Utopia, you are standing in it!

As part of my annual “hopes and fears” column, I expressed optimism at the start of 2021 that Joe Biden would steer the country back toward free trade after the economically debilitating protectionist mistakes of the Trump era. I’ve been bitterly disappointed. On this issue, he’s another Donald Trump. I’m not the only one to […]

The Job-Destroying Effect of Trump-Biden Protectionism

Though both England and Scotland recognised Anne as their queen, only the Parliament of England had settled on Sophia, Princess-Electress of Hanover, as the heir presumptive. The Parliament of Scotland (the Estates) had not formally settled the succession question for the Scottish throne. In 1703, the Estates passed a bill declaring that their selection for […]

September 18, 1714: King George I of Great Britain arrived in England. Part II.

New Zealand is at a constitutional crossroad. In one direction is liberal democracy. In the other is co-government; power-sharing between one ethnic group and all others. ACT will end co-government and restore universal human rights in New Zealand. The current government is presenting New Zealanders with a false choice. It says that if we want…

DAVID SEYMOUR: NZ at a Constitutional Crossroad

Below is my column in The Hill on the impeachment inquiry and one striking pattern among the alleged crimes facing Hunter Biden: they all served to conceal the influence peddling efforts to sell access or influence to his father. The investigation and charging of Hunter Biden has, thus far, been strikingly surgical in avoiding this […]

How The Surgical Charging of Hunter Biden Ignores a Pattern of Concealment

George I (May 28, 1660 – June 11, 1727) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from August 1, 1714 and ruler of the Prince-Electorate of Hanover within the Holy Roman Empire from January 23, 1698 until his death in 1727. He was the first British monarch of the House of Hanover as the most […]

September 18, 1714: King George I of Great Britain arrived in England. Part I.

This week my ECONS102 class is covering externalities. An externality is the uncompensated impact of the actions of one person on the wellbeing of a third party. Externalities can be negative (they make the third party worse off) or positive (they make the third party better off). We call them externalities because they lie outside…

Forestry slash, externalities, and the Coase Theorem

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson 688 pages Simon & Schuster Published: Sept 2023 “Elon Musk” is Walter Isaacson’s long-anticipated biography of the mercurial entrepreneur behind SpaceX, Tesla and, most recently, the website formerly known as Twitter.  Isaacson is an author, journalist and professor at Tulane University who has written popular biographies of Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, […]

Review of “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson

Battle of the “experts”. Who are Newshub’s “Highly Regarded Economists” trying to discredit the Nats? The economics news has been dominated the past couple of weeks by Newshub insisting that the National Party’s tax plan doesn’t “add up”. Here’s the headline the outlet has been running, “National’s foreign buyer tax costings likely have a roughly…

ROB MacCULLOCH: Who are Newshub’s “Highly Regarded Economists” trying to discredit the Nats?

It is a long time now that I wanted to have a deeper look into the cost of systems based on intermittent power sources, but didn’t know where to begin. That is why I was very interested when I came across a cleantechnica article by Georg Nitsche who created a renewable electricity calculator in order […]

Looking into a 100 percent Renewable Electricity Calculator for the United States: overview

It is remarkable but true that per capita US economic growth has hewed close to a trendline of 2% per year for the last 150 years. Here’s a recent figure showing this pattern from Charles Jones in his paper “The Outlook for Long-Term Economic Growth,” as prepared for the annual symposium at Jackson Hole hosted…

The Remarkable Steadiness of US Economic Growth

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson 688 pages Simon & Schuster Published: Sept 2023 Despite my bias against biographies of people whose lives are still unfolding, Walter Isaacson’s review of Elon Musk proved irresistibly tempting. I was lured by the prospect of gaining insight into Musk’s entrepreneurial magic and the possibility of understanding what makes this […]

Unrelated Reading: “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson

Operation Market Garden was a failed operation by the allied forces, which would have dire consequences for the Netherlands in the winter that followed. Irish journalist and author, Cornelius Ryan wrote the book “A Bridge too Far” about the operation. Market Garden was divided in two parts. Market: airborne forces of Lieutenant General Lewis H. […]

Market Garden

Wind and solar have lost their ‘social licence’; the masses no longer believe the ‘clean and green’ propaganda. Wrecked communities, wrecked environments and wrecked economies are too difficult to hide or spin away. Once people get a grip on the great wind and solar scam, their conversion is irreversible. The original trope had it that […]

Clean, Safe & Reliable Nuclear Power the Environment’s Best Friend

James Francis Edward Stuart (June 10, 1688 – January 1, 1766), nicknamed the Old Pretender by Whigs, was the son of King James II-VII of England, Scotland and Ireland, and his second wife, Mary of Modena, (Maria Beatrice d’Este), the second (but eldest surviving) child of Alfonso IV, Duke of Modena, and his wife, Laura […]

September 16, 1701: Prince James, the Prince of Wales claims the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland. Part I.

The problem with taking GST off of food has little to do with the revenue cost of the policy, it’s that it’s just dumb to begin with. Any gains to households are smaller than those that could be achieved through other instruments, and there’s long-term cost to the integrity of the tax system. So I […]

ERIC CRAMPTON: Foreign buyer taxes