This time surely Julia Gillard has gone too far:
Denigration of religious beliefs is never acceptable.
Surely attacking the beliefs of atheists and agnostics should be recognised as unacceptable in a free society. Their right to be heard should never be in doubt.
As part of my course in economics, I teach some of the history of the subject and have noticed something of a trend over the past few years in the kinds of background knowledge I can assume they will have. There was a time that I could count on at least some of my students having heard of and known something about Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Almost all will have heard of Karl Marx but none will have heard of Thomas Malthus or David Ricardo. John Maynard Keynes lots of them already have heard of but never Mises and Hayek. Thus, when I teach students the economics of the free market, much of it is completely new to them. Very few have much of an idea how our economy works, and many (most?) believe that it is the government that causes economic activity to happen.
John Howard has now entered into the debate over how our history is taught. There is a front page story in The Australian on Howard’s critique of the Australian history high school curriculum. Here is some of what it says in this article:
The former prime minister said last night that ‘our Western heritage appears to be so conspicuously absent from the history curriculum reflects a growing retreat from self-belief in Western civilisation’. In a swingeing critique of the government’s national high school curriculum, which is being introduced at various levels in the states through to 2014, Mr Howard said a lack of proper perspective in history teaching would ‘deny future generations a real understanding of what has made us as a nation’.
‘The curriculum does not properly reflect the undoubted fact that Australia is part of Western civilisation; in the process, it further marginalises the historic influence of the Judeo-Christian ethic in shaping Australian society and virtually purges British history from any meaningful role,’ he said in the inaugural Sir Paul Hasluck lecture at the University of Western Australia. . . .
‘It is a fact that the modern Australia is a product of Western civilisation; the Judeo-Christian influence is a reality and the British inheritance self evident. We cannot properly understand our nation’s history without fully recognising that this is the case,’ Mr Howard said.
‘The laudable goals of enhancing the teaching of indigenous and Asian history could have been fully achieved by the curriculum’s authors without relegating or virtually eliminating the study of influences vital to a proper understanding of who we are as a people and where we came from.
‘That our Western heritage appears to be so conspicuously absent from the history curriculum reflects a growing retreat from self-belief in Western civilisation.
‘It is as if the West must always play the villain simply because it has tended to enjoy more power and economic success than other parts of the world since 1500.
‘Magna Carta; parliamentary democracy, the language we speak – which, need I remind you, is now the lingua franca of Asia; much of the literature we imbibe; a free and irreverent media; our relatively civil system of political discourse; the rule of law; and trial by jury . . . these are all owed in one form or another to the British.’
This is a sorry situation if it’s true. We are one of the most successful societies on earth, a magnet for others from everywhere, but if our students are not taught about that great Western tradition which we are all the beneficiaries of it will not last for very long.
It makes me actually angry that the media are such fools that for reasons that remain entirely invisible they are willing to lie, distort and deceive, not just to keep the worst president in more than a century in office, but also to keep someone who might well turn out to be the best president over the century to come out of office. On this matter, let me take you to an article in today Financial Review that outlines Mitt Romney’s concept of how to deal with foreign aid. Here are the direct quotes from a speech given yesterday about the program he has in mind:
Working with the private sector, the program will identify the barriers to investment and trade and entrepreneurialism in developing nations. In exchange for removing those barriers and opening their markets to US investment and trade, developing nations will receive US assistance packages focused on developing the institutions of liberty, the rule of law and property rights.
The aim of a much larger share of our aid must be the promotion of work and the fostering of free enterprise. Nothing we can do as a nation will change lives and nations more effectively and permanently than sharing the insight that lies at the foundation of America’s own economy – and that is that free people pursuing happiness in their own ways build a strong and prosperous nation.
What an extraordinary vision! A system of foreign aid that will work, that does not empower a bureaucracy but which makes private individuals pursuing their own interests the centrepiece of America’s assistance program. No doubt there are endless obstacles, but if implemented this would work and transform the remaining dead spots of the world’s economies even if this was taken up in only a minor way at first. Not everywhere is going to turn into Chile, Thailand or South Korea but this is the only way in which they could.
Mitt Romney has the potential to become the greatest president of the twenty-first century but first he has to be elected in November. How bizarre that it still remains a close run thing which can only be because of the impaired moral vision of so many of our graduates of higher education and the inanities they have passed on either in teaching others to despise the free market or in writing media stories filled with leftist stupidities and ignorance in which the underlying premise is that governments must protect the poor by preventing others from becoming rich.
There I was on the ABC’s Outsiders on Sunday morning. The issues were freedom of speech, the American election and the Australian economy. You can put this up on the website and listen in.
I will just make this observation. Freedom of speech, rather than being a merely reflex good as it ought to be in our society, is now a hot issue because of the threats to our ability to say in public what we like since the right to free speech has now been mixed up with the politics of religion and the Middle East. But we here should be defending our right to free speech to the fullest extent possible. If we wish to end up like the various religious tyrannies which are dime a dozen, mired in poverty and with nowhere to go, then now’s the time to cave in and fail to defend our right to say anything we wish while governments seal off our right to discourse on whatever we want whenever we please. Governments typically don’t like it, and religious bigots certainly don’t like it, but we citizens do like it. Our right to discourse on whatever we like and to debate and discuss whatever we please has been amongst the most important reasons, if not the single most important reason, for our wondrous freedoms – unknown to almost any other civilisation in history – and for our economic prosperity as well, which is the greatest this planet has ever been able to produce.
Interestingly about being on radio, it is free form so you don’t know exactly what you will be asked, when you are asked you don’t know what you’re going to say often till after you’ve said it, but most importantly, once it is said, you cannot bring it back. What is therefore an immense worry is that it felt potentially dangerous to be defending free speech because of the political overtones that now surround public discourse on so many topics. It should not be like this but it is.
Law of Markets 