Category Archives: Politics on the left

“I have unfettered legal power”

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“I’m in charge of spectrum auctions and if I say to you everyone in this room, ‘if you want to bid next week in our spectrum auction you better wear red underpants on your head’, you’ll be wearing them on your head,” he said. “I have unfettered legal power.”

The quote is from Stephen Conroy and may be found here: Conroy plays down ‘red underpants’ comments. They love the power, these totalitarians. Daniel Andrews has never shown himself as anything other than stoopid. But he likes the power to tell everybody else what to do. He has screwed up every single thing he has done since becoming Premier, and especially the lockdown, but he gets to give the orders. He has even sold out Victoria to the Communist Party of China to cover his fantastically large deficit expenditures. Disgusting.

Meanwhile: Coronavirus: Levels of herd immunity in UK may already be high enough to prevent second wave, study suggests.

“The outbreaks look similar at the beginning. But in the heterogeneous population, individuals are not infected at random.

“The highly susceptible people are more likely to get infected first. As a result, the average susceptibility gets lower and lower over time.”

She added: “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent. It’s very striking.”

I only wish there was herd immunity against voting for socialists. There is, of course, but only after the voting is over plus around half a dozen years. And even then, it’s always only temporary.

NOW COMING TO MELBOURNE:

Explaining what is wrong with Magic Money Theory [MMT]

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This was from Beachcomber in the comments:

Hi Steve, I just read a fascinating essay by Peter Smith at Quadrant: Money printing in the age of Covid

In the essay it states:

In the age of COVID-19, bonds sold to finance deficit spending are being largely or wholly bought up by respective central banks. This is manifest in banks’ holdings of deposits with their central bank and of treasury notes or bills.

In comments the question is asked as to from where the “central bank” garners the money to buy the bonds.

To which Peter Smith answers:

It creates it out of thin air cos it can.

The central bank simply issues a cheque or like instrument, drawn on the central bank, which allows the holder of the bond (assume it is a non-bank – the process is short-circuited if the holder is a bank) to lodge the cheque in its bank account. The bank correspondingly lodges the cheque with the central bank and sees its deposts with the central bank increase accordingly. The central bank now has an asset – the bond – and a corresponding liability – the bank’s deposit. It can go on doing this till the cows come home. Or, practically speaking, until inflation rears its ugly head.

Is this true? Can this continue forever? With shrinking incomes and the associated shortage of money supply, inflation seems unlikely. Peter Smith makes a distinction from Modern Monetary Theory without explaining how it is different. Can the creation of money from nothing by the Government continue forever? If so, then Andrews can reign forever!

First, if there is an authority on the banking system in Australia outside and beyond the reach of government, it is Peter Smith. He was, when I first met him, the economist for the Australian Bankers’ Association, then became the Chief Economist for the State Bank of Victoria and finally was the first Chief Executive for the Australian Payments Clearance Association. No one gets this stuff better than he does.

But let me buy into this because this is part of my expertise as well. And to follow this with any understanding you have to divide the economy into two halves. On one side is production, the actual goods and services produced, which also includes the production of inputs into the production process, such as iron ore and natural gas.

And on the other side there is the monetary side of the economy which is completely distinct. This comprises:

  • money as a medium of exchange, say a $100 note, but represents the value of goods and services so that we can sell what we produce to buy what others produce
  • money which we set aside as a store of value, such as bank accounts or superannuation savings, and
  • money which we use as a unit of account so that businesses can calculate how much things cost to produce so that they can determine what to charge so that they can calculate whether they are making a profit.

And it should be emphasised that only profit-making businesses create more value than they use up in production. Loss-making enterprises – which include virtually every activity run by governments – slow the economy, using up more value than they create. Loss-making enterprises cause the economy to contract. Only if there are other enterprises making profits – almost always private sector enterprises – can the economy expand. Without understanding that, you cannot understand the first thing about how an economy works.

Creating more money does NOT create productive resources. Giving more money to governments, or allowing them to print more money out of thin air, lets governments spend on non-productive activities which they inevitably do. Spending more on non-productive activities means less is spent on productive activities.

And adding to the problems, when the government expands the volume of money by just printing the stuff up, they undermine each of the uses money has: as a medium of exchange, as a store of value and as a unit of account. The economy can no longer be run as productively as it might have been and often even leads to a fall in real income across the entire community.

Virtually no politician I have ever met has understood this. Virtually no political leader I see in the news today understands this. All of the others are Keynesians now, who believe the mere spending of money creates jobs, growth and higher real earnings. On this they could not be more wrong.

We will be paying for this ignorance for a very long time to come.

Is this the worst journalism you have ever read?

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It’s a good thing that The Age is still around so I don’t have to depend on the hysterics at The Oz for my news. Take this today by someone classified as the Associate Editor: Code red for Premier Daniel Andrews as coronavirus crisis reignites. He starts:

Daniel Andrews’s premiership has been smashed and his legacy imperilled. He has had a horrible month; in normal circumstances the Victorian Premier might already have walked.

But for complex social and psychological reasons the Andrews experiment is on life support rather than in the political mortuary. His community is still more interested in beating the virus than in revenge politics.

In his own obtuse way, he has put his finger on the problem: there is no opposition party or leader in Victoria. My favourite party trick at the moment is to ask people to name the Victorian Opposition Leader. Virtually no one can do it. But back to the article as The Oz does everything it can to beat up this dead horse for reasons unknown to me:

Just as the behaviour of the COVID-19 virus can be unpredictable, so is the state of mind of Victorians as they confront their gravest challenge since World War II. The latest record numbers have stunned an already stunned city, with deaths certain to rise [they certainly cannot fall].

“We are in the fight for our lives,” Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos says.

Today the community’s narrowed eyes are focused almost completely on suppressing the killer virus that is marching through the metropolitan area.

He finishes with this:

This once-in-a-lifetime event has entered a highly emotional phase. The economy was retrievable until the fresh outbreak but is now under even greater threat. We are staring at potentially large-scale loss of life. If this crisis deepens and the government is nailed by the judicial inquiry, how long could the Labor caucus justify retaining Andrews at the helm?

Of course Andrews is going to resign, in just the same cowardly way that John Cain left the mess he was responsible for to Joan Kirner. Some legacy! Andrews is the worst premier Victoria has ever had, and that is really really saying something.

Defund the ABC

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Modern Monetary Theory: How MMT is challenging the economic establishment

Illustration of a tree with money for leaves and lush flowers on the ground below where the money falls.

From the dumbest economic analysts in Australia, our very own ABC: Modern Monetary Theory: How MMT is challenging the economic establishment.

What if everything we thought we knew about public finance over the past 40 years has been wrong? A new economic theory has emerged that could rewrite our understanding of how governments create and spend money and what type of society we can afford to build.

And if it is correct, people may be furious. Because it could show that Australia’s political elite can afford to spend far more than they are on public health and education, social housing, scientific research and green energy schemes, while eliminating unemployment.

And yet they’re not — either from a misunderstanding of government finances or because they don’t want to. However, to embrace this radical economic theory you will have to forget what you’ve learned about budget deficits (that they’re bad) and government debt (that it burdens future generations).

Why? Because proponents of the theory say that far from being a problem, budget deficits are often a good thing — they can be the source of healthy economic growth.

More at the link and some previous discussion of MMT here.

Daniel Andrews is showing the way. He spends enormous amounts of money, but never finishes a project so that nothing is ever completed. Tunnels, train lines, you name it, he has left all kinds of useless projects halfway done, which even if completed would never earn as much in revenue as they cost to build. Just build it and they will come, they in this case being massive debt and deficits.

The ABC is filled with such deadheads. I never watch the thing myself but only found out about this from someone else who monitors the place. I don’t know how anyone can listen to such ignorance day after day, but I guess someone has to do it.

ABC delenda est which is Latin for Defund the ABC.

“Everything is what it is, and not another thing”

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And what is everything about at this time and in America? It’s All About November 3. The point of the article, by Roger Kimball, whose premise I have believed since the start:

I do not believe I am violating the principle of Bishop Butler’s argument when I say that almost everything happening in our society—all the craziness, all the posturing, all the distracting noise, exaggeration, and downright mendacity—all of it is not about itself but about something else, and that something else is Donald Trump….

The unremitting, monolithic wall of noise that has been crashing against Donald Trump since election day 2016 has gotten louder and louder, more cacophonous, more furious, more irrational. Everything is what it is, and not another thing. But the one thing that takes precedence over everything now is defeating Trump, which means defeating not only Trump himself but what he stands for—those 63 million voters who put him in office, for starters.

Do enough of us get it? Will we beat back the tide? That is what is at stake and only time will tell. Read the entire article through and think about what part you ought to take yourself. It’s not long. This is how it ends.

Everything that is happening between now and November 3 is about November 3. But the fundamental choice is not really Donald Trump or Joe Biden. It is civilization and America on one side, anarchy and woke tyranny on the other. The Democrats thought they could ride the tiger to victory. Instead, they will be consumed by the monster they created but could not control.

And after you read the article read the comments where you will find these charts.

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And let me pair the above with this, via Instapundit.

WHY I SIGNED THE HARPER’S LETTER:

In 1996, the late great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was on stage taking questions at the Lincoln Center in New York City after the premiere of his film Through the Olive Trees, when someone asked why he had used classical music (a piece from Concerto for Oboe and Strings by Domenico Cimarosa) in a movie that was set in a small village in northern Iran? Kiarostami turned to me, his translator for the hour, and said, in his soft voice and even softer manner, “Tell him classical music has long ceased to belong to the West. It belongs to the world now.”

That exchange, the way Kiarostami disabused the audience of the notion that music knew borders or that great ideas, once invented, remained the “property” of one nation or region, was on my mind when I signed the “Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” which ran in Harper’s Magazine last Tuesday. What I saw at the heart of the text was a defense of American democracy, which no longer belongs solely to America. For every activist on the streets of Hong Kong, every feminist in the prisons of Saudi Arabia, and every interned Uighur in China, America and its democracy remain, for better or worse, the last hope. Are they naïve and misguided? Right or wrong? It does not matter. Those who are suffering under tyrannies around the world, who are trying to imagine a different future for themselves and their fellow citizens, do not dream of Moscow, Beijing, or any nation in Europe. Just as little girls in the far corners of the world who do not even speak English want to dance like Beyoncé, and just as the youth living under prohibition in the Middle East huddle together to secretly watch bootlegged copies of Hollywood films, activists everywhere look to America, and dream of this democracy.

Hysteria in the time of Covid

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We’re living through the greatest mass hysteria in modern history and there are no men of reason to end it.

With thanks to Currency Lad

We need a statue for George Floyd, model citizen of the left

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“His legacy is the rich promise of social reform.”

And this is what we should put on the monument, all taken from Wikipedia.

Between 1997 and 2005, he was convicted of eight crimes; in 2009, he accepted a plea bargain for a 2007 aggravated robbery, serving four years in prison. In 2014, he moved to the Minneapolis area, finding work as a truck driver and a bouncer. In 2020, he lost his security job during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Floyd had five children, including two daughters (ages 6 and 22) in Houston and an adult son in Bryan, Texas. [No mention of a wife.] A former partner lives in Houston with his youngest daughter. He also had two grandchildren. A GoFundMe account to defray Floyd’s funeral costs and benefit his family broke the site’s record for number of individual donations.

On May 25, 2020, Floyd was arrested after allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a grocery store in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood of Minneapolis. He died after Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes during the arrest.

The Economist, which made Floyd its June 13 cover story, said that “His legacy is the rich promise of social reform.”

AND FOR CONTRAST YOU MIGHT READ THIS: Do all black lives matter to BLM? with this as the subhead.

‘That was my son’

It’s either a wage-based economy or slavery

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It must be one or the other. There is no third way.

There are only two ways you can get other people to work for you.

You either hire people and pay them a wage.

Or someone owns their labour and commands them to do what they do.

The first form is called the market system. The second is referred to as slavery although in the modern world there are various forms of disguise. But if things need to be donem you must have one or the other.

It is only where we have a market economy that freedom is even possible. The loons of the left wish to replace the market economy with socialism, which for all practical purposes means a return to a slave-based economy.

Every socialist economy must ultimately resort to some form of forced labour with fake versions of market economy. Socialist economies are those in which workers are allocated to the jobs they do in a society with a virtual absence of personal freedom. There are also no private employers so that everyone works for the government. And since there is no private enterprise, all production is decided by the government. And since there is no market economy for the purchase and sale of anything, all production decisions are made by central planners. And since there is no price system, no one can work out which is the least wasteful form of production.

So not only does socialism mean a return to poverty at levels not seen for hundreds of years, it also means all forms of work are forms of slave labour.

It is inevitable and cannot be avoided.

“Time for a class action by the people of Australia against Daniel Andrews”

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This may be the longest letter to the editor I have ever seen at the Oz. And it’s right on the money.

History may be repeating itself. According to the National Museum of Australia, the 1918-19 flu pandemic started in Australia in Melbourne, in January 1919, and then spread to the rest of the country after the Victorian health authorities were slow to react.

Why have things gone wrong this time? It is hard to go past the conclusion that, encouraged by their Government, people in Victoria Health have not been paying attention to what should be their core duties.

If we start with Brett Sutton, the Chief Health Officer, we find that he was the main author of a paper in the Medical Journal of Australia published in May. Did this, for example, deal with ways of shortening long waiting lists or preventing people with psychiatric illness becoming homeless? Not at all. Instead, the hospital system was seen, not as a place to look after the sick, but a big polluter: “In 2018–19 every occupied bed-day in a Victorian public hospital generated on average 120kg of carbon dioxide equivalents and 3.65kg of waste, and used 630L of water.”

And it’s not just Australia’s sick contaminating the planet: “If the global health sector were a country, it would be the fifth‐largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet.” And the plan to improve the hospital system? “It requires all public hospitals and health services to have an environmental management plan and report publicly on their environmental performance.”

Then we have Dr Annaliese van Diemen, Deputy Chief Health Officer (Communicable Disease), sending a tweet in the midst of the pandemic to the effect that James Cook was “an invader from another land, decimating populations, creating terror”.

It may be said that people in Victoria Health are intelligent people who can do two things at once, but the evidence does not support this. How do we prevent this happening again? Make people do their job and not grandstand. If the virus does now take hold, it might also be time for a class action by the people of Australia against Daniel Andrews and the Victorian Health Department, run by Maurice Blackburn, of course.

Paddy Grattan-Smith, Matraville, NSW

Andrews is the most incompetent political leader I have ever witnessed in all the years since I arrived in Australia. He has ruined Victoria’s economy, and with his role in “the National Cabinet” he has done much to wreck much else as well. What do we know about his agreements with the Chinese? What is the actual off-the-books level of debt in still uncompleted road and rail constructions? He can talk the talk, but is so far out of his depths in everything he deals with that had he set out to deliberately ruin the place he could not have done a better job.

“If we don’t act now…”

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Watch this first. You won’t be sorry if you do.

This is an article by Gen. Michael Flynn: If We Don’t Act, 2% of the People Are About To Control the Other 98%. And this is someone who knows whereof he speaks.

If the United States wants to survive the onslaught of socialism, if we are to continue to enjoy self-government and the liberty of our hard-fought freedoms, we have to understand there are two opposing forces: One is the “children of light” and the other is the “children of darkness.”

As I recently wrote, the art and exercise of self-governance require active participation by every American. I wasn’t kidding! And voting is only part of that active participation. Time and again, the silent majority have been overwhelmed by the “audacity and resolve” of small, well-organized, passionate groups. It’s now time for us, the silent majority (the indifferent), to demonstrate both.

A long article which you should read. He continues:

I believe the attacks being presented to us today are part of a well-orchestrated and well-funded effort that uses racism as its sword to aggravate our battlefield dispositions. This weapon is used to leverage and legitimize violence and crime, not to seek or serve the truth.

The dark forces’ weapons formed against us serve one purpose: to promote radical social change through power and control. Socialism and the creation of a socialist society are their ultimate goals.

He ends with this:

To the silent and currently indifferent majority: Wake up. America [Western Civilisation] is at risk of being lost in the dustbin of history to socialism. The very heart and soul of [our Western way of life] is at stake.

In war, as in life, most failure comes from inaction. We face a pivotal moment that can change the course of history.

We the people must challenge every politician at every level….

Now is the time to act.

No one can believe it. Mr DeBlasio is such a nice man. Daniel Andrews too. But there are barbarians at every turn and in every generation. How much did Lenin really care about anyone else? Same for Castro? Same for Mao (and Xi if it comes to that). Same for them all.

Did you watch it? They tried to warn us.