The economics of Magical Money Trees (MMT)

Underlying many of the wildest spending promises made by the most irresponsible political parties this election is an idea popularised by so-called Modern Monetary Theory, aka Magical Monetary Theory. This is the idea (as articulated by Chloe Swarbrick yesterday) that "the right-wing mythology around a government budget being the same as a household budget is exactly that, a mythology."  

According to MMT theory, government budgets differ different to normal household budgets (to over-simplify just a little bit) in that the money for government spending literally grows on trees.

If you need more, just print more.

To be perfectly fair, there's a little more to it than that. But not much. And for politicians promising billions of dollars of overspending, for whom the seduction of easy money is irresistible, anything close enough is good enough.

So what more is there? For a government like New Zealand that uses its own currency, MMT argues that government spending does not depend on first raising revenue through taxation or borrowing. Why? Because:

A monetary sovereign creates the dollars by spending and then those dollars disappear when taxed or are transformed into government bonds when the government runs a deficit. The government, therefore, is not financially constrained. MMT proponents argue that government deficits are private-sector surpluses, public debt is private wealth, and big government programs shouldn’t be limited by questions such as “How will we pay for it?” The real constraint, they insist, is the availability of labour and other resources.

So keep printing until all labour and resources are on fire. And then stop. 

"Stopping" is just one of the many political problems with the economic argument: there's barely a politician in the known universe who can stop (over)spending once started.

So it's fortunate that Jonathan Newman has enlisted several luminaries to explain in a new book, from an Austrian perspective, what the MMTers get wrong. [FREE DOWNLOAD HERE of an advance PDF copy].

Newman is also giving a chapter-by-chapter summary on Twitter of the main points, often engaging there with the theorists of MMT -- insofar as they're able to. These are some of the highlights...

Chapter 1 dismantles MMT’s foundational myth that money originated with the state. ...

Chapter 2 diagnoses the “spending illusion” that infects MMT. Joseph T. Salerno shows that MMT is “the unwanted stepchild of the neoclassical quantity theory” ... The spending illusion not only persists in MMT but is put on steroids, resulting in bizarre claims about how the state institutes money and policy prescriptions that “will inevitably distort prices and interest rates, divert resources from those uses that best serve consumer preferences, precipitate inflationary booms and asset bubbles, and generate financial crises and economic depressions.”

In chapter 3, Robert P. Murphy refutes the claim of MMT proponents that government debt represents private sector wealth. The so-called sectoral balance approach ["their debt is your money" say MMTers] is employed by MMT proponents in misleading ways. They imply that the only way the private sector as a whole can save and invest is if the government accumulates debt. Murphy exposes their faulty assumptions and sins of omission. Importantly, government debt is repaid with both explicit and implicit taxation (money creation), meaning that government debt service ultimately comes at the expense of the private sector. ... 

In chapter 4, Patrick Newman demolishes the idea that government spending can ever be productive. ... Government spending ...  should be considered consumption and not investment. Newman reviews the concerns held by Simon Kuznets [the inventor of GDP analysis] about the inclusion of government spending in aggregate production statistics, and then evaluates the growth-inhibiting consequences of government spending in light of its true nature: waste.

In chapter 5, Karl-Friedrich Israel exposes the faulty premises of MMT’s inflation management aspirations. MMT acknowledges that price inflation is an important constraint on government spending. [The author shows that] attempts to measure and respond to price inflation are bound to fail however ... [Furthermore] MMT has no dependable guide for determining if, when, and where government spending is pushing beyond productive capacity [or whether politicians would ever have the capacity to stop spending once started].

In chapter 6, Per L. Bylund points out [that] ... MMT proponents entirely ignore the wealth-creating, resource-economising market process—entrepreneurship and economic calculation are wholly absent from MMT analysis. Instead, they reason from accounting tautologies ... and assume that policymakers can effectively and efficiently manage scarce resources without market prices and the profit-and-loss mechanism.

In chapter 7, Joshua A. Mawhorter shows that MMT prescribes policy from a “privileged position,” taking for granted the laissez-faire preconditions for monetary sovereignty, and instead proposing policies that would undermine it. [Ayn Rand called reasoning like this as committing the Fallacy of the Stolen Concept.] It is this monetary sovereignty, according to MMT, that opens the door for deficit spending, debt monetisation, and government control of resources ... [yet a]chieving monetary sovereignty requires quite the opposite: limited government, sound money, and a flourishing private market economy based on capital accumulation. The US is the MMT proponents’ “monetary sovereign par excellence,” but its economic history exhibits institutions and policies condemned by MMT.

Chapter 8 is the chopping block for the MMT job guarantee proposal [reflected in the Greens's own $8 billion "green jobs guarantee"]... MMT overlooks the fact that apparently idle resources are in such a state for a reason. Resources may have no known valuable use or may be held idle temporarily because the owner anticipates a valuable use in the future. Labourers may withhold their services because they value leisure more highly or as a negotiating tactic in a labour strike. A ... job guarantee programme [financed by printed money] would not reduce idleness in the way MMT proponents desire but merely redirect valuable resources and labour away from productive and economising uses and toward wasteful projects chosen by central planners who are inherently unable to engage in economic calculation.

As you'd expect, the book is filled with countless examples illustrating the arguments. 

It's out officially in December, but fortunately you can download a PDF advance copy now just in time to send a copy to your favourite politician ...

"The Green Party’s supermarket policy is a textbook example of how modern ideological movements drift toward retroactive punishment."

Chloe Swarbrick: 'Yes, I alone will decide how much profit you will make. Or not.'

"One of the most valuable inheritances from Roman law is the prohibition on retroactive legislation; the principle that what is lawful today cannot be declared unlawful tomorrow and punished after the fact. Civilisation depends on this. Without it, citizens cannot plan, cannot trust the law, and cannot defend themselves against the State. The rule of law collapses into rule by law — law as a weapon. ...

"The Green Party’s supermarket policy is a textbook example of how modern ideological movements drift toward retroactive punishment. Their proposal to penalise 'excessive profit' or 'price gouging' sounds simple until you ask the only question that matters: excessive according to what standard?

"So far, no standard exists.

"Chlöe Swarbrick has been unable to articulate: 

• how “excessive profit” would be defined, 
• what baseline would be used, 
• whether the metric would be tied to past behaviour, 
• or how businesses could know in advance whether they were compliant.

"Without a clear, objective, forward‑looking definition, the policy becomes retroactive by default. It allows the State to declare, after the fact, that last year’s lawful profit was actually this year’s unlawful 'gouging.' That is not regulation; it is ex post facto punishment disguised as economic justice.

"This is precisely the danger Roman jurists warned about. Law must be knowable before action, not invented after action."

~ Colinxy from his post 'Retroactive Law: When the Past Becomes Illegal'

Who actually carries NZ’s tax burden?

 

"[W]ho actually carries their share of New Zealand’s tax burden. [Let's see] how unfair and disproportionate New Zealand’s tax system is on higher earners.

"The top 20 percent [of income earners] pay nearly two-thirds of all personal income tax.
The top 10 percent pay more than the bottom 80 percent combined.
And the top 1 percent contribute more [tax] than the entire bottom half of [income earners].

"Taxpayers’ Union spokesperson Tory Relf said: 'Politicians like Chlöe Swarbrick push a myth that successful New Zealanders are not paying their fair share [sic]. The evidence tells the opposite story. The truth is that wealth taxes, capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes, and higher income tax rates are harder to justify if politicians were truthful about how the tax system works right now.' ”

~ Taxpayers' 'Union' [sic] from their post 'Tax Inequality: Who Really Pays Their Fair Share?'

"With this information in hand, you might ask the next person who says the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes: Exactly what percentage of total federal income taxes should the 1-percenters pay? I seriously doubt whether you will get any kind of coherent answer. 

    "By the way, since 1-percenter income [in NZ starts at around $225,000], it might be pointed out that [$225,000 or even $450,000] a year is not even yacht or Learjet money. Plus, if one has two [children at university], a big mortgage and car payments, I doubt he would declare himself rich."

~ Walter Williams from his column 'What Is The Fair Share Of Taxes?'

“Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?”

~ Thomas Sowell

"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."

~ PJ O'Rourke

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 Return of Chloe's Wealth Tax

Watch any rant by Chloe Swarbrick and, after the obligatory nods to te reo, to Palestine, and to passing laws to change the weather, she'll tell you that it's time for "the wealthy" to fund everything every government could dream of. 

It's really the only substantive policy she can articulate. Yet she remains blithely unaware that the fortunes she want to sack are not gold bars under the mattress but ownership stakes in operating companies, real estate, and other productive assets, so her Wealth Tax would function as a direct penalty on those investments. That penalty doesn’t remain confined to the wealthy. Capital formation is what drives productivity growth and wage gains, and policies that discourage it ultimately leave everyone worse off.

As Adam Michel explains in this Guest Post, the chronic government spending growth she advocates cannot be paid for by ever more aggressive taxes on a narrow subset of high-income taxpayers.  Not even in a US more stocked with billionaires than she'll ever see here ...

The Return of the Wealth Tax, Evidence Against Them Is Stronger Than Ever

by Adam Michel

Wealth taxes are back in the policy conversation— a good opportunity to review how wealth taxes work and why they have been called “one of the most harmful taxes ever created.”

Wealth taxes are unique in that they are not levied on an annual flow of income or consumption (like a sales tax). Instead, wealth taxes apply to a stock of assets and are usually intended to be primarily redistributive, aiming to reverse a perceived inequality in the distribution of resources.

Wealth taxes promise redistribution but more often deliver high economic costs, administrative complexity, and disappointing revenue. California’s proposal  to impose a broad-based wealth tax on the state’s billionaires illustrates how these taxes distort investment decisions, magnify fiscal volatility, and tend to evolve from one-time levies into permanent features of strained budgets.

Wealth Taxes In the Real World

Wealth taxes impose an additional layer of tax on the income generated by the underlying asset. Most wealth consists of productive assets deployed in the economy, such as active businesses and other physical investments. The annual income streams generated by the underlying assets—capital gains, dividends, and interest—are taxed through the normal income tax system.

The existing tax system already charges the wealthiest Americans high tax rates. A Biden administration Treasury study found that the wealthiest 92 Americans faced total state, local, federal, and international income tax rates of 59 percent. Recent research by four prominent liberal economists concludes that US billionaires pay higher tax rates than their counterparts in the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and France, and, contrary to the headline claim, the wealthiest taxpayers also pay the highest tax rates among all Americans.

Because wealth taxes are assessed on a stock instead of an annual income flow, expressing the tax rate as an equivalent income tax rate is more informative. Unless the taxpayer is expected to slowly sell off their underlying assets, the tax will be paid from annual income. Table 1 shows the equivalent income tax rate on underlying assets with different rates of return at different wealth tax rates. At the California top wealth tax rate of 5 percent, any asset earning less than a 5 percent annual pre-tax return would face income tax rates above 100 percent before paying other taxes. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign proposal included a top wealth tax rate of 8 percent.

Net wealth taxes have been tested in other countries and repealed due to high economic costs and administrative burdens. Peaking at 12 in the 1990s, only four Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries still impose broad-based net wealth taxes today: Colombia, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland. The figure below shows the trend of wealth taxes over time.

Economic and Administrative Costs

Wealth taxes can impose confiscatory effective tax rates with predictable economic consequences. By directly reducing the after-tax return to saving and investment, they weaken incentives to build businesses, expand productive capacity, and take entrepreneurial risks. Because most large fortunes are not gold bars under the mattress but ownership stakes in operating companies, real estate, and other productive assets, a wealth tax functions as a direct penalty on those investments. That penalty doesn’t remain confined to the wealthy. Capital formation is what drives productivity growth and wage gains, and policies that discourage it ultimately leave everyone worse off.

Wealth taxes also distort capital allocation. Investors have a strong incentive to shift portfolios toward assets that are harder to value, easier to shelter, or more mobile across borders, rather than toward their most productive use. This encourages tax avoidance rather than genuine economic activity. It can mean less investment in long-term projects, more leverage, and greater reliance on complex financial arrangements to reduce reported net worth.

Wealth taxes are also administratively complex. Valuing a broad range of assets every year is extraordinarily difficult. Unlike easy-to-value publicly traded stocks, most wealth is tied up in closely held businesses, partnerships, real estate, artwork, and other illiquid or unique assets. Annual valuation invites avoidance and disputes, which raises compliance costs for both governments and taxpayers. It took 12 years for the IRS and the Michael Jackson estate to reach a court-mediated agreement on the value of its taxable assets. Going through such a process every year for all taxpayers with assets above or near the tax threshold is administratively impracticable.

Because of persistent administrative difficulties and taxpayers’ behavioural responses, wealth taxes raise comparatively little revenue. Countries that experiment with wealth taxes repeatedly find that taxpayers adjust their behaviour or move in large numbers, undermining optimistic revenue forecasts. Before France repealed its net wealth tax in 2018, the government estimated that “some 10,000 people with 35 billion euros worth of assets left in the past 15 years.” 

Spain experienced a similar behavioural response following the 2023 “solidarity tax,” which raised just 40 percent of the projected revenue. Cato’s Chris Edwards summarises that “European wealth taxes typically raised only about 0.2 percent of GDP in revenues. Given the little revenue raised, it is not surprising that they had ‘little effect on wealth distribution,’ as one study noted.”

California’s Proposal Is a Warning for the Country

California’s proposed 5 percent wealth tax is especially notable because it would layer on top of the most progressive tax system in the OECD. The state already relies on taxpayers making over half a million dollars a year (the highest income 2.5 percent) to pay 49 percent of income tax revenue. They do this by combining high marginal income tax rates and heavy reliance on capital gains taxation, which makes revenues volatile and highly sensitive to the fortunes and domiciling decisions of a small number of taxpayers.

The initiative’s own findings make clear that this will not be a one-time tax. The ballot text explains that the wealth tax “would only modestly slow” the growth of billionaires’ fortunes in California. That admission undermines the premise that the tax solves any underlying fiscal or wealth distribution problem. If a tax leaves wealth largely intact, political pressure to repeat, expand, or permanently extend it is inevitable. This is what happened in Spain, when its “exceptional and temporary” wealth tax became permanent. California’s proposal should be understood in this light, not as a one-off correction, but as a test case for permanent wealth confiscation.

The lesson extends beyond California. Chronic spending growth cannot be solved by ever more aggressive taxes on a narrow subset of high-income taxpayers. Wealth taxes are not a solution to budgetary or economic gaps; they are a symptom of a broken fiscal system grasping for short-term revenue while postponing the difficult but necessary work of restraining spending growth. 

* * * * 

Adam Michel is director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute, where he focuses on analysing the economic and budgetary effects of taxation in the United States.
    He is widely published and quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He has also appeared on Fox News, CNN, and CNBC to discuss tax policy and its economic effects. In addition to numerous book chapters, his scholarly work has been published in the Journal of Public Budgeting and Finance and Tax Notes.
    His post first appeared at the Cato at Liberty blog.

Yes, this is pathetic.

The reason for the punishment. Threats not immediately obvious.

Yes, it's accurate to call Te Pāti Māori a racist party — both its constituencies and policies are race-based. Like Wee Willy Jackson, who spoke yesterday against them being banned for 21 days, they view everything through a lens focussed on race.

"The world is watching'" said Jackson, "and this type of punitive punishment will enshrine and entrench in world political commentators, and certainly the Māori Party, that this place is indeed racist and that there's no hope for this place. That's how bad that decision is."* TPM MPs and other were happy to pile on and magnify his point. "Everyone can see the racism," said Takuta Ferris. " It is hardly being hidden." "Racism-whistling," said Marama Davidson. "Racism," said Ms Hapi-Clarke. Racism, racism, racism.

Baloney.

It's just a Parliament trying to maintain the illusion that its members deserve any sort of respect. 

As Chloe Swarbrick pointed out, it's a place full of of humbug: Winston stood up and preached about "contempt" — TPM's "utter contempt for the whole institution." Yet "the last time ... that the Privileges Committee did not make a consensus-based decision," cited Swarbrick in her speech, "in fact it was—and here I am reading explicitly from the Privileges Committee report back then—'for the Member, the Rt Hon Winston Peters, who knowingly provided false or misleading information on a pecuniary interest.'" MPs of course caring nothing for how much they lie to you, but who get upset (or pretend to) when they're seen to lie to each other.

But as for those wanting to punish these MPs by removing them from the House for an unprecedented period?

Don't be so bloody precious.

The Parliament needs some formality in order to function, to allow violently-opposed views to be heard and debated. But it also needs some theatre — and no-one could argue that Han-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke's defiant rip-up-and-haka conclusion to the Treaty Principles Bill wasn't great theatre.

And let's not get all uptight about the alleged "threats" against the ACT Party front bench. If threats alone were enough to ban an MP for three weeks then Julie Anne Genter might be permanently on leave.

It was National Party MPs who escalated all this by arguing for a 21-day ban. And let's not forget it was ACT Party MP Parmjeet Parmar who investigated imprisonment as a possible punishment. Imprisonment!

Was that racism? No, it was simply irresponsible. (And in Parmar's case, authoritarian.)

Yesterday the Māori Party co-leader was still berating the "coloniser government" for punishing them. Maybe they should take a leaf out of Sin Fein's book, who also refused to concede the legitimacy of their Parliament. But in the Westminster Parliament Sinn Fein take their stand seriously: their seven MPs refuse to front at all.

* * * * 

* To be fair, Jackson was a bit more subtle than that. "These people on the other side," he said, "they're not all Ku Klux Klan members .... Some of them are quite good."

"The people who incoherently scream mixed messages into their megaphones about a range of unrelated topics are not the people to lead that environmental debate for us"

"Whether we talk about a business, a school, a sporting body or indeed a political party, plenty of organisations lose their way from time to time. In strategic planning reviews, we are often forced to consider the fact that our progress is not taking us towards our intended goal or our purpose. Sometimes it’s because we are off course. Alternatively, the destination or target may have changed without us noticing. Either way, a conscious change is usually required.
    "In the case of the Greens, that target is no longer the environment. Instead, their attentions are focused on the impoverished, the Palestinians, Māori and, most recently, each other. If these are the causes they wish to pursue, that’s okay. But these are not the aspirations of a genuine Green Party. In any review of their performance, it is awfully tempting to talk about the inappropriate behaviours in the parliamentary chamber, the shoplifting, the immigrant labour or the tantrums. But we don’t really need to, do we? Because there is a bigger picture.
    "In New Zealand, we don’t deserve the hard time we give ourselves on environmental issues. While our environmental standards might not meet the expectations of the protesting few, the reality is that we do better than most countries. ...
    "One of the reasons we do better than most is that those earnest Green party politicians from the 1990s ... I often wonder what [Rod] Donald and [Jeanette] Fitzsimons might have achieved if they had the social media channels available today.
    "However, the current Green Party show no signs of using those social media channels to lead another generation to a better environmental place. They don’t talk about the oceans or the bush. They talk about Palestinians, indigenous rights and the rainbow community. ... Are they off-track? Or has their purpose changed? ... the aspirations to be our environmental conscience have been overtaken by the desire to champion those whom they believe to be the downtrodden ...
    "I’d like to see us do the obvious things around our waste, our waterways and our oceans. And I’d like to see us acknowledge the challenges in each of those areas and to develop a plan that would see us lead the world.
    "But the people who incoherently scream mixed messages into their megaphones about a range of unrelated topics are not the people to lead that environmental debate for us."

~ Bruce Cotterill from his post 'Green Party's Identity Crisis Should Be Cause for a Rebrand'

Giving it the gas [updated]

 

NZ Electricity Generation, 8:10am to 11:20am, 13 June 2024.
Source: NZ Interactive Electricity Grid by @morganfrnchstgg

Today's a normal kind of cloudy, breezy winter day around the motu (as they say).

As you were enjoying your breakfast toast and coffee this morning, at today's first peak-power time, the electricity grid was supplied with 82% renewable power. Good stuff, right! 

As you can see above (and I've enlarged it for you just below), the bulk of that renewable power came from hydro — almost two-thirds — with a decent amount (17%) from geothermal. Good stuff. Thank you. But can you see the anaemic offering from the other two renewable contributors, solar and wind? Just 129MW from the country's wind farms — contributing just 2% to your breakfast toaster — and from solar just a risible 1.3MW. Virtually zero percent.

And that's a normal morning.  (As we were reminded by Transpower on May 10th, we're so close to being underpowered here that the gap between peak production and consumption on still, cloudy days is dangerously small.) If we zoom out to see the contribution of New Zealand's largest solar "farm" up in Kaitaia over the last seven days, even it's useful-but-insubstantial peak of 20MW is only achieved momentarily in the middle of the day, offering little help for morning or evening peak.  Sure, more solar "farms" are planned, but they all have that same problem. And they all take time to get going. Lots of time.

But what about wind? Sure, this morning it only gave the grid a measly 2%. But on other mornings (Monday for example, see below) wind "farms" put in around 17% of the power that made your shower hot and your kettle boil.

But — and here's the big but — that wind doesn't blow all the time. If we zoom out again to the last seven days (below) we see that the contribution of New Zealand's largest wind farm, just outside Palmerston North, is literally up and down. from zero to 150MW (and back again, see that drop-off on Monday afternoon) in the time it takes to yell "turn that bloody heater on!"

In fairly simple terms, that's why we need gas. Even when the wind does blow and the sun still shines, it's gas that helps make up that sizeable difference. Just one plant, Todd Generation's Junction Road plant running on Taranaki gas produces almost as much peak power as the windmills do on the Tararuas, and at times that the windmills don't, and can't. It's almost like the two are symbiotic. (Just for fun, compare the two graphs above and below, and with the peak morning and evening times at which we need to cook.

Maybe that's why we say, "now we're cooking with gas!"

Even at Huntly — which uses both gas (light brown below) and Indonesian coal(because we're no longer able to produce our own) — and which  produces up to a massive peak of 850MW, you can see it keeping your kettle on the boil even when the wind isn't blowing.

This is why commentators like Alex Epstein describe unreliable wind and solar as "parasitic" on reliable power. And not cheap. Essentially to rely on wind and solar, we need generators to build enough capacity — in the form of power that's easily turned on and off — so that when wind don't blow and sun don't shine the lights can still be kept on. Which essentially means that the more wind and solar are built, exactly the same capacity of reliable power needs to be built to double that, so it can come on the field as a reserve.

But we can't build dams any more — too expensive, takes too damn long under the RMA, and too many objections. And batteries, while promising, still only contribute a maximum of 13MW here, and take oodles of new mining to produce. (And the more unreliables you have, the more expensive battery power would be necessary, one reason this is still is not being tried anywhere.)

So what does that leave? Answer: gas. If you want your breakfast sausages, you need this place to be be cooking – or at least producing power — with gas.

Sure, good old Chloe Swarbrick told the nation on Monday that Australia does all this with domestic solar panels. She didn't tell you however that the price of power in Australia has gone through the roof those solar panels are on. Or how often Victoria, say, suffers brownouts. Or how small a proportion of the grid those panels produce even at peak time. (All of Australia's solar panels, domestic and commercial, contribute just 12% of the grid's power and, like here, need still non-existent battery power and reliable backup generation of the same capacity when they're not producing.) But in any case, New Zealand is not that sunburnt land — not even as sunburnt as Victoria.. And no amount of solar panels can fill the gap when the sun don't shine.

For that, and for some time to come, we still need gas.

(NB: These graphs come from the really neat interactive electricity grid charts made possible by Morgan French-Stagg. Thank you sir.)

UPDATE: The UK has noticed the results of Jacinda Ardern's 'energy suicide note' of banning gas exploration, and warns its politicians not to contemplate the same there. The Telegraph writes:

[UK Labour leader] Keir Starmer is standing by a pledge to ban new drilling in the North Sea, despite New Zealand abandoning a similar policy amid blackout fears. [UK] Labour’s manifesto, due out on Thursday, will feature a pledge to block all new licensing for oil and gas as one of its key energy policies. It follows last weekend’s announcement that New Zealand’s government was lifting a ban on new oil and gas exploration.
    The ban was announced by former prime minister Jacinda Ardern in 2018. “The world has moved on from fossil fuels,” Ardern proclaimed at the time. New Zealand’s trailblazing policy, which was the first of its kind, became a key inspiration for [the UK] Labour Party’s own plan. However, some in the party are now questioning the commitment after New Zealand resources minister Shane Jones last weekend denounced its own ban as a disaster – and revoked it. It followed three years of rising energy prices that have left 110,000 households unable to warm their homes, 19pc of households struggling with bills and 40,000 of them having their power cut off due to unpaid bills, according to Consumer NZ.
    Since April the situation has further deteriorated: Transpower, the equivalent of our National Grid, warned that the nation was at high risk of blackouts. New Zealand’s shift to renewables meant it no longer had the generating power to keep the lights on during the cold spells that mark the Antipodean winter, said Transpower, as it begged consumers to cut their electricity consumption.
    The threat to New Zealand’s energy security comes despite the fact that geologists have discovered billions of cubic metres of natural gas in the seabeds around the country.
    Sean Rush, a leading New Zealand barrister specialising in petroleum licensing law and climate litigation, called the oil and gas ban “economic vandalism at its worst in exchange for virtue signalling at its finest”.... [Shane] Jones said last week: “Natural gas is critical to keeping our lights on and our economy running, especially during peak electricity demand and when generation dips because of more intermittent sources like wind, solar and hydro.” ...
    

Jenny Stanning, director of external affairs at OEUK, says exploration is essential to simply slowing the decline in output. “The New Zealand experience shows how important it is for countries to carefully manage energy transition and energy security. We will need oil and gas for decades to come so it makes sense to back our own industry rather than ramping up imports from abroad.” ... Russell Borthwick, chief executive of Aberdeen & Grampian Chamber of Commerce – the region that lies at the heart of the UK offshore industry – says the UK needs a managed and nuanced transition to low carbon energy. ... New Zealand’s experience suggests much of the UK industry would not survive a ban on new drilling.
    “Back in 2018, at the time of the ban, there were 20 international and five local companies engaged in exploration and production in New Zealand,” says John Carnegie, chief executive of Energy Resources Aotearoa, the local industry trade body. “Since then, exploration has fallen dramatically. We only have nine remaining investors, seven international and two local. The rest have left.” ...

Robin Allan, chairman of Brindex, which represents the UK’s independent offshore companies, says: “New Zealand’s ban was a politically motivated decision which ignored data on oil and gas demand, the advantages of domestic production and a realistic pace of decarbonisation. The [UK] Labour Party should see what is happening in front of their eyes in another island nation which has already implemented a poorly reasoned policy – and think again.” [Hat tip Ele Ludemann]

The Green Party under Swarbrick calls for "a Zero-Sized Economy"

"Chlöe Swarbrick says tax reform is needed in NZ.
She says that adopting a capital gains tax is just "basic economic sense."
 I wonder which books in economics she is reading? Das Kapital..."

"Chlöe Swarbrick ... says that adopting a capital gains tax is just 'basic economic sense.' I wonder which books in economics she is reading? 'Das Kapital' by Karl Marx? ...
    "[P]roductivity is particularly weak in NZ? [Why?] Because we are a 'capital shallow' economy ... Poor countries have lots of labour and little capital, which leads to low wages, whereas in rich countries it's the other way around. At present, NZ is driving up labour with record-breaking immigration — whilst GDP per capita, and productivity, are plummeting. So what is Swarbrick's mind-bogglingly contradictory intervention into the tax debate? That in order to improve our prosperity, it's 'basic economic sense' to tax capital more. Since when did you get more of something by taxing the pants off it?

    "The Green Party under Swarbrick has a new way to achieve its Net Zero carbon goal - its by aiming for Zero Capital and a Zero-Sized Economy."

~ Dr Robert MacCulloch from his post 'Chlöe Swarbrick says capital taxes are "basic economic sense", which goes to show she doesn't have any'

"By any measure, the 'School Strike for Climate' was a disaster" [update]

"On Friday, March 15 2019, an estimated 170,000 New Zealand secondary school students took to the nation’s streets. RNZ still ranks that turnout as the 'second-largest' protest in New Zealand history. ... [Last] Friday morning (5 April 2024) RNZ was carrying the School Strike for Climate protest organisers’ predictions of a turnout in excess of 100,000. Protest rallies were scheduled from Whangarei to Invercargill. ...
    "By the end of the day, however, it was clear that something very serious had gone wrong with the plan to unite the Left’s fragmented movements by, in effect, piggy-backing on the huge numbers formerly responsive to the SS4C’s summonses. Rather than a turnout in the range of 100,000: across the whole country, and by the most generous estimate, the organisers of the 'Strike' turned out a derisory 5,000 people.
    "By any measure, the 'Strike' was a disaster ...
    "Certainly, the dismal turnout must have given Green co-leader, Chloe Swarbrick, considerable pause. After all, she has staked a great deal of her political credibility on the proposition that she and her party can mobilise, electorally, the young, the alienated, and the disenfranchised. After Friday, however, transforming the 2026 general election into a people’s crusade would appear to be a much taller order.
    "Contrariwise, the failure of the 'Strike' offers Messers Luxon, Seymour and Peters considerable cause for celebration. Their coalition is described on the SS4C website as: 'the most conservative government in our history' – a claim that would doubtless bring a wry smile to the lips of Bill Massey, Sid Holland, and Rob Muldoon. Still, if Friday’s flop is the best the New Zealand Left can set against the Great Strike of 1913, the 1951 Waterfront Lockout, and the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, then our Coalition Government can breathe a huge sigh of relief."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Something Important: The Curious Death of the School Strike 4 Climate Movement.'

UPDATE: This chimes with news from the States "that just 3% of 18-to-34-year-old voters named climate change as their top issue, with most citing the economy, inflation or immigration." (Not that the latter is anything about which to be concerned either.)

"Let’s not forget, [notes Jo Nova] all these surveys are done on people who never see a skeptical expert on TV or a real documentary ... They don’t hear that carbon dioxide was higher for most of the last half billion years, or that 'climate change' causes record grain yields, and saves 166,000 lives a year. Most of the 18 to 35 year olds have been fed the climate diatribe from school — but even they don’t believe it. ...

"So the good news that the young can see through this, despite the wall of propaganda.."

Parliamentary entitle-itis is catching

It's not just Christopher Luxon with a bad case of entitle-itis. There is a raft of other MPs and ministers who think taxppayers — you – should help them pay their mortgages on their Wellington homes.

MP expenses came to almost $1.7m and Ministerial expenses came to more than $670,000. ... The National Party - which has the largest caucus in the Parliament - spent the most on expenses in the period, totalling almost $731,000.

Here's a list of the scum currently or recently claiming large "expenses" and accommodation allowances from you (costs are for three months, unless stated):

• Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was the biggest expense of the lot, at a cost of just more than $57,500 - including VIP transport of more than $39,000. The rest was made up of costs of almost $7500 for accommodation, air travel of $9500 and "surface" - ground travel, such as taxis of more than $1300
• The next highest expenses cost in National's caucus was Auckland-based Defence Minister Judith Collins, at a cost of more than $24,200, made up of more than $6000 for accommodation and just over $18,000 on travel. Also giving the trough a decent nudge were West Coast's Maureen Pugh at just over $21.500; Taupo's Louise Upston at $21,000; and Christchurch-based Matt Doocey and Rotorua-based Todd McLay at just under $20,500.
• During the last Government, there were four ministers in the same situation as Luxon, living in their own homes in Wellington and claiming the ministerial accommodation allowance, which is up to $45,000 a year. These were Willy Jackson, Jan Tinetti, Deborah Russell and Duncan Webb. All are likely to claim again this year, but on a lower accommodation allowance.
• In addition, last year four other Labour MPs were living in their own Wellington properties while claiming the allowance. These were: Jenny Salesa, Arena Williams, Jamie Strange and Sarah Pallet.
• And in 2024, there are now 20 MPs (not yet named yet) with second-homes in Wellington who are claiming up to $45,000 so that taxpayers can help pay their mortgages.
• Labour's David Parker and Manurewa MP Arena Williams both claimed around $23,000 on expenses. Ingrid Leary in South Otago and Tangi Utikere in Palmerston North.
• Greens's Manurewa-based co-leader Marama Davidson enjoyed almost $26,000 of largesse in her last two months in the ministry trough. Third-assistant speaker Teanau Tuiono declared almost $25,000 of expenses, while Auckland-based Chloe Swarbrick grabbed $17,500 and former Greenpeace activist Steve Abel claimed just over $17,000. 
• ACT's Mark Cameron, based in rural Northland, declared almost $21,000 in expenses, the highest of any ACT MP. That included almost $10,000 on accommodation and a similar amount on travel. ACT's second-highest grasper is Todd Stephenson, living in Queenstown, claiming just under $19,000.
• NZ First's Jamie Arbuckle, from Marlborough, spent more than $16,000, while Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Rawiri Waititi - who lives in a remote part of his Waiariki electorate - spent $36,500 of your money, and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer nearly $22,500.
• Other big spenders in the last few months include and Grant Robertson, given $42,369 to go see the rugby, 

A nice rort, if you can get it.

The lowest spenders [include] new Finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds, who is based near Wellington. She spent $521, most of which was $403 on flights. ... and [Labour] Leader Chris Hipkins - who is based in Upper Hutt - declared $1129, all of which was on flights. 

Good for them. On this, if nothing else.

Swarbrick & the currents of Green unreason

"The weakness [interviewer Jack] Tame homed in on was Swarbrick’s political inflexibility – a flaw which has only grown as her time in Parliament has lengthened. ...
    "While, on paper, the Greens’ determination to arm their politics with the weaponry of reason and science [makes] it a perfect fit for the serious, almost scholarly, Swarbrick, there were risks [with her choosing to join them]. The currents of unreason that were flowing with ever-increasing force beneath the surface of Green Party politics were bound to end up battering her core intellectual and political principles. ...
    "Her six years in Parliament appear to have diminished her faith in democracy as the most effective political system. .it appears to have hardened her and made her brittle. ... 

    "Swarbrick’s declining faith in representative democracy is reflected in her conviction that “the people” possess a power that overmatches the tawdry compromises of professional politicians. In her pitch to Green members Swarbrick hints that this power may be sufficient to bring the whole rotten, planet-destroying system crashing down. That, with the masses at their back, the Greens can build a new and better Aotearoa.
    "How many times has revolutionary zealotry offered this millenarian mirage to an angry and despairing world? How many times has it all gone horribly wrong? And how sad is it that a politician as talented as Chloe Swarbrick now finds herself wandering this arid trail?"

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Iron in Her Soul'

"Does that mean the annhilation of Israel?" "Yes, of course." [updated]

 

Hamas's "useful idiots" were out in Auckland's Domain over the weekend. In a month or so, they will be in Parliament. 

"Useful fool" was Lenin's phrase for his western dupes -- those shallow thinkers in the West whom the Communists manipulated.

On the weekend's evidence, the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand is officially Hamas's useful fools.

Let me give you some context.

On Saturday's pro-Palestine rally, Labour's Phil Twyford was granted a speaking spot by organisers, the NZ Palestine Solidarity Network. He condemned the violence. But he made the mistake of condemning Hamas's violence as well as the IDF's. The crowd turned on him, organisers asked him to leave, he was booed off, and without a police guard his escape from the grounds would not have been guaranteed.

Immediately after -- immediately -- the increasingly shrill Chloe Swarbrick got up to speak. She began by making "absolutely clear," in front of a gaggle of cheering new Green MPs and co-leader Marama Davidson, that "just after what we've witnessed, I want to say strongly, clearly and vehemently, the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand stands for a free Palestine.... From the river to the sea, Palestine" she chanted, "will be free."

"Free free Palestine!" they shouted. "Free free Palestine!" they chanted. But I have a question: Free Palestine? From what? for what? of what? of whom? 

"It's not complicated," shouted Swarbrick.

And it's actually not.

In the end, what really matters is what matters to Hamas, who rule the geographically-western strip of Palestine, their launchpad for their attacks on October 7th. And all the fools, tools and useful idiots should be absolutely clear what Hamas's own "Leader Abroad" Khaled Mashal means by "freeing" Palestine, about with he is abundantly clear. For him, it is not at all complicated. Speaking from the safety of his multi-million dollar apartment in Qatar, he makes it absolutely plain of whom he wants Palestine to be freed:

" ... We will repeat the October 7 massacre time and again, one-million times if we need to, until we end the occupation. 

Q: "Occupation where, of the Gaza strip?"

No, I am talking about all the Palestinian lands.

Q: "Does that mean the annihilation of Israel? 

"Yes, of course."

Annihilation.

All the way from the river -- that's the whole Jordan Valley on the east-- right down to the Mediterranean Sea on the west.

Annhilation.

From the river to the sea.

UPDATE: 

Just to be absolutely, pellucidly clear here .. it cannot be Gaza of which they say "the Israeli occupation" must end. Because rightly or wrongly Israel stopped occupying Gaza 18 years ago,

The Discomforting Solution to Homelessness

"PEOPLE ARE UPSET OVER THE homelessness problem in American cities," writes Jacob Hornberger. NZers are just as disturbed about our homelessness problem here. Visit any of our major towns and cities and you'll see the streets playing host to many poor souls unable to put a roof over their heads.

 

Most people pass them by, perhaps with a sinking sense of guilt. Or perhaps not. But the problem seems so intractable, so most do very little. 

If there's nothing to be done, why do anything at all? 

But there is something to be done, says Hornberger, and should be done by anybody who cares. Two things in particular, which you'll find at the bottom of the post. And could be done bloody quickly - iff there were a will.

But first, just think for a minute and compare two sorts of places. You see homeless folk on the streets when you walk the main streets of our major towns and cities. But think for a minute: do you see them so often, or at all, in any of the smaller towns or cities?? Even the poorer of our small towns and cities???

Hornberger grew up in what was officially the poorest city in the U.S. Located right on the U.S.-Mexican border, Laredo, Texas, his hometown, was also home to many new immigrants, both legal and illegal. And yet, as he says, for all the very visible poverty, "There was no homelessness. That is, there was no one living on the streets or in their cars, as we see in many American [or New Zealand] cities today."

Now, think about that for a moment. People say that poverty is the cause of homelessness. But if that’s the case, why wasn’t there any homelessness in Laredo?
    The answer is: At that time, there was was no zoning in Laredo. Anyone could establish low-income housing anywhere he wanted, including such things as trailer parks, low-priced rental units, and multiple-family housing.
    Thus, everyone was able to find housing at some price.

It's breathtakingly simple when you think about it -- and it's not because of any "wrap-around care" or any of the welfare buzzwords you hear that have been so unsuccessful at helping our own homeless folk.  And the simple fact is this: If governments restrict where and how many roofs can be put up (which is what zoning is designed to do: for the town planner it's a feature, not a bug), then there will be fewer roofs available for people to put over their heads. And those few will be at higher prices than they otherwise would.

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I should point out that Laredo also had public-housing units (which, ironically, had been started by my grandfather). But even if the government had not entered into the housing market, there still wouldn’t have been a homelessness problem in Laredo.
    When I returned to Laredo after graduating from law school, one of our legal clients was a man who specialised in building and providing low-cost housing for the poor — for a profit. He would buy his building supplies in Mexico, where he could get them at a much lower price, bring them back to Laredo, and use them to build low-cost motels. His motel rooms were oriented toward the very poor. They were clean and simple. People could rent the rooms on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.     He always had a very high occupancy rate.
    He was free to situate his rental units anywhere in town. That same freedom applied to mobile-home parks. That’s because there were no zoning laws.

Take a short break and think about that again:  no homeless people because homes of all kinds (trailer parks, low-priced rental units, multiple-family housing, clean and simple motel units, mobile-home parks) could be situated anywhere in town. And they could be situated could be situated anywhere in town because there were no zoning laws.

Forgive me for writing this as if you, dear reader, were a six-year old. And for underlining those conclusions. But it seems as if those who refuse to understand this have less understanding of the world and how it works than even the most stunted young child. Allow builders the freedom to build where there is demand for it, and of the type that's demanded, and you will have more buildings at better prices that are warm, and dry, and occupied by those who were formerly homeless. That's the experience of places like Laredo. (Do you understand, Chloe Swarbrick, who walks past the homeless every day on K Rd, who says new homes should be built only in places town planners dictate. Do you even give a shit, Chris Bishop, averting his gaze, who says new homes should only be built where, and how, he dictates. Are you listening David Seymour, ignoring the waifs and strays around the less-leafy edges of his electorate, who says we must "fix infrastructure first"?)

That same freedom [says Hornberger] does not apply in cities where there is a homelessness problem today. I guarantee you: Show me a city that has a big homelessness problem and I will show you a city that has zoning.
    To protect citizens’ property values from such things as mobile-home parks and low-price housing, local officials enacted zoning laws. They figured that they could abolish “blight” by simply using the force of zoning laws to make low-cost housing illegal. What they ended up doing is producing a massive homelessness problem.
    Today, much of the anger that arises from the homelessness problem is directed toward the homeless. But what are they supposed to do — commit suicide? They can’t afford to rent a place in which to live because zoning laws have knocked out low-priced housing within the city.

Indeed.

Zoning only came to New Zealand in 1928 with the Town Planning Act (brought in by a conservative government, wouldn't you know). Back then, it was a relatively new phenomenon. But if you observe things today, you will notice that town planners and the like today much prefer to live in those places like Devonport, Ponsonby Parnell and the like that were built before town planners infested the country -- and the places that are built today based on town planners' rules are those like Albany and Manukau and (gulp) Hobsonville.

Unattractive. And (still) unaffordable by most measures. Especially to those sleeping on the streets.

Think about it.

AND THINK ABOUT THIS too, especially if you castigate homeless folk because "they should just get a job." Have you ever considered that government-mandated minimum-wage laws prevent them from getting a job at a wage that is lower than that government-mandated minimum? 

It's all very well for "Chippy" to crow about "raising the minimum wage," as if that has magically "lifted all boats" to that government-mandated level. But what he ignores, or hopes that you do, is that the real minimum wage is zero. Which is what most of those homeless are currently "earning." 

And most of those are only earning that because Chippy's much-touted raise in the government-mandated wages level simply places a large gulf between what they're earning, what they could earn, and what employers are allowed to pay them.

It's as if the Prime Minister were gloating about taking several rungs out of the ladder they might have climbed themselves, if he hadn't taken them away.

It would be one thing if they were free to get a job at less than the governmentally set minimum wage. In that case, one could legitimately say, “Get a job, you bum.” But when their labour in the marketplace is valued by employers at less than the artificially-set minimum wage, the state has locked them out of the labor market with its minimum-wage law. Thus, telling them to “Get a job, you bum” is nothing less than cruel and abusive. And if they can’t get a job, then how are they supposed to be able to pay rent for housing, especially when rents are exorbitantly high because of zoning laws?

It's a tragedy. But it's not intractable. It is fixable. It's fixable iff there were a political will to to do it.

Want to do something about the homeless? Tell your politicians to fix it. And make sure you tell them how:

(1) repeal zoning laws, and
(2) repeal minimum-wage laws.

"Let's be clear, the Greens require socialist state control to achieve their goals."

"Let's be clear, the Greens require socialist state control to achieve their goals. Their constant and divisive analysis of class warfare ... is self-fulfilling: The entrepreneurial class will get cancelled, and the state become an inefficient bourgeoisie. 

    "[They offer] only a one-dimensional school of thought: 

• The excesses of the ‘rich’ post colonialists are to blame for climate change and the socio-economic inequities of capitalist society. 
• Market-driven capitalists should be consigned to unforgiving repentance. 
• The wealthy should fund the state that unfortunately still relies on its taxes until the silent revolution can acquire the historically ill-gotten assets. 
• This narrative relies on stable economic growth (GDP) but its fundamental flaw is that economic growth, by the Greens own analysis and admission, is in their view destroying the planet. 
• Yet a Greens government [would need] the derivative wealth from a market-led economic multiplier for their social and climate justice agenda. 
• Meanwhile the breakdown of law and order further undermines society and economy.

"The Greens fail to point out any actual international successes of these economically destructive policies and models.
    "There is no nuance, no understanding of markets, no acknowledgement of ‘equitable’ wealth generation and distribution or how to achieve it... The reality is the greens policy requires totalitarianism and is championed on the back of [allegedly] imminent and catastrophic climate change. It is nothing short of a Marxist revolution in a green guise. ...
    "James Shaw ignores the impossibility of the utopic vision, knowingly championing vacuous policy from a position of privilege. Marama Davidson provides no economic intelligence and more incoherent ideology. Chloe Swarbrick seems to be now mired in class rhetoric and social justice issues. None of them show any capability or realisation for their inevitable and ultimately necessary coalition of the state with corporations that they will have to turn to as social control dissipates with economic contraction.
    "The Greens now represent the implosion of our society as we know it."

~ Alastair Boyce, from his post 'The Greens's Agenda v Reality'