Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

To identify with the left ought to be a mark of great shame

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I will merely link to this story, but won’t quote from it since it is so disheartening. The title tells you what it’s about and you can read it for yourself: ISIS’S SEX SLAVES COMMIT SUICIDE: WESTERN FEMINISTS SILENT.

They of the progressive label, the members of the left, think of themselves as the best the world has produced and they are amongst the worst. The civilisation that grew out of the Judeo-Christian tradition is now dying, inherited by an anti-Christian horde who do not deserve the great good fortune they live in but are bringing to ruin.

The lost republic

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Linked from Roger Simon who writes re Obama:

He is the man who assures us he successfully reformed our healthcare and saved our economy despite adding about eight trillion to the national debt (nearly doubling it) and overseeing an all-time low in labor participation, approaching a hundred million souls not even looking for work. (Why should they? They can get all the sushi they want on food stamps anyway.)

Okay, there have been a few setbacks on the racial front, but not to worry. He is a master of foreign affairs. So what if those religious sociopaths in Tehran get the bomb? They’re our friends now. We’re not going to be any higher than third or fourth on their target list. And, yes, it’s true that jayvee team from Rakka has taken over half of Iraq and Syria and is threatening just about everywhere else (including wherever you are right now) but that’s sports. Upsets happen. Didn’t you see Nadal go out in the third round at Wimbledon on Thursday?

It’s about a dumbed-down country as it can be, with no ethos of public service, only a weak set of sentiments that are now the reverse of self-help and independence. The Republic is lost and the rest of us are on our own.

My lead article on John Stuart Mill at the Liberty Fund

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It has been a great honour for me to have been asked to write the lead article for the Liberty Fund online discussion forum for July 2015, which is on the economics of John Stuart Mill. The article has now been published and may be found here. It will be followed by commentaries from three of the world’s great scholars on Mill, after which there will then be open discussion thread from readers. The following is the Liberty Fund’s introduction to my article and the three commentaries:

In this month’s Liberty Matters online discussion we reassess the economic ideas of John Stuart Mill as found in his classic work Principles of Political Economy (1st ed. 1848, 7th ed. 1871) and other writings. In the Lead Essay by Steven Kates of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology it is argued that in the light of the evident failures of Keynesian economics to solve the problems of the boom and bust cycle, and that of ongoing high unemployment and economic stagnation, that we should go back to Mill’s “Four Propositions on Capital” for enlightenment. In Kates’s view there is “more insight into the operation of an economy than any of the Samuelson clones that have been published to explain what Keynes meant in trying to raise aggregate demand.” The commentators are Nick Capaldi, the Legendre-Soulé Distinguished Chair in Business Ethics at Loyola University New Orleans; Richard M. Ebeling, the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina; and Sandra J. Peart, who is dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond.

If nothing else, this article and the three commentaries should alert you to the virtual certainty that modern economic theory is not even near being the best economics there has ever been.

Finding the straight and narrow

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Finding the straight and narrow has never been more difficult. The only time I ever seriously shocked and angered my mother with anything I ever said was when I quoted a friend of mine:

“Better a sexual revolution than no revolution at all,” he said.

I didn’t understand her attitude then but I do now. The values of the adult world allowed restraint because there were genuine moral restraints that were felt and understood. There is almost nothing there now. For a reminder of how things once were, read Stacy McCain’s Let’s Bring Back Guilt and Shame. It’s a thought, but for the moment that’s all it is. But if you read it, you will also see why the video’s been posted.

What a disgusting hypocrite

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It really is hard to credit such lack of judgement, but there you are. Now Mark Scott himself has gotten into it. From The Australian:

“As someone said to me this week, free-speech arguments would be easier if you were always defending Martin Luther King,” Mr Scott said at a Centre for Corporate Public Affairs’ function. “At times, free-speech principles mean giving platforms to those with whom we fundamentally disagree.

That is exactly the point, but it is precisely what you and the ABC never do. Is he really that dense? Does he honestly not see what the rest of us are saying. It is that the ABC does not give platforms to those with whom they fundamentally disagree, unless they first stack the deck. The entire explosion over Zaki was that this was the typical ABC approach. Yes, see, we have the Minister whose views we fundamentally disagree with and have provided him with a platform. But of course, we then try to expose him to our own hit job, in a way that would never ever happen if he were someone from the left, or even better from the Greens.

It is insulting and disgusting to have to listen to such shallow reasoning. This is now the Thursday after the Monday and is this really the best Scott can do? Because you didn’t give Zaki a “platform”. You gave him an opportunity to sandbag a government minister, which you were hoping he would do. He was not there because anyone cared about his opinions.

The political side of the ABC is a wasteland of vacuity. It is an empty shell of green-left ignorance and the greenest and most left of them all appears to be its CEO. But the most disgusting part is this, from the opening para of the article:

ABC managing director Mark Scott has compared extremist Zaky Mallah’s right to appear on Q&A with the campaign for free speech that flowed from the jihadist murder of 12 journalists from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

To even mention Charlie Hebdo in such circumstance is beyond maddening. If I follow this analogy right, Zaki, according to Scott, is like those poor journalists who were murdered by jihadi gunmen, in that he is being deprived of his right to free speech (really, how? when? where?). And the jihadi murderers at Charlie Hebdo are likened to the people who object to Zaki, a former jihadist himself, being brought in to confront a government Minister on national television. This is so warped that really, it is time for the board at the ABC to ask for Scott’s resignation and set the Corporation off in a new direction. He is a mouthpiece for the left and is too blinded by his prejudices to understand what he is saying and why what the ABC did was so fundamentally wrong.

Here, if you can bear it, is Scott’s speech in full.

The ABC is a mad dog running loose

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Just what is Zaki Mallah’s point of view, exactly? His views on anything are of so little interest in an intellectual sense that it is beyond belief that I have had to endure his illogical and illiterate ranting on our national broadcaster. He was there, not because he had anything of any interest to say about anything at all. He was there because he threatened to murder other people and went to jail, but the attempt to put him away for terrorism was stopped at the supreme court. His beliefs are, of course, fascinating as a case study since there are appear to be many others like him. And I wish others would ask him about his actual beliefs about how things should go in the Middle East, say, or how he thinks religious tolerance ought to be practised, or what he thinks of whatever is the other side in his own religious wars. These would be fascinating, because the more you hear the more you fear for this country’s future.

So this conversation between Andrew Bolt’s producer and Raphael Epstein of the ABC is incredible. Is Epstein simply not capable of some basic distinctions. We read Andrew Bolt because he articulates views we are interested in hearing. No one would do the same for this Zaki fellow. His views, to the extent that I know them, are vile and disgusting, of no interest as an actual set of beliefs. The prelude to this exchange is Rafael Epstein, who is apparently a radio host on 774 in Melbourne, telling Andrew’s editor, Damon Johnston, “there seems little difference between the ABC giving a platform to Zaky Mallah and the Herald Sun giving one to Andrew”. This is from Andrew’s blog. The dialogue is not perfect, but in essence Raphael equates the ABC giving a platform to Zaky and and the Herald Sun giving one to Andrew Bolt:

EPSTEIN

No, I don’t think it is a partisan criticism, but it goes to, you are essentially I guess editorialising that the ABC is in some way doesn’t have the nation’s best interests at heart and [inaudible] appropriate given that one incident

JOHNSTON

Yeah, yeah, I think in that context it is appropriate to question that

EPSTEIN

Is that, so let me try and fit around they can Damon. Andrew Bolt, columnist, very very popular. He, I guess, I’m trying to frame his words in a way that are acceptable to him. He doesn’t believe in the concept of the stolen generations, he strongly questioned that. He has got a lot of strong questions on the science of climate change, many people would feel that they are irrefutable facts and that by questioning those things, Andrew Bolt is in some way corroding the social fabric. Does that mean that we can all we should question the Herald Sun’s real commitment to cohesive society?

JOHNSTON

Are you trying to draw some equivalency between Zaki Mallah and Andrew Bolt? Last time I looked Andrew hadn’t done 2 ½ years jail

EPSTEIN

No no no I’m not saying they are saying that all I am just trying to, I’m trying to get at whether or not it is fair to attack the ABC’s intentions towards the country around some coverage. Andrew Bolt is clearly very popular, I don’t want to get into the ins and outs of his columns, I don’t think this is the place to do that. However, if he is asking a lot of significant questions around the stolen generation and climate change science and they are things that for many people, not for everyone, for many people they are irrefutable facts. Can I then question the Herald Sun and say well, you are in some way being corrosive in you know, [inaudible]

Look Raphael. The ABC did not put Zaki onto Q&A because of what he thinks but because of how he was treated by the law. You used him as some kind of weird exhibit of repressive legislation. I wish you would ask him his opinions of many more things, since the minuscule bits we saw were terrifying and provides a broader lesson to the rest of us. If you think Zaki has a point of view on any single issue that is worth considering as a genuine perspective of any value of any kind in any place at any time, then you and the crew you work with are as far as it is possible to be from understanding just exactly what the problem with the ABC is.

Dealing with the global warming crowd in a cooling world

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On Drudge, but down the bottom on the side where no one will see it.

SUN COOLS…
THREATENS ‘LITTLE ICE AGE’…
Light, warmth nosediving to levels ‘not seen for centuries’…

Global freezing is a catastrophe in the making. If it does happen, we should remove from every university department and government agency every single one who had so strongly argued that global warming was our biggest concern. And we should make them repay every last cent of the grant money they received.

You gotta be joking

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Jerry Seinfeld must have a philosopher’s soul to be getting into the nature of humour in a world of PC. In an article titled, No Jokes for You, Harry Stein discusses the boundaries Seinfeld has just discovered. This is the conclusion. There is much food for thought along the way.

Many of us should feel better knowing Seinfeld is in this fight. Might he eventually go all in, and connect the dots? Might he come to realize that this issue also bears on the proliferating trigger warnings at colleges—the kinds his children will soon be attending—and the treatment of people like Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and so much more?

Probably not. But for now, let’s settle for a steady push for the freedom to make light of anything, across the ideological spectrum—including, for the next month or so, Rachel Dolezal and her amazing quick-switch from white to black.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The mystery of the Keynesian Revolution

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Here is another book just published about the Keynes, this one, Reinterpreting The Keynesian Revolution by Robert Cord. This is what it’s about.

Various explanations have been put forward as to why the Keynesian Revolution in economics in the 1930s and 1940s took place. Some of these point to the temporal relevance of John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), appearing, as it did, just a handful of years after the onset of the Great Depression, whilst others highlight the importance of more anecdotal evidence, such as Keynes’s close relations with the Cambridge ‘Circus’, a group of able, young Cambridge economists who dissected and assisted Keynes in developing crucial ideas in the years leading up to the General Theory.

However, no systematic effort has been made to bring together these and other factors to examine them from a sociology of science perspective. This book fills this gap by taking its cue from a well-established tradition of work from history of science studies devoted to identifying the intellectual, technical, institutional, psychological and financial factors which help to explain why certain research schools are successful and why others fail. This approach, it turns out, provides a coherent account of why the revolution in macroeconomics was ‘Keynesian’ and why, on a related note, Keynes was able to see off contemporary competitor theorists, notably Friedrich von Hayek and Michal Kalecki.

There are many reasons why it happened, but there is this for starters: if you say to kids that the best way to grow up strong and healthy is to eat lots of chocolate cake you will need to do very little convincing. You will actually ruin their health, but they won’t know that until they have tried it for themselves.

My own contribution to this issue of why Keynes with this theory at that time is to point out that Keynes was reading Malthus’s letters to Ricardo at the bottom of the Great Depression at the end of 1932 while preparing his “Essay on Malthus” for his Essays in Biography that was published at the start of 1933. And there, in the midst of Malthus’s letters, he discovered the general glut debate of the 1820s and Malthus’s arguments attributing recessions and unemployment to demand deficiency. So obvious is this sequence that it remains the most mysterious of all of the mysteries I have encountered in my dealing with Keynes and the Keynesians that not only do they not accept that reading Malthus had any effect on Keynes’s thinking, they will not even consider it as a possibility. But that’s how it happened, and the more evidence I have the more resolutely it is ignored. If you want to look at the sociology of science in relation to Keynes, that is where I would start.

A common sense program for action

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Let me see if I have this straight.

Public spending on wind farms will create jobs, save the planet, restore the economy to strong rates of economic growth and raise our standard of living.

And in spite of the obvious common sense of this program, there are still people who are opposed. I have to say, it’s incredible what some people will believe.