Utopia, you are standing in it!

In his Guardian op-ed, Daniel Barenboim, a musician who holds Israeli citizenship, follows in the Guardian tradition of expressing contempt for Israel by claiming that its policies betray the country’s founding principles, whilst distorting both the policies and founding principles.  His piece attacking the Jewish nation-state law(This racist new law makes me ashamed to be Israeli, July 23) in fact grossly mischaracterises both the bill and the founding Zionist ideals (articulated in Israel’s Declaration of Independence) it is said to betray.

He begins by selectively quoting from Israel’s declaration of independence:

“The state of Israel will devote itself to the development of this country for the benefit of all its people; it will be founded on the principles of freedom, justice and peace, guided by the visions of the prophets of Israel; it will grant full equal, social and political rights to all its citizens regardless of differences of religious faith…

On the evening of July 26^th a terror attack took place in the community of Geva Binyamin (Adam), north of Jerusalem.

“The regional council spokesman said the terrorist climbed over Adam’s security fence. He then walked deeper into the settlement, crossing a playground area, where he encountered the 31-year-old resident, and stabbed him repeatedly in the upper torso. A second resident, the 58-year-old, came out of a nearby home and was also stabbed. A third resident, hearing the disturbance, went outside and, realizing that an attack was occurring, shot the Palestinian terrorist three times, killing him.”

Doctors were unable to save the life of the first victim, who was later named as Yotam Ovadia – a father of two young children.

Early on the morning of July 27^th the BBC News website published a report titled “Israeli stabbed to death by Palestinian in West Bank attack”…

Heather Roy

27 July 2018

What price a principle? Coalition politics is about prizes and prices.  One of Winston Peters’ prizes for making Jacinda Ardern Prime Minister is support for the Waka Jumping Bill but without Green Party votes the numbers are not there for the bill to pass. This week, despite warnings by Green Party royalty, the party has decided to support Winston Peters undemocratic measure to control a party’s MPs.

The thing I admired about the Green party, despite frequently disagreeing on particular issues, is that they have always stood by their principles – until this week. There is no way Jeanette Fitzsimmons, Rod Donald, Sue Bradford, Keith Locke, Russel Norman, Kennedy Graham or Sue Kedgley would ever have supported the Waka Jumping Bill.

The Bill is a coalition deal between NZ First and Labour. It was a bottom line for Winston Peters who has been burnt in…

I’ve written various posts here about the conduct of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund when Adrian Orr was CEO.    Their investment returns have been no better than one might have hoped for given the amount of risk they (force taxpayers’ collectively to) take.  Formally, they will argue that their strategies are risky enough that one can really only judge based on 20 year runs of performance (the Fund is only 15 years old).   But they talk themselves up endlessly, making dubious claims about their contribution, and playing politics more often than sound economics.  We had the big call last year to reduce their carbon exposures, allegedly on the grounds that risk-return considerations didn’t support such investments any longer, but then they implemented the decision in a way that makes it impossible to see whether this big active management call was well-judged on financial grounds, or not.  As I…

House Domestic Monetary Policy subcommittee held a hearing recently on Improving the Federal System (HT: John Taylor Blog).

There are very interesting testimonies/papers there. I just read this one from Austrian school economist – Peter Klein. He says the issue is not of reforming Fed, but why have it at all in the first place?

Harris Dellas and George S. Tavlas (both at Bank of Greece) review Friedman’s thinking on flexible exchange rates.

Below is my column in the Hill newspaper on release of the first Cohen tape and rumored seizure of many more such tapes by federal prosecutors.  I have previously stated that the secret taping of Donald Trump was, in my view, flagrantly dishonest and disloyal in dealings with a client.  While the American Bar Association relaxed the rule against secret taping from being per se unethical, few lawyers would contemplate what Cohen did to his client.  Indeed, New York is a jurisdiction that looks with disfavor on such taping as a routine matter.  Unless done for some clear societal benefit, it is a serious potential unethical act.  Michael Cohen continues to be an embarrassment to the profession in his low level of legal judgment and even lower professional standards of conduct.

Here is the column:

Former Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons will be deeply disappointed in the anti-democratic position taken (“reluctantly” – ha!) by her party’s current bunch of Parliamentary incumbents.  They will be voting in support of the so-called waka-jumping bill.

As reported by Newshub, Fitzsimons said of the Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill:

“You can’t legislate for integrity. Integrity is a question of judgement. It’s a question of conscience,” she said.

The bill’s singular aim is to prevent disgruntled MPs from exercising their freedom to join or create another party if they fall out with their own.

Australian film maker Topher Field interviews Donna Laframboise, former journalist turned investigative author. Donna has critiqued the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s claims about itself, its authors and its peer review process, and found them very VERY wanting.

Alongside Rosolino Candela, I have a new paper out. This paper is to be included in a forthcoming edited companion to the work of Israel Kirzner (UFM Companion to Israel Kirzner). The chapter is a reconsideration of the debate on the lighthouse as a public good in the lenses of Israel Kirzner’s emphasis on market processes. The chapter is available here on SSRN and the abstract is down below:

In this chapter, we point out that Kirzner’s focus on the market process and entrepreneurial alertness to profit opportunities that come from improving allocative efficiency (or pushing back the frontiers of production possibilities) is universal in that it can be applied to what appears to be the most unassailable “bailey” of market failure theory. To do so, we consider the historical case of lighthouses which, because the light they produced to guide ships in the age of sail…