"[I]n perception and rhetoric the Left has certainly lost or even surrendered the high ground. Conservatives have successfully seized the mantle of free speech advocacy in many public debates. But whether that shift reflects a deeper, principled commitment to the ideal remains to be seen ... "

~ David Harvey from his post 'Speak the Speech, I pray you'

"Race-based funding is racist. A statement so obviously true that it ought to be stitched onto the curtains of the Beehive and should be self-evident to anyone with an IQ above room temperature. ...

"Yet... [t]his fetish for ethnic exceptionalism has become the most expensive fiction in New Zealand’s policy landscape. The central myth - that Māori are uniquely deprived and therefore must be uniquely subsidised - collapses under the slightest statistical scrutiny. But facts, regrettably, are of little use to those whose salaries depend on ignoring them.

"The Māori economy now exceeds $70 billion. That is not a typo. Seventy billion dollars, according to BERL. Māori businesses thrive in agriculture, fisheries, energy, tourism, construction - you name it. We are not talking about a struggling underclass. We are talking about a sovereign economic force with the political influence of a Middle Eastern oil bloc. And yet, astonishingly, we are still expected to believe that Māori are victims — infantilised, eternally fragile, and unable to function without a phalanx of publicly funded 'navigators,' 'equity officers,' and 'tikanga consultants' to shepherd them through modernity.

"This narrative is insulting, inaccurate, and intolerably expensive.

"Consider life expectancy. In 2002, the average Māori lifespan hovered around 68 years. As of 2022, it stands at 74.3. That’s an increase of more than six years in two decades. Māori smoking rates have halved since 2006. Educational attainment among young Māori has risen steadily. Tertiary enrolments are at record highs. And in urban areas, Māori household incomes are now statistically indistinguishable from the Pākehā average.

"So where, precisely, was the need for a separate Māori Health Authority? ... [for o]ur state schools [to] have become temples of cultural appeasement ... [for] 'Māori housing strategies] that will [allegedly] solve intergenerational poverty [but simply mean] priority access for iwi developers and whānau collectives ...

"Māori make up 51% of our prison population. We are told this is a result of systemic racism. No - it is a result of systemic dysfunction. ... race-based funding enables this dysfunction. It reinforces dependency. It signals that failure will be rewarded, not rectified ...

"None of this is a call to ignore Māori disadvantage. It is a call to address it with honesty, rigour, and standards. The previous model did precisely the opposite. It flattered tribal elites, funded unaccountable bureaucracies, and delivered nothing but resentment and division.

"So dismantle the rest. ...

"Let the iwi aristocracy, so fond of preaching commercial wisdom, compete on a level playing field in the free market. Let them earn their fortunes without the insulation of state patronage.

"This romanticised vision of Māori as an eternally wounded, noble caste is not merely ahistorical. It is politically corrosive. It distorts justice, misallocates resources, and entrenches mediocrity. ...
New Zealand must decide: do we believe in equality under the law or cultural exceptionalism? One cannot have both.

"Race-based policy is not just unsustainable. It is immoral. And if the National Party had any spine, it would say so."

~ Tony Vaughn from his post 'Racial Romanticism Is Not Policy - The Cost of Coddling a Myth'

In “Liberation Day for Gas-Powered Cars,” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2025 (print edition), the Journal editors make a strong case for getting rid of the California government’s mandate that requires an increasing number, year by year, in the percentage of auto makers’ sales that must be “zero-emission vehicles.” For the year 2026, that number must be 35 percent. In 2023, I wrote about why we won’t come close and why it’s good that we won’t.

Along the way, though, the Journal editors make a basic price theory mistake. They write:

Auto makers warn the quotas would force them to produce fewer gas cars. Prices would almost certainly rise to offset their EV losses.

No. They’re right about the effect on prices of gasoline-powered cars, but they’re wrong about the causation. Profit-maximizing firms don’t typically raise prices in one segment to offset losses in another. The reason: if raising prices in that segment increases profits, then they would already be doing it.

Nevertheless, they would raise prices on gas-powered vehicles. The reason is not that dong so would increase profits to offset losses elsewhere. Since they’re already at the profit-maximizing price, raising prices of gas-powered cars further would reduce profits. So why would they raise them? To reduce sales. There are two ways of hitting the percentage target: reduce prices artificially on zero-emission vehicles to increase sales of those vehicles and raise prices artificially on gas-powered cars to reduce sales of those vehicles. They would do both.

In 1985, I wrote about the distorting effects on the mix of cars sold, when auto companies were figuring how to comply with the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations. Those regulations required each company to meet a stringent average fuel economy standard for all their cars sold in a given model year. To hit their targets, the companies needed to sell more small cars and fewer large cars. I thought I had been more explicit about the pricing implications than I was.  In any case, the way to do so was to price their high mpg cars below the profit-maximizing price and to price their low mpg cars above the profit-maximizing price. The same thing is going on now for zero-emission vehicles and gasoline-powered vehicles.

A little price theory goes a long way.

The post A Little Price Theory Goes a Long Way appeared first on Econlib.

DALLAS, TX — Local man Jim Reese honored the fallen this Memorial Day by purchasing a Whirlpool refrigerator at an incredible 47% discount.