Utopia, you are standing in it!

https://soundcloud.com/980cjme_650ckom/gormley-measuring-extreme-weather-june-11

Last week, Prof. Ross McKitrick wrote an op-ed for the Financial Post (Canada) about my experiences in the climate debates. It’s pretty good.

Based on that I was invited to discuss extreme weather and climate change on the @JohnGormleyShow – Canadian talk radio. It was fun. You can listen to the interview above – comments welcomed.

To mark Parliament Week 2018, our editor Dr Philip Salmon looks at a key element of Parliament which we don’t usually have much opportunity to reflect on in our work on Victorian MPs and constituencies: the House of Lords. Yet, as he explains below, the upper chamber played a vital role in many important 19th century reforms and continued to wield significant influence even after the 1911 Parliament Act.

The pre-1834 Lords (Court of Requests)

The House of Lords remains a rather neglected subject in modern British political history. One recent study has even suggested that ‘for the last half-century and more it has been largely ignored’ (but note the reading list below). Most studies constructed around the traditional theme of democratic development inevitably tend to downplay the significance of the ‘unelected’ chamber. The Lords, however, should not be under-estimated.

Over half the twenty prime ministers of the 19th century…

It’s been a long time since the business of suspending Parliament and starting a new session has generated so much political controversy. Throughout most of the 20th century prorogations invariably tallied with the expectations of most parliamentarians, neatly book-ending a government’s legislative programme. Scroll back a little further into the 19th century, however, and a rather different picture emerges …

Parliament’s historic procedures and conventions have generated a huge amount of public interest recently. Responding to popular demand, the latest version of Erskine May’s Parliamentary Practice, detailing the ‘law, privileges, proceedings and usage of Parliament’, has even been uploaded online. What readers won’t find in the latest edition, however, is much information about prorogation. Beyond stating that it is a personal prerogative power exercised by the Crown on the advice of the prime minister, which ends the current session of Parliament, there is remarkably little discussion of how and…

by Judith Curry

Human induced climate change requires urgent action. – AGU

After over ten years as Speaker, John Bercow has announced his intention to stand down at the end of October. As for who will replace him, that is unclear and will be decided by an election amongst MPs, several of whom have already declared their candidacy. But how does that election work? Mark Bennister offers a guide to the process. 

During yet another dramatic day in the House of Commons on Monday 9 September, the Commons Speaker John Bercow announced he would be stepping down either ’when this Parliament ends’ (if the Commons voted for an early election) or on 31 October. As the motion for an early election under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act did not secure the required two-thirds majority, this means he will be in the Chair for some further drama until the end of October.

On 22 June 2019, John Bercow marked his tenth anniversary as…

Steven Horwitz points to an example of Helen Lovejoyism at Liberty & Power:

You’ve all seen them. Those ubiquitous TV ads where a simple little pill transforms a man suffering from erectile dysfunction, or ED, into a virile tiger who puts a smile on the face of his now beaming wife.

Well, Representative Jim Moran (D-VA) has seen them too, and you’d be hard pressed to see a smile on his face when he talks about the ads. “A number of people,” he says, “have come up, including colleagues, and said I’m fed up. I don’t want my three or four-year old grandkid asking me what erectile dysfunction is all about. And I don’t blame them.”

Comedian Louis CK (hat tip to Bryan Caplan for pointing to another Louis CK clip which prompted me to view others) sums up the Helen Lovejoyist argument against same-sex marriage. I’m not normally…

There are many reasons to oppose the various bailouts of the Greek government. Here are my two main reasons.

1. I don’t like rewarding investors who make imprudent decisions, and it really galls me to bail out the (mostly) rich people who bought Greek bonds.
2. I don’t like rewarding politicians who make imprudent decisions, and it really galls me since bailouts encourage additional imprudent behavior.

Let’s focus today on the second point.

Here’s Greece’s score for the “Size of Government” component from Economic Freedom of the World. As you can see, bailouts have actually subsidized a decline in fiscal responsibility.

And it’s worth pointing out that Greek politicians have been doing a bad job in other areas.

The burden of red tape has been, and remains, stifling.

Greece ranks at the top in difficulty in setting up and running a business among 75 countries, according…

The world is full of surprises, a fact with which rational-expectations theorists have not yet come to grips. Yesterday I was surprised to find that a post of mine from May 2016, was attracting lots of traffic. When published, that post had not attracted much attention, and I had more or less forgotten about it, but when I quickly went back to look at it, I recalled that I had thought well of it, because in the process of calling attention to Wicksteed’s anticipation of the Coase Theorem, I thought that I had done a good job of demonstrating one of my favorite talking points: that what we think of as microeconomics (supply-demand analysis aka partial-equilibrium analysis) requires a macrofoundation, namely that all markets but the one under analysis are in equilibrium. In particular, Wicksteed showed that to use cost as a determinant of price in the context of…

When Oklahoma City Council member JoBeth Hamon wassworn inearly this year, she chose to use a copy of Marxist Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” rather than the Bible.

While there’s no law or policy that requires the use of a Bible for swearing-in ceremonies, Hamon upset traditions going back to ninth-century England.

In an email to me, Hamon explained that she comes from a social services background, so she wanted to center her campaign “on uplifting voices that aren’t often at the table when our governments make decisions”— the homeless, the car-less, and so forth, from whose perspective, she claimed, Zinn told U.S. history.

“A People’s History,” she thought, “would be a good reminder of who I seek to serve.”
Implicit in the ritual of taking oaths on the Bible is the acknowledgment of the need for God’s guidance—something that U.S. presidents have signaled…

Why is Africa poor?

More than half of the world’s poorest people live in sub-Saharan Africa. Why? Why is that region so poor? There are lots of theories — some blame a “colonial history.” Others blame the weather or discrimination.

But Magatte Wade, an African entrepreneur, tells John Stossel that she knows the biggest reason from her own first-hand experience: it’s crushing government regulation. “Once you hire someone, good luck getting rid of them for any reason,” she says. Her home country, Senegal, requires government permission to fire an employee. That makes it hard to run a business. It also makes entrepreneurs reluctant to hire. Then there’s the complicated tax code. “Some people say it’s worth at least two or three truckloads of paper,” she says. Hiring an accountant to wade through that is expensive for new businesses.

Magatte started a business anyway — she makes lip balm. She has…

The request made by the Privy Council that the Queen prorogue Parliament was a clumsy and inappropriate attempt to shorten the time available for parliamentary scrutiny of the Brexit process. That much seems clear from papers submitted to the Court of Session in Cherry. It is therefore no surprise that the Inner House was receptive to the petitioners’ argument that the advice given to Her Majesty violated the conventional purposes for which prorogation ought to be used and was therefore unconstitutional (Cherry, [1]; see also Lord Sumption). Where the court erred was in concluding that the act of prorogation was itself unlawful. The intimate relationship between the prerogative power to prorogue and the supremacy of Parliament precludes such a conclusion. If, as seems correct, a response to this breach of convention is warranted, it is one that can, constitutionally, only come from Parliament itself.

In this…

If you read The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels give a poetic account of how societies evolve. Western society moved out of antiquity into feudalism and then into capitalism. In their view, capitalism is so exploitative and unstable that revolutionary forces will topple the system and impose state control over the economy. Ideally, the state itself will wither and you’ll get an idyllic communist society.

But we now know that’s wrong. The industrialized nations of the West never turned to socialism, though they did institute welfare states in the 20th century. Instead, more rural societies like China and Russia were the biggest customers of Marxism. And very few socialist states of the 20th century remained socialist in the classical senses. Socialism, and communism, was not the end of the story.

So what did we get? If you follow someone like Francis Fukuyama, you might believe that liberal capitalism is…

One this date in History: February 13, 1689. William III-II & Mary III declared joint sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland.

William III (Dutch: Willem; November 4, 1650 – March 8, 1702), also widely known as William of Orange, was sovereign Prince of Orangefrom birth, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic from 1672 and King of England, Ireland and Scotland from 1689 until his death in 1702. It is a coincidence that his regnal number (III) was the same for both Orange and England. As King of Scotland, he is known as William II. He is sometimes informally known in Northern Ireland and Scotland as “King Billy”.

William inherited the principality of Orange from his father, William II, who died a week before William’s birth. His mother, Mary, was the daughter of King Charles I of England. In 1677, he married his fifteen-year-old first…

James II-VII (October 14, 1633 – September 16, 1701) was King of England and Ireland as James II and King of Scotland as James VII, from February 6, 1685 until he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The last Roman Catholic monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland, his reign is now remembered primarily for struggles over religious tolerance.

However, it also involved the principles of absolutismand divine right of kings and his deposition ended a century of political and civil strife by confirming the primacy of Parliament over the Crown.

King James II-VII of England, Scotland and Ireland.

James inherited the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland from his elder brother Charles II with widespread support in all three countries, largely based on the principle of divine right or birth. Tolerance for his personal Catholicism did not apply to it in general and when the English and Scottish…