Monthly Archives: April 2014

The hits just keep on coming

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This is a modest blogsite which I do mostly for my own interest as a kind of intellectual diary but is not really done for others. I make no effort to let others know that I even do this which is why the explosion of hits this morning has taken my hit count to five times its previous max. This required a bit of investigation, and it has pleased me to the end of the earth that the reference came from Mark Steyn, bless him. The post was on Johnny, Get Your Gun-Free Zone, a reference to Dalton Trumbo’s eerie Johnny Got his Gun which I read in my bad old student days, and this is what Mark said on his link:

Yesterday the Supreme Court struck down key elements of US campaign-finance law. As a practical matter, I’m not a fan of “money in politics”, because, at least on the Republican side, with the “smart money” the money may be smart but the fellows who give it and spend it aren’t. However, in a country with a corrupt prosecutocracy and the most politicized judiciary in the developed world, a byzantine campaign-finance regime policed by a corrupt Justice Department is far worse than the problem it purports to solve. After a recent piece of mine, this Aussie blogger wrote that “a more self-conscious society would be embarrassed by what he is revealing“:

Although quite a bit of his post is about his own efforts in dealing with Michael Mann and the hockey stick, this story he tells about Dinesh D’Souza is incredible:

‘Take Dinesh D’Souza, one of those “political enemies” who’s managed to attract the attention of the feds. For a campaign finance “violation” of $15,000, he has already been handcuffed and perp-walked, bailed for half-a-million, lost his passport and freedom of movement, and requires permission from a judge even to travel from New York to Boston. This is disgraceful. Yet D’Souza now faces the choice between confessing to something or having his life ruined. This is a disgusting, capricious system of which Americans should be entirely ashamed.’

Even if “shame” were the right word for the emotion they should be feeling, they’re not ashamed because it is not how they see it themselves.

No liberals other than Alan Dershowitz have a thing to say about the D’Souza outrage. And nor do many conservatives. Because this “is not how they see themselves”. But civilized societies do not do this over a $15,000 political-donation overspend. This system is evil.

It was, indeed, the absence of any further comment by anyone else anywhere that made me lose my bearings about this whole issue. How could this be happening to someone as prominent and important as Dinesh D’Souza without anyone but Mark Steyn saying a word. The reality is that no one is now safe.

The GST will not be raised

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Good!

DEPUTY Liberal leader Julie Bishop has ruled out accepting Treasury advice to expand the GST or re-index the fuel excise, as former treasurer Chris Bowen claimed the department “never” advised him to increase the consumption tax.

Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson last night warned that Australia must be prepared for a recession in the next decade and cannot rely on rising income taxes to restore budget health.

Dr Parkinson, whose term as Treasury secretary has been extended by Tony Abbott for six months to the end of the year, also argued for increases in the GST to ease the burden on personal and company income taxes.

So the question remains, why is Martin Parkinson being kept around till November? Is there really no one the Coalition can think of to put in his place? It is a worry that Treasury, as in all departments, promote clones of the people at the top so where are they going to find someone who has a feel for the private sector. Still, Peter Costello was Treasurer as recently as 2007 so there must be some plant of his that has grown into the job and can be put into this slot

An Australian balanced budget amendment

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I may have been too hasty in judging our Treasury Secretary. My own fault for taking the word of the SMH. I, of course, remain adamantly against raising taxes to fix our current problems and repeat what I wrote yesterday:

Stop fixating on the deficit. Do the specific things that make the economy work better. Lower public spending. Reduce regulation. Fix up IR. Encourage private industry in every way you can.

But with my morning reading of the AFR there was an important detail left out of the SMH story. The AFR headline reads:

Push to lift GST, cut income tax

This is, of course, different and even if initially the size of the tax take stayed the same this would be a genuine benefit, both in terms of economic prosperity and broadening the tax base.

But the problem remains how you could make such a shift stick. If we raise the GST, it will stay raised forever. But if we cut income taxes, it is not likely at all that they would stay down. Governments are revenue hungry and very weak on keeping the lid on expenditure. There really needs to be something in place to ensure governments do not pocket one tax increase and then go back to where we were on the others.

An idea whose time may have come is the notion of a balanced budget constitutional restriction on governments. It appears that some kind of critical mass may have taken place in the United States over whether enough states have passed a balanced budget amendment that must lead to a constitutional convention which will determine whether or not the federal government of the United States must by constitutional restriction maintain a balanced budget. The article is titled, Balanced budget convention gains steam as congressman calls for official evaluation and this is how it begins:

Rep. Duncan Hunter on Tuesday asked Congress to evaluate whether enough states have officially called for a constitutional convention to propose a balanced budget amendment — marking the next step toward what could be an historic gathering.

Mr. Hunter, California Republican, said Congress should take stock of where things stand after Michigan last week approved an official call for a balanced budget amendment convention. According to some analysts, Michigan’s move makes it the 34th state to request a convention.

For something as unconventional as the notion of a balanced budget amendment to have passed at different times and in different states through 34 different state legislatures shows there is an understanding of the problems that runaway federal spending has caused. The multiplying economic problems that have befallen one economy after another due to the insane levels of public spending after the GFC are due almost in their entirety to the spending that followed the financial crisis and not to the crisis itself. But you almost have to be a non-economist even to notice. Economists still think that C+I+G provides them with some form of understanding about what to do in recessions, with no lessons learned from the past five years.

Since we will already be having a vote on amending the constitution at our own next election, I cannot see why we shouldn’t include one on a balanced budget as well. If we really want to fix our governments’ addition to higher spending we will have to tie their hands. If they want the money they will have to raise our taxes. Then we’ll see just a tad more care in what they do and how they spend.

Parkinsons’s disease

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If you keep a Keynesian as Treasury secretary you are going to get Keynesian advice. If you take advice from a Keynesian, you will never get the economy working properly again.

I have just seen this story at Andrew Bolt and it is a report of a speech given by the Treasury Secretary, Martin Parkinson, on what the government needs to do. Here is how it starts.

Treasury boss Martin Parkinson says the goods and services tax will have to be boosted or broadened if the budget is to have any hope of returning to surplus.

He must be from the same school of advisors who told the first President Bush to break his “no new taxes” promise. Paying for public service waste with higher tax revenues is both an economic loser and even worse, a political loser.

Stop fixating on the deficit. Do the specific things that make the economy work better. Lower public spending. Reduce regulation. Fix up IR. Encourage private industry in every way you can.

If you start raising taxes you will be out on your ear at the next election.

Are these really the people we trust to bring us the news?

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I get to the papers at the end of the day and when I saw the story that the “ABC’s Scott warns on News Corp’s position of power” on page 5 of today’s AFR, I went searching back through all of the other normal websites to see if anyone else had focused on such blithering idiocy but it seems not. It appears that whatever may be Mr Scott’s strengths, irony is not amongst them. The first two paras of the story:

ABC managing director Mark Scott hit out at Rupert and Lauchlan Murdoch’s News Corporation, arguing its newspapers have been never been [sic] more assertive in exercising their power through “aggressive editorial positioning”.

In a carefully worded attack, Mr Scott claimed News’s share of newspaper sales in Australian capital cities could rise from “70 per cent” to “80 per cent” and predicted that print titles which survive the digital revolution will be more powerful than ever.

Although this has been pointed out on endless occasions, he apparently still cannot see the difference between the number of newspapers and the number readers. For the kinds of things Scott would like to concentrate on, there is still The Green-Left Review which is another title although one without the circulation of The Australian say. Thus, two titles but a different number of readers. Should not be all that hard to see the difference. But then Mr Scott entered a zone of his own with the following:

He also predicted a rise in ideologically slanted news.

He is predicting this! This is the future someday but not yet! What a discerning mind he has! A national treasurer without a doubt. From someone at the ABC to say this is beyond the realms of normal out-to-lunchness and into some kind of stratospheric zone previously never encountered. But meanwhile back at the ABC ranch house:

Mr Scott defended the ABC’s role and hit back at allegations of a left-wing bias at the corporation as it braces for the Abbott government’s May budget.

One can only hope that the aftershocks he is bracing for will be even beyond anything he is capable of imagining today.

What it takes to make a culture a great culture

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The article by Charles Murray, at least according to its title, is about whether America is past it, but is in reality about what it takes to make a culture a great culture great in the sense of innovation and historically significant achievement.

Human achievement has clustered at particular times and places, including Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Sung China, and Western Europe of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. But why? What was special about those times and places? In the book’s final chapters, I laid out my best understanding of the environment within which great accomplishment occurs. . . .

To guide the discussion, I’ll provide a running synopsis, in language drawn from Human Accomplishment, of the core conditions that prevailed during the glorious periods of past achievement. I’ll focus in particular on science and technology, since these are the fields that preoccupy our contemporary debates over the present course and future prospects of American innovation.

Of course it is not just America’s prospects which are now being submerged but the prospects more or less across the globe. I will provide the five headings Murray uses but the whole article is worth the time to read:

1. WEALTH, CITIES, POLITICS

2. RAW MATERIALS

3. THE NEED FOR PURPOSE AND AUTONOMY

4. TRANSCENDENTAL GOODS

5. HOW AMERICA MATCHES UP

The US is being used as a case study. It was the most advanced of our various cultures but its rot is also happening more rapidly than anywhere else. Decline of the West is an old story but it takes a long time for the fall to complete itself given the heights from which it begins. Still declining and not a single reason anywhere on the horizon to think that any of it can be reversed.

Balanced budget amendment

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It is good to see that at least someone notices the problems with deficits and public spending even if economists are not amongst them. It appears that some kind of critical mass may have taken place in the United States over whether enough states have passed a balanced budget amendment that must lead to a constitutional convention which will determine whether or not the federal government of the United States must by constitutional law maintain a balanced budget. The article is titled, Balanced budget convention gains steam as congressman calls for official evaluation and this is how it begins:

Rep. Duncan Hunter on Tuesday asked Congress to evaluate whether enough states have officially called for a constitutional convention to propose a balanced budget amendment — marking the next step toward what could be an historic gathering.

Mr. Hunter, California Republican, said Congress should take stock of where things stand after Michigan last week approved an official call for a balanced budget amendment convention. According to some analysts, Michigan’s move makes it the 34th state to request a convention.

For something as unconventional as the notion of a balanced budget amendment to have passed at different times and in different states through 34 different legislatures shows there is an understanding of the problems that runaway federal spending has caused. The disasters that have befallen one economy after another due to the insane levels of public spending after the GFC are due almost in their entirety to the spending that followed the financial crisis and not to the crisis itself. But you almost have to be a non-economist even to notice. Economists still think that C+I+G provides them with some form of understanding about what to do in recessions, with no lessons learned from the past five years.

And since we will be having a vote on amending the constitution at our own next election, I cannot see why we shouldn’t include one on a balanced budget as well.

A clear case of racial vilification returns

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I should say straight out that I am a free speech absolutist. If we think governments have a role in licensing what we say to each other, there really is a slippery slope we have embarked upon. Given the world as it is, there is almost no danger of any kind for someone on the left to say whatever it is they want since none of the speech codes and rules of PC apply to them. Only to us on the right. But as dangerous as it often can be to say certain things, the government should not be in a position to restrict the kinds of things we say to each other.

The post found below was put up this morning and then taken down by me. I could see where the conversation was going and I was not interested in fostering a discussion over whether Australian women on an international scale are or are not slatterns. What I was really interested in was this example of a comment made about Australians that annoyed me not a little but whether it was protected free speech. It is not just minorities that can find themselves on the wrong end of comments that do insult whether or not that was the intention. Kathie Shaidle, writing on her blog in Toronto, wrote about her own relatively constrained sexual experience that “my ‘number’ (as the kids call it these days) is so low that in certain Australian provinces I would still be considered a virgin.” And in Toronto, where the Australian ex pat community is both small and non-violent, no one would really have been offended and therefore taken her to court never mind taken out a contract on her life. Try that remark with any one of a hundred-plus other national, racial or ethnic groups and we’ll see how you go.

But if it were any one of these hundred-plus national, racial or ethnic groups she would have been shunted before some tribunal who would adjudicate her right to have said what she said. And if they had decided that some group had been vilified, humiliated or even merely made uncomfortable, some penalty would have been assessed. So she chooses Australians as her target and really there was only me to get upset, hurt, disgusted, perturbed, shamed, since how many people in Australia read a Canadian blog?

But what’s the answer? How should Australians react to this slur on Australian women? Well, you know what. This is what we do. We get on with life. We don’t make a federal case out of it. We don’t go to some court for redress for our hurt feelings. We just get on with life, which is how it ought to be. Anyway, what follows is the post I put up this morning, now perhaps put in its proper context. Bear in mind that this was originally posted on the first of April.
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I am reluctant to bring this up, but if ever I have seen need for a Racial Discrimination Act this is it. Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian blogger, is entitled to advertise her book in any way she likes, but still there is a certain profiling that leaves me somewhat nonplussed and decidedly uncomfortable. This is from her advertising promotion for her new book, Confessions of a Failed Slut:

As the only female columnist at controversial, conservative Taki’s Magazine, Kathy Shaidle soon found herself covering an unlikely beat: sexuality.

“Unlikely” because as the married, 50-year-old Shaidle explains, “my ‘number’ (as the kids call it these days) is so low that in certain Australian provinces I would still be considered a virgin.”

I take it that one’s number is the number of sexual partners one has had. And, of course, to refer to our political divisions as “provinces” is quite provincial but what would you expect from a Canadian? But if I understand the comparison she is making, the implication is that Australians are so sexually out there that an Australian maid with as few liaisons as Kathy has had would not even think of herself as ever having had sex at all.

It’s not even that I am insulted by the implication, although I am, but my main curiosity is where did such an analogy come from? Do Australian girls in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter, have a reputation somewhere along these lines. I am thankfully well past the age and inclination of ever having to enter into the sexual wilderness of the present day to find out for myself, but there is nothing I know of that makes me think of our local maidens as anything other than innocent, modest and pure, or no less so than anyone else.

There was a joke when I was young about a particular ethic group which went, what’s a virgin in such-and-such country, and the answer was the fastest girl in Grade 2. But we used to tell ethnic jokes in those days and it was just a joke without much more than a bit of fun (except for people of that ethnic group who didn’t find it funny at all). But Australians? I must do a bit of research.

In the meantime, I think there needs to be a reference to our Human Rights Commission so that if Kathy ever sets foot on these shores down under that she will end up facing the same kind of tribunal faced by her Canadian mates Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

Posted on the first of April 2014.