Utopia, you are standing in it!

Wisdom comes with experience: people soon wise up to the reality of the wind and solar ‘transition’ once they’ve spent time freezing or boiling in the dark.

Over time, the experience will be shared by more of our compatriots on planet Earth. Obsessive, indeed maniacal, renewable energy policies are a guarantee of crippling power bills and routine power rationing; maintaining grid stability is now an expensive affair for power users and a hair-raising experience for grid managers, used to power generation sources that could be dialled up in an instant to satisfy increases in demand.

Unable to control the weather and make the sun shine on queue, the first resort is to start chopping heavy energy users from the grid under the euphemistic tagline “demand management”, where “chaotic mismanagement” would be a more accurate description of the response to routine collapses in output directly connected to sunset and/or calm weather.

Charles X’s reign of almost six years proved to be deeply unpopular from the moment of his coronation in 1825, in which he tried to revive the practice of the royal touch. The governments appointed under his reign reimbursed former landowners for the abolition of feudalism at the expense of bondholders, increased the power of the Catholic Church, and reimposed capital punishment for sacrilege, leading to conflict with the liberal-majority Chamber of Deputies.

Charles X also initiated the French conquest of Algeria as a way to distract his citizens from domestic problems, and forced Haiti to pay a hefty indemnity in return for lifting a blockade and recognizing Haiti’s independence.

He eventually appointed a conservative government under the premiership of Prince Jules de Polignac, who was defeated in the 1830 French legislative election. He responded with the July Ordinances disbanding the Chamber of Deputies, limiting franchise, and reimposing press censorship.

The capital gains tax is double taxation, and that’s a bad idea (assuming the goal is faster growth and higher wages).

Let’s consider how it discourages investment. People earn money, pay tax on that money, and then need to decide what to do with the remaining (after-tax) income.

If they save and invest, they can be hit with all sorts of additional taxes. Such as the capital gains tax.

If you want to be wonky, a capital gain occurs when an asset (like shares of stock) climbs in value between when it is purchased and when it is sold.

But stocks rise in value when the market expects a company will generate more income in the future.

Yet that income gets hit by both the corporate income tax and the personal income tax (the infamous double tax on dividends).

So a capital gains tax is a version…

Power prices driven through the roof by subsidised and unreliable wind and solar means electricity is out of reach for thousands of struggling households.

Reliable and affordable electricity is at the heart of modern, socially stable societies. Deprive the masses of something that has been taken for granted for generations, and get set for serious civil unrest.

Across Europe, the effect of 20 years of a suicidal obsession with intermittent wind and solar is being keenly felt. Germans suffer the world’s highest power prices and power rationing for German industry is now routine.

Like their compatriots across the ditch, Britain’s energy consumers have been treated with utter contempt by their political betters. But, as the Global Warming Policy Foundation contends below, there is a reckoning in the wind.

As energy crisis threatens civil unrest, new study documents 30 years of the EU’s failed climate policies
The Global Warming Policy Foundation

By Muriel Newman

Finally, the mainstream media is reporting that a coup is under way in New Zealand – by the Māori tribal elite.

Admittedly that observation was penned by former Labour Minister and ACT Party leader Richard Prebble in an opinion piece for the Herald – but the newspaper published it and Radio NZ reported it.

The on-line Herald headline read “Three Waters is a coup — an attack on democracy”.

That bold and compelling headline, however, didn’t last. It was changed to remove the words “a coup” and now reads: “Three Waters is an attack on democracy”.

The obvious question is why?

A clue comes from an article written last year by political journalist Andrea Vance, about Jacinda Ardern’s PR machine:

The Government’s iron grip on the control of information has tightened. At every level, the Government manipulates the flow of information.”

She then explained,

“And the prime…

At the start of this interview, I cite Economic Freedom of the World and the Index of Economic Freedom to make the point that more economic liberty is correlated with more human prosperity.

For purposes of today’s column, I want to focus on the last half of the interview. I point out that a handful of nations began to escape poverty, largely back in the 1800s, when the fiscal burden of government was very small.

But that’s just a partial explanation. As Professors Donald Boudreaux and Deirdre McCloskey explained in short videos, the adoption of capitalism in a few nations enabled a stunning increase in living standards starting a couple of hundred years ago.

If you want a one-sentence summary, all you need to know is that capitalism enabled the industrial revolution and the industrial revolution triggered a huge increase in living standards.

If you prefer to see…