There was a great old The Three Stooges bit about plumbing that teaches us a lot about regulation. The Stooges were a trio of hapless idiots who produced comedy gold in the days before colour television. Read more

In a world without laws about fists meeting noses, it would make a lot more sense to prohibit us from punching someone else on the nose without their consent than to ban us from punching ourselves on the nose. It might make sense to ban both, but it would be ridiculous to start by banning people from punching themselves. Read more

I often describe New Zealand as the Outside of the Asylum – the last sane place in a world going mad. But just what should we make of New Zealand’s public health system? Read more

I don’t know if anyone ever really believed manufacturing televisions in New Zealand made sense. Controls in place until New Zealand’s reforms prohibited importing fully assembled televisions, to encourage manufacture and assembly in New Zealand. Read more

Suppose I told you that anticompetitive activity right here in New Zealand was behind a transfer of wealth amounting to, at the very least, hundreds of billions of dollars. The victims of the cartel are New Zealand’s poorest, who have had to endure hardship so substantial that its effects are directly visible in New Zealand’s poverty and material deprivation statistics. Read more

Despite all your predictions to the contrary, the children still have not colluded against me. On finding out that the Crampton household’s way of divvying up the chores is somewhat nonstandard, I reported on it in a May 2018 Insights column in case others might find it helpful. Read more

When Arthur Dent complained that he had not been informed of Council’s plans to bulldoze his house for a bypass, Mr Prosser, the Council officer, calmly told him that the plans had been on display for months - in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’. Arthur found the plans there the day before the bulldozers showed up at his door. Read more

Chutzpah really should be part of New Zealand's vernacular. I don't think I've heard it since moving to New Zealand almost 16 long years ago, but we do see a bit of it here. Read more

This week, the Chinese government celebrated the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s 1949 takeover of the country. Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s letter to Premier Li Keqiang noted the opportunity to reflect on China’s transformation over the past 70 years, and on how China “lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, raised their living standards, and created new opportunities for them to fulfil their aspirations.” The only problem is that everyone might be celebrating the wrong anniversary. Read more

Finding that water flows downhill is not all that surprising. But it can be vey much worth knowing how fast that water moves, and how badly wrong we can be if we assume the waters are still. Read more

Douglas Adams' classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers salient advice about an awful lot of things. Don't listen to Vogon poetry. Read more

When Alice tried to recite one of her lessons while down the rabbit-hole in Wonderland, she thought only a few words had come out wrong. The Caterpillar corrected her bluntly: “It is wrong from beginning to end.” By contrast, the Cabinet Paper on the National Policy Statement protecting sensitive soils is not wrong from beginning to end. Read more