Monthly Archives: September 2013

New Aussie President

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I have been asked by an American friend, “are you happy with this election?” His email message line is the title of this post. This is what I wrote:

Thank you for the question because I am really happy to be able to answer. We have just ended six years of the worst government in Australian history with a landslide win to the conservative side of politics. Almost anything would have been better, but this government has all the markings of one that could be special. The new Prime Minister is a solid liberal-conservative in the nineteenth century meaning of the words, a deeply religious Christian and a moral and ethical man leading a sensible, moderate and pragmatic party. They are not libertarian but they are a nice mix of Rand Paul and Mitt Romney, my two favourite American politicians. He is also the Prime Minister and not the President which makes an enormous difference. Here the Prime Minister is similar to being the Majority Leader in your House of Representatives. The Prime Minister therefore cannot be aloof from day-to-day politics in the way an American president can. The Leader of the Opposition can quiz the Prime Minister on every sitting day of the Parliament and all members of the cabinet are on call to answer questions put to them. Lying to the House can almost instantly end a political career if someone is genuinely caught out trying to mislead but will anyway cause serious problems.

Tony Abbott, who has become Prime Minister, was considered unelectable by the previous government but they couldn’t evade him and there he was asking the questions that needed to be asked and becoming better known to the country as he grew every more confident in his role. Romney, alas, had to go through a wearing and grinding series of preliminaries where he was criticised day after day by people on his own side of the fence before he became the nominee. It makes it harder to get to the top and then have to deal with a sitting president who just has to wait until the other side’s candidates have knocked each other out. Even then Romney almost won but here is the difference. Romney has completely disappeared from all political involvement. He’s gone and even though I recently saw an article, “Was Mitt Romney Right About Everything?” what difference does it make? As it happens he was on near enough right about everything he said but so what? He is now gone and there is no platform for him to continue stalking Obama for all of his errors and stupidities. Our new PM, however, led his side of politics into the election in 2010, almost won and now has won big time. A different system that has allowed us to fix a mistake. And with only three year Parliaments, even though the three years seemed a long, long time it has finally ended sooner than it might otherwise have done.

My expectation is that although the new government has been left a legacy of serious problems created by the previous government over the past three years, and even though I expect the international economy to sour over the next three years before getting better, they have the ingredients to be one of our best governments ever. The times will try them but I expect they will be up to it. But we shall see. The euphoria of seeing Tony Abbott as Prime MInister has not worn off. Will keep you posted.

Kindest best wishes

Betraying Diana West

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Since reading M. Stanton Evans’ Blacklisted by History and then Ronald Radosh’s highly negative review I have mistrusted Radosh to the point where I can only think of him as a far left socialist plant here on the right. Radosh, from the deepest of leftist motivations, wrote a book about the Rosenbergs in which he was hoping to defend them but was compelled by the evidence to conclude that they actually had been Soviet spies. Unexpectedly for him but not for me, his friends on the left immediately drove him out and would no longer associate with him. No principle of his had changed, only the people who were now willing to talk to him. Thus under the my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend principle that if you are shunned by the left then you must be something else, the assumption has grown that he is one of us. But from everything he has written this is so obviously untrue it only amazes me he is not so utterly discredited that no judgment of his is ever accepted amongst ourselves.

Radosh has done the same again in a review of Diana West’s American Betrayal which was published in Front Page Magazine where you would hope for better. West has now replied at Breitbart in an article titled, The Rebuttal – Part One which presumes there will be at least one more section to come. You can read her reply for yourself – long and detailed – but here are the reviews of her books that were put up on the Amazon website:

“Diana West masterfully reminds us of what history is for: to suggest action for the present. She paints for us the broad picture of our own long record of failing to recognize bullies and villains. She shows how American denial today reflects a pattern that held strongly in the period of the Soviet Union. She is the Michelangelo of Denial.”– Amity Shlaes, author of Coolidge and the NYT bestseller The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

“This explosive book is a long-needed answer to court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow. Must-reading for serious students of security issues and Cold War deceptions, both foreign and domestic.”– M. Stanton Evans, author of Blacklisted by History

“If you haven’t read Diana West’s “American Betrayal” yet, you’re missing out on a terrific, real-life thriller.”– Brad Thor, author of the New York Times bestsellers Black List, Full Black, and The Last Patriot.

“What Diana West has done is to dynamite her way through several miles of bedrock. On the other side of the tunnel there is a vista of a new past. Of course folks are baffled. Few people have the capacity to take this in. Her book is among the most well documented I have ever read. It is written in an unusual style viewed from the perspective of the historian—but it probably couldn’t have been done any other way.”—Lars Hedegaard, historian, editor, Dispatch International
“Her arguments shred our preconceived notions of twentieth century history.”—Jeff Minick, Smoky Mountain (NC) News

“American Betrayal is a monumental achievement. Brilliant and important.”–Monica Crowley

“Diana West’s new book rewrites WWII and Cold War history not by disclosing secrets, but by illuminating facts that have been hidden in plain sight for decades. Furthermore, she integrates intelligence and political history in ways never done before.”–Jeffrey Norwitz, former professor of counterterrorism, Naval War College

“Enlightening. I give American Betrayal five stars only because it is not possible to give it six.”–John Dietrich, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency and author of The Morgenthau Plan: Soviet Influence on American Postwar Policy.

If it is endorsed by M. Stanton Evans, the one person more likely than anyone to know whether this kind of book is on the hunt or not, it is a book that is worth your time although by the time you are through you will wonder whether the betrayal continues to this day and where its gangrenous tentacles now reach.

David Horowitz Replies: This is the reply at FrontPageMag that leaves me unsatisfied. I don’t know what Horowitz is afraid of but he should mistrust Radosh. Unless he has read the book himself and decided that her misjudgments are seriously unacceptable, he should not be policing such a debate in such a heavy handed way. The first of the comments after Horowitz’s very brief remarks captures the issue:

I read West’s book, as well as the one by Evans and Omerstein, Stalins Secret Agents. Both complement each other, and West made a reasonable case, even if some parts of her work lapsed into speculation. She was clear about that, however. Hopkins appears condemned by the facts to have been a Stalinist agent, either that or FDR was, and was instructing him to do what he did. Whatever the truth, massive help was given to the Soviets by FDR, and more than just Dodge trucks via Murmansk. America helped Stalin on many factors, and West exposes them, unmercifully. Did FDR deserve mercy? Not if half of what West dug up is true, and I say more than half is true, and well documented. Her facts mirror those of Evans and Omerstein.

This ‘debate’ between West and Horowitz has lost focus, and should return to the “search for truth” which is always the first duty of good scholarship. it has now become something more bitterly personal. The acid being thrown around seems to be far greater than any mere disagreement on the facts.

I admire both West and Horowitz. How about you both take a cooler, and get back to debating the facts about the many Soviet spys and communist betrayers in FDRs administration, and how that connects to the modern very similar situation.

This, then, is the second comment:

David,

I have just one question for you, what the heck were you thinking when you let Ron Radosh talk you into this nonsense?

And please don’t deny it because I know Radosh talked you into this. You have already admitted that it was Radosh who first called to alert you to the ‘mistakes’ in Diana West’s book and the folly of the initial review that was since removed, so anyone who can add 2+2 knows Radosh took you down this road in the first place.

That said, don’t you realize who you are in the conservative movement and on the anti communist right, as compared to Ronald Radosh?

Ron Radosh may be a big-shot in academic circles, but most grassroots conservatives couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup, not if there was a million dollars at stake, not if their lives depended on it, therefore Radosh has nothing to lose by alienating conservatives, he has nothing to lose by attacking Diana West just as he had nothing to lose when he attacked Stan Evans and Evans proceeded to clean his clock. Ultimately the only people Radosh is beholden too are the folks he encounters at think tanks and in the faculty lounge, that’s where his bread is buttered and none of this stuff alienates that crowd, and he knows it, so he risks absolutely nothing by going after West or Evans, viciously or otherwise.

You, on the other hand, are an icon in the movement with a direct connection to grassroots conservatives. Prior to this, had you asked the grassroots to contribute to this endeavor or that endeavor, the checks would come fast and furious because the grassroots trusted you and believed wholeheartedly that your causes were our causes. If you said ‘this is important too me’, most conservatives would automatically say, ‘then it must be important to all of us.’

Do you realize how rare that is and that its more precious than gold?

How many people in the movement have that kind of clout with the grassroots and why on earth would you do anything to damage that?

This is what I tried to explain to you weeks ago!

Heck, now you are calling West’s defenders an ‘army of kooks.’

Really David, is that where you want to take this now?

Think David, think long and hard about this, in fact I suggest you consider what your mentor, the late/great Reed Irvine, might have advised you here.

You knew Reed much better than I did, I know that you were like a son to Reed, I simply adored him from afar, but I find it hard to believe, knowing how much Reed cared about you, that he ever would have allowed the likes of Ron Radosh to talk you into this fools errand. I think he would have reminded you, right or wrong, Diana West is on our side and if you must correct some factual errors, do so in a constructive way, and say or do nothing to bring embarrassment on this woman, do not put her in a position where she can be abused and ridiculed by the left.

Just my opinion, for whatever its worth.

So what if Mitt Romney was right about everything

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There was an article yesterday under the heading, Was Mitt Romney Right about Everything? The point of it was that much of what we see today was foretold by Romney. But how little relevance that has! The real lesson is that his critics – and we are not talking about the American president who might occasionally by accident be right about something – but the American media who are the chorus of American politics. They call it fact checking but what it really amounts to is everything critical they can think of to say about the more conservative candidate. We now have our political systems across the west whose potential leaders are judged by people with about as much knowledge and depth as your Grade 7 teacher. These media critics would never have understood what Romney was saying, firstly because it would have required too much in-depth thought but secondly, and more importantly, because they would not have wanted to. Our civilisation is being led to its doom by the members of this chorus and there is not a thing in the world that can be done about it.

“The facts are that this was a pretty massive defeat”

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The quote is from Bob Hawke sums up how things turned out. There are fifteen seats in a Parliament of 150 that now have to be turned round to return Labor so it is far more than a comfortable win. But it is that the two party preferred ended up at the 53-47 that remains the problem. It is hard to conceive under what circumstances the 47% would not vote the Labor-Green Alliance if they still voted for them now. It is the majority party at all times except when it isn’t. But below 47% it will never go except under the most extraordinary circumstances, circumstances hard to imagine if these were not just the kinds of circumstances that would do it.

Like with Obama, the Labor-Green Alliance is a coalition of the envious and perpetually unsatisfied. Our new Prime Minister, on the other hand, offers a government of reasonable people who will manage our affairs in an orderly and efficient way. They will base their policies on a Judeo-Christian ethic that has dominated the politics of the West. They will provide considered judgments on the issues of the day after due deliberation. Their aim will be to maintain a prosperous and harmonious community. They will attend to the affairs of the nation in ways that reflect a prudential judgment about what can be done with the means we have available. They will not offer the sun, the moon and the stars. And that, my friends, is exactly where the problem lies.

It is the failure to promise the sun, moon and stars that will keep the other side ever unsatisfied. That is what they want, not all of them, of course, but a very large proportion. They don’t even care if it can be delivered. They don’t even care if they do more harm than good trying to do what cannot be done. They are not looking for prudence and common sense. They do not want a government of reasonable people acting in a reasonable way.

What they want from a government is to feel good about themselves. They want to show they are virtuous and moral, not by acting in a virtuous and moral way, but by inventing some impossible standard of righteousness so they can complain bitterly when it is not on offer. And even where parts of it might be delivered, they don’t care because the possible, the deliverable is precisely what they do not want. Anyone can do what can be done.

A government of the right cannot ignore them, but it should be aware that it can also never satisfy them. They will never acknowledge the good you have done because as far as they are concerned, good of itself can never be delivered by anyone who does not display one of the banners of the left. Without a socialist label and an anti-market mindset, it makes no difference because it is not the outcome they seek but the motive and the motive will never be pure of heart and morally correct if it does not come in the name of some version of socialist thought. I despair in having to share a political world with such people but there is no answer to their existence.

My hope is that our new government is a government that will last for at least six year and maybe nine. Heaven would be to repeat John Howard’s eleven. But that they will once again be succeeded by the same kind of visionless visionaries, morality-free moralists, as the kinds of people the Labor Party has been led by over the recent past is inevitable. One can only hope that in the meantime institutional structures can be put in place that will stop them from wrecking the place when their hands are once again on the levers of power as they will one day be again. But in the meantime, a return to some sort of calm and good sense.

Our own 47%

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John Hinderaker has a post, in relation to the United States, with the title, Who are the 47%? This is the puzzle he has had to address:

After nearly five years, it is hard to see how anyone could defend Obama’s record in office. And yet, in the Rasmussen Survey, over the month of August an average of 47% of voters–there’s that number again!–said they approve of Obama’s job performance. Obama’s approval rating has taken a a hit because of recent disasters, but only a very small one. It seems that nearly half the population will say they approve of him, no matter what.

So you tell me why we have that same 47% number here, with the election, the last time I saw a poll number, pitched at 53-47. Here is the Coalition list in its latest ad with my brief counterpoint that I hear all the time, and it doesn’t stop there:

The Carbon Tax (but what about Global Warming)
The Record Debt (but what about the importance of the Keynesian stimulus)
The Taxes (but what about the need for higher spending to fund government outlays)
The Job Losses (but we did better than anyone else after the GFC)
The Boats (but what about humanitarian aid)
The Chaos (but what about their wonderful concern for others)

And then there is this passage from The Economist editorial from 31 August discussed by Samuel J, that almost defies sense. If you are looking for an “instinctive fan of markets”, you could go through the entire Labor Party starting from the PM on down and find no one at all, but the writer is worried about Tony Abbott. This is the low point of an exceptionally low-grade editorial:

Of the country’s two main parties, the Liberal Party, now in opposition in a Liberal-National coalition, is the natural home of The Economist’s vote: a centre-right party with a tradition of being pro-business and against big government. But the coalition’s leader, Tony Abbott, does not seem an instinctive fan of markets, and one of the few key policies he has let on to possessing is a hugely expensive federal scheme for parental leave. That may help him persuade women voters that charges of misogyny are unfair, but he has not properly explained how he intends to pay for it. His social conservatism does not appeal to us: he opposes gay marriage and supports populist measures against Afghans, Sri Lankans, Vietnamese and others who have attempted to get from Indonesia into Australia in rickety craft that have drowned thousands in recent years. Indeed his promise to ‘turn back the boats’ seems to be his only foreign policy.

It’s a toss up which one of our local journos may have written it but I can think of at least a dozen for whom that would be a neat fit. And there will be three years of much the same from Saturday on.

I think of the Coalition as people who for the most part would have fit into Menzie’s cabinet but who are also living in the world you can see around you where the editorial in The Economist may well represent elite opinion, that is, the opinion of those who write for a living. Not going to be an easy three years by any means, not easy at all.

The Libs will win but not by enough

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53-47 does not give me much comfort. We are always some set of happenstance away from another bout of Labor. Kevin Rudd may have the most poisonous personality in the world but he might have pulled it off had he gone to an immediate election when he reclaimed the leadership. A very large proportion of the population want what Labor offers who now make up a near rock solid half of the voters in this country who cannot be turned off voting for these people no matter what. You do have to wonder what would cause them to vote non-Labor and non-Green. If they’re not turned off now I cannot think of a thing.

The democratic poison is now the media. It’s all very well for Labor to complain about the Murdoch press but however number of times I have turned to The Australian‘s editorial page to see one and sometimes two cabinet ministers putting their views across is however many times too many for me. Cabinet ministers have others ways to reach us that do not require them to block out comment from their critics.

But I did my duty today and read The Age editorial on why you should vote Labor and quite quite oddly their list is almost exactly the same as my list on why you shouldn’t. In order, they were the NBN, increases in the superannuation guarantee, Gonski, the carbon tax (which will be morphed into an ETS), boat people under the heading of a “humanitarian intake”, maintaining the $4.5 billion in foreign aid that is to be cut, the need to cut carbon emissions (“a fundamental economic imperative”), support for more public transport but not more roads and on it goes. A priority list that exactly matches the ALP agenda. Every one of which draws down on our productivity, every one a drain. None of it rebuilds our nation. All of it is an additional burden with no evidence of an intention to make the economic infrastructure any better able to support these increased demands.

Who doesn’t want more if you can afford it. But like the NBN, on the front page of today’s Australian, the shoddy work that’s been done will require a second go just to get it started. If this is the best they can do, governments should not be determining our economic priorities in this way. This is something so obviously available for market determination that it is pathetic to find the government leading the way with such a second rate scheme.

But further into the media, there is now The Economist‘s own editorial which came out on 31 August. Here is what it says about the Coalition:

Of the country’s two main parties, the Liberal Party, now in opposition in a Liberal-National coalition, is the natural home of The Economist’s vote: a centre-right party with a tradition of being pro-business and against big government. But the coalition’s leader, Tony Abbott, does not seem an instinctive fan of markets, and one of the few key policies he has let on to possessing is a hugely expensive federal scheme for parental leave. That may help him persuade women voters that charges of misogyny are unfair, but he has not properly explained how he intends to pay for it. His social conservatism does not appeal to us: he opposes gay marriage and supports populist measures against Afghans, Sri Lankans, Vietnamese and others who have attempted to get from Indonesia into Australia in rickety craft that have drowned thousands in recent years. Indeed his promise to “turn back the boats” seems to be his only foreign policy.

This is near idiotic if not actually disgusting. Rudd, who has slagged the “neo-liberal” persuasion and is a dirigiste, evident not just from the policies he has adopted but from his very words in his Monthly article back in 2009, has no market credibility. The notion that The Economist is centre-right would only be true if the centre is now deeply socialist. The actual issues that grab this writer are all of the things that turn us in Australia off. But that is where the media are today, whose views will be just as strongly rejected as will be the views of the Labor Party. Unfortunately, the ability for the media to moderate and mitigate the disgust with Labor will mean exactly that, that Labor will not get the bashing it actually deserves.

It’s easy to believe what everyone else believes – it’s harder when no one else believes the same

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There is this exchange with Ronald Coase:

Reason: You began teaching at the University of Virginia in the late 1950s, and by the early 1960s the administration there was not impressed with the work being done by yourself, Warren Nutter, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock- four of the most famous and influential economists in the post-war era, two of whom [Coase and Buchanan] went on to win Nobel prizes. Yet the University of Virginia was not happy with what was happening in their economics department.

Coase: They thought the work we were doing was disreputable. They thought of us as right- wing extremists. My wife was at a cocktail party and heard me described as someone to the right of the John Birch Society. There was a great antagonism in the ’50s and ’60s to anyone who saw any advantage in a market system or in a nonregulated or relatively economically free system.

Well, let me change that last sentence just a bit:

There was a great antagonism at the start of the twenty-first century to anyone who saw any advantage in a supply-side approach to the macroeconomy or in a nonregulated pre-Keynesian theory of the cycle based around Say’s Law.

Everyone is so smug and self-satisfied about knowing the world is round once everyone else believes it too. It’s not as easy when there is no one else around anywhere who believes the same things as you do.

My 500th post

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What a milestone! I began this on 23 September last year so I have hit 500 within the year and even though I abandon posting when I am overseas. What a colossal waste of time but it does provide the necessary outlet for saying things even if it goes largely into the ether with no one reading it – except for my son: hi there Joshi. I though 500 might coincide with the election but seems not. I might just note that our cat which we found last October as a three week old kitten in a car of ours we were about to sell also has 23 September as her official birthday. So lots going on, including my going into hospital today to have minor surgery on my blocked nose. The damn thing is going to cost over $1000 what with the surgeon’s fees, the anaesthetist and the hospital. Of course, I could wait another year and have it done for free and am very pleased to have the choice.