Utopia, you are standing in it!

Over the last few years, while I continued my research on other fronts, I started spending small amounts of time on a daily basis to read about the Great Depression and more precisely, how Canada lived through the depression.

Since the old adage is that Canada gets pneumonia when the US gets the flu, I thought that it was a worthy endeavor (although Pedro Amaral and James McGee have been working on that front) to try to see what insights we can derive from looking at Canada’s experience during the Great Depression (especially since it had a very different banking system).

In the process, I managed to collect in a datasheet, the Industrial Production Index of Canada (consisting largely of heavy industry with some light industries and utilities, making it a relatively well-rounded index). This is what it looks like.

Other than seeing Canada’s experienced mirrored in the US experience…

I have written a number posts (hereherehere, and here) over the past few years citing an article by one of my favorite UCLA luminaries, Jack Hirshleifer, of the fabled UCLA economics department of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Like everything Hirshleifer wrote, the article, “The Private and Social Value of Information and the Reward to Inventive Activity,” published in 1971 in the American Economic Review, is deeply insightful, carefully reasoned, and lucidly explained, reflecting the author’s comprehensive mastery of the whole body of neoclassical microeconomic theory.

Hirshleifer’s article grew out of a whole literature inspired by two of Hayek’s most important articles “Economics and Knowledge” in 1937 and “The Use of Knowledge in Society” in 1945. Both articles were concerned with the fact that, contrary to the assumptions in textbook treatments, economic agents don’t have complete information about…

Well, my headline may be a tad exaggerated, but I’m pretty sure that the subject of this post is not friendly to Jews (she’s made some remarkably ill informed comments about Palestine). Read on.

Many Democrats have been excited about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for the young Hispanic activist (she’s 28) won the Democratic primary for a House seat in New York, gaining a big upset victory over the incumbent. She’s a Democratic Socialist, but my take on her is that she’s not particularly bright and is espousing views that, while they may win her a seat in the House, won’t advance the Democratic platform. In fact, her election may give Democrats an even worse image.

I say that because Ocasio-Cortez has cozied up to some odious characters. Here she is headlining the Universal Muslim Association of America meeting with our favorite sharia-lover and FOF (Friend of Farrakhan), Linda Sarsour (click…

You might have heard that about 200 (or more) rockets were fired at Israeli civilian targets by Hamas last week, and that Israel responded by the Israeli Defense Forces targeting over 100 Hamas terrorist and military sites. No Israeli civilians were killed, though at least 7 were injured and more treated for shock as 30 rockets not intercepted by Israel’s “Iron Dome” landed in fields but also destroyed Israeli houses, cars, factories, and a playground (Israel has an efficient early warning system). According to reports, three Palestinians were killed: a woman, her one-year-old chid, and a Hamas militant.

Not in dispute is that Hamas has continually been firing rockets from Gaza at Israeli citizens for months, but not on the scale that happened this week, which was a significant escalation of the violence. Also, since April Hamas has been sending incendiary devices via balloons and even birds into Israel, aimed…

h/t CL

BBC Radio 4’s ‘Midnight News’ on August 9^th included an item (from 18:09 here) concerning events in southern Israel and the Gaza Strip which had begun several hours beforehand.

The BBC’s newsreader refrained from informing listeners who carried out the missile fire mentioned in his chronologically reversed portrayal of the story. [emphasis in bold added, emphasis in italics in the original]

Newsreader: “Israel has carried out a dozen airstrikes on targets in Gaza in response to the firing of around 36 missiles into Israel. One Palestinian man was killed. The Israelis said at least three people were wounded inside Israel. Yesterday two fighters from Hamas, which controls Gaza, were killed by Israeli fire. From Jerusalem, Yolande Knell reports.”

By the time that news bulletin went on air (02:00 Israel time), over 70 projectiles had been launched from the Gaza Strip. In other words, Radio 4 news…

On 11 and 12 June 2018 the Constitution Unit co-hosted a workshop at Rome LUISS university, on ‘The challenges of reforming upper houses in the UK and Italy’. This is the second in a series of posts summarising the speakers’ contributions. Professor Carlo Fusaro, a leading proponent of Matteo Renzi’s failed Senate reform of 2016, reflects on why the proposals were defeated and what wider lessons can be learned from their failure.

In a previous blog, Constitution Unit Director Meg Russell set out some more general obstacles to bicameral reform. In this post, reflecting on the recent Italian experience, I argue that the challenges of reforming second chambers have changed, and grown, significantly in recent years.

Constitutional change is difficult by design. Transformation of those constitutional bodies which have a say in the decision making process of constitutional revisions is even more difficult, the most difficult of all…

When I give speeches about modern welfare states, I’ll often cite grim data from the IMF, BIS, and OECD about the very depressing fiscal consequences of ever-expanding government.

And if I really want to worry an audience, I’ll augment those numbers by talking about the erosion of societal capital and explain it’s very hard to adopt necessary reforms once the work ethic and self-reliance have been replaced by a culture of dependency and entitlement.

I basically warn people that many western nations (including the United States) are doomed to suffer Greek-style fiscal collapse. Depending on the type of speech, this is where I sometimes share a slide suggesting that there are two possible outcomes once an economic crisis occurs.

• Does a crisis caused by bad government lead to even more bad government, which is the pessimistic hypothesis in Robert Higgs’ classic, Crisis and…