In the fight for labour market reform there were and remains two opponents, the ACTU and the fungus brained “Right”. Who caused the damage, and continues to damage this grave and highly moral cause? The second. Incredibly, this lot blamed Howard for the defeat and for the 2007 election loss, and continue to do so.
Peter Brown commented in, RBA in a fluster: reply to “Anon”. He took exception to the reply to “Anon” on the subject of labour markets:
Gerry is that you? If not, then Douglas you are a total lunatic. You are sick. The lawyers are on their way to you and Rumcorps
This is in two parts. The first fixes an upset stomach. The second part is more damning indictments of what the frozen “Right” did and continue to do to labour market reform.
1. What is wrong Brown? Upset stomach?
Brown is free to hurl even the most offensive of invectives against me, I’ve no complaint because I happily throw in a few telling adjectives. But this alone is no good. Rule one, Brown, make sure abuse is surrounded by argument.
If wrong, Brown should have attached an argument as to why. Instead, his response is the Right’s typical notion of cut and thrust, jerk knee and come out smearing. Secondly, while the inert “Right” whine about hard leftists censorsing opponents, consider the record of the “Right”.
It is a profound insight into the Statist “Right” that it was they, through the Kennett administration, who turned the STO and OPA into a criminal racket it still is. They prepared the Victorian anti-Bill of Rights and, in view of the timing, it is reasonable to infer that they might have aimed at strengthening the criminalisation of free speech in Victoria by preparing the Blasphemy Act it was Brumby’s pleasure to have passed.
Moreover, Federal MPs of the scrofulous Right clamoured, in the final couple of years of the Howard administration, for ‘censorship’ of the Internet. What they meant was suppression of free speech - there are blogs and websites that hurt them as much as they do the diseased Left. Now what do we see:
Peter Brown, for some reason peculiar to the scrofulous Right, likes neither what Mr. Gerry Jackson writes and publishes in his news magazine, and doesn’t like what I write. His answer is not refutation but intimidation, threatening to “sick” lawyers onto Jackson, and onto me. I thank Peter Brown for providing another crystal clear insight into the treacherous but comatose “Right” for readers.
Oh, to reinforce: it is typical of the Right’s notion of ‘debate’. That was their reaction to Jackson’s devastating criticism of the IPA’s totally false ‘Islam and the free markets’ by Andrew “Andy Pandy” Kemp and Chris “the brain challenged Kid” Berg. It was their reaction, through the Centre for Independent Studies when Jackson delivered a strict Austrian economic criticism of their position paper boosting mass capital destroying carbon taxes. We know why they immediately reach for the knee jerk and smear.
They can’t defend what they write, they refuse to defend what they put, and are afraid of a direct encounter that will expose them for the hollow men that they are. They also know Jackson is solid, his defence impenetrable and that is why, instead of challenging him directly, they run about smearing him elsewhere, as Brown has done on this site. After all, millions in donors’ funds into their bank vaults is at stake and their hubristic conceited estimation of their prowess and grip.
2. What the frozen “Right” did and continue to do to labour market reform
Wreck the fight for it.
The economic case is rock solid. This they cannot wreck.
They wreck the fight for reform, and persist in wrecking it. One part why they do so is: they don’t have a clue as to what the case is. It is important to observe that from 2005 - the official launch of the campaign to the present, they have not defended what they put as the ‘case’ for reform. They ensured that they never faced open, direct exchange with, say, ACTU guns. They ran away and the reason is clear, cowardice. They have enough sense to realise, they would be shot up all over again,and they are bleeding their gizzards out as it is.
In regards to labour markets, it is plain that what pains Brown is exposure of the sheer stupidity of his heroes in the “Right” and in particular, the HR Clubmen and the fact that they are ignoramuses who have caused great damage to a rock solid and thus highly moral cause. Let’s see:
I draw attention to, for example, Walter Block and William Barnett II, An Austrian Critique of Neo – Classical Monopsony Theory.
This paper is a thorough examination of the false assumption on which monopsony, and oligopsony rests, ‘perfect competition’. Monopsony is the extension of the root fiction. They demonstrate perfect competition is the anti-free market fiction it truly is - pseudo economic theory. [There is nothing new in this demolition by the way, as Jackson’s articles also shows - from history of economic theory.] What is the importance of this?
Des Moore Moore, for instance, concedes the ACTU false claim of indeterminacy of wage rates, and of “balance of power”. The second is rooted in the falsehood of monopsony. The ACTU latched onto Card and Krueger in an attempt to lend credence to it. Jackson nailed a suicidal qualification made by Card and Kreuger, an escape hatch as it were.
The crux is: neither employer nor employee has power. There is no power to be ‘balanced’. Free markets and the marginal productivity of labour explains why, and why labour is justly paid.
The error of perfect competition involves a whole nest of errors including horizontal curves. The HR Nicholls club committed the lot, and in truly clownish style. They compounded the mess by their own idiosyncratic notions.
The ACTU’s assessment of the “Right” in the labour market wars
I had the hot flash from an ACTU heavy that they were delirious with joy when they found out the HR Nicholls Society were supplying advice to Cabinet. That, no alternative sources were involved. This was early in the piece, when the Cabinet began preparing for reform.
Futher, they were surprised Cabinet had not turned to Jackson for advice. That, they fear Jackson and their concern was, if Cabinet had turned to Jackson, they would have been smashed. Remember, not only the ACTU but also the ILO attend to Jackson’s work very carefully.
Further, they checked to make sure it wasn’t a ruse. That, the Cabinet might have been holding Jackson as a secret weapon, concealed by the screen of buffoons in the HR Nicholls Society (Bob Day is a worthy member of this circus of wreckers). This is what the ACTU did; they could not believe their lucky stars that it was true, Cabinet was hanging itself by relying on the troupe of jokers.
In March 2005, Hugh Morgan puckered up for ABC cameras (he believed Auld Bolshevik Cow’s cameras loved him and for once he got something right). Fresh from buying a $700,000 oil painting that very day, and reciting his novel theorem, told modest Australians they are paid too much.
In a few minutes, the final disasterous demolition of the campaign had been accomplished. Cabinet was warned and it ignored the warning - dump this lot and find a gun to get it right. Here’s the confirmation:
Joe Cambria, in Are Liberal Party blue bloods sinking the Government’s workplace reforms? (Nov. 2005), informed the public that the ACTU had hired the highly experienced US national pollster Vic Fingerhut (which also means the ACTU shelled out a hefty sum for his servics). His findings?
“Despite the incredibly stupid headline in the Financial Review (IR bluster fails to rouse most voters) the figures show that your campaign has made an enormous impact.
“These are powerful numbers… you’ve increased the proportion of voters who saw the issue as important to 49 per cent of the electorate and Labor is now seen as best to handle the issue by a 24 point, 50-26 point margin.
“Also, you’ve hit one of the key target audiences [the $50-$75,000 income range] with a full 40 per cent saying they are now less likely to vote Coalition as a result of its planned workplace changes.
“These are great numbers. Very few independent media campaigns –– anywhere –– do this much damage.
“These findings are absolutely devastating for the Government and its advisers, and must surely be cause for considerable alarm among Coalition MPs and Senators.”
Cambria then names the culprits for this massive defeat:
Friends of mine in the City have complained for years about Michael Kroger, Morgan and Calvert-Jones picking incompetent advisers and funding self-important twits.
Oh, defeat wasn’t inevitable. It hung on whether the Cabinet would reach for brains, but they didn’t and they stuck with the arsenic the HR Nicholls clubmen poured into them. The odd thing is, they did cut Des Moore, Ray Evans, and Hugh Morgan loose.
It was not appreciated at the time, Senator Nick Minchin, as a Cabinet Minister, had failed in his oath sworn duty by unilaterally rejecting material prepared for Cabinet. Why? His fellow HR Nicholls Society clubmen? Oh, yes, what Minchin did stinks, marked by his grovelling before his fellow clubmen over the disaster Howard was not responsible for but them.
An amusing blackwash
Des Moore and Ray Evans each made a submission to the July 2007 hearing of the Fair Pay Commission. Being absent of economics, the submissions are revealing for entirely different reasons to these:
Any submission to the Commission would, presumably, contain a proposition and the case for why the proposition is sound. An economic case in fact.
Moore’s paper is 2½ pages long, bears a grandiloquent title, and littered with the perpendicular “I”. He showed his “classical literary learning” in a nice, callous touch. He quoted Luke 6:20. Not a few have noted Moore’s ‘delicacy’. He, as Evans did, told the Commission to read their classics on labour markets for all that they need to know.
Ray Evans’ paper has a modest title but overtook Des in the “look at me stakes”. His paper is 5½ pages, on the HRNS letterhead, with a postscript: “Mr. Ray Evans is the President of the HRNS.” [Is that for life, or just all eternity?]
I showed the ’submissions’ to a senior executive of a large concern. Finished reading, he remarked : “They make me cringe.”
Here begins the scrofulus “Rights” decision to blame Howard
For the caranage they caused:
Evans declared to the Commission; the Howard Government accepted
“the Marxist dogmas which inspired the trade union movement of the 1880s and 1890s.”
He insouciantly concluded:
“…imbalance-of-power argument used to justify collective bargaining is the last remnant of a “Marxist class-war mindset”.
Unionism in the English speaking world in the 1880s and 1890s was not inspired by Marxism. This is not the first time that Mr Evans has asserted “the entire regulatory edifice of unions, tribunals, employer bodies, is based on the Marxian fallacy of class struggle”. It was the HR Nicholls Society, as above, that ‘conceded imbalance of power’ - from perfect competition.
Evans then accused Cardinal Archbishop Pell of being a neo-Marxist! He recieved it through Aquinas!
Pell is no neo-Marxist - not even protean. Neither were Aristotle, Aquinas, and the scholastics who seminally drove economics. Pell is only in need of sound economic advice. Evans has no excuse for his completely stupid defects in economics and history. For the ostrich “Right”, history begins when, risen each morning, they’ve had their first cup of coffee/ tea.
This is typical of the Right, they are impervious to correction of major mistakes in facts and in explanation (theory). Remarkable. Slothful, intractable, and arrogant clutzes are a few apt adjectives. And cowardice:
Evans, Moore, and the Institute of Public Affairs smeared Howard and Pell in safety; they know as well as anyone else, they were not as Prime Minister and Cardinal Archbishop of Australia in a position to defend themselves and are still not in a position to do so. Other bishops and parliamentarians can but not anyone in their positions is free to engage in such a public exchange.
The trouble is, they have caused great, extensive damage. Their collapse on Co2 taxes and the Greens’ lie Co2 emissions causes global warming draws it out: they don’t give a stuff about the sheer havoc they can wreak on lives of many others, so long as they are at the fore and, in the case of the Centre of Independent Studies and the Institute of Public Affairs, their bank vaults are lined with bundles of cash.
Back to Peter Brown
A. I haven’t met Mr. Jackson. I am not defending him, he demonstrates on Brookesnews that he is very capable of defending what he puts forth. The point is why the mention of Block and Barnett II: Jackson, as an exponent of and theoretician in the Austrian school of economics, reasons from solid principles - theory. He makes predictions from these grounds and they have shown out, demonstrating the soundness of theory he is solidly grounded in. Along with Dr. Shostak, these are the only two fine economists who write for the public and are fighting good causes.
B. I correspond with a couple of economists overseas, who are also very fine. I take their advice. They can’t serve Australians. They have their own countrymen to serve. They can’t engage in Australian affairs, they are engaged in the affairs of their countries.
Here we have in Australia the only site one has come across writing for Australians, from solid economic reasoning and they hurt the Hard Left. They hurt the Right too for the reasons indicated above, and one has banged on about for some years now. The economists I correspond with have no difficulty in concurring with Jackson, and in damning the efforts of the cretinous “Right”. It’s not Jackson, it is what he works from and puts. When I read Block, I read nothing new for it is solidly grounded too.
C. The Institute of Public Affairs in its December edition of the IPA Review, bashed Howard. This was the core of what the edition was for, self-exculpation of their part in the destruction of reform and the election. With the Centre of Independent Studies , this is not the only damage they have caused, damage that is certainly hurting many a Victorian, who now also face blackout because of their rubbish.
D. Stupid people are callous, destructive types. Confined to themselves, they only hurt kith and kin. But when in the Executive and advising, they hurt many.
Defective and worse economics will do this, hurt many Australians, as Co2 taxation will do - thanks to the rotting “Right”. This is of no concern to them. Their concern is themselves.
Truth counts, truth in economics counts, because the impact is great and the ruination can be great when in error. We are talking about the lives of millions of Australians and this lot conduct themselves as narcissistic, shallow, delinquent children do.
E. It is clear where Brown stands. It is clear what he ‘defends’, his completely stupid “Rightwing” heroes. His reaction tells me he is one of them.
‘Labour market wars’, it alludes to the publication, The Labour Market Wars, Jackson, which works through the case and hits targets that had to be hit, and still have to be hit. Go blow bubbles Peter Brown.