Utopia, you are standing in it!

Sir Charles “Charlie” Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977) lived a tragic life. He was essentially abandoned by his parents as a child. When he grew up, he married four different women who were each much younger than Chaplin. He sired no less than eleven different children (many of whom he apparently treated poorly) and he entertained a long list of romantic affairs. Chaplin became a sympathetic socialist/communist despite being a wealthy millionaire and, as punishment for his political leanings, he was ultimately exiled from the U.S. and forced to live in Switzerland for the remainder of his life, returning to the U.S. only once in 1972 to accept an honorary Oscar.   

Charlie Chaplin’s life was one of the greatest tales of rags to riches. Almost as if mirroring a Horatio Alger novel, Chaplin was born in the rowdy, impoverished region of South London on the cusp of collapsing Victorian society. South…

Earl is a rank of the nobility in the United Kingdom. The title originates in the Old English word eorl, meaning “a man of noble birth or rank”. The word is cognate with the Scandinavian form jarl, and meant “chieftain”, particularly a chieftain set to rule a territory in a king’s stead. After the Norman Conquest, it became the equivalent of the continental count (in England in the earlier period, it was more akin to a duke; in Scotland, it assimilated the concept of mormaer).

In modern Britain, an earl is a member of the peerage, ranking below a marquess and above a viscount. A feminine form of earl never developed; instead, countess is used.

It is important to distinguish between the land controlled directly by the earl, in a landlord-like sense, and the region over which he could exercise his office. Scottish use of Latin terms provincia and comitatus…

Most people have heard of the Laffer Curve, which shows that there is a non-linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenues (for instance, doubling tax rates won’t produce a doubling of tax revenue because people and businesses will have less incentive to earn and report income).

There’s something similar on the spending side of the budget. I call it the Rahn Curve and it shows there is a non-linear relationship between government spending and economic performance.

The concept is not controversial, just like the concept of a Laffer Curve is not controversial.

What does trigger disagreement, however, is figuring out the shape of the curve, especially the growth-maximizing size of government (or, in the case of the Laffer Curve, the revenue-maximizing tax rate).

Much of the academic literature suggests that is maximized when government spending consumes about 20-plus percent of economic output.

But I’ve questioned whether…

From the Emperor’s Desk: This is an updated and expanded article I wrote in 2012 at the start of my blog when Elizabeth II was Queen.

Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

I am a bit of a stickler for correct and proper usage of styles and titles. So it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine when these are used improperly. The main one that bugs me is calling Charles III, King of England. That bothers me because “King of England” is not his correct title! His correct title, simplified here, is King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. England has not been a separate sovereign state since 1707.

Wales

The country of Wales was once an independent Principality. The conquest of Wales by Edward I of England was completed by 1283, though Owain Glyndŵr…

Since he entered the Democrat Primaries for the Presidential nomination in 2019, I’ve documented Joe Biden’s slow decline into a state of senile dementia, usually with numerous video clips where you can’t deny what your eyes have just seen or what your ears have just heard.

Admittedly even before senile dementia set in Biden made gaffes. In one infamous clip from 2008, then-Senator Biden, who by that point was also Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate,urgeda Democrat member of the Missouri state senate to “Stand up Chuck, let ’em see you.” The man was in a wheelchair. But that’s probably just ignorance and a failure of his staff to brief him.

I was hardly alone in making this assessment; during the 2019-2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign season, a number of his Democratic opponents and even some in the mainstream mediaraised questionsabout Biden’s fitness to serve as…

It is tempting to liken the political hacks of the mainstream news media to piranha, rather than ever-vigilant watchdogs of the Fourth Estate.

With the exception of the NZ Herald, they have lamentably ill-served the voting public by failing to muster a whimper, let alone a snarl or a warning bark, about issues raised by the awarding of contracts to family members of Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta.

The hacks were aroused from their indifference to those contracts only when another watchdog – the Public Service Commission – announced it is looking into government departments’ management of the contracting process.   

On the other hand, the imagery of piranha seems apt when they engage in a feeding frenzy of the sort that followed the hapless Kelvin Davis’ derogatory – and racist – remarks about ACTs Karen Chhour.

Davis told Chhour (a Māori) she must look at things from a Māori…