Utopia, you are standing in it!

Elizabeth Stuart (August 19, 1596 – February 13, 1662) was Electress of the Palatinate and briefly Queen of Bohemia as the wife of Friedrich V of the Palatinate. Because her husband’s reign in Bohemia as King and in the Palatinate as Prince-Elector lasted for just one winter, Elizabeth is often referred to as the “Winter Queen”.

Elizabeth was the second child and eldest daughter of James I-VI, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, and his wife, Anne of Denmark. Anne of Denmark was the second daughter of daughter of King Frederik II of Denmark and Norway and Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow. Elizabeth had two siblings, infancy: Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, who predeceased his parents and James’s future successor, Charles I. Other siblings, Margaret (1598–1600), Robert Bruce Stuart, Duke of Kintyre and Lorne (January 18, 1602 – May 27, 1602), Mary Stuart (1605–1607), and Sophia (June 22, 1606 – June 23…

Washington is filled with dishonest and self-serving analysis. Much of that shoddy output is driven by privileged groups seeking bailouts, subsidies, protectionism, or a tilted playing field.

• The health insurance and pharmaceutical companies supported Obamacare.
• Big agribusiness firms support farm subsidies.
• The big Wall Street Firms supported Dodd-Frank.

But that’s not the only type of dishonest and self-serving you find in Washington.

Let’s take the example of President Biden’s proposal to gut welfare reform with per-child handouts.

The micro-economic problem with that policy is that it reduces incentives to work – as illustrated by this Wizard-of-Id parody or this cartoon about socialism.

The macro-economic problem with that policy is that it’s part of a radical expansion in the burden of government that will make the U.S. more like Europe.

For today’s topic, though, I want to call attention to a recent…

Introduction

On 15 August 2021, Prime Minister Boris Johnson requested that the Speaker recall the House of Commons from its summer recess early so that MPs could hold an emergency debate over the fallout of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, which the Taliban took as an opportunity to recapture Kabul and to install themselves as the de facto government once more.[1]The House of Commons would originally have reconvened on 6 September under its regular sitting calendar but met instead on 18 August.[2] The Lords Speaker also recalled the House of Lords for the same day. The British House of Commons and House of Lords could meet to discuss the British response and efforts to evacuate their diplomatic personnel and refugees because the two houses had merely adjourned for their regular summer recess. The British House of Commons has cut short its adjournments in such a manner…

The Signs Pointing to a Snap Election, June to August 2021

Since at least mid-June, the media had treated an early election as a fait accompli, and politicians and political parties began acting as if the writ had already begun by early July. On 15 June, several MPs in the House of Commons delivered their “Farewell Speeches”, including Jack Harris (New Democratic Member for St. John’s East), Simon Marcil (Blocist Member for Mirabel), and Kate Young (Liberal Member for London West).[1]The very same day, Elections Canada announced that it could administer a general election during the pandemic without the statutory amendments contemplated by Parliament which ultimately died on the Order Paper on 15 August.[2]On 22 June, Prime Minister Trudeau denounced the 43^rd Parliament for its “obstructionism and toxicity,” not the sort of thing that one would say in advance of a…

In the end, of course, the bottom line of yesterday’s Reserve Bank announcement was unsurprising and perhaps inevitable – action deferred on account of Covid. It wasn’t as if they were on some statutory schedule, so they could easily have postponed the decision for a couple of weeks, but in the scheme of things the difference between that and waiting for the next scheduled review (6 October) isn’t great. It is clear from the Bank’s forecast numbers they had not been minded to raise the OCR by 50 basis points this time, so if need be they can always catch up by acting a bit more firmly in October.

There was even something to praise. The Bank had revamped the look of the document and – bad-wig new logo aside – it was a definite improvement, even if it is hard to be sure what (if anything) the front cover…