Category Archives: Politics on the left

stupéfaction et tristesse / shock and sadness

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An email I received this morning from the Research Network on Innovation in Boulogne-sur-Mer. This is a terrible tragedy that goes well beyond the loss of any of the brave individuals who were murdered.

Bonjour,

J’ai appris avec stupeur l’assassinat de notre collègue Bernard Maris dans les locaux du journal “Charlie Hebdo”. Bernard (ou oncle Bernard) a été depuis le début d’Innovations un soutien scientifique précieux de notre revue. Il a été depuis 1999 membre du comité scientifique, auteur et conseiller du bureau de la revue.

Bien à vous

Dimitri Uzunidis
Innovations

****************
Dear colleagues,

I have been shocked to learn that our colleague Bernard Maris was murdered in the office of the journal “Charlie Hebdo”, Paris. From the beginnings of Innovations, Bernard (uncle Bernard) has been a major scientific support for our journal. He has been a member of the Scientific Committee, author and advisor of the Editorial Board of Innovations.

Best regards,

Dimitri Uzunidis
Innovations

Réseau de Recherche sur l’Innovation
Research Network on Innovation

As it says in his just updated Wikipedia entry, “Bernard Maris (23 September 1946 – 7 January 2015) was a French economist, writer and journalist who was also a shareholder in Charlie Hebdo magazine. He was murdered in January 2015, in the Charlie Hebdo shooting at the headquarters of the magazine in Paris.”

MORE ON BERNARD MARIS: This is my edited Google translation of an AFP report.

Bernard Maris, iconoclastic economist of the left who was killed on Tuesday in the attack against the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, was a man “tolerant and benevolent”, recognized for the quality of his thought and his art extension. He was 68.

“He was a tolerant man, caring, friendly, full of humor and did not take himself too seriously,” said the clearly moved editor of Les Echos Dominique Seux who had debated with him every week on France Inter.

“Bernard Maris was a man of heart, culture and a high tolerance. He will be greatly missed,” Christian Noyer, Governor of the Bank of France, said in a statement saluting Maris, who had sen appointed in 2011 to the General Council of the central bank.

A graduate of the Toulouse Institute of Political Studies in 1968, associate degree in economics in 1994, he recently completed his teaching career researcher at the University Paris after an earlier period at Toulouse I.

But as a recognized researcher, he was familiar to many for his many appearances on radio, television and in the press.

Shareholder of Charlie Hebdo since 1992, he wrote a weekly satirical weekly column signed “Uncle Bernard”. And what illustrated his talents as a difficult-to-chategorise populariser was his frequent description as a “journalist-economist”.

He has written numerous books with evocative titles including, in 1998, “Ah that economic Lovely War!”, and in 2010, “Marx, Marx oh, why have you forsaken me?”. But it was his “Anti-saving manual”, released in early 2000, where the first volume is devoted to the ants and the second to the grasshoppers, which was his most successful publication.

“Economics is so annoying! Must recognize that it is more pleasant to read poetry … And at the same time, it affects us all. Then my pleasure – outside the small personal and egocentric satisfaction of seeing my name in the media – is hearing it said by a viewer: ‘With you, we understand’,” he quipped in an interview with Telerama in 2008.

Originally from the southwest of France, he had kept a beautiful accent that made him recognizable in any debate. As an economist, he had long defended the thesis of economic decay, advocating the values ​​of a collaborative and participatory economy and criticizing the ravages of consumer society.

“I will again never wake up with Bernard Maris on a Friday morning …. Infinite sadness,” Tweeted a listener, amid a wave of tributes on the social network.

“At home there are Pedagogical Notebooks, Charlie Hebdo and Bernard Maris anti-saving manual …” added another, recalling the commitment deeply rooted on the left of this atypical personality.

“We can say that he was anti-liberal, left …, anarcho-Keynesian” describes Dominique Seux, insisting that he represented “the economic thinking of many French.”

Member of the scientific board of Attac, and the Green candidate in the 2002 legislative election, Bernard Maris was also a recognised university professor. In 2011, the President of the Senate Jean-Pierre Bel was surprised by Maris being asked to join the General Council of the Banque de France.

Recently, Bernard Maris had drawn fire, including from the left, for the devaluation of the euro.

Always working on several fronts, in 2014 he had published, “Houellebecq Economist” (Flammarion). He saw, indeed, in the novels of the provocative writer, a lucid analysis of economic reports, the world of work and deindustrialization.

Bernard Maris defended the memory of the writer Maurice Genevoix, great witness of the war of 14-18. He was married to Maurice’s daughter, Sylvie, with whom he had two children.

Is there more to this story?

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Or is this all there is?

A DETAINED Indonesian refugee who beat his Australian spouse to death with a child’s ­bicycle should be released into the community and given $350,000 compensation for seven years of “arbitrary” detention, the Australian Human Rights Commission has found.

John Basikbasik, 51, a former West Papuan independence ­activist, has been repeatedly deemed too dangerous for release following decades of violent offending fuelled by alcohol. His offences include the manslaughter of his de facto wife in 2000 and numerous assaults during his seven-year jail term from 2001. He has been held in detention since 2007.

Mental health experts have ­assessed him as having a high or moderate risk of reoffending, citing his impulsive personality and lack of “insight” into his crimes. Basikbasik had failed to adapt to a Western lifestyle, one said.

HRC president Gillian Triggs accused successive federal governments, dating back to the Howard era, of breaching the man’s human rights by holding him in immigration detention rather than monitoring him in the community.

There are certainly a lot of crazies about, that’s for sure.

Gramscian prescriptions

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This is from a much longer post on Gramscian Damage by Eric Raymond which is interesting even if you don’t know what “Gramscian” means. It’s a wicked world out there, as he explains:

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the “race bomb” rumor, really were instruments deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation, irony, or an automatic and half-conscious genuflection towards the altar of political correctness. In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.

He also linked to an earlier post of his, Suicidalism, which has a convenient list of ways in which we are ruining our own culture by adopting ideological positions that no other society would ever come close to copying. Why we create such rabid enemies from among our own citizens, I do not know. But all this is much too familiar to need to have to argue about since you can come across each of these sentiments pretty well everywhere across the West:

There is no truth, only competing agendas.

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.

Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying
with poor people and criminals.)

For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

But we might still save our selves in the end, since none of these are true while all are pernicious as more and more people are beginning to find out. In the meantime, read both of his posts.

Progressive internationalism and the withering away of the state

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I was reading a book that has turned out as good as I thought it might be before I started, Mind vs. Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism by someone I had never heard of, Alan S. Kahan. And there on page 145 I came across this sentence:

For Marx, the ideal form of politics is not the state, which he famously predicted would wither away, but free association.

And immediately as I read those words, the entire matrix of ideas that sit behind the progressive internationalist of our day, the elites who wish to subvert the nation state, the kinds of people who set up the EU, or open the borders on the American southern frontier, presented itself to me as a completely closed circle of ideas. This is the utopian vision of the far left, is and has always been. Obama is an empty vessel, generally with no serious wit and depth. But the animating ideas that drive those who fund and fill his head with the rhetoric he reads, that is their vision, the end of the nation state and the mixing of us all in one global village.

It is a nightmare vision, where the worst will ultimately pull the framework down, because the best will be drowned in the flood. And whatever you may wish for yourself, it is the outcome that is step by step being put into place, and cannot be stopped because the only answer is to recognise the problem, and then put that problem into words that will shape the politics of a people. And the fact is that there is virtually no place on the face of the globe where such politics is allowed to prevail, and where it is – Israel say – the enmity of the world, driven by its progressive elites, makes impossible a defence of any social order built on the historic circumstances of a particular people over the longer term.

In unity there is treason

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Hal Colebatch takes the domestic shame of half the population and exposes the Australian left to ridicule on the American Spectator website. WINNING THE PM’S HISTORY PRIZE AND UPSETTING THE LEFTY LUVVIES is the heading, but the sub-head is more to the point:

A study of labor union treachery during World War II.

The part that was always something of a mystery is why our communist unions would subvert our war effort while the Japanese forces were on the march in our direction. Here’s the answer:

It does not take a very profound knowledge of World War II to know Stalin was not at war with Japan until the very end, and had nothing to lose by Australian Communists damaging the Pacific War effort. An important and scholarly U.S. book, Stalin’s Secret Agents, by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, reminds us that Stalinist Russia was not at war with Japan until the very last few days of the war (after Hiroshima). Japanese ships were still coming and going out of Vladivostok through nearly all the war. Most importantly, the authors point out that Stalin did not want a quick and overwhelming allied victory in the Pacific until he had moved troops from Europe and was positioned to take a share of the spoils.

The left are a menace at all times and in all places. There is a kind of insanity that pervades everything they do. It is impossible to understand their actions then, but you would think they would be at least somewhat ashamed of what they did, and I suppose their denial of the facts does show that they are unwilling to accept the reality of the kinds of things they once stood for. But how different are they now if this is the kind of thing that comes out of their keyboards. Colebatch again:

There was some applause at the end of my speech but it did not take long to discover that, with a conservative author winning a major national literary prize, probably, as blogger and wag Tim Blair said, for the first time ever, the leftie luvvies were furious (Tim telephoned Perth to tell my daughter). Twitter was going berserk even before the ceremony finished. Leading the charge was one Mike Carlton, whose own entry, a rehashing of a naval engagement in World War I, had not won a prize. (I had previously written critically of another book by him and received a delightful note from him replete with four-letter words, a practice that is said to have got him sacked from the Sydney Morning Herald.)

He claimed my book was both “badly researched” and “fiction,” though how it could be both I am not sure. It could only be untrue if I or the ex-soldiers, sailors, and airmen who contacted me with first-person accounts, the various memoirs, unit histories, and official documents that I quoted from, were lying. I believe the man who risked their lives to defend our country were telling the truth. Where possible I quoted service numbers to help ensure accuracy.

Carlton also claimed that one of my informants, W.S. Monks — who said a strike at the end of the war prevented him and other men returning from Japanese prison-camps from being disembarked from HMS Speaker — did not exist, despite the fact an hour-long interview with him exists on YouTube.

They have no shame, these people, only their delusions.

Unreality on the left

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Do you suppose they at least notice their own biases themselves?

A study that sought to show that conservatives reach their beliefs only through denying reality achieved that result by describing ideological liberal beliefs as “reality,” surveying people on whether they agreed with them, and then concluding that those who disagree with them are in denial of reality — and lo, people in that group are much more likely to be conservative!

So you don’t think it can get any worse, do you?

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Do you want to be afraid, really afraid? Tucked away at the very end of an article today on political reading lists for the beach this summer was this on behalf of Bill Shorten:

. . . and US senator Elizabeth Warren’s A Fighting Chance.

As with the election in 2008, the only way that Hillary Clinton won’t be the next President is if the Democrats come up with someone worse. And they have.

Members of her party’s anti-bank, anti-capitalist wing have found somebody to stir them as she never did. And Warren erases Clinton’s gender advantage.

Most telling, the left’s intensity is growing since the GOP midterm rout. Instead of being chastised, the populist wing absurdly claims that Democrats have been too willing to compromise.

No more of those Obama half measures for Warren, the fake Cherokee oddball far-left nutty professor now Senator from the great state of Massachusetts. She and Bill will make quite a pair. For those who think it can’t get any worse, oh yes it can.

The centre cannot hold because the centre no longer exists

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The US is no longer a country, a unified coherent whole, the homeland of a people with a common history and a common purpose. Large parts of its landmass is instead being turned into a campsite, where the campers are given votes so that the productive can keep passing on a significant part of their incomes to the government to bribe the new campers with. Here’s the story: Obama opens fraud-ridden benefits programs to illegal immigrants:

President Obama’s unilateral executive action on immigration will make hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million, illegal immigrants eligible for federal transfer payments. That will be done primarily through two widely used programs — the Earned Income Tax Credit, or EITC, and the Additional Child Tax Credit, or ACTC.

As it turns out, those two programs are already among the most corrupt and fraud-ridden in the entire federal government. A newly-released report from the inspector general of the Internal Revenue Service confirms that the EITC is plagued by fraud (which was already well known) and also reveals for the first time that the ACTC is even worse.

The two programs, intended for low-income workers, are what is known as refundable tax credits. That means they give workers a tax refund that is larger than their tax liability. So a family with a tax bill of $1,000 might receive an EITC “refund” of $5,000, meaning the family doesn’t write a check to the government but rather receives a check from the government. The ACTC works similarly for low-income workers with children.

Supported by both political parties over the years, the programs were intended to encourage work and strengthen families. Their growth has been extraordinary in recent years — payments increased 40 percent from 2007 to 2012 alone. And now both are beset by staggering levels of fraud. . . .

In fact, the president obscured what is happening by telling the covered illegal immigrants that if “you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to stay. …” In fact, for many of those affected, “willing to pay your fair share of taxes” actually means “willing to accept an assistance check from the government.”

If past practice is any guide, the Obama administration will likely start an aggressive, multilingual campaign to encourage illegal immigrants affected by the president’s action to apply for as many benefits as possible. And if not all of them are actually eligible to receive the taxpayers’ money? Well, no one will be checking that too closely.

You tell me where this ends? That the productive will forever remain content to share their wealth with millions of others who have not contributed a single dollar over and above what they have taken is not a longterm proposition. How and what circumstances will bring it to an end will remain the mystery for now, but I suspect not for long.

Australia’s not so secret war

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Tim Blair has gone after the critics of Hal Colebatch’s Australia’s Secret War: How Unionists Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II which had the audacity to win the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, or at least shared one with someone else. This has apparently sent the unusual suspects off into a frenzy.

What is astonishing to me is that the sabotage continued past the Soviet Union entering the War. We had the same problem in Canada, but the moment that the Soviet motherland was under attack, everything changed in a nanosecond. That unions were still at it in Australia long after, and especially out here where we were all by ourselves in the South Pacific, shows an insanity that defies description.

Yet in the Orwellian world we seem to inhabit, apparently nothing is ever settled if it in any way is discrediting to the left. You cannot even mention that Alger Hiss was just maybe perhaps possibly a Soviet agent without bringing half the world down on your head. So I won’t.

The interesting part about this episode is that the left understands how important it is to fortify the line and never concede anything ever no matter what. The critics of Colebatch’s book would have to do an awful lot of research to seriously erode the evidence that has been brought together by a serious scholar, which is what Hal Colebatch is. It is the usual demonstration effect. Do not go there if you know what’s good for you. So once again I won’t.

A perfect example of someone in politics economically out to lunch

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I saw this at Andrew Bolt and it is absolutely perfect. Labor’s Catherine King claims government spending isn’t the same as taxpayers’ spending. Here are the quotes which could be made by anyone on the Labor front bench (and by all too many in the Coalition):

Is healthcare important in this country? Yes it is. Who pays for it? We think it is perfectly possible … for the government to continue to contribute alongside our taxpayers as they do both through the Medicare levy, Medicare levy surcharge and of course through general taxation to continue to have a sustainable Medicare system. . . .

When the Government points out that the co-payment will at least pay for a new $20 billion medical research fund, Labor health spokeswoman Catherine King tells the Government to keep the fund but ditch the tax to pay for it, claiming the Government could somehow “find the money from consolidated revenue”. You know, the great big money pot that magically refills?

One of the many problems that have been caused by Keynesian theory is to have substituted thinking in terms of money for thinking in terms of productive inputs. She sees no end to the money tree. Just keep printing and we can have everything. What she misses are the severe limitations on the productive real side of the economy.

Yet the undeniable fact is that there are a finite number of doctor-hours available across the economy, and these can only be expanded, over time, by reducing the number of other-profession-hours available. And there are only so many nurses-hours available and hospital-bed-nights available and ambulance-hours available, with none of these expandable other than incrementally and at huge cost in the other things we might do instead, like build schools, or roads, or trains, or submarines or anything else, like medical research, let us say.

I suspect that she and her colleagues are so dazzled by the billions they get to spend that they think there are no limits that matter. The reality is that she is so out of her depth, like so many of her colleagues, that they end up creating the fiscal mess that Julia and Kevin have left behind. It is a scandal, of course, but the level of economic education is now so low that even half the economists we graduate would not be able to immediately see the flaws in the arguments Catherine has made.