@NZNationalParty @nzlabour @NZGreens inflow of asylum seekers into #UK #Canada, #Australia and #NewZealand since 1980

New Zealand’s intake of asylum seekers has been embarrassingly low. The left-wing parties in New Zealand should be ashamed of themselves given the way they wear their international consciences on their sleeves about New Zealand being above it all morally, nuclear free, and can lecture the rest about war, peace and compassion from on high.

Data extracted on 08 Oct 2015 09:06 UTC (GMT) from OECD.Stat; Dataset: International Migration Database.

The UK absorbed an immense number of asylum seekers in the 1990 as did Canada. The data stops in 2013.

@GreenpeaceNZ @NZGreens energy poverty and extreme poverty

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Top 10 countries of foreign birth for Australian residents

Source: 3412.0 – Migration, Australia, 2013-14

What’s Right About Social Justice

Video

@jamespeshaw nails the #TPPA policy trade-off @NZGreens

About 1% more GDP but higher drug prices.

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Source: No increased medicine costs under TPPA | Stuff.co.nz

The next best arguments James Shaw made were xenophobia about foreign investment in land and some vast conspiracy theory regarding endangered dolphins.

When your next best argument is foreigners are coming to buy up all our land, you are playing from a weak populist hand. About half of million New Zealand born live in other countries.

About 80% of these live in Australia, the great majority as residents rather than as citizens. These New Zealanders living in Australia and elsewhere need protection under international agreements to ensure they are not the victim of populist outbreaks against the sale of land to foreigners.

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Source: Statistics New Zealand.

In addition, if a foreigner wants to pay over the odds for my house I am glad to separate a fool from his money.

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Source: Statistics New Zealand.

New Zealand has a strong interest in protecting the rights of its own expatriates as well as New Zealand foreign investors to buy land in other countries. As David Friedman explains:

Much more commonly, [economic imperialism] is used by Marxists to describe–and attack–foreign investment in “developing” (i.e., poor) nations. The implication of the term is that such investment is only a subtler equivalent of military imperialism–a way by which capitalists in rich and powerful countries control and exploit the inhabitants of poor and weak countries.

There is one interesting feature of such “economic imperialism” that seems to have escaped the notice of most of those who use the term. Developing countries are generally labour rich and capital poor; developed countries are, relatively, capital rich and labour poor. One result is that in developing countries, the return on labour is low and the return on capital is high–wages are low and profits high. That is why they are attractive to foreign investors.

To the extent that foreign investment occurs, it raises the amount of capital in the country, driving wages up and profits down. The effect is exactly analogous to the effect of free migration. If people move from labour-rich countries to labour-poor ones, they drive wages down and rents and profits up in the countries they go to, while having the opposite effect in the countries they come from.

If capital moves from capital-rich countries to capital-poor ones, it drives profits down and wages up in the countries it goes to and has the opposite effect in the countries it comes from. The people who attack “economic imperialism” generally regard themselves as champions of the poor and oppressed.

To the extent that they succeed in preventing foreign investment in poor countries, they are benefiting the capitalists of those countries by holding up profits and injuring the workers by holding down wages. It would be interesting to know how much of the clamour against foreign investment in such countries is due to Marxist ideologues who do not understand this and how much is financed by local capitalists who do.

Social Justice and Its Critics

 

@nzlabour @NZGreens @jamespeshaw cannot tell the crims from the injustice in the tough new Australian laws on deporting criminals

Australia is introduced tough new deportation laws for noncitizens of bad character that sweep up New Zealanders who may have lived in Australia since childhood.

The new laws provide for automatic deportation of noncitizen criminals. The Immigration Minister used to decide if a criminal who was not an Australian resident was to be deported. Deportations are now automatic, although there are some exemptions and the opportunity for the Minister to intervene in special cases.

Anyone sentenced to more than a year in prison, or for a child-sex related offence automatically loses their visa and is detained to await deportation. This can include cumulative sentences over decades. Anyone spends a total of more one year in a prison is not a petty offender.

If you are a guest in another country, that is not a citizen, you do not go around messing up the place and making a nuisance of yourself. Sooner or later your host will lose patience and send you on your way.

There are injustices in these deportation laws because of a quirk of the New Zealand citizenship law. Some New Zealanders living in Australia cannot pass on their New Zealand citizenship to their children through decent. You cannot become an Australian citizen simply by being born there.

The injustice therefore is some of these New Zealanders who are Samoans whose children spend most of their lives in Australia will be deported back to Samoa because they have Samoan citizenship. They have neither New Zealand nor Australian citizenship.

It is one thing for a criminal to be deported from Australia to New Zealand – both are developed countries. It is another to be deported to a backward Pacific island.

If the New Zealand Labor Party and the New Zealand Greens would take time out for standing up for New Zealand criminals at home and abroad, they might be able to plead with greater success for a deal for these children of New Zealanders who find themselves in a quirky citizenship status. For these children of New Zealanders, their deportation is unusually harsh because they end up back in Samoa, not New Zealand.

Teachers are well-paid in #NewZealand

Once were British

https://twitter.com/CartogRRaphy/status/649016785929265152/photo/1

The politics of marijuana in the USA

In representative democracy that is a unitary state such as New Zealand, the issue on marijuana decriminalisation is who will change their vote to vote against a party who advocates marijuana decriminalisation under a MMP system where all elections are close.

In a strong federal state, where some states allow citizen initiated referendums to change the law, it is possible to pioneer reform without that backlash. Then laboratory federalism takes over. Subsequent to the decriminalisation of marijuana or medical marijuana by various state governments, the Congress defunded federal marijuana drug law enforcement in states who had decriminalised marijuana. That major reform was underreported.

The essence of corporate capitalism

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The Australian tax – transfer system after 30 years of heartless neoliberalism

https://twitter.com/JohnDaley_/status/646505463710773248/photo/1

RT @GreenpeaceNZ are right: Do not send anyone to @cop21 The summit is waste of time

Greenpeace is right in saying in their open letter with others that New Zealand should not send a minister to the climate talks in Paris later this year. I agree for different reasons.

In common with many previous climate summits, the Paris talks will be a futile gesture that will have no significant effect on the pace of global warming and holding the summit is a waste of taxpayers money.

Nothing will come of them because the developing countries have no interest in postponing their development because of a minor inconvenience from global warming.

The easy way to tell if there is anything going to happen at a climate summit is the seniority of the delegation.

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The Chinese made it clear at the Copenhagen summit in 2009 that they were not interested in an agreement by sending a Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs to a key side meeting of the American and French presidents, the British Prime Minister and the German Chancellor. All subsequent policy manoeuvrings by the Chinese on global warming are an attempt to head off green tariffs on their exports.

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Economic impact of global warming: new evidence

A nice summary of the latest research showing that once again the welfare cost of climate change is small except under the most extreme scenarios.

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2% of national income is not something to declare a national emergency over unless you are in a very poor country.

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Richard Tol also mentions that there has only been 27 studies of the economic costs of climate change:

Twenty-seven estimates is a thin basis for any conclusion. Researchers disagree on the sign of the net impact; climate change may lead to a welfare gain or loss. At the same time, researchers agree on the order of magnitude. The welfare change caused by climate change is equivalent to the welfare change caused by an income change of a few percent.

  • That is, a century of climate change is about as good/bad for welfare as a year of economic growth.

As Tol wrote elsewhere, the reason why there are so few studies of the welfare cost of global warming is governments and bureaucracies do not like the small numbers they yield so they pre-emptively do not fund such research.

Few economists work full-time on the economics of climate change as their research results are too moderate to win repeat business and further research grants. Importantly, there is vicious criticism of what you say. Much better to just work on other topics.

One of the great tactical victories of the climate activists, I resisted the temptation to call them climate alarmists, is they keep going on about the science is settled and whether you are accepting the scientific results.

I have long argued let the science be settled, only the economics matters. The climate change activists do not want to talk about the economics that much except for the estimates by that political hack Lord Stern. Lord Stern has been on the losing side of history ever since he wrote a bad review of PT Bauer’s Dissent on Development where he said:

Dissent on Development is not a valuable contribution to the study of development.

The Stern Review puts the costs of unmitigated climate change at 5–20% of GDP (now and forever). The Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finds differently.

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HT: Lorenzo M Warby

Real housing prices in Australia and New Zealand since 1975

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Source: International House Price Database – Dallas Fed

Note: The house price index series is an index constructed with nominal house price data. The real house price index is an index calculated by deflating the nominal house price series with a country’s personal consumption expenditure deflator

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