Tag Archives: politics

There’s a Hint

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This is the subhead on a Wall Street Journal article over the weekend:

New registrations of company’s vehicles dropped to zero from 2,939

This happened to Tesla’s electric car sales in Hong Kong, but it’s a lesson that’s universal.

Not a single newly purchased Tesla model was registered in Hong Kong in April, according to official data from the city’s Transportation Department analyzed by The Wall Street Journal.

The March sales figure was that 2,939, albeit the number is artificially high: it occurred after the subsidy’s end had been announced, but before the end was to take effect.  The drop to zero, though, is not at all artificial.

The reason for the collapse?  Hong Kong taxing authorities ended the tax break folks got for buying a “green” car.  It’s not just that side of the world:

Last year in Denmark, an incentive program expired and was replaced with a less generous one. New car-registrations for all-electric vehicles of all brands fell 70% in 2016 in the country to 1,373 vehicles, while across the European Union the number grew by 7% to 63,278 vehicles. In the first quarter of this year, only 48 all-electric vehicles were registered in Denmark.

In the rest of Europe, existing “incentive programs” were unchanged in the period.

Here’s the hint: if a technology can’t sell in a free market without government subsidy, it’s not ready for sale; it’s not economically viable.  Full stop.

In the US, the tax subsidy remains in place in the form of a $7,500 tax credit for each Tesla or other electric car bought.  Who do you suppose is actually paying those $7,500?  Anyone? Bueller?  Bueller?

They’ve Been Called Out

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The Left is always on about the need to raise taxes, the need for folks (especially the rich, but in general, too) to pay more to government in order to get all the services government is supposed to provide.

Now they’ve been called out and their hypocrisy exposed empirically, at least in one nation that our own Left wants us to emulate.

Hammered by the opposition for slashing taxes and going on a spending spree with the country’s oil money, the center-right government [of Norway] has hit back with a bold proposal: voluntary contributions.

Launched in June, the initiative has received a lukewarm reception, with the equivalent of just $1,325 in extra revenue being collected so far, according to the Finance Ministry.

Finance Minister Siv Jensen:

The tax scheme was set up to allow those who want to pay more taxes to do so in a simple and straightforward way.  If anyone thinks the tax level is too low, they now have the chance to pay more.

Jonas Gahr Store, with a net worth of $8 million (and a leading Labour Party politician), is one of those refusing to pay more than tax law requires, even though the rate, he insists, is too low.  Now it’s personal, though; he’s not dealing with anonymous OPM.

“Pay up, Sucka–”

“No.”

Charlie Gard and the British Government

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Or, Charlie Gard and sovereignty.

Charlie Gard is the baby with a rare genetic disease that has damaged his brain, probably fatally and soon.  The baby’s parents want to be able to try alternative treatments, or in the alternative, be allowed to bring him home to die there with his parents who love him rather than encumbered by the state’s bureaucrats and representatives, his parents also by-the-way present, in an emptily sterile hospital room.

The British government has chosen to not allow any of this: the baby must die in the hospital.  The EU’s Court of Human Rights, in a breathtaking repudiation of its mission, has sided with the British government.  Understand: that the Brit government and the EU in their ruling have sided with the hospital in which Charlie is being held is neither here nor there.  Both the Brit government and the EU Court could have sided with the baby’s parents, and each chose not to.

Which, as The Wall Street Journal put it in their op-ed at the link, raises a question:

Whose baby is Charlie, anyway—his parents’ or the state’s? In this delicate case, Britain’s national care system has elevated technical expertise over parental love.

In this, the WSJ has misunderstood.  It’s the Brit government that has decided, not the bureaucrats of the NHS.  It is the government of the home of 1984 that has claimed this baby, poor Charlie Gard, as its ward.

With the British government’s ruling, it has made parents irrelevant and claimed all children to be wards of the state.  By extension, the British government has made all citizens of Great Britain, raised from early childhood as wards of the state, themselves wards of the state.

The citizens of Great Britain are not sovereign in their own nation.  Only Government is sovereign.

Misguided Reporting

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A Dodd-Frank requirement to report the pay ratio between a company’s leadership and its rank and file—specifically, the total earnings of the chief executive compared with those of the median employee—is on the chopping block.

Supporters of the rule, part of the post-financial crisis Dodd-Frank Act, hope disclosure at an individual-company level might focus more attention on inequality and sky-high CEO pay.

This sort of pay ratio metric may well have value to a company’s investors, but it has no value at all to the Federal government beyond a cynical social-justice virtue signal kind of mandate from the Progressive-Democrats.  The requirement needs to be chopped (along with the whole of Dodd-Frank, but that’s a different story).

If investors find value in this, they can push the company of interest to publish the ratio on their own; government should not be involved.

Payback

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The European Union is pushing for it over Great Britain’s appalling effrontery in choosing to go out from the EU.

The European Union’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier on Thursday gave a stark warning to officials in London that the UK won’t have “frictionless trade” with the bloc after it leaves.

… Mr Barnier said that he isn’t sure that the EU position is “fully understood across the Channel.”

Barnier added

In practice, “no deal” would worsen the “lose-lose” situation which is bound to result from Brexit. And the UK would have more to lose than its partners[.]

Lose-lose.  And the Brits will lose more.  Barnier and his EU comrades will make sure of it.

You shouldn’t have voted to leave.  Pay up, sucka.  The rest of you in the EU, pay attention.  If you try to leave, we’ll make you pay, too.