Utopia, you are standing in it!

Here are two videos from last weekend’s Atlanta, Georgia convention of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group whose members include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and which has endorsed (and worked for) the election of Bernie Sanders. The organization is pretty much what it says it is,—a group that favors liberal democracy but with significant socialistic aspects like universal Medicare. As they say,

We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few. We are a political and activist organization, not a party; through campus and community-based chapters, DSA members use a variety of tactics, from legislative to direct action, to fight for reforms that empower working people.

So far so good, though I’m probably less socialistic than many of them (I’m not quite ready for “Medicare for All”, for instance). But I’m not above…

By Dan Sanchez writes at Real Clear Markets ‘Free Everything’ and Thomas Sowell’s First Law of Politics.Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The other night, a politician criticized Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for offering voters “free everything and impossible promises.” Remarkably, the critique came, not from a Republican fiscal conservative, but from a fellow Democrat during a primary debate. John Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland, said such policies were based on “fairy-tale economics.”

As economist Thomas Sowell wrote, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

So it was surprising to see a presidential candidate give a nod to the first lesson of economics and lay off the first lesson of politics for a moment.

The word “free” slips freely…

The House of Commons in Wilberforce’s day, by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson

Note: unless otherwise indicated, page numbers cited are from my book. For copyright reasons I am unable to quote directly from the Wilberforce MS in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, but the quotations are to be found in the book, fully referenced.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne is the latest Conservative to claim the credit of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery for his party. This is repeated so often than it is almost becoming an established ‘fact’. The reality is that the slave trade was abolished in 1807 by a  coalition government, and slavery itself was abolished in 1833 by a Whig administration. Alongside this false claim goes the assumption that William Wilberforce was a Tory.  I am going to suggest here that this is a problematic identification that risks misunderstanding both the man…

Not long ago, Germany led the charge on wind power, now its wind industry faces Armageddon. Subsidies have been cut. Market rules against intermittent sources have been tightened. Germany’s rural residents are on the brink of revolt, fed up with their bucolic landscapes being trashed and being forced to live with practically incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound. And a fair proportion of those neighbours forced to suffer these things are pursuing legal remedies against those ready to torment them.

All in all, it’s a perfect storm, with thousands of MWs worth of projects at a standstill and the hopes of eager developers left in tatters.

Needless to say, the rent-seekers that populate Germany’s wind industry are apoplectic.

German daily Die Welt reports on the desperate state of fear and self-loathing that’s struck amongst a group who thought that their sunny days would never end.

Collapse of Wind Power…