Utopia, you are standing in it!

For some reason the other day I was prompted to have a look at how many research papers the Reserve Bank had published in recent years. This chart resulted.

Only one in the last two years, and that one paper – published last February – had five authors, four of whom worked for other institutions (overseas). It was really quite staggering. It wasn’t, after all, as if there had been no interesting issues, policy puzzles or the like over the last two years. It wasn’t as if universities had suddenly stepped up to the mark and were producing a superfluity of research on New Zealand macro and banking/financial regulation issues. It wasn’t even as if the Bank had suddenly been put on tight rations by a fiscally austere government – in fact, the latest Funding Agreement threw money and the Bank and staff numbers have blown out. Rather, or so…

The dates December 5 through the 7^th, 1941 mark the parameters of the most consequential week of the 20^th century or perhaps any other time in history. It was during that week that the Soviet Union began a major counter offensive against the Nazis who were threatening Moscow, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Hitler declared war on the United States. It was a perilous time for the British who had endured Dunkirk, the Luftwaffe’s blitz over London and other cities, fears of Japanese attacks against British held territories in Asia, and Churchill’s fear that the only thing that could save his island empire – the entrance of the United States into the war against Germany would not occur as Washington would now focus on Japan after Pearl Harbor. The event that saved the British was the Nazi dictator’s declaration of war against the United States, an…

Western Nations are determined to prevent the World’s poorest from having cheap and reliable energy, a fact laid plain at the Glasgow gabfest, where the Climate Industrial Complex did its best to ensure that the likes of India will never have any hope of dragging themselves out of agrarian misery and grinding poverty.

The wind and solar obsessed in the first world are quite prepared to ensure that it stays that way. With economic development agencies peddling ridiculously expensive solar panels – seen as ‘fake electricity’ by those lumbered with it – and forcing tinpot governments to sign up to costly and pointless wind and/or solar power schemes, the ratio of haves to have-nots is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

More than a billion humans struggle through daily life without access to power at all, and two billion more are limited to a meagre trickle…

The United Kingdom Constitution Monitoring Group published itsfirst annual reportin 2021. It described the UK Government as ‘set upon legislating over a range of substantial matters with a constitutional dimension’, with its overall programme being ‘notable for its scale, the speed with which it is being implemented’ and this being ‘far from a model of good practice in constitutional change’ (p5).

A significant aspect of the ‘constitutional dimension’ of such changes is that they expand executive power in a number of different ways. This post presents a brief summary of key expansions of executive power via legislation introduced to or passed in the Westminster Parliament in 2021. It then assesses the substance of these expansions, arguing that two key themes emerge. First, that there is an increase in the executive’s capacity to use coercive force, and, second, there is a reduction in the accountability of the executive to…