Chancellor Kurz addresses the Austrian National Council just before losing its confidence.

Introduction

A series of strange events has recently befallen Austria. It began with political scandal and the collapse of the coalition government between Sebastian Kurz’s People’s Party and Heinz-Christian Strache’s Freedom Party and ended a few weeks later with the President of Austria appointing a “technocratic provisional government” composed of judges and civil servants, who will now steer the ship of state as a caretaker cabinet until early elections in September. The details of what precipitated the coalition government’s collapse would have seemed outlandish prior to, say, 2016, but now seem both depressingly believable and yet still absurd. The final outcome of the political scandal has taken the caretaker convention to its logical extreme because of the peculiarities of Austria’s constitution and its provisions surrounding non-confidence, early dissolution, and government formation.

At the end of my long post yesterday on the Reserve Bank’s latest efforts to spin the Governor’s plans to increase very markedly minimum capital ratios for locally-incorporated banks, I noted

PS.  As Martien Lubberink at Victoria has pointed out there is another international agency paper out just recently that really doesn’t help the Bank’s case much if at all. I might touch on that tomorrow.

His post is here (complete with the sly –  if obscure, presumably deliberately so, to readers –  dig at the Governor in the final paragraph).

The paper he was referring was recently published by the Bank for International Settlements as a Working Paper of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, with the title “The costs and benefits of bank capital – a review of the literature”.   The paper was released only a couple of weeks ago, and it should be studied carefully…

One of the classic academic studies of the effects of immigration on low-skilled Americans is that of David Card, concerning the Mariel Boatlift. Card found that the sudden Cuban influx had little or no adverse work impact on native African-Americans. Lately George Borjas, one of my favorite economists, has disputed Card’s findings, only to find my UC Davis colleague Giovanni Peri disagreeing. Needless to say, Borjas has been responding to Peri. And today I was taken aback to find that another of my favorite economists, Jennifer Hunt, also disagrees with Borjas.

I have been quite open in pointing out that Peri, while very sharp and by the way very personable, generally does not cite work by those taking views opposite his — a grievous academic transgression — and is prone to contradicting his own work, as I have explained before and is also seen in the first link…

PQC: We all will be gone! Justin, you lived your life as you wished, you made your mark and your point in this earth. My appreciation.

I have the sinking feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of this American horror show, while – under the pretext of “fighting terrorism” – we act out our sadistic fantasies all over the world. As these outrages against human decency and morality provoke worldwide revulsion at the perpetrators, perhaps one day we’ll go looking for “terrorists” in the vicinity of a mirror – and see ourselves for what we’ve become. Justin Raimondo “Who Are the Terrorists?”

Justin Raimondo, RIP (1951-2019)

by Antiwar Staff Posted on June 27, 2019

Justin
Raimondo, former editorial director and co-founder of Antiwar.com, is
dead at 67. He died at his home in Sebastopol, California, with his
husband, Yoshinori Abe, by his side. He had been diagnosed with 4th

On page xxxii of Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean writes the following.

Actually, what I find the most telling about this statement is that James Buchanan did not say this, or at least not in the article MacLean cites as the source. Endote 36 cites Buchanan’s essay “Saving the Soul of Classical Liberalism” as the source, but these phrases do not appear.  (The endnote also cites a book by Matt Kibbie, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff, so I checked it.  The quote does not appear in this book either.)

The closest related idea to the “quoted” statement is:

A motivating element in the liberal philosophy is, of course, the individual’s desire for liberty from the coercive power of others. But a second element in the liberal soul and spirit is critically important. It is the absence of desire to exert power over others.

I’m…

On 7 June 2019, the High Court brought to a halt the attempted private prosecution of Boris Johnson for misconduct in public office. Today, the full judgment has been published. There has been a lot of commentary surrounding this case, not all of it based on a firm (or even rudimentary) grasp of the facts. So breaking it down, what exactly has gone on here? Eight (likely-to-be) FAQs spring to mind.

1. What the dickens is going on, legally speaking?

 On 29 May 2019, District Judge Coleman sitting at Westminster Magistrates’ Court granted an application by Marcus Ball and Brexit Justice Limited for a summons against Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the proposed defendant, in respect of a contemplated private prosecution seeking to charge the aforementioned Mr Johnson with three counts of misconduct in public office, contrary to common law. On 7 June 2019, the Administrative Division of the…

James Taylor, senior fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute, explains why we are not in the midst of a climate crisis during Heartland’s breakout session at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (aka CPAC).

Celebrity rugby player Israel Folau is in a complicated legal position. He shared a “meme” on social media site Instagram recently, the text of which was: “Warning: Drunks, Homosexuals, Adulterers, Liars, Fornicators, Thieves, Atheists, Idolators: Hell Awaits You- Repent! Only Jesus Saves.” To this he added his own personal comment: “Those that are living in Sin will end up in Hell unless you repent. Jesus Christ loves you and is giving you time to turn away from your sin and come to him.” (The comment was similar to many other pictures shared on his account, many of which are Bible verses or exhortations to nominal Christians to follow Jesus Christ in deed as well as word.)

An important decision of the England and Wales Court of Appeal, The Queen (on the application of Ngole) -v- The University of Sheffield[2019] EWCA Civ 1127 (3 July 2019)has ruled that a social work student, Felix Ngole, should not have been dismissed from his course on the basis of comments he made on social media sharing the Bible’s view on homosexuality. The court says in its summary at para [5], point (10):

The mere expression of views on theological grounds
(e.g. that ‘homosexuality is a sin’) does not necessarily connote that the person expressing such views will discriminate on such grounds.

The decision is a welcome one, which will hopefully provide guidance in similar situations.