◊Apparently Helen Kelly has announced that the CTU will no longer co-operate with government on trade issues. I assume this is union code for “business as usual”. ◊It’s been fun watching Chris Carter implode, but it seems the show is coming to an end. His latest bout of self-immolation appears to be his last. Still, [...]

“For you will have the poor with you always” Jesus Christ  (Matt 26:11, NKJV) The MacDoctor has already blogged on the book The Spirit Level, the book that contends that inequality is the cause of all social evils. As Jesus Himself points out, the poor are not going away any time soon, which means this [...]

Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article Following on from my previous post on the futility of government intervention in the case of obesity, the Herald obligingly provides this piece of on-topic spam: Support high for GST trim Political momentum for removing GST from healthy food is increasing with both [...]

I have noticed that the subject of inequality has been rearing it’s head again. Tapu Misa started the ball rolling with her opinion piece on how income inequality is pushing us further apart. I find this a very superficial reading of the facts and I am not surprised that Misa used the 1999 2009 book [...]

I am not a big fan of GST. I appreciate it is a consumption tax and therefore inherently much fairer because it taxes all people, equally. I also understand that it has a small positive effect on savings, as it discourages spending (a little). The reason I am not a fan is entirely personal – [...]

I find it quite depressing to read all the utter drivel from Labour and it’s left wing crony blogs, harping on about how the tax cuts to “rich” people (those earning over 70,000, apparently) are worth more that the tax cuts to the poor. Are these people stupid or something? Of course the cuts for [...]

Idiot/Savant (well, just Idiot, really) posts on John Key’s comment on the politics of envy, so clearly beloved by that bloke who leads Labour, whatever his name is. That’s the clear message of John Key in saying that we should not be jealous that the rich will get massive tax cuts while everyone else gets crumbs. [...]

An OECD report shows that New Zealand has almost the lowest “Tax wedge” (Individual tax as a percentage of labour costs) in the OECD. Enter Russell Norman attempting to claim that “the report showed the Government was misleading people that New Zealand had high taxes, to justify tax cuts for the highest-earners”. Unfortunately, the Herald [...]

The Amphibious One posts a long interview with Paul Drain on how wonderful the Cuban Health System is. This is not the first time I have seen left-wing articles on how wonderful (and cheap) the Cuban Healthcare system is. Such articles are usually full of unflattering comparisons with the US Healthcare system and the somewhat [...]

There seems to be quite a lot of debate around the subject of organ donation at the moment. The Herald today warns people off looking for “bootleg kidneys“. The university of Victoria ran a conference yesterday on the issue and Eric Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour has run a series of articles here, here and here. [...]