The Martin Hutchinson Place
The Conservative Party, of which Kemi Badenoch has just been elected leader, has been betraying its supporters since 1834. The new Reform party has not yet begun betraying its supporters, but undoubtedly will if it selects parliamentary candidates centrally. Those Brits wishing to achieve the distant miracle of having their country competently governed therefore have […]
No less an authority than Mohamed El-Erian, former CEO of the $2 trillion bond giant PIMCO, has now said in the Financial Times that we should pay attention to the rise in the gold price above $2,700, up around 40% over the past year. El-Erian is a former advisor to President Obama and perennial bond […]
President Trump has proposed a general tariff for the United States if he is re-elected. This is traditional Republican policy; the GOP was highly protectionist from 1860 until 1932, with the 1862 Morrill Tariff being the first major assault on Britain’s attempt to move to a free-trade world. However looking back, the Republican tariff policy […]
Haute couture dresses are hand-sewn by craftsmen, as they were centuries ago. First growth wines are produced by methods established in the Middle Ages, though there is much new chemical knowledge in their contents. Yet both product groups, now with vast ancillary industries worth hundreds of billions, were the product of mid-19th century industrialization; without […]
The recent assaults on property rights by abusive governments and law-enforcement agencies, the “lawfare” against President Trump and his associates, in which the same misdeed is treated quite differently depending on the perpetrator, and the shenanigans and double standards surrounding U.S. elections all show that U.S. constitutional protections are increasingly being eroded. To defend them, […]
Jamie McGregor of McGregor Metal in Springfield OH. openly welcomed the opportunity to employ Haitian refugee immigrants for wages far below what he would pay domestic labor. In that, he is typical of the cheap labor lobby ever since Sir Robert Peel (1750-1830), father and son. The low wage lobby is destroying our societies and […]
In my youth, the British automobile company British Leyland was an iconic example of what was wrong with Britain before the advent of Margaret Thatcher. It had merged most of the British automobile industry with government encouragement, only to achieve zero economies of scale, ever-worsening product quality, ever-increasing losses that caused it to enter public […]
Keir Starmer has announced that he will introduce legislation to remove the last remaining voting rights of the 92 hereditary peers remaining in the House of Lords after Tony Blair’s 1998 massacre. In terms of legislative quality, this is a travesty. The innumerable “life peers” pushed into the Lords by Blair and his successors are […]
Kamala Harris has proposed a 25% “Kamala Tax” on unrealized capital gains, applicable to all those with more than $100 million net worth, while removing the differential between income tax and capital gains tax rates for the rest of us. Since the inflation her policies will inevitably cause would push us all into the $100 […]
Democracy is an imperfect form of government – no question. As the 1784-1830 Tories successfully demonstrated, a property franchise with a low qualification is a much better way of selecting representatives, but since that is not one-man-one-vote, it is not technically a democracy. Yet genuine democracy, while it often leads to sub-optimal economic policy, nevertheless […]