Utopia, you are standing in it!

‘Bombs’ are designed to store and quickly release copious amounts of energy, so are the mega-batteries said to save wind and solar from their hopeless intermittency.

The notion is that giant lithium-ion batteries will quell the power delivery chaos that comes with attempting to rely wholly weather-dependent wind power and wholly sunshine-dependent solar power; thereby bringing stability and security to plenty a power grid teetering on the brink of collapse, all the consequence of our “inevitable transition” away from reliable and dependable power generation sources, like coal and gas.

But there’s nothing ‘stable and secure’ about lithium batteries.

As Samsung mobile phone owners are painfully aware, lithium batteries have a horrifying habit of spontaneous ignition. STT has fond memories of watching fellow airline passengers being berated for having a Samsung 7 in their pocket.

And there have been plenty of incidents where the lithium batteries in Tesla’s electric cars have…

Senator Bernie Sanders wants to dramatically increase the burden of government and he claims that his policies won’t lead to economic misery because nations such as Sweden show that you can be a prosperous country with a big welfare state.

Perhaps, but there are degrees of prosperity. And a large public sector imposes a non-trivial burden on Nordic nations, resulting in living standards that lag U.S. levels according to OECD data.

Moreover, according to research by a Swedish economist, people of Scandinavian descent in America produce and earn much more than their counterparts at home.

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Nordic Model.

But there actually are some things we can learn from places such as Sweden. And not just things to avoid.

As Johan Norberg explains in this short video (you may have to double-click and watch it on the YouTube site), there are some…

Since I called Trump a big-government Republican during the 2016 campaign and just condemned his capitulation to a spendaholic budget deal, it goes without saying that I’m not a huge fan of the President.

Heck, I also recently criticized his protectionism, warning that additional barriers to trade could offset the pro-growth effect of lower tax rates.

But I like to think I’m fair in my criticisms. I stay away from the personal stuff (other than for humor purposes) and and simply focus on whether liberty is increasing or decreasing.

Today, though, I want to quasi-defend Trump because a professor from the University of Richmond wrote a really strange column for the Washington Post with a very bizarre assertion about Juan Perón, the populist post-World War II president of Argentina.

It’s en vogue for enraged liberals to compare Trumpism to Argentine Peronism, wielding the analogy as a warning…

Economists widely agree with the theory of “convergence,” which is the (mostly true) idea that poor nations should grow faster than rich nations.

This means that we can learn important lessons by looking at examples of “divergence,” and I provide 20 examples in this presentation.

The above video is an excerpt from a presentation I made earlier this week to a seminar organized by the New Economic School in the country of Georgia.

While it seems like I was making the same point, over and over again (and I was), I wanted the students to understand that the real-world evidence clearly shows that good policy is critical if less-developed nations want convergence.

And I also wanted them to realize that there are many examples of free market-oriented nations growing much faster than anti-market countries.

But, by contrast, there are not examples that go the other way.