Eric Crampton

Hyperempowering pseudoscience will kill Americans. It will kill Conservative and Liberal Americans, and all of us deserve better.

Auckland's zoning allows roughly a million pie shops, give or take a couple hundred thousand.
Look around. Do you see hundreds of thousands of pie shops? Obviously no.
Zoning space for a couple million houses doesn't mean that many will be built.
Me in The Post.

www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/3609...

Nah, we secretly control everybody by inviting them to have lunch with and talk to a couple dozen CEs and Chairs of our member companies.

And even before I joined the Initiative when I lectured at Canterbury, I had Genter give a talk for the econ students on Don Shoup's work. Forward-thinking see.

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GRAND PRIZE: Ukrainian flag signed by soldiers of 17 units
...

Atlas Network CEO Brad Lips on Nobel Peace Prize María Corina Machado Atlas Network celebrates María Corina Machado, 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, for her decades-long fight for democracy and human rights in Venezuela.

In case you missed this additional link...

www.atlasnetwork.org/articles/atl...

Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.

www.nzinitiative.org.nz/reports-and-...

Other funny part I didn't get to in the column here.

So Treasury, partially on lobbying from environmentalists, changed its cost-benefit guidance to set a 2% discount rate for 'non-commercial' projects, 8% for commercial.

Roads aren't considered commercial.

But KiwiRail is an SOE.

La brea tar pits

Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists.

You're telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man, but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?

1. I didn't know this;
2. This guy should have been named Ransom E.O. Speedwagon, not Robert.

This week's column in The Post gave me an excuse to email Joe Bennett for comment.

An illicit cigarette vendor on Facebook Marketplace is purporting to be selling cartons of Bennett's book about bullshitting.

"That's wonderful. Double Happiness as double irony."

www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/3608...

Great piece from @joelmacmanus.bsky.social .

Awesome

Photo of the back of a private transport bus featuring a Pegasus logo. The company phone number printed on the bus is 1-888-PEG-TRANS

LOSING MY MIND AT THE PHONE NUMBER ON THIS BUS IN FRONT OF ME

In local council politics, I don't care about left/right. Only measure that matters is whether the candidate will be effective in improving housing supply.

Wellington seems to have come out okay.

For more on Dunedin's candidates, including the vampire:

thespinoff.co.nz/politics/17-...

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

My piece in today's Herald goes through one on the lessons from Canada's path to greater First Nations autonomy: starting small and learning as you go can have a lot of merit.

www.nzherald.co.nz/business/the...

WOW. Remember this May video of a US citizen wrestled to the ground by ICE agents and detained for an hour despite having a valid REAL ID?

It gets worse. Two weeks later, ICE did it AGAIN — handcuffed him and detained him for 20 minutes despite his REAL ID. Now the Institute for Justice is suing.

At least energy stays in the ETS!

Notably this suit was filed by the libertarian Institute for Justice

Building Nations: What Canada’s First Nations can teach us about devolution and development Canadian First Nations are helping tackle Canada’s housing crisis through council-like authority over their own land. Our new report highlights this proven Canadian turnaround success story and draws ...

Full report's here for those keen.

And stay tuned for a few more columns on it.

www.nzinitiative.org.nz/reports-and-...

I simply cannot believe that any hapū signing onto the Treaty could have imagined that their descendants would wind up needing to travel to a council office miles away to beg permission to build things on their own land.
Canada shows a path to this kind of rangatiratanga.

The process also built guardrails that help build capacity and accountability.

Sen̓áḵw is very obviously big-city.
Ch'íyáqtel is next door to a town the size of Palmerston North.
And a lot of Reserves are far more remote.
But really neat things are happening elsewhere.
First Nations can buy land near town and bring it under their jurisdiction.

And it just works. In part, I think, because they started small and learned along the way.

Other bits are similarly pragmatic.
Municipalities are creatures of provinces. Reserves are not. First Nations can adopt provincial rules, like building codes, by reference - if they want. Or choose others.

I love the pragmatism here.
The City has no jurisdiction on-reserve. But they can't provide services unless the Reserve has by-laws around utilities access. So the Nation sets mirror by-laws.

The BC Supreme Court confirmed that the Reserve is under its own jurisdiction, not subject to City by-laws, and that the City had no duty to consult with NIMBYs about the service agreement.

Phase 1 of the Sen̓áḵw project is nearing completion.
The pictures here are from July.
They didn't need Vancouver's permission to build.
But they did need to come to an agreement with the City for services.
There is no free-ride here.