"Neoliberalism." "Austerity." Bollocks.

There are people who think the world in recent times has been suffering under something called "neoliberalism" in which "social spending"is savaged ....

... and others who claim governments have recently been inflicting something called "austerity." Here's the UK's "austerity" measured over the last three centuries. Their experience is not unique ...

[Hat tips Zeitgeist Explorer and A. Comte] 

"This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine."

"Capitalism created the possibility of the win-win-win. It used to be a zero sum game where somebody won, somebody else lost.  

"It was never a zero-sum game in my mind. You’re always trading with your customers and your employees and your suppliers for mutual benefit, mutual gain. That’s the miracle of capitalism. That’s why humanity has been lifted out of the dirt in the last 250 years. The Industrial Revolution led humanity out of this trap that we were in, which really was a zero-sum game. ...

"The biggest mistake people make, intellectuals in particular, they still think we're in a zero sum world. They're obsessed with some billionaires because Bernie Sanders thinks that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk somehow stole the money from the people. 

"They don't understand that it's this prosperity machine that's creating more, not just for those billionaires, but for everything that they're touching. They're creating value for their customers, they're creating value for their employees. Their suppliers are flourishing, their investors are seeing their capital go up. It can be reinvested and compound. 

"All philanthropy ultimately comes from business. That's where the profits are. Where do all the taxes come from? It ultimately comes from business as well. 

"This is the engine that's lifting humanity out. The entrepreneurs are the drivers of that engine. Somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world."

~ Whole Foods founder John Mackey on the Win-Win Mentality That Lifted Humanity Out of the Dirt [hat tip David Senra]

Simple Swarbrick

"Mainstream Media reports that the Green Party will campaign on mass electrification for the election, saying the sun, wind, water and geothermal energy 'don’t come through the Strait of Hormuz.'

"Chloe Swarbrick with that wild-eyed enthusiasm that only she is capable of offers a simplistic solution. I use the word 'simplistic' advisedly. She herself says the solution is simple. ... Swarbrick said the Government needed to create a national electrification plan ...starting with improving access to 'cheap, easy loans for solar panels and batteries' ... 'tak[ing] control of our country’s own needs by powering ourselves, with every renewable resource available in abundance around us.' Would that it were so easy. ...

"[T]hink about a few things.;

• Is what Swarbrick proposes really a solution?
• Does she really know what she is talking about?
• Is she aware of the pervasiveness of the petrochemical industry in our day to day lives and how much we depend upon it?
• Have she and the Greens really thought through this policy or is it an easy one to articulate.
• Or in fact are Swarbrick and the Greens speaking and policy making from a position of unawareness or ignorance of the nature of the problem?

"And if the answer to the preceding question is in the affirmative, do they have any business being near the levers of power. ...

"Think about it and ... about the pervasiveness of the petrochemical industry and how much we depend upon it."

~ David Harvey from his post 'Unawareness, Blind Ignorance and a Sense of Unreality'

"The blight of Pauline Hanson is that her dumb bigotry offers a fantasy."

Former Aus PM Paul Keating -- aka the Lizard of Oz -- has deservedly unloaded on the pathetic race-baiting of newish Aus Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor.  "Many people, me included, wished him well in fighting One Nation with a conservatism anchored in principles. How dispiriting is his cowardice."

The Liberal party, battling an extreme version of itself – One Nation – has again fallen back to its default political policy: racism.

Angus Taylor, announcing a policy at primary odds with an immigrant nation, says a Liberal government under his leadership will adopt Trump ICE-style policies to weed and “boot out” people who fail to adhere to “national values” and who are responsible for the erosion of national culture including the Balkanisation of communities.

And, to hammer the point, sitting beside Taylor at his policy launch was Mr Racial Opportunism himself, John Winston Howard, late of anti-Asian migration in 1988 – the picket fence suburban racism of his first round as Liberal leader, and the wilful anti-humanitarianism of his electorally-driven Tampa atrocity of 2001. ...

Angus Taylor came to the Liberal leadership with a reputation of being mainstream Liberal; that is, a keeper of the Liberal party’s best longer-term instincts both in social and economic policy.

And many people, myself included, wished him well in consolidating the Liberal base and in fighting One Nation with a conservatism anchored in principles. If not righteous, decent.

But by adopting racism with its shabby appeal to differentiation and primal instincts, Angus Taylor marks himself out as a political leader unworthy of the leadership of a party that has managed Australia for the greater part of the last century and which celebrated the country’s unifying values.

Racism is not simply immoral and abhorrent, it is absurd. The notion that some of us are in some way different to the rest of us – in some way born differently, of some alien biology. ...

The blight of Pauline Hanson is that her dumb bigotry offers a fantasy. The fantasy that Australia in the modern age can return to a monoculture. A monoculture which fails to acknowledge or accept that a continent of our scale is able to turn its back on the multilateralism of neighbouring states or on the vitality of their societies. And, more than that, shun them while disparaging any contribution they may make or bring to us as migrants.

How dispiriting for the rest of us is Angus Taylor’s cowardice in not even attempting to stand and argue for principles that have been integral to Australia’s strength – principles his party has long championed.

RELATED:

=>Welfare State Leaves Boat-People to Die

Thursday, 30 August 2001, 11:01 am | Libertarianz Party

"New Zealanders who wish the 434 Afghan refugees on board the Tampa moored off Christmas Island would just 'go away' are exposing the dark underbelly at the heart of the Welfare State," says Libertarianz Leader Peter Cresswell....

=>Better Way for Boat-People

Thursday, 30 August 2001, 11:06 am | Libertarianz Party

"There is a better way forward for politicians wrestling with a way to deal with the 434 homeless Afghan refugees that no country wants to admit," suggested Libertarianz leader Peter Cresswell today....

"If you want to know the real meaning of work, read Frederick Douglass's account of his first time working as a free man."

"If you want to know the real meaning of work, read Frederick Douglass's account of his first time working as a free man.
    "After escaping slavery, his first job was loading coal onto ships. It was new, hard, dirty work. Here's how he describes it:

"'I was now my own master. It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves. It was the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own.
"'There was no Master standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it. I worked that day with a pleasure I had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and my newly-married wife. It was to me the starting-point of a new existence.'

"Dirty, backbreaking work—and he describes it as rapture, pleasure, a new existence. 

    "Next time you struggle to find meaning in whatever it is you do for paid work, think of Frederick Douglass."

~ Gena Gorlin, quoting Frederick Douglass from his Autobiographical Writings

"Taxes ... "

"Taxes are the price you pay to fund the things that you protest against."

~ Spike Cohen

'Who Deserves Our Support?'

"Whenever I begin to debate certain issues such as the war in Iran or the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, I am confronted with the fact that the side I support has done some pretty stupid (sometimes evil) things. America supported the Shah, who was an oppressive dictator. Israel enabled the rise of Hamas by supporting Islamist social and charitable organizations within Gaza in order to create a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). And then there allegations of even more sinister actions, ranging from the plausible to the ridiculous. It is easy to see why so many people retreat to a kind of neutrality. They shrug and say both sides have some valid points. Who can know which is worth supporting?

"Without a well-grounded philosophical framework, there really IS no way to know. ... if you’re not thinking conceptually, it might be hard to make a distinction between this group dropping bombs and that group dropping bombs.

"You might be tempted to view the conflict in terms of who is the underdog. Who is the David fighting Goliath? Of course, even on these terms, it’s pretty bizarre to view a nation of about 10 million (Israel) as the Goliath when they are facing down Iran (a nation of about 90 million) or the entire Arab world (around 500 million) or the entire Islamic world (perhaps as many as 2 billion).

"But regardless, this is the wrong way to look at the conflict. Instead, we should be thinking in terms of what kind of civilisation does each side represent? What values would we like a society to uphold — and which of these 'sides' [if any] better represents those values? ... it does mean understanding the fundamental distinction between [semi] free and unfree societies — between good societies that sometimes makes mistakes, and fundamentally bad societies that (like all societies) have many good people in them who are just trying to live their lives.

"Once you understand the distinction, you might come to understand that the only way to 'Free Palestine' or to truly support any of the “underdogs” in the world is to free them from the ideological chains of their terrible belief systems. Fundamentally, these people are not angry at the West because they have (sometimes legitimate) grievances about particular actions, but because they resent the example that even a semi-free society presents. While we can’t force people to be free or even to believe in freedom as an ideal, we can (and should) show them the utter futility of continuing to support the death cult of Islamism. It was only utter defeat that discredited Nazism in Germany and emperor-worship in imperial Japan — and allowed them to develop into much happier, freer, and more prosperous societies. That is what I wish for Palestine, Iran, and all the oppressed people of the world."

~ Stewart Margolis from his post 'Who Deserves Our Support?'

Deregulation in Argentina: Milei Takes “Deep Chainsaw” to Bureaucracy and Red Tape

Argentine President Javier Milei has lowered inflation, drastically reduced government spending, and dismantled large parts of the federal bureaucracy. But as Ian Vásquez points out in his guest post, one of the most far-reaching efforts by his administration has been its deregulation push, with officials implementing about two deregulations per day on average since he took office, and using ingenious ways to discover where most needs deregulation. It's an Example for the World, if only New Zealand were not too sclerotic to learn from it ...

Deregulation in Argentina: Milei Takes “Deep Chainsaw” to Bureaucracy and Red Tape

by Ian Vásquez
At the heart of Argentina’s chronically crisis-prone economy is a political system that encourages unconstrained public spending and overregulation in the extreme. It is the system set up by Juan Domingo Perón in the 1940s that strengthened in subsequent decades, and that President Javier Milei promised to cut down with a chainsaw and replace with classical-liberal policies of the kind that made his country one of the most prosperous in the world a century ago.

Since assuming power in December 2023, Milei has been slashing government to that end. His priorities have been to get spending under control and to deregulate. Milei cut the budget by about 30 percent and balanced it one month into his term. That facilitated more disciplined monetary policy and the reduction of inflation from 25 percent per month when the president came to office to 2.2 percent in January 2025.

The success that Milei’s economic stabilisation has had so far is now widely acknowledged. The president took an economy from crisis to recovery much faster than most people expected: Growth returned in the second half of 2024, wages have increased, and the poverty rate, after having initially risen, has fallen below the 40 percent range that the previous government left as part of its legacy.

How much Milei has been deregulating, however, and the role that deregulation plays in Argentina’s success, is less widely appreciated—yet it is every bit as important as cutting spending. To understand why, it helps to know something about what makes Argentina’s politics different from that of most countries.

Argentina’s Peronist System

For more than seven decades, Argentina has had a corporatist system that Perón set up using Mussolini’s fascist Italy as a model. Under that system, the state organises society into groups—trade unions, business guilds, public employees, and so on—with which it negotiates to set national policies and balance interests. It’s a kind of collectivism that erases the individual, centralises power in the state, and incentivizes interest groups to compete for government favoritism through public spending and regulation.

This system gave rise to a proliferation of rules intended to protect and promote particular sectors through price controls, licensing schemes, differential exchange rates depending on type of economic activity, capital controls, preferential borrowing rates, compulsory membership in (and support of) guilds, and other interventions.

The system that the Peronist party set up discouraged free exchange, competition, and productivity but became deeply entrenched. Privileges accorded by regulation were politically difficult to lift. Legal scholar Jorge Bustamante, moreover, notes that regulation plays a more significant role in redistributing wealth in Argentina than fiscal policy does. He adds that “the waste of scarce resources caused by regulations is more serious than the direct activity of the state in the economy itself [fiscal policy], which is known to be in deficit.”

Unions in particular gained immense political power. Such was the case that Bustamante describes the Argentine system as one that “converts the unions into organs of the state when the party to which they belong [the Peronist party] is in power or converts the state into a prisoner of the unions when the party is in the opposition.”

Federico Sturzenegger, Argentina’s minister of deregulation and state transformation, made a similar point at the Cato conference we held in Buenos Aires in June 2024 with President Milei and other leading classical liberals. “The Peronist party,” Sturzenegger said, “is the manager of the status quo.… It is the manager of the vested interests; it is the conservative party of Argentina.”

The Peronists may want to conserve the system, but Milei is right in cutting it down. According to Cato's Human Freedom Index, the Argentina that the president inherited is one of the most regulated countries in the world, ranking 146 out of 165 countries in terms of the regulatory burden. As of last year, it ranked 81st.

Milei’s Cuts in One Year

Since coming to power, Milei has made wide-ranging cuts to Argentina’s bureaucracy. In his first year, he reduced the number of ministries from 18 to 8 (eliminating some and merging others), fired 37,000 public employees, and abolished about 100 secretariats and subsecretariats in addition to more than 200 lower-level bureaucratic departments.

The president has also aggressively pursued deregulation. Using a conservative methodology, my colleague Guillermina Sutter Schneider and I calculated that during Milei’s first year in office, he implemented about two deregulations per day. Roughly half of the measures eliminated regulations altogether, while the rest modified existing regulations in a generally market-oriented direction.

Milei has implemented these reforms legally and constitutionally, and they have resulted mainly from two broad measures. First, Milei began his administration by issuing an emergency “megadecree” that consisted of 366 articles. Emergency decrees are consistent with Argentine law if they meet certain conditions. They are also reviewable by Congress, which has the right to reject the orders within a specified period of time. Since the legislature did not object, most of the deregulations in the megadecree went into effect.

Second, Congress approved a massive bill (“Ley Bases”) last June that allows the government to issue further deregulatory decrees for one year. Most of Argentina’s deregulations are taking place under that authority and have been led by the new Ministry of Deregulation that began operating the following month.

The ministry is literally in a race against time, and its sense of urgency is palpable. When I visited Minister Sturzenegger and his team in November, they showed me a countdown sign outside his office that read “237 days left,” indicating the time remaining for the government to continue issuing deregulatory decrees. Sturzenegger’s team—made up of legal experts and accomplished economists—also has a clear sense of mission: to increase freedom rather than make the government more efficient. When reviewing a regulation, therefore, they first question whether the government should be involved in that area at all.

Following that approach, the government implemented deregulations in sectors of the economy ranging from agriculture and energy to transportation and housing. 

Looking at Prices

To help prioritise those reforms, the ministry looks at prices. If the cost of a good or service is significantly higher in Argentina than internationally, the regulatory burden often explains the price differential. Sturzenegger reports that deregulation in Argentina has tended to make prices fall by about 30 percent. The ministry has also set up a web portal called Report the Bureaucracy that takes recommendations from businesses and the public, resulting in numerous reforms.

Some of the reforms have been procedural. For example, government inspections are now sometimes conducted after a firm begins engaging in business (on the assumption that it is following the law and may be subject to inspection), rather than before any business is allowed to even go forward. This “ex-post” inspection of the labeling of imported textiles, for instance, led the price of textiles to fall by 29 percent. 

The government has also instituted a “positive administrative silence” rule affecting several activities by which requested permission is considered approved if the government bureaucracy does not respond within a fixed period of time. In yet another example, Milei prohibited legally sanctioned hereditary positions that had become normal practice at numerous government agencies.

Much of the impact of the deregulations has not yet been measured, but the hard or anecdotal evidence that does exist suggests that the reforms are making a significant difference. The following are some accomplishments from Milei’s first year:

• The end of Argentina’s extensive rent controls has resulted in a tripling of the supply of rental apartments in Buenos Aires and a 30 percent drop in price.
• The new open-skies policy and the permission for small airplane owners to provide transportation services within Argentina has led to an increase in the number of airline services and routes operating within (and to and from) the country.
• Permitting Starlink and other companies to provide satellite internet services has given connectivity to large swaths of Argentina that had no such connection previously. Anecdotal evidence from a town in the remote northwestern province of Jujuy implies a 90 percent drop in the price of connectivity.
• The government repealed the “Buy Argentina” law similar to “Buy American” laws, and it repealed laws that required stores to stock their shelves according to specific rules governing which products, by which companies and which nationalities, could be displayed in which order and in which proportions.
• Over-the-counter medicines can now be sold not just by pharmacies but by other businesses as well. This has resulted in online sales and price drops.
• The elimination of an import-licensing scheme has led to a 
• 20 percent drop in the price of clothing items and a 35 percent drop in the price of home appliances.
• The government ended the requirement that public employees purchase flights on the more expensive state airline and that other airlines cannot park their airplanes overnight at one of the main airports in Buenos Aires.

Many more examples could be given, but there’s no doubt that Argentines are beginning to feel the results of the reforms. Those results also help explain Milei’s approval rating of 50 to 55 percent, according to recent polls.

Year Two of Milei: The “Deep Chainsaw” Begins

In his address to the nation on his one-year anniversary as president, Milei explained that the cuts he’s made so far are only a beginning. “We will continue to eliminate agencies, secretariats, subsecretariats, public companies and any other State entity that should not exist,” he promised, and then went further: “Every attribution or task that does not correspond to what the federal state is supposed to do will be eliminated. Because as the state gets smaller, liberty grows larger.” Milei declared that he would now begin applying the “deep chainsaw.”

Minister Sturzenegger is leading the charge. A decree in February instructed all ministers to review all laws and regulations under their purview and recommend comprehensive deregulations within 30 days. In a country with nearly 300,000 laws, decrees, or resolutions, that is no small task. But according to Sturzenegger, the government has cut or modified 20 percent of the country’s laws; his goal is to reach 70 percent. He adds that the pace of firing public employees will increase.

Regulatory reforms have already picked up pace. In January, Sturzenegger announced a “revolutionary deregulation” of the export and import of food. All food that has been certified by countries with high sanitary standards can now be imported without further approval from, or registration with, the Argentine state. Food exports must now comply only with the regulations of the destination country and are unencumbered by domestic regulations.

That innovative reform, which outsources regulation, is intended to generate “cheaper food for Argentines and more Argentine food for the world.” But it is also an example of how the ministry takes input from Argentine citizens about the need to change nonsensical regulations. As Sturzenegger explained: “Countless companies have told us of the incredible hardships they had to go through to meet local requirements that were not required by the destination market. A producer who needed to certify a sample to see if he could enter the US market was asked to set up a factory first.”

In another case, Argentina required a watermelon exporter to package his product in a way that was different from what the recipient country required. So, in practice, the exporter would load the ship in compliance with Argentine law and, once the cargo left port, the watermelons would immediately be repacked.

Other examples abound. A decree in February facilitated farmers’ use of new seeds by eliminating the requirement to conduct extensive testing of those seeds. As Sturzenegger observed, in a country where agriculture plays a significant economic role, those restrictions were especially perverse: “Brazil has tripled its soybean production, largely with seeds made by Argentine researchers, working in Argentine companies but based in Brazil. The dramatic thing is that the increase in production in Brazil sinks the price of the grain while we are relatively stagnant because we cannot access our own technology!”

Another decree reduces the cost of warehousing imported containers awaiting customs inspections by an estimated 80 percent because it allows importers to keep their goods in competing locations during that time rather than solely in places run by the customs service. That cost reduction, like countless others that result from accelerated regulatory reforms, will be passed on to Argentine consumers. And to the extent that the chainsaw really does go deeper and faster in year two, the benefits will be even more pronounced.

An Example for the World

Milei’s task of turning Argentina once again into one of the freest and most prosperous countries in the world is herculean. But deregulation plays a key role in achieving that goal, and despite the reform agenda being far from complete, Milei has already exceeded most people’s expectations. 

His deregulations are cutting costs, increasing economic freedom, reducing opportunities for corruption, stimulating growth, and helping to overturn a failed and corrupt political system. Because of the scope, method, and extent of its deregulations, Argentina is setting an example for an overregulated world.

* * * * 

Ian Vásquez is Ian Vásquez is vice president for international studies at the Cato Institute, holds the David Boaz Chair, and is director of Cato’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. He is a weekly columnist at El Comercio (Peru), and his articles have appeared in newspapers throughout the United States and Latin America.

His post first appeared at the Cato at Liberty blog.

How regulation works

Above a certain size, building new homes in France requires a registered architect.

Take a wild guess: what size do you reckon that is ...

In the same vein, at what number of employees do you reckon French firms are obliged to unionise ...

...and at what level of income do you reckon UK firms are legally obliged to register for VAT...

...and what happened in Georgian Britain when they taxed windows ...

Here are The Beatles ...

"And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley."

"Q: 'So I want to ask you about Philistines and how Philistines have taken over the culture. I think the phrase you used is ‘Philistine supremacy’?'

"A: 'That's right. A lot of the time, when we talk about Philistines, we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts. And it's a kind of snob thing. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine. You're a Philistine.

"'The really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that, you know, Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley. And the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just so many examples like that—that sort of suggest that the elite tier has kind of given up on being elites in a way.

"'I think part of it is we had what was called prestige TV, and people wanted to write about that and talk about that.'

"Q: 'Let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment and say, no, 'Succession' is really good. The writing is very interesting. The cinematography adds a new layer to its presentation. The storytelling's good. It gives you room to explore various themes in a way that a play doesn’t because of its runtime and multi-season arc. Tell me why that’s crazy.'

"A: 'There are two questions here. Is Succession good? And is Succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? And those are separate questions.

"'Maybe Succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative. ... But should we be talking about it in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of fiction and drama? That’s obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. And, you know, King Lear is 400 years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the Succession scripts and doing a close reading. ...'

"Q: 'What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?'

"A: 'So the first thing I would say is, you’re not at school and you’re not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn’t like at school that are no longer relevant. So just move on. Put that to one side. That’s over. Shakespeare’s the best. People get a little fussy about, can we say the best, and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes, he’s the best. He’s the heart of the English canon. He’s the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read some Shakespeare in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it’s crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary?'"

~ from an interview with Henry Oliver on developing literary taste in an age of TV binge-watching and dumbed-down mass culture: 'How to Be a Serious Reader'

"Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements...."

"Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind... Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships. The political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to communism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens. It means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed."

~ Ayn Rand from her article 'The Roots of War' [hat tip Objectobot]

The Vance Effect

See if you can spot when Victor Orban's chances really hit the skids...

TOFU Trump

 

A brief update for you on last week's summary post:

Brief Trump summary of the past weeks: 

-“Open the Strait” 

- “Help us open the Strait” 

- “We don’t need the Strait open” 

- “Open the f’king Strait or I destroy you all” 

- “I will block the Strait”

How to get me into a voting booth

When it comes to election time my general approach is "Don't encourage them, don't vote." I've never been  disappointed with that considered choice.

But Henry Olsen has an idea that might get me into a booth: a negative vote.

We know exactly who we cannot stand and why the other lot would be a disaster. But our positive support for any party is probably lukewarm at best. ...

Perhaps the voting system should reflect that.

Imagine this: ... You head to the polls and discover that, not only can you vote for a party, but you can also vote against one.

Instead of adding to your preferred party’s vote count, you could bring down the count of one you hate. Now that voters have finally mastered MMP, this would take democracy to a whole new level.

Are you a middle-aged farmer worried about the Greens’ alternative Budget, or a young college graduate mad at the Coalition for reducing Auckland’s housing construction allowance? Use the negative vote to express your anger!

No one would be obliged to use their positive vote, so all votes could be negative. The party with the fewest negative votes would then win the election.

I like it. It could be that all parties are so hated, we could have a Prime Minister leading a party with more negative votes than positive. Just fewer negative votes than all those other bastards.

Then let's see them talk about their bloody "mandate."

PS: Which of the bastards would you be voting against?

Infinite Voices and Narrow Minds

"[There is now a] strange coexistence between an unprecedented variety of opinions that are strongly represented in the public square and the rigid worldview that constrains the beliefs of the most influential people in our society ....

"Never before have so many opinions been at our fingertips—and never before have so many professionals felt unable to voice theirs. What explains this paradox [of infinite voices and narrow minds], why does it matter, and what can we do about it?

"It is impossible to understand the recent politics of the Western world without considering a giant sociological transformation ...: The bourgeoisie has switched sides. ...

"Karl Marx called on the workers, not on the lawyers or freelance illustrators, of the world to unite. The origins of Germany’s Social Democratic Party, of Britain’s Labour Party, and even of the modern-day Democratic Party in the United States lie with factory workers and trade unionists. ... But of late, these realities have started to shift ...

"Plumbers are right wing but lawyers are left wing. Cab drivers are right wing but university professors are left wing. Police officers are right wing but civil servants are left wing. And though many professions claim to be apolitical, the plumbers and cab drivers and police officers increasingly suspect that the lawyers and professors and civil servants are letting their political values influence their work. The decline in respect for 'experts' is in part owed to the blatant lies spread on social media; but it also has its roots in the real ways in which the consensus within these professions has increasingly come to adhere to a narrowly progressive—and often lamentably erroneous—set of assumptions about the world. ...

"The resulting state of affairs leaves both sides equally unhappy. ... What one side perceives as flagrantly unjust domination by the well-credentialed, the other interprets as the perils of revanchist demagoguery."

~ Yascha Mounk from his post 'The Bourgeoisie Has Switched Sides: What happens when elites all believe the same thing'

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.