Utopia, you are standing in it!

The old saying that a ‘week is a long time in politics’ can rarely have been more apt. The changes in Westminster have been overshadowed by the transition in the Monarchy. But the new Prime Minister has also begun to tackle the challenges facing the UK economy.

The first big policy announcement was a freeze on energy bills. The ‘Energy Price Guarantee’ will cap the unit price of energy for households for two years, with the government compensating suppliers for any additional costs. Similar support is also being offered to businesses and other non-domestic energy users, such as schools, initially for a period of six months.

This is a dramatic turnaround from Liz Truss’s apparentdismissalof more ‘handouts’ in the early days of her leadership campaign. The Energy Price Guarantee is another massive state intervention in the markets which will subsidise the energy bills of every household…

Ever since I’ve been writing about house prices – more or less the life of this blog – one of the things that has struck (and sobered) me is that I do not know of (and no one has ever been able to point me to) an example of a country or even a region that having once messed up its housing and urban land regulation, generating absurdly high house price to income ratios has undone things and returned to sustainably low price to income ratios (perhaps fluctuating around three times). There are, of course, many places in the United States where price to income ratios never went crazy. But never having dug a deep hole is a different matter than getting out of one once dug. One reads occasionally – even briefly on this blog – of how easy it is to build in Tokyo (and a culture of…

As Germans and Brits stock up on woollen blankets and candles, the world has a chance to avoid the perfectly avoidable.

In both cases, an obsession with chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar has them scrambling for reliable energy – as if thousands of lives depend on it – which they literally do.

In Germany and the UK, electricity prices are truly punitive – such that power is now out of reach for low-income households; thousands of small businesses are under pressure, like never before.

Oh, and low-margin energy-hungry businesses – like mineral processing and metal fabrication – will simply disappear off the map. No doubt destined for China, where power costs are a tiny fraction of those suffered in the virtue-signalling West.

Australia, a first-rate country run by third-rate people, has been overrun by lunatics from the hard green left. Its Federal Government, a Green/Labor Alliance, has…

There are numerous biographies of Sigmund Freud, the best ones I have read include Peter Gay’s FREUD: A LIFE FOR OUR TIMES, Joel Whitebrook’s FREUD: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY, and an earlier work, Ronald W. Clark’s FREUD: THE MAN AND THE CAUSE.  The latest monograph SAVING FREUD: THE RESCUERS WHO BROUGHT HIM TO FREEDOM by Andrew Nagorski is not a complete biography but one that focuses on how Freud and fifteen of his followers managed to escape Austria in 1938 as Hitler and his Nazis achieved their Anschluss with Austria triggering a wave of anti-Semitic violence.  While Nagorski provides biographical details of Freud’s life, his main thrust is the years leading up to World War II.  Nagorski tells an engrossing tale of how there was little margin for error for Freud as he escaped Nazi persecution.

Nagorski a former Newsweek correspondent has written a number of…