Utopia, you are standing in it!

Jocelyne Roy-Vienneau, the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick, has just died of cancer after having revealed the diagnosis in the fall of 2018 around the time of the last change of government from Gallant to Higgs. CBC News reports that the province’s Protocol Office will make more announcements in the coming days. Canada has lost two Lieutenant Governors to cancer in as many months, after W. Thomas Molloy, the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan, died in office on 2 July.

1) At ‘Lawfare’, Matthew J. Aiesi presents a legal view of the incendiary attacks launched from the Gaza Strip.

“…Israel has also been subjected to frequent attacks by incendiary balloons. By early June of this year, these attacks had destroyed approximately 4,300 acres of land, and more has been destroyed since then. Yet news reports on the incendiary balloons often fail to identify the balloons for what they are—a war crime. […]

As Hamas has been using them, these incendiary balloon attacks violate numerous rules and customs of warfare—principally concerning the targeting of civilians and the use of indiscriminate weapons. The attacks also likely violate the prohibition on the use of incendiary weapons in this context.”

2) MEMRI reportson views of the PA’s handling of an incident earlier this year.

“On April 26, 2019, an urgent appeal by the largely Christian residents of the Palestinian village of Jifna, in the Ramallah and Al-Bireh district…

The latest Pew Research American statistics at first light make grim reading. It appears that over the last decade in all traditional news outlets, that is newspapers, radio, television and cable, total employee numbers dropped by 25%.

But analysis shows the employee numbers in radio, television and cable in fact pretty much stayed the same and the drop was almost entirely attributable to newspapers which lost 47% of their staff in the past ten years. For those of us interested in quality and substance in their news consumption, which television and radio cannot provide, this is alarming.

The lawlessness of the Board of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand never ceases to amaze me,  Just in recent years, there was clear evidence that the Board simply ignores the requirements of the Public Records Act.   There was their facilitation of what was almost certainly an unlawful appointment of an “acting Governor” in the run up to the election (decent outcome in the abstract, but unlawful nonetheless).   And, of course, they play fast and loose with the Official Information Act, apparently confident that the Ombudsman is largely toothless.  It is all the more extraordinary in that since 2013 the Bank’s Board has had a senior lawyer as a member.  I’d not paid much attention to him, not knowing anything about him, but when I finally met him last week –  where he told us he “trains judges” – it reignited my interest in just how a…

Last week, I received news that the International Review of Law and Economics accepted my paper (co-authored with Rosolino Candela) titled “Why Consider the Lighthouse a Public Good?”. The abstract is below and I will update this blog post to add the link to the article once it is online:

Was the lighthouse ever a public good? The lighthouse is presented as the quintessential public good as it was inherently non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Since the work of Ronald Coase (1974) on the lighthouse, economists have used debated the extent to which the private provision of public goods is possible. In this work, we highlight recent findings in the history of lighting services (especially private provision of said services) in order to argue that it may be incorrect to consider the lighthouse as a public good. First, we argue that lighthouses are probably better seen as a complement to other maritime…

States which have not been invaded by the British (white)

At some point in it’s history, Britain has invaded about 90% of the countries of the world. While most of these states were not a part of the British Empire, all the countries in red sustained some kind of British military presence or government sanctioned incursion. The list of 22 non-invaded countries, which includes São Tomé and Príncipe (though not pictured on the map), was put together by Stuart Laycock in his 2012 book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded: And the Few We Never Got Round To.

The Cummings: what real environmentalists look like.

The faux environmentalist is easy to spot: he loves industrial wind power and couldn’t care less about the environmental destruction it causes. Faced with the rampant slaughter of birds and bats, he initially denies the evidence and then pushes the moral equivalence button, claiming that more birds are killed by cats, cars and skyscrapers. Ignoring the fact that cats, cars and tall buildings don’t kill apex predators like Eagles, Hawks and Kites. And also ignoring the fact that cars and skyscrapers deliver benefits in the form of transport and accommodation that make modern, civil societies possible. Whereas, heavily subsidised wind power delivers nothing but chaotically intermittent electricity and rocketing power prices, as a result.

In Tasmania its rare and endangered Wedge-Tailed Eagle is already being sliced and diced by wind turbines and, with more on the way, it faces a rapid extinction…

The Opposition in the Australian Federal Parliament that is.

In my post yesterday, I noted  that Simon Bridges’s latest speech continued the pattern in which our Opposition pretends there is no real structural problem in the New Zealand economy: no decades of productivity underperformance, no near-complete absence of any productivity growth in the last several years (whether under National or Labour).

And so it was some mix of refreshing and depressing (would that it were so in our country) to yesterday read a new paper by the Australian Shadow Assistant Minister for Treaasury on “tackling Australia’s productivity crisis”.  No doubt it helps that the Shadow Assistant Minister was previously a professor of economics at the Australian National University (I wrote about a paper he gave in New Zealand last year here).   And perhaps the political context is different: it is now six years since the ALP was in…

Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin are two of the great economic historians of our time, writing, in the splendid tradition of Charles Kindleberger, profound and economically acute studies of the economic and financial history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most notably they have focused on periods of panic, crisis and depression, of which by far the best-known and most important episode is the Great Depression that started late in 1929, bottomed out early in 1933, but lingered on for most of the 1930s, and they are rightly acclaimed for having emphasized and highlighted the critical role of the gold standard in the Great Depression, a role largely overlooked in the early Keynesian accounts of the Great Depression. Those accounts identified a variety of specific shocks, amplified by the volatile entrepreneurial expectations and animal spirits that drive, or dampen, business investment, and further exacerbated by inherent instabilities in market…

The Hands Off Our Tamariki Network has an admirable ring to its name. Here’s hoping everybody gets the message because if whanau members kept their hands off their tamaraki … well, there would be no need for a state agency to intervene and get its hands on the victims of domestic violence.

The reasons why the Oranga Tamariki agency becomes involved in caring for children has been somewhat downplayed by speakers at protest meetings who demand the state leave their mokopuna alone and insist Māori be the ones caring for their children.

Yet while they call for the state to stay away when Maori children are involved, paradoxically they want the government to do something: