Category Archives: Economics

AB5

A letter from a California Democrat to California Democrats: What were you thinking?

She’s being overgenerous in her assumption that there was actually anything resembling thought involved.

[Thursday-morning update]

The bill is so bad that the legislature may dump it next week.

[Bumped]

[Friday-morning update]

Now the legislature is going to require strippers and webcammers to get an occupational license.

I volunteer to help with providing the necessary training.

[Bumped]

After Brexit

Britain somehow carries on:

Ever since David Cameron announced a referendum on Britain’s EU membership in February 2016, the British people have been issued the direst imaginable warnings. Before the referendum, the then–chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, among others, predicted an immediate recession in the U.K. if the voters were unwise enough to disregard his instructions and vote to leave the EU. But we did disregard his instructions, as we did those of the prime minister and the heads of all the other major parties. We disregarded everybody, in fact, who warned us that our future would be darker, poorer, more ignorant, and more insular. In June 2016 we voted to leave the EU.

For a variety of reasons that arose after that decision (not least the ineptitude of Theresa May’s government and her minority rule after the 2017 election), the scare stories stepped up. The warned-of recession was claimed to have merely been deferred. And the financial threats were the least of it. The media and politicians on the Remain side upped the volume on all their dire warnings. Disappointment and rage about losing the referendum were transferred into a number of vitriolic behaviors, but most prominent amongst them was the claim of increased insularity.

Media, including a new, strange propaganda paper called the New European, offered the British public “farewell tours” to the Continent. Such publications strongly suggested that once Britain left the EU, we Brits would be unable to visit again. We would return to where we were before we entered the Common Market in 1975. And as centuries of literature and history attest, until 1975 nobody from Britain ever went to the Continent. In fact, prior to 1975 we had been a strange, hobbit-like people, famously incurious about abroad and choosing never to visit the place.

RTWT

My Space Property-Rights Project

I’m not being funded for it this year, but I’m wondering who would like to contribute to keeping it going, if I do a Kickstarter? I’d need about twenty grand, much of it for required travel (including, potentially, Dubai for IAC in the fall). It would be to promote the ideas in my IAC paper from last fall.

[Thursday-morning update]

OK, to brainstorm a little bit, if I do a Kickstarter (as opposed to a GoFundMe or something else), any suggestions for rewards? Maybe a signed copy of the multilateral agreement(s)?

[Bumped]