Utopia, you are standing in it!

There’s an old legal saying that goes something like, “When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts; when the law is on your side, pound on the law; when neither are on your side, pound on the table.”

We’ve heard a lot of table-pounding in response to our discussion of sugar taxes in Jenesa’s report. Most of it points out that we’re a member-based organisation and darkly hints that member interests guided our pens.

John Roughan’s column this week is very much on point.

If you wonder why social research never produces unexpected results like real science, so do I. Be that as it may, the researchers share their findings in academic journals and convinced of its importance they march fearlessly out of their faculty into the public domain.

There, something strange happens. They are lionised by the media. Public health campaigns make compelling news because…

President Obama intervened in 2011 to destabilize the leaders of two confirmed United States allies, Libya in North Africa and Egypt in the Middle East. He achieved his objectives with the brutal assassination of Colonel Gaddafi and the caged trial of Hosni Mubarak. Events have followed precisely predictable paths since the initiation of hostilities against these two pro-Western leaders.

Gaddafi’s Libya could not possibly expect to survive the combined assault of NATO forces, even given the ragtag, undisciplined rebels that rose up against his regime. Mubarak could not outbid the United States in its successful effort to deploy taxpayers’ monies in  bribing a corrupt Egyptian military to shift allegeiance in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood and its anti-Western collaborators. So spring promise inevitably turned into glorious summer for those who seek chaos in the Middle East.

Glorious summer, however, turned out to be brief indeed. Predictably, the fall has brought reality, in the…

Let’s be very clear – many on the British far-left (and far too many Muslims unfortunately) don’t believe the state of Israel should exist.

They think it is a racist state akin to apartheid South Africa and it needs to be destroyed. They believe the displacement of Palestinians as the state was created is an historic injustice that can only be righted by – one way or another – abolishing the Jewish state.

(The picture is me [left] as part of an NUS Executive delegation that visited Israel/Palestine in 1978 – also in the picture are Trevor Phillips and David Aaronovitch)

I just read a great op-ed by Tim Padgett called “Without The U.S. To Scapegoat, Latin America Discovers Its Inner Godzillas.” Padgett argues that President Maduro is running out of scapegoats to blame for the debacle that is currently the Venezuelan economy:

“When a U.S. president is eating ropa vieja in Havana and dancing tango in Buenos Aires, Latin American leaders can’t seem to find their handy Star-Spangled Scapegoat anywhere in their desk drawers. Instead, from the Río Grande to the Río de la Plata, Washington’s new and less imperialista engagement with Latin America has helped expose the region’s inner Godzillas.”

As for the region’s “inner Godzillas,” Padgett is referring to a recent meme about Venezuela’s electricity crisis.  Here is his description:

“A new Internet meme offers him a culprit: Godzilla! It shows the slimy monster destroying Venezuela’s power lines under a caption that reads: “Government Finds Out…

In my recent post about Keynes’ “A Tract on Monetary Reform” I quoted Brad Delong for saying that Tract is the best monetarist book ever written. I also wrote that I disagreed with Brad on this.

That led Brad to respond to me by asking: “What do you think is a better monetarist book than the Tract?”

I think that is a very fair question, which I tried to answer in the comment section of my post, but I want to repeat the answer here. So here we go (the answer has been slightly edited):

One could of course think I would pick something by Friedman and I certainly would recommend reading anything he wrote on monetary matters, but in fact my pick for the best monetarist book would probably be Leland Yeager’s “Fluttering Veil”.

In terms of something that is very readable I would clearly choose Friedman’s

Scott Sumner yesterday posted a excellent overview of some key Market Monetarist positions. I initially thought I would also write a comment on what I think is the main positions of Market Monetarism but then realised that I already done that in my Working Paper on Market Monetarism from last year – “Market  Monetarism – The  Second  Monetarist  Counter-­revolution”. 

My fundamental view is that I personally do not mind being called an monetarist rather than a Market Monetarist even though I certainly think that Market Monetarism have some qualities that we do not find in traditional monetarism, but I fundamentally think Market Monetarism is a modern restatement of Monetarism rather than something fundamentally new.

I think the most important development in Market Monetarism is exactly that we as Market Monetarists stress the importance of expectations and how expectations of monetary policy can be read directly from market pricing. At…

Paul Krugman has a very interesting blog post on the relative economic performance of the US and the euro zone.

Krugman starts out with this graph.

Krugman then goes on to give a complete (Market) Monetarist explanation for this development:

Things really go off track only in 2011-2012, when the U.S. recovery continues but Europe slides into a second recession…

…What was happening in 2011-2012? Europe was doing a lot of austerity. But so, actually, was the U.S., between the expiration of stimulus and cutbacks at the state and local level. The big difference was monetary: the ECB’s utterly wrong-headed interest rate hikes in 2011, and its refusal to do its job as lender of last resort as the debt crisis turned into a liquidity panic, even as the Fed was pursuing aggressive easing.

This is of course what Market Monetarists have been saying forever – we even have a…

When the wind industry and its worshippers start chanting their mantras about the ‘wonders’ of wind, it isn’t long before they start preaching about the examples purportedly set by the Europeans; and, in particular, the Nordic nations.

That the great wind power fraud was driven by Denmark’s struggling turbine maker, Vestas probably has a fair bit to do with the worshippers’ fanatic-cult-like veneration of Scandinavia.

But, hold the phone?

It seems that economics works in precisely the same fashion in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway, as just about everywhere else (save Cuba and North Korea, say?).

When you’re trying to sell a ‘product’ with NO commercial value, the ‘business’ – for want of a better word – can only be about what you can extract from gullible/compliant governments (and unwitting power consumers), in the form of massive and endless subsidies.

Now, in the wind industry’s heartland, the Danes…