Monthly Archives: April 2014

One learns from the past only what one already believes

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An article on the universalisation of Anne Frank as an example to us all of the dread of racism, not of what she actually represents which is the versatility of anti-semitism which can bring together so many diverse groups. This is the final para and the final sentences sum up all too accurately what has come before:

The most questionable connection of all, I find, is made between Anne Frank’s fate as a Jew and the need to tolerate each other in a diverse society. Sadly, modern anti-Semitism is not a negation of multi-culturalism, but in some respects a result of it. Perhaps the only occasion when the extreme right and extreme left sit down together in harmony is when they combine to descry the power of international Jewry (sometimes thinly disguised as ‘Zionism’). Here, diversity is not the solution, but part of the problem, because an extreme desire to respect it often means tolerating extreme intolerance. The exhibition could easily have ended with a poster containing portraits of the white extreme right-wing politician Jean Marie le Pen, the black comedian Dieudonne M’Bala M’Bala, an Iranian Mullahs, and assorted other extremists, with the question: “Which one of these is an anti-Semite?” Answer: “All of them.”

To survive life after Hockey, the ABC must change — if it can

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In actuality, the headline comes from the Canadian National Post and really reads, To survive life after hockey, the CBC must change — if it can. In this case, however, it is the rights to broadcast the hockey (I don’t have to tell you which kind, do I?) which is why they discuss “life after hockey”. But with some luck we will be saying the same in a few months’ time except with the capital “H”. And from Small Dead Animals there is this assessment from The Friends of the CBC which I hope to see the Friends of our local media commune repeating in the near future:

From the Friends of the CBC

The full brunt of Stephen Harper’s hostility to our CBC is now in full view.

Today is a very bad day for those of us – and that includes the vast majority of Canadians — who believe in and support public broadcasting.

Please stand with me now in support of public broadcasting and to hold Harper accountable for what he has done.

Earlier today, the CBC announced it faces a $130 million shortfall. This is largely the consequence of Harper’s punitive cuts to the CBC’s budget which as of April 1st are now fully phased in.

As a result, the creative energy of 657 CBC people who make programs will be lost to our national public broadcaster and the damage to every program CBC audiences see and hear will be obvious. Sadly, the layoffs will be concentrated among CBC’s younger, digitally savvy staff with less seniority.

Harper is attacking our CBC from the outside. But he also has an insidious strategy to undermine our national public broadcaster from within.

Seven years ago, Harper handed the reins to our most important cultural institution to someone with no senior level broadcasting or management experience whatsoever.

That lack of experience is now painfully clear to see as the CBC – knowing this day would come – has failed to prepare.

CBC’s President Hubert Lacroix owes his job to Harper and, as Harper’s man inside the CBC, appears to us to be doing the Prime Minister’s bidding.

Public broadcasting in Canada desperately needs your help right now.

Please help FRIENDS mount a major campaign to hold Harper accountable and to deter the next attack, which is looming on the horizon.

Harper’s fingerprints can also been seen [sic] in a Senate Committee study of “challenges facing the CBC” that has turned into a campaign to strip all public funding from the CBC and give that money to the private broadcasters.

This is nothing less than a trial balloon straight from Harper that must be shot down immediately. We need your help now to expose this chicanery to public scrutiny.

Just days ago, Senator Leo Housakos, the Conservative Vice-Chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Transport and Communications – a man with close ties to Prime Minister Harper – placed this agenda firmly on the Committee’s plate.

Here is the question Housakos asked at the Committee’s hearing on last Tuesday:

“Is there a way to take the money we spend right now on a broadcaster (the CBC) and re-route that money to give that $1 billion-plus dollars to filmmakers and producers of Canadian content so they can make quality content and films? Once they make that quality Canadian content, wouldn’t there be an easier appeal made to the private broadcasters to start running it more.”

That last suggestion, by the way, seems like a good one that should really be looked at.

The hardest quiz I ever saw

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The Guardian has set up a quiz based on a comparison of statements made, either by Patrick Bateman, the eponymous hero of American Psycho, and the other none other than our former Labor foreign minister, Bob Carr. As The Guardian explains:

One is Australia’s former foreign minister, the other a fictional investment banker and serial killer. But both share an obsessive attention to detail about diet, exercise and lifestyle. Can you tell who said what?

Here, as an example, is the first question in the quiz:

1. “I take a bran muffin, a decaffeinated herbal tea bag and a box of oat-bran cereal. A bowl of oat-bran cereal with wheatgerm and soy milk follows; another bottle of Evian water and a small cup of decaf tea after that.”

Bob            ο

Patrick      ο

You can do the rest of the test at the Guardian website online: Quotation quiz: Bob Carr or American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman – who said what?. But Bob, if The Guardian thinks you are a buffoon even with the Labor brand name, you are in some kind of new territory you have carved out for yourself.

[My thanks to JIK for sending it along.]

It’s absolutely and completely true, Tony

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This is special, found at Andrew Bolt. Government spending is always related to some social good which often seems to make it beyond criticism, and certainly there are vast numbers who will not listen. But the NBN is almost unto itself in its vast oceans of waste. Here is the Minister for Communications discussing said NBN with Tony Jones.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: No. Look, this – the NBN is not a commercial project. It is the most – the single most expensive, irrational project of the Labor government. It should never have been undertaken in the way it is. It is completely non-commercial.

TONY JONES: “So let’s keep it going,” says Malcolm Turnbull.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, no – well the problem that we’ve got – the problem that we’ve got is is that if we were to pull the pin on it completely, we would lose at least – we’d write off at least $15 billion, probably more and have nothing to show for it. So, Labor has left us with a shocking mess. The best thing we can do is to complete the project as quickly and cost effectively as possible.

TONY JONES: Alright. If you can …

MALCOLM TURNBULL: And that’s the – and that is the – you know, now, can I just say this to you?: the way Labor went about the NBN was unique in the world. No other country did anything as mad as this. And …

TONY JONES: Yes, but we have heard this argument before (inaudible) …

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Yeah, but you don’t care about it because it’s the taxpayers’ money. – that’s the thing.

TONY JONES: That’s not at all true.

Ah, Tony, I’m afraid that it is entirely true and it takes a special ability to be unable to see this expenditure for what it is.

Truth even unto its innermost parts

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This is the speech Ayaan Hirsi Ali did not give at Brandeis. She is not the bravest woman in the world, she is the bravest person. I wish I had one tenth the courage she has.

One year ago, the city and suburbs of Boston were still in mourning. Families who only weeks earlier had children and siblings to hug were left with only photographs and memories. Still others were hovering over bedsides, watching as young men, women, and children endured painful surgeries and permanent disfiguration. All because two brothers, radicalized by jihadist websites, decided to place homemade bombs in backpacks near the finish line of one of the most prominent events in American sports, the Boston Marathon.

All of you in the Class of 2014 will never forget that day and the days that followed. You will never forget when you heard the news, where you were, or what you were doing. And when you return here, 10, 15 or 25 years from now, you will be reminded of it. The bombs exploded just 10 miles from this campus.

I read an article recently that said many adults don’t remember much from before the age of 8. That means some of your earliest childhood memories may well be of that September morning simply known as “9/11.”

You deserve better memories than 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing. And you are not the only ones. In Syria, at least 120,000 people have been killed, not simply in battle, but in wholesale massacres, in a civil war that is increasingly waged across a sectarian divide. Violence is escalating in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Libya, in Egypt. And far more than was the case when you were born, organized violence in the world today is disproportionately concentrated in the Muslim world.

Another striking feature of the countries I have just named, and of the Middle East generally, is that violence against women is also increasing. In Saudi Arabia, there has been a noticeable rise in the practice of female genital mutilation. In Egypt, 99% of women report being sexually harassed and up to 80 sexual assaults occur in a single day.

Especially troubling is the way the status of women as second-class citizens is being cemented in legislation. In Iraq, a law is being proposed that lowers to 9 the legal age at which a girl can be forced into marriage. That same law would give a husband the right to deny his wife permission to leave the house.

Sadly, the list could go on. I hope I speak for many when I say that this is not the world that my generation meant to bequeath yours. When you were born, the West was jubilant, having defeated Soviet communism. An international coalition had forced Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. The next mission for American armed forces would be famine relief in my homeland of Somalia. There was no Department of Homeland Security, and few Americans talked about terrorism.

Two decades ago, not even the bleakest pessimist would have anticipated all that has gone wrong in the part of world where I grew up. After so many victories for feminism in the West, no one would have predicted that women’s basic human rights would actually be reduced in so many countries as the 20th century gave way to the 21st.

Today, however, I am going to predict a better future, because I believe that the pendulum has swung almost as far as it possibly can in the wrong direction.

When I see millions of women in Afghanistan defying threats from the Taliban and lining up to vote; when I see women in Saudi Arabia defying an absurd ban on female driving; and when I see Tunisian women celebrating the conviction of a group of policemen for a heinous gang rape, I feel more optimistic than I did a few years ago. The misnamed Arab Spring has been a revolution full of disappointments. But I believe it has created an opportunity for traditional forms of authority—including patriarchal authority—to be challenged, and even for the religious justifications for the oppression of women to be questioned.

Yet for that opportunity to be fulfilled, we in the West must provide the right kind of encouragement. Just as the city of Boston was once the cradle of a new ideal of liberty, we need to return to our roots by becoming once again a beacon of free thought and civility for the 21st century. When there is injustice, we need to speak out, not simply with condemnation, but with concrete actions.

One of the best places to do that is in our institutions of higher learning. We need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged. I’m used to being shouted down on campuses, so I am grateful for the opportunity to address you today. I do not expect all of you to agree with me, but I very much appreciate your willingness to listen.

I stand before you as someone who is fighting for women’s and girls’ basic rights globally. And I stand before you as someone who is not afraid to ask difficult questions about the role of religion in that fight.

The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to students, faculty, nonbelievers and people of faith when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect.

So I ask: Is the concept of holy war compatible with our ideal of religious toleration? Is it blasphemy—punishable by death—to question the applicability of certain seventh-century doctrines to our own era? Both Christianity and Judaism have had their eras of reform. I would argue that the time has come for a Muslim Reformation.

Is such an argument inadmissible? It surely should not be at a university that was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, at a time when many American universities still imposed quotas on Jews.

The motto of Brandeis University is “Truth even unto its innermost parts.” That is my motto too. For it is only through truth, unsparing truth, that your generation can hope to do better than mine in the struggle for peace, freedom and equality of the sexes.

Where are the critics of Keynes?

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I put the following post up at the History of Economics list the other day because it exactly reflects a problem I am having.

I am doing some work on Keynesian economics in the period following the Global Financial Crisis. It just may be that I do not know where to look but I am having trouble finding articles of any kind criticising Keynesian models and the theory behind public sector spending and the stimulus. Can anyone help?

And as an additional query, although Mises, Hayek and Friedman are seen as “anti-Keynesian” whatever that may mean, again there seems to be a dearth of articles by them critical of Keynesian theory as it relates to public sector spending and the stimulus. So again, can anyone help?

Responses both online and offline would be greatly appreciated.

There are other economic traditions, from Austrian to Marxist, but each keeps to itself without bothering to actually criticise explicitly what they think is wrong with Keynesian analysis. And for many of the traditions, public spending in recessions is the least of their aims in changing the nature of policy based on the theories proposed. And while there have been a number of useful suggestions that have been sent to me offline as well as discussed online, there is no great cache of anti-Keynesian material anywhere that anyone has been able to unearth.

It would be one thing if the stimulus had been a no-questions-asked success, or even a mid-level so-so success, but instead it has been the most abject failure with every economy struggling to untrack from the debt and deficits the stimulus has caused. So where are the critics?

Ageist, racist, sexist

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Having been brooding on this for two weeks now, I feel I have no choice but to refer to the Human Rights Commission an egregious and unacceptable case of ageist, racist and sexist public comment, found on the ABC of all places. As an elderly, Caucasian male, I am disturbed that someone is able to make these kinds of comments in the public space without the Human Rights Commission coming down on them like a tonne of bricks. This is taken from the Q&A transcript dated 31st of March 2014, and as will be seen, Ms Eltahawy is already being prosecuted in the United States for infringing the free speech of others.

MONA ELTAHAWY: Well, you’re talking to someone who got arrested for spray-painting over a racist and bigoted ad in the New York subway and I’m going to stand trial very soon in New York soon for this and I – so I have many thoughts on this. First of all, in the United States, the people who go on the most about freedom of expression and it’s my right to say this and my right to say that are usually old, rich, white men who parade under the term libertarian. And what it ends up basically meaning is: I have the right to be a racist and sexist shit and I’m protected by the first amendment. And it’s utterly ridiculous. Because when you look – if you look at this ad that I sprayed over – now, I’m – I love the first amendment. As a US citizen, because I am Egyptian-American, I love the first amendment. I love that it protects freedom of expression and freedom of belief. But here is the thing: if a racist, bigoted ad is protected as political speech, which it was – the New York subway didn’t want this very racist and bigoted ad but a judge deemed it protected political speech?

TONY JONES: What did it say? Are you allowed to tell us?

MONA ELTAHAWY: I can tell you because it – I mean it’s outrageous. It said: “In the war between the civilised man and the savage, always choose the civilised man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” And I thought: are you fucking kidding me? In my subway? How can you put this up? And the subway – the subway authorities did not want this ad, because they said it was going to incite people and so they took it to the hate group and it’s been classified as a hate group by the – it’s the Southern Law Centre, right, Ken? Is that what they’re called?

KENNETH ROTH: Southern Poverty Law Centre.

MONA ELTAHAWY: That’s it. They have deemed it a hate group. They have deep pockets, these libertarian, you know, old rich white men. And they took it to a judge and the judge deemed it protected political speech. I am fine with protected political speech but surely it should be my right to protest racism and bigotry? I am the one who got arrested. When you have an ad like that, you know, can you imagine, under any circumstances, in the New York subway that you would have an ad like that that either talked about the black community, the Jewish community, the gay community? Absolutely not. The reason that I protested it was because I believe, as a US citizen who has lived in the US for the past – I now live in Egypt but I was in the US for 13 years, Muslims are fair game. So let’s talk about who the subjects or, like, who were the people targeted by this: it’s my right to say and do whatever I want?

Of course, you can vilify and demean old, white males all you like and Gillian Triggs won’t turn a hair. We are not amongst her protected groups. As she said, the law should “retain the impact on the victim’s group as a relevant consideration when assessing whether something is ‘reasonably likely’ to intimidate or vilify.” I suspect nothing that could ever be said to me or about me would lead to a moment’s concern since she has made her judgment and that is that. But also from this same interview, there was this:

Accusing the Coalition of hypocrisy, Professor Triggs said: “One of the disturbing aspects of the freedoms debate … is the inconsistency in approach.

“Those who emphasise individual freedoms have remained curiously silent in the face of the mandatory detention currently of about 4700 asylum seekers in remote detention centres in Australia and Christmas Island.”

Obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer since she confuses the right to free speech with saying nothing at all. But even worse cannot see that having manadatory detention for illegal migrants is not a human rights issue. You do not have a right to enter another country illegally when you have already landed in an intervening port, i.e. Indonesia. And if they really were in fear of their lives, Manus Island, Indonesia or Cambodia would each work just as well.

Andrew Bolt on “The Left is the natural home of the bigot”

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No one wants to be on the wrong end of a racist rant but more importantly, since so much of modern day racism comes from minorities who would like to see their bigotry protected, the only way through this mess is to allow free speech and discussion. If the decency or the Australian public will no longer protect you, then nothing else will either. This is from Andrew Bolt in a post he titled, Carr is a warning to Jews: the Left is the natural home of the bigot.

Many of Australia’s most prominent Jews face a terrible reality that I’ve warned about for almost a decade: the natural home of the anti-Jewish bigot is now the Left. Too many prominent Jewish intellectuals here have pampered their enemy.

ABC chairman Jim Spigelman concedes the point:

Spigelman: My father was a bit of a lefty from his Polish days because Jews in Poland tended to be on the left ‘cause all the anti-Semites were then on the right. That’s exactly the reverse today.

Throsby: Is it?

And, right on time, former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr takes the stage.

Carr is not an anti-Semite, but his views on the Jewish lobby are absurd and dangerously close to an anti-Semitic trope:

BOB CARR: … And what I’ve done is to spell out how the extremely conservative instincts of the pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne was exercised through the then-Prime Minister’s office…. I found it very frustrating that we couldn’t issue, for example, a routine expression of concern about the spread of Israeli settlements on the West Bank….

SARAH FERGUSON: You’re saying that the Melbourne Jewish lobby had a direct impact on foreign policy as it was operated from inside Julia Gillard’s cabinet?

BOB CARR: Yeah, I would call it the Israeli lobby – I think that’s important. But certainly they enjoyed extraordinary influence. I had to resist it and my book tells the story of that resistance coming to a climax when there was a dispute on the floor of caucus about my recommendation that we don’t block the Palestinian bid for increased non-state status at the United Nations.

SARAH FERGUSON: They’re still a very small group of people. How do you account for them wielding so much power?

BOB CARR: I think party donations and a program of giving trips to MPs and journalists to Israel. But that’s not to condemn them. I mean, other interest groups do the same thing. But it needs to be highlighted because I think it reached a very unhealthy level. I think the great mistake of the pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne is to express an extreme right-wing Israeli view rather than a more tolerant liberal Israeli view, and in addition to that, to seek to win on everything, to block the Foreign Minister of Australia through their influence with the Prime Minister’s office, from even making the most routine criticism of Israeli settlement policy using the kind of language that a Conservative Foreign secretary from the UK would use in a comparable statement at the same time.

Carr is not wrong to say there is a Jewish lobby, or Israel lobby, just as there are other ethnic and religious lobby groups, including Aboriginal ones. The Jewish lobby is more organised that most, and on certain issues speaks with more unity than most, too.

This can come with a risk, as we now see in the debate over the Abbott Government’s plans to reform the Racial Discrimination Act to allow more free speech. Jewish community leaders have been the strongest opponents of this change, and base much of their argument on an issue of particular concern to Jews: that such a change would permit Holocaust denial. I suspect most non-Jews also loathe Holocaust deniers but would not be so quick to say they should be gagged by law – and that the rest of us should be gagged from arguing other propositions as a consequence. The danger here is that Jewish leaders are seen to be arguing for an illiberal ban to the benefit of their own community, but at the cost of the wider one. Such tribalism comes at a risk in a multi-ethnic, multi-faith nation.

I think it is fair to make these points. But Bob Carr’s comments go further – dangerously further.

He is singling out the “Israel lobby” as having had a more “unhealthy” influence than other such groups in that it had “influence with the Prime Minister’s office” under Labor, seeking “to block the Foreign Minister of Australia” from aiding Palestinian interests. This influence, claims Carr, is exercised through “party donations and a program of giving trips to MPs and journalists to Israel”, trips which indeed both Gillard and I have received.

Here is where Carr oversteps.

Carr completely ignores the reality that many supporters of Israel in the case he raises have not been bought, bribed or otherwise influenced by “unhealthy” lobbying, but have reached their opinion by judging on the merits of the argument. They see a democracy threatened by terrorism, an open society challenged by a closed one, and they decide accordingly. Yet this difference of opinion is portrayed by Carr as just the evil product of “unhealthy” Jewish influence peddling.

It is a joke to believe Gillard as prime minister could be further influenced by the offer of trips from Melbourne Jews. Politicians and journalists are also offered trips to the Muslim Middle East, yet Carr does not declare those “unhealthy”.

And how much influence did those Melbourne Jews have really? Carr boasts that he actually defeated Gillard on the issue by leading a caucus revolt against Gillard’s position.

That raises Carr’s dangerous double standards – to decry a “unhealthy” a Jewish influence he defeated while saying nothing about the more troubling Muslim influence to which he surrendered – and Labor with him.

Labor politicians have done dangerous favors for Islamist extremists like Sheik Hilali, revoking moves to throw him out in exchange for votes, but Carr has not criticised that as “unhealthy”. Labor made a politician of a Muslim ethnic boss and supporter of the Syrian dictator in exchange for votes, but Carr did not say this was “unhealthy”. Nor did Carr say it was “unhealthy” when even Liberal Prime Minister John Howard appointed a Muslim Community Reference Group to advise him – one third of whose members were supporters of the pro-terrorist Hezbollah.

Carr did not denounce this “unhealthy” influence, either:

Australia’s senior Islamic cleric threatened to withdraw community support for federal Labor in Western Sydney if union leader Paul Howes replaced Bob Carr in the Senate, a leaked email reveals.

The email, written on behalf of the Grand Mufti of Australia, Dr Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, by his chief political adviser, accused Mr Howes of a “blind bias for Israel” and said that if he was appointed to the Senate, community support for Labor that was mustered for the federal election would be withdrawn.

The email was sent to MPs and ­officials on September 9… Mr Howes, the national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union, withdrew from the contest …

Note that the Mufti has shown support for Hamas.

But let’s talk about the truly unhealthy influence in the very case Carr discusses – a bid by Palestinians for greater recognition.

Labor ditched Israel in that instance not so much out of principle but out of Labor self-interest. As former Labor speech-writer Troy Bramston wrote at the time after talking to the players, Labor feared the influence of the Muslim lobby and the votes it could muster in key Sydney marginal seats:

And, critically, there is the growing Muslim and Christian make-up of several key western Sydney Labor seats, which have exposed MPs to different points of view on the Middle East.

Some sections of the party suggest Victorian Labor is too close to the Israel lobby and does not fully understand the underlying changes in Sydney’s outer suburbs.

Did Carr denounce that “unhealthy” influence? No. He in fact was among the first to give in to it:

BUT of all reasons given, the worst and most repeated was as the Daily Telegraph said: “NSW Right MPs … were more concerned a no vote at the UN would offend Middle East and Muslim communities in their fragile southwest Sydney seats.” The Sydney Morning Herald heard the same: “Many MPs in western Sydney, who are already fearful of losing their seats, are coming under pressure from constituents with a Middle East background.”…

Carr reportedly stressed “the electoral problems in Sydney” to Gillard, and The Australian reported the “demographically challenged” Water Minister, Tony Burke, insisted on not rejecting the Palestinian resolution.

Burke’s “demographic challenge” is that the proportion of Muslim voters in Watson, his Sydney seat, has rocketed to an astonishing 20 per cent… In fact, of the 20 seats with the most Muslim voters, Labor holds all but one.

That’s why Carr’s attack on the Jewish lobby is so sinister. He exaggerates its power, falsely assumes those who agree with the lobby have been bought, and meanwhile is silent on the rise of more troubling lobby that has influenced Labor – the Muslim lobby, which includes supporters of extremists.

Something sick is at work in the Left. It’s not just Jews who should be alarmed.

UPDATE

What a disgraceful breach of confidence and a shameless betrayal:

Bob Carr has published private text messages between himself and Julia Gillard to reveal the “extraordinary” level of influence the pro-Israel lobby had on the former prime minister’s office.

In a remarkable disclosure of private conversations, Mr Carr said he chose to publish the text messages in his book – Diary of a Foreign Minister – without getting Ms Gillard’s permission, because to do so was in the national interest.

Carr wasn’t the foreign minister of Australia, seeking to advance the nation’s interests. It seems to me he was merely an embedded journalist, seeking material to advance his own.

The exchange:

Reproducing private text messages, Mr Carr suggests Ms Gillard’s support of Israel was so immovable that she would not even allow him to change Australia’s vote on what he considered to be a minor UN motion.

“Julia – motion on Lebanon oil spill raises no Palestinian or Israel security issues. In that context I gave my commitment to Lebanon,” Mr Carr writes in a text message.

“No reason has been given to me to change,” Ms Gillard reportedly replies.

“Julia – not so simple,” Mr Carr responds. “I as Foreign Minister gave my word. I was entitled to because it had nothing to do with Palestinian status or security of Israel.”

Ms Gillard shuts him down in a final terse message: “Bob… my jurisdiction on UN resolutions isn’t confined to ones on Palestine and Israel.”

UPDATE

Mark Liebler responds, during an aggressive interview with Tony Jones:

Just unpick for a moment what he’s saying. He’s talking about the Jewish lobby, he’s talking about a difference of opinion between him and the Prime Minister. Why can’t they have a difference of opinion on a matter related to Israeli policy? No, if there’s a difference of opinion, the Prime Minister has to be controlled or influenced by someone. So the Prime Minister has to be wrong ‘cause she’s controlled by the Jewish lobby. How does the Jewish lobby control the Prime Minister? Through donations to the ALP and sending people to Israel. I mean, give me a break. I mean, would anyone sort of seriously accept that? I mean, I’m very flattered.

By the way, the Jewish lobby he’s referring to is the Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. He’s referred to it in The Australian newspaper, so he’s referring to me directly. But, you know, as flattered as I am, this is really a figment of his imagination. I mean, Julia Gillard is an independent-thinking woman. She can come to her own conclusions without being influenced by the Jewish lobby and I suppose the Jewish lobby, according to Bob, … has the current Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, under its influence. After all, he’s adopted a very pro-Israel attitude.

The one man global human rights defendant

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Mark Steyn has a look at our troubled dealings with free speech and doesn’t like what he sees.

No two situations are identical, but Australia’s Section 18 is very roughly analogous to Canada’s Section 13, with Andrew Bolt and The Herald Sun playing the roles of me and Maclean’s magazine and various aboriginal persons in the parts of Khurrum Awan and the Canadian Islamic Congress Sock Puppets. Thanks to Brian Storseth’s private member’s bill, Section 13 was final repealed by the Canadian Parliament last year, after a somewhat protracted path to Royal Assent. By contrast, it’s not clear our Aussie cousins’ efforts to repeal Section 18 will get out of the starting gate.

Steyn is so unique that it is only he who has been able to see through to the core issues and then set himself against the gale force winds that come his way. Here the legal precedent went the other way and was not appealed beyond the initial court decision. But let’s face it. No one wants to take these issues on; we all have other things to do with our lives and no one is made of money. So this may be more than a bit of whimsy.

I hope the Section 18 campaign picks up a bit of steam soon. But I did take the precaution of threatening The Australian‘s readers:

I might have to fly in and do it myself.

I mean that. We’re currently mapping out plans for my Aussie tour later this year. In ideal circumstances, I’d fly in in time to attend the Governor General’s Section 18 Repeal cocktail party at Government House. But I have the glum feeling that the case for free speech might still be far from won.

Meanwhile on Steyn’s other adventures in the world of law, there is the latest episode of Mark v Mann, Mann of course being the man with the hockey stick who sued Steyn for slander. The only trouble is actually trying to get the case before a court. This is where the process is now at after more than a year of Mannoeuvering:

On Saturday, I noted that Mann had yet to join me in filing an objection to National Review‘s Motion to Stay Discovery. He did so today:

Defendant Mark Steyn opted not to appeal the denial of the motions to dismiss the amended complaint. Rather, Mr. Steyn has filed an answer and counterclaims and has expressed his intention to move forward with discovery, regardless of the fact that his co-defendants have opted to appeal.

Indeed, I have. So what’s Dr Mann’s position? Well, it’s a two-part response.

On the one hand, he’s in favor of his proceeding with discovery against me:

The fact that Mr. Steyn has not appealed the denial of the motions to dismiss counsels further against a discovery stay. Mr. Steyn, like Dr. Mann, has made clear his desire to have this Court resolve this lawsuit and to move forward with discovery immediately. As such, there is no reason for this Court to delay discovery further.

On the other hand, he’s totally opposed to my proceeding with discovery against him:

While Dr. Mann agrees with Mr. Steyn that discovery should move forward on Dr. Mann’s claims, discovery cannot move forward on Mr. Steyn’s counterclaims.

Oh, my. You do surprise me.

The Greatest Economist of the Millennium

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The following article on the greatest economist of the millennium was published on January 4, 2000 as one of the last of my regular columns in the Canberra Times. It was a follow up to the article on the ten most influential economists of the century that had been published two weeks before.

The Greatest Economist of the Millennium

To choose the greatest economist of the past thousand years to some extent invites the question whether the study of economics has even existed over that span of time.

Economic questions have certainly been matters of the deepest consideration for as long as humans have had commercial relations. Hammurabi’s Code, the first recorded attempt at a written system of law, sought to fix prices. Aristotle’s arguments against the charging of interest remained an obstacle to economic development for more than fifteen hundred years.

But the actual attempt to isolate an economic system from within the on-going blur of events, and then make judgements about what ought to be done, is probably no older than the sixteenth century. It was not until then that the first pamphleteers attempted to understand the structure of the economies in which they lived and to persuade governments about the policies they ought to adopt. These were the ancestors of the economists of today.

Who then was the greatest economist of the millennium? In my view it was John Stuart Mill (1806-73) whose great work, his Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, was first published in 1848. There were to be seven editions during Mill’s life and it was used as a text, with few concerns about its antiquity, well into the twentieth century.

The year of publication of Mill’s Principles is one of the most significant in world history. It was the year of European revolution and in that year and for that reason Karl Marx (who is definitely not the runner up) published his Communist Manifesto. The contrasting visions of Marx and Mill were to reverberate down the succeeding years in a battle for the allegiance of the whole of the human race, a battle which has not ended even to this day.

To Marx the unit of analysis was the economic class to which one belonged. To Mill, what mattered was the individual.

The world of Marx was a world of class conflict in which the capitalist class, the owners of the means of production, exploited those who laboured but earned barely enough to keep alive.

The world as seen by Mill was strangely similar to the one inhabited by Marx, but with a recognition that an economic system based on personal liberty was one in which even those ground down by the burdens of poverty could have their material wellbeing vastly improved and their political freedoms at the same time preserved.

In one of the most remarkable passages ever written, listen to Mill’s judgement on whether the world as he knew it, if it could not be made to change, was preferable to a system in which all property was communally held.

If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour … if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance.

The twentieth century has been a war of ideologies in which the rights of the individual have been crushed time and again by the dictates of the state. Both the Nazis and the Communist dictatorships ruthlessly suppressed human rights in the name of a higher truth.

The cold war was fought over little more than the structure of the economic system. Massive damage was inflicted on large swaths of the world’s political landscape due to the attempts made to turn collectivist economic theories into a living reality.

Indeed, much of what is now called the third world continues to live in desperate poverty because of the introduction of central direction into their economies, an approach to solving the economic problem which has never yet worked in practice and whose continuation will guarantee poverty for so long as such attempts persist.

There is, of course, much we have learned since his time that makes Mill an imperfect guide to the operation of the economic system, although there are many worse being written even now. His theory of value, to which he believed nothing need ever be added, is the most famous instance of Mill having been superseded by the subsequent work of a later generation of economists.

Yet at the start of the new millennium, we live in the world bequeathed to us by Mill. The politics of On Liberty united with the basic propositions of his economics of limited government, free contract and individual initiative provide the blueprint for a future filled with hope and the promise of a lasting prosperity.