Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

The Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance hit the weekend current affairs shows to make the case for the government’s housing/tax package.

I watched both the Newshub Nation interview – the one in which the Minister of Finance refused to rule out bringing in rent controls (a move which would, among other things, simply accelerate a trend towards the government itself being the main provider of rental housing) – and the one on Q&A. Perhaps because the latter is fresh in my mind – I only watched it this morning – but also because it was a better interview, I want to focus here only on the Q&A interview. For those who haven’t seen it, the whole thing seems to be available here. Incidentally, it was interesting that the government chose not to send out its Minister of Housing for these interviews.

What I found most striking was…

Sweden’s role in World War II has evoked little interest outside of that country. Although we now know this nation would never enter the war, Hitler and Dönitz could not count on this. For Hitler Sweden represented a valuable source of raw materials and manufactured goods, as well as a possible threat to Germany’s position in Norway. To Dönitz this politically unreliable nation’s location potentially endangered the navy’s U-boat training areas in the Baltic. Particularly in the final stage of the war, both Hitler and Dönitz endeavored to ensure at all costs that Sweden remained neutral.

On several occasions Hitler claimed a political motive for retaining a foothold in the Baltic States. He feared that withdrawing from Estonia, and later from Courland, would adversely affect Sweden’s attitude. Hitler believed that the presence of German troops in the Baltic States deterred Sweden from cutting off ore imports. On 5 September 1944…

During the recent Big Freeze, thousands of Texan wind turbines were frozen solid, incapacitated by burst of frigid winter conditions. Dead calm weather meant that those that weren’t frozen stiff, added practically nothing to the grid.

While the internal workings of wind turbines (gearboxes, generators, yaw and blade pitch controls) can be kept operable with on-board heating systems (chewing up electricity from the grid all the while), the 50-60m long blades are a different story.

This recent study from the Iowa State University shows that the phenomenon will knock – an already ephemeral energy source – completely out of action. As it did in Texas, last month.

Field study shows icing can cost wind turbines up to 80% of power production
Iowa State University
Hui Ha and Mike Krapil
4 March 2021

AMES, Iowa – Wind turbine blades spinning through cold, wet conditions can collect ice nearly a foot…

The Constitutional Balance, a new work by the former judge John Laws, was published posthumously in January. Here, David Feldman discusses the key themes of the book, and pays tribute to the author, a long-serving judge, who served as a Lord Justice of Appeal and was one of the most well-respected public law judges of the last 50 years.

The late Sir John Laws stood out as one of the greatest English public law judges of the last 50 years. Throughout his distinguished and creative career as Treasury Devil – First Junior Treasury Counsel (Common Law), responsible for advising and representing the government in a large range of public law matters – and judge, he was uniquely willing to argue publicly for and apply in his judgments a systematic philosophy of the liberal, democratic state and of the respective roles within it of the people, their representatives, the government and the…

Boosters assert that the hopeless intermittency of wind and solar will soon be remedied by the addition of giant lithium batteries. Well, that’s the marketing pitch tossed up by renewable energy rent seekers, anyway.

The volume of electricity stored by these so-called ‘giant’ batteries is risible, and their cost astronomical, such that the grid-scale storage of electrical power is simply a fantastic pipe dream.

Which, given the article below, may be no bad thing.

How do you Extinguish a Lithium Battery Fire?
Watts Up With That?
Eric Worall
4 March 2021

A few weeks ago I asked a fire fighter friend how they extinguish electric vehicle battery fires.

He said “Oh you mean like a Tesla or something? The answer is you can’t. You cordon off the area, and spray a fine mist of water on the fire to try to keep the temperature down until it finishes…

I’ve been warning that the United States should not copy Europe’s fiscal policy, largely because living standards are significantly lower in nations with large welfare states.

That’s true if you look at average levels of consumption in different nations, but the most compelling data is the fact that lower-income people in the United States generally enjoy living standards that are equal to or even higher than those for middle-class people in most European countries.

A bigger burden of government is not just a theoretical concern. President Biden has already pushed through a $1.9 trillion spending bill that includes some temporary provisions – such as per-child handouts – that, if made permanent, could add several trillion dollars to the burden of government spending.

And the White House has signaled support for $3 trillion of additional spending for items such as infrastructure, green energy, and other boondoggles.

This doesn’t even count the…