Utopia, you are standing in it!

For all the vitriol directed at Donald J Trump, he got one thing right: the American economy was fairly humming along until a Chinese virus derailed his project and put paid to his second term, as well.

Capitalising on America’s abundant oil and gas reserves – made available with advanced drilling technology – Trump oversaw rising employment and falling unemployment, the return of American jobs to American soil, the resurgence of manufacturing and high-tech industry, all to the betterment of the American people.

With an 80-year-old mumbler and bumbler soon to take charge, with Kamala Harris and her buddies from the Squad itching to take the controls, things do not augur well for the land of the free.

What this lot have in store for the USA will inevitably make energy unaffordable for all but a handful of their elite buddies. Businesses and whole industries will head offshore and American…

It seems I keep stumbling upon hooray stories about Australian grid batteries. I found this reneweconomy article about a new Tesla battery that will be built in New South Wales. The article is titled “Transgrid to build Australia’s first Tesla Megapack big battery in western Sydney” and the author is Giles Parkinson. I remember him from a cheering and one-sided article about the Hornsdale Power Reserve and this article seems not much different.

The first paragraph provides the crux of the story (my emphasis):

Transmission company Transgrid is to build the first big battery in Australia using Tesla’s recently introduced Megapack battery technology, and what is likely to [sic] the first of more than 10 big batteries to be built across NSW as it they are important in face of the looming retirement of its ageing coal fleet..

A new big Tesla battery will be built, this time…

President Obama and many other leftist politicians are running around the nation claiming that supposedly greedy employers are deliberately choosing to reduce their profits.

They’re not actually making that specific claim, but that’s what they’re asserting, for all intents and purposes, when they claim that women are not getting equal pay for equal work.

Inaccurate, but nonetheless clever

If genuine and pervasive sexism existed, then non-discriminatory employers could dramatically reduce labor costs – and therefore dramatically increase profits – by getting rid of overpaid male workers and hiring women. Does anyone really think entrepreneurs and business owners are willing to sacrifice big profits simply because of anti-women animus?

That’s what Obama would like us to believe. And he wants the government to have the power to second-guess the decisions of private businesses. Heck, he probably would like to make America like Europe, where there are efforts to impose gender quotas

I’m a big fan of New Zealand because the nation is a great example of how sweeping free-market reforms lead to very good results.

• The Kiwis got rid of all agriculture subsidies and farmers benefited.
• The Kiwis put the clamps on government spending, both in the 1990s and 2010s.
• The Kiwis used private property rights to rescue ocean fisheries.

Perhaps most impressive, New Zealand has very high levels of societal capital, ranking #1 in the new Global Index of Economic Mentality.

And the country also gets very high scores from Economic Freedom of the World and the Index of Economic Freedom.

But that doesn’t mean policy is perfect. The current Primer Minister already has demonstrated she has a very limited understanding of economics, and now she’s proving her lack of knowledge by imposing a version of “comparable worth.”

In a column for the New York Times, Anna…

Not the latest model
They may imagine this will have some sort of effect on the global climate in the long run, but even if it does it will be too small to be worth mentioning. But so-called green ideology must prevail, in the minds of most of today’s political leaders.
– – –
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to announce next week a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030, five years earlier than previously planned, the Financial Times reported on Saturday.

Britain had originally planned to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel-powered cars from 2040, as part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and in February Johnson brought this forward to 2035, reports Car and Bike.

Citing unidentified industry and government figures, the FT said Johnson now intended to move the date forward again to 2030 in a…

Everyone loves New Zealand and Jacinda Ardern. According to the conventional wisdom ‘countries with the quickest and strictest lockdown have had the smallest reductions in their GDP’. But did you know that in the second quarter in New Zealand GDP fell by 12.2% – a very large hit.

This blog is not about the wisdom of New Zealand’s health policy. In these terms New Zealand may be world beating. The problem is the myth that there is a painless economic way to solve the coronavirus problem.

New Zealand’s Great Success

New Zealand is a highly developed economy with a population of some 5 million. It is made up of two big islands and a cluster of smaller ones.

It has the advantage of being isolated. Wellington to Sidney is over 2000 km. 3 hours by air (farther than London to Moscow). Wellington to Shanghai is nearly 10,000 km. This has…

We all know that the promised “blue wave” of Democratic victories didn’t occur. While Trump has been given the boot (but got nearly half the vote), the Dems lost seats in Congress, failed to flip state legislatures, and doesn’t look as if it will control the Senate, either. Why, with a President who is so palpably unfit for office that his coattails should have swept many Republicans out of office as well.

In this bit from his latest Real Time, Bill Maher has what I think is a pretty good analysis: he attributes it largely to wokeness. While the GOP may be an unpalatable alternative, so are Wokies to many Americans. And that’s what I was afraid of. While, thank Ceiling Cat, Wokeness didn’t keep Biden from being elected (but might have done so for Bernie Sanders), it didn’t, says Maher, inspire many Americans to vote for Democrats. You…

What’s happened to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a crying shame. And I say this even though I volunteered for them, have been a member on and off, and was the recipient of their largesse when, for no fee, they represented me and four other defendants in a class-action suit about illegal drafting in New York. I went to the ACLU, and their lawyers took the case, arguing successfully in Federal court that we were drafted illegally as conscientious objectors. This freed a couple of thousand men from forced civilian service. I’ve always been deeply grateful for the ACLU’s help.

Although the ACLU is still doing a lot of good legal work defending genuine civil liberties, they’re also getting woke in a way that, to me, deeply compromises their integrity. I’ve done a fair number of posts calling out their dubious stands over the last few years; these…

The wind and solar ‘industries’ were built on lies and run on subsidies. Sunset and calm weather are real things, but those troublesome facts are merrily glossed over by the crowd that tell us that coal, oil and gas are all doomed at the hand of sunshine and breezes.

Massaging figures that literally turn night into day, has allowed outfits like the International Energy Agency to make increasingly wild and ludicrous claims about the contribution made to global energy demand by wind and solar. Currently their joint contribution to the planet’s energy needs amounts to little more than a rounding error, and that calculation is unlikely to change anytime between now and kingdom come.

Peter Foster takes a look at how the IEA’s bunkum statistics make astrology look, not just respectable, but like real solid science.

The IEA’s solar spin cycle: Sorry folks, the world will still be overwhelmingly fossil-fuelled…

John H. Cochrane writes at the Hoover Institution Central Banks and Climate: A Case of Mission Creep. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The following is adapted from John H. Cochrane’s remarks at the European Central Bank’s Conference on Monetary Policy: Bridging Science and Practice. His full presentation about the challenges facing central banks is here.

Central banks are rushing headlong into climate policy. This is a mistake. It will destroy central banks’ independence, their ability to fulfill their main missions to control inflation and stem financial crises, and people’s faith in their impartiality and technical competence. And it won’t help the climate.

In making this argument, I do not claim that climate change is fake or unimportant. None of the following comments reflect any argument with scientific fact. (I favor a uniform carbon tax in return for essentially no regulation, but this essay is not about carbon policy.)

John H. Cochrane writes at the Hoover Institution Central Banks and Climate: A Case of Mission Creep. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The following is adapted from John H. Cochrane’s remarks at the European Central Bank’s Conference on Monetary Policy: Bridging Science and Practice. His full presentation about the challenges facing central banks is here.

Central banks are rushing headlong into climate policy. This is a mistake. It will destroy central banks’ independence, their ability to fulfill their main missions to control inflation and stem financial crises, and people’s faith in their impartiality and technical competence. And it won’t help the climate.

In making this argument, I do not claim that climate change is fake or unimportant. None of the following comments reflect any argument with scientific fact. (I favor a uniform carbon tax in return for essentially no regulation, but this essay is not about carbon policy.)