Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Reserve Bank has a consultation document out inviting public feedback on the idea – to which they express themselves sympathetic – of the Bank possibly, at some stage in the future, issuing a new central bank digital currency, to which members of the general public would have access (unlike their existing wholesale digital currency – exchange settlement accounts – that only (some) banks currently have).

I wrote a post last week on Barry Eichengreen’s recent seminar for the University of Auckland and some of my own ideas, notably the idea that there is little reason to suppose there would be much demand for such a product (unless subsidised or underpinned by other distorting regulation).

Submissions close on Monday – at the curious hour of 10am. I spent a few hours this afternoon jotting down some thoughts as a submission. No doubt various bankers will make longer, more detailed, and…

How wrong I was, as it turned out, in all my preconceived notions about this journey.
(Remote People, page 97)

After weeks of reading heavy factual and often horrifying history about Africa, it was like getting into a warm bubble bath to read some Evelyn Waugh. He is a wonderful writer, clear and smooth – admittedly with occasional old-fashioned locutions and sometimes antiquated word order which makes you realise he was closer to the Victorians than to us – but he is nonetheless a deep pleasure to read because of his calm, clear, quietly cynical, drily humorous attitude. For his sophistication and style. For his combination of super-civilised manners and bright heartlessness. For his permanent alertness to the absurdity of life.

We sat in the open under an orange-tree and drank chianti and gossiped about the coronation, while many hundreds of small red ants overran the table and…

Notwithstanding the $billions in subsidies directed to wind and solar, their joint contribution to energy demand amounts to little more than a rounding error.

Oil and gas still account for more than 80% of world energy demand and talk about an ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future, remains just that.

Energy matters, and what truly matters is that it’s available all day, every day, irrespective of the weather. Which is precisely why wind and solar will never amount to meaningful power sources.

Here’s a few numbers from the team at Jo Nova explaining why.

After 26 COP meetings we are a Fossil Fueled World: Coal, oil gas give us 80% of the energy on Earth
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
5 November 2021

This is what Decarbonization Failure looks like:

After three decades of effort, twenty-six glorious international COP meetings, six IPCC reports, and the installation…

It’s not often (actually, only once) that I share a video lasting nearly two hours. But this video – revolving around the intellectualrivalry between pro-market Hayek and pro-intervention Keynes – is an excellent summary of 20th-century economic policy.

We learn about the growth of socialism and communism during and after World War I.

This then led economists from the Austrian school – including Hayek – to explain why that approach (genuine socialism, meaning government ownership, central planning, and price controls) was doomed to failure.

But other forms of intervention and redistribution gained new adherents, especially when Keynes argued that the Great Depression was the fault of capitalism (for what it’s worth, I think the video fails to include analysis on how the New Deal actually lengthened and deepened the downturn).

Unfortunately, the Keynesian narrative dominated and the video informs us that the people of the…

A couple of years ago, to help build the case against socialism, I showed how West Germany enjoyed much faster growth and much more prosperity than East Germany.

The obvious lesson to be learned from this example of “anti-convergence” is that market-oriented economies out-perform state-controlled economies.

I want to revisit this topic because I recently dealt with someone who claimed that government spending via the Marshall Plan deserves the credit for West Germany’s post-war economic renaissance.

What does the evidence say? Was foreign aid from the United States after World War II a key driver (for Keynesian or socialist reasons) of the West German economy.

The answer is no.

Professor David Henderson explained the role of the Marshall Plan for Econlib.

After World War II the German economy lay in shambles. …less than ten years after the war people already were talking about the German economic miracle…

“Born and educated in this country, I glory in the name of Briton,” declared the new king to the House of Representatives upon his succession. George III was proud to announce he was the first British-born king since the reign of the Stuarts. He was also the first Hanoverian monarch to speak native English, in fact, George III never even visited Hanover during his lifetime. He viewed himself as a man of the people, a noble and virtuous patriot-king, an Englishman to the core, although his opponents rarely missed an opportunity to brand him an alienating tyrant hell-bent on subverting the constitution. Indeed it is common today to associate George III with tyranny, particularly in the United States. Perhaps the sobering effects of several centuries has muted this controversial king’s legacy to some degree, but a growing modern revisionist reassessment of George III’s legacy is not enough to overcome his…