Utopia, you are standing in it!

by Roger Koppl

Mario changed everything by writing The Economics of Time and Ignorance with Jerry O’Driscoll.  That was the book that changed everything.  I know; I was there.  I had the incredible good luck to show up at NYU as an “Austrian” graduate student in 1980.

This is one of the Seminar Studies series produced by academic publisher Longman, a set of short introductions to historical topics.

This one on the Vietnam War features an 87-page overview of the war’s long and tangled history, with 23 pages of original source documents, a 6-page chronology, a 2-page list of the main characters, a 3-page glossary, and an 8-page bibliography. Designed for A-level students this is still a very useful short overview and reference book.

Vietnam geography

Vietnam is a 1,000-kilometer-long sliver of land along the east coast of the fat peninsular once known as Indochina. It widens in the north to form a kind of flowerhead shape around the northern city of Hanoi in the delta of the Red River, which is less than 50 miles from the border with China. Along the central belt which borders Laos in the west, it is sometimes as little as 30…

by Pete Boettke

I want to wish Mario Rizzo the very best on his 70^th birthday. To this day, the phone call I received from him in March of 1990 remains the highlight of my professional career. Mario called me at my office at Oakland University to tell me I was going to be offered an Assistant Professorship in the Economics Department at NYU.  I ran home, rang the doorbell, and did my best Frank Sinatra impression of “New York, New York” for Rosemary and we hugged and jumped up and down.  The next 8 years of my professional life were critical in so many ways, and I owe that to Mario and Israel Kirzner, their mentorship and their guiding example. So, on a personal-professional level, my debt to Mario is very deep, and my friendship with him at an intellectual and personal level is something I cherish greatly.

As Adam noted earlier:-

Nine to Toon on film subsidies

Some interesting comments, following Matt Nipperts Herald article

The New Zealand taxpayer has forked out nearly $600 million to Hollywood producers since 2010 to support the Wellington-dominated film industry, and despite commissioning numerous studies the Government is unclear whether this represents money well spent.

The subsidy scheme, originally conceived to facilitate filming of the Lord of the Rings, has steadily increased over the past two decades and now sees mostly overseas producers paid subsidies of up to a quarter of production costs – resulting in $161m paid to the makers of the wildly profitable Hobbit trilogy and $12m for animation on Alvin and the Chipmunks 4.

Nippert makes some very valid points, but at the same time the NZ film industry has expanded dramatically in recent years .

In addition the profitability of a film is not the point.

What is the point…

Our Lord has done great things for us, because he wanted us to accomplish a deed so magnificent that it surpasses even what we have prayed for… I have burned the town and killed everyone. For four days without any pause our men have slaughtered… wherever we have been able to get into we haven’t spared the life of a single Muslim. We have herded them into the mosques and set them on fire… We have estimated the number of dead Muslim men and women at six thousand. It was, Sire, a very fine deed. (Afonso de Albuquerque describing the Portuguese capture of Goa on 25 November 1510, p.286)

In 1500 the Indian Ocean was the scene of sophisticated trading networks which had been centuries in the making. Muslim traders from the ‘Swahili Coast’ of Africa traded up the coast to the Red Sea and across land to Cairo, heart…

Labour recently announced that any new peers it nominates must commit to abolishing the House of Lords. In this post, Pete Dorey discusses Labour’s track record on Lords reform and why the party has failed to enact serious reforms when in government, arguing that the subject has suffered from a lack of intra-party consensus and a lack of serious interest in reform at ministerial level.

It is a clear reflection of the political turbulence and febrile atmosphere wrought by Brexit that some prominent Conservatives, and pro-Conservative newspapers, have attacked the House of Lords for daring to obstruct ‘the people’s will’, with regard to tabling significant amendments to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill. Of course, there is delicious irony in such condemnation, given that support for Brexit has long been couched in a discourse about restoring parliamentary sovereignty, whereby Westminster, not Brussels, should be the locus of all political decisions…

On 26 June 2018, the hitherto hotly-debated European Union (Withdrawal) Bill became an Act of Parliament (“2018 Act”) after a tennis match of amendments and counter-amendments between Parliament’s two Houses. Much has been said by leading academics about the contents of the 2018 Act both during its stormy passage through Parliament and after its enactment (see for example Professors Paul Craig, Alison Young and Mark Elliott). However, there is one part of the 2018 Act which merits a detailed examination: section 10 and its implications for the Irish border.

Section 10 of the 2018 Act creates a two-fold duty for Crown Ministers: that they must not act incompatibly with the Northern Ireland Act 1998 (“NIA 1998”) and must have “due regard to the joint report from the negotiators of the EU and the United Kingdom Government on progress during phase 1 of negotiations under Article 50”…