I here want to salute the brave artists who used their talents to capture the inhumanity and essential insanity of lockdowns. My favourite is the "guerilla mask force", an artistic idea that apparently started in Switzerland but spread all over Europe. what this guerilla mask...

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[caption id="attachment_34756" align="alignright" width="464"] Amazing what Google Images serves up[/caption] Last week Sam Roggeveen e-mailed me asking if I'd accept a post for Troppo from him on the above subject. I said I would – any time. When he sent it to me I thought it...

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As one the best illustrations of the way our minds deal with uncertainty, consider the following video. Please listen and watch at least 30 seconds so you can experience the three sequences of spoken words. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWGeUztTkRA[/embed] Pretty much...

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The essential governance problem in March 2020 in Western countries was the overwhelming demand of the vast majority of the population to do something dramatic in response to their fear. There was a clamour to be ‘led to safety’ by populations scared to death by images in the...

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With a recent publication in Nature that reported lockdowns have no effect on covid-cases or covid-deaths, there are now over 30 studies that fail to find any covid-reducing benefits of lockdowns. Worse, across countries and time, more severe lockdowns are just leading to more...

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Herewith a podcast interview of me setting out my case that the New Zealand Wellbeing Budget has a relationship to wellbeing which corresponds to a Pirates Ball's relationship to pirates. It's ' themed ' as promoting wellbeing rather than being thoughtfully crafted to do so. A...

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Together with Benno Torgler and Katharina Gangl, I published a piece recently on how to tax the powerful and sophisticated. Our substantive argument on what one should do becomes relatively simple once you understand what happened in the world of Western taxation the last 50 y...

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The Fairness Doctrine was a 1949 policy that required holders of broadcast licenses (so TV and radio) to air contrasting views on controversial issues of public importance. It was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1969 but eventually was abolished in 1987 by the FCC commission un...

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