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Displaying: 1 - 32 of 1939 items.
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Perspectives: Issue 519 An Ignored ‘Disparity’: Part II
3 February 2012, Thomas Sowell
One of the ways of trying to reduce the vast disparities in economic success, which are common in countries around the world, is by making higher education more widely available, even for people without the money to pay for it. This can be both a generous investment and a wise investment for a society to make. But, depending on how it is done, it can also be a foolish and even dangerous investment, as many societies around the world have learned the hard way.
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Perspectives: Issue 518 I Love Greed
31 January 2012, Walter E Williams
What human motivation gets the most wonderful things done? It's really a silly question, because the answer is so simple. It turns out that it's human greed that gets the most wonderful things done. When I say greed, I am not talking about fraud, theft, dishonesty, lobbying for special privileges from government or other forms of despicable behaviour. I'm talking about people trying to get as much as they can for themselves. Let's look at it.
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Perspectives: Issue 517 An Ignored 'Disparity'
25 January 2012, Thomas Sowell
With all the talk about "disparities" in innumerable contexts, there is one very important disparity that gets remarkably little attention -- disparities in the ability to create wealth. People who are preoccupied, or even obsessed, with disparities in income are seldom interested much, or at all, in the disparities in the ability to create wealth, which are often the reasons for the disparities in income.
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Perspectives: Issue 516 A Wild Forecast for Euro Pain
24 January 2012, Oliver Marc Hartwich
Revisiting my predictions for Europe in 2011 (Don’t believe this forecast, December 23, 2010), I can today declare without any false modesty that I was right on the money. Not only that 2011 has been very much like 2010. It is also emerging that we will celebrate Christmas on December 25 this year – just as I had forecast last December.
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Perspectives: Issue 515 In Private Enterprise We Trust
18 January 2012, Richard A Epstein
The persistently fragile economic situation confronting the United States, Europe, and now perhaps Asia presents a grave challenge on how to best reverse the current trend of stagnation through the introduction of sound regulatory and business policies. In dealing with this issue, it is imperative to recognize that the proper response to short-term boom or bust cycles depends on developing those policies and practices that prove sustainable in the long run.
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Perspectives: Issue 514 Rising Credulity
21 December 2011, Nils-Axel Mörner
It has now become traditional for climate change summits to open with a new, dazzling prediction of impending catastrophe. The UN Climate Conference under way in the South African coastal town of Durban is no exception. This year’s focus is on a familiar and certainly arresting argument: that sea levels are rising at a catastrophic and unprecedented rate mainly due to man-made global warming.
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Submission: Submission on the 2012/13 appropriations for electricity efficiency appropriation
20 December 2011,
A joint submission by the Major Electricity Users’ Group and the New Zealand Business Roundtable on the 2012-13 appropriations for electricity efficiency appropriation.
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Perspectives: Issue 513 Curing the Unemployment Blues
19 December 2011, Richard A Epstein
One of the enduring faiths of modern progressive thought is that omniscient policy makers can cancel out the errors of one form of economic intervention by implementing a second. That lesson was brought home to me when I was a third year student at Yale Law School, whenever discussion turned to the perennial debate over the minimum wage.
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Media Release: Think Tanks to Merge
16 December 2011, Business Roundtable
The New Zealand Business Roundtable and the New Zealand Institute confirmed today that the boards of the two organisations had agreed to combine forces to form a new, independent public policy think tank.
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Perspectives: Issue 512 Sending Profits Abroad is a Good Thing
14 December 2011, Oliver Marc Hartwich
On Sunday, Senator Bob Brown was interviewed on ABC 1's Insiders program. The Greens leader admitted that putting a price on carbon would ultimately mean shutting down the coal industry. But never mind, Brown explained. Since the big mining companies were largely 'foreign-owned, multinational corporations,' their profits would only 'line the pockets of millionaires elsewhere in the world.'
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Perspectives: Issue 511 Nothing New on the Euro Front
13 December 2011, Wolfgang Kasper
Most people around the world—laymen and seasoned investors alike—seem confused and bemused by the unfolding saga of the troubled Euro. Though I'm a distant observer of the Euro experiment, nothing has surprised me so far.
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Media Release: Charter School System Could Transform Lives
8 December 2011, Business Roundtable
The Business Roundtable welcomes the charter school initiative announced this week, New Zealand Business Roundtable chairman Roger Partridge said today.
Mr Partridge outlined the Business Roundtable’s views on the charter proposal in an article Charter Schools: A Dove Among the Pigeons published on the organisation’s blog Policy Matters (businessroundtable.wordpress.com)
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Perspectives: Issue 510 Three Cheers for Income Inequality
8 December 2011, Richard A Epstein
Taxing the top one percent even more means less wealth and fewer jobs for the rest of us.
The 2008 election was supposed to bring to the United States a higher level of civil discourse. Fast-forward three years and exactly the opposite has happened. A stalled economy brings forth harsh recriminations. As recent polling data reveals, the American public is driven by two irreconcilable emotions. The first is a deep distrust of government, which has driven the approval rate for Congress below ten percent.
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Perspectives: Issue 509 Let Champagne Socialists Pay More Tax Voluntarily
6 December 2011, Janet Albrechtsen
Having reached the summit of their careers, using the free market to build businesses and earn mountains of money, employing top-end tax lawyers to ensure they pay not a cent more in tax than required, a form of rich businessman's guilt complex seems to set in with some of them.
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Media Release: Business Roundtable Questions ‘Strange’ Treasury Advice re Spending Cap Bill and Proposes Strengthening Measures
2 December 2011, New Zealand Business Roundtable
The Treasury’s advice to the government on the Spending Cap (People’s Veto) Bill constitutes an abandonment of its duty to advise and an inappropriate political judgment, according to a submission on the Bill released today by the New Zealand Business Roundtable.
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Submission: Submission on the Spending Cap (People's Veto) Bill
2 December 2011,
A submission on the Spending Cap (People's Veto) Bill to require a voter referendum to approve any real per capita increase in core Crown operating spending and proposed strengthening measures.
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Perspectives: Issue 508 The Euro: A Man-made Disaster
1 December 2011, Michael James
In the early 1990s, while eastern Europe was emerging from the man-made disaster of communism, in western Europe the seeds of a new man-made disaster were being sown.
The euro - the European Union's common currency - was designed to draw the countries of Europe together. In practice, it is now driving them apart.
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Perspectives: Issue 507 Compelled to reform, unable to deliver
28 November 2011, Henry Ergas
It is not just Berlusconi financial markets have lost confidence in. It is the sistema Italia -- the complex interplay of economics, social relations and politics that characterises modern Italy.
From the ruins of fascism and war, that interplay made Italy one of Europe's most prosperous countries. But it contained the seeds of its own destruction, and unless its fundamental vices are addressed, the repeated failure of reform efforts shows today's problems will persist and worsen.
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Article: Setting the Sails
28 November 2011, Roger Partridge
Prime minister John Key observed that the 2011 election was about the economy.
Business people are looking to the incoming government to address critical weaknesses in our economy and implement policies to boost economic growth.
The two main economic problems the country faces are structural imbalances and the slump in productivity growth.
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Article: It's about ownership, not assets
24 November 2011, Bryce Wilkinson
National and Labour are to be commended in this election campaign for proposing to sell shares in SOEs and to raise the age of entitlement for New Zealand Superannuation respectively. Both proposals have a clear national interest rationale, but took political courage.
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Perspectives: Issue 506 Ignorance Exploited
22 November 2011, Walter E Williams
Many Wall Street occupiers are echoing the Communist Party USA's call to "Save the nation! Tax corporations! Tax the rich!" There are other Americans, on both the left and the right -- for example, President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner -- who call for reductions in corporate taxes.
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E-Connect: The Perils of Price Control
21 November 2011, Richard A Epstein
With the United States currently facing a drug supply shortage, Richard A Epstein analyses the threat price controls have on the pharmaceutical market. Professor Epstein, a longstanding Business Roundtable friend, author and visiting lecturer and regarded as one of the most influential law and economics scholars of our times, examines how over-protective government forces are driving drug suppliers out, discusses the damaging effects price controls are having over supplier profit margins and considers how government intervention through regulatory standards are causing a shortage in the market supply for drugs.
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Perspectives: Issue 505 The Euro Crisis: Doubting the ‘Domino’ Effect
17 November 2011, Edward P Lazear
It seems everyone is worried that problems in Europe will derail our fragile recovery. For this reason, markets breathed a sigh of relief when the Europeans came up with a plan to provide yet another reprieve to Greece. The main worry, now somewhat eased, was that a Greek default would spread to countries like Italy, Spain and Portugal.
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Perspectives: Issue 504 A Slow-Growth America Can’t Lead the World
16 November 2011, John B Taylor
At the most recent meeting a year ago in Seoul, the G-20 rejected the president's pleas for a deficit-increasing Keynesian stimulus and instead urged credible budget-deficit reduction and a return to sound fiscal policy. And on that trip he had to defend the activist monetary policy of the Federal Reserve against widespread criticism that its easy money was damaging to emerging-market countries, causing volatile capital flows and inflationary pressures.
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Media Release: Bryce Wilkinson Appointed Acting Executive Director
15 November 2011, New Zealand Business Roundtable
New Zealand Business Roundtable chairman Roger Partridge announced today that economist Dr Bryce Wilkinson has been appointed acting executive director of the Business Roundtable.
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Media Release: Draft Auckland Plan Bound to Fail
11 November 2011, New Zealand Business Roundtable
The Auckland Council's draft Auckland Plan fails to focus the Council on succeeding in its core task of providing local public goods efficiently and at least cost, according to a submission on the draft plan released today by the New Zealand Business Roundtable.
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Perspectives: Issue 503 Bailouts for Me, but Not for Thee
11 November 2011, Matt Welch
About one week before the Occupy Wall Street protests really started taking off nationwide, long-time consumer crusader and third-party perennial Ralph Nader enthused to reporter Michael Tracey that Rep. Ron Paul and the movement he spearheads represent a “foundational convergence” with the progressive left.
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Article: Tribute to Roger Kerr
11 November 2011, Janet Albrechtsen
Many people have good intentions. Some fall for the fatal conceit that good intentions are all that count. Far fewer are able to couple good intentions with positive results. Roger Kerr, who died on October 28 in Wellington, was one of the few who did both. Most people won't know that Kerr played a critical role in turning around the economic fortunes of New Zealand in the 1980s, which is why this largely unknown man ought to be saluted.
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Submission: Submission on the Draft Auckland Plan
10 November 2011, New Zealand Business Roundtable
A submission by the New Zealand Business Roundtable on the Auckland Council's Draft Plan.
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Perspectives: Issue 502 The Shortsighted Keynesians
9 November 2011, Richard A Epstein
Last week, I participated in a debate about the Obama jobs plan. The debate, sponsored by Intelligence Squared, was on the topic, “Congress Should Pass the Obama Jobs Plan—Piece by Piece.” This was one debate in which the home-court advantage of my being a faculty member of NYU Law School served Mitchell and me naught. New York City was true to its liberal image.
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Article: Roger Kerr RIP
8 November 2011, Mary Kissel
The Reagan revolution wasn't an isolated movement, but one that was echoed from the shores of Britain to as far away as the Antipodes. One of the great stalwarts of that free-market agenda, Roger Kerr, passed away last month in Wellington, New Zealand, at the age of 66. He will be missed.
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Perspectives: Issue 501 Obama: Campaigning Like It's 1936
7 November 2011, Merrill Matthews
While Republican presidential candidates are looking forward by proposing variations of a flat income tax, President Barack Obama’s tax-the-rich campaign strategy is looking backward—to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 reelection campaign. FDR won his reelection, but the American people lost.
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