Utopia, you are standing in it!

By Andrew Bolt ~

Wind and solar account for just six percent of total electricity globally, despite decades of subsidies. The growth of fossil fuels were enough to wipe out any emissions reductions from wind and solar, which grew 17 percent and 35 percent, respectively.

According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), public and private actors spent $1.1 trillion on solar and over $900 billion on wind between 2007 and 2016…. To put this roughly $2 trillion in investment in solar and wind during the past 10 years in perspective, it represents an amount of similar magnitude to the global investment in nuclear over the past 54 years, which totals about $1.8 trillion.

Turns out the green movement also played itself. Hysterical scaremongering over the Fukushima emergency had a number of nuclear plants closed, especially…

It has become hard to keep track of the corporate welfare troughs around the country into which companies dip their snouts.  One challenge in some cases is to find out how much swill has been poured into them.

The Business Dictionary defines corporate welfare as government financial support for big business, usually in the form of bounties, subsidies, or tax breaks.

The Taxpayers Union, which monitors this form of wealth redistribution, a year ago released a report, ‘Socialism for the Rich’, by Jim Rose.  This showed the annual cost of corporate welfare had become $1.6 billion – or $931 per New Zealand household.

Releasing the report, it said: 

On Friday July 25^th the BBC’s Jon Donnison reported from Jerusalem for BBC television news on the topic of the ‘Day of Rage’ called for by assorted Palestinian factions including Hamas on that date. The report also appeared on the BBC News website under the title “Gaza and Israel brace for ‘day of anger’“.

In that report Donnison described the events of the night before at Qalandiya checkpoint.

“Now you mentioned those clashes in Ramallah overnight – ah…pretty bad. Ten thousand people demonstrating. They marched towards the Qalandiya checkpoint which separates Ramallah from…err… East Jerusalem. We had two Palestinians killed, more than 250 injured and 29 Israeli police officers also injured. So – as you say – a day of anger being called for and I think it could be a difficult day.”

Like all the other BBC journalists who reported on those violent riots in Qalandiya

Below is my column on the implications of the IG report for the obstruction allegations being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.  I have previously written how the most likely explanation for actions taken by this Administration will be found in Ockham’s Razor and that theory that requires the least number of assumptions.  The IG report is an example of following such logic rather than assumptions.

Here is the column:

Economists often do a crummy job of teaching people about the impact of fiscal policy on the labor force, largely because we put people to sleep with boring discussions about “labor supply” decisions (my blog post from last year perhaps being an example of this tendency).

From now on, I will try to remember to use this cartoon. It’s a parody of Obama’s policies, but the last slide (or is it a panel?) is a great teaching tool about what happens when politicians turn the safety net into a hammock.

I’m a big believer that some images do a great job of capturing an issue.

• The essential insight of supply-side economics.
• The Washington welfare morass.
• America’s inescapable demographic challenge.
• The ever-more-confusing tax code.
• How the swamp beat Trump on the budget.
• The left’s view of how insurance should work.
• The one-way street toward liberty.
• The economic incentives of socialism.

Speaking of socialism, let’s look at some more images that reveal the essence of that bankrupt ideology.

Here’s a cartoon from Libertarian Reddit that does a great job of showing the real difference between capitalism and socialism.

Perfectly stated. Reminds me of the insights offered by Thatcher and Churchill.

Sadly, if you provide the statists with real-world evidence, many of them still prefer the world in top-right frame rather than the bottom-right frame.

Heck, the IMF actually publishes studies supporting equal levels of poverty.

As you…

Endangered species: thousands of well-paid jobs threatened by eco-zealots.

Australia’s enviable prosperity isn’t due to sunshine and breezes, it’s down to iron ore, coal and a bevy of other minerals including copper and uranium.

Australia also has an abundance of bauxite which, when a reliable and affordable power sources is added, turns ‘NT road-gravel’ into aluminium – a high-value metal used in all manner of applications, from mobile phones, window frames and hipster bicycles.

Australia’s remaining aluminium smelters and thousands of jobs are now under mortal threat. Thanks to an obsession with heavily subsidised, intermittent and unreliable wind and solar.

The same goes for a range of energy hungry businesses and the jobs and wealth they currently create.

The fastest way to destroy any businesses’ bottom line is to keep cranking up energy costs. Which is exactly what’s happening in Australia.

Already suffering the highest power prices in the world…

The existence of insurance, which dates back to at least 1000 BC, is one of the great arguments for the enriching power of markets.  Insurance doesn’t just allow people to transfer wealth from their hypothetical future self who is not in a car accident to their alternative hypothetical future self who is in a car accident, which is mind boggling to think about.  Still, as I think about the topic more, the puzzle isn’t why insurance exists in the first place, but why there isn’t insurance for much more types of losses.

Take this 2017 The Atlantic article discussing some people’s reactions to Donald Trump’s presidential victory:

…as state after state flipped to red, her friends left quietly, one by one. Caffrey yelled at her husband for being too confident Hillary Clinton would win. She blamed herself for not volunteering more. Then she cried herself to sleep, “thinking about…

Economics is the dismal science, as Thomas Carlyle infamously said, reprising John Stuart Mill for defending the abolishment of slavery in the British Empire. But if being a “dismal science” includes respecting individual rights and standing up for early ideas of subjective, revealed, preferences – sign me up! Indeed, British economist Diane Coyle wisely pointed out that we should probably wear the charge as a badge of honor.

Non-economists, quite wrongly, attack economics for considering itself the “Queen of the Social Science”, firing up slurs, insults and contours: Economism, economic imperialism, heartless money-grabbers. Instead, I posit, one of our great contributions to mankind lies in clarity and, quoting Joseph Persky “an acute sensitivity to budget constraints and opportunity costs.”

Now, clarity requires one to be specific. To clearly define the terms of use, and refrain from the vague generality of unmeasurable and undefinable concepts so common…