Utopia, you are standing in it!

Ahead of this evening’s session of the IHR’s Parliaments, Politics, and People seminar, Lewis Brennen, PhD candidate at the University of Southampton, summarises the themes that he covered in his paper, ‘The Political and Religious Origins of the 1563 Witchcraft Act’, at our last session…

The 1563 Witchcraft Act, formally titled an ‘Act agaynst
Conjuracons Inchantments and Witchecraftes’, was one of the most significant
pieces of early modern English legislation. It formally criminalised witchcraft
and imposed the death penalty in certain circumstances. This was England’s
second (but arguably most important) witchcraft statute and was fundamental to
the entirety of the English witch-trials.

Since the early eighteenth century there have been two
competing explanations for the introduction of the 1563 Act. The first of these
is that Bishop John Jewel delivered a powerful sermon before Queen Elizabeth
calling for legal action to be taken against witches, and this led directly…

In the first of a new series of blogs on the Elizabethan period, Dr Andrew Thrush, editor of our 1558-1603 House of Lords project, discusses the last-minute attempts by the bench of Catholic bishops to thwart Elizabeth I’s reintroduction of Protestantism. He also draws attention to an important, if little appreciated, date in the re-establishment of the English Protestant state, as it was on 24 June 1559 – 462 years ago to the day – that the 1559 Act of Uniformity took effect …

In May 1559, six months after Elizabeth I ascended the throne, England formally returned to the Protestant fold, to the dismay of her Catholic bishops. The English Reformation had begun under Henry VIII, with Protestantism becoming entrenched under Henry’s immediate successor, Edward VI. However, during the brief reign of Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary I (1553-58) England had readopted Catholic doctrine and restored the papal supremacy. Elizabeth’s…

Last week, I shared Part I of my discussion with John Stossel about “capitalism myths.” Here’s Part II.

In the first video, we discussed three myths about free enterprise.

• Myth #1 – Capitalists get rich by ‘taking’ money from others.
• Myth #2 – The rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer.
• Myth #3 – Monopolies destroyed the free market.

Here are the final four myths.

Myth #4: Free markets create unsafe workplaces.

Proponents of government intervention often claim that greedy capitalists will skimp on safety in order to get more profits. To support their argument, they cite data on how workplace deaths have declined since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created.

That data is accurate, bu what they fail to mention is that workplace deaths were falling at exactly the same rate before OSHA.

This is because wealthier societies, created by capitalism, have both the…

I wrote last week about evil of totalitarian ideologies such as communism and fascism and pointed out that both antifa and Nazis should be treated with complete disdain and ostracism.

And that led me to find common ground with my left-of-center friends, even though I don’t like many of their policies.

I don’t like redistribution…programs are financed with taxes and that the internal revenue code is enforced by coercion…if you catch me in a cranky mood, I’ll be like the stereotypical libertarian at Thanksgiving dinner and wax poetic about what’s wrong with the system. That being said, I much prefer the coercion found in western democracies compared to the totalitarian versions of coercion found in many other parts of the world. At least we have the rule of law, which limits (however imperfectly) capricious abuse by government officials. …our Constitution still protects many personal liberties, things…

If, superficially, this suggests an absurdly cheap victory, it must be compared with what happened on the American sectors where, it will be recalled, the troops did not have the benefit of armoured breaching teams. On Utah Beach their task had been eased somewhat by the dropping of the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions some miles inland during the previous night; but on Omaha Beach the US 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions were pinned down on the shore by defences that were no more formidable than those on the British sector. Not until an hour after the initial landings did the situation begin to improve slowly when eight American and three British destroyers, observing the carnage amid the shattered LCIs at the water’s edge, closed in to batter the defences at point blank range. Even then, it was only by the inspired leadership, heroism and self-sacrifice of individuals and…

When, on 19 August 1942, the Allies mounted a major raid on Dieppe, they did so with the political object of demonstrating to Stalin that the opening of a ‘Second Front’ in the West was, for the moment, not a practical proposition. However, while the operation was ostensibly a failure, many valuable lessons were learned and put to good use in the planning of the invasion of Western Europe almost two years later.

After Dieppe the Allies recognised the impossibility of securing a heavily defended French port, deciding instead to invade over the open beaches of Normandy and bring their own prefabricated harbour with them. These beaches, while not as heavily fortified as the more important ports, nonetheless possessed formidable defences which were capable of inflicting terrible losses on a conventional landing force. The German belief was that the Allies would time their invasion to coincide with high tide, so…

Here we go again.The Daily Telegraphis reporting that Treasury officials are “drawing up plans” for a pensions tax raid in the autumn to help pay for Covid. It might be more accurate to say that old plans are now being ‘dusted off’, but the quality of debate does not seem to have improved.

For a start, it is wrong to assume that taxes have to rise at all. We could, and probably should, regard the increase in government spending and borrowing during the pandemic as a one-off, and accept that the level of debt will be permanently higher as a result. A strong economic recovery and a bit of inflation will still reduce the burden of that debt (as a share of nominal GDP).

Indeed, thelatest monthly figureson the public finances show that borrowing is continuing to undershoot the OBR’s gloomy forecasts, as it…

Bjorn Lomberg exposes the doublethink rhetoric around the “Net-Zero” carbon emissions notion in his Financial Post article Enough with the net-zero doublethink Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

When John Kerry and many other politicians insist that climate policies mean no sacrifice, they are clearly dissembling.

Our current climate conversation embodies two blatantly contradictory claims. On one side, experts warn that promised climate policies will be economically crippling. In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) states that achieving net-zero in 2050 will likely be “the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.” That is a high bar, surpassing the Second World War, the black plague and COVID.

On the other side, hand-waving politicians sell net-zero climate schemes as a near-utopia that every nation will rush to embrace. As U.S. climate envoy John Kerry told world leaders gathered at President Biden’s climate summit in April: “No…