Monthly Archives: June 2015

A low information voter is someone who gets their news from the mainstream media

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First this just the other day:

The New York Times published an article Friday morning showing that Marco Rubio and his wife have – gasp – incurred 17 traffic citations over the past 18 years.

And then this from 2007:

The Times studiously ignored the scofflaw behavior of Barack Obama, who ignored 15 outstanding parking tickets until his run for the presidency forced him to clean up his record.

The left counts on their voters being uninformed not just of the news but of the way they are being taken for patsies. Does the NYT not perfectly well understand what it is doing? Since it does, it assumes, and probably correctly, that the readers of their paper just don’t want to know the facts. They are happy to print the American version of Pravda and let their readers remain wilfully ignorant of the inconvenience of knowing that there may be something radically wrong with their own side of politics and the people for whom they vote.

Recognising the left for what it is

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Some thoughts by Laura Rosen Cohen on why the left manages to get it together and the right does not. I am only going to repeat the first two because I think her third point is irrelevant if not actually wrong.

1) It’s about the end result and the power: Leftists are very serious about power and therefore have more solidarity. It’s all about the power. They may loathe each other personally, but the goal is power so they protect each other, till death do they part. There is no moral, financial, philosophical ‘outrage’ so large as to distract from the goal of complete power There is unity in their evil. They are ruthlessly loyal to one another as long as the party line is followed.

2) Corruption pays, lies and morally reprehensible behaviour is encouraged, tolerated and unpunished: There is very little amoral behaviour that gets punished nowadays. It emanates from the White House and that is the example being set by the former bastion of freedom and morality. Even when the disgusting stories of corruption, lies and tyranny get out in the open, most people heave a collective yawn. The individuals who do try to make a difference are punished with lawsuits, intimidation and personal threats to their safety. They are bankrupted, slandered and libeled. Not a single element of their personal or professional life goes unchecked and unexposed. Organs of democratic states are employed against them in order to destroy them.

We make a big deal out of the supposed hypocrisy of the left but there is almost none at all. If they believed what they said themselves, you could call it that. But when Julia was setting up her slush fund, or Hillary selling to the highest bidder, they were not unaware that these kinds of things must never see the light of day since they are indefensible. They did what they did to give themselves money and power, and they say what they say to protect their positions. They throw a few crumbs at the voting mob paid for invariably by others, but there is not the slightest chance that they would ever live amongst them, and they certainly do not like them. The elites hang out with others of the same class, while many of the fools who support them find their lives enveloped in hopelessness and misery.

On the right the major problem is that we do not protect our own. We allow the left to run over our people with lies and slander without rising up to defend and attack in turn. A strategy of defence is needed. Where I think it must begin is with a refusal to brand leftist actions as hypocrisy but as out and out falsehood intended to deceive. If you think that Bill Shorten or Julian Gillard or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama care a fig for you or anything about you then you are a sucker. They are leading you around by your envy of the success others have had. If by now you haven’t worked out that the left is overwhelmingly led by people who are only in it for themselves, then you are merely deceiving yourself. But in your ignorance, you are not only making things worse for me, you are making things worse for yourself as well.

Real wages are, virtually to their full extent, the product of past labor

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Folks, I know no modern economist would think this way, but what worries me more is that I doubt they would even know what he is saying. This is from the great F.W. Taussig in his 1896 Wages and Capital: an Examination of the Wages Fund Doctrine. Moreover, it is from pages 26-27 of a 325-page book where he seeks to dispose of one matter right from the start before getting into any of the more difficult questions. This is mere trivia:

We are now in a position to give an answer to one part of the question with which this chapter opened; whether wages are or are not paid from present or current product. . . . Wages are certainly not paid from the product of present labor; they are paid from the product of past labor. . . . Real wages are, virtually to their full extent, the product of past labor. At this moment, or within a few days, the last touches toward completion have indeed been given to the commodities now being enjoyed. But the great bulk of the labor whose product all of us, whether laborers or idlers, now enjoy, was done in the past.

Our ability to produce is based on our capital base. If we fritter it away on the various value-losing activities that Labor has been indulging in, falling living standards is what you must expect. Labor has been progressively lowering our living standards by allowing our capital base to erode. This from today’s Australian: Joe Hockey’s sales pitch fails to reach the retail counter.

The worst retail sales report in ­almost a year and the biggest foreign trade deficit on record have signalled that Australia’s superior economic performance may be short-lived.

Retail comes at the end of a very long process that modern economic theory not just ignores but virtually denies in everything it preaches. I’m afraid that economic theory will have to go back to the nineteenth century to pick up the lost threads that Keynesian economics has trampled on.

Auditioning for the ABC

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She is obviously auditioning for a gig at the ABC when she is finally relieved of her present post:

The head of Australia’s human rights watchdog has linked Indon­esia’s refusal to negotiate on the death penalty for executed Bali drug-smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran to the Abbott government’s policy of turning back the boats.

Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs said nobody could disagree with the need to stop refugees drowning at sea. “Boats have got to stop,” she said. “But have we thought about what the consequences are of pushing people back to our neighbour Indonesia? Is it any wonder that Indonesia will not engage with us on other issues that we care about, like the death penalty?”

It is more than their drowning that had to stop although that’s part of it. Their coming was what had to stop, as every country in the region has now made clear. The story provides a brief reminder of just how out of it she is:

The Weekend Australian revealed on Saturday that she had ordered $5.9 million in compensation payments in just three years, making up more than half of all recommended payouts since 1996. This included a call for $350,000 in compensation for John Basikbasik, who was detained for eight years after serving a seven-year jail sentence for bashing his pregnant wife to death.

I know there are serious issues around but when human rights are put in the hands of people who don’t seem to understand them bad things do flow.

If they’re so smart why are they socialists?

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I know what he means, but I wish the Treasurer would save the hubris for more certain times. Still, he does have a point:

Treasurer Joe Hockey has ramped up his criticism of “complete fools” doubting the strength of the nation’s economy as he declared Australia was a “long way off” from a housing bubble burst.

Mr Hockey yesterday slammed economic doomsday sayers as “clowns” after soaring resource exports and the housing boom delivered the best GDP growth in a year.

Asked today who the clowns and fools were, Mr Hockey replied: “You can just have a look around, just have a look around.

A market economy just runs itself if you let it. There’s not nothing to do, but there’s a lot less than our textbooks and regulators seem to understand. We are far from out of troubled times, but the trends so far look good.

AND NOW THAT I HAVE READ THE AFR: They are a bit more negative, like a whole lot more. I’m not a fan of GDP for many reasons – see Chapter 9 – but the adjustment process towards lower real incomes is part of what is required.

“Australia’s living standards are falling on a sustained basis for the first time in 50 years – this is not a short-term trend,” says Andrew Charlton . . . an ex-advisor to former prime minister Kevin Rudd.

How he knows what will turn into a long-term trend from a data point or two I will leave to him. But anyone who thought there would be no aftershocks following the stimulus and the NBN and all of the other useless value-negative projects backed by Labor should really keep their opinions to themselves.

It’s hockey night in Melbourne – this Friday

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canada usa hockey

I last saw a Canada-USA hockey game around a quarter of a century ago in Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. Now another this Friday here at Rod Laver in Melbourne. There is no game like hockey. I think Aussie Rules is tougher and all forms of rugby more dangerous. But there is nothing like the grace and flow of hockey. The game I saw those many years ago ended with the classic score 6-5 for us, the same score in the eighth game of the first ever Canada-Russia series where it was our pros against their pretend amateurs. They won the first game, we won the second and then we tied the third and they won the fourth. We then we lost the first in Moscow and had to win three straight, on the road, to win the series. I saw none of the games because I was hitchhiking through Europe at the time. And only found the result as we arrived in Paris late at night, trying to work out what happened from this typically sociological discussion on the pages of Le Monde that went on for two full columns until there was this vague mention of the result in a three-line last sentence that my French was only barely good enough for me to work out that the Canadians had won.

HOW IT ENDED: All for fun but I could see it was a real game, although the fight was completely staged. C’mon, it’s forty guys vacationing together in Australia, sharing the same hotels and breakfasts. But the game was the real thing, although with a complete absence of body contact. Yet there we were, with a minute and a half to go, 7-6 Canada, before two goals into the empty net left it 9-6. But there was a real fight in the stands with a chap wearing a shirt with a Russian name in Cyrillic script on the back taken out bleeding from the nose and head. Except for him, a nice time was had by all.

“We’re racists and that’s why PM won’t allow same-sex marriage”

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From Cut & Paste today:

Playing identity politics is easier than thinking. RMIT University’s Steve Kates, Catallaxy, yesterday:

What genuine problem has a party of the left actually solved anytime in the last forty years? Parties of the left never solve any actual problems, they only make existing problems worse and create new ones along the way … But the parties of the left are good at finding solutions for things that are not a problem at all … There are lots of such fake problems invented by the left and promoted through the media … to become controversial issues in immediate need of solution. Conservatives then have the choice of doing nothing since they think there is nothing to be done, and therefore end up hammered by the press and the left for not taking such problems seriously. Or they do take these up and legitimise the issue.

QED. Policy analyst Miriam Lyons, the ABC’s Q&A, Monday:

There was a time in Australian history where Irish Australians were extremely discriminated against.

Or … Q from Q&A:

My question is for Anthony Albanese. What do you say of recent criticism of the influence of Joe de Bruyn’s union, the SDA, over your party? How can we trust you when you say that you support marriage equality yet you have allowed a super union to bully you into stalling it for a significant amount of time?

Let alone this Q&A leap of logic:

Since the state of New York legalised gay marriage, it has brought $259 million to their economy. So I ask the panel this: if Tony Abbott is all for small business, then why doesn’t he agree with the 72 per cent of Australians who agree with legalising gay marriage and also bring these added funds to our kind of failing economy?

That kid will go places. Parliamentary secretary Scott Ryan, AM Agenda, Sky News, yesterday:

I didn’t watch Q&A. I find my weeks start better when I don’t watch it.

What in economics is known as Say’s Law

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There I was just yesterday quoting Kevin Williamson in discussing Economics is quite simple and straightforward when today I find that he has now gone all the way and invoked Say’s Law.

Dollars have value because of the things for which we can trade them: Picasso paintings (or, ideally, paintings by some superior artist), coffee, cotton, cheeseburgers, sofa beds . . . checks, chickens, or pesos. This is an aspect of what in economics is known as Say’s Law, which holds that goods are paid for in goods — i.e., that we manufacture widgets or grow tomatoes or write novels because we wish to consume shoes and poached salmon and Buicks. The dollar or the euro is just a way to avoid the difficulties of trading a truckload of chickens (or a convoy of them) for Les Femmes d’Alger.

Say’s Law really wouldn’t be adding much of a point at all if the only thing it said was that spending is based on selling. What makes it important in a world of Keynesian economics is that it points out that demand which is not based on having produced and sold, ultimately leads to a fall in output and employment. Where spending is greater than available supply, the economy finds there are more than 100 units of output being bought for ever 100 units of output having been produced. It takes a while for the problems to show up, but eventually they must. When those down the expenditure track try to spend the dollars they receive, they find they cannot buy as much as they thought they would. Some firms therefore cannot pay all their bills and the economy slips a bit further back. The wheels of the economy do not mesh, but given the way we teach macro, hardly one in a million can understand why. Indeed, the worse our economies perform, it is often the very businesses being cheated by these deficits which ask governments for even more of the same to get them out of the problems that the first set of deficits had caused.

Modern economics is based on the fallacy that demand can be manufactured before there is production to match the spending. You can see that such policies do not work by the dismal state of those economies which tried deficit spending to generate growth. You just cannot find these policy failures explained in any of our economics texts, other than, of course, my own.

[My thanks to Dimitri for sending the link along.]