America got a little bit crazier this week. I’m not talking about the Ferguson riots, round two, which make me ever-grateful that New Zealand maintains an unarmed constabulary. Read more
“A change-over from an increasing to a declining population may be very disastrous,” John Maynard Keynes once reflected. This may be so, but a declining working-age population could prove even worse. Read more
Sitting in one of New Zealand’s urban centres, it is tempting to look across the various data points and conclude that all is well with the country. Yes, dairy and log prices have pared back substantially over recent months, but almost every other economic indicator is improving, holding its own, or lingering below warning levels, as in the case of inflation. Read more
There are many emotions that Reserve Bank Governor Graeme Wheeler is likely to provoke, depending on the state of your bank account, but sympathy for this modern Beowulf is hardly the first choice. Yet that is exactly what I felt for the technocrat last week when he announced that he was thinking about delving deeper into his economic toolbox in the hopes of finding a gizmo that could zap more heat out of the housing market. Read more
It was always going to be a bittersweet victory: whoever won the Labour leadership battle would immediately be thrust into the war of winning back voters. And boy has Andrew Little been thrust into a war: the Labour Party has faced a stunning defeat domestically, within the wider context of an international left-wing demise. Read more
A spending spree after an unexpected Christmas bonus is something we can all understand. Maybe it isn’t the best way of planning your finances, but it isn’t going to really do any harm. Read more
In 2009, I wrote a piece on the social costs of drugs for NORML; it appeared in their NORML News magazine. The police later sought to have several issues of NORML News deemed Objectionable; some articles described hashish production methods. Read more
Fish don’t know they are swimming in water. Similarly, many Kiwis don’t know they are living in freedom. Read more
William Voegeli, a senior editor at Clarement Review of Books, recently gave a speech, The case against liberal compassion, at Michigan's Hillsdale College that raised the question of why many (US) liberals appear to feel that no matter how much governments are spending to alleviate and prevent poverty, the latest amount is always shamefully inadequate. He put US federal spending on welfare, including health and education, in 2013 at 2/3rds of all federal outlays and 14% of GDP. Read more
Imagine for a minute there were a magical ring that, when twisted, rendered the wearer invisible. In using the ring, would that person remain true to their moral code, or abandon their principles and use it to their undue advantage? Read more
Imagine if your financial advisor, to whom you had entrusted with your life’s savings, turned around and told you one day that actually, they didn’t really know what they were doing; that you were probably in a better position than them to make decisions; but they invested your money anyway, just to prove they are doing their job. You probably wouldn’t be too pleased that a trusted authority could be so reckless with your hard-earned money. Read more
When Gordon Tullock submitted his article, The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopoly and Theft, to the top journal in economics, The American Economic Review, John Gurley, then Editor, rejected it, saying “You will no doubt note that the referee neglects your point regarding the amount of real resources devoted to establishing, promoting, destroying monopolises, etc. However, I have noted it and, while I think it is certainly valid, it does not appear significant (as a theoretical contribution).” Tullock’s contribution was eventually published in 1967 in the rather less prestigious Western Economic Journal. Read more
We moved to New Zealand over a decade ago because I reckoned it the world’s least mad country: the Outside of the Asylum. It tops my informal ranking on this important metric. Read more
The media’s responsibility is to establish facts. Yet it seems the job of a journalist now is nothing more than taking a press release at face value, paraphrasing it a little, and fluffing it up. Read more
Dutch graphic design student Zilla van den Born recently made international headlines with her Bachelor’s thesis on ‘Fakebooking’. For those of us familiar with Facebook but not with Fakebooking, her project was all about falsifying her own life and posting about it on the social network. Read more
