Utopia, you are standing in it!

By Ian Parry

With global leaders set to start signing the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change tomorrow—April 22 is Earth Day—at the United Nations in New York, countries will embark on the potentially difficult and contentious issue of setting prices for greenhouse gas emissions, most importantly carbon dioxide (CO₂). Our back of the envelope calculations show that most large emitters will need to charge anywhere from $50 to $100 per ton or more (in current prices) by 2030 to meet their commitments to reduce carbon emissions.

Questions about the handling of the OCR leak issue aren’t going away.  Last Saturday, I posted about some issues the Reserve Bank and MediaWorks should be asked about, flowing from a careful rereading of the relevant documents.

Since then there has been a variety of articles –  especially focused on MediaWorks – in the mainstream media.   Jenny Ruth had a piece on the NBR website “Were there other MediaWorks leaks from Reserve Bank lockups”.  Hamish Rutherford has a substantial and useful piece in the Dominion-Post this morning “MediaWorks Owes an Explanation” (although I have considerably more readers than he reports) and John Drinnan’s media column in the Herald today is largely devoted to media aspects of the leak and its aftermath.

It is perhaps understandable that the mainstream media has focused mainly on the media dimensions –  many of them are grumpy at losing the opportunities previously afforded by the lockups (although others…

An April 20th Guardianreport on Britain’s National Union of Students (NUS) election was titled ‘NUS elects first female black Muslim president after tense contest’.  However, the report by Jessica Elgot fails to inform readers that the new NUS president, BDS activist Malia Bouattia, represents another first – the first time NUS (a group representing the interests of 7 million British students) will be led by someone who’s supported terrorism and used thinly veiled antisemitic tropes.

Elgot’s report deals with the controversy surrounding Bouattia’s refusal to boycott ISIS for fear of stoking Islamophobia, as well as criticism surrounding her ‘accusation’ that University of Birmingham is “a Zionist outpost in British higher education” due it’s “large Jewish Society”. However, Elgot failed to note far worse comments by Bouattia revealed in a video circulated elsewhere in the media (including at theBBC) hours before her Guardian report was published.

Here’s the video, filmed at an…

James Kwak has a piece wondering why does mutual fund industry make large profits?

It is mainly because they continue to get high asset management charges. Why have people not ditched these active funds for index funds where charges are far lower?

Margret Thatcher transformed much in our national life. Now taken as the totemic figure of Tory Euroscpeticism, her attitudes to Europe were perhaps less fixed, and more interesting.

Thatcher often portrayed herself as an ideological politician, and her supports followed suit. Of course, she was just that. Certainly, it would impossible to understand Thatcherism without some understanding of monetarism and free markets, for example. To see Thatcher and Thatcherism in purely ideological terms would be to misread her, and misread her career.

In the first place it makes what appear like her inconsistencies as hard to account for. To square the Heathite milk-snatcher and slayer of grammar schools with the later Thatcher has always required explanation. In part, it is argued, she was on the ideological and political path that would lead her to monetarism, free markets and the radical Conservatism of the likes of Sir Keith Joseph or even Enoch…