There really is such a place, and we do live there and our leader is a humbug. Art imitates life once again.
The Dinkum Wizard of Oz
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Comedy gold
Migration and the new Europe
They do not produce wealth where they come from so they are now going to places where they know how wealth is created but will be unable to create this wealth with so many unproductive migrants within their borders. We will have income equality soon enough, but not wealth.
A reminder to those who think Tony made no difference
This is by Dominic Perrottet, Finance Minister in the government of NSW Premier Mike Baird: Abbott’s Legacy Must Live On. I am choosing the same excerpt that was used by Andrew Bolt but you ought to read it all:
Going against the grain isn’t easy. For all that’s written about Tony Abbott’s prime ministership, it must be recognised that he went against the grain for the good of the country. Under the last Labor government, over 50,000 people arrived illegally by boat, costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars. According to the ‘Canberra consensus’, this was simply the ‘new normal’ and nothing could be done….
Abbott went against the grain. He pledged to stop the boats.
Deterrence doesn’t work, thundered the Greens. A pig-headed refusal to accept reality, wrote Michelle Grattan. A policy that risks lives, said Mike Carlton. In the face of this opposition, Abbott delivered. Since the 2013 election, just one boat has arrived. Lives saved, borders secured, order restored.
On climate change, the “consensus” was more of the same. Climate Armageddon was nigh, we were told, so businesses and individuals must cough up billions of dollars.
Abbott took a more measured approach… This in the face of a climate orthodoxy that successfully frightened governments in NSW, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland into spending tens of billions of dollars on desalination plants that, to this day, sit idle while dams fill and flood.
So Abbott again went against the grain and promised to scrap the carbon tax. Too difficult to undo, said Labor. Impractical and disruptive, according to the SMH‘s Peter Hartcher. Reckless and disturbing the status quo, said Michelle Grattan.
In the end, the people agreed with Abbott, and the carbon tax was abolished. So, too, the business-killing mining tax, which just about every talking head in Canberra agreed was a great idea — right before the iron ore price crashed.
It has been said that conservatives are often in government, but rarely in power, in part because many centre-right governments simply accept the status quo, failing to reverse bad policy. Tony Abbott not only opposed bad policy, he actually rolled it back, and he did it decisively and quickly in the face of a hostile Senate and an intransigent Labor Party…
Meanwhile, going against the grain on climate change and boat arrivals earned Abbott the abject hatred of the political Left, as did stripping terrorists of their dual-citizenship, challenging the conformist orthodoxy of the ABC and opting for the will of the people to decide on gay marriage. Despite this, much like John Howard before him, the secret of Abbott’s initial success was simple: he addressed the concerns of the silent majority – not the chattering classes – using Liberal principles.
With a change of leader there will be a temptation to downplay, even do away with, the achievements of the Abbott government. This would be a mistake for several reasons.
Firstly and most importantly, conservative policies are not fantasies – they apply in the real world, and they work. The boats have stopped, the taxes have been axed, free trade agreements signed and the budget on track for repair. The country is the better for all that.
Secondly, any shift to the left would be a betrayal of the Liberal base, which is profoundly and unapologetically conservative. They do not get their talking points from Q&A or The Age. They will have no truck with a government delivering a Labor agenda in Liberal clothing.
Thirdly, Liberal electoral success has always come from the centre-right.
The good that men do is oft interred with their bones. In this case, not yet, but brave to say it all the same. And when you realise the amount of white-anting Tony had to deal with, you get a measure of just how uphill his battles were.
Malcolm is becoming an international metaphor for idiot
This is from an article the other day by Mark Steyn which you should, of course, read in full. But these are the relevant bits about our new PM:
Let’s take Malcolm Turnbull at his word that it’s only “a very very small percentage of violent extremist individuals”. What is the actual percentage? In the aforementioned Malmö, where up to a thousand mostly young male “refugees” arrive each day, suppose the “very very small percentage” is two per cent. That’s 20 brand new “violent extremists” per day. During the Northern Irish “Troubles”, MI5 estimated that there were no more than a hundred active members of the IRA at any one time – that’s to say, people actively involved in shooting and killing. So Malmö is taking in the equivalent of the entire IRA every week.
What will be our contribution? And when you have finished reading Mark Steyn, you should go on to Andrew Bolt.
UPDATE: And if you want to see what mugs they take us for, have a look at these: Yesterday’s Terrorist is Today’s “Helpless Refugee”…THESE Pictures will SHOCK you. There’s more at the link than just this one.
Somehow they just seem to know
As Tim Blair so rightly says: The ABC knows when it is safe to mention religious affiliation.
Consumption makes the world go around, world go around
My thanks to Tel for bringing this to my attention. I Want to be a Consumer, a Poem by Patrick Barrington. Henry Hazlitt, in his Failure of the “New Economics”, quotes this poem, which can be viewed as a critique of Keynesian economics. Hazlitt wrote:
The natural consequences of the Keynesian economic philosophy were vividly portrayed by Patrick Barrington (two years before the particular rationalization that apeared in the General Theory) in his poem in Punch [Issue of April 25, 1934]
Some ideas are just in the air. The poem was written two years before Keynes got around to showing how well before his time this young lad was. From a Keynesian point of view, what is really socially wrong with his ambition?
I Want to be a Consumer
“And what do you mean to be?”
The kind old Bishop said
As he took the boy on his ample knee
And patted his curly head.
“We should all of us choose a calling
To help Society’s plan;
Then what do you mean to be, my boy,
When you grow to be a man?”“I want to be a Consumer,”
The bright-haired lad replied
As he gazed up into the Bishop’s face
In innocence open-eyed.
“I’ve never had aims of a selfish sort,
For that, as I know, is wrong.
I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
And help the world along.“I want to be a Consumer
And work both night and day,
For that is the thing that’s needed most,
I’ve heard Economists say,
I won’t just be a Producer,
Like Bobby and James and John;
I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
And help the nation on.”“But what do you want to be?”
The Bishop said again,
“For we all of us have to work,” said he,
“As must, I think, be plain.
Are you thinking of studying medicine
Or taking a Bar exam?”
“Why, no!” the bright-haired lad replied
As he helped himself to jam.“I want to be a Consumer
And live in a useful way;
For that is the thing that’s needed most,
I’ve heard Economists say.
There are too many people working
And too many things are made.
I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
And help to further Trade.“I want to be a Consumer
And do my duty well;
For that is the thing that’s needed most,
I’ve heard Economists tell.
I’ve made up my mind,” the lad was heard,
As he lit a cigar, to say;
“I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
And I want to begin today.”
Who would use a word like ‘phantasmagorical’ in an economics text?
I met with my publisher today and we briefly discussed a third edition of my Free Market Economics. It’s now on the agenda but distantly since I have pretty well said what I want to say. I bring this up for a series of additional reasons, and let me start with this much appreciated comment on a previous post:
Hi Steve
Off topic here (apologies Cats) but I wanted to congratulate you for finding an opportunity to slip the wonderful word ‘phantasmagorical’ into your book . To find such a word embedded within an economic text was a great little ‘Easter egg‘! I am about half way through and am thoroughly enjoying it. I only studied economics in high school but have always had more than a passing interest in the subject. Jump forward 20+ years and I am bashing my way through an MBA and found your book really relevant for my elective unit on ‘Entrepreneurship’, a great refresher on some of the base principles of the subject and a refreshing perspective on the functions of supply and demand in any economy.
Cheers Nathan
And then, also just today, there was this from a student who is studying from the book as part of an online course I run. He had a question to ask about a coming test, but then wrote this:
For the book, I have to say I really enjoy it and though I really hope you don’t mind in me giving some suggestions as such. Firstly just on the premise on the book i could see it being a love hate for some students just as it continuously goes through as an argument of sorts rather than laying down the facts as they should be, if you know what I mean. Not a dig just meaning that if it were more just this is as it is then we could just focus on that.
The second one is on the explanations for say’s law and the business cycles. I have kind of found for me in learning it I keep trying to apply it to real life as we should and ended up looking through all of the recessions in the past. And actually looking at them it makes the classical views blatantly obvious and correct even in the great depression where there wasn’t a reduction in the demand but that the economy was rapidly changing to the more modern economy with the setting of the public market for stocks. Not sure if I explained that quite right, though what I am getting at is if in the explanations or even in an assignment we were looking at what has caused every recession it would really hammer in the concepts of the book and prove that they in fact are correct and that Keynes is some funded by government full of shit fraud.
Again really enjoying the book now that I have got into it, just more on the output as I really hope it would become universal proof of the correct concept.
I will think about what I can do now that the issue has come up, but I have to say I am very reluctant to mess with the text again. It’s not perfect, but it remains the only anti-Keynesian textbook available anywhere in the world and there’s much else in it besides.
A political cartoon you will find only in Australia
Political correctness does not work in this country, at least not yet. You can also find the cartoon – from The Australian today – on Tim Blair’s blog, where there is also the following comment from the Letters to the Editor in The Daily Telegraph:
After bringing in Muslim refugees and giving them free healthcare, free education, open-ended Centrelink payments, and priority public housing, we now have to pay for de-radicalization programs so they don’t kill us. Why can’t the Muslim community pay for this themselves via the money made from halal certification fees? Malcolm Turnbull is off with the fairies on immigration and national security matters – a slave to political correctness.
We have always been able to Australianise our migrants because we believe in our heart of hearts that we are superior to every other society on earth. Wherever you come from, it’s not as good as here. And not only do we believe it, it may actually be true. So to all those ungrateful migrants who feel so aggrieved that they can shoot police IT workers of Chinese descent dead on the street for some kind of bigoted racist jihadist reason, it won’t work on us, in spite of what our elites might like to pretend. Look at that cartoon, and ask yourself where else it might get published. I cannot think of another place on earth, and as long as we can do it, we will remain all right.
“I am a Keynesian,” Bowen declares proudly
These people don’t get it. They just don’t get it. I want to write, “such idiots they are”, but I am much too polite for that. From Paul Kelly’s column today on Keating and Swan loom large in Bowen’s thinking:
“I am a Keynesian,” Bowen declares proudly. “I would take a Keynesian approach to fiscal management. We can’t rule out the need for a government to stimulate domestic demand sometime over the next decade.” It is an unambiguous statement of belief.
Given Australia’s lower economic growth and doubts about economic recovery, Bowen as treasurer resorting to fiscal stimulus would be a live option. It reminds us that Bowen is a politician formed by the 2008-09 global financial crisis and is a champion of the huge fiscal stimulus put in place by Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan at that time. . . .
In his book The Money Men, Bowen rejects the main criticisms of the Rudd-Swan stimulus. While admitting the outcome was “imperfect”, Bowen says Swan was tested like no treasurer since Labor’s Ted Theodore during the 1930s and concludes that Swan, in relation to the GFC, “got all of the big calls right”.
The evidence of cloth between the ears never gets more evident than dealing with someone who actually sat in Parliament first through the Costello years and then through the years of economic management under Wayne Swan and thinks that Swan got it right. Those Costello years, when everything was going so well because the world economy was so placid. Like through the Asian Financial Crisis and the Dot-Com bust, you mean. They went well here because, for a change, we didn’t have a Keynesian in charge. How really out of it do you have to be to say this:
As Bowen says, Labor’s $46 billion second stimulus package of February 2009 triggered a debate that dominated “at least the next five years of Australian politics”.
It dominates us now because the deficits and debt will remain a problem for years on end. And now this clown wants to come back into government and add to the problems in the same way that they did the last time we gave them the chance. And if you really want to start to worry, try this on for size:
For Bowen, economic growth is the mission. He wants a competitiveness strategy “sector by sector”, says it is “not the job of Canberra” to determine where the new jobs come from but identifies the sectors that he sees as a priority and the skills deemed to be essential.
Picking last year’s winners is a tried and true strategy of failure, but back it will come if we give these people the chance to turn the Australian economy into the same kind of wreck that Obama has managed in the United States.
Law of Markets 