Utopia, you are standing in it!

• Dr Bryce Edwards writes – 

It’s truly astonishing the way that the Government has been able to suppress evidence of business donors gaining special access to Cabinet information.

Now that Stuart Nash has been fired from Cabinet for leaking sensitive information to individuals who funded his election campaign, the focus has shifted to why this information was kept from the public back in 2021. It turns out that the Prime Minister’s Office knew Nash had given privileged information to donors. Furthermore, the PM’s Office played a central role in preventing that information from being released to a journalist who specifically asked for it, and should have received it, under the provision of the Official Information Act.

The Nash scandal is now far wider than the ex-minister, and there are fundamental questions about the role of the Government in allegedly covering up the misuse of public office for vested interests. Labour…

Is the government imploding?

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has had to sack one of his more effective (and likeable) ministers, while another (from the Green Party) has insulted many of the adult population.

For  his  part, Hipkins had appeared to  be shaping  up well since he took over the top job. Furthermore, he has been succeeding in turning  around Labour’s plunging poll ratings.

But now with the Nash disaster and the Davidson insult, alongside the nationwide strikes of teachers, plus the cost-of-living crisis, it may take something of a political miracle to recover.

Stuart Nash was already on a final warning, when Stuffrevealed he had emailed business figures, including donors, detailing private Cabinet discussions. Hipkins said the most recent scandal was “inexcusable” and this incident alone would have seen Nash sacked.

He described the call as “black and white”, but he was still “gutted” to see Nash go.

Logic and reason don’t register with the wind and sun cult, nor does empathy or compassion. Happy to wreck your community by carpeting it with an endless sea of solar panels and spearing hundreds of bird-munching monsters into your backyard, it’s all care and no responsibility for these characters.

Overlooking the real environmental destruction caused by wind and solar is essential when you’re on a grand neo-Marxist economic reset. Practiced cognitive dissonance, or ‘double-think’ as Orwell called it.

John Robson singles out Greta Thunberg for a little attention on that score, thanks to her recent arrest for protesting against the wind turbines that are destroying the lives and livelihoods of the nomadic Sami reindeer herders of the frozen Arctic north.

Nooooo, not Rudolph
Climate Discussion Nexus
John Robson
8 March 2023

It would be easy to make fun of Greta Thunberg for joining a protest against a wind farm that…

Stolen shamelessly from a famous American article published in 1996.

The author, John Tierney, later said that he got more hate mail for that piece than anything else he or anybody ever wrote for the New York Times Magazine.

The article can be found here.

The article starts off with a scene of school kids gathering rubbish and shows the problem right from the start:

Miss Aponte finished emptying the last bag. “We’ve been learning about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle,” she said, and pointed at the pile.
”How does all this make you feel?”
”Baaaad,” the students moaned.
The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceeded the value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a…

The poll was conducted by Senate Opportunity Fund, a not-for-profit 501(c)(4) organization, to test public opinion regarding congressional bill H.R.1, called The Lower Energy Costs Act.  A national sample of 800 likely voters were contacted by phone during March 21 to 23, 2023, with questions regarding a number of public policy issues.  Responses are shown by self-identified political leanings, and by participants located in battleground states. Note that the final question showed about 80% approval by all cohorts.

While speaking last week at the Acton Institute in Michigan, I responded to a question about the perpetual motion machine of Keynesian economics.

For purposes of today’s column, let’s try to understand the Keynesian viewpoint.

First and foremost, they think spending drives the economy, whether consumer spending or government spending.

Critics like me argue that the focus should be on income and production. We want to increase saving, investment, entrepreneurship, and labor supply. Simply stated, money has to be earned before anyone spends it.

Keynesian economists, by contrast, think it is very important to distinguish between the long run and short run. In the long run, they generally would agree with the previous paragraph.

But they would argue that “stimulus” policies can be desirable in the short run if there is an economic downturn.

More specifically, they argue you can stop or minimize a…

On 22 February 2023,the judgment of the Special Immigration Appeals Commission(‘SIAC’ or ‘the Commission’) was published, upholding the Home Secretary’s decision to deprive Shamima Begum of her British citizenship under section 40(2) of the British Nationality Act 1981 (‘‘the BNA 1981’’) on the ground that it would be conducive to the public good to do so, because her return to the United Kingdom would present a national security risk.

The present post considers the judgment in relation to the issue of Ms Begum being a victim of trafficking and her rights under article 4 ECHR. There were nine grounds pleaded before SIAC. Particularly relevant to the issue of trafficking are grounds 1 and 2. Ground 1 was that the Secretary of State failed to take into account a mandatory relevant consideration and/or failed to undertake proper inquiries into it – namely that Ms Begum may have been a…

The Nashville Police have released bodycam footage of their officers taking on the woman who invaded a school and shot three adults and three little kids.

It’s an incredible six minutes from the time Officer Engelbert drives up to when he puts down the woman shooter. The last part includes footage from one of the other officers who also fired on the woman.

It’s also a massive, if implicit and unstated rebuke to the gutless Uvalde Police who loitered around for literally hours while little kids were being shot in that school and they talked of the need for body armour. You’ll not that these officers went in without it, knowing the risks but also knowing that time was of the essence.

Actually it’s also a silent rebuke to our crowd who stood around at Albert Park last Saturday watching the Trannies get their rocks off assaulting woman.

As…

What is one to think of a book whose closing line is a quote from John Dowd, who resigned as President Trump’s lawyer in March 2018, that states “the president is a fucking liar.”  The book in question is FEAR: TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE by Bob Woodward, and like his other books it is based on his own reporting, extensive interviewing, gathering information directly and indirectly from other publications and news accounts.  Woodward’s narrative covers the Trump presidential campaign through the resignation of Dowd, and presents, perhaps the most dysfunctional White House in American history.

Recently, the public has been bombarded with books dealing with the rise of the Trump presidency.  What sets Woodward’s monograph apart is the author’s reputation and history of access to sources that others do not employ.  The book presents an administration that Trump’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly describes as “crazy town,” and the…

This week I have tackled Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s exceptional account of the Trump administration, THE DIVIDER: TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE, 2017-2021.  As I was reading the book I tried not to pay attention to the news of an impending indictment of the former president, but it was impossible.  Baker and Glasser’s narrative are almost encyclopedic in its detail and as I pushed on words describing the Trump presidency kept going through my mind; scary, unimaginable, unprecedented, unbelievable, inconceivable, overwhelming, mind-boggling, etc.  Today I find myself comparing events and comments related to the Trump presidency with the barrage of racist, anti-Semitic tropes that the former president is currently bombarding the airwaves and it seems he is willing to foster violence and say or do anything that will protect him.  It is the Roy Cohn playbook on steroids and there is no daylight concerning Trump as president and…

There will be many posts summarizing the modern market design aspect of Roth and Shapley, today’s winners of the Econ Nobel. So here let me briefly discuss certain theoretical aspects of their work, and particularly my read of the history here as it relates to game theory more generally. I also want to point out that the importance of the matching literature goes way beyond the handful of applied problems (school choice, etc.) of which most people are familiar.

Pure noncooperative game theory is insufficient for many real-world problems, because we think that single-person deviations are not the only deviations worth examining. Consider marriage, as in Gale and Shapley’s famous 1962 paper. Let men and women be matched arbitrarily. Do we find such a set of marriages reasonable, meaning an “equilibrium” in some sense? Assuming that every agent prefers being married (to anyone) to being unmarried, then any set of…