Utopia, you are standing in it!

Sawhill and Haskins (photo collage from Brookings)

The American Academy of Political and Social Science gives the Moynihan Prize each year to:

recognize social scientists and other leaders in the public arena who champion the use of informed judgment to advance the public good. The Moynihan Prize is intended to honor those who, like the late Senator, have promoted the use of sound analysis and social science research in policy-making, while contributing to the civility of public discourse and pursuing a bipartisan approach to society’s most pressing problems.

This year’s winners are Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, longtime fellows at the Brookings Institution, specializing in poverty policy. Now that classes are over I’m going to head downtown to hear their speeches.

Both have appeared frequently on the pages of Family Inequality. Looking back at that record, I see that I’ve been pretty negative. Here are the highlights, in chronological order:

Four-out-of-five myths…

Scottish offshore wind project [image credit : urbanrealm.com]
The project is certainly on the ropes but a knockout punch may not yet have been applied, as the report explains.
H/T Daily Telegraph

A £2 billion offshore wind farm is set to be scrapped after it lost a Government subsidy contract due to an ongoing legal challenge over its impact on birds.

The proposed Neart na Gaoithe wind farm would see 64 turbines built nine miles off the coast of Fife and was one of only two offshore wind projects to win a subsidy contract from the Government last year.

October 2008

When the voters learn what we know about John Key – or what we will soon know once Mike Williams returns from Melbourne – they will be appalled. We now know what the H in H-Fee stands for. It’s “Hasta la vista, baby!”

July 2009

The honeymoon is finally over. John Key is an empty vessel, a man without any convictions, a rich prick who will say anything to be elected. We are in the midst of a global financial crisis, but let’s focus on issues of character and integrity, and not allow ourselves to be distracted by all that other stuff.

August 2011

The honeymoon is finally over. There is a mood of change in the air. The public are falling out of love with John Key. Everywhere I go people tell me they think John Key is an untrustworthy unprincipled swine. His lies are finally coming…

After an all-night debate, the Brazilian Senate voted today to begin impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff. Impeachment was once a powerful tool for MPs in our own parliament. Here Dr Andrew Thrush, editor of the House of Lords 1603-1660 section, discusses the 17th century revival of impeachment…

Impeachment was a judicial procedure, carried out in the name of the king, whereby those suspected of serious misconduct in office were accused by the House of Commons and judged by the House of Lords. It first emerged towards the end of the reign of Edward III, in 1376, when it was used to attack the Lord Chamberlain, William, 4th Lord Latimer. It originated in a well-established procedure in the common law courts, whereby a group of litigants would lay a single charge in the King’s name. Penalties for those judged guilty included loss of office, fines and imprisonment…

Can we get an overview of the occupations of the persons associated with the Panama Papers? Well … that might be difficult, but we can get a biased plot by using the listing in Wikidata, where persons associated with the Panama Papers seems to be tagged and where their occupation(s) is listed. It produces the plot below.

It is fairly straightforward to construct such a bubble chart given the new plotting capabilities in the Wikidata Query Service. Dutch Wikipedian Gerard Meijssen seems to have been the one who has entered the information in Wikidata linking Panama Papers to persons via the ‘significant event‘ property. How complete he yet has managed to do this I do not know. Our Danish Wikipedian Ole Palnatoke Andersen set up a page on the Danish Wikipedia at Diskussion:Panama-papirerne/Wikidata tabulating with the nice Listeria tool of Magnus Manske. Modifying Ole’s…

If nothing else, our leftist friends deserve credit for chutzpah.

All around the world, we see concrete evidence that big government leads to stagnation and decay, yet statists repeatedly argue that further expansions in taxes and spending will be good for growth.

During Obama’s recent state-of-the-union address, he pushed for class warfare policies to finance bigger government, claiming such policies would be an “investment” in the future.

But it’s not just Obama. Hillary Clinton, on several occasions (see here, here, here, and here), has explicitly argued that higher tax rates and bigger government are good for growth.

The statists at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (financed with our tax dollars) actually argue that higher taxes and more spending will somehow enable more prosperity, both in the developing world and in the industrialized world.

And some left-wing “charities” are getting…

Economists certainly don’t speak with one voice, but there’s a general consensus on two principles of public finance that will lead to a more competitive and prosperous economy.

• Lower tax rates are more conducive to work and entrepreneurship than higher tax rates.
• Reducing the tax bias against capital formation will improve growth by increasing saving and investment.

To be sure, some left-leaning economists will say that high tax rates and more double taxation are nonetheless okay because they believe there is an “equity vs. efficiency” tradeoff and they are willing to sacrifice some prosperity in hopes of achieving more equality.

I disagree, mostly because there’s compelling evidence that the left’s approach ultimately leads to less income for the poor, but this is a fair and honest debate. Both sides agree that lower rates and less double taxation will produce more growth (though they’ll disagree on how much growth) and…

Summary: Paul Krugman made a remarkable admission for a political columnist in America, one that points the way to a path for the reform of America. He took a step towards seeing that there is no “reality-based party” in America.

“… first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
— Matthew 7:5.

Today both Left and Right routinely “create their own reality”. The Right invented and perfected this methodology to mobilize their followers (via engines of disinformation such as Fox News and the Washington Times). The Left has copied them, making this the primary tactic for their crusades. The most obvious example is the fight against climate change, where the Left has liberated themselves from dependence on the consensus of climate scientists (as expressed through the IPCC and major climate agencies). Unusual weather (no matter…