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WHAT'S NEW |
8 February 2010, Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman gives a concise and lucid argument for free trade at Utah State University in 1978. ...more.
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8 February 2010, Janet Albrechtsen
Each time a reform has been proposed in our schools, the vocal bosses of the teachers' unions have opposed it. They tell us the reason is they care for our children. In truth, teachers' unions care about protecting the jobs of teachers and the status quo of schools, no matter the performance of those teachers or the school. Don't rock the boat has been their motto. For too long, state Labor governments beholden to union influence obliged. ...more.
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4 February 2010, Adrian Wooldridge
Two years ago, as the world flirted with a second Great Depression, Gregg Easterbrook was in the midst of writing a book about the coming economic boom. A less confident writer might have abandoned the project in despair. But Mr. Easterbrook, a graduate of the New Republic's school of contrarian journalism, forged on regardless. The result is a book that is both a pleasure to read and a valuable corrective to the gloom that currently envelops us.
The big idea behind "Sonic Boom" is that globalization—celebrated, reviled and analyzed for at least a decade now—has hardly begun. The world, Mr. Easterbrook believes, is on the verge of a period of pell-mell integration that will dwarf anything before now, and a good thing too: The coming age of global integration, he argues, will produce riches that none of us can imagine and scatter them more widely than ever before. But it is a good thing that comes wrapped in a paradox: Growing prosperity will also produce growing anxiety. If the besetting malady of the 19th century was "quiet desperation," as Henry Thoreau wrote in "Walden," then the besetting malady of the 21st will be noxious nervousness—a pervasive sense of anxiety about job security and impending disasters.
...more.
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2 February 2010, Edward P Lazear
In last night's State of the Union address President Obama proposed a three-year "spending freeze" on what amounts to one-sixth of the federal budget. Our biggest entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, would be excluded. These changes are optical rather than substantive. Given the spending agenda that is already in place, we can expect to see large increases in the proportion of GDP that is spent by our government for years to come. Since 2008, the ratio of federal spending-to-GDP has risen by about 14%. From 2008 to 2009 we saw the greatest annual increase in spending in the last 30 years. In the name of stimulating job growth, the share of federal spending is now 24% of the economy, up from 21% in the last year of the Bush administration. ...more.
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1 February 2010, Roger Kerr
The global financial crisis has certainly exacerbated the fiscal crisis, partly by triggering a recession that has shrunk tax revenues and expanded welfare payments, and partly, in some countries, by prompting huge government bail-outs of failing financial institutions . But even without the financial crisis, some kind of fiscal reckoning was on the way. ...more.
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29 January 2010, Roger Kerr
In its 2009 report on New Zealand, the OECD noted that “econometric evidence for OECD countries indicates that large government size may be detrimental to growth in living standards. This evidence shows that each percentage point in total government spending as a share of GDP reduces the growth rate of real GDP per capita by 0.13 percentage points per year.” ...more.
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28 January 2010, Dr Benny Peiser
Climate science too is facing a crisis of credibility. It is confronted by growing doubt and criticism, not in the least as a result of the so-called Climategate scandal, the revelations about the behind-the-scene shenanigans by leading climate researchers. Moreover, the unforeseen arrest of the global warming trend has only increased the credibility crisis and has led to growing and deepening scepticism among wide sectors of the public. The standstill global warming, as well as the global economic crisis have greatly dampened the enthusiasm for expensive climate policies as well as for green taxes and exorbitant subsidies. ...more.
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26 January 2010, Wall Street Journal Opinion
The Federal Communications Commission recently told Congress that it will miss a February deadline for delivering a "national broadband plan" and requested a one-month extension. If it keeps missing deadlines, nearly everyone in the U.S. might soon have high-speed Internet.
As part of last year's stimulus package, Congress asked the FCC for a plan to ensure that everybody in the country has access to broadband. That's a worthy goal, but the idea of a government plan is based on a false presumption that the spread of broadband is stalled. The reality is that broadband adoption continues apace, as does the quality and speed of Internet connections.
...more.
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25 January 2010, Roger Kerr
The export monopoly is a relic of old New Zealand. As far back as 1992, the Business Roundtable published the ACIL report, Agricultural Marketing Regulation: Reality versus Doctrine. It recommended the removal of the export monopolies for dairy products, apples and pears and kiwifruit. We published a follow-up ACIL report specifically on kiwifruit in 1994 (Restoring Kiwifruit Profitability: Choice, Ideas, Innovation and Growth).
In the 1998 budget, the National-led government stated that it saw “the removal of the statutory backing for all New Zealand’s producer boards as inevitable over time.” While the dairy and pipfruit monopolies were removed shortly afterwards, the government decided that the single desk export model for kiwifruit would be retained “for the time being”.
...more.
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22 January 2010, Terry Miller
In the world-wide rankings of economic freedom, the U.S. fell to eighth from sixth place. Canada now ranks higher and boasts North America's freest economy. More worrisome, for the first time in the Index's 16-year history, the U.S. has fallen out of the elite group of countries identified as "economically free" by the objective measures of the Index. Four Asia-Pacific economies now sit atop the global rankings. Hong Kong stands in first place for the 16th consecutive year, followed by Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Every region of the world maintains at least one country among those deemed "free" or "mostly free" by the Index. ...more.
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21 January 2010, Roger Kerr
In its submission to the Law Commission, the Business Roundtable argued that instead of penalising the vast majority of responsible drinkers, the emphasis should be on individual and parental responsibility, disincentives and penalties for abusive behaviour, making abusers face the consequences of their actions, the responsibility of institutions such as the media and universities, better enforcement and social sanctions. ...more.
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20 January 2010, Boris Johnson
Not since the waters retired from the face of the earth has this country seen such a display of protoplasmic invertebracy and as the dying days of Labour drag on you may find it hard to believe that any system could produce a government more feeble, more indecisive more racked by internal feuding and division. ...more.
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18 January 2010, Heather MacDonald
The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the "root causes" theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant. ...more.
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15 January 2010, Schumpeter
Business people do not just invent clever products that solve nagging problems, from phones that can link fishermen in India with nearby markets to devices that can provide insulin to diabetics without painful injections. They also create organisations that manufacture these products and then distribute them about the world. Nandan Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, put the case for business as well as anyone when he said that the computer-services giant’s greatest achievement was not its $2 billion in annual revenue but the fact that it had taught his fellow Indians to “redefine the possible”. ...more.
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15 January 2010, Roger Kerr
Expectations about the forthcoming report of the Victoria University-led Tax Working Group may be inflated. This is not a criticism of the TWG or its likely lines of thinking.
The basic terms of reference of the group are to recommend options for improving the tax system subject to raising roughly the current amount of revenue. This constraint – understandable given projected budget deficits – severely limits the scope for meaningful (growth-enhancing) tax reforms.
...more.
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13 January 2010, Thomas Sowell
Today, politicized "science" has too big a stake in the global warming hysteria to let the facts speak for themselves and let the chips fall where they may. Too many people — in politics and in the media, as well as among those climate scientists who are promoting global warming hysteria — let the raw data on which their calculations have been based fall into the "wrong hands." ...more.
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12 January 2010, Center for Freedom and Prosperity
A new video released today by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation (CF&P) is the first in their ...more.
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5 January 2010, Roger Kerr
It has been obvious for months that no substantive agreement would be reached at Copenhagen. The government’s unseemly rush to pass the emissions trading legislation before the meeting and before decisions by the United States and Australia was folly. ...more.
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4 January 2010, Roger Kerr
The recent report of the Capital Market Development Taskforce, chaired by respected investment banker Rob Cameron, contains excellent analysis of the state of our capital markets – the sources of business funding – and makes many sound recommendations. ...more.
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23 December 2009, Nigel Lawson
Far from achieving a major step forward, Copenhagen—predictably—achieved precisely nothing. The nearest thing to a commitment was the promise by the developed world to pay the developing world $30 billion of "climate aid" over the next three years, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. Not only is that (perhaps fortunately) not legally binding, but there is no agreement whatsoever about which countries it will go to, in which amounts, and on what conditions. ...more.
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23 December 2009, Clive Crook
The evidence for the climate consensus, they say, is stronger year by year. But in the US, public confidence in their statements is falling: less than half the electorate now regards man-made global warming as a proven fact. Admittedly, the US is an outlier in this, but few electorates anywhere seem sufficiently convinced to support, when push comes to shove, the policies that many climate scientists are calling for. ...more.
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21 December 2009, Will Wilkinson
At first blush, "libertarian paternalism" seems a linguistic miscarriage, a self-crippling idea condemned to limp aimlessly in eternal darkness on the island of misfit creeds alongside "humanitarian sadism" and "color-blind racism." But that hasn't stopped Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, law and economics superstars at the University of Chicago, from pushing the catchphrase and concept as a solution to the nation's problems for a half-decade now. And this year libertarian paternalism has achieved manifesto status with the new Thaler/Sunstein book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. ...more.
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18 December 2009, Roger Kerr
Public understanding about what constitutes good economic policy will ultimately dictate the economic performance of New Zealand.Overwhelmingly, the quality of a country’s institutions and policies, which are largely chosen through the political process, determine whether it is an economic success story or a laggard. ...more.
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18 December 2009, Andrei Illarionov
As the Copenhagen Climate Conference is taking place, it is appropriate to clarify once again what is more or less accurately known about the climate of our planet and about climate change.
Obviously, a brief post can not substitute for detailed studies of professionals in a variety of scientific disciplines – climatology, atmospheric physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and economics. However, a short post can summarize basic theses on the main trends in climate evolution, on its forecasts, and on its actual and projected effects.
...more.
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16 December 2009, Center for Freedom and Prosperity
Huge deficits and skyrocketing debt levels are creating considerable worry. This Center for Freedom and Prosperity video explains that that government borrowing is excessive - and will get worse in coming decades. But this mini-documentary explains that deficits and debt are merely the symptoms, and a rising burden of government spending is the real problem. ...more.
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14 December 2009, David Brooks
I’ve introduced you to my friends Mr. Bentham and Mr. Hume because they represent the choices we face on issue after issue. This country is about to have a big debate on the role of government. The polarizers on cable TV think it’s going to be a debate between socialism and free-market purism. But it’s really going to be a debate about how to promote innovation. ...more.
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11 December 2009, Daniel Henninger
Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once. ...more.
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9 December 2009, Robert J Barro and Charles J Redlick
The available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus spending stimulus programs will likely raise GDP by less than the increase in government spending. Defense-spending multipliers exceeding one likely apply only at very high unemployment rates, and nondefense multipliers are probably smaller. However, there is empirical support for the proposition that tax rate reductions will increase real GDP. ...more.
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8 December 2009, World Growth
Greenpeace mounts publicity stunts which it coaxes foundations
to fund and celebrities to endorse. The latest is a “climate
defenders” camp in Sumatra. Greenpeace claims the support of local communities, but local communities have protested its presence. Greenpeace also neglects to show the 70,000 or more people dependent upon forest industries for their livelihoods. ...more.
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7 December 2009, Richard S Lindzen
Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned. ...more.
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6 December 2009, Roger Kerr
Is history about to repeat itself? On assuming office in 1999, former prime minister Helen Clark declared that her government’s “top priority” goal was to get New Zealand into the top half of the OECD by 2010. Later, Clark said she never meant to say the goal would be achieved by 2010. Then she stopped talking about the goal altogether when it became obvious no progress was being made. ...more.
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2 December 2009, The Wall Street Journal
The minimum wage hike has driven the wages of teen employees to $0.00.
Yesterday's September labor market report was lousy by any measure, with 263,000 lost jobs and the jobless rate climbing to 9.8%. But for one group of Americans it was especially awful: the least skilled, especially young workers. Washington will deny the reality, and the media won't make the connection, but one reason for these job losses is the rising minimum wage.
...more.
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30 November 2009, Michael J Boskin & John F Cogan
California's economy radically underperforms. While uncontrolled spending, excessive regulation and litigation have helped create a dismal business environment, the tax system is central to the state's economic woes. The top personal income tax rate (also levied on capital gains), the sales tax rate, the corporate tax rate, and the gas tax are all at or near the highest of any state. And the top 1% of the state's income earners pay almost half the income taxes. ...more.
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30 November 2009, New Zealand Business Roundtable
“The Taskforce report on closing the income gap with Australia offers a realistic assessment of New Zealand’s major economic challenges and a substantial programme for achieving the 2025 goal”, Roger Kerr, executive director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, said today. “Nothing less would do the job.” ...more.
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27 November 2009, Roger Kerr
The Taskforce report is an outstanding piece of legal and economic analysis. It should give the government comfort that the bill it proposes respects constitutional principles and the sovereignty of parliament. The bill would present no barriers to the adoption of sound regulations but should help to screen out bad ones. ...more.
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27 November 2009, Holman W Jenkins, JR
Someday this country will have a health-care debate that's not abject in its idiocy. ...more.
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27 November 2009, New Zealand Business Roundtable
New Zealand Business Roundtable chairman Rob McLeod today congratulated Commonwealth Bank of Australia chief executive and former Business Roundtable chairman Sir Ralph Norris on being named Executive of the Decade at last night’s Deloitte/Management Top 200 Awards. The previous winner of the award (for the 1990s decade) was long-standing Business Roundtable member and former vicechairman, Dr Roderick Deane. ...more.
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25 November 2009, Donald J. Bourdreaux
It's Halloween season, and the scariest demons in the world of business are insider traders, lurking behind every stockbroker's desk and four-star restaurant banquette. They whisper dark corporate secrets into the ears of venal speculators, and inflict pain and agony upon ordinary investors.Time to stop telling horror stories. Federal agents are wasting their time slapping handcuffs on hedge fund traders like Raj Rajaratnam, the financier charged last week with trading on nonpublic information involving IBM, Google and other big companies. The reassuring truth: Insider trading is impossible to police and helpful to markets and investors. ...more.
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24 November 2009, Roger Kerr
It is not as though there is any serious opposition, including within the business community, to New Zealand’s taking additional action now that Australia and the United States have come to the Kyoto party.
What business wants, however, are well-designed, broadly supported measures that are not unduly burdensome to households and industry and are not implemented ahead of comparable action by our trading partners.
...more.
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