Utopia, you are standing in it!

At The Common Room Ian Powell outlines our scary public hospital crisis :

On 9 February 2023, TVNZ’s 1News revealed some data that should alarm us all: that our hospitals had hit 100% occupancy more than 600 times in 2022. That is, on average, each day, roughly two public hospitals around the country were running at an occupancy higher than they were resourced for.

If anyone doubts that our public hospitals are in crisis, this fact alone removes any doubt. Arguably it is worse than crisis – it’s a scary crisis +! 

A 100% occupancy rate is heaven for hotels. But it is hell for hospitals. Behind it is ‘bed blocking’; that is, patients can’t get admitted to the wards from the emergency department because they are already fully occupied. Emergency Departments become overcrowded. Within the hospital system, diagnoses and treatment are delayed, and planned surgery cancelled. Even the…

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy
Evidence that what is today called ‘climate change’ can naturally occur, and has occurred, over a relatively short timescale – described here as ‘remarkable’. Maybe history is trying to tell us future climate conditions are more unpredictable than advocates of IPCC doctrines would have us believe.
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An El Niño event has officially begun, says Science Daily.

The climate phenomenon, which originates in the tropical Pacific and occurs in intervals of a few years will shape weather across the planet for the next year or more and give rise to various climatic extremes.

El Niño-like conditions can also occur on longer time scales of decades or centuries. This has been shown to have occurred in the recent past by an international research team led by Ana Prohaska of the University of Copenhagen and Dirk Sachse of the German Research Centre…

I have previously written on this blog and elsewhere about statutory interpretation and the rule of law. In the previous blog post I stated that the idea “that the courts will not allow the executive to escape their jurisdiction is well established as part of the rule of law” and referenced, inter alia, Anisminic Ltd v Foreign Compensation Commission [1969] 2 AC 147 (HL) to support this view.

This is an overarching principle, which has manifested itself most obviously in the courts’ treatment of so-called ouster clauses. The traditional view is that such clauses will be interpreted in such a way that does not preclude judicial supervision of the administrative process. The reasoning for this is simple: every body of the state derives its legal powers from law and, because of this, to be acting lawfully one has to act within one’s powers. A necessary component of this is…

This morning in Monaco, I moderated a panel for the Convention of Independent Financial Advisors on the implications of an “uber-ized” economy. In my introductory comments, I asserted that the best part of capitalism was “creative destruction.” Simply stated, we all benefit when entrepreneurs come up with products such as personal computers that make our lives better.

But I also pointed out that creative destruction was the most painful part of capitalism. Think, for example, about the people who used to work in the typewriter industry.

One of the speakers, Professor Philippe Silberzahn of the EMLYON Business School, cited another example. Kodak used to be one of the biggest and most profitable companies in America, but the digital camera (ironically, first invented by Kodak) set the firm into a death spiral. What was creative for the rest of us wound up causing destruction for the people who worked…

According to the bean counters at Ernst and Young, the United States has one of the highest capital gains tax rates in the world.

But if you don’t trust the numbers from a big accounting firm, then you can peruse a study from the pro-tax Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that reaches the same conclusion.

But does this really matter? Is the United States harmed by having a high tax rate?

The Wall Street Journal certainly makes a compelling case that high tax rates on capital gains are self-destructive.

And this remarkable chart shows that workers are victimized when there is less investment.

Let’s add to all this evidence.

Jason Clemens, Charles Lammam, and Matthew Lo have produced a thorough study for the Fraser Institute about the economic impact of capital gains taxation.

A capital gain (or loss) generally refers to the price of an asset when it is…

Earlier today at the Friedman Conference in Australia, I spoke on the proper design of a tax system.

My goal was to explain the problem of double taxation.

I’ve repeatedly shared a flowchart to illustrate the pervasive double taxation in the current system (my example is for the United States, but many other nations make the same mistake).

And to help explain why this is economically misguided, I developed a (hopefully) compelling visual based on how to harvest apples.

But I’ve always wondered if I was presenting the information in an accessible and understandable manner. So for today’s presentation, I decided to experiment with some different visuals.

Here’s how I illustrated the current system.

As you can see, there are several additional layers of tax on people who save and invest their after-tax income.

And I explained to the crowd that this is very foolish since every economic…

The economic analysis of taxation has plenty of jargon, statistical analysis, and complicated graphs, which can make it seem very mysterious to ordinary people.

But the core principles are actually very easy to understand.

Simply stated, the more you tax of something, the less you get of it.

For instance, politicians often argue that there should be higher taxes on tobacco and alcohol in order to discourage smoking and drinking.

Given my libertarian proclivities, I obviously don’t like them trying to control our private lives, but they are right about higher taxes reducing cigarette and booze consumption.

To be sure, politicians don’t care about our health. They simply want more money in order to buy more votes. And they also don’t seem to care that punitive tax rates increase smuggling.

But I’m digressing. Let’s get back to the economics of tax policy.