Category Archives: Politics – Australian

Kafka and thought control

Posted on by
Reply

This is such a subtle article that fills me with endless admiration. By Daren Jonescu and titled Kindergarten and the Kafkaesque the point is that when the leftist loons go after five year olds for pointing fingers at someone and saying, “bang, bang” there is a real intent behind it that actually ends up shaping society in the intended way. And it is more than just about guns. As he writes:

No one ever mistook a half-eaten Pop Tart for a weapon. And that is precisely why you are forbidden from saying ‘bang, bang’ while wielding a half-eaten Pop Tart. If this still makes no sense to you, that is because you are not crazy. But try, for a moment, to put yourself into the twisted psyche of a progressive authoritarian, and ask yourself this question: What is the message being sent through such rules, and the lesson being taught through their enforcement?

These are all of a piece with the way we enforce speech codes by making certain expressions of our beliefs beyond the pale in acceptable society. Eventually everyone will understand that it is against the rules of “civilised” society to have a positive view about guns and gun culture but it goes beyond just guns. It is everything the left doesn’t like that they turn into the equivalent of swearing in public. Everybody learns to behave themselves because there is an ever present danger that they will be hauled before the PC courts of public opinion.

The ultimate goal is not to punish such thoughts; punishment is merely the means. The real goal is to break the young soul to self-censorship and self-accusation regarding all thoughts related to personal efficacy, individual power, independence, and self-defense. A submissive citizen does not ‘cling’ to his weapons. Therefore, future citizens must be taught that such ‘clinging’ is a vice. Submission to the collective is the goal. Seen from that perspective, it is quite logical to try to make children self-conscious about how they eat their Pop Tarts, lest they appear to be ‘threatening’ society. Notice, they are not actually threatening any person; their threat, being imaginary, is abstract. It is a threat to ‘other students’ in the abstract, to the collective. The child is learning to feel guilty if he catches himself in possession of thoughts unacceptable to the state as such; that is, he is learning to submit.

This is, as he notes, a world of insanity but it is designed to shape the future so that these five year olds will know they can do the “bang, bang” routine or their equivalent in other areas of social censorship with trusted friends but never, but never, when out of the house and in mixed company. It will become as great a faux pas to speak positively of such matters as it is to smoke inside a building. You will be shunned and cast out from society. It will be impossible to have such views and travel in the company of our social and political elites. Which is why he brings in Kafka and the future we are creating:

Kafka’s world is our world. The nightmare logic of infinite bureaucratic authority which drives a man into admitting his own guilt without even understanding what he is accused of is the mechanism of public school indoctrination. And like Kafka’s Josef K., we are all, in the compulsory progressive public school, to learn how to self-accuse, to self-incriminate, to self-condemn. And then, at the end of our submissive life of democratic self-enslavement, socialized medicine will treat us to the ignominy of an ending worthy of Josef K. — “‘Like a dog!’ he said; it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.”

It is the way it happens and it is how we are controlled in the modern world. Some things just can no longer be said without risking one’s entire career and social position. Being pro-gun is now becoming one of those ideas in the way that other forms of expression have been leached from elite society. Fascinating to see this in action but also extremely depressing.

The right way and the Gillard way

Posted on by
Reply

A quite interesting story on education reform in The Australian. The Prime Minister sort of picked up the idea in 2008, when she “returned from a trip to New York City fired up by the vision of then schools chancellor Joel Klein and his radical overhaul of the city’s schools.” See if you can pick up the salient difference between the Klein model and the Prime Minister’s. The bolding is mine:

Klein graded schools every year on a scale from A to F on the improvement recorded in students’ results, and schools that failed to improve were closed down.

In Australia, transparency is used to identify struggling schools and support them with additional resources – financial, or targeted teaching programs.

In New York they rewarded success and penalised failure. Here we are to reward failure and penalise success. For those who can’t spot the difference – the PM for example – there is a very too-the-point accompanying article by Kevin Donnelly.

According to a government information sheet the additional millions can be spent on “more teachers and better resources”, introducing “personalised learning plans”, “more teachers, teacher aides, support staff”, “better resources and equipment, like SMART Boards, computers, iPads and tablets” and “new and better ways of teaching”.

The flaws in such an approach are manifest. The assumption that simply by giving schools more resources and more staff disadvantage will be overcome and standards will improve is incorrect.

As Donnelly concludes:

No matter how much cultural-left groups such as the Australian Education Union want to believe, low SES is not the principal cause of underperformance. Working-class kids, with effort, ability, application and effective teachers and a rigorous curriculum, can do well. Such students are not destined to failure because of postcode.

It doesn’t take a cultural-left view to recognise that the main reason Australia’s standing in international tests has flatlined or gone backwards is because we have fewer high-ability students performing at the top of the table.

If the Prime Minister is serious about getting Australian students to be among the top five performing countries in literacy and numeracy tests by 2025, then one of the most cost-effective and efficient ways is to better support gifted students.

Promoting competition and meritocracy in education represents an alternative to Gillard’s cultural-left, Fabian-inspired approach.

To a leveller, such a thought is beyond comprehension. They know only how to pull down, never how to build up.

Why stop at free education?

Posted on by
Reply

This is from Andrew Bolt and on the one hand it is hilarious but on the other it is downright disgusting. We talk about low info voters but the completely skewed ideas these people have is quite a scandal. These kinds of things are the typical province of students but I suspect that the Greens do not go much beyond this in economic sophistication if they go beyond it at all.

The CBC solution to the ABC

Posted on by
Reply

journalist bias australia

This is from Andrew Bolt and it is a sensation. How is it that the folks over at the ABC are so completely lacking in self-awareness that they happily answer these questions so that the rest of us can know just how politically naive they are. Who would buy a political opinion from such a bunch as these?

I have over the past few weeks been thinking about a solution to the problem caused by the ABC. And while privatisation might be a nice idea I don’t think it would work out very well. But what would in my view be just as good is for the next Coalition government merely to say to the ABC that within five years, 90% of your funding must be raised through advertising revenue. And having grown up in Canada, there is a precedent. I don’t know what the proportion of its funding must come from its own revenue sources but whatever it might be could be our own target.

I like it because it will still remain “our ABC”. I like it because we can allow the ABC to help the rest of us finance all of the social programs it believes the government ought to finance. And I like it because it should be more commercially oriented so that it is no longer allowed to compete in the market at a zero price.

And I especially like it because this is not the 1930s. We can get cable across the country. There is no one locked out of reception that only the ABC can reach (and if there are such places, the government can provide the subsidy out of the ABC’s new revenue stream).

And then, of course, there is this from Blazing Cat Fur in Toronto who notes how the CBC audience has diminished almost to the vanishing point:

If the share of CBC TV was just over 5% in prime time, it is below 5% on a 24 hour basis; CBC daytime schedules have traditionally performed poorly compared to CBC’s prime time. Making matters worse is that the audience to about half the U.S. TV stations available in Canada are no longer being measured by the ratings company and neither are services such as Netflix or Apple TV, meaning that CBC’s share of all TV viewing is actually lower than the numbers suggest. This is the lowest audience share in CBC’s history and yet there is no hint of the severity of the TV network’s situation in the quarterly report. CBC TV audiences are sold to advertisers and with less audience to sell, 2012-13 revenues, shown in the table above, are almost $40 million less than at the same point the previous year, creating a revenue shortfall that, when added to federal cuts, may be crippling.

There has been some public debate about whether or not CBC is in crisis. The CBC’s latest report confirms that many programs on the main TV service, despite efforts to be more ‘popular,’ have fallen to audience levels not much greater than many specialty channels. Those who deny the crisis fail to realize that Canadians prefer Duck Dynasty to most CBC shows, including the national news. The most important and costly CBC service has an audience crisis and CBC needs to respond to it. Is it time to rethink the role of CBC TV?

Maybe if the ABC were made to think about advertising revenue it might perhaps end up a tad more central to community views than it now is.

Resolved: That Keynesian economics is junk science

Posted on by
Reply

This goes back to 2011 but has re-surfaced. Here is the original letter from Ben Eltham dated 28 August 2011:

Dear Steven

As someone who finds myself in consistent disagreement with your opinion writing on economics, I was wondering if you’d be interested in a public debate on some of the issues you’ve advanced in recent times, for instance concerning the effects of Keynesian stimulus.

I think it might be quite a fun event and I’m sure we could ensure a good attendance from interested parties from both the left and right of the political spectrum.

If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll investigate what venues are available. The Wheeler Centre might be interested.

Sincerely,

Ben Eltham

Leaving out the various emails in between, this was my last response dated 12 October 2011.

Dear Ben

When I had not heard back from you before, I just assumed that you had gone cool on the idea so I am pleased that you would still like to have it on. Seems like a potentially very festive occasion.

So please do go ahead and organise something. I am in Melbourne between now and Christmas aside from a week at the end of November. The Wheeler Centre or anything else would be fine. I do not expect either of us will change a lot of minds but for both of us there are serious issues involved in thinking through what needs to be done in the face of the inevitable downturns in the cycle.

I should also apologise for not writing back immediately when you sent your note. I am in what I not-so-whimsically call ‘marking hell’. I gave a test to my 180 students last week, which was the penultimate week of the course, and now I have been buried marking them so that they can have some feedback before they plunge into the final on Hallowe’en. Just finished an hour ago.

But please do organise something. And many thanks again for your willingness to take this on. BTW, we should also meet for a coffee if you are ever around the CBD.

Kind regards

Steve

From that day to this month I had not heard back. But now this dated 15 May 2013:

Hi Steve

We obviously let the idea of the debate get away for a time, but seeing as you seem keen to renew the discussion, perhaps its time to lay down some guidelines and set an appropriate date?

best

Ben

I am unfortunately more busy now than I was then. The claims on my time have reached crisis proportions, but nevertheless, last night I finally replied but only after five days which has been the time I have been doing the mulling:

Dear Ben

I have mulled over your original letter to me and the time just wandered by. I am not particular averse to debating the Keynesian issue. What has stayed my hand in replying is whether you actually understand enough of what I am trying to get at to make it a fair debate. But then again, not many others would either, specially if they have studied Keynes and take aggregate demand as gospel so why should I worry.

We were going to have this debate at the Grattan Institute or somewhere but it was not going to be at RMIT. I will leave that to you. The only stipulation I would make if you are actually interested in this, that this is the resolution we put to the floor:

That Keynesian economics is junk science.

I would then speak to the resolution and you could reply. After that, we could think about what to do next. One-on-one; two-on-two. Anyway, make a concrete proposal and I would be happy to be in it. Might be fun.

Kind regards

Steve

Which is where matters now stand. Will report when there’s more to report.

“Living within your means is not mindless austerity – it’s simple prudence”

Posted on by
Reply

The best line from Tony Abbott’s sensational reply to the Budget.

And might I compare this with the opening of Adam Creighton’s article in The Australian last weekend:

IN 1946 George Orwell famously pointed out how politics degraded and abused the English language for the sake of political ends. The same is true in economics. The word austerity, used to describe European and even US fiscal policy, has been a clever ruse by opponents of measures that may cause any reduction in the size of government.

No objective, sane person could describe, in a relative or absolute sense, fiscal policy in Europe or the US as austere, a word stemming from the Greek meaning harsh or severe.

‘The word austerity entered into the conversation once it became clear what a disaster the debt-financed stimulus was going to be,” says Steven Kates, an economics lecturer at RMIT University, referring to the failure of repeated and colossal budget deficits to resurrect economic growth across advanced countries, almost five years after the end of the global financial crisis.

‘Those who support public spending and deficits prefer to characterise those who oppose them as wearing a hair shirt, rather than wanting to reduce public waste and have governments live within their means,’ he adds.

The other side will have to find some other scare word because this one is not working like it used to.

When do you suppose we will see the likes of that again?

Posted on by
Reply

Janet Albrechtsen discusses austerity in The Australian today. A nice column and well timed to coincide with the budget. If actual economic outcomes counted for anything, this Keynesian theory would have been flushed out to sea years ago, but there it is, stronger than ever. So you have to sympathise with Angela Merkel as she tries to battle with people with real money to lose if these balanced budgets ever catch on again. From Janet’s column:

Happily, the ‘austerity thing’ is not pretty much debunked everywhere. While the word may have lost appeal (let the Left enjoy that hollow victory), the need for fiscal discipline is more certain than ever. ‘I call it balancing the budget,’ German Chancellor Angela Merkel said last month. ‘Everyone else is using this term austerity. That makes it sounds like something truly evil.’ A week earlier Merkel repeated her oft-repeated theme that Europe was living beyond its means. It has 8 per cent of the world’s population, 25 per cent of its gross domestic product and 50 per cent of its social spending. ‘That money has to be earned,’ she said.

It’s not even as if Merkel hasn’t got the runs on the board. The German economy is practically supporting the entire southern half of Europe but mendicants, whatever they may lack in honour and scruple, never lack the hunger for the wealth of others. The mentality of the indolent is that the hard working and provident owe them a tribute for being so capable of earning incomes on their own, in contrast with they themselves who can do no more than plead for a cut of the wealth produced by those who are somehow, through hard work and foresight, able to produce the flood of goods and services the mendicant class are so desirous of.

It is all luck in their minds, completely unjust and in no way related to merit.

But I fear Merkel and the rest will never be able to overcome the Keynesian monster until they have a theoretical explanation of how things work that refutes the belief that spending is itself the cause of growth. It’s obviously untrue, but what is even more obvious is that it is not in the interest of those who love parceling the booty out or of those who are on the receiving end, to admit that, just perhaps, this Keynesian economics is utterly mistaken from stem to stern and is the actual source of many of the economic problems we have.

Every fact has a thousand explanations. I used to say during the Costello years that when it is finally over no one would have learned a thing. And it’s true. There is not one economist in a hundred who could give you a coherent theoretical explanation why the Australian economy took off after public spending was cut in 1996 and 1997 just as the Asian Financial Crisis got under way. Zero deficits, zero debt and a strong economy. Sounds good to me. When do you suppose we will see the likes of that again?

Doing its level worst

Posted on by
Reply

A government is supposed to do its level best, as best it knows how, to improve economic conditions and make the world a better place. It’s not supposed to do this. From The Age front page today:

Labor ‘booby trap’ set to enrage Coalition

Lock in unaffordable increases whose costs G&S will never have to find the money for and then leave the next guys to drown in the debt and deficits they have left behind. The worse the economy inherited will be, the sooner the ALP believes it can return to continue its wrecking program.

The worst government in our history. Since they know a surplus is what needs to be achieved, since they continually promised to deliver one until it became impossible, that they are doing the reverse only demonstrates an inability to rise about politics and think about the national interest.

Which is better?

Posted on by
Reply

Listening to the unctious and ignorant comments by Swan and Gillard talking about the economy is an actual health hazard for someone such as myself. But here is the question: Which would be better, today’s level of spending and our present deficit or public sector spending cut in half with a deficit twice as large? I don’t know your answer but I do know mine. It’s the growth you want, which will only come about if we manage to cut the dead weight cost of this useless politically driven public spending.

Everyone thinks of the Great Depression having been brought to an end by the start of World War II. Sure, sure. Most of the men in their 20s and many of the women were drafted into the armed forces so disappeared from the labour market. And while this may have ended the unemployment, it hardly created an economic boom since the war was characterised by shortages and rationing as well as massive deficts and a rise in the level of debt.

World War II ends with the soldiers mustered out of service and only some of the women who replaced them in the workforce returning to the home. This is 1945 and in the United States only four years before there had been 14% unemployment. And what does the American President do? He cuts spending and balances the budget. The result: the beginning of the fastest growth in world history which continues from 1945 through until the 1970s.

Make your economy productive and it will create the growth that eliminates your debt. Continue with public spending and extenstions of various forms of non-value-adding welfare expenditures one upon the other and our economies will continue to struggle. But the public spending addictions, shared by both the politican class and their constituencies will continue to edge us towards the cliff unless some kind of economic sanity can return.

Austerity and Keynesian economics

Posted on by
Reply

Oddly, could the real beginning of the Keynesian counter-revolution begin here in Australia? It’s one thing to stop spending because you have run out of other people’s money. It’s quite another to understand the problem of valueless public spending which will lead to a very focused attack on public waste.

Adam Creighton has a wonderful article in today’s Australian, Nothing austere about Europe’s fiscal policies which truly goes to the heart of the problem. He begins:

IN 1946 George Orwell famously pointed out how politics degraded and abused the English language for the sake of political ends. The same is true in economics. The word austerity, used to describe European and even US fiscal policy, has been a clever ruse by opponents of measures that may cause any reduction in the size of government.

No objective, sane person could describe, in a relative or absolute sense, fiscal policy in Europe or the US as austere, a word stemming from the Greek meaning harsh or severe.

‘The word austerity entered into the conversation once it became clear what a disaster the debt-financed stimulus was going to be,’ says Steven Kates, an economics lecturer at RMIT University, referring to the failure of repeated and colossal budget deficits to resurrect economic growth across advanced countries, almost five years after the end of the global financial crisis.

‘Those who support public spending and deficits prefer to characterise those who oppose them as wearing a hair shirt, rather than wanting to reduce public waste and have governments live within their means,’ he adds.

Government budget deficits in Europe are still up to twice as large as they were before the GFC – when no one described them as austere – and are contributing to already vast public debt burdens. Far from the ‘savage cuts’ of Wayne Swan’s imagination, European governments have reduced only the rate of growth of public spending. Even in Greece, a country with little population or economic growth in recent years, spending is still greater than it was five years ago.

Yet ‘mindless austerity’ has become a favourite phrase of the Treasurer since he dumped his promise to restore the budget to surplus this financial year. With a tsunami of costly spending promises on the horizon across disability, health, the environment and parental leave, it appears unlikely the budget will return to surplus soon – and without a change in attitude, ever.

OK, obviously I was one of the people he spoke to when he put this article together. But I speak to lots of people who never seem to get it. This is different. He sees the point and explains it exactly right which I don’t think you can do unless you understand it. And while it has felt somewhat strange to discover what I have discovered ploughing this furrow since the 1980s, I would still make the statement that there is no other way to find our way out of the economic problems we are in without a return to pre-Keynesian economic theory. First let me get back to the article and then let me continue:

Adam Smith’s dictum that what is prudent for households is never folly for governments infuriates economists who remain deeply wedded to the theory of John Maynard Keynes, who said public borrowing and spending, however wasteful, could revive moribund economies.

The giants of economic history before then – Jean Baptiste Say, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall, for instance – all railed against the idea, which for Mill was an absurdity: ‘The usual effects of the attempts of government to encourage consumption is merely to prevent saving; that is, to promote unproductive consumption at the expense of the reproductive (investment).’

You won’t find the problem explained in any modern text based on the idea that aggregate demand drives an economy forward, which as it happens constitutes virtually all modern texts at the macro level. You certainly cannot make sense of the economic problems we have in the absence of a focus on value adding activity (i.e. the supply side of the economy) as the actual driver of economic growth. These concepts were, however, the foundational principles of the economics of Smith, Mill and Marshall, and indeed for all economists of the classical school prior to Keynes. But with the publication of The General Theory, which argued that public spending on anything at all will prime the pump and get an economy moving again, the notion that spending to create growth and jobs had to be value adding evaporated from the curriculum.

For me, schooled in the classics as I am, it was as obvious as a cloudless day that the stimulus could never achieve its ends. For virtually the rest of the profession it was not. Why the difference? I base my understanding on the classical theory of the cycle; they base their understanding on Keynes. That’s it. Nothing else. Anyone can do it. So why don’t they? Because the grip of Keynesian demand management has since the 1930s had the profession locked into the most destructive form of economic analysis, a form of analysis every classical economist understood as fallacious to its very roots. So all I can do is direct you to the pre-Keynesians. Here is a primer on the classics.

After that read either the first edition of Haberler’s 1937 Prosperity and Depression or if that doesn’t appeal to you, you can try my own Free Market Economics. But unless we can get out of this Keynesian death grip, our economies may never fully recover. We’ll just get used to slow rates of growth and limited improvements in our standard of living, in just the same sort of way the Japanese have done since their own Keynesian stimulus of the 1990s wrecked the world’s fastest most vibrant economy of the time.