Utopia, you are standing in it!

There have been a few posts here recently about Professor Caroline Saunders, whose initial term on the Reserve Bank MPC expired at the end of March and who was eventually, belatedly, and with no announcement at all, appointed by the Minister of Finance to a short second (and final) term on the MPC. The most recent of those posts was here.

When there was no announcement before the Saunders term expired, I had lodged OIA requests with both the Reserve Bank and the Minister of Finance for material relating to her reappointment (or otherwise). Responses to both emails have now come back.

If it is now clear that the bottom line reason why Saunders was not reappointed before her term was expired was administrative slackness (between the Minister’s office and Treasury mainly), the documents that were released don’t put any of those involved in a particularly good light.

My…

Serfs attacking Climate Establishment

Phys.org sounds the alarm: Meteorologists targeted in climate misinfo surge.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Once trusted faces on the news, meteorologists now brave threats, insults and slander online from conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers who accuse them of faking or even fixing the weather.

Users on Twitter and other social media falsely accused Spain’s weather agency of engineering a drought, Australia’s of doctoring its thermometers and France’s of exaggerating global warming through misplaced weather stations.

“The coronavirus is no longer a trend. Conspiracy theorists and deniers who used to talk about that are now spreading disinformation about climate change,” Alexandre Lopez-Borrull, lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia, told AFP.

“These scientific bodies are seen as part of the establishment, so anything they say may get disputed on social networks.

“They are providing…

As wind and solar capacity increases, it becomes increasingly evident they are hopelessly incapable of delivering power as and when we need it.

Back in January 2021, Germany shut down 11 coal-fired power plants (with a total capacity of 4.7 GW). That shutdown lasted eight days, with most of the plants up and running by February that year.

Australia is hellbent on committing the same form of suicide; ideologues cheered as another large, perfectly operable 2,000 MW coal-fired power plant (Liddell in NSW) was shut down earlier this month. Power consumers were less enthusiastic, as wholesale power prices jumped 80%, almost overnight.

Australia’s big pumped hydro scheme, Snowy 2.0 has turned into a ludicrously costly fiasco, which is unlikely to be completed anytime between now and kingdom come. Snowy 2.0 was meant to act like a big battery and make up for routine total collapses in wind and…

Back in 2020 and 2021, in and around the straight economics and economic policy posts, there were quite a few on aspects of the Covid experience in New Zealand, particularly in a cross-country comparative light.

More recently, you see from time to time suggestions that New Zealand’s experience may have been so good that in fact excess mortality here since Covid began might actually have been negative (in which case, fewer people would have died than might have been expected had Covid never come along.

A couple of alternative perspectives on that caught my eye in the last couple of months, both from academics, one from a physicist and one from an economist.

The first was a very very long Twitter thread from Professor Michael Fuhrer at Monash in Melbourne. His thread starts with this tweet

and after reviewing the evidence, and granting that

he concludes that

All of which…

Dr Bryce Wilkinson says when debating tax, don’t forget spending quality:

An IRD report on effective rates of tax attracted much public attention last week.

It was launched by the Minister of Revenue, David Parker.

In proposing that high income people are not taxed enough, Parker asserted in the report’s foreword that: “New Zealand is not a highly taxed nation”.

This claim is false.

Parker’s case is that we “sit in the middle of the OECD in terms of total taxes as a proportion of the economy.” That is like claiming that an obese person in New Zealand is not obese by American standards. So what?

Not being as bad as the worst doesn’t make it good.

Member countries of the OECD commonly have big (and problematic) welfare states. This gives them amongst the highest government tax and spending burdens in the world, New Zealand included.

On the Heritage Foundation’s…

News source  Stuff  has reported almost 100 wealthy New Zealanders have signed an open letter to the government to say they want to pay more tax.

Said to be inspired by global initiative Millionaires for Humanity, 96 wealthy individuals have told the government they recognise the current tax system is unfair, allowing wealthy people to pay less tax, while other New Zealanders who struggle day-to-day pay more.

Those who signed include Sir Ian Taylor, Phillip Mills, of gym chain Les Mills, company director Rob Campbell, actress Robyn Malcolm and Dame Susan Devoy.

The letter says they recognise the benefits of tax; that it “funds everything from the teachers who give our children a great start, to the Department of Conservation rangers who look after our environment, through to healthcare professionals on whom we all rely”, and it asks the government to fix the tax system.

After a shaky start to his reign, the king intended his coronation to bolster his personal image and agenda ahead of the 1626 Parliament. However, things didn’t go according to plan, as Dr Paul Hunneyball of our Lords 1558-1603 section explains…

Little went right for Charles I in the opening months of his reign. Following his accession in March 1625, a major outbreak of the plague in London forced him to delay his coronation. His war against Spain, which had initially boosted his popularity, was fast becoming a liability, prohibitively expensive to maintain, and with no prospect of a decisive victory. His marriage to the Catholic princess Henrietta Maria was intended to seal a military alliance with France, but almost from the start this union was prone to tensions and misunderstandings, at both the personal and diplomatic levels. The marriage was also unpopular with Charles’s Protestant subjects, while anxiety…