The classist lunacy of Net Zero - Brendan O'Neill :
. . . It feels like the working classes are caught in a pincer movement. On one side, upper-class fanatics punish them on the streets by blocking their journeys by car; on the other, officialdom punishes them with green energy . .
The political class's war on the car confirms that XR-style hostility to modern life is now rife in establishment circles. I bow to no one in my opposition to the eco-privileged who clog up the highways to send a stern message to what they view as the low-information polluting masses. But these people are small fry in the Net Zero religion. They're the back-whipping outliers of the cult, not its priests. Edred and Tilly might stop your car for two hours but it's officialdom that is erecting bollards, putting up spycams and introducing stiff eco-taxes to discourage 'unnecessary journeys by car' in the glorious name of the new god: Net Zero. . .
Net Zero has been institutionalised by governments across the West. They've sworn to achieve the holy state of carbon neutrality by 2050 or 2040. And the impact of their eco-adoration on the lives of working-class people has been disastrous. The Net Zero drive is causing the loss of farming jobs, dents in the pay packets of truckers, rising energy bills, rising fuel costs, the end of cheap flights. As Ross Clark says, the 'uncosted fantasy' of severe carbon reduction will leave us 'poorer, colder and hungrier'. Well, not all of us. Mr Neilson will be okay. And Edred and Tilly.
Net Zero is best seen as the policy expression of the self-loathing of the elites, of late capitalism's turn against itself. The neo-aristocratic disdain for the gains and wonders of industrial society might enlarge the sense of virtue of those who rule us, who get to pose as saviours of the planet, but it violently shrinks the prospects of working people and the global poor. Alongside the valiant scaffolders ejecting eco-zealots from the roads, we need more people willing to demand the ejection of Net Zero in its entirety from government policymaking. Growth and freedom are what will deliver us from the current crisis, not fear, hysteria and cruel reversals in the fortunes of working people.
The legal foundation of women's sports is under fire - David French :
. . . Race segregation in athletic programs is a legal and cultural taboo. There are no legally segregated white and Black football leagues, for example, and if a school decided to create a Black league and a white league, it would face an immediate civil rights complaint. Excluding a football player from a team simply because of his race is unlawful discrimination.
But this is not the case when it comes to sex. The result of Title IX was not the large-scale creation of coed sports leagues, where men and women have an equal opportunity to compete in the same events, where the best man or woman makes the team, and the best man or woman wins the race. Instead, Title IX has resulted in the expansion of women's sports into an enormous, separate and parallel apparatus, where women by the millions compete against one another, winning women's titles in women's leagues.
Why this difference? Why have two statutes with such similar language created such different realities? Because sex is substantially different from race, and treating sex the same as race would be a profound injustice for women in sports.
Let's go back to the language of the statute itself, which speaks in terms of both "participation" and "benefits." If you treat people of different races the same, people of all races can both participate and receive the benefits of participation in athletics. If you treat people of different sexes the same, the reality is very different.
The evidence is overwhelming that there is a significant average difference between male and female athletic performance, including at the most elite levels and even when female athletes receive funding, training and nutrition comparable to that of the best male athletes. In a 2020 article in The Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy, the authors, Doriane Lambelet Coleman, Michael J. Joyner and Donna Lopiano, observed that "depending on the sport and event, the gap between the best male and female performances remains somewhere between 7 to 25 percent; and even the best female is consistently surpassed by many elite and nonelite males, including both boys and men.". . .
After all, when we survey the performance gap between male and female athletes, is that gap best explained by the differences in gender identity between the competitors or the differences that are inherent in biological sex? And if those differences are best explained by biological sex rather than gender identity, then any rule that wipes out biological sex as the determining factor in eligibility will undermine both the practical and legal basis for women's sports.
I'm not a catastrophist. I hate rhetoric that declares that women's sports will be "destroyed" by the inclusion of a small number of trans women in athletic competition. I hate even more any demonization or disparagement of the trans athletes themselves. When they compete according to the rules of the sport, they are doing nothing wrong. But legal definitions do matter, especially when they are rooted in hard facts, such as the systematic, documented performance gap between the sexes.
All people are created equal, and possess equal moral worth, but we are not all created the same. To protect equal opportunity, there are times when the law should recognize differences. And in the realm of athletics, if we want to both secure and continue the remarkable advances women have made in the 51 years since Congress passed Title IX, it's important to remember that sex still matters, and sex distinctions in the law should remain.
Tighter tax take points to trouble ahead - Cameron Bagrie :
You can only push so far against the laws of economics before there are consequences.
Inflation siphons money out of people's pockets and adds to costs.
Higher costs, if not matched by revenue, mean lower profits. Less profit means less tax.
And so, one of the key indicators to turn of late has been government tax revenue.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, tax revenue beat expectations, courtesy of a stronger economy and low unemployment, which boosted income tax. Farmers paid a lot of tax.
That worm has now turned. Tax revenue is still rising in aggregate but coming in below expectations and some tax components are showing major declines.
Tax revenue undershot the Half-Year-Economic and Fiscal Update projections in the fiscal year to January, February and March, with March showing a $2.3 billion gap to forecast after being broadly flat in the six months ended December.
The culprits included lower terminal tax, provisional tax and goods and services tax, which are all barometers of the profit cycle. When firms and farmers make less money, they pay less tax. . .
Here are some key tax divergences.
Corporate tax revenue for the month of April 2023 came in at $1bn compared to a forecast of $2.7bn (a variance of minus 64%) and this compares to $1.6bn in April 2022.
Corporate tax revenue for the 10 months ended April was 6% ($940 million) below the same period for the prior year (though 2022 was a good year).
Other person's tax (individual tax outside PAYE) for the 10 months ended April was 6.2% ($535m) below the same period for the prior year, reflecting lower provisional tax estimation.
Other person's tax was 28.6% lower in the month of April 2023 compared to April 2022.
Less terminal and provisional tax has been a big driver. Businesses or farmers are not doing as well as the Treasury thought they were.
Overall, the tax take is still up in the 10 months ended April 2023 compared with the same period of the prior year, supported by PAYE, reflecting a strong labour market.
However, the turn in some tax components is significant and signifies the brutality of rising costs.
Inflation comments tend to focus on households. The consumer price index peaked at 7.2%.
Producer price inflation for non-labour inputs (the business equivalent of household's consumer price index) peaked at 9.7%. Farm cost inflation rose to 15% and is currently running at 12%, though that includes interest costs, which are not included in the consumer price index. The cost-of-living index measure, which includes interest costs, peaked at 8.2%.
The rural sector is particularly exposed to rising costs because they are a price-taker on the revenue side. The lower New Zealand dollar has helped but commodity prices are under pressure as global economic conditions deteriorate.
A lot of cost increases have been beyond businesses' control, including covid, supply chain challenges, Ukraine and energy prices. Some of these have eased and, globally, what we call goods inflation is receding.
The economy still has ample demand with constrained ability to meet it, which has been a recipe for price rises. Firms are still struggling to fill job vacancies, though border reopening has helped.
But inflation can also be put down to a gap between ideology and reality. Pick your example.
Take the consistent ramping up of the minimum wage, which adds to costs. I'm for higher wages and some catchup was needed to put some respectability and fairness into incomes, but the speed has been phenomenal and productivity gains are not matching. Firms have not been able to adjust to the speed.
Or how about the slow re-opening of borders and regulatory impediments to getting much-needed employees into the country?
The extent of the turn in the tax cycle is one reality reset. Costs hit profits, which hits tax.
Some pull-back in profits was to be expected. Profits tend to do well at the top of the cycle and are more sensitive to movements in the cycle so suffer more in tougher economic times.
As profits come under pressure, so too does the inevitably of the next stage of the economic cycle.
Part of restoring economic balance will be a stronger focus on costs and efficiency. Analysing labour inputs/costs will be a major part of it. This is the stage of the economic cycle we are now entering, and it could be a major wake-up call for society. Taming inflation is not friendly for asset prices, spending, profits, or jobs. We have yet to see the impact on jobs.
Who benefits most from he protection of free speech - the haves or the have-nots ? - Arthur Grimes :
Whether it be repression of free speech under authoritarian regimes or instances of "cancel culture" in various countries, the importance of freedom of expression is as hotly contested as ever. But does freedom of speech benefit all groups equally?
In recently published research, we tackled the question of who actually benefits the most from having freedom of speech. Is it people with the most resources – either income or education – who benefit more, or is it people with few resources?
The idea that those with resources benefit most falls in line with the "hierarchy of needs" developed by American psychologist Abraham Maslow. He argued that people would seek to meet their most pressing needs – such as food and shelter – before looking to achieve "luxuries" such as freedom of speech.
But the view that freedom of speech most benefits those with few resources is consistent with the idea that marginalised people have less scope to influence decisions in society through their spending or networks. They require freedom of speech to influence societal decisions. . .
Our research tested whether changes in countries' restrictions on free speech were associated with rises or falls in the wellbeing of well-resourced people relative to poorly-resourced people in those countries. . .
The research produced two key findings.
First, people with more resources place greater stated priority on freedom of speech (when asked to rank its importance).
Second, it was actually the people with fewer resources who benefited most from free speech. The results indicated that free speech empowered those with fewer resources, providing a greater lift to the wellbeing of more marginalised people.
The two results are not incompatible: people with fewer resources may need to prioritise basic needs more than "luxuries" such as free speech but, being in marginalised populations, they may still benefit most from having freedom of expression.
We also found that people who said they valued free speech benefited from living in countries with free speech. And, preferences towards free speech varied according to certain characteristics within the population (in addition to income and education).
Groups more likely to prioritise free speech included the young, students, non-religious people and those on the left of the political spectrum. Preferences also reflected country circumstances, with people in the West being more supportive of free speech than people in other regions of the world.
In defence of the marketplace of ideas
In a world in which freedom of speech is increasingly being placed at risk, it may become important to protect the "marketplace for ideas". As 19th century thinker John Stuart Mill argued, ideas should "compete" in an open marketplace and be tested by the public to determine which ideas will prevail.
Notwithstanding current risks with social media "echo-chambers", this basic insight still has much to recommend it. People must be able to express their views and receive the views of others openly.
The UN Declaration of Human Rights emphasises this two-way aspect of freedom of expression – that is, people have "the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas".
Countries' laws should reflect Hall's insistence about freedom of expression – at a national level we should defend people's right to say what they want. At a personal level, we should also respect the importance of being a good listener, even when, to paraphrase Hall, we disapprove of what is being said.
Left envy Titanic - Douglas Murray :
I ADMIRE bravery. I admire adventurers. And I was brought up in a Britain which admired these things too.
But much of our country has changed. Where we used to admire adventure we have become cautious and safety obsessed.
Where we used to admire heroism we now favour moaning and victimhood.
Where we once admired success we have come to elevate failure.
There could hardly be a clearer demonstration of this ugly shift than in certain responses to the submersible tragedy at the site of the Titanic. . .
Ordinarily, the people who talk about "kindness" and "compassion" would be kind and compassionate at such a time.
But no. Because the people on board the vessel were guilty of a terrible crime; they were rich. . .
Self-confessed "communist" and Guardian writer Ash Sarkar, who can frequently be seen on the BBC, lost no time in trying to politicise the tragedy.
Even as hope remained that the men could still be alive, Sarkar took to social media to say: "If the super-rich can spend £250,000 on vanity jaunts 2.4 miles beneath the ocean then they're not being taxed enough."
That's quite the reaction. As a teenage Pakistani boy and four others were thought to be struggling for their last breath as oxygen supplies dwindled, this "luxury communist" criticised them for not being taxed more highly.
From where I sit, when someone is dead or dying it never occurs to most decent people to have a discussion about tax policy.
But Sarkar and other lefties on social media doubled down on the victim-blaming — something they usually pretend to hate.
"The Titanic submarine is a modern morality tale of what happens when you have too much money, and the grotesque inequality of sympathy, attention and aid for those without it."
The point of this ghoulish communist seemed to be that if the victims had been poor no one would have taken any notice. . .
The public's sympathy has nothing to do with wealth.
It has everything to do with empathy for people in an unimaginable situation.
The idea of running out of oxygen is one of the most basic human fears of all.
But bitter people are able to feel bitterness everywhere.
If the victims had all been white then the bitter Left would have attacked them for being white.
But as it was they have been attacking them for being rich. . .
If anyone is to blame for the tragedy it is OceanGate, the company in charge of the expedition.
But it is not the fault of the victims.
And in any case, apart from being rich and successful what exactly were they guilty of? Of being curious.
Of wishing to explore the depths of the ocean. Of seeing extraordinary sights and returning to tell people about them.
Of putting their lives in the hands of people who they trusted.
They are people to be admired, not attacked. They should be admired for being successful in their lives.
And they should be admired for continuing one of the things that is greatest about us as a species.
Which is our quest for knowledge and experience, even when it comes at the most terrible price.
A healthy society would admire them.
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