NEW YORK, NY — As the New York City mayoral race entered its final stretch before Tuesday's election, leading candidate Zohran Mamdani sought to broaden his appeal with undecided voters by promising to establish rent-free gulags throughout the city in which he would graciously imprison his political opponents and also everyone else.

From the excellent Janan Ganesh (FT):

Often, it is fear of causing offence that stops liberal-minded people engaging with vast tracts of the world. And so cultural sensitivity turns into its own kind of parochialism. If Forsyth was a workmanlike writer, he had a grander twin in VS Naipaul, who wrote on a global canvas despite or because of personal attitudes that some call reactionary. (Others have used a different r-word about him.) A modern liberal would not be as cutting about Africa and south-east Asia as Naipaul, it is true. But then don’t assume that a modern liberal would, in either sense of the phrase, “go there” at all.

I even wonder if a small amount of jingoism helps. You have to see the world from somewhere. The branding of this column, Citizen of Nowhere, is tongue-in-cheek: a reference to an old speech by one of our lesser prime ministers here in Britain. The truth is, without a starting point to which one is attached, it is hard to even register cultural differences, let alone comment on them. The result is that weird flattening jargon in which well-meaning people address the world. Rory Stewart remembers some first-class diplomatic baloney during his time in Afghanistan. “Every Afghan is committed to a gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic centralised state . . . ” and so on.

Recommended.

The post The cosmopolitan conservative appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

TORONTO — One of the largest and riskiest investments paid off late Saturday night, as the Los Angeles Dodgers successfully purchased their second World Series victory in as many years.

It will be no surprise to learn that we’re against this:

Professor Andy Summers of the Centre for Analysis of Taxation, which first proposed the policy, said it had been largely made possible by Brexit.

…

Wealthy Britons fleeing the country for low-tax havens face being hit by a 20 per cent charge on their business assets when they leave the UK under plans being drawn up ahead of the budget.

Summers is half of CenTax along with Arun Advani. Their proposal for a 5% weath tax, to be applied retrospectively, one of us described as “Tantamount to theft” when giving evidence to a Commons committee. For it is tantamount to theft.

This social contract thing is really here are the rules if you wish to live here. If you don’t keep to the rules then don’t live here is the easy part. But also within that same concept is that if we change the rules then you’ve the right not to live here. To insist upon rule change but no right of unpunished exit is to switch from government doing as the populace desires to government regarding the populace as a possession to be farmed.

We regard that change in that basic social contract as a vileness, an abomination.

But there is also a more practical issue here. As we’ve said before about tax avoidance - and even tax evasion - people successfully dodging taxes reduces the rate of taxation for everyone else. Yes, we know, most think that if some pay less then everyone else pays more. But that is to assume that there is some set amount that government needs to spend. Which isn’t our view of reality at all. Spending money is fun so politics, government, will do as much of that as it can. Collecting taxes is, a few misanthropes aside, not fun. So the tax that can be collected acts as a brake upon the ambitions of politicians - or these days, bureaucrats - to spend.

That we’ve a deficit shows not all that much of a brake but one all the same. Therefore people changing their behaviour to pay less tax, from just not working as hard all the way through to leaving the country, limits how much the rest of us can be taxed. There really is a Laffer Curve and even the most gurning of politicians realises that going above that peak rate leaves less for those pleasures of the spending. People being able to leave lowers that peak of the Laffer Curve.

Please do note the mobility of the rich is wholly accepted in the standard economics as being a limitation on the ability to tax - lowers that Laffer Curve peak. This is why the Advani/Summers abomination insists upon being retrospective - if it only kicked in next year then all the money would already have left.

An exit tax increases the amount the rest of us can be taxed by limiting that ability to leave the tax system. And anyone who believes that this ability to tax all more would not be used has, we’re afraid, not grasped the reality of politics. Spending your money is fun for politicians. So, if they can do so they will do so - take more of your money to spend that is. We’re thus against those things that enable them to do this.

Plus, you know, an exit tax is an abomination.

Tim Worstall

Is paying down the federal debt a recession trigger? Bob takes on the MMT claim and checks the record, citing US debt payoffs, Canada’s 1990s reforms, and ECB case studies.

The New York Times ran a repellent interview in its opinion section Friday, “We Need to Rethink How We Think About the Holocaust -- Professor Marianne Hirsch on how the way we teach the ‘crime of all crimes’ informs our understanding of Gaza.” By “rethink,” the paper means downplay the Holocaust and to lie about the war in Gaza as a "genocide." Hirsch of Columbia University was interviewed by Times columnist M. Gessen, formerly Masha Gessen, who now goes by “they.” Can one even imagine the New York Times in a previous era complaining about the “outsize influence of the Holocaust” and weaponing the Holocaust against its Jewish victims? M. Gessen: Throughout the war in Gaza, Israeli leaders and their supporters in the United States have invoked the Holocaust to justify their actions….Some scholars of the Holocaust — people who have spent their professional lives keeping the memory of the catastrophe alive — are worried. They worry that their work has been repurposed as war propaganda and as justification for committing a genocide....There is a very strongly articulated position that the Holocaust should never be compared to anything.... Hirsch: …. And there’s an outsize influence of the Holocaust that then obscures other histories and also obscures what is happening right now: the genocide in Gaza, which the exceptionalism of the Holocaust has fostered denial of other genocides.... To further smear Israel, Hirsch misled about the Nakba of 1948, when Britain partitioned the Palestinian Mandate, cleaving out a Jewish state and an Arab state, with the Jews accepting statehood but the Arabs refusing to live alongside the Jews in the region. Several Arab countries then launched a failed war on Israel to strangle the Jewish homeland in its crib. As in Gaza, when Israel-haters start losing a war that they started, they blame the Jews. Hirsch: ….one historical phenomenon that is part of the Holocaust is actually the formation of the state of Israel and the Nakba — the expulsion of Palestinians. So I think when we teach the Holocaust now, that has to be somehow part of the history. Our interrelation of Holocaust memory and Nakba memory really has to be taken into account. The professor told Gessen why she felt compelled to drop her course at Columbia University because Jewish students had the false sense of being victimized on campus. Never mind the constant harassment and threats against Jews at Columbia and other progressive hotbeds during the pro-Hamas rallies. HIrsch…. the way universities — including my own, Columbia — have conceded that they are hotbeds of antisemitism, and that Jewish students are suffering, has fostered a sense of Jewish victimization. That feeling of victimization prevents us from making the kinds of connections I’ve just been talking about. Hirsch praised Gessen for previously comparing Gaza to the Nazi's Warsaw Ghetto for Jews: "You compared it to the Warsaw ghetto and wrote something that was so memorable and devastating: 'The ghetto is being liquidated.' How are you thinking about this now?" Gessen responded by agreeing with her own words and then again redefining “genocide” so Israel could fit into the parameters (though it still didn’t). Gessen: It’s still being liquidated….Reporters would insist that obviously Gaza wasn’t a ghetto, and obviously it wasn’t being liquidated. Those were fascinating conversations, because I realized just how little many of them actually knew. I think the most important thing they didn’t understand — and that we often fail to understand — is that genocide is a process. Lately, I’ve been reporting a series on international justice and war crimes, and I realized that, legally, one of the key distinctions between genocide and crimes against humanity is precisely this: Genocide is a process. Crimes against humanity occur when large numbers of people are killed — or when civilians are intentionally targeted, or when there’s blatant disregard for human life. But genocide is different: It unfolds over time. It begins with setting the conditions for mass killing — with propaganda, with creating a climate in which many people can be killed — and then with gradually eliminating the conditions for life itself. So starvation is very much a part of this genocide…. The post-ceasefire figures prove there was no starvation in Gaza, and certainly no genocide, as the ratio of civilian deaths to combat deaths was 1.5-to-1, a tribute to the Israeli army. But don’t expect such facts to penetrate the sealed anti-Israel propaganda bubble of the New York Times, which is far more concerned about fake “Islamophobia” than the actual anti-Semitism of Holocaust diminishment demonstrated in this interview.