Utopia, you are standing in it!

Libertarians often make the claim that taxation is a form of robbery, and some of them (especially the anarcho-capitalists) even assert that it is a form of slavery.

Since I’m an economist, I stick to less flamboyant arguments about the adverse impact of high marginal tax rates and double taxation.

But, based on a controversy in the Netherlands, maybe the more radical libertarians have a point.

There are some people in that country who think a race car driver who left the Netherlands and now lives in Monaco has an obligation to surrender half his income to the Dutch government.

Here are some excerpts from a report published by a sports website.

Max Verstappen, ever since he turned 18 has been living in Monaco which is known to be a tax haven. Essentially, Max Verstappen has not paid any tax whatsoever to the Dutch government for his earnings…

The Kings of England and the Kings of France had a history of rivalry, enmity and even being enemies of one another. There are often times when attempts at peace were made.

An early meeting between the kings of England and France when they’re trying to bring peace between the two realms occurred in 1396 rom October 27 to 30, 1396, when King Charles VI of France and King Richard II of England had meeting at Balinghem, Ardres near Calais to treat for peace during the Hundred Years’ War. The scale, splendour and pageantry were comparable to the later Field of the Cloth of Gold meeting held on the same site in 1520.

At this meeting a truce was agreed to, which was to last 28 years. As part of the truce, Richard agreed to marry Isabella of Valois, daughter of Charles VI of France, when she came of age…

I don’t trust The Spinoff, which I regard as the online, 21st century version of The Listener, hitting all the notes of whatever is currently trendy with the Left.

However, they have given space to Danyl Mclauchlan, the man behind the fabulous blog The Dim Post, which has sadly been locked in private limbo since Danyl got proper writing jobs. As much as I enjoy his serious essays, like this one on the Administrative State, his satire was brilliant and biting during the Key era (** see below for three examples). It’s no great surprise to see him now writing for…. The Listener.

And so I was willing to give this lengthy article a crack and I think you should too, as it covers the history of Seymour in ACT from its nadir in the 2017 polls to now: The fall and rise of David…

Last month, our Green Minister of Energy approved the doubling of the grid tariff (a charge for network use that the grid manager charges to the electricity users). The reason for this increase is the massive investment that the grid manager wants to do in the next decade.

These investments are expected to cost around 7 billion euro over the next decade. A big part of the investments goes to a sea cable to Denmarkand and to the UK, also cables to Germany, France and the Netherlands. Another part of the investment is the strengthening of the backbone that brings the Denmark/UK/offshore electricity inland (Ventilus). So, these investments have directly to do with the energy transition.

These costs will be billed to the end users (families and industry). There was some protest against this increase from the energy watchdog, consumer associations and the industry, but the Minister pushes through(translated…

If wind power were delivered at an affordable cost, 24 x 365, the wind industry might just justify the rampant slaughter of millions of birds and bats, including America’s iconic bald and golden eagles. However, given that wind power will only ever be delivered in chaotic fits and spurts all avian carnage is is entirely pointless.

Every butchered eagle is greeted by the wind power cult with a ‘couldn’t care less’ shrug; the wind industry switches to lies and obfuscation and – when the corpses can no longer be hidden and the lying fails – issue court proceedings in an effort to literally bury those facts (see our post here).

Cars, cats and skyscrapers don’t kill Eagles – like the critically endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, but 60m wind turbine blades with their tips travelling at 350Kph routinely smash them out of existence.

With thousands more of these things…

The new Three Waters amendment bill is intended to increase the number of water services entities to ten and introduce a Funding Agency but only makes a bad policy worse.

• Thomas Cranmer writes –

 The Three Waters legislation was back before Parliament this week in the form of an amendment bill which is intended to implement changes to the reforms announced by Prime Minister Hipkins and Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty in April.

Those changes came about as a result of the new Prime Minister’s “policy refresh” which asked McAnulty to consider options for reform of the Three Waters proposal, including timing and sequencing, the number of entities and boundaries and alternative approaches for Māori representation and involvement.

The relevant Cabinet Paper from February suggested that alternative approaches for Māori representation could include replicating in the Regional Representative Groups the structure proposed for the Regional Planning Committees in the…

Stardate: 41235.25
Original Air Date: October 12, 1987
Writers: Katharyn Powers & Michael Baron
Director: Russ Mayberry

“Yours is a different world.”

The Enterprise has arrived at Ligon II, a planet which is the source of a rare vaccine needed elsewhere on a Federation planet called Styris IV, currently suffering from an outbreak of the plague. Starfleet has instructed Picard to make a friendly visit to Ligon II in the hopes of entering into treaty negotiations in order to acquire the needed “medicinal substance.”

When the Enterprise enters standard orbit, a Ligonian party beams aboard the ship using its own technology. They offer Picard a small sample of the material needed for the vaccine. Here, the episode begins to go off the rails –while the Ligonians reside in a highly structured society similar to an ancient society on earth, they are also extremely proud, almost to the point…

Auckland surgeons have been told to prioritise Māori and Pacific Island patients:

Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first.

Several surgeons say they are upset by the policy, which was introduced in Auckland in February and gave priority to Māori and Pacific Island patients – on the grounds that they have historically had unequal access to healthcare.

Health officials stress that ethnicity is just one of five factors considered in deciding when a person gets surgery, and that it is an important step in addressing poor health outcomes within Māori and Pacific populations.

Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand has introduced an Equity Adjustor Score, which aims to reduce inequity in the system by using an algorithm to prioritise patients according to clinical priority, time spent on the waitlist, geographic location (isolated areas)…

Cinephiles congregate around the films of Stanley Kubrick the way history buffs are drawn to Alexander, Hitler and Napoleon. They were all-powerful control freaks who set out to remake the world in an image they saw in their own minds, and gained the power to attempt it.

So it was with Kubrick, a chess fanatic who came along too late to have grown up with the world-building games that connect new generations of Kubrick fans to his films and his career. He is admired by fans at least partly because of his dictatorial powers over the worlds he created in his films.

He was an Orson Welles who won absolute power over his career and his movies, a Spielberg with more grandiose visions and ambitions.

“Paths of Glory” was a brisk and biting World War I anti-war film, a politicized combat movie that reset the standard for trench warfare movies…

The big fiscal debate in the United States is whether the United States should become a European-style welfare state, which is something that automatically will happen over the next few decades in the absence of genuine entitlement reform.

Some people even want to accelerate this process.

My response is usually to ask why the United States should copy Europe when there is a wealth of evidence that living standards are substantially lower on that side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Not only are living standards lower, but there is also lots of evidence that Europe is suffering from anemic growth.

Which means the gap in living standards is getting wider every year.

At the risk of understatement, copying European fiscal policy seems like a big mistake.

If you’re still not convinced, here’s some more evidence. In his column for the U.K.-based Financial Times, Gideon Rachman compares the…

• Thomas Cranmer writes –  

They say a new broom sweeps clean, and that is certainly the case with the premiership of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. However, even he couldn’t have anticipated the rapid exodus of ministers under his premiership. The fallout has left reputations tarnished, with survivors like Kiri Allan grappling after a series of missteps. Meanwhile, Jan Tinetti’s fate hangs in the balance as the Privileges Committee investigates allegations of misleading the House regarding her office’s role in the release of school truancy data.

What has prompted this state of affairs and what does it mean for the next government?

Undoubtedly many of these mini-scandals can be traced back to former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her more relaxed and permissive approach to managing her ministers. During 2022 it was apparent that problems were beginning to mount.

By her own admission, much of the Prime Minister’s time during the…

There’s nothing even vaguely ‘clean’ or ‘green’ about wind power. An industry built on lies and running on subsidies can’t produce power as and when we need it, but is a master at producing environmental havoc at a global scale.

The wind and sun cult happily ignores the thousands of wind turbine blades and millions solar panels already being dumped in landfills. Apparently, their mountainous toxic waste legacy will be something for future generations to deal with.

Likewise, little notice is given to the millions of bird and bat carcasses diced and shredded by 40-70m blades with their outer tips travelling at over 350 km/h.

And the hundreds of dolphins and porpoises, and dozens of whales washing up along the Atlantic coast – victims of America’s offshore wind industry – don’t signify, either. Of course, the US government has given the wind industry a license to kill as many marine…

• Bryce Edwards writes –

Michael Wood has become a victim of his own complacency about conflicts of interest. He simply didn’t take integrity rules meant to protect the New Zealand political system from corruption seriously. And that’s rightly led to his downfall.

Wood’s complacency about corruption-prevention is hardly unique. The whole country has generally been far too relaxed about conflicts of interest in politics and public life.

And why wouldn’t we be? After all, we are told consistently that New Zealand is the least corrupt country on earth. Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perception Index always ranks us at or near #1.

Complacency about corruption

The problem is we’ve become conditioned to believe the hype, and not to trouble ourselves with the idea that conflicts of interest occur in our politics. The upshot is that New Zealand simply doesn’t have much in the way of significant safeguards against political corruption.

Edward III (November 13, 1312 – June 21, 1377), also known as Edward of Windsor before his accession, and was King of England and Lord of Ireland from January 1327 until his death in 1377.

Family

Edward III was the son of King Edward II of England, Lord of Ireland and his wife Princess Isabella of France. Her parents were King Philippe IV of France and Queen Joan I of Navarre,daughter of King Henri I of Navarre and Blanche of Artois.

Princess Blanche of Artois was the elder child and only daughter of Robert I, Count of Artois, and Matilda of Brabant. A fraternal niece of King Louis IX of France, Blanche was probably born in 1248. Blanche’s father,

Robert I (25 September 1216 – 8 February 1250), called the Good, was the first Count of Artois. He was the fifth (and second surviving) son of King Louis VIII of…