Trump’s “victory timeline” claims (actual quotes)

June 25, 2025: "Iran's nuclear facilities have been obliterated."
Jan 2, 2026: threatens a "locked and loaded" military intervention if Iran kills peaceful protesters.
Jan 13: "Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!... HELP IS ON ITS WAY"
Feb 13: Regime change "would be the best thing that could happen" in Iran
Feb 24: "We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven't heard those secret words, 'We will never have a nuclear weapon.'" "My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy. But one thing is certain, I will never allow the world's No. 1 sponsor of terror to have a nuclear weapon."
Late Feb: "I'm not happy with the fact that they're not willing to give us what we have to have."

Feb 28: [Oman says a deal is "within reach."]

[IRGC kills 36,000 protestors to March. No "help" appears.]

Also Feb 28: Trump releases an 8-minute video on Truth Social announcing strikes have begun, saying Iran's "menacing activities" endangered the US and its allies; cites the Iran hostage crisis, support for Hamas and Hezbollah, the killing of protesters, and Iran's chanting of "Death to America." He called on the Iranian people to overthrow their government.
Mar 2: "First, we're destroying Iran's missile capabilities… and their capacity to produce brand new ones. Second, we're annihilating their navy… Third, we're ensuring that the world's number one sponsor of terror can never obtain a nuclear weapon… And finally, we're ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders."
Mar 3: Iran is building "powerful missiles and drones to create a conventional shield for their nuclear blackmail ambitions."

Mar 3: Iran poses an "imminent threat" because it is going to retaliate against US forces when Israel attacks.

Mar 3: "We won the war." 

Mar 7: "We defeated Iran." 

Mar 9: "We must attack Iran." 

Mar 9: "The war is ending almost completely, and very beautifully. 

Mar 10: practically nothing left to target 

Mar 11: “You never like to say too ⁠early you won. We won. In ​the first hour it was over.” 

Mar 12: "We did win, but we haven't won completely yet." 

Mar 13: "We won the war." 

Mar 14: "Please help us." 

Mar 15: "If you don't help us, I will certainly remember it." 

Mar 16: "Actually, we don't need any help at all." 

Mar 16: "I was just testing to see who's listening to me." 

Mar 16: "If NATO doesn't help, they will suffer something very bad." 

Mar 17: "We neither need nor want NATO's help." 

Mar 17: "I don't need Congressional approval to withdraw from NATO." 

Mar 18: "Our allies must cooperate in reopening the Strait of Hormuz." 

Mar 19: "US allies need to get a grip - step up and help open the Strait of Hormuz." 

Mar 20: "NATO are cowards." 

Mar 21: "The Strait of Hormuz must be protected by the countries that use it. We don't use it, we don't need to open it." 

Mar 22: "This is the last time. I will give Iran 48 hours. Open the strait" 

Mar 22: "Iran is Dead" 

Mar 23: "VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST." 

Mar 24: "We’re making progress." 

Mar 24: We "won" the war. Iran wants "to make a deal so badly."

Mar 25: “They gave us a present and the present arrived today. And it was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money. I’m not going to tell you what that present is, but it was a very significant prize.” 

Mar 26: "Make a deal, or we’ll just keep blowing them away." 

Mar 27: "We don’t have to be there for NATO." 

Mar 28: No major quote 

Mar 29: Claimed talks were progressing 

Mar 30: "Open the Strait of Hormuz immediately, or face devastating consequences." 

Mar 31: Claimed a deal was "very close" and that Iran would "do the right thing" 

Apr 1: "Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders' death. They're all dead,"

Apr 1: "We’ll see what happens very soon." 

Apr 2: Repeated that a deal was likely, while warning of continued strikes if not 

Apr 3: "Something big is going to happen." 

Apr 4: Said Iran must comply "immediately" or face further consequences. 

Apr 5: "Open the fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah." 

Apr 6 : "...a whole civilization will die"

Apr 6: "We may even get involved with helping them rebuild their nation."

Apr 7: Total and complete victory 

Apr 8: "Double ceasefire ... We have already met and exceeded all Military objectives" 

[Hormuz Straits that were formerly open will now be tolled. Iranian regime continues nuclear programme. Iran regime continues political executions at the rate of nearly 6 per week.]

So what was achieved ... ?

"The Greens are proposing one of the most aggressive tax regimes of its kind anywhere in the developed world..."

 

"The Greens are proposing one of the most aggressive tax regimes of its kind anywhere in the developed world, resulting in a broad-based raid on Kiwis who’ve worked hard, saved, and built something over a lifetime. 

"The idea this only hits the wealthy simply doesn't stack up. One in five Kiwi homes is held in a trust, and the Greens would tax those assets from the first dollar. In Auckland, that means an annual bill of over $18,000 on a mortgage-free family home, or $3,600 for first home buyers with a twenty-percent deposit.

"And it doesn't stop there. A 33 percent death tax would force many families to sell farms, homes, or businesses just to pay the bill. Inheriting the average dairy farm would trigger a $1.2 million tax bill. There is nothing fair about taxing grief, or taxing the same income again when it's earned, saved, and finally passed on.

"Most countries that have tried wealth taxes have scrapped them because they drive investment and talent offshore. Death taxes are even worse, New Zealand tried one and abandoned it in 1993 because it crushed farming families and raised almost nothing.

“This package is light on evidence, heavy on populism, and green with envy.”

~ Austin Ellingham-Banks on the Taxpayer Union's 'NEW REPORT: Green With Envy: Wealth, Death, And Trust Taxes Examined'

"One 'solution' to inequality ... is the wealth tax. ... This taxing away of capital means less means of production and thus less production and higher prices. At the same time, it means less demand for labour and thus lower wages. [The] programme is a call for mass impoverishment....

"Taxing wealth is not merely a levy on individuals but a direct seizure of the capital required for production, which ultimately harms everyone's standard of living. ...

"As [Ludwig Von] Mises observed* ...., almost all of the technological advances of the last centuries are available to and can be fully understood by engineers in even the most impoverished corners of the world. What stops the implementation of those advances is not any lack of technological knowledge but a lack of capital. Thus, a farmer in India who has seen a tractor on television can easily understand the value of using one. What stops him from using one is certainly not any lack of technological knowledge. It is certainly not that he does not know how to operate a tractor or could not easily be taught how to do so. What stops him is that he cannot afford a tractor. He does not possess the capital necessary to buy a tractor and cannot find a lender to provide it. This is a lack of capital that probably could not be made good by any rise in the local capital/income ratio. It reflects generations of insufficient local capital accumulation."

~ George Reisman from his comment on 'The Problem with the Wealth Tax' and his 'Piketty’s Capital: Wrong Theory/Destructive Program' [emphases mine]

"New Zealand’s productivity challenges are strongly linked to low capital intensity. ... New Zealand’s slowing labour productivity growth is likely to reflect both slowing growth in innovation and declines in the capital to labour ratio. ... New Zealand’s capital intensity [already] lags other countries...."

~ Treasury from their 2024 report 'Causes of New Zealand’s low capital intensity'

* Ludwig Von Mises, in his chapter 'Capital Supply & American Prosperity'--in which he observes that "the average standard of living is in [America] is higher than in any other country of the world, not because the American statesmen and politicians are superior to the foreign statesmen and politicians, but because the per-head quota of capital invested is in America higher than in other countries."

"No such thing as a low-energy high-income country"

A gentle reminder for everyone: You may have a low-energy low-income country or a high-energy high-income country ---- but you will go a very long way to find any place with that link reversed.

But how are these things measured?

"New Zealand has just been ranked one of the happiest countries in the world. This is obviously good news. But there is something badly wrong beneath that glossy headline, especially in terms of loneliness and youth.

"The 2026 World Happiness Report, released last month, ranked New Zealand 11th out of 147 countries – up one spot from last year, and the highest-ranked English-speaking nation. On the surface, that sounds pretty good. Better than Australia, better than the United States. Finland, inevitably, came first.

"But buried inside the report was the figure that actually matters. For changes in happiness among 15-to-24-year-olds, New Zealand ranked 126th out of 136 countries. Young people’s happiness over the last decade has been plunging. We sit alongside the United States, Australia, and Canada in what researchers have labelled the 'NANZ' group: affluent nations where youth happiness is in freefall while older generations report world-leading life satisfaction. In contrast, according to the report, 85 of 136 countries saw youth happiness increase."

~ Bryce Edwards from his post 'Are we “bowling alone”?'

NB: How are these things measured? In short, the rankings come entirely from how ordinary people in each country rate their own lives on a 0–10 scale -- it's self-reported wellbeing, not a composite of economic or social statistics.

1 in 4 people born in New Zealand live elsewhere by age 30

Some fascinating research by Tim Hughes and his team at Treasury reveals that "25-30% of people born in New Zealand are living elsewhere by age 30."

We find that only about a third of emigration each year is of the NZ-born, and about 40% of NZ-born emigrants return to live in NZ again. Those with the highest qualifications are most likely to leave but also the most likely to return. Those who return earn more and pay more tax than those never to leave.
    Yet much emigration is permanent and the diaspora is still substantial, with 25-30% of each birth cohort living elsewhere by age 30. Approximately $4b of public investment in human capital [sic] each year is ultimately lost to emigration, needing to be replaced with migration from other countries.

Complementary research further reveals that this "human capital [sic] is replaced via migration of people born elsewhere. 

Foreign-born residents contribute a disproportionate share of personal tax revenue, reflecting their age structure and other factors.
    In 2024, foreign-born NZ residents made up 32% of the population, and paid 38% of the personal tax.
    This analysis helps demonstrate the growing importance of migration policy settings for fiscal sustainability.

[hat tip Eric Crampton]

FOMO leaves little time for reflection

"I must hold it for the greatest calamity of our time, which lets nothing come to maturity, that one moment is consumed by the next, and the day spent in the day; so that a man is always living from hand to mouth, without having anything to show for it. Have we not already newspapers for every hour of the day! They publish abroad every thing that everyone does, or is busy with or meditating; nay, his very designs are thereby dragged into publicity. No one can rejoice or be sorry, but as a pastime for others; and so it goes on from house to house, from city to city, from kingdom to kingdom, and at last from one hemisphere to the other, all in post haste."

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from his posthumous 1833 Maxims and Reflections, reflecting "that a culture of constant news eviscerates the past and the future, leaving you no time to metabolise lessons or sketch out a plan, always pulling you into the whirlpool of Something Important Happening Somewhere."

Is it Gustav Holst we have to "thank" for heavy metal

Who's to blame for heavy metal? We have a new data point.

Robert Fripp -- guitarist extraordinaire and King Crimson leader now for nearly 60 years! -- was just sent a passage from the Geezer Butler autobiography (he of Black Sabbath, whose first album appeared in 1970) which contains this observation under the heading 'The Devil in Music' ...

A breakthrough came in May 1969, when I saw King Crimson at Mothers club. As part of their set, they played a version of "Mars," from Gustav Holst's Planets suite. I was dumbfounded, couldn't believe what I was hearing. The following day, I went out and bought The Planets on LP, and I couldn't get enough of "Mars, the Bringer of War." I'd never had much of an interest in classical music, but this was angrier and more menacing than most rock music I'd ever heard.

At our next rehearsal, I was playing the main part, the so-called tritone, on bass, when Tony started playing a tritone riff (in medieval times, the tritone, because of its sinister, foreboding sound, was known as diabolus in musica, or "the devil in music"). That song would eventually become "Black Sabbath."

Naturally enough Fripp's eyebrows were raised.

I've seen it written that Holst invented heavy metal [says Fripp]. That might be stretching things a bit, but you could argue he inspired heavy metal's first riff. And since we wrote that song, the tritone sound has become synonymous with metal.

But did Black Sabbath even invent heavy metal? Nah, says a commenter on Fripp's post. "If he saw King Crimson in 1969 and they played 21st Century Schizoid Man then Heavy Metal had already been invented!"

In which case, since Fripp had pinched that riff from Bartok (String Quartet #5, from memory), could we say that it's Bartok we have to blame?

In any case, the first time the term "heavy metal" was used in print was arguably in a November 1970 Rolling Stone magazine article on the new Humble Pie album, calling them "a noisy, unmelodic, heavy metal-laden shit rock-band."

It's a shame the term "shit rock" didn't take hold instead.

Here's Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

How the world's climate promises became a new way to keep Africa poor

 

"[The world] today says ... 'Net Zero by 2050. ... 

"Banks sign net-zero pledges and quietly stop funding energy projects in Africa (while continuing to fund the exact same projects in America, Canada, and Norway). The African Energy Chamber has a term for this: financial apartheid.

"Meanwhile, NGOs run campaigns ... to pressure Western financiers out of ... a project Uganda and Tanzania are building to export their own oil. The European Parliament actually passed a resolution against it in September 2022. ... And every quarter, investors publish sustainability reports full of net-zero targets that have almost nothing to do with whether anyone in sub-Saharan Africa can turn on a light. 

"Africa is responsible for about 4% of global CO₂ emissions. Four percent. No serious calculation says that cutting off financing to the continent that contributes the least will change the trajectory of the climate. ...

"Back home, 600 million people on my continent don’t have electricity.

"The WHO estimates that cooking with wood and charcoal kills around 800,000 people a year in Africa from the smoke alone, most of them women and children. 

"The solution is LPG, which comes from natural gas, but building the gas infrastructure to distribute it gets caught in the same net-zero 'logic' that chokes everything else.

"Nigeria sits on some of the largest natural gas reserves in the world yet its power grid collapsed again in February 2026. At Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in 2025, three ICU patients died during a blackout because the hospital had gone days without power. Twenty-six percent of health facilities across sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity at all. And the people signing those net-zero pledges in London and New York will never know their names.

"No single bank executive decided to keep Africans in the dark. But the world's net-zero pledges created a structure where not funding African fossil fuels became the easy, compliant thing to do, and funding them became a career risk. ...

"I grew up in Senegal, and I remember my grandmother cooking over fire because there was nothing else when the power went out. Cutting off Africa’s energy doesn’t save the planet. It just guarantees that the next generation grows up the same way mine did.

"That’s what I’m working to change through Prosperity Not Poverty — because African nations have the right to use their own resources to build their own futures."

~ Magatte Wade from her post 'The Lie Keeping Africa in the Dark'

Scratch a conservative, find a statist

The newly minted Dr Matthew Hooton slithered into print on Friday last to make the case for state control of international trade.

Did I say make a case? Not a bit of it. The ever-odious doctor in conservative ideology simply told us that solutions to the international diesel dilemma will, and I quote, "require some sort of state control over international trade that we haven't seen since 1984."

"Diesel rationing," says the sickening spin doctor, "needs to be implemented urgently."

Reasons for this sudden need to abandon free trade, the price system and our minimal and ever-decreasing freedoms? Nah, just rhetoric: "If we run out of diesel," says his fire-filled column, "Covid will look like a rehearsal."

Covid, if you remember, was when government locked us up. There are people who enjoyed that -- and who still look with rosy-eyed affection at every over-bearing measure taken back then. 

This repellent reptile is clearly one of them.

"Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate."

"Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate. (The first is dictatorship, the enslavement of their own citizens, which is the cause of wars.)"

~ Ayn Rand from her 1967 essay "The Wreckage of the Consensus," collected in her 1967 book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal [ read it here on p.249]

"Globalisation encourages the capitalist engine of growth."

"Globalisation encourages the capitalist engine of growth. If people understood how generous that engine has been they would have less enthusiasm for protectionism or socialism or environmentalist or economic nationalism in any of their varied forms. Most educated people believe that the gains to income from capitalism’s triumph have been modest, that the poor have been left behind, that the Third World (should we start calling it the Second?) has been immiserised in aid of the First, that population growth must be controlled, that diminishing returns on the whole has been the main force in world economic history since 1800. All these notions are factually erroneous. But you’ll find all of them in the mind of the average professor of political philosophy."

~ Deirdre McCloskey from her review of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree and John Gray’s False Dawn

It's Shitty Anniversary time

A year ago, Donald Trump stood in the Rose Garden, surrounded by charts nobody understood, and declared war on mathematics. One year later, not even the Rose Garden remains.

It's being called "The Greatest Economic Own Goal in Living Memory" -- and that was before the same goal-scorer launched a war without a strategy that's locked up twenty percent of the world's traded oil behind the mullahs' missiles. 

This, above, was one year ago today when Donald Trump stood in the White House's Rose Garden to shoot himself and world trade in the foot. 

Today, we 'celebrate' the anniversary of  one man's gut feelings over economic reality...

One Year On: The Greatest Economic Own Goal in Living Memory
by Gandalv 

One year ago, Donald Trump stood in the Rose Garden, surrounded by charts nobody understood, and declared war on mathematics. He called it Liberation Day. 

The Financial Times, along with every economist who has read more than a bus ticket, is marking the anniversary with a verdict that should be carved into marble: it failed. On every single front. Spectacularly. Completely. Embarrassingly. 

Let us be precise about this. 

Measured against Trump’s own three stated goals, making foreigners pay for doing business with America, narrowing the trade deficit, and punishing China, the tariffs have clearly failed. Not partially failed. Not failed with asterisks. Failed the way a man fails when he drives a Reliant Robin the wrong way onto a motorway and acts surprised when it rolls. 

And everyone said so. Economists said so. Trading partners said so. His own party said so. The entire field of international trade theory, developed over roughly two centuries by people who actually read things, screamed it from the rooftops. [Even this humble blog said so.] But Donald Trump, a man whose relationship with economics appears to consist entirely of gut feeling, cable television and 6 casino bankruptcies knew better. 

The average American household paid an extra $1,700 due to tariffs. Over 65 percent of Americans reported that everyday goods became significantly less affordable. This is what happens when you run the world’s largest economy on instinct and vibes. 

One year after the Rose Garden ceremony, factory jobs are down and inflation is up. The precise opposite of what was promised. And promised with extraordinary (and wholly unjustified) confidence. 

Then the lawyers arrived. 

The Supreme Court found that Trump had exceeded his authority, ruling that the declared emergency bore no rational connection to the trade measures imposed. In other words, the legal foundation was nonsense. The government had collected $166 billion in tariffs from over 330,000 businesses on grounds the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. The refund process is now underway.  One hundred and sixty-six billion dollars. Collected illegally. From American businesses. 

The financial markets, bless them, responded with the only appropriate tool available: mockery. The meme “Trump Always Chickens Out” refuses to go away, and the TACO index is now actively used by analysts to price in the president’s chronic habit of retreating. 

Every serious voice warned this disaster would happen. Trade economists. Former Treasury secretaries. The IMF. The WTO. The EU. Canada. Japan. Basically anyone who had spent more than forty minutes studying how global trade actually works. The man who ignored all of them had previously run a casino into bankruptcy and considered that a learning experience. He was not, it turns out, a fast learner. 

One year. 

Zero of three goals achieved. 

One Supreme Court ruling. 

One $170 billion refund. 

A world economy paying more for everything and making less of it. 

Liberation Day. What a name for it.

Who's to blame for high power prices? It's the usual suspects, of course.

"[I]it frustrates me that our politicians have become victims of short-termism and tribalism. ... But those with the biggest chequebook in town are still responsible for the decisions they make. And this includes 100% responsibility for our high power prices.

"Why are politicians to blame? Because they retain 51% public ownership - and 100% control - of our three biggest power companies - Mercury, Genesis and Meridian.

"And, since they were listed on the stock exchange, no subsequent Government, blue or red-led, has allowed the gentailers to raise the money required to meaningfully expand the supply of power. And this has meant higher power prices. It’s a simple supply and demand thing. ...

"[S]uccessive Crown Ministers have become addicted to the juicy gentailer dividends. Treasury estimates them to have been a combined $5.4 billion since listing. Quid quo pro. And successive Governments have (cunningly) left any political fallout from higher power prices to be their successors’ problem.

"There is a horrible irony in all this. Politicians, with 51% ownership and 100% control of the gentailers, get to blame their management and directors for our high power prices. But, as the majority owners of the gentailers, it’s actually their fault. It’s like your manager making a mistake, but publicly shaming you.

"And there is only one loser in all this: everyone who pays their power bill. ....

"[We have neither] 100% Government ownership of our power companies ... [nor] 100% private ownership. ... Instead, we have a horrible middle ground. 51% ownership by the Government -- with 100% control -- yet starving them of the capital to increase power supplies. Yet, if you were to believe the politicians, high power prices were the greedy gentailers’ fault. Rubbish. ...

"Make no mistake, high power prices are 100% the fault of our successive governments, blue and red. They’ve been starving our power companies of the food they require -- capital -- while also milking them for dividends. Ask any dairy farmer how that works out."

~ Sam Stubbs from his op-ed 'Who should we blame for high power prices?' [Emphasis mine]

AUT's dean steps down to go away and work quietly in a corner [updated]

Legal battles can be very personal, but arguments about the law less so. Yet when barrister Gary Judd criticised the impetus from AUT's law school dean Khylee Quince to "embed tikanga" in students' first year -- to be taught that tikanga is "the first law of the country" -- her reply was that Judd, a King's Counsel (KC), should "go die quietly in a corner."

Judd is fortunately still with us. And Quince, still unapologetic, is now stepping down as dean to go away and work quietly in a corner. Her legacy however remains: that those wishing to take up law as a reasoning discipline should try to find a university with a faculty whose leadership has greater respect for that argument.

And issues remain. As Samira Taghavi says (a barrister and practice manager at Active Legal Solutions and a member of The Law Association’s council and Criminal Law committee), 

Khylee Quince’s belittlement of Judd KC raises important questions about the lessons we impart to the next generation of lawyers. Are we equipping them to confront and counter challenging viewpoints effectively? Or are we teaching them to resort to personal attacks?

So let's leave the personal and look at law. As Judd pointed out, quite simply: tikanga cannot be "first law" because tikanga is not law at all, it is a collection of beliefs; to tell students it is law is cultural indoctrination.

[T]ikanga” ... is a set of beliefs, principles of a spiritual nature, a way of life (“the right Māori way of doing things”). When beliefs result in people consistently behaving in a certain way, the behaviour may become customary. Then, in certain carefully confined circumstances, customs may attain the status of law.
    If “tikanga” were confined in its meaning to customs which had attained the status of law, there would be no problem. Introducing a regime which would impose beliefs, principles of a spiritual nature, a way of life of some of our people, on the nation as a whole is a completely different proposition. Beliefs and principles of a spiritual nature are not law. The way of life of some is not part of the law of the land. ...

Where tikanga beliefs have been acted on, they may have given rise to customary behaviour and those customs might [mature] into a species of customary law applicable for specific purposes, for example for determining who owns Māori land, but [one cannot simply declare] that tikanga [is] first law.
Calling tikanga something which patently it is not, not only offends reason but undermines the value of what it actually is. Making a falsehood a fundamental part of the description of its nature is not a good way to ensure its survival. ...
Beliefs, even if common to the entire population, are not law. However, beliefs may cause people to act in a certain way. Those actions may become customary and may even mature into customary law.

But they are not yet law, let alone first law. And hissy fits still won't change that.

UPDATE: Her time is up, literally -- her five-year term has expired. But judging by the results of last September's AUT staff survey, it looks like few of her colleagues will be mourning. Kiwiblog reported:

I have been leaked a copy of the latest staff survey from AUT Law Faculty and it is very clear that it is a very unhappy place. Here are some of their results:Would recommend AUT as a great place to work 45%

• AUT is in a position to succeed 42%
• Have confidence in senior leaders at AUT 35%
• AUT has a thriving research culture 35%
• Am comfortable reporting inappropriate behaviour 30%
• Workloads are divided fairly 25%
• Innovation is recognised and rewarded 20%
• At AUT we are good at learning from our mistakes 20%
• The right people are recognised and rewarded 20%
• If someone is not delivering in their role we do something about it 5% ...

As you can see [in the above Powerpoint screenshot] the results for the Law Faculty are much much lower than AUT as a whole. So this would suggest the major issue is not the central administration, but the faculty management itself. I [David Farrar] am told by sources that everyone knows what the major problem is, but people are too scared to say so.

Chloe Swarbrick's Green Party are promising a 2 percent annual cap on rent increases. At first glance that might sound compassionate, but as Matthew Horncastle observes, "In reality it is a textbook example of bad economics."

As virtually every economist has told us for decades, “In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city except for bombing.” Politicians keep promising the same thing not so they can actually fix the problem -- even the most inept political reptile is aware of this -- but to win votes from people who still think that emotions can trump the reality of a rent cap.

As Marcos Falcone points out in this guest post, it's not even necessary to understand the reasons for rent control being do destructive. In contrasting the experience of Spain and Argentina, where xxx, he shows what the Greens and Green voters should realise before helping to destroy rental accommodation here...

Rent Control Always Fails—Argentina Shows a Better Way

by Marcos Falcone

On Friday, March 20, in light of the Iran war, which has pushed up energy and other prices, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced measures to lower the cost of living. Rent control was included among those measures, even though it is already failing in Spain.

Reportedly under pressure from one of its left-wing coalition partners, Sánchez decreed a nationwide contract extension at current prices for rentals about to expire, effectively amounting to a rent freeze. He has also instituted a 2 percent annual cap on rent increases through the end of 2027, which will apply to existing contracts currently indexed to inflation.

Ironically, a report published by the Instituto Juan de Mariana the same week as Sánchez’s announcement shows the extent of the harm that various forms of rent control are already causing in Spain. Following the introduction of rent caps in the region of Catalonia in 2024, the supply of rental housing has declined by 23 percent. Even more dramatically, the city of A Coruña and the region of Navarra saw rental supply fall by 44 percent and 51 percent, respectively, only six months after they designated certain areas as “stressed” housing markets and also imposed rent caps. 

In a country with an estimated deficit of 700,000 housing units, rent control is making things even worse.

Rent control in Spain not only cuts supply but also fails to improve conditions for renters. As the Instituto Juan de Mariana shows, wherever rent control has recently been introduced, average rental unit space has decreased, and prices per square meter have either stayed the same or increased—in Barcelona, for example, prices reached a record high in the third quarter of 2025.

The Spanish experience contrasts sharply with Argentina’s, which has adopted the exact opposite approach since Javier Milei became president in December 2023. 

Before then, listings had plunged by a massive 53 percent following the passage of a rent control law in 2020. But after Milei repealed it ten days after taking office, supplies rose by a staggering 180 percent less than a year and a half later. (My colleague Ryan Bourne and I documented that extensively here). 

As of December 2025, rental prices in the city of Buenos Aires were still almost 30 percent down in real terms from two years before, and supply has not declined.

Rent control does more harm than good, as Ryan Bourne explains in The War on Prices. Hopefully, Spain will correct course as Argentina did before things get much worse.

* * * * 

Marcos Falcone is a policy analyst focusing on Latin America at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. His research interests range from contemporary public policy in his home country of Argentina to the history, theory, and language of classical liberalism. His essays have received awards by the Mont Pelerin Society, Caminos de la Libertad, and the European Center for Austrian Economics, among others. His columns appear frequently in Argentine and US media.

His post first appeared at the Cato at Liberty blog.

The fuel crisis delivers a chance for genuine political leadership

"New Zealand does not possess the people, the capital, or the institutional settings to maintain our first world status. We are moving from the bottom of the OECD to the top of the developing world.

"[It's a] problem [when] ... the price of construction is the highest in the OECD, more than double the average, and ... the cost of capital formation '…which covers machinery, equipment and construction -- is 70% above average in New Zealand and also the highest in the OECD.'

"Meanwhile, global rating agency Fitch confirmed [this] gloomy assessment by downgrading the outlook for New Zealand from dismal to hopeless. I am paraphrasing. They noted that our promised return to fiscal surplus is perpetually delayed due to weak economic growth and expenditure proving more persistent than anticipated. ...

"[T]his [fuel] crisis [however] represents a greater opportunity [for real leadership]. It is chance for the Prime Minister to explain that we cannot borrow our way out of every economic shock. That the path back to fiscal solvency and economic vitality lies not in leveraging the sliver of headroom on the Crown’s balance sheet to avoid addressing our structural deficiencies but in aggressively dealing with those deficiencies.

"I do not mean to diminish the real progress his administration has been achieved but the underlying structural issues of over-regulation and lax fiscal discipline mean all we are doing is slowing the rate of decline.

"Leadership is about telling the electorate what they do not want to hear but need to understand; and that extends well beyond the prospect of a temporary fuel shortage."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'Is this moment that the PM forces me to eat my words? I hope so'

When the “junk heap” is steadily deteriorating

Wastewater analysis suggests increasing recreational drug use among New Zealanders. (Although there are some problems with the data.) But this isn't an issue confined to our small islands.

This is of course when recreational drugs are illegal. So drug consumers are willing to pay more to gangs for a riskier product to get their chosen high.

Two questions always come up when one advocates for drug legalisation. 

The first is that legal drugs will make drug consumption more prevalent and more sordid. This goes against both evidence and theory: Milton Friedman for one arguing that the Iron Law of Prohibition actively encourages the escalation of more virulent pharmaceuticals, to make any drug problem worse.

But the other question is this: 

Why do many people want to abuse drugs and alcohol? Why is this such a persistent problem in our culture — and would it still be a problem in a more rational culture?

Good question. And Stewart Margolis takes a good stab at answering it, beginning by drawing a distinction between drug use and drug abuse. Because clearly there are many well-functioning adults happily consuming recreational drugs including opium, alcohol and caffeine -- and if we trace the history, have been doing so since the first fermented berries were found several thousand years ago.  Indeed,

Archaeologists have found evidence of opium use in Europe by 5,700 BC, and cannabis seeds have been found at archaeological digs in Asia from 8,100 BC.

So it seems at least some adults have discovered a rational way to use mind-altering substances. A decent martini before dinner for example being one of the best ways to shake off the cares of the day.

There may be some that are simply too dangerous to ever be used, but that would be a scientific question rather than a moral one. 

But some adults won't, can't or don't want to be rational about it. If we discount the obvious (that some people are prone to addiction; that there might be genetic factors increasing susceptibility to substance abuse) we're left with the nagging idea that there might be more to it than that. 

Margolis makes the case that the problem is fundamentally philosophical:

Of course, a worldwide problem like this undoubtedly has multi-factorial causes, but I think at root drug abuse is an attempt to escape reality. 

Materially, the world has never been richer, so what are so many people eager to escape from? Despite our affluence, I think we are experiencing a philosophical crisis. 

Ayn Rand pointed out that humans need a philosophy in order to live. In “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” she wrote, 

“Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalisations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt.”

 I think Rand was spot on, and the increase we are seeing in drug abuse is the result of the self-doubt brought on by people who have assembled a “junk heap” of often contradictory ideas. This has always been a huge problem, and has always resulted in a tremendous amount of suffering. So why does it seem to be worse now?

I think it’s because the quality of the ideas in the “junk heap” has been steadily deteriorating. 

When ... [common sense and] enlightenment ideas were widespread in the culture, average, unthinking people could randomly pick up a pretty workable set of ideas, which would allow them to prosper and attain a measure of happiness. They were not as happy and prosperous as they could have been, had they done the work of choosing and integrating the right ideas, but they could do all right.

But today, many of the ideas floating around in the cultural are anti-enlightenment. If you unthinkingly accept a collection of these ideas, you are unlikely to prosper or find happiness.

It's perhaps also the case that governments' increasing  economic mismanagement has been making it increasingly difficult for younger folk to get ahead economically -- they can sense that even if they can't see that explicitly -- so that there's part of of them ready to give up on the "old" idea that hard work will pay off.

You [might] notice that you’re not doing as well as your parents did, either economically, romantically, or socially. As a result, you will be filled with doubt, with dread, with a sense that something is wrong with the world — but you don’t know what or how to fix it. I believe this is the feeling that people desperately want to escape — and so they turn to drugs that numb or relieve these feelings, at least temporarily.

While I’m sure there are benefits to be found in a variety of drug and alcohol treatment programmes, I don’t think we’re likely to make much progress on substance abuse until people deal with the underlying philosophical crisis driving the abuse. 

In the meantime, though, making drugs legal would provide a huge benefit, both to those struggling with abuse issues, and more importantly, to those of us who don’t use drugs or who are able to use them responsibly.

Inequality

“In order to make people equal, you have to treat them differently. If you treat people alike, so far as government is concerned, the result is necessarily inequality.

"You can have either freedom and inequality, or unfreedom and equality.”

~ Friedrich Hayek

Taking a stand, living in truth

"[Let's look at] the example of the greengrocer, living in an authoritarian state [who] habitually puts a sign 'Workers of the world, unite!' in his shop window each day even though he doesn’t believe the slogan but understands it is necessary to demonstrate his loyalty to the regime and ensure he stays out of trouble.

"One morning he decides he will no longer put out the sign .... His seemingly trivial action enables him to live more honestly even if he risks official penalties. ... 

"Czech playwright Václav Havel ... who became President of his country in 1989 after the Soviet-backed, communist government collapsed. ... argued that private individuals [lie our greengrocer] can help overturn repressive systems simply by refusing to participate in expected rituals of obedience, no matter how minor.

"And random acts of resistance like the greengrocer’s can give courage to others similarly tired of enforced conformity in totalitarian states — or in liberal democracies. ...

"What Havel saw so clearly is that totalitarian systems don’t primarily run on violence — they run on the complicity of the population. Each person who goes along with the ritual reinforces the illusion that the ritual reflects genuine consensus. Each greengrocer who puts up the sign makes it harder for the next one to refuse.

"New Zealand’s version of this operates through social rather than state coercion, which in some ways makes it harder to name and resist. ... The country is small and the networks are tight; the social cost of being known as a dissenter is higher in a place where everyone knows everyone.

"The result is a kind of pre-emptive self-censorship that Havel would recognise immediately. ... The New Zealand consensus is not a single monolithic ideology but a cluster of positions that have achieved a kind of sacral status ...

"Some of the most charged include the application of Treaty principles across virtually all public policy, certain framings within debates about Māori sovereignty and co-governance, consensus around specific approaches to climate and housing policy ... To question them is to be located, socially and professionally, as the kind of person who questions them, which is itself a disqualifying mark.

"Havel’s prescription is deceptively simple and genuinely demanding: live in truth. ... It means saying plainly, in your own sphere, what you actually think.

"The greengrocer who refuses to put up the sign does something that seems trivially small but is in fact a profound disruption — he breaks the illusion of consensus ...

"In a New Zealand context this looks like the scientist who publishes findings that complicate the preferred narrative, even knowing it will generate institutional discomfort.

• It looks like the journalist who covers a story the consensus would prefer left alone.
• It looks like the professional who declines to sign the ritual statement and explains why calmly and without apology.
• It looks like the historian who prefers to deal in objective facts rather than subjective “stories” and won’t bow to a critical theory neo-Marxist dialectic.
• It looks like the council member who won’t participate in a prayer (disguised as a karakia) before a meeting because of its religious significance.
• It looks like your author who will not use Aotearoa for New Zealand or insert te reo words into a narrative written in English.
• It looks like the ordinary person who says at a dinner table, 'I don’t think that’s quite right,' and is willing to sit with the social discomfort that follows.

"What Havel emphasises is that this is not heroism in any dramatic sense -- it is simply the refusal to participate in the agreed-upon falseness. And its power is precisely that it is available to anyone. You do not need a platform or an institution or a movement. You need only the willingness to say what you see."

~ David Harvey from his post 'Above the parapet'

Are human rights a gift from government?

"Roy, a commenter on my 'Lessons from Iran,' says there is no such thing as human rights: 'Human rights [he says] are given and allowed by Governments.' ...

"If Roy is right, it means that the Iranian people do not have the right to life or liberty because the government of Iran has not given and allowed them to have those rights. By way of an opposite example, it also means that New Zealanders have those rights only because the government has given them to us or allowed us to have them. ...

"John Locke (1632-1704) produced the rationale for certain rights to exist independently of any expression of them in government legislation or the common law. I go into detail below, but the essence is that human beings have certain characteristics which differentiate them from other living things, characteristics which demand of each person that they allow every other person to live their own lives without forcing them or attempting to force them to act or not to act in a particular way.

"That means each person has the right to be left alone and each person has the reciprocal obligation to leave everyone else alone.

"This is a moral imperative, and humans may occasionally or habitually refuse or fail to act in that way. That’s why we have laws proscribing certain conduct. ...

"Humans cannot sustain and live their lives in the uniquely human way unless they are free to do so. Freedom is the fundamental ‘human’ right. It subsumes the right to life because if the individual’s freedom is respected, so also his life will not be in jeopardy from others’ aggressions. It subsumes the right to pursue happiness because if the individual is free, he is free to pursue happiness so long as in doing so he does not trample on others’ freedom.

"The caveat “so long as in doing so he does not trample on others’ freedom,” is vital. It is why so many so-called rights are bogus because, for example, they involve taking from others thereby violating the others’ right to be free."

~ Gary Judd from his post 'Human rights: are they real? Or are they just a gift of the government?'

"This is what Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran actually looks like in practice: millions of Iranians who want this regime gone and are willing to risk everything to make it happen."

"Israel is not just targeting Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders. They are specifically going after the officers who killed protesters -- the people who ran checkpoints and shot Iranians in the streets during the January uprisings when the regime massacred thousands of its own citizens. 

"And they're calling them first. Victor David Hansen described one exchange [in the video from 10:03]: an Israeli contact reached an IRGC officer and told him he was a dead man. The officer's response: 𝘠𝘦𝘢𝘩, 𝘐'𝘮 𝘢 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘐 𝘥𝘪𝘥𝘯'𝘵 𝘥𝘰 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨. He did do something wrong. He killed protesters. And Israel knows exactly who he is, where he is, and what he did -- because Iranians inside the country are feeding them the intelligence. Cell phones. Starlink. A population that hates this regime so deeply that ordinary citizens are calling in GPS coordinates of checkpoints from their apartment windows. 

"This is what Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran actually looks like in practice. It's not just satellites and signals. It's millions of Iranians who want this regime gone and are willing to risk everything to make it happen."

~ Michael Rothman

UPDATE: Is this wishful thinking, below? I hope not. Remember, when collapse happens, as Vaclav Havel used to say, the crack are see first from below:

Super-abundant economic progress

EVER SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION in the nineteenth century and ever-increasing global freedom in this one, human progress has been on a roll -- so says author and rational optimist Marian Tupy. He outlined his arguments and data a few nights ago at an enjoyable NZ Initiative presentation.

Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, the world's most comprehensive database tracking improvements in human wellbeing, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and co-author of the acclaimed book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.

He's one of the good guys.

Miserabilist Thomas Malthus famously expressed the idea that while resources would only expand at a linear rate, population will expand exponentially -- a disaster waiting to happen. But Malthus was writing about rabbits, or animals without the brain that humans have; and he was writing before the industrial revolution, when that brain was put to powerful practical use. Malthus was not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong, as Tupy's data abundantly proves.

Take that Malthus!

In just the last four decades alone, commodities across the board have become more abundant thanks to globalisation and increasing freedom. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, long a source of concern, the average calorie intake is now ticking up to 2,500!

Take that Paul Erlich!

THAT FAMOUS PANGLOSSIAN THOMAS BABINGTON Macaulay talked in the nineteenth century about the inevitability of progress: “In every age," said Macaulay, "everybody knows that up to his own time, progressive improvement has been taking place; ... On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” It's still possible to remain optimistic even with the many steps backwards anti-freedom forces insist we take.

I was reminded of Peter Boettke's analogy of the horse race between Smith, Schumpeter, and Stupidity -- the progress of Smith's Division of Labour and Schumpeter's progress in technology (well explained by our presenter) has to continually stay ahead of the various degrees of Stupidity inflicted on us all. It's a tribute to human reason and the power of human freedom to wield it that we have to thank for continuing and ongoing progress.

OUR PRESENTER DID GET A LITTLE  pushback from a questioner who interrogated his concept of abundance. Is abundance always good, asked his questioner? A super-abundance of nuclear weapons, for example, or opioids, is hardly a good thing for human progress, he maintained.

It's a fair point, and it resonates with those who argue that to expect infinite growth on a finite planet you must be either insane or an economist. For both points, I think, economist George Reisman makes a profound point in response: the loss of the concept of economic progress.

Tupy still talks of human progress but of economic growth. Reisman (a student of Von Mises) would suggest he'd be better to combine the two to answer both objections: i.e. to talk of economic progress rather than economic growth.

Growth is a concept that applies to individual living organisms. An organism grows until it reaches maturity. then it declines, and sooner or later dies. The concept of growth is also morally neutral [the point made by our questioner], equally capable of describing a negative as a positive: tumours and cancers can grow. Thus the concept of growth both necessarily implies limits and can easily be applied negatively.

In contrast, the concept of progress applies across succeeding generations of human beings. The individual human beings reach maturity and die. But because they possess the faculty of reason, they can both discover new and additional knowledge and transmit it to the rising generation ... with each succeeding generation receiving a greater inheritance of knowledge than the one before it and making its own fresh contribution to knowledge. This continuously expanding body of knowledge, insofar as it takes the form of continuously increasing scientific and technological knowledge and correspondingly improved capital equipment, is the foundation of continuous economic progress.

Progress is a concept unique to man: it is founded on his possession of reason and thus his ability to accumulate and transmit a growing body of knowledge across the generations. Totally unlike growth, whose essential confines are the limits of a single organism, progress has no practical limit. Only if man could achieve omniscience would progress have to end. But the actual effect of the acquisition of knowledge is always to lay the foundation for the acquisition of still more knowledge. Through applying his reason, man enlarges all of his capacities, and the more he enlarges them, the more he enlarges his capacity to enlarge them.

He notes here that it Ludwig Von Mises who had first alerted him to this vital distinction.

The concept of progress differs radically from the concept of growth in that it also has built into it a positive evaluation: progress is movement in the direction of a higher, better, and more desirable state of affairs. This improving state of affairs is founded on the growing body of knowledge that the possession and application of human reason makes possible. Its foundation is the rising potential for human achievement that is based on growing knowledge.

While it is possible to utter denunciations of too rapid "growth" as being harmful, it would be a contradiction in terms even to utter the thought of too rapid progress, let alone denounce it. The meaning would be that things can get better too quickly -- that things getting better meant they were getting worse. [Capitalism, p.106]

FYI, Professor Reisman has kindly made his book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (in which you can read all his arguments) freely available for reading, saving, and printing. Download the link here.

Was there a strategy?

UPDATED 8:53am: We said last week the risk, once started, is Trump chickening out. As of this morning our time, Trump chickened out. Trump always chickens out (TACO). Which, here, long term, is disastrous.

"President Trump has created the conditions for another quagmire in the Middle East, and the question is whether American military excellence can rescue him from his own impulsiveness and incompetence.

"Here is the present situation, in a nutshell: The United States and Israel have established absolute air dominance over the nation of Iran. ... The intention of the air campaign is clear: to destroy the regime’s capacity to harm its neighbours while also creating the conditions for a revolution on the ground. ...

"So why, then, is Trump lashing out at American allies? Why was he 'shocked' that Iran struck Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait in response to American attacks?

"Perhaps the answer lies in a Wall Street Journal report from last Friday. According to The Journal, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump that Iran might attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz and Trump shrugged off the threat and launched the attack anyway. ...

"But Iran did not capitulate. ... Instead, it has effectively closed the strait, and it’s reportedly done so without choking off its own oil exports. In other words, while other nations can’t ship oil through the strait, Iran still is.

"Iran ... could well emerge from the conflict with its regime intact (and perhaps even more hard-line) and its power over the world economy undiminished. ...

"Trump launched a major war on his own initiative while announcing competing and potentially contradictory war aims. Is the goal regime change? Unconditional surrender? Or is it much narrower — the destruction of Iran’s missile and drone forces, sinking its navy, stopping its nuclear programme and destroying its ability to wage war through its proxy forces, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and the kaleidoscope of allied militias in Syria and Iraq. ...

"Even when wars are carefully planned, with allies brought on board and a majority of the public in support, they are still highly volatile and unpredictable. ...

"My great concern is that Trump has [instead] created the conditions for failure. ... And now, dismayed that the war has not resulted in the regime’s immediate capitulation or destruction, he’s flailing about, once again threatening the viability of NATO if our allies don’t come and bail him out from a war they did not start and did not ask for.

"As an American, I want our forces to succeed, once they are committed. I want to see the military open the Strait of Hormuz as quickly and painlessly as possible. I want to see the Iranian regime collapse and replaced by a democracy. That regime is loathsome. It’s an enemy of the United States. It deserves to fall. If it does, I will cheer its demise.

"At the same time, however, my patriotism can’t blind me to reality. This is not how our democracy should go to war. Trump is not the right man to lead our nation into battle. People I respect applaud Trump for his courage in taking on Iran. But I don’t see courage. I see recklessness. I see thoughtlessness.

"I see a man who plunged a nation into a conflict without fully comprehending the risks. I see a man full of hubris after achieving success in much more limited military engagements. And he’s now counting on two of the world’s most competent militaries to essentially bail him out.

"He’s counting on them accomplishing a mission without clear precedent in military history: destroying a hostile regime and forcing its compliance entirely from the air and sea, and to do so quickly enough that the economic pain doesn’t overshadow the military gains. ...

"Trump has only himself to blame. He led America into an unconstitutional war. And now he’s compounding that sin by proving to be every bit as reckless a commander as he is a president."

~ David French from his column 'Trump Has Only Himself to Blame' 

"Either Donald Trump holds his nerve, crushes the Iranian regime, rides out the oil shock and reopens the Strait of Hormuz, or he and America are finished, exposed as unserious, fickle and incapable of forward planning, a superpower manquée felled by drone-wielding barbarians."

~ Allister Heath from his column 'This is a turning point in history, the moment the West could be lost'

"Morally it was entirely justifiable to attack the Islamic Republic of Iran. ... Whether or not it was tactically correct [or strategically mapped out] ... only history will tell.

"As much as those against the war will be wanting Trump to lose, to embarrass him, this is a very narrow and suicidal position. ...

"Overthrowing the regime would be a success; weakening it so it falls due to domestic pressure (including from the Kurdish north) would be a partial success --- but emboldening it even if its ability to project abroad is significantly weakened, would be ... a victory for the regime, and a victory for its proxies.

"For it would embolden Iran and its proxies to attack not just in the Middle East, but beyond ... This would make us all less safe, it would embolden Islamists across the world to promote their ideology, and for a few to be willing to use force to terrify us all. ...

"At this stage the biggest risk is that Trump chickens out, and wants a 'deal.' There is no 'deal' with those who want you dead, who want your country dead and another dead. As much as the international law purists want pontification from the Western world about the legality of the war on Iran ..., that horse has bolted."

~ Liberty Scott from his post 'Whether your agree with it or not, the US has to win in Iran'

"But as with Bush II's Iraq War, the question to come is: do they know what the hell they're going to do next. With this administration, that's unlikely .... So it will need every circumstance to go the way of those Iranians celebrating [in these photos]. As Eliot Cohen says, 'Something of an exercise in ambivalence here. I would like to see the Iranian regime go down hard -- and am not confident Trump knows what he is doing.'

"Let's [still] hope with crossed fingers for a lion of freedom to arise from the attacks."

~ PC from the 2 March post Iranians: Yearning to breathe free!

UPDATE: Posted last night from the White House press corps, and now going viral on Twitter: