Utopia, you are standing in it!

When Queen Victoria died on January 22, 1901, Edward became King of the United Kingdom, Emperor of India and, in an innovation, King of the British Dominions. He chose to reign under the name of Edward VII, instead of Albert Edward—the name his mother had intended for him to use—declaring that he did not wish to “undervalue the name of Albert” and diminish the status of his father with whom the “name should stand alone”.

The numeral VII was occasionally omitted in Scotland, even by the national church, in deference to protests that the previous Edwards were English kings who had “been excluded from Scotland by battle”. J. B. Priestley recalled, “I was only a child when he succeeded Victoria in 1901, but I can testify to his extraordinary popularity. He was in fact the most popular king England had known since the earlier 1660s.”

As king, Edward played a…

Yesterday, I shared part of an interview that focused on Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s scheme to give more subsidies to colleges, thus transferring money from poorer taxpayers to richer taxpayers.

Here’s the other part of the interview, which revolved around a very bad idea to copy nations that impose price controls on prescription drugs.

In some sense, this is a debate on price controls, which have a long history (going all the way back to Ancient Rome) of failure.

But my comments focused primarily on the adverse consequences of Pelosi’s approach.

And if you want more details, Doug Badger explained how Pelosi’s approach would backfire in a report for the Heritage Foundation. He starts with an explanation of the legislation.

The Lower Drug Costs Now Act of 2019 (H.R. 3), introduced last week with the backing of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would double down on the failures of…

There are some issues – such as class-warfare tax rates and the minimum wage – where intelligent people on the left will privately admit being wrong (or at least they will admit adverse consequences).

Another example is rent control.

Indeed, it’s so obvious that imposing price controls on housing will create shortages that some folks on the left even admit publicly that it’s a bad idea.

Yet leftist politicians are drawn to the policy for the simple reason that renters outnumber landlords.

Simply stated, they’re willing to impose considerable damage so long as they can grab a few extra votes.

Let’s look at some evidence about the folly of rent control, and we’ll start with a hot-off-the-presses column by Ryan Mills for National Review.

Democratic leaders in Minnesota’s capital city are scrambling for solutions after developers put several large projects on hold across St. Paul in the wake…

One of the (many) disillusioning aspects of the Covid response of the New Zealand government (politicians and public service) has been the apparent total absence of any use of cost-benefit analysis techniques to help inform thinking about policy responses. No cost-benefit analysis on any aspect of the policy response has ever been published (or hinted at), on the couple of occasions I’ve OIAed any such analysis (just to be sure) agencies have been quick to deny any such analysis exists, and when one independent agency (the Productivity Commission) did do a little exercise along these lines at one point last year it was shunned as almost “unclean”. And if there had been any slight excuse early last year about “no time” – not convincing even then – officials have had 22 months now to get toolkits in place. But they (and their political masters) seem to prefer seat-of-the-pants thinking, all…

Diagram showing solid-body rotation of the Earth with respect to a stationary spin axis due to true polar wander. [Credit: Wikipedia] The researchers say their finding ‘challenges the notion that the spin axis has been largely stable over the past 100 million years.’
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We know that true polar wander (TPW) can occasionally tilt whole planets and moons relative to their axes, but it’s not entirely clear just how often this has happened to Earth, says ScienceAlert.

Now a new study presents evidence of one such tilting event that occurred around 84 million years ago – when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

Researchers analyzed limestone samples from Italy, dating back to the Late Cretaceous period (100.5 to 65.5 million years ago), looking for evidence of shifts in the magnetic record that would point towards an occurrence of TPW.

Bacteria fossils trapped in the rock, forming chains of…

Charles, Prince of Wales (Charles Philip Arthur George; born November 14, 1948), is the heir apparent to the British throne as the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II.

Charles was born in Buckingham Palace on November 14, 1948, during the reign of his maternal grandfather King George VI, as the first child of Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He was baptised there by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, on December 15, 1948.

The death of his grandfather and the accession of his mother as Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 made Charles the heir apparent. As the monarch’s eldest son, he automatically inherited the titles Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. Charles attended his mother’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953.

Prince Charles was created Prince…

If the Climate Industrial Complex gets its way, kiss goodbye to reliable and affordable energy. The apparent answer all our woes is more of the same: endless subsidies to hopelessly chaotic wind and solar, with even greater subsidies to pie-in-the-sky ‘green’ hydrogen and insanely expensive giant lithium batteries.

If you’re not already suffering the consequences of policies that favour meaningless weather-dependent wind and solar over meaningful coal, gas and nuclear power generation systems, you soon will be. Brits, Germans, Californians and South Australians already know what it is to suffer crippling power prices and unreliable supplies.

After the climate cult jamboree in Glasgow, crony capitalists and rent-seekers have zeroed in on net-zero emissions targets as the next great opportunity for government-mandated racketeering.

Which means this is as good as time as any to get a grip on what net-zero madness will cost us all.

Aynsley Kellow is Professor Emeritus of…