for those who lived in the past? To understand a time period and the motives of the people of the past, we have to understand the structure of their society. How they understood things like class, sex, violence, government, and religion is essential for us to understand what separates us from our ancestors. What they ate, what they wore, and where they slept also give a unique insight into the time period. It can be a difficult undertaking to figure out all of the different aspects of the past connect and to present it cohesively, yet acclaimed historian Ian Mortimer has embraced this challenge head-on to tackle one of the most complex periods of the past; the Elizabethan era. His love letter to the Elizabethan age entitled, “The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England” is a…

SOME might argue that the latest global temperature, as measured by x15 NASA/NOAA AMSU (advanced microwave sounding unit) satellites, measuring literally every square inch of the lower troposphere (the exact place where ‘man-made global warming’ is supposed to occur) might be an anomaly caused by the de-industrialisation experiment carried out during draconian COVID-19 lockdowns.

Not so, according to the UN’s own meteorological agency, the WMO.

They concluded that despite the draconian COVID-19 lockdowns that initiated the greatest de-industrialisation science experiment ever carried out in human history, CO₂ levels failed to drop…

Ergo, if CO₂ concentrations didn’t budge, at all, during the most comprehensive global science…

In 1483, King Edward IV’s family received a devastating announcement; the king in the prime of his life died, leaving the throne to his young son Edward V. However, neither Edward V nor his younger brother Richard of York would ever see the throne. Instead, they were taken to the Tower of London by their protector, Richard of Gloucester, for protection, never to be seen again. For over five hundred years, many theories have emerged about what happened to the princes in the tower and who might have possibly killed the boys. In MJ Trow’s latest book, “The Killer of the Princes in the Tower: A New Suspect Revealed”, he works hard to uncover the truth of what might have happened to the sons of King Edward IV.

I would like to thank Net Galley and Pen and Sword Books for sending me a copy of this book. When I…

The Ardern  government has  made  “well-being”  such  a  focus  of  its  policies  that many  New  Zealanders  think  it  is   now  the  way  forward.

Labour’s ally, the  Green Party, is so enamoured  with  the  “well- being”  philosophy  it  sharply criticised   the  government for raising the  level of  main  benefits  “by less than $8 a week” from April 1.

“We have a poverty crisis in NZ, and we must go further and faster to deliver income support that enables everyone to live with dignity,” says Green Party spokesperson for Social Development & Employment Ricardo Menéndez March.

“The government currently expects a single person over 25 years old to be able to get by on just $250.74 a week, and they’re supposed to celebrate that rising to $258.51. That extra eight dollars isn’t even enough to buy a block of cheese.”

Menendez  March  says it is  “disingenuous”  of  the  government to continue to…

I have a four-part series (here, here, here, and here) about the conceptual downsides of Joe Biden’s class-warfare approach to tax policy.

Now it’s time to focus on the component parts of his agenda. Today’s column will review his plan for a big increase in the corporate tax rate. But since I’ve written about corporate tax rates over and over and over again, we’re going to approach this issue is a new way.

I’m going to share five visuals that (hopefully) make a compelling case why higher tax rates on companies would be a big mistake.

Visual #1

One thing every student should learn from an introductory economics class is that corporations don’t actually pay tax. Instead, businesses collect taxes that are actually borne by workers, consumers, and investors.

There’s lots of debate in the profession, of course, about which group bears what share…

The following is an updated and revised version of the penultimate section of my paper with Ron Batchelder “Pre-Keynesian Theories of the Great Depressison: What Ever Happened to Hawtrey and Cassel?” which I am now preparing for publication. The previous version is available on SSRN.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, empirical studies of the effects of money and monetary policy by Milton Friedman, his students and followers, rehabilitated the idea that monetary policy had significant macroeconomic effects. Most importantly, in research with Anna Schwartz Friedman advanced the seemingly remarkable claim that the chief cause of the Great Depression had been a series of policy mistakes by the Federal Reserve. Although Hawtrey and Cassel, had also implicated the Federal Reserve in their explanation of the Great Depression, they were unmentioned by Friedman and Schwartz or by other Monetarists.[1]

The chief difference between the Monetarist and the Hawtrey-Cassel explanations of…

So what happened to “go hard, go early”? Does anyone expect house prices (which have risen more than $100,000 since early 2020) to start falling?

The Ardern government’s housing package aroused curiously mixed reactions, hardly any of them providing a glimmer of light to would-be first-home buyers that house prices will be falling any time soon.

From one side, the warning came that rent controls could not be far behind. From the other, “market forces” and the evils of neo-liberalism had at last been corralled.

Over on the Left, Chris Trotter sees a housing crisis ripping apart the country’s weakest and most vulnerable communities.

“While the detail of the Labour government’s housing package has been sufficient to unleash the very worst impulses of NZ’s landlord class – whose screams of rage and wild threats of social vengeance have pretty much confirmed the rest of NZ society’s worst fears concerning‘property…

Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet in Paris in 1694. He was raised with a Jesuit education (Latin, theology, rhetoric, and so on) but he quickly became a thorn in the side of the French establishment. He was a brilliant student who wrote extensively about the lavish corruption of 18th century French society. His blistering satires and critiques were largely directed at the decaying Catholic French monarchy and its rigid censorship laws as well as its self-aggrandizing ecclesiasticism. Voltaire is known to us today as the essential Enlightenment man. Victor Hugo said likened Voltaire to the whole of the 18th century -Voltaire contained within himself both a Renaissance and a Reformation. He carried on the skepticism of Montaigne and the humor Rabelais. He was a more potent enemy of superstition and religious fanaticism than either Erasmus

He had a rocky relationship with his father. As a young…

If wind and solar power are so cheap, then why is it that Germany now suffers Europe’s highest power prices? And equally wind power obsessed, Denmark is right behind it?

On the one hand, the wind and solar cult point to Germany as the shining example of our inevitable transition to an all wind and sun powered future and wax lyrical about what’s been achieved. However, the same characters tend to quietly crab walk away from the hard facts about the effect of subsidised and unreliable wind and solar on power prices, a connection that is pretty obvious in Germany and Denmark. Inconvenient truths, and all that.

The same crowd of zealots also assert that nuclear power is so expensive as to be unaffordable.

The French obtain around 75% of their electricity from nuclear power plants.

So, why is it that the French enjoy power prices half those suffered in…