Monthly Archives: April 2014

The most influential economists of the twentieth century

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The following article on the ten most important economists of the twentieth century was published in the Canberra Times on December 21, 1999 just as the century was coming to an end. Economics being ultimately about influencing the political decision making process, the criterion used to frame the list was based on their influence over policy. It was no more than a personal statement but oddly or not, it was the only such list published at the time. So here they are, my list of the Ten Most Influential Economists of the Twentieth Century. And if you find this of interest, you might then have a look at my note on the greatest economist of the milennium.

Who were the century’s most important economists? The following presents my own selection of the ten economists of the past hundred years who have had the greatest influence on policy.

1. John Maynard Keynes is far and away this century’s most influential economist, but in saying this it should not be thought I believe that influence as having been for the good. Until the publication of his General Theory in 1936 it was well understood that public spending dragged an economy down rather than propping it up. It will be well into the next century before his destructive influence will have finally disappeared.

2. Friedrich von Hayek is the economist of choice for those nations who have lived under communism these past fifty years. His name today is virtually unknown in the West, but within those economies trying to resurrect free markets, his is the guidance most frequently sought. His Road to Serfdom is beloved by anyone who treasures political freedom.

3. Ludwig von Mises took the fight up to the socialist dogmas of the early twentieth century and showed on paper that no economy could ever solve the problem of allocating resources without a price mechanism, free markets and private property. Who doesn’t know it now? He knew it eighty years ago.

4. Milton Friedman has been the single most important advocate of free markets in the late twentieth century. He was also instrumental in turning the attention of governments away from Keynesian policies, which had created massive worldwide inflation, towards the need for monetary disciplines and a balanced budget. Much of what sounds like the mantra of the economics profession today Friedman had advocated almost on his own in the early years of the post-War period.

5. Arthur Pigou is in many ways my favourite. A conscientious objector during World War I, he nevertheless spent his summers as an ambulance driver on the Western Front. He also wrote the Economics of Welfare which provided the basic framework in which to consider how best to deal with harmful side effects (“externalities”) to the production process. Most of the solutions to greenhouse problems developed by economists today are based on his original work.

6. Paul Samuelson makes the list twice over. His Foundations of Economic Analysis changed the study of economics from a subject based on words into a discipline where without mathematical ability one is entirely lost. But even had he not written his Foundations, his first year text, simply titled Economics, is easily the most influential of our time, having educated three generations in Keynesian sophistries whose baneful effects are indelibly imprinted on the profession.

7. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote popular works on economics which had a massive influence in their time. His basic line was that wage and price controls are an absolute necessity if an economy is to be run at full employment with low inflation. More countries than one ended up adopting such controls whose only effects were to prolong inflation and lower employment. His books still make entertaining reading; just don’t follow the advice.

8. John Hicks was a prolific writer on a wide variety of subjects but his lasting claim to fame is based on a 1937 article, “Mr Keynes and the Classics”, in which he developed an apparatus taught to every aspiring economist. These IS-LM curves show how playing around with aggregate demand can supposedly affect the level of economic activity. It is still how almost every economist is taught to think.

9. Bill Phillips invented the Phillips curve, a device for relating the growth in prices to the growth in unemployment. Debates over policy stemming from this original model have been legion. To this day the Phillips curve sits at the core of discussions over the proper conduct of monetary and interest rate policies.

10. Robert Lucas is famed for developing the theory of “rational expectations” which explains how anticipation of the effects of government policy can prevent that policy from doing what it was intended to do. It is one of the standard ways used to explain why Keynesian policies never work in practice.

It has been a long century and these have been the economists whose names have mattered. Aside from ethnic and religious conflict, no controversies are as intense as those over how economies work. Wars and revolutions have been fought over nothing other than the architecture of the economic system. Passionate differences over economic matters are never ending.

Economists attempt to provide satisfying answers to the age old questions of how to organise production, who should receive how much of what is produced, and what should be the basis of this division.

A century from now the names will be different, but what may be said with certainty is this: the issues will be much the same as those we are dealing with today.

An errand taken by a fool

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Jonathan Tobin writes about Why Did Kerry Lie About Israeli Blame? Why do any of the lying swindlers in the Obama administration lie about everything? Here are the issues as set out by Tobin:

Kerry knows very well that the negotiations were doomed once the Palestinians refused to sign on to the framework for future talks he suggested even though it centered them on the 1967 lines that they demand as the basis for borders. Why? Because Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas wouldn’t say the two little words —“Jewish state”—that would make it clear he intended to end the conflict. Since the talks began last year after Abbas insisted on the release of terrorist murderers in order to get them back to the table, the Palestinians haven’t budged an inch on a single issue.

Thus, to blame the collapse on the decision to build apartments in Gilo—a 40-year-old Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem that would not change hands even in the event a peace treaty were ever signed and where Israel has never promised to stop building—is, to put it mildly, a mendacious effort to shift blame away from the side that seized the first pretext to flee talks onto the one that has made concessions in order to get the Palestinians to sit at the table. But why would Kerry utter such a blatant falsehood about the process he has championed?

The answer is simple. Kerry doesn’t want to blame the Palestinians for walking out because to do so would be a tacit admission that his critics were right when they suggested last year that he was embarking on a fool’s errand.

Meanwhile the Palestinians remain the second most prosperous people in the Middle East, supported to the nines by the UN, while places like Egypt, Libya and Syria fall to bits. A few more fool’s errands he and his President can run if that is their wont.

UPDATE: This is from the Republican Jewish Coalition in the American Congress:

After almost nine months of negotiations, during which Israel took concrete steps to advance the process, including the release of 78 prisoners – many of them terrorists – it is outrageous for Secretary Kerry to blame the Jewish state for the apparent failure of the diplomatic process undertaken at his insistence.

The simple fact is that while Israel has supported the peace talks, the Palestinians have consistently undercut them. Most recently, Israel has pledged to continue talks past Kerry’s original deadline and the Palestinian side has refused to do the same.

Secretary Kerry’s testimony today is a troubling consequence of the Obama administration’s assumption that increasing the pressure on Israel will bring the Palestinians back to a process they have repeatedly rejected.

Even here the statement pretends to see goodwill and genuine good intentions in Obama and Kerry. Only a complete moron would think that the side that has no pressure on it to concede a thing will concede a thing. Everyone knows there is no intention to reach an agreement, and this is an intention that is as firmly held by Obama and Kerry as it is by Abbas. The only intention is to weaken Israel. And let me finally ask, where is the Democrat Jewish Coalition? You don’t really have to ask, do you?

FURTHER UPDATE: And now there’s this, Israel ‘Deeply Disappointed’ by Kerry’s Remarks on Peace Talks.

In an unusually pointed rebuke of its ally, the United States, Israel said on Wednesday that it was “deeply disappointed” by Secretary of State John Kerry’s remarks a day earlier that appeared to lay primary blame on Israel for the crisis in the American-brokered Middle East peace talks.

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute that has brought the talks to the brink of collapse appeared to be developing into an open row between Israel and the United States, even as Israeli and Palestinian negotiators were said to be planning a third meeting here this week with American mediators to try to resolve the crisis.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Mr. Kerry said that both the Israeli and Palestinian sides bore responsibility for “unhelpful” actions, but that the precipitating event of the impasse was Israel’s announcement of 700 new housing units for Jewish settlement in an area of Jerusalem across the 1967 lines, in territory the Palestinians claim for a future state.

“Poof, that was sort of the moment,” Mr. Kerry said. “We find ourselves where we are.”

In what is being referred to here as “the poof speech,” Mr. Kerry laid out the chain of events that led to the verge of a breakdown.

Clearly stung by Mr. Kerry’s version and his focus on the settlement issue, Israel countered on Wednesday that it was the Palestinians who had “violated their fundamental commitments” by applying last week to join 15 international conventions and treaties.

Mr. Kerry’s remarks “will both hurt the negotiations and harden Palestinian positions,” said an official in the office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The thing here is that Israel has basically said that Kerry is incompetent at his job and has washed its hands of the whole “peace process”. This is quite a stand to have taken and suggests Israel is looking at other options than having to depend on the United States.

The future of Mannkind

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Having watched Mark Steyn pick apart the human rights industry in Canada was merely a prelude to his evisceration of the American injustice system as a whole. Steyn has decided to go it alone in his suit and counter-suit with Michael Mann, and they are at the “discovery” process, or would be if anyone allowed the case to go forward. So where are we up to now:

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.

About parasites and other vermin

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Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

I came upon two articles one after the other about start-up companies in San Francisco which I discussed here. These start-ups create enormous wealth for those who build them, but they also create enormous resentment amongst those who envy others for their success. I have therefore written a post that may be found at Quadrant Online that deals with the resentment such success has created. This was the flyer distributed in the neighbourhood of one of the truly successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that started me thinking about these things [very bad language alert!]:

kevin-rose-flier

The entire article can be found here under the title, The Enemies of those who Create.

The Venezuelan experiment – proving what everyone already knew

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The Venezuelan experience is an example endlessly repeated about how the politics of resentment, the natural home for the socialist ethos, leads to ruin for everyone within such communities, aside from its political leaders or their friends. And so Venezuela, which is an example in so many different ways, but here we are looking only at price control:

Two years before his death, Hugo Chavez tried to repeal the law of supply and demand. . . . Chavez despised the law because he believed it robbed the poor and unjustly profited producers. . . .

In its place, he persuaded the Venezuelan legislature to enact the 2011 Law on Fair Costs and Prices, a price-setting mechanism to ensure greater social justice. A newly created National Superintendency of Fair Costs and Prices was empowered to establish fair prices at both the wholesale and retail levels. More than 500,000 price edicts have been issued. Companies that violate these price controls are subject to fines, seizures and expropriation.

And the results. This is from The Guardian who may report but being good leftists probably don’t really understand what’s gone wrong:

“Battling food shortages, the Venezuelan government is rolling out a new ID system that is either a grocery loyalty card with extra muscle or the most dramatic step yet towards rationing in Venezuela, depending on who is describing it. . . .

Registration begins at more than 100 government-run supermarkets across the country on Tuesday and working-class shoppers – who sometimes endure hours-long queues at the stores to buy cut-price groceries – are welcoming the plan.

“The rich people have things all hoarded away, and they pull the strings,” said Juan Rodriguez, who waited two hours to enter the government-run Abastos Bicentenario supermarket near downtown Caracas on Monday, then waited three hours more to check out….

Patrons will register with their fingerprints, and the new ID card will be linked to a computer system that monitors purchases. The food minister, Félix Osorio, said it will sound an alarm when it detects suspicious purchasing patterns, barring people from buying the same goods every day.

Re The Guardian story, what is most revealing of all is its last para:

Defenders of Venezuela’s socialist government say price controls imposed by the late President Hugo Chávez help poor people lead more dignified lives, and the United Nations has recognised Venezuela’s success in eradicating hunger.

Do you think the idiot who wrote this story and ended it this way has learned a thing. He lives somewhere else but in spite of the evidence he has reported still thinks what Chavez did helped the poor. With morons like this around, the next Venezuela is just around the corner.

The will to create meets the will to destroy

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Being on the left is in part a fashion statement for our elites so it’s interesting to see how this is coming back to bite amongst the techno geeks in San Francisco. This really is a story about the cultural mayhem overtaking the US where once upon a time achievement was actually admired. Kevin Rose has been a successful funder of start-ups so now he finds that Anti-Tech Protesters Are Telling Kevin Rose’s Neighbors That He’s A “Parasite”. Here’s the leaflet being distributed outside his home:

kevin-rose-flier

Kevin is, of course, amongst the one percent, the point-one percent, but that is the nature of achievement. It brings its rewards and if he is going to be drinking coffee someone else will have to serve it to him. What Kevin Rose does is demonstrate most definitively that some people are actually better at things, smarter, more gifted, hard working. Others are less so of each and possibly all of these and therefore do not receive the material and social rewards that seem to accrue to Kevin. Envy, resentment, dissatisfaction all accrue instead and make up the majority of the Obama constituency. You can tell these people all you like that their own good fortune relative to every past civilisation is a result of the efforts of Kevin Rose and those like him but they could not care less. They wish only to destroy not what they cannot have themselves, but what they cannot be themselves. It is an existential recognition that others are better than them and therefore the promise of fairness and equality is exposed, so far as they are concerned, in all its emptiness. These are people of the deepest hatreds and nothing can be done to make those hatreds go away.

And as for the material rewards of success, it is likely we don’t know the half of it. This article on Mike Judge, a pillar of the Silicon Valley establishment, who worked his way up through hard work, endeavour mixed with an inordinate amount of genius, shows what extraordinary rewards there are for success. The article begins:

The Goolybib party is well under way, and you can smell the self-congratulatory excess. The company, which says it “disrupts digital media” to “make the world a better place,” has just been purchased by Google for $200 million, and its cofounders are celebrating their good fortune with an extravagant bash in a sleek modern mansion. The place is packed with signifiers of contemporary success: reflecting pools, floor-to-ceiling windows, white leather sofas. Venture capitalists work the crowd, chatting up billionaires. Guys in hoodies are slurping liquid shrimp from test tubes (it’s a Wylie Dufresne concoction, $200 a quart). A dozen twentysomething dudes play Battlefield 4 on an ultrathin 55-inch flatscreen. Kid Rock gyrates in a fog-machine cloud atop an elaborately lit stage in the backyard.

Someone has got to mix and serve the liquid shrimps in those test tubes if these others are to drink $200 a quart concoctions. Such is the unfairness of life. But beneath it all, there is the creative will that underpins the entrepreneurial drive and talents that set those who make it apart from those who don’t, mixed of course, with a heavy dose of luck. Judge was the inventor of Beavis and Butthead and much else. His life was the farthest thing imaginable from having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It is instead about the genius and insight that allowed someone who was just no one at all to make himself into what he is today. The final paras of an article you should read in full.

Judge himself has become something of a startup CEO. But Judge does it his way. His indie production company, Ternion Pictures, which he cofounded with Altschuler and Krinsky, runs lean. When Judge made Extract for a modest $8 million—one-fifth the budget of a typical Hollywood comedy—he raised private financing so he could retain more control.

“I started out making these little cartoons, working on my own, and suddenly I’m in charge of 60 people,” Judge says. “I don’t like telling people what to do. But I do really like building something and making it work.”

He likes to build and make things work. Others, as Kevin Rose has discovered, like only to destroy.

Apocalyptic idiocy

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This comes from the advertising notice for the latest Spectator which is an interesting summary of where we now are. For myself, I remain the deepest kind of sceptic, having cut my teeth on predictions of famine, resource depletion and ecological disasters for over fifty years, not a single one of which has ever turned out to be remotely true. Both of The Spectator authors unfortunately accept there may be something to this global warming creed. Seems a weak position from which to start but maybe when in the grip of such delusion, that is the only available course.

The hype around Monday’s IPCC global warming report was the usual alarmist nonsense. The real story lay in the small print. In our cover piece this week, Matt Ridley has done the digging and found that the authors of the UN climate consensus have now accepted what Nigel Lawson has argued for years: that we may not be able to do much about the planet warming, but we can adapt to it. The apocalyptic scenarios need never emerge, as long as we take the right action.

Meanwhile, Bjørn Lomborg exposes the true green scandal. When Rowan Williams talks about climate change, his assumption is that it hurts the poorest hardest. There’s much truth in that, says Bjørn, but what the alarmists don’t realise (or don’t want to accept) is that green policies inflict far more harm on the poor than the global warming they are trying to avert. Access to cheap and plentiful electricity is one of the most effective ways to escape poverty; green energy is neither cheap nor plentiful.

But for more of this apocalyptic doomsaying, let me take you to a book written exactly a century ago, and to its introduction dated 21 March 1914. Reading the economics of the past is beneficial for a hundred reasons (see my Defending the History of Economic Thought) but one of the most important is that it takes you out of the time in which you live and allows you to look at things in a wholly different way. This is from the preface of a book titled, The Nation’s Wealth which was written by L.G. Chiozza Money:

That the conditions of British wealth are static is a common and dangerous assumption. That assumption is challenged in this volume. The British national economy is revealed as a thing of uncertain equilibrium, the future of which it may be beyond the power of the British people to determine. From a careful examination of the facts of the case, the conclusion emerges that as modern British wealth depends upon a peculiarly good supply of coal, and as the duration of the Coal Age is uncertain, it is the supreme duty to regard the present as a preparation, during which it is necessary to train our people, and so to mould our social and industrial institutions, that the nation may be fortified for that scientific future as to which, while are many uncertainties, there is one absolute certainty – that Coal will pass. [My bolding]

Those absolute certainties! Six months later, his world would be plunged into a different kind of disequilibrium but in the meantime the absolute certainty was that coal would run out and soon. A century later, coal has not run out, there is something like 500 years’ worth of the stuff in easy reach, never mind all of the other forms of carbon-based energy. The effort is therefore being made to rid us of carbon-based energy through another kind of apocalyptic vision, one about as accurate as the one held by L.G. Money a century ago.

So if there is one absolute certainty it is this: these same apocalyptic the-end-is-nigh types will be forecasting the end a hundred years from now just as they will be there two hundred years from now and so on ad nauseam ad infinitum.

Gnostic Noah

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Noah, at least as a film, was an incoherent mash, or so I thought. But here is an analysis that provides an actually insightful look at the film and what it was about that goes off in a direction I would have neither the knowledge nor the background ever to have recognised. This is what good criticism is about. You learn something you didn’t know before and some work of art is interpreted in a way that takes you closer to what the artist had intended. The review is titled Sympathy for the Devil. This is the core insight:

In our day and age we are so living in the leftover atmosphere of Christendom that when somebody says they want to do “Noah,” everybody assumes they mean a rendition of the Bible story. That isn’t what Aronofsky had in mind at all. I’m sure he was only too happy to let his studio go right on assuming that, since if they knew what he was really up to they never would have allowed him to make the movie.

Let’s go back to our luminescent first parents. I recognized the motif instantly as one common to the ancient religion of Gnosticism. Here’s a 2nd century A.D. description about what a sect called the Ophites believed:

“Adam and Eve formerly had light, luminous, and so to speak spiritual bodies, as they had been fashioned. But when they came here, the bodies became dark, fat, and idle.” –Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, I, 30.9

It occurred to me that a mystical tradition more closely related to Judaism, called Kabbalah (which the singer Madonna made popular a decade ago or so), surely would have held a similar view, since it is essentially a form of Jewish Gnosticism. I dusted off (No, really: I had to dust it) my copy of Adolphe Franck’s 19th century work, The Kabbalah, and quickly confirmed my suspicions:

“Before they were beguiled by the subtleness of the serpent, Adam and Eve were not only exempt from the need of a body, but did not even have a body—that is to say, they were not of the earth.”

Franck quotes from the Zohar, one of Kabbalah’s sacred texts:

“When our forefather Adam inhabited the Garden of Eden, he was clothed, as all are in heaven, with a garment made of the higher light. When he was driven from the Garden of Eden and was compelled to submit to the needs of this world, what happened? God, the Scriptures tell us, made Adam and his wife tunics of skin and clothed them; for before this they had tunics of light, of that higher light used in Eden…”

And just one more bit but if these things interest you, read the full text:

The world of Aronofsky’s Noah is a thoroughly Gnostic one: a graded universe of “higher” and “lower.” The “spiritual” is good, and way, way, way “up there” where the ineffable, unspeaking god dwells, and the “material” is bad, and way, way down here where our spirits are encased in material flesh. This is not only true of the fallen sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, but of fallen angels, who are explicitly depicted as being spirits trapped inside a material “body” of cooled molten lava.

Admittedly, they make pretty nifty movie characters, but they’re also notorious in Gnostic speculation. Gnostics call them Archons, lesser divine beings or angels who aid “The Creator” in forming the visible universe. And Kabbalah has a pantheon of angelic beings of its own all up and down the ladder of “divine being.” And fallen angels are never totally fallen in this brand of mysticism. To quote the Zohar again, a central Kabbalah text: “All things of which this world consists, the spirit as well as the body, will return to the principle and the root from which they came.” Funny. That’s exactly what happens to Aronofsky’s Lava Monsters. They redeem themselves, shed their outer material skin, and fly back to the heavens. Incidentally, I noticed that in the film, as the family is traveling through a desolate wasteland, Shem asks his father: “Is this a Zohar mine?” Yep. That’s the name of Kabbalah’s sacred text.

I disliked the film because it did not conform to the biblical text either in relation to the story or the message. But as it turns out there is a lot more not to like than one would have ever known. The message of the film will pass everyone’s understanding other than the vegan nonsense so it is really not much more than an empty frame with no more influence on our culture than any other science fiction pot boiler. It is not its influence on anything that is troubling but as one further sign of our already existing decadence that makes the film notable. And I doubt that had those who financed the film known its true underlying message that it would have led them to hesitate for a second. Undermining the religious teachings of the West is the temper of the times in which we live which is a large part of the reason why our civilisation is in such peril.

Keynes and the coming Chinese recession

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I realise I haven’t been haranguing you about the menace of Keynesian economics for a while so thought I’d remind you of its enduring horrors as there is unanimous agreement that Australia has to get its fiscal house in order. The origins of that disorder are, of course, in the Keynesian policies put in place during the GFC. Just hearing about Kevin Rudd’s 48-hour decision process for the pink batt adventure is a reminder of just how useless, in terms of productivity and real growth, almost all government spending is. A perfect paradigm example. Past the first ten percent, government spending is unproductive whatever other benefits there may or may not be.

As for a recantation from the economics community, not so much as a word. You do have to wonder if they are ever going to get it right. And if they don’t get it right, how policy is ever going to get it right. The latest episode of wrongheaded analysis shows up on the ABC with this story not about Australia but about China. Apparently the problem with the Chinese economy is debt:

In recent times, the boom has been sustained by an explosion in lending by banks and so-called “shadow banks”. If the current scale of lending proves to be unsustainable, could that end the boom and result in China becoming the next country to succumb to the impact of unproductive debt? [my bolding]

Ah, “unproductive debt”! What, pray tell, is that? It is, in fact, exactly what every pre-Keynesian classical economist warned against. It’s spending on non-value-adding forms of production, the usual object of government spending in virtually every one of its forms. There it is, the problem right before their eyes but invisible all the same. Whether one thinks of it in money terms, so that debt is taken on for forms of production which ultimately do not earn sufficient revenue to repay what is owed, or it is thought of it as using up productive resources in ways which do not replace the capital that has gone into that particular form of production, one way or the other the economy is going backwards and not ahead. Keynesian economics is poison but who’s to know? This is what the Chinese did:

The program clearly lays out how the Chinese leadership responded to the prospect of a global financial crisis and possibility of a world-wide depression. The response focused on a spending and investment program carried out on a scale never seen before in human history. Over the past five years, a new skyscraper has been built every five days in China – along with 30 new airports and 26,000 miles of motorways.

Well there was certainly an enormous quantum of resources used up which, incidentally, also happens in highly productive investments. In this case, however, there are the office building, there are the roads, there are the airports, but none of them will generate the revenue to repay their costs. A Keynesian program to the back teeth with predictable results, or at least predictable if you start with Say’s Law. Starting from Keynes it is all a mystery with no explanation. And where do they think it will end up:

Interviewing key players including former American Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former Chairman of the Financial Services Authority Lord Adair Turner and Charlene Chu, a leading Chinese banking analyst, reporter Robert Peston reveals how China’s extraordinary spending has left the country with levels of debt that many believe can only result in an economic crash with untold consequences for the world – particularly resource-driven economies like Australia.

If you thought the last five years were bad, apparently the next five will be even worse. Meantime, ending the reign of Keynes and return to classical economic theory would be a start in even understanding what’s going on never mind actually getting our economies untracked.

OK you cowards at the ABC – why don’t you invite him?

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Now here’s a Q&A that would get a record audience. As Andrew Bolt has asked, Margaret, why didn’t you invite me?. The invitations that were extended come 58 seconds into the presentation, saving you more than an hour of tedium. Here is Andrew’s comment:

Margaret Simons, head of Melbourne University’s journalism course, introduces ABC boss Mark Scott by noting that News Corp people had declined to debate him.

Funny, I didn’t get an invitation. Nor did Simons mention I’d invited Scott to put his case on The Bolt Report and he has refused.

Now this would be a heavyweight division contest. My suspicion, though, on why Andrew wasn’t invited is because they know that one-on-one and over the course of an hour he would absolutely take Scott to the cleaners even with Tony Jones in the chair.