Utopia, you are standing in it!

Continuing our series on the different buildings occupied by the House of Commons between 1832 and 1868, this blog looks at the makeshift arrangements made for the prorogation in the aftermath of the devastating Westminster fire of October 1834. The first blog, on the pre-1834 Commons chamber, can be found here.

On 15 August 1834 the House of Commons assembled for the last day of the 1834 parliamentary session. Around seventy members were present in the chamber – the former St. Stephen’s Chapel – when the Speaker, Sir Charles Manners Sutton, took the chair that afternoon.

A limited amount of business took place, including the presentation of petitions, questions to ministers and notices of future motions. In a reminder of how long Parliament has been subject to restoration and renewal, Sir Samuel Whalley asked when ongoing repairs to Westminster Hall would be completed and suggested that ‘the painting…

The government of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven was ousted in a no confidence vote with 181 votes against it in the 349-seat Swedish parliament, the Riksdag, on 21 June. The prime minister has a week to decide whether to go to a snap election or resign to allow the speaker of parliament to facilitate the negotiation of a new government. According to Reuters, this make Lofven “the first Swedish prime minister to be ousted by a no-confidence motion put forward by the opposition.” If there is a snap election, it would be the first since 1958.

The government is a minority government of the Social Democrats and Greens, with a policy-based agreement to allow it to govern signed with the Centre and Liberal parties. It also has had tacit support from the Left Party, but the agreement with the two center-right parties calls for the Left to have no policy…

When studying the economic of taxation, one of the most important lessons is that there should be low marginal tax rates on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.

That’s also the core message of this video from Prof. John Cochrane.

I wrote a primer on marginal tax rates back in 2018. I wanted to help people understand that the incentive to engage in additional productive behavior is impacted by how much people get to keep if they earn additional income.

So what matters isn’t the tax on income that’s already been generated. The key variable is the marginal tax on the additional increment of income. As illustrated by the accompanying visual.

I’ve shared real-life examples of how the American tax system can result in very high marginal tax rates, especially when you include the extra layers of tax on income that is saved and invested (producing extremely high effective marginal…

I see there has been some ruction here in New Zealand about a high school activist group (School Strike For Climate Auckland or SSFCA) breaking itself up because of its inherent White Supremacy.

Apparently the group was “advised” about this problem by Maori and Pasifika groups also engaged in “fighting Climate Change”. I was amused that Chris Trotter covered this story with the title, Losing The “Struggle-Session” Over Climate Change:

The statement released by SSFCA was heart-breaking. To find an historical precedent for the document’s abject self-negation and unqualified acknowledgement of guilt it is necessary to go back to the “struggle sessions” of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the late-1960s. Or, even further back, to the “confessions” tremulously delivered by the broken victims of Joseph Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s. The shaming and vilification required to reduce these idealistic young people to a state of such utter…