There is a fun sign at the Wairau Road Pak’nSave explaining the store’s story. The story began in 1987 when Foodstuffs acquired an interest in the land. Read more

The Regulatory Standards Bill before Parliament provides no enforceable legal right to compensation for the cost of regulation. It only suggests that compensation can be warranted when regulation takes or impairs property. Read more

Parliament faces tighter constraints when it wants to spend money than when it wishes to regulate. The Regulatory Standards Bill would set the two on slightly more equal footing. Read more

It is legal to buy books. Obviously. Read more

The New Zealand Association of Economists’ annual conference is unlike other academic conferences and better for it. The Association’s membership spans academics, officials, consultants and a few think-tankers. Read more

Parliament is supreme but it is not infallible. Governments often propose policies that are wrong in principle. Read more

Late night ‘situation monitoring’ on Twitter when Israel and America are bombing Iranian nuclear weapons facilities is not ideal for a good night’s sleep. Possible outcomes seemed to range from a happy and peaceful shift to a more liberal Iranian government, through to serious regional or broader war with a nuclear-armed Iran. Read more

Imagine that you owned a vacant piece of land. You were trying to decide whether to put solar panels on it to generate electricity or to plant trees on it to sequester carbon and earn carbon credits. Read more

There are already too many reasons for international supermarket chains to decide our small set of islands far from everywhere are not worth bothering about. Adding one more seems bad if government has prioritised retail grocery competition. Read more

We can learn a lot from newspapers’ Letters to the Editor pages. This week, I had a column in the Stuff newspapers on the Initiative’s proposed fast-track for new supermarkets. Read more

The United States has the world’s best universities. At least for now. Read more