“The more big and active the state is, the more it is worth purchasing.”
– Deidre N McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State (page 97).
|
|||||
|
June 25th, 2026 | 16 comments
 “Mathematics will need to develop a research culture that can accommodate AI as a partner. This will involve journals that require verification, hiring and tenure arrangements that reward exposition and checking, and collaborative practices for the verification of proofs. Checking and explaining AI-generated mathematics must count as original intellectual labor. The stronger AI becomes, the more valuable this human expertise will be.” – Daniel Kipnis, Wall Street Journal ($) June 16th, 2026 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
“If everybody must be equally well-off all the time, there can be no significant movement up or down. That would rule out what might be seen as a natural trajectory from less successful to more successful, or from early struggle to affluent independence, perhaps involving personal resourcefulness or a climb up a professional ladder.” And: “Personal achievement and self-improvement are among the greatest satisfactions life has to offer. The possibility of moral agency and the scope for taking individual responsibility are probably the defining attributes of emotional maturity.” – Janet Daley, Sunday Telegraph. May 26th, 2026 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The richest person in the world in the 1830s was Nathan Rothschild, whose personal net worth was around 0.6 per cent of national income. Despite this vast fortune, Rothschild died at age 58 in 1836 of an infection that $10 of antibiotics could likely cure today. Similarly, the richest people in the world today, such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, presumably have a marginal utility from additional consumption spending that is zero. Nevertheless, their utility still increases when new goods (smartphones or LLMs) are invented. These examples suggest that more consumption of a fixed set of goods eventually hits a marginal utility of zero while the invention of new goods or higher quality goods continues to increase wellbeing.” As seen on a Students For Liberty comment on a Facebook page I follow. The quote was cited by this chap: Karthik Tadepalli, of the Becker Friedman Institute For Economics, University of Chicago. I don’t have the original link. There are some super-smart young classical liberals out there, and many seem to be coming from places such as Eastern Europe, India, etc. The point about marginal utility reminds me of a comment from Perry Metzger on this blog on 2014, debunking the Thomas Piketty book that purported to claim that wealth rises faster than the overall economy and that the “rich” will eventually swallow up the world unless restrained by wealth taxes and so on. Perry M got in a reference to Douglas Adams, which is always the mark of a good article, IMHO. May 17th, 2026 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The return of the Right in 2016 and again in 2024 was not an intellectual revival. It was not driven by theory or political philosophy, but by visibility and reach: Jordan Peterson debating feminists, Charlie Kirk confronting campus socialists, Donald Trump dominating the podcast circuit. The Right returned culturally, but with an intellectual vacuum at its centre: most notably, a lack of serious economics. For classical liberals looking back decades from now, this revival of the Right is unlikely to inspire them in the way Thatcher and Reagan still do today. The politicians of the 1980s were what George Will called ‘conviction politicians’: figures who entered politics with a coherent social creed. Politics for them was not merely about remaining in power, but about pursuing a broader mission of prosperity. That mission was not to control the economy toward a collective goal, but to empower individuals to make their own decisions. Today’s Right, by contrast, is dominated by political entrepreneurs: figures highly skilled at attracting attention and mobilising voters. By nature, they are populists, and populism is the direct translation of public emotion into government policy. Without intellectual grounding, politics becomes purely oppositional. Today, lacking any clear sense of direction in economics, the Right is often effective at identifying problems but incapable of solving them.” May 12th, 2026 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
“In the pantheon of destructive, counterproductive laws of the last few centuries, Labour’s new Renters’ Rights Act, which starts today, must be up there with the worst. Perhaps alongside the Corn Laws of 1815, or the Trade Union Act of 1906 that allowed unchecked industrial unrest and economic decline, or the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 that constrained housing supply. It is that bad. The Renters’ Rights Act is sold as a moral crusade: a bold attempt to drive rogue landlords out of England’s private rental sector and protect tenants from abuse. As with the soon-to-be-implemented Employment Rights Act 2025, it is a cure that worsens the disease. Just as higher unemployment will come from the Employment Rights Act, so higher rent and fewer tenancies will come from this Renters’ Rights Act. Employment rights creating more unemployed people, renters’ rights creating more people that cannot rent. Classic performative socialism.” – Tim Briggs on CapX. One take-away from all this in my opinion is that this will seriously damage private landlords who own, say, one to five properties, and benefit larger, more institutional landlords, including corporations. Ownership of rental property will become concentrated into the hands of medium-sized and large companies, which I suspect is exactly what the existing government (and not just the existing one) wants. Such landlords will be more pliable when it comes to political pressure to adopt this or that new rule. Also, at the margins, it makes the rental sector less flexible, which also hampers the ability of people to move around in finding and obtaining new jobs. This adds to the baleful impact of the new employment legislation in the UK, which amongst its features is an attempt to re-unionise the workforce and shorten periods when an employee is on probation and can be let go. Even the BBC covers this aspect of such rules, referring to “unintended consequences”. The point has to be made over and over that there is cause and effect. Make X more costly, or potentially risky (such as by making it harder to fire a person, evict a delinquent tenant) – there will be less of X. We impose speeding tickets on speeding motorists, so why should it be different if we somehow increase the cost of doing something, all else being equal? In fact, it would be honest if a politician said “yes, imposing these rules will reduce supply of X, so we will need to make up the difference in some other way”. But this hardly ever happens. There’s just this assumption that a new piece of law or tax will be absorbed. This is a species, in a way, of the magical thinking that we also get in areas such as around Net Zero. May 4th, 2026 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The people pursuing luxury beliefs are engaged in a kind of status competition. Who can épater la bourgeoisie with the boldest, most transgressive political statements? After Oct. 7, 2023, we saw this kind of status-jockeying on college campuses, where elite students vied to become the most fervent supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah. Keffiyeh scarves became de rigueur. Celebrating political murder is the next step on this progression. For most, it’s only talk. But there will always be a few who seek what they see as the ultimate status: actually carrying out a political attack. “People who shrug off this violence chic as mere talk need to take a hard look at what’s going on. The foiled attack on President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was the third attempt on Mr. Trump’s life in less than two years. The 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk was tragically successful. As was the hit on two Israel embassy staffers on a street in Washington, D.C., last year. We’ve seen hundreds of attacks on Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues. An anti-Israel extremist firebombed the residence of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. The list goes on and on. And the pace of these attacks seems to be accelerating.” – James B Meigs, Wall Street Journal ($) His article also addresses how it is now considered chic for these poseurs and self-regarding halfwits to steal stuff. One consequence of all this nastiness will be a rise in vigilantism, and I don’t at this point think anyone has an excuse for being surprised. April 30th, 2026 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I got this on my Linkedin page, from a chap called John Russo. Here’s more:
Hard to dispute any of this. Read the whole thing, as someone once put it.
April 27th, 2026 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
It seems to me that for Iran to use the Straits to squeeze the rest of the world into acquiescing into its brutality is a ploy that brings diminishing returns. Given that oil can be piped as well as shipped via a tanker, construction of more pipelines to take the stuff – and gas – over land rather than via sea seems screamingly obvious. Sure, pipelines can be attacked and that creates issues around security. Even so, the key is to have options. I have heard it said that one reason behind the Hamas Oct 7 attacks was that Iran wanted to stymie a pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would, as part of it, include a cross-region pipeline or set of pipelines (maybe with the oil reaching the Mediterranean coast in Israel).
Even if the Straits retain some value, that is going to erode and fast in the next few years, is my guess. And this whole saga also highlights the truth of a quote attributed to an American fracker business executive, who is supposed to have said that these folk are not just extracting more oil and gas, but are helping to save Western civilisation. Whoever that was, he or she wasn’t exaggerating. As of the time of going to press, President Trump has announced a two-week ceasefire. I worry that this gives Iran breathing space – I don’t think the region will be sorted out until or unless the regime in Tehran is overthrown, although this needs, ultimately, to come from Iranians themselves. That said, it is worth taking stock of what has happened in terms of the loss of military power in Iran, including its ability to make nukes. That’s not a trivial achievement. And the world – including China – has had a good look at the impressiveness of the US and Israeli air forces and special forces. It has, to be fair, also had a good look at the parlous state of the UK’s military, particularly its pitiful navy. April 8th, 2026 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Chris Bayliss weighs up UK energy minister Ed Milliband and this politician’s determination to press on with his decarbonisation, Net Zero agenda, facts of reality be damned:
Reading all this, it is hard not to think of how Milliband, and others who share his views, hold the intellectual equivalent of the sunk cost fallacy. Meanwhile, at the Daily Sceptic:
I remember the late Brian Micklethwait, of this parish, telling me a while back that sooner or later, the lies and exaggerations of the climate change alarmists would be exposed, and the anger of electorates over what has been allowed to pass would have major consequences. Remember, gentle reader, that much of the deindustrialisation of the West, and all that this implies, has been driven by those who championed the end of fossil fuel production. March 31st, 2026 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Sovereignty is not merely the technical possibility of making a one‑off decision. It is the continuing ability to govern yourself: to set and revise your own rules in the light of your own needs. When you adopt the regulatory framework of a foreign power, when commercial realities make reversal prohibitively costly and when you have no seat at the table where the rules are made, you may have exercised a choice at the outset but you have chosen powerless subordination thereafter.” – Steve Baker, former Conservative MP and campaigner for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. He’s unhappy at the machinations of the current Labour government, and I share his annoyance. March 29th, 2026 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Zack Polanski may be terrible at economics, but he is a great entrepreneur — a political entrepreneur, that is. The lesson from Corbynmania, the Greta Thunberg movement, BLM, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, the gender movement and the Palestine movement is that there is a lot of vaguely youthful, vaguely left-wing, vaguely anti-capitalist political energy around. That energy was looking for a political outlet, a gap in the market which Polanski spotted and filled. I wish he had used his talents to become an actual entrepreneur in the private sector instead, creating wealth rather than promoting ideas that destroy it. For those blissfully unaware of Zack Polanski (original name is David Paulden), here is some information about his approach to foreign affairs. Assuming he is sincere, he is mad, or it may be that he is simply intellectually depraved. March 19th, 2026 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||