Utopia, you are standing in it!

The looming uncertainty around Johnson’s term in office is not just a perfect setting for political intrigue, but may also have something to offer to students of constitutional law. It should draw our attention to one of the fundamental questions of the UK constitutional process – how should we choose or remove a Prime Minister between general elections? The constitutional theory is straightforward. To become a Prime Minister, an MP must enjoy the confidence of the majority of the members of the House of Commons. Constitutionally, therefore, Parliament, not the electorate, selects the PM for appointment by the Queen. Hence, the House of Commons as a whole should remove and select the PM. According to this theory, then, Johnson would be removed if he loses a vote of confidence on the floor of the House of Commons.  The classical formulation is neat but incomplete. Most importantly, it does not take…

Recently on the Australian “Sunrise” TV program co-presenter David Koch said: “There have only been 3000 deaths from COVID, far less than that from influenza in the same period, so we should oppose the lockdowns”. This statement ignored the fact that prior to and during the vaccination rollout, lockdowns are likely to have prevented many thousands more deaths.

Similarly, some people argue against counter-terrorism measures on the grounds that there have been relatively few successful terrorist attacks in Australia, ignoring the fact that counter-terrorism has deterred and disrupted many more terrorist plots than those that have been carried out.

Several years ago, I was working as a regulatory consultant helping to remake sunsetting Victorian water regulations. Amongst other things, these regulations require the installation of backflow prevention devices on the customer’s water service pipe, just after the water meter. Backflow can result in contaminants being drawn into the drinking water…

Rocketing power prices were inevitable once Europe decided to put all its energy eggs in the wind power basket. Europe has squandered billions on subsidies to construct tens of thousands of turbines both onshore and off – the Germans managed to spear more than 30,000 across their homeland and are paying a hefty price.

By giving grid preference to the erratic and occasional delivery of wind and solar, the owners of reliable on-demand generators are pushed to the back of the queue, rendering many operators uneconomic, which is all part of the plan.

The Germans, however, went further by effectively banning nuclear power generation (the plan is to shut down all of their nuclear plants) and sought to shut down their coal-fired power plants too, only to restart them in a dreadful hurry when wind power output collapsed for weeks last winter.

But it’s the chaos in the power market…

The inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic is due to start work in the spring, chaired by Baroness (Heather) Hallett, a former Court of Appeal judge. It will be one of the most complex inquiries in legal history, and highly charged politically, with over 150,000 deaths so far, and the pandemic far from over. In January, the UCL Political Science Department hosted an expert panel discussion to pool advice on how best to set up a complex inquiry to ensure that it works speedily and efficiently, victims feel they have been heard, and the findings are accepted as legitimate. Ioana Măxineanu summarises their contributions.

On January 13th, the UCL Political Science Department hosted an online seminar entitled Setting Up the Covid Inquiry. The event was chaired by Robert Hazell, and brought together three distinguished panellists previously involved in high profile inquiries: Lord (Nicholas) Phillips, chair of the BSE Inquiry

Canadians are blocking a bridge. For Americans who like to engage in stereotypes about Canadians, this is inexplicable (even though the practice of blocking things in Canada is not new by any means). However, for me as an economist, it is entirely explicable.

Consider what vaccine mandates/passports (which is what initiated the current mayhem) do in pure economics terms: they raise costs for the unvaccinated. They do not alter the benefit of being vaccinated. All they do is raise costs. People could be more or less inelastic to this cost, but the fact that many are willing to spend time and resources (fuel, wear and tear of trucks etc.) to prevent such policies from continuing suggest that their behavior is not perfectly inelastic.

How elastic is it then? Well, we can see that by looking at what happens when we alter the benefit of being vaccinated. This is…

More than 11 years ago, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released this video about the OECD, a Paris-based bureaucracy subsidized by American taxpayers.

As outlined in the video, there are many reasons to dislike the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

As a fan of tax competition, I don’t like the OECD because the bureaucrats persecute jurisdictions with low tax burdens.

But the bureaucracy’s pro-tax harmonization campaign is a symptom of a broader problem, which is that the OECD relentlessly advocates for higher taxes.

Consider the recent publication entitled “Fighting Tax Crime – The Ten Global Principles.” As you can see, nine of those ten principles involve more power and authority for government.

Since I’m not an anarcho-capitalist, I realize some taxation is necessary (ideally only the amount needed to finance genuine public goods).

As such, I don’t necessarily condemn enforcement policies.

But…