Utopia, you are standing in it!

In a post a couple of weeks ago I outlined some reasons for scepticism about the case for increasing the OCR by 50 basis points specifically at the then-forthcoming OCR review. My point was mostly about the data hiatus – the OCR decision would be taking place almost 3 months after the most recent CPI data and more than 2 months since the last main labour market data. It seemed (and seems) foolish for the MPC to stick to its schedule of review dates, including the long summer holiday it will give itself after next month’s MPS. It remains highly problematic that New Zealand governments have penny-pinched on core statistics and as a result we have such slow and infrequent macro data (we got the September quarter CPI inflation data yesterday, Switzerland by contrast released September month data on 3 October).

But there were also some considerations in the macroeconomics

Crushing power costs and power rationing follow wind and solar reliance, like night follows day. Texas is no exception.

Bullying power consumers to stop consuming power is par for the course; chiselling taxpayers to cover the exorbitant cost of making up for power shortfalls when the wind stops blowing and/or the sun sets, is grist for the mill.

Bill Peacock explains it all below.

Texas Grid Reliability: Gone With the Wind (and solar)
Master Resource
Bill Peacock
14 September 2022

“The solution to keeping the lights on in Texas is … to stop politicians and regulators from micromanaging the Texas energy market. Texas politicians could do this by ending renewable energy subsidies in the state and making renewable companies pay for the costs they impose on the rest of us from their federal subsidies.”

As everyone knows, Texas had the worst blackout in its history during the winter of 2021…

October is Black History Month in the UK, as institutions like the History of Parliament attempt to re-insert and highlight the Black experience into fields of history previously overlooking this. Here, we hear from Helen Wilson, PhD candidate with the History of Parliament and Open University, who is researching the Black and Mixed Ethnicity Presence in British Politics, 1750-1850. As Helen explains, despite significant barriers to their inclusion, there are some active and engaged Black voters to be seen in this period…

There has been a marked change in the research into Black political participation in the eighteenth century; a topic now proving as rich an area of study as that of the participation of women. In the wake of modern scandals like the Windrush scandal the push for a more inclusive British political and social history is clear to see. In the last 20 years significant scholarship into Black…

Marlo Thomas explains in his Real Clear Energy article Expensive Energy Is a Core Feature, Not a Bug, of Biden’s Climate Agenda.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was being generous by describing interventionism’s nasty side-effects as “unintended.” Some younger interventionists are naïve, and know not what they do, but the older, street-smart captains of progressive politics understand the harms their policies entail. For them, the adverse consequences are features, not bugs.

The only downside is the risk of political retribution at the polls.

That’s the predicament in which the Biden administration now finds itself. It is also the theme of “Energy Inflation Was by Design,” a new report by supply-chain consultant Joseph Toomey.
[Synopsis is in previous post Energy Inflation Playbook]

President Biden and congressional Democrats want to replace fossil fuels with a “zero-carbon” energy system. Their

One aspect of the British Monarchy is hereditary succession. However, that is not the only rule governing the succession to the crown. There are laws controlling who can legally inherit the throne.

I often will see people claim that some descendant of either a King of England or a scion of the royal family is the rightful monarch of England or the United Kingdom due to hereditary succession. These claims mistakenly believe that hereditary descent is the main issue controlling the succession to the crown.

His Majesty, the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

In the beginning of the monarchy, in the times of the Anglo-Saxon period prior to the Norman Conquest, the throne was elective. Succession was governed by the Witan.

The Witan (lit. ’wise men’) was the king’s council in Anglo-Saxon England from before the seventh century until the 11th century. It was composed…

The renewable energy debacle in Germany means that it won’t axe its nuclear plants and is likely to start building more of them, like their French neighbours.

The French, of course, set the benchmark for generating clean, safe and reliable nuclear power; they’ve been doing so for nearly 60 years and still get over 75% of their electricity from their nuclear plants, and export large volumes of what they generate to power starved Germans and Brits.

Meanwhile, Australia sits as the only G20 Nation to not employ nuclear power. With the power pricing and supply catastrophe out in Europe, Australia’s legislated ban on nuclear power looks positively insane.

Australia holds the world’s largest uranium reserves and, despite its shifting policy of limiting the number of mines and states that have banned them, is the world’s third-largest uranium exporter. Happy to export it, but too dim to use it…

A conversation about the similarities and differences between taxes and social security contributions – my son is studying economics – prompted me to head off to the OECD website and get the data on total taxes and social security contributions as a share of GDP.

Here is what I found for 2021 (the OECD didn’t have this level of data for its Latin American members, and I omitted Ireland and Luxembourg, as their GDP numbers aren’t a suitable basis for these purposes).

That is the snapshot for the most recent year, 2021, and here is how New Zealand has compared to Australia and to the OECD median (countries in the first chart) for the period back to 1995 when the data are comprehensive.

To be honest, I was a little surprised. I guess time passes and impressions need updating from time to time: the story I had been walking around…

World energy markets keep defying the wind and solar cult’s prediction that coal’s days are over. The meme has it that ‘coal is dead’, but in reality it hasn’t suffered so much as a flesh wound.

Indeed, thermal coal prices are off the charts, with record demand driving record prices: Australian thermal coal prices hit $US$400 ($548 a tonne) in March, with prices still on the rise.

The black stuff remains critical because it does something that sunshine and breezes can never do; fed into coal-fired power plants (such as the Isogo HELE plant in Japan depicted above) it provides cheap and reliable power around-the-clock, irrespective of the weather. The reason that coal remains in constant (and indeed rising) demand is that simple.

The Australian’s Greg Sheridan picks up the thread below.

Coal is booming but you won’t hear about it at the ABC
The Australian
Greg Sheridan
3 October…

Because of her support for lower tax rates, I was excited when Liz Truss became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Especially since her predecessor, Boris Johnson, turned out to be an empty-suit populist who supported higher taxes and a bigger burden of government spending.

But I’m not excited anymore.

Indeed, it’s more accurate to say that I’m despondent since the Prime Minister is abandoning (or is being pressured to abandon) key parts of her pro-growth agenda.

For details, check out this Bloombergreport, written by Julian Harris, about the (rapidly disappearing) tax-cutting agenda of the new British Prime Minister.

Westminster’s most hard-line advocates of free markets and lower taxes are looking on in despair as their agenda crumbles… When Liz Truss became prime minister just over five weeks ago, she promised to deliver a radical set of policies rooted in laissez-faire economics — an attempt to boost…

To be honest I was never a great fan of Charlie Chaplin. I was always more of a fan of the Laurel and Hardy type of humour. I find that Charlie Chaplin’s movies dated quite badly compared to the aforementioned Laurel and Hardy movies.

However there is one notable exception. There was one Chaplin movie that has stood the test of time. That movie of course is “the Great Dictator”, released on October 15,1940.

It is relevant now as it was in 1940.

The film is a satire on Adolf Hitler, played by the main character Adenoid Hynkel. The story is based on Hynkel looking exactly like “a Jewish barber”: both are played by Charles Chaplin. But it begins with a notice: “Any resemblance between Hynkel the dictator and the Jewish barber is purely co-incidental”

Chaplin spent two years developing the script and began filming in September 1939, six days…