Utopia, you are standing in it!

The statists are making a big issue out of income inequality, hoping to convince ordinary Americans that redistribution is their only hope for a better life.

I’ve explained with a pizza analogy that this is horribly misguided because it falsely assumes the economy is a fixed pie.

Simply stated, it doesn’t make sense – or help anybody – if inequality is reduced by policies that hurt everyone, but happen to hurt upper-income people more than lower-income people.

Moreover, redistribution tends to create a “poverty trap” as people get seduced by dependency.

That’s why I’ve argued that economic growth is the best way of helping the less fortunate.

But I have to admit that Margaret Thatcher does a much better job of eviscerating the left’s agenda on this issue.

While it’s inspiring to watch Thatcher in action, it’s also painful to realize that the current crop of GOP presidential candidates…

Whether or not Scotland can legally hold a referendum without the consent of Westminster is a question that has provoked much debate. Ciaran Martin argues that the answer to this question does not really matter: regardless of the legality of any referendum, it is unrealistic to think that Scotland will leave the Union without the consent of Westminster. This makes the key question a political one, which the courts cannot resolve.

In mid-August I spoke at the Edinburgh International Book Festival about Scotland and the future of the United Kingdom. My theme was that when the constitutional debate resumes (which it will) after the post-Holyrood election lull, there could, and in my view should, be a debate not just on what independence means, but on what remaining in the Union means. This is a fundamentally different proposition than it was in 2014, and not just because of Brexit.

In 2014…

Heinz Brandenburg on Twitter walks readers through a very useful explainer on how the current Germany version of MMP deals with overhangs through a multi-layered compensation mechanism, and why it could mean the new Bundestag will top out at more than 800 seats!

It is best to read it in its native Twitter, but following is the text of most of it (courtesy of the ThreadReader app) . The starting point, not quoted here, is a poll of current party standing in the state of Bavaria.

[the remainder of this text is not mine, but Brandenburg’s; numbers correspond to tweets in the thread]

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Last time around, the CSU won 38.8% of the vote but all of the constituencies in Bavaria (they even swept all of Munich). That results in so-called overhang and compensatory seats.
How are these calculated?

1/Well, there are 93 regular seats allocated to Bavaria, 46…

At the end of last week, I came across a SolarQuotes article about Snowy Hydro 2.0 being more expensive than batteries. Snowy Hydro 2.0 is a pumped hydro project in Australia (New South Wales and Victoria) and is currently under construction. The brunt of the article is that pumped hydro is too expensive compared to (grid sized) batteries and makes the plea to halt the project in favor of batteries.

That was new to me. As far as I know, pumped hydro is the cheapest way of dispatchable backup in order to counter intermittency and definitely cheaper than batteries. Yet, the author of this article argues that it is the exact opposite.

The name of the author of the article, Ronald Brakels, rings a bell. Not even a year ago, I wrote a post on his claim that South Australia has the second cheapest electricity in Australia, despite…

CO2 is not pollution
Irrational fears about essential carbon dioxide in relation to the Earth’s climate have long since degenerated into superstition or old wives’ tales, for which we’re all paying the price, as discussed here.
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Last year a student at a nearby university complained she couldn’t focus in class; she was convinced high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) were the cause, says Dan Nevert @ CFACT.

The entire building was immediately evacuated and tested for “toxic levels of this dangerous gas.” After determining the CO2 levels were less than 500 parts-per-million (ppm), the classroom air was considered “safe” and classes again resumed.

Recently, this same school advertised that you can now “offset carbon emissions from previously completed university-funded ground-transportation and air travel trips” — by filling out a “travel carbon offsets” form, available in their “Sustainability Office.” Plus, this school is offering a course on…