“When Boris Yeltsin visited a Houston supermarket in 1989, the sheer choice of goods and services on offer compared to stores in Soviet Russia shocked him. `Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,’ he said. Faced with this new, striking reality of American living standards, he began to recognise the massive costs of the communist economic system on the Russian people. Before seeing it with his own eyes, though, Yeltsin was none the wiser. To echo the movie The Matrix again, his supermarket visit was a ‘red pill’ moment – it allowed him to escape the constructed reality of Soviet communism and experience a real, alternative world.”
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From the Wall Street Journal:
Assuming that there is some connection between having a higher education qualification and pay (that connection is not by any means set in stone) then if this trend continues, not only will it eliminate any alleged “pay gap” to the detriment of women, but push it another way. Of course, it might be that some US men have worked out that college in many ways is a waste of their time, a cesspit of wokery and pointless diversions, and they’d be better off learning code, or industrial welding, or something that doesn’t saddle them with big debts. Even so, the male/female college attendance gap in the US, and quite possibly in a few other nations, appears to be one of those stories that very clearly pushes against a standard narrative of how the cards are stacked in favour of we toxic males and that therefore this needs to be fixed in some way. In my day job, I routinely get lots of emails from banks, wealth managers and other firms going on about the wonders of diversity, etc, and rarely, if ever, is this college attendance point brought up. I have raised it once or twice with people, and it gets a sort of muffled response, if at all. A few more paragraphs from the WSJ article, which is behind a paywall:
September 7th, 2021 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “President Biden’s tax plans might soon make Europe look like a capitalist heaven by comparison. He wants to raise the long-term capital-gains tax from just below 24% to above 43%. Switzerland has no such tax. In Britain, inventor of the welfare state, it is 20% and in Germany 26%. On income tax, the U.S. may soon top the scale. Mr. Biden wants a top marginal income-tax rate of just below 40%. Add state and local income taxes, like California’s 13.3% for top earners, and wealthy U.S. taxpayers could pay more than their European counterparts.” – Josef Joffe, Wall Street Journal ($) I have been covering this news story about the tax proposals in my regular day job in the banking and wealth management/media sector. Joe Biden, who has been having such a shit-show lately over Afghanistan, is equally terrible over tax and the economy, and also a bit two-faced. This is a man who, let it not be forgotten, was a senator for Delaware for many years. Delaware is a bit like a mini-“Switzerland”, one of those states that is favoured by corporations and creators of trusts (South Dakota, New Hampshire, Nevada and Alaska are similar). The US is going to have to familiarise itself with the “Laffer Curve” all over again. August 23rd, 2021 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Politicians have spent trillions of dollars subsidizing renewable energy with no effect on climate. Nuclear power, which would sharply reduce CO2, is taboo among the greens. Innovation in developing low-cost natural gas, which substitutes for coal, may have done more than any government policy to reduce U.S. emissions. Yet President Biden wants to crush the gas industry with regulation. The IPCC report doesn’t justify putting the U.S. economy into the hands of government. A sensible climate policy will continue to monitor trends, while allowing a free economy to find solutions and build the wealth that will allow for adaptation and amelioration if the worst happens. This lacks the drama of the Apocalypse, but it will better serve the world.” – Wall Street Journal, responding to the latest IPCC report on global warming (aka climate change). August 10th, 2021 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There’s a reason that Her Majesty’s government can now afford, politically speaking, to experiment with policies that are native to stratified east Asian states. It’s the very same reason why the Democratic Party here in the States can attempt to spend multiple trillions of dollars during just six months of unified government without any obvious public dismay. Catastrophes are accelerants of government expansion, and the pandemic will go down in history as one in a series of quantum leaps into a more statist world — a world in which governments feel increasingly emboldened to attempt the previously unthinkable.” – Cameron Hilditch, writing in National Review. Quick observation: there would, from a free market sort of view, be nothing necessarily wrong if an insurance company, for example, varies its premiums on clients who have proof that they, for example, keep fit, eat a healthy diet and so on. But that is a transaction freely entered into, and subject to the competition of a market place. Social credit systems on the Chinese model are not like this, however. There is no choice, no opportunity to opt out. If I got a pound every time someone went on about Boris Johnson’s damned “libertarian instincts”, I’d be a resident of Monaco by now. We left the EU to get out of a form of creeping statism, and we get this. At least, I suppose, we can eventually vote the current government, led by this albino circus act, out of office, but for things to improve, there has be a shift in the culture in the UK – and elsewhere – of what is acceptable and and about the importance of liberty and autonomy. August 3rd, 2021 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
China appears to be doing its level best to harm itself in the long term. This story hasn’t so far stirred a lot of international commentary, but it matters, I think. It shows that the rising nationalism (and arguably, a degree of paranoia) in China is reaching the point where it is damaging the domestic economy. According to one report in Forbes:
The moves by Chinese authorities have hammered shares of firms operating in the space. One story I read in the Wall Street Journal said that China, while hitting private sector education, is at the same time trying to make it easier for young couples to have more kids, reversing decades of its odious “one child” policy. Why does this matter? Because the ever-shifting moves of Chinese authorities on certain sectors must make it hard for entrepreneurs in that country to plan ahead. One moment a chap like Alibaba’s Jack Ma is a sort of business “rock star”, and the next, he’s “disappeared”. In my job in the financial services industry, I have heard a lot of comments over the years on how vibrant, dynamic and coherent Chinese policymaking is, so much better than all that messy Western “neoliberalism”. Well, it turns out that things in China aren’t quite what they are cracked up to be. July 28th, 2021 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“When something is free, only the well-connected get much of it.” – George Gilder, The Scandal of Money. July 22nd, 2021 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Today’s targeting of successful Asian-American kids lacks the crudity of a Jim Crow lunch counter or a whites-only drinking fountain. But it is no less ugly—and no less racially discriminatory—for being more genteel.” – William McGurn, Wall Street Journal ($). Here is a non-paywalled story at USA Today outlining the issue, and highlighting what a steaming pile Critical Race Theory is. And its doubly outrageous given the demoralising impact it has on children who study and work hard and on the families who encourage this effort. Given how these things work, this story is worth reading outside the US as well. July 14th, 2021 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The cliche goes that the UK is a former empire in search of a role. That is not strictly true. The NHS has become Britain’s all-consuming project, the millstone around its neck and the cloying source of confected national pride. Its hold over the country is so powerful that even a libertarian Conservative PM decided this week to risk sacrificing our ordinary freedom rather than dare to reform it.” – Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph, 13 July (£) My only quibble is the appellation “libertarian”, in this case. Mr Johnson’s libertarian views increasingly resemble entities of myth and legend, such as the Loch Ness Monster, Atlantis, or the 1966 English World Cup winning football team. July 13th, 2021 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
As well as the hypocrisy of a man who seemed at times to delight in locking down fellow citizens during the pandemic, here are some other reasons for enjoying the spectacle of this turd being forced to spend time having rotten tomatoes, dead cats and other items thrown against him in the stocks:
From an article by Daniel Miller. What is perhaps unsurprising is that there is not more anger about this. It’s as if this level of jobs-for-the-boys/girls is now par for the course. The ironies abound. A few years ago, the UK enacted something called the Bribery Act, designed to stop UK companies bribing officials and others into winning contracts. To be clear, it is not stated anywhere I know that what Hancock (an unfortunate surname) did was illegal, but it sails pretty close to the wind. Directors of companies and those in public positions have to disclose a lot these days. I’ll be interested to see what ultimately happens. To go all libertarian “meta-context” here, a berk such as Hancock is political road-kill, a footnote to history as and when it this melancholy period of history is written. But what he represents is how in the hunt for fame and riches, the public realm attracts such bottom-feeders. Brass neck, a certain pushiness and so forth, can take certain people very far. With such a large chunk of our lives controlled or mediated by the State, such creatures flourish. Large C and small conservatives are supposed to understand all this. Yesterday, the US marked Independence Day and the Founders crafted the Constitution and the elaborate set of checks and balances with such issues in mind. What is troubling about today is that I see zero sign anywhere, and certainly not from the Boris Johnson administration, about learning wider lessons from the venality on display in the Hancock case. Addendum: I see the Queen (who would have been advised by Mr Johnson) has conferred a collective George Cross medal on the National Health Service. In the eyes of some, the NHS should have been renamed the National Covid Service over the past 18 months or so. To honour a socialist entity such as the NHS is quite a bold step. The only two other collective holders of the GC are the island of Malta (my second nation by marriage) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. July 5th, 2021 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The truth is that China has come out of the lockdowns grimmer, stronger and more assertive. The world we knew has gone.” – Daniel Hannan, Sunday Telegraph today (behind paywall). He is writing on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. An organisation responsible for the deaths of tens of millions and which continues to run a heavily authoritarian and dangerous place. It is nothing to celebrate – quite the reverse. July 4th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The `robber barons’ gave us railroads and public libraries. Zuck gave us Farmville and censorship.” – Glenn Reynolds, apropos criticisms of how Big Tech bosses such as Mark Zuckerberg carry on. For what it is worth, the censorship operated by the Facebook and other Big Tech folk is still, in my view, less serious than of the traditional government kind. If you don’t like Facebook then don’t use it. By contrast, with government, we are forced to pay taxes to the bastards, regardless of what we use or how we vote. And by the way, most of the “robber barons” weren’t robbing anyone, but adding value and doing such evil things as producing cheaper steel, oil and transportation. Much of the anti-trust furore was built around a total failure to see competition as an active process across time, not a static sport. The “perfect competition” model of neoclassical economics has done a lot of damage. June 9th, 2021 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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