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Ah! A testable proposition. So, currently the UK government takes 45% of everything, 45% of all economic effort and GDP. The US government – at all levels – consumes about 28% of GDP, the Indonesian about 11% (yes, 11%) and Singapore’s some 17% or so. So it would seem that economic dynamism is indeed associated with less than the UK’s confiscatory tax rates. Even, that fructifying idea has some empirical legs. As ever, all economics is either footnotes to Adam Smith or wrong. January 25th, 2024 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
 So, in spite of the Russia/Ukraine war, the growing conflict in the Middle East and the Chinese military threats to Taiwan, Ursula believes the most important issue facing the world is “disinformation and misinformation” – basically what we plebs are allowed to see and hear. And she believes a key role for the elites is rebuild trust in the plans the elites have for us by protecting us against being fed information which she and other leaders consider to be potentially harmful or polarising. January 22nd, 2024 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
One can see why this idea has taken off again: it sits at the intersection of two of the most voguish ideologies of our time, namely, woke progressivism and anti-capitalism. It is a story about white people – white men, mostly – oppressing non-white people, which also doubles up as an “original sin” story of capitalism. But is it actually true that imperialism makes countries richer? Does imperialism make economic sense? This question was already hotly debated at the heyday of imperialism. Adam Smith believed that the British Empire would not pass a cost-benefit test. January 20th, 2024 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
I would like to think that the cozy post war socialist consensus is coming to a long overdue end. We defeated the divine right of kings, now we have to do the same to the divine right of bureaucrats. January 17th, 2024 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Prices in markets are information – however much we might not like the lessons being delivered. January 14th, 2024 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Too often the culture war is misconceived as a conflict between Left and Right, with “woke” aligned with the former and “anti-woke” with the latter, but “wokeness” carries with it the kind of clout that transcends the political binary. In their 13 years of government, the Conservatives have presided over the worst excesses of this identity-obsessed ideology and the havoc it has wrought on society. Far from fighting a “war on woke”, they have been actively enabling it. January 9th, 2024 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
So, there you have it. To recap — the new government installed its own political nominees by force, based upon a completely bogus legal justification, and the excuses it used were… “depoliticization”, “trust” and “restoring the constitutional order”. Moreover, the democratically elected President, who actually suggested being open to compromise, is treated like an obstacle to be bypassed by illegal means. All of it in the name of — you guessed it — “the constitutional order”. Right… – Paweł Sokala, discussing the astonishing coup-like behaviour of the new Polish government. January 7th, 2024 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s going to be an interesting election: the party that deserves to lose versus the party that doesn’t deserve to win. – Commenter Andy January 5th, 2024 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
To say our elites have a blindspot where anti-Semitism is concerned is a grotesque understatement. Having spent years obsessing over fantasy forms of racism and fascism, having spent years soberly telling us that Boris Johnson was Eton’s answer to Hitler, the great and good look upon Jew-hating marches, attacks and even terror plots… and it barely registers. Whether these people are ignoring anti-Semitism, making excuses for it, or participating in it, the story remains the same. Our supposedly ‘anti-racist’ betters, people who during the Black Lives Matter uprising just two years ago were taking knees and ‘doing the work’ and tweeting #SilenceIsViolence from their £4million townhouses, are so marinated in a divisive identity politics and a demented ‘anti-imperialism’ that they see Jews as ‘white’ oppressors, even when they’re being beaten up, and Israel as the aggressor, even when it is under attack. The silence of the ‘anti-racists’ over the barbaric rise of anti-Semitism reminds us that these people were never anti-racists at all. December 29th, 2023 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
We also visited the sense-dulling intersection of sports, wokeness, and science journalism, via the publication laughingly referred to as Scientific American, in which we were told, “The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences, but of biases in how they are treated in sport.” That such male-female differences and their implications for athletes have been widely studied and quantified seemed somehow to have escaped detection. That Allyson Felix, an 11-time Olympic track and field medallist, would place six hundred and eighty-ninth on a ranking of high-school boys was one of many details carefully avoided. And which again suggests that wokeness is actively stupefying, a kind of rapid-onset morony. – David Thompson, presenting us with a roundup of 2023’s lunatic antics. Read the whole thing and prepare to be stupefied by the cavalcade of idiocy. December 28th, 2023 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a time of war, everybody makes proportionality arguments. But proportionality is a fool’s game, more suited to propaganda than to reasoned judgement. Wars are not sporting events. December 7th, 2023 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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