Kate Hawkesby: Getting out of NZ shows how introspective we've become

As school goes back today, for how long who knows given the looming strikes, but as we head back to the office and to school, it’s been interesting to reflect on the past two weeks.

We headed away for the first time in three years – we hadn’t left the country since Covid and closed borders, but we’d heard from everybody who had, how refreshing it is to get out of NZ. How inspiring it is to see how much the rest of the world has moved on. How blinkered and parochial we have become in our own little hermit kingdom.

Our first stop was San Francisco, a lost city full of drugs and homeless people and not much to enthuse a tourist to be honest. It felt edgy and unsafe and made me worried about our next stop – New York – and how much more dangerous and unsafe that may feel.

But how wrong I was. New York is incredible. It feels super safe due to the fact the place is flooded with cops – Police on every corner, and lots of them.

Jon Miltimore: The Costs of NYC’s $15 Minimum Wage Are Already Visible

New York City’s minimum wage jumped more than 15 percent overnight on January 1, and employers are already cutting workers’ hours as a result.

CBS has the story.

Richard Epstein from the US: The Way Forward On Police Reform

For the past two years, I have taught a course in criminal procedure at the University of Chicago Law School. A key component of that course dealt with police behavior leading up to an arrest. In the class, I pointed out that relations between the police and the public have improved from the bad old days, and that much of the credit should go to the increased professionalization of police departments in controlling police abuse. 

The reason for this change is that it is never possible to effectively control the operation of thousands of individual police officers by ex-post interventions through the criminal justice system. What was needed was a strong police management team that sought out hotspots before they erupted, in order to create a culture in which police self-discipline would eliminate many of these problems before they occurred.