Utopia, you are standing in it!

That pig at a Roger Waters concert (jpost.com)

By Richard Millett

It seems the Guardian wants to shut down all social and cultural life in Israel. Last week it published an article which accused the Jewish state of “sportswashing” its reputation by hosting the Giro d’Italia‘s first leg, irrespective of the fact that Israel had obviously been invited to host it!

Implicit in the accusation of “sportswashing” is the historical antisemitic trope of “dishonest Jews” manipulating the world via unethical business practice.

This antisemitic trope has reared its ugly head yet again today with the Guardian publishing a letter by artists. The letter is about the Seret International Film Festival currently underway in London. The letter states:

“Art, media and culture are being employed to give an apparently acceptable face to a brutal reality.”

Again there’s the implicit notion of “dishonest Jews” manipulating others in an unethical manner.

I was a big fan of the lower corporate tax rate in last year’s tax bill, largely because I want a better investment climate, which then will lead to higher productivity and rising wages.

Simply stated, the current tax code (as shown in the chart) has a very harsh bias against income that is saved and invested.

Anything that can be done to reduce the magnitude of this “double taxation” will lead to better economic performance.

Now that the lower corporate tax rate has been implemented, there’s a debate about whether it is having desirable affects.

In this CNBC debate, I explain that stock “buybacks” and employee bonuses are positive short-run results, but that I’m much more interested in the potential long-run benefits.

As with all brief interviews, it’s difficult to share a lot of information. My main goal was to point out that there’s nothing…

Pursuing so-called green energy initiatives may force poor people in developing countries to remain in their conditions, including continuous exposure to pollution, which results in shorter life spans. That is the conclusion of a policy analysis issued by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on Friday.

Since environmentalists have pushed for policies based on human-induced climate change, environmentalist groups, like Greenpeace, have supported efforts to halt developmental project abroad and even methods of transport for oil and gas (like pipelines) in an attempt to halt the use of fossil fuels.

As impractical as it may be, the GWPF study states that the result of the green movement’s Keep It in The Ground campaign would result in more human deaths by pollution. By halting the production and use of fossil fuels developing countries would be unable to progress which depreciates higher standards of living and reduced carbon emissions.

The activists belonging…

9 March 2012

In 1964 the BBC produced a major documentary series about The Great War, feted with prizes and widely seen as the precursor to ITV’s landmark World At War. I toyed with buying the box set off Amazon but it’s a surprising £60 and I suspected would join all the other half-watched box sets in the cupboard.

Whereupon I discovered the whole thing is available free on YouTube! Just search for the titles of each episode, as listed on Wikipedia.

Having watched 23 episodes I’m struck by a) just how much footage seems to exist of specific events and b) the cumulative effect of hearing just a few pieces of classical music over and again: the brooding opening of Shostakovitch’s 11th symphony, the most intense parts of his 5th and 7th symphonies; the titanic opening chords of Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica (occasional snippets of his pastoral…

1848 became known as ‘the year of revolutions’ and ‘the springtime of nations’ because there was political turmoil, fighting and unrest right across Europe resulting in ministries and monarchies being toppled and new nation states proclaimed.

Causes

The underlying causes were agricultural, economic and demographic.

1. Agricultural failure

From 1845 onwards grain harvest across Europe were poor and this was exacerbated when the ‘fallback crop’, potatoes, were hit by a destructive ‘blight’. The result of the potato blight in Ireland is estimated to have been one and a half million deaths, but right across Europe peasants and small farmers starved, often to death. Hence the nickname for the decade as a whole, ‘the Hungry Forties’.

2. Economic downturn

Food shortages combined with an economic downturn resulting from overproduction, particularly in the textile industry, which saw textile workers and artisans  thrown out of work in all Europe’s industrialised areas, the north…

As anyone who has been following the ‘Great Return March’ agitprop will be aware, the six weekly instalments (to date) of that publicity stunt organised by Hamas and other terror groups in the Gaza Strip have included stone-throwing, shooting and tyre burning, the use of petrol bombs, incendiary kites and IEDs, attempts to sabotage the border fence and attempts to infiltrate Israeli territory.

The phrase ‘largely peaceful’ is therefore hardly the most accurate term that could be chosen to describe the pre-planned actions of the Palestinian rioters, some of whom have already been shown to have links to terror groups.

However, that was exactly the term used by the United Nations Children’s Fund – UNICEF – in a statement put out on May 4^th.

“Over the past five weeks, five children were killed and hundreds were injured in largely peaceful protests in Gaza.”

Despite at least one…

While there are some notable similarities between classical liberalism and contemporary liberalism (or progressivism), it has become increasingly obvious that the differences between two philosophies are growing ever larger.

This is in large part due to the fact that progressives, particularly at universities and in coastal cities, have embraced, to seemingly an extreme degree, political correctness and cultural Marxism in the form of feminism, social justice, and race and gender based identity politics.

Now, these social justice oriented philosophies do have legitimate concerns and often do produce ideas that may improve our society. But generally, the “good” beliefs and ideas coming from the social justice movement are almost universally recognized already. Simultaneously, the worst parts about social justice ideology are almost entirely exclusive to it.

For example, nearly everyone accepts that many women and minorities will face certain social pressures and barriers to their success that most whites or men will rarely if ever face. The social justice left…

What government spends the most on health care?

• Is it Canada or the United Kingdom, which are famous (or, if these stories are any indication, infamous would be a better description) for single-payer healthcare systems?
• Is it Sweden, the home of the cradle-to-grave welfare state?
• Or France, the land of the world’s most statist people?
• How about Italy or Greece, nations that have spent themselves into fiscal crisis?

Nope, nope, nope, and nope.

The United States spends more money, on a per-capita basis, than any of those countries. Here’s a chart from a Forbes analysis prepared by Doug Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy.

There are three big reasons why there’s more government-financed healthcare spending in the United States.

1. Richer nations tend to spend more, regardless of how they structure their healthcare systems.

2. As you can see at the 1:18 mark of this video, the United…