Utopia, you are standing in it!

Senator Bernie Sanders wants to dramatically increase the burden of government and he claims that his policies won’t lead to economic misery because nations such as Sweden show that you can be a prosperous country with a big welfare state.

Perhaps, but there are degrees of prosperity. And a large public sector imposes a non-trivial burden on Nordic nations, resulting in living standards that lag U.S. levels according to OECD data.

Moreover, according to research by a Swedish economist, people of Scandinavian descent in America produce and earn much more than their counterparts at home.

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Nordic Model.

But there actually are some things we can learn from places such as Sweden. And not just things to avoid.

As Johan Norberg explains in this short video (you may have to double-click and watch it on the YouTube site), there are some…

Since I called Trump a big-government Republican during the 2016 campaign and just condemned his capitulation to a spendaholic budget deal, it goes without saying that I’m not a huge fan of the President.

Heck, I also recently criticized his protectionism, warning that additional barriers to trade could offset the pro-growth effect of lower tax rates.

But I like to think I’m fair in my criticisms. I stay away from the personal stuff (other than for humor purposes) and and simply focus on whether liberty is increasing or decreasing.

Today, though, I want to quasi-defend Trump because a professor from the University of Richmond wrote a really strange column for the Washington Post with a very bizarre assertion about Juan Perón, the populist post-World War II president of Argentina.

It’s en vogue for enraged liberals to compare Trumpism to Argentine Peronism, wielding the analogy as a warning…

Economists widely agree with the theory of “convergence,” which is the (mostly true) idea that poor nations should grow faster than rich nations.

This means that we can learn important lessons by looking at examples of “divergence,” and I provide 20 examples in this presentation.

The above video is an excerpt from a presentation I made earlier this week to a seminar organized by the New Economic School in the country of Georgia.

While it seems like I was making the same point, over and over again (and I was), I wanted the students to understand that the real-world evidence clearly shows that good policy is critical if less-developed nations want convergence.

And I also wanted them to realize that there are many examples of free market-oriented nations growing much faster than anti-market countries.

But, by contrast, there are not examples that go the other way.

Image credit: livescience.com

It’s not as hot as we thought, they could say. That’s been obvious for a long time, but the defensive bluster of modellers has finally dried up, it seems. Time to dump the pointless and ‘implausible’ extreme scenarios and think seriously about some of the assumptions, such as greenhouse gas theory and its supposed climate consequences, and other suggested shortcomings.
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Leading climate scientists conceded that models used to estimate how much the world will warm with rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are running too hot, reports The Australian (via The GWPF).

“It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Science ­magazine.

The admission is seen as a significant development by scientists who argue that not enough attention has been paid to natural ­cycles in…

It only takes a moment’s consideration to understand why wind and solar will never amount to meaningful power sources. Sunset is a daily phenomenon and repeated bouts of extended calm weather occur with remarkable regularity.

While there’s plenty of lip service paid to the ‘inevitable’ renewable energy transition, the reality bites every day.

Always clear and to the point, Mark Mathis provides another helpful insight on to why wind and solar will never really power us.

Flip the Fossil Fuel Script
Clear Energy Alliance
Mark Mathis
8 June 2021

No shortage of anti-energy agitators would LOVE IT if wind & solar were our primary energy providers with fossil fuels relegated as only minor players. Ok…. That’s crazy and impossible, but as an exercise we thought it would be fun to play along. Let’s flip the fossil fuel script with so-called renewables and see what that looks like. We would need…

Those interested in European Royalty and its history know the story of how William II, Duke of Normandy became King of the English in 1066. In this short series I will instead examine what type of King William the Conqueror was and how he ran his administration.

The Norman conquest of England began in 1066 after William II, Duke of Normandy conquered England to capture the throne he believed was rightfully his. And although William was crowned King of the English on Christmas day in 1066 his subduing and conquest of England was not completed until 1071. English nobles and the populace in general did not easily and willingly submit to Norman rule.

As part of his efforts to secure England, William ordered many castles, keeps, and mottes built – among them the central keep of the Tower of London, the White Tower. These fortifications allowed Normans to retreat into…

Infrastructure often is a good thing. Government-financed infrastructure is a questionable thing. Infrastructure financed by Uncle Sam is a bad thing. Those three rules guide my thinking and make for a perfect introduction to this must-watch video from Reason on high-speed rail.

The core message from the video is that Californian’s disastrous experience with high-speed rail should be a warning for the entire nation.

Simply stated, the government is incapable of doing infrastructure without jaw-dropping cost overruns.

But even if – by some impossible miracle – the government spent the money wisely and efficiently, long-distance rail doesn’t make sense.

Why? Well, if I do a tweet-of-the-year contest for 2021, this entry from Rory Cooper would be an early favorite to win the prize.

Instead of expanding the federal government role, it’s time to end Washington’s involvement.

That means shutting down the entire Department of Transportation.

But…

As a matter of sensible public policy (and well as fealty to the Constitution), the federal government should not be involved in transportation.

But since I don’t expect the current crowd in Washington has any interest in getting rid of the Department of Transportation, perhaps we should have a more modest goal of eliminating subsidies for mass transit.

After all, there’s no reason why taxpayers across the nation should be subsidizing the cost of railway, bus, and subway travel in a handful of cities.

Getting rid of these handouts would save a decent chunk of money. Here’s a chart from Downsizing Government, which shows the history of pre-pandemic spending by the Federal Transit Administration.

But that chart is now out of date since politicians have used the pandemic as an excuse to dramatically increase the burden of federal spending. Including big handouts for mass transit.

And now…