Mangled Thoughts

The IPA, “Australia’s Premier Free market Think Tank” (1), is in the middle of fighting what has become a very serious fraud. The matter is drawing increasing attention and from very senior figures around Australia, if the contacts I have received from some of those figures is an indication. What a fight it is too.

The IPA committed itself to what has become a fraud. It has published an article that is stamped in ignorance, and absence of rigor that, once upon a time anyway, a fresher in the first week of their first term at university would have been given a proper metaphorical caning for it. I am referring to the disgusting article by joint authors:

Chris Berg, Editor of the IPA Review,

Andrew Kemp, an ” occasional contributor” to the IPA Review.

They have committed more than trivial errors in scholarship. The paper is an arrogant, self-indulgent, and scandalous exercise in telling a nest of what are now nothing but outrageous lies.

Their “article” is the lead article of the March 2007 issue of the IPA Review, with a handsome illustrated cover indeed to match its sheer weightiness. The weightiness of ignorant, incompetents who have only told what must now be called a pack of lies and worse. The offending article is titled, “Islam and the free market” ( March,2007). Before the grist, an indication of the shallowness of this pair of professorial geniuses is given in the introduction:

American strategy in the Islamic world has been aimed at the establishment of political democracy is a worthy goal, but a worryingly incomplete one. Social and political freedom cannot be fully established unless they are united with the other pillar of liberalism, economic freedom.

The 1st sentence conveys the tone of the rest of the paper, they are “know-it-alls” telling poor readers all about the mysteries of the universe. Mark the put down of what is a deadly war being fought by the men of the allied forces against a vicious foe, ” a worthy goal”; Bah!

Phrase 1 of the 2nd sentence is, from the pens of those who claim to be “free market economists”, garbage. It’s the sort of rubbish usually expected of leftists, and idiot journalists, politicians and other cretins who bang on so. Economic freedom, and that is rooted in uncompromised property rights, is the root of all freedoms, and this fact makes the sentence by these two “free market think tankers” not simply all the more ludicrous. It’s also a very crude oxymoron.

Do they really have a grip on any jot or tittle they claim to advance? Such flaws are mere trivia, in this case. It’s the vacuous lies they have told, which has drawn wide notice from concerned Australians.

Before continuing, readers keep in view that this is not simply about two incompetent, ignorant morons and their nasty little bit of toilet paper material. It is also about the fact that the IPA pretends to be what is quoted above. The IPA is in the same circle of “freedom fighters” as Quadrant and the HR Nicholls Society. What do they all have in common: They are ineffectual and they’re the butt of leftists jokes and the contempt of many Australians who are fed up to the gills watching a closed gene pool handing victory over to the left precisely because of their laziness, hubris and ignorance. There is one more observation to make.

Such “righties” are quick to attack the greens for telling lies, the ABC for telling lies, the “black armband” brigade for telling lies. Yet, in this article, Kemp (he is related to those two ineffectual, puffed up types, the brothers Kemp, occupying precious Liberal Seats in Federal Parliament.), and Berg have done exactly what leftist liars in the media do, cooked a pack of lies.

What is more exasperating, they have not merely told lies. It’s a very serious offence in an article purveyed as sound scholarship advancing truth. Their lies betray very many things that lot claim to stand for. What is more, how did the senior figures in the IPA let those two fools get away with publishing a pack of lies? I know, they are on the same wave length, densely dead.

The article was published in March. It is now July, and August is looming, and the IPA has still not withdrawn it. The IPA has not published a public apology. The IPA has not published an article demolishing it and correcting the falsification of the historical record.

The demolition and correction of the paper has been done, outside of the IPA, in another forum. Internet links are given below, for readers to check out the corrective material. So much for a lengthy introduction but, readers, the gravity of the matter, and the damage done by Kemp, Berg, and the IPA by writing, publishing and fully supporting the fraud, warrants nothing less than extended evisceration.

In summary, Kemp and Berg make four claims:

1.There is in Islam a vibrant, shining strand of free market liberalism, which can be traced right back to Mohammed and the Koran.

2.A formal intellectual tradition beginning in the late scholastic age.

3.The Muslims were the seminal intellectual influences behind the advance of economics in the West -western economists are indebted to them for solutions to observations and outstanding problems.

4. Some fundamental economic theorems were formulated by Muslims, and taken up by the Western economists.

Bye the bye, do Kemp and Berg seriously hold “value of labour” is a true economic theorem? In any case, they imply Adam Smith derived the proposition from the Muslim, Ibn Khaldun, who, while he might have been a 14th century Islamic historian, he was not a scholastic, contra Berg and Kemp.

In other words, the two haven’t simply claimed there is a vibrant Islamic Liberal tradition, underpinned by a profound intellectual tradition. They have also asserted, the west is indebted to Islam, and its masters. This claim alone is absolutely false, as are the other claims. There is not the slightest attention to historical facts in the assertion of the claims, and forget argument, there is none.

Their summary summation of history is a fiction from beginning to end, a tissue of fabrications resting on wild assertions. In concocting it, they only betrayed the history of western civilisation, to the glorification of Islam. Ponder it a moment, ladies and gentlemen, in view of what we face today. The word ” treasonous” is being bandied about, freely, around Australia.

It might be assumed they supplied at least some sound evidence. Not at all. Not one jot. Some friends attended a forum at which , they related, the editor of Brookesnews, Mr. Jackson, dealt with the actual intellectual history of economics, during which he thoroughly demolished the Berg-Kemp account of economic history. To this, they related this amusing scene:

Michael Moore (brother of Des Moore, who heads Michael Kroger’s Brains Trust, the HR Nicholls Society), alerted to the subject of the lecture, attended the forum to, as he declared to Mr. Jackson, “represent the IPA”. By the end, my informants related, Michael Moore had crumpled into a cringing heap, cringing from the fact that Mr. Jackson had thoroughly destroyed the fabrications of Kemp and Berg.

Jackson’s lecture, was given ex tempore, but is reprised here in full,

Prodos Worldwide, podcast titled, “Does Islam Really have a Free Market Heritage?”.

Jackson shows how appallingly false the claims of Berg and Kemp are, and their complete ignorance of the history of economics.

Economics is a western tradition, owing nothing to the Muslims. There was no Muslim development at all even to merely give a slight nudge to progress in economic reasoning.

The singular point is, economics is solely a western tradition, initiated by the Greeks. It was curiosity driven westerners, seeking rational explanations, who made discoveries, solved problems, discovered the laws of economics, and hammered out theory. In other words, it is a strictly western tradition of critical reasoning and analysis and the enterprises of western individuals, beginning not with Muslims but with the Greeks.

The point shows up in the sheer stupidity of Kemp and Berg in daring to write not only the paper, but also in smearing two distinguished economists and ‘correcting’ them, Schumpeter and Rothbard:

Joseph Schumpeter slandered Islamic scholarship by arguing that there existed a “great gap between the Greek scholars and the Christian scholastics”. Ibn Khaldun deserves a central place in economic thought.

Rothbard’s two volume Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought rightfully rehabilitates the Christian School of Salamanca in Spain as heretofore unacknowledged giants in economic history, pre-dating Adam Smith with many of the Scotsman’s key insights, but unfortunately he too neglects Islamic scholars such as Ibn Khaldun.

The reason why, as Jackson explained, Ibn didn’t occupy even a minor place is, his contribution to economics is zero. Going on their quotations Kemp and Berg attribute to Ibn, the amusing thing is that if he figured as they claim, Ibn would have arrested advance in economics. As it is, Adam Smith did considerable damage to economics or, rather, those who followed him did:

The notion of the value of labour had been demolished as false long before Smith made the very bad mistake of asserting it once again.

Worse, the dud duo attribute to Ibn some crucial discoveries and formulation of terms, for which they supply no evidence and cannot because, Ibn did not make them. They had been made long before Ibn’s time, some by the Greeks, with attention to Democritus and Zenophon. The major advances were made before the time of the mythical Muslim economists, the 14th century.

Leaving economic history to the editor of Brookesnews, some other observations need to be made. Kemp and Berg assert, for example:

The early history of the Muslim world is a history of commerce… religious texts describing this period are replete with contextual references to commercial institutions, merchants and markets, commodities traded and commercial practices.

It would be hard to find a successful civilisation without a stable economic base at its origins, but it is worth emphasising the extent to which Islam, in particular, was conceived in a commercial environment.”

Forget about economics and its history, Berg and Kemp don’t even have a hint of a clue as to the beginnings of Islam, and the history of the middle east, or they would not have written such rubbish. They disclose only total ignorance of Middle Eastern History, and this is before more exacting, scholarly requisites inclusive of languages, and philology. It shows out in their very crude, completely false and facile account. Next, the paper reads as if no University Professor in the pertinent fields checked their “draft” and, worse, they didn’t even bother to contact even one expert.

Totally void in ancient history, it is no wonder they can write such vulgar nonsense as, “Islam was conceived in a commercial environment”.

A word on Mohammed’s splendiferous “theology”. It is a stew of syncretistic beliefs, a fusion not of Judaism and Christianity, but those of Jewish and Christian heretics. More-over, he barely understood the Jews nor the Christians, just as he really didn’t have a foggy as to the force of the heresies he absorbed. He was laughed out of towns when he tried to purvey his beliefs. The only people who accepted them were the desert Arab tribes, and it is understandable why. Mohammed’s ethics, such as they were, were more consonant with tribalism than civilisation.

Meanwhile, while Mohammed was working out his primitive code, the Fathers of the Church, by the 6th century, had behind them a massive intellectual history to call upon, stretching right back to Hesiod of Greece, who was born About 750 BC. Ibn Khaldun should be referred to as a Muslim commentator. The term scholastic cannot be applied to him.

Islam did not begin as a successful civilisation. Mohammed and his successors destroyed civilisation in the East. They neither generated civilised traditions, nor civilised tribesmen. They waged war against the civilised peoples of the east, put them to the sword, subjugated them, enslaved them, wrought carnage upon them, and as for market guided Liberals, they were nothing but parasites.

Kemp’s and Berg’s summation of that early history is a grotesque, infantile parody in revisionist mode. Keep in view, that that is not the only period they lie about in their paper.

What evidence do they present? None at all, is the answer. Neither do they supply a list of sources. The only reference they mention is a Mr. Mustafa Akyol, editor of the Turkish daily News, in Ankara, whom they thank “for invaluable comments”. The rubbish in their paper makes plain:

They did not at the least take advice and direction from experts in the fields needed to tackle all that they pretend to cover. This derelection is compounded by their complete ignorance of the ancient history of the middle east down to the end of the 7th century.

My informers are speculating about how they went about writing the paper. That they had Akyol and some “others” review, not one draft, but a number of drafts is rather more suggestive as to what might have really transpired, and that does not look good at all.

Jackson, in the podcast linked above, has probably hit the nail when he remarks that it seems as if they were “spoon-fed”. If so, and Berg and Kemp should confess what they actually did, and who spoon fed them?

Was it Aykol, a Turk, an obscure editor of an obscure newspaper editor in Ankara, Muslim Turkey? Seems plausible, since they cite him, no-one else, as their authority on Islamic tradition and history. This raises questions about Akyol.

Berg and Kemp may not appreciate how bad this is, but can other senior figures of the IPA have been so stupid to miss this? Well yes.

After all, if they can be so stupid as to fully back the article, it’s hardly to be expected they checked out Aykol, and checked out what Berg and Kemp actually did - apart from writing their article using a mixmaster machine.

So bad is their drivel the only point to a corrective exercise is to undo the damage and rectify those two charlatans, and the IPA. Mr. Jackson has done a fine job to this end.

So, what was the IPA on about in publishing such a scandalous betrayal of western cvilisation, and, for that matter, a complete falsification of the history of classical liberal economics? There are those already speculating on the motivation of the IPA:

“What is the deal behind it?”

“Tthere must be something very rum behind it because they still refuse to retract and correct.”

“Why have they sold out to muslims and in such an ugly fashion?”

The cretins at the IPA may not like it, but senior figures have made their disgust plain.

It is a standing joke as it is, the self-magnification, “Australia’s Premier Free market Think Tank”. Their fight for freedom is, as it is, a self-propelled cow pat catapult battering a fort.

Now, they have crossed the line from being merely ineffectual. What many are beginning to appreciate is, it is appalling that the cretins in the IPA, CIS, and Quadrant, are being generously funded to mount an ostensibly gutsy fight against the left and for liberty, and fail to do so every step of the way. Now we see the depths to which these cretins can sink.

The IPA, by continuing to back the Kemp-Berg paper, are not simply looking very foolish, stupid and moronic, they are now committing a scandalous fraud. Freedom fighters, free market economists, bah!

P.S. while Berg, Kemp and the IPA appease Islamo fascists by publishing such rubbish, where were they, from their bunker in NSW, when the Bracks regime persecuted the two pastors? They were silent. Come to that, what fight, with all the funds behind them, did the IPA, the HR Nicholls Society, and Quadrant put against Bracks’ blasphemy “law” and his goon squad headed by Sisel and Szoke? The answer is, ladies and gentlemen, no fight at all, not even from within the safety of NSW. Bravo, “Premier Think Tankers”.

In contrast, Jackson of and Brookesnews stood up for the pastors by a direct challenge to HEROC. As a challenge to Bracks’ blasphemy laws, Brookesnews deliberately violated them while the IPA, CIS, and the HR Nicholls stood silent and afraid. Don’t forget, readers, IPA and CIS are well funded and what did they do with all that monetary weaponry and ammo? They cowered behind bolted doors.

(1) Institute of Public Affairs, IPA,  has on its website is its modest claim in bold heading, ” Australia’s Leading Free market ThinkTank”

Here’s the IPA Review site location for the Berg-Kemp article.

Added this day, 12/2/09, the following note:

The IPA  subsequently framed a very large glossy poster of the front cover of the Review edition containing the Kemp- Berg paper. They admire it as a classic in history of economics, underscored by having hung it alongside a large, glossy advertising brochure for a book by distinguished historian, Antony Beevor on the Spanish Civil War.

I attest it, because I saw it hanging in the reception of the office. Kemp and Berg had chickened out of an offer from Strider and me to meet them in the Sherlock Holmes. We were generous, in indicating to them they could bring along bodyguards.

No show. So, I went up to visit them. They were out. Glass doors locked. It was 2. The time set was 12 noon. They had knocked off. The IPA and CIS rages against “dole bludgers”, and laggard employees of companies paid far less than what they are. I can’t yet nail the hypocrisy but I have a funny feeling it’s there’s a deal of it about.