Utopia, you are standing in it!

In 1483, King Edward IV’s family received a devastating announcement; the king in the prime of his life died, leaving the throne to his young son Edward V. However, neither Edward V nor his younger brother Richard of York would ever see the throne. Instead, they were taken to the Tower of London by their protector, Richard of Gloucester, for protection, never to be seen again. For over five hundred years, many theories have emerged about what happened to the princes in the tower and who might have possibly killed the boys. In MJ Trow’s latest book, “The Killer of the Princes in the Tower: A New Suspect Revealed”, he works hard to uncover the truth of what might have happened to the sons of King Edward IV.

I would like to thank Net Galley and Pen and Sword Books for sending me a copy of this book. When I…

The Ardern  government has  made  “well-being”  such  a  focus  of  its  policies  that many  New  Zealanders  think  it  is   now  the  way  forward.

Labour’s ally, the  Green Party, is so enamoured  with  the  “well- being”  philosophy  it  sharply criticised   the  government for raising the  level of  main  benefits  “by less than $8 a week” from April 1.

“We have a poverty crisis in NZ, and we must go further and faster to deliver income support that enables everyone to live with dignity,” says Green Party spokesperson for Social Development & Employment Ricardo Menéndez March.

“The government currently expects a single person over 25 years old to be able to get by on just $250.74 a week, and they’re supposed to celebrate that rising to $258.51. That extra eight dollars isn’t even enough to buy a block of cheese.”

Menendez  March  says it is  “disingenuous”  of  the  government to continue to…

I have a four-part series (here, here, here, and here) about the conceptual downsides of Joe Biden’s class-warfare approach to tax policy.

Now it’s time to focus on the component parts of his agenda. Today’s column will review his plan for a big increase in the corporate tax rate. But since I’ve written about corporate tax rates over and over and over again, we’re going to approach this issue is a new way.

I’m going to share five visuals that (hopefully) make a compelling case why higher tax rates on companies would be a big mistake.

Visual #1

One thing every student should learn from an introductory economics class is that corporations don’t actually pay tax. Instead, businesses collect taxes that are actually borne by workers, consumers, and investors.

There’s lots of debate in the profession, of course, about which group bears what share…

The following is an updated and revised version of the penultimate section of my paper with Ron Batchelder “Pre-Keynesian Theories of the Great Depressison: What Ever Happened to Hawtrey and Cassel?” which I am now preparing for publication. The previous version is available on SSRN.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, empirical studies of the effects of money and monetary policy by Milton Friedman, his students and followers, rehabilitated the idea that monetary policy had significant macroeconomic effects. Most importantly, in research with Anna Schwartz Friedman advanced the seemingly remarkable claim that the chief cause of the Great Depression had been a series of policy mistakes by the Federal Reserve. Although Hawtrey and Cassel, had also implicated the Federal Reserve in their explanation of the Great Depression, they were unmentioned by Friedman and Schwartz or by other Monetarists.[1]

The chief difference between the Monetarist and the Hawtrey-Cassel explanations of…

So what happened to “go hard, go early”? Does anyone expect house prices (which have risen more than $100,000 since early 2020) to start falling?

The Ardern government’s housing package aroused curiously mixed reactions, hardly any of them providing a glimmer of light to would-be first-home buyers that house prices will be falling any time soon.

From one side, the warning came that rent controls could not be far behind. From the other, “market forces” and the evils of neo-liberalism had at last been corralled.

Over on the Left, Chris Trotter sees a housing crisis ripping apart the country’s weakest and most vulnerable communities.

“While the detail of the Labour government’s housing package has been sufficient to unleash the very worst impulses of NZ’s landlord class – whose screams of rage and wild threats of social vengeance have pretty much confirmed the rest of NZ society’s worst fears concerning‘property…