Utopia, you are standing in it!

Suetonius

Not much is known about Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, generally referred to as Suetonius. He was born around 70 AD, probably in a town in modern-day Algeria. He may have taught literature for a while, he seems to have practiced the law. He is recorded as serving on the staff of Pliny the Younger when the latter was governor of Bithynia in north Turkey in 110 to 112 AD. Subsequently he served on the staff of emperors, being in charge of the emperor’s libraries under Trajan and then managing the emperor Hadrian’s correspondence. Pliny describes him as a quiet and studious man devoted to his writing. He wrote The Lives of Illustrious Men, 60 or so biographies of poets, grammarians, orators and historians, almost all of which has been lost (except for short lives of Terence, Virgil and Horace).

The Lives of the Caesars, by contrast, has survived…

The wind industry was built on lies and runs on subsidies; cut the subsidies and the whole thing collapses in a heartbeat.

Wind turbine makers like Germany’s Siemens are having a rather miserable time of it, of late. Subsidies were already being wound back across Europe (and with it demand for these whirling wonders) when an ambitious Russian decided to storm across Ukraine in an effort to expand Russia’s territorial control.

All of a sudden, focus was drawn on Europe’s critical dependence upon Russian gas; a critical component of their reliance upon intermittent wind and solar.

The Germans have now renounced their purported disdain for nuclear and coal-fired power, opting to have power as and when they need it. The French, among others, are determined to expand their nuclear power generation capacity, as if their lives and livelihoods depend upon it. Needless to say, the love affair with the unreliables…

Back in 2015, I explained to Neil Cavuto that easy money creates the conditions for a boom-bust cycle.

It’s now 2022 and my argument is even more relevant.

That’s because the Federal Reserve panicked at the start of the pandemic and dumped a massive amount of money into the economy (technically, the Fed increased its balance sheet by purchasing trillions of dollars of government bonds).

As the late, great Milton Friedman taught us, this easy-money, low-interest-rate approach produced the rising prices that are now plaguing the nation.

But that’s only part of the bad news.

The other bad news is that easy-money policy sets the stage for future hard times. In other words, the Fed causes a boom-bust cycle.

Desmond Lachman of the American Enterprise Institute explains how and why the Federal Reserve has put the country in a bad situation.

Better late than never. Today, the…

Here are some of America’s main economic problems.

• Painful inflation caused by bad monetary policy by the government.
• Excessive spending and debt caused by bad fiscal policy by the government.
• Rising prices and waste caused by bad health policy by the government.
• Inflexibility and inefficiency caused by bad regulatory policy by the government.

And that’s just a partial list. I’m not asserting that markets produce perfect results. Indeed, markets are a never-ending process of creative destruction.

But what I am stating is that intervention by politicians and bureaucrats almost always leads to bad outcomes.

So you can imagine my angst and disappointment at this recent polling data from Echelon Insights. A plurality thinks the government should “do more.”

I’m tempted to speculate whether 47 percent of Americans are morons.

But let’s take the high road and simply dig into the numbers. Whenever I see polling data, I always check…

Wind and solar generators happily take credit when the sun’s up and the wind’s blowing, but dodge all criticism when blackouts follow sunset and/or calm weather. The standard trick is to point in every direction – except the obvious – when power rationing (euphemistically called “demand management”) or unplanned power rationing (aka widespread blackouts) follows routine and unpredictable collapses in wind and solar output.

All care and no responsibility, renewable energy rent seekers then point the finger at coal and gas generators – where a few of their units are often offline for routine maintenance, or, if they suffer a breakdown, are repaired and up and running in a jiffy – and assert that the chaos was all their fault.

The line goes that wholesale prices spiked and/or power supplies were cut because a coal-fired or gas-fired generator failed to deliver X hundred MWs of power, cleverly ignoring the fact…

In yesterday’s presidential election in Colombia, the top two candidates were from the extremes of the political spectrum. Leading the pack is Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla of the M-19 (which demobilized about thirty years ago and has been a political party, or component of various alliances, since). He won 40.3% of the vote. In second place is Rodolfo Hernández, with 28.2%. He is an outsider–having had only municipal political experience in a medium-sized city¹–and presents as Colombia’s Trump/Bolsonaro/Bukele. Or worse, as he is on record saying he admires Hitler.

Regular readers of this blog or followers of my published research will know I have always been skeptical of two-round majority election of presidents. And this Colombian runoff pairing is a perfect demonstration of why–sometimes reducing choices to two means a choice between two brands of poison. Consider the third-place candidate: Federico Gutiérrez, who finished just under five…