Mangled Thoughts

[Continued from, Hard Leftist Clive Hamilton has a good whine, 23/2/2010]

Reviewing Part I, Hamilton’s ABC “article” rests on nothing more than a thick tissue of fallacies and very crudely put too. This is an argument? This is the calibre of a University Professor? What a joke. Some of Clive Hamilton’s fallacies, as in many fallacies, are explored in the footnotes to this article ⁽¹⁾, so only a few remarks need be delivered here:

Hamilton’s case misrepresents the position of scientists, and we are talking of hundreds of thousands of scientists all around the world, who have thoroughly shown the lie is a lie. He uses the nasty little device of picking on a few “emailers” to assert these cretins sum up the arguments of scientists and all else who say no!

Clive Hamilton damns by generalistion anyone who opposes the lie as somehow morally deficient and worse. Accordingly, sceptics are really nothing more than pack of a few isolated malcontents unhappy with life. Hummph! Hamilton and his fellow travellers are unhappy malcontents. Capitalism and freedom makes them unhappy.

Hamilton’s proudly mounted great defence is a feeble (and this is an exaggeration) fallacious moral argument written in crude, bilious drivel.

This is an argument? This is Clive Hamilton’s defence of lies? This is what ABC boldly publishes on its website as gutsy analysis and commentary? Of course it is, to the hard Left. It is their cult and aims that counts, not the truth. It’s no wonder so many taught by hard Left “Professors” turn out twisted cultists.

Sadly, there is no let up in Hamilton’s soporific, trashy little exercise in mud throwing. It must have really strained the full capacity of his intellectual powers to deliver it, as other ‘articles’ he writes shows by their inferior quality. Let’s not forget, it is one of his most considered articles on what is a very serious matter, involving the corruption of science, totalitarian measures and economic destruction, the causes he fully approves of and advocates as his “articles” demonstrate. And, we are still to complete the item on the CSIRO.

The rest of Clive Hamilton’s magnificent whine

Hamilton sets up a straw-woman as evidence for his banal tirade, Janet Albrechtsen. Albrechtsen has caused great damage to grave causes. She’s still at it. Hamilton cites an ‘article’ by Albrechtsen as damning of sceptics. It’s bad and it’s false.

Typically, Albrechtsen’s notion of arguing and fighting is character assassination, and whom did she do this to but Viscount Monckton, whose integrity is beyond question. It’s a real contest between the likes of Albrechtsen, Helen Kroger, Greg Hunt, Julie Bishop and Tony Abbott for the Human Freezer of the Year Award.

As in some of her nasty little rants, Albrechtsen commences on a reasonable, promising note and it’s all downhill after one sentence,

“IS it too much to ask for a measured climate change debate in 2010? Looking back at 2009, it’s hard to think of a more frustrating debate than the one about anthropogenic global warming.”

Quite. Here she begins her descent into adolescent stupidity,

“Yet frustration only grows at the extremism on both sides.”

She degenerates through a controlled tone. The measured tone is not Albrechtsen. After her stupid sprays against Buchanan and Woonray⁽²⁾ and calling aspiring homeowners and financial markets’ traders criminals⁽³⁾, obviously someone in The Australian is excercising tight editorial control over her. The measured tone is not Albrechtsen.⁽⁴⁾

Who is this “extremist” Albrechtsen slates as discrediting a “debate”? Why, none other than Viscount Monckton. Maintaining the tone of sweet reasonableness, and anyone could be forgiven for assuming the entire article was ghost-written” because it is not her typical style, she begins her damnation of Monckton:

“To those with an open mind, Monckton’s fact-based questions demand answers from our political leaders. To this end, he will impress his Australian audience over the next few days.”

A “few days” only, and this is her explanation of why:

“More important, it damages the debate. You… look like a crank… describ(ing) opponents as Nazis and communists. You can see how it happens. Talking to a roomful of cheering fellow travellers, the temptation is… hyperbole. But if your aim is to persuade those with an open mind, this kind of talk will only turn people away. Warning people about the genuine threat to national sovereignty from a centralised global-warming bureaucracy is one thing. Talking about a new front of communists marching your way is another. It sounds like an overzealous warrior fighting an old battle.”

Albrechtsen, typical of “Right-wing” journalists, investigates nothing. Albrechtsen is either ignorant of the facts or is lying. I can’t tell which.  She can clarify the question but what she wrote is mendacious.

Monckton has faced Leftists in Copenhagen. He was forthright there. He has been forthright in his open letters to the Prime Ministers of New Zealand and Australia. He has been forthright in Australia.

I attended the Melbourne leg of his tour and he said the same thing he has stated before, in front of the audience in which sat hard Leftists. He didn’t simply level serious claims in safe company. Since Albrechtsen is a journalist, her item ghost-written or not, she is lying on this count alone.

It is worse, for her. Viscount Monckton, unlike her chums of the Clique that has wrecked the Liberal Party, never has and does not hide in Coward’s Castles, including the media. He has faced the hard left out in the open and has been literally brutally bashed in Copenhagen by State Police for daring to do this. Albrechtsen has the nerve to slime Monckton with a lie and the lie is this:

Janet Albrechtsen called Monckton a coward.

It is the exact force of the paragraph. Well, it looks like her editorial controller didn’t learn a trick from the Buchan-Woonroy “stunt” either. The lesson is: never let Albrechtsen write on any serious matter because, she drowns it in shite the moment it occurs to her.

Monckton did not and has not declared, for instance, Rudd is Hitler, in contrast to hard leftists who have equated Howard with Hitler.

A break

Readers, I have to break this item up, one more item again.  The reason is as, for example, the CSIRO and Mr. Ben Eltham’s economic  articles (both yet to be completed) for the Real Matilda, too rich for treatment in a single item. The next item on Clive’s tripe follows shortly.

Footnotes will be given separately once the body of this item is complete.

A Note

I repeat again, I acknowledge and respect Mr. Eltham’s integrity shown in his willingness to debate the matters concerning taxes and capital. I apologise to Mr. Eltham for not having yet delivered the third part. Though, unless mistaken, Mr. Eltham, and all who have followed it, can infer the conclusion because it follows from the case put.

The items planned for today are deferred. Some probings and searches threw up some interesting things. An internet search threw up something that should have Liberal party members of the victorian division and Victorians foaming at the mouth and calling for blood. It’s covered in today’s item immediately below, “Robert Doyle, a worthy man of the Right”.

A modern day Eureka Stockade

On the case of Mr. Spencer and inalienable property rights, from news reports it looks like rebellion against thuggery is growing. Good. Even  more cheering was catching a snippet of someone addressing the pitchfork bearing ‘rabble’ saying:

‘They rely on intimidation of the little man to rob him of his inalienable property rights. Those who cannot fight back.’

I’m looking forward to reading news reports, if any tomorrow, about this prelude to a modern day Eureka Stockade and who the daring rebel rouser is. It is time someone in public showed guts, to match those that, at bottom all decent, modest Australians are possessed of.

Apologies readers for no postings this week but I was hit by a particularly nasty virus. Now it’s Christmas eve. We shall resume next Wednesday.

Merry Christmas.

Andrew Bolt, if he were blond, is the male of the female specimen bimbo. This $4k plus a week Kroger-Costello shoe-shine boy, to refresh, called modest Australians ingrates because they didn’t realise they earned what Bolt never has, $4k plus/week and because they were not about to vote for the world’s Ultima Pulitzer Bull Puller - tra lalalalal, dual economics and jurisprudence, Peter Costello.

Pete the Prat (to his leftist pals), unlike his brother Leftist and two-faced hypocrite, Tim Costello, otherwise alike in being paparazzi flash mikes addicts, fled to join the Liberal Party after his ’stoodent ooonion’ Lefty ‘bruvvers’ called him a pansy, biffed him on his proboscis and ALP machine heavies told him he’s a sodding little squealer for whining about it. What else could a nice toe-licker do but in tandem with his buddy, Michael the necrophiliac Kroger, bend low and lick the toes of the very gee jaws who have wrecked the Liberal Party and imposed Kroger as Chief Tosser in Chiefy Weifyness.

Leftists, as we shall recount and added with new intelligence, are still so happy that they could be investigated for possession and using and cleared of drugginess. I know if I faced the likes of Abbott, Turnbull, Bishop, Hunt, Helen Kroger, Minchin, Michael Kroger, Ted Baillieu, David Davies, et al, I’d be had up on the same charges. Throw in IPA, CIS, HR Nicholls Society, Samuel Griffiths Society and sundry other inbred cousins and, well, 2010 will be all purple and polka dotted. I’ve digressed; back to the unicycle pusher, Andrew Jumbo Bolt.

Andrew Bolt bike pump man recently declared Rudd is ’authoritarian’, over ETS and the pulp used to justify what, in an earlier day, would be called the spade it is, totalitarianism. Now?!

He piked, calling it authoritarianism. He wears the dunce cap for no rotten reason. I mean to say,  in his supine position - in his case flat on his in-built food holding apparatus taking it all in, what does he make of his “right-wing” pals whose Fuhrer impulses make my treatment of snails, ants, kangaroos, snakes, rabbits, crippled dogs and sundry beasts, and trout, smack of all the highest virtues informing the gentlest of gentlemen - just me, my rifles, guns and rods, and game and vermin. “Well, asp, are you feeling lucky.”

I must be an a-spinal, pillow biting, sand hugging pansy, measured against Bolt. Must be. I mean to say, never crawling for a $4k plus per week job , prepared to fight for his country against the sort of guys (Islamo-fascists) that would make the the toughs running riot in Melbourne shite their pants every second they live, who has already dealt with a gunman, in dinky hell town, aka Melbourne, and other pansy antics I won’t relate because a gentleman simply does n0t do that, I know I’m all yellow when compared to Mr. Andrew “Bulldog” Bolt.

For cartridge-less Bolt won’t confess the hideous, apparently, truth, his ‘right-wing’ pals are the same, which is why we have the brown, short-panted, little fascist creep called Rudd, whom Queensland QCs want to cross-examine on the wrong side of the bench. So, Bolt bleated like Mary’s sodding little git of a lamb and said, Rudd is authoritarian. Now, Mr. Bolt, when you take off your white jacket, what do you really make of it? Tim Blair has never said boo either against his buddies, nor against leftist liars in the paper in which he features as an intrepid, fighting Conservative columnist, and the less said about  how he and Bolt slobber over the high heels of that retarded, callow, half wit, Janet Albrechtsen, the better for them: we’ll have to rectify this. for the umpteenth time.

After all, Bolt, having crawled his way to a good screw in the journalistic pay rankings heap, and really made it - and Blair too, who is living the high life attending Greg Lindsay’s smack up barbies, cannot be but the epitome of bon homme and fearless reporting. You can tell by the way they both set about blackening Jackson’s (of Brookesnews) name. These two are in good company. I mean to say, there is that distinguished Professor in economics, Sinclair Davidson, and IPA guru, whose notion of economic reasoning is to cite himself 50 times in a single tiny tome of bilge, and then smear his superiors f0r skewering the fallacies and falsehoods he writes, daily.

I have, during the time out, had some very interesting chats, and attended to some developments that are shocking and these Australians can thank what is called the “Right”. 

Last, but  not least, Greg Lindsay, John Humphreys, and the CIS.

This is Douglas Bignell of Mangled Thoughts. I’m back.

A nasty couple of months, some more of rest and, for once,  sheer self-indulgence, and now I’m gunning again and we will kick off with more new ripe material too, on the criminal operation set up by the Right, as advised by their think tanks the IPA, CIS,  the the State Trustees Office of Victoria and, by god! I wish I were a member of the bar, because I would have all responsible hung, and, readers, this is no joke.

Companies are shutting down or collapsing . I have fresh material and how the “Right’ under their guru Costello helped bring this about. Both the Right and the hard Left in Australia do really regard all modest Australians as fodder for their pockets and ‘ambitions’. I include genuine entrepreneurs as well as those on modest pay. It’s not so much as all should ‘eat cake’ as be swept off the tables of these neo-Lords , as detritus, dirt not even fit to be fed to dogs. I’m here to correct these pestilential usurers and their ‘think tank’ fellow parasites. Damn, the ulcers are already returning.

Bolt does not have the spine to do it because he is ignorant and a foghorn for the “Right-wing’ slobs - lead by the likes of Peter Costello, Michael Kroger, their half witted backers  - Toorak Brahman and Doctor’s wives. Nick Minchin, the Kemps and their family slush fund the IPA, Hugh Morgan, Ron Walker, Ray Evans, Des Moore, Greg Lindsay and his super fund the CIS and so on.

Yes, readers, the voice leonine is back. I don’t believe in roaring, just the more modest effort of using a machine gun against those who deserve far more than what they have done to Australians. This, before contemplating the Left! I’m here to serve.

The Jokers in the Right don’t know the meaning of the word, serve, which is funny because they like to accuse the left of being little dictators too. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I have fresh material, which adds to my mountain range of unused evidence.. The last three days I’ve been plotting the bombing runs. there will be, of course, a brief interlude for Christmas . You see, gentle reader, what’s to fear when you have faced the wrong sort of death only inches away, something that can  kill you only. Nothing.

The Right, as the Left, prey on  fear. Fear is the refuge of the dead and dictatorial slobs who all share one thing in common, including the Rudds and Penny Wong, they are parasites. The living fear nothing. So when I look at dead men such as “Professor” ’Sinkers’ Sinclair Davidson, I laugh. Unfortunately, it’s not the hearty, cheery laugh, though guttural , it’s the black humour, for the likes of Davidson too have caused tremendous damage. The man is not fit to be regarded as an undergraduate but he’s not alone. It’s no joke, no jest; I mean it.

Yes, “Liberal Party News: How we defraud the members and voters” sums up what this lot do daily to Australians.

Refreshed, Hell is, for the wrong types, renewed. Gad, I love blood sport; God help me, I love it.

There is emerging support for protectionism. This is driven by the combination of the recession due to Central Banks and their monetary expansion, and the cult of environmentalism and one its upshots - carbon taxes. The Right is responsible for what is turning out to be very nasty, which the treachery of Abbott, Turnbull and Greg Hunt is also fuelling -

Senior Liberal Party sources are calling not for the heads of these three. No, they would like to be the ones weilding the axes against their necks. Meant to add more on this today, but a little bit of proding into some other matters chewed up time today.

Anyway,

Push within ALP for green trade barriers

Besides being economically destructive, let’s suspend a few things and assume they work. They still would not save Australians from the impact of carbon taxes, which directly wipes out capital. The notion that they could is no better than those who assert Rudd and Turnbull should only impose them if other nations because then ‘we’d be on a level playing field’ - this is appallingly naive and bad too.

Turnbull, Hunt, and Abbott aside, where has the Right been on such questions in the past? Nowhere. These ’self-styled’ defenders of free markets have done much to discredit free markets.

For, now, I also wish to note some interesting comments by Frank Nejad, to which I replied in comments. Mr. Nejad has linked material on Samuels, and Costello. It is also cause for a correction:  Yesterday I said Peter Costello paved the way for the obnoxious, vicious ‘anti-cartel laws’ that came in to force on Monday. I was wrong. Peter Costello as Treasurer was already drafting measures to make entrepreneurship a hideous crime.

I realised Costello is an ignoramus in law and economics. Now I realise what a stupid, dictatorial *#^$$%*! he really is but then, the treatment of the Liberal Party Kroger and Costello also shows this.

It’s a fascinating good read over at Frank’s page. I’d say he has Costello appointee, Graeme Samuel, well and properly skewered. I extended my appreciation to Frank for linking the material and do so again. 

Tomorrow, readers, we pick up the cudgels properly and use them in good form - jolly head crushing exercise.

Chris Berg and John Humphreys’ civil replies to my criticism in Two replies (16/7/09) deserve a highly detailed and considerate response. Let me start by pointing out that leftist economists and Prime Minister Rudd have succeeded in pinning the recession on the free market. Why, because our Right have refused to debate the Austrian analysis of the boom bust cycle. These are the people who now tell me they have been influenced by Austrian thinking.

On Friday morning (17/7/09) The Australian published,

China’s growth of 7.9pc to rescue world and local economies.

According to the authors’ logic increasing exports of commodities increases economic growth. So why isn’t Nigeria, a country that exports vast quantities of oil, an economic giant? This leads me to consider an article by Paul Craig Roberts.

Roberts is an economist and a syndicated columnist. He was an assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and was an Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. In a recent article, Roberts comments on the recession, saying under low interest rates, US manufacturing was not simply hollowed out but ‘traded away’ for ‘a new economy of services’.

Attacking the idea of a ‘post-manufacturing economy’ is proper, and concern about the erosion of manufacturing a serious concern. However, Roberts is not, unlike Austrian school economists, sheeting the damage to a dreadful misunderstanding of how monetary policy really works, as does Mr. Jackson. That monetary mismanagement is the cause of recessions escapes him as it does Australia’s Right who refuse to even discuss the subject.

Challenging Roberts on this issue is important.  Roberts attacks ‘globalism’, which is a vulgar word coined by the Left to attack free trade. The “Right” in Australia adopted the word as if it was etymologically sound, to the delight of Leftists. Roberts lets fly. In 2006, for example, he confidently accused economists of not ‘acknowledging the facts’ (some did, some have not) because they endorsed “globalisation”. It was “a win-win” situation they said. It is and this is, while it might seem a quibble, important not to concede to protectionists and the hard Left. He continued,

“At a time when America desperately needs the voices of educated people as a counterweight to the disinformation that emanates from the Bush administration and its supporters, economists have discredited themselves. This is especially true for “free market economists” who foolishly assumed that international labor arbitrage was an example of free trade that was benefiting Americans…after decades of struggle to regain credibility, free market economics is on the verge of another wipeout.”

Nuking the Economy, February 2006.

This is an out and out attack on free trade. Surprise, surprise! On the 15th of July, 2009, Roberts asserts:

There is no economy left to recover. The US manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical ‘New Economy’.

Can the Economy Recover? Roberts, 15/7/09 

Free trade theory is not an ideology. Now, it might be said Roberts is a distraction. What does he have to do with Australia? Mind, the hard left is loyal to a different and international country called socialism. Roberts preaches the same economic errors that the Left spin in Australia. And they go unchallenged. Worse, not only has the Right carelessly accepted nonsense terms coined by the hard Left to attack free markets, they have even conceded such basic monstrosities as free markets ‘is an ideology’.

Peter Costello made the same claim in a tedious address to the HR Nicholls Society. This genius considers free labour markets can be nailed through legalese. He said Adam Smith initiated free market ideology. This is shocking and Smith himself would be horrified to be accused of it. Smith committed errors but not this one.

Smith was not engaged in ideology. Smith was engaged in examining what economists know to be true, that free market thinking is not an ideology, economics explains real laws. Lastly, Costello has no clue as to the origin of the phrase, laissez faire. Asked by Cobert what the government could do to promote business a French merchant replied, you can get off our backs. Exactly what Costello should have done when he was Treasurer but, instead, he multiplied the burdens.

I’ve digressed. Why? Why does the above go unchallenged by the Right as in killed stone dead in public? Peter Costello’s nonsense indicates one reason. The second reason is, and it reinforces a problem manifest, there is no genuine economic debate in Australia.

Mr. John Humphreys wrote: “… the CIS employs and publishes Austrian economists.” Then why isn’t it publishing articles that are indisputably Austrian? The reality is that the CIS does not publish any Austrian analyses. And it certainly does not publish genuine Australian Austrians. Moreover, it has totally ignored the vitally important economic points that Mr. Jackson has continually raised, including his approach to labour market reform, and that the Right has made a point of continually ignoring.

If the CIS has, for example, produced material on labour market reform that directly contradicted the nonsense that the HRNS was producing then I’ll apologise. If it didn’t then  this fact reinforces the point I’ve been trying to make, ie., the Right does not engage in real economic debates. Further, if Lindsay is so “keen to hear from new people” why does he ignore Shostak and Jackson? The fact that the CIS has published stacks of materials on various stuff does nothing to refute my charge that it is ignoring the Austrian approach.

Let’s consider, for example, Ben O’Neill. Taking a sample of 12 articles by O’Neill, I didn’t find anything in them that struck me as marking him out as an Austrian. On the other hand, once you have read Jackson on economics, you cannot doubt to which school he belongs. So, John, your suggestion that by publishing Ben O’Neill the CIS has been publishing Austrian analysis is very wide of the mark. Which leaves me asking again:

Why is the CIS ignoring genuine Austrians - Jackson and Shostak, both of whom are genuinely learned in Austrian economics? Further, Jackson also seems to have a remarkable knowledge of the history of economic thought and economic history, certainly far more than any member of the Right has so far demonstrated. And, out of curiosity, why refer to an American site for Austrian economics while ignoring the one we have in Australia?

O’Neill’s items are also, to be blunt, soporific. Having read 12 of them I couldn’t face any more of it. Enough said.

On ‘diversity’ of opinion at the CIS, I’m not saying there isn’t any. In any closed ‘one view shop’ there will be ‘diversity’ between its members. A bit of haggling at the edges. This is not serious debating. Fundamentals are never challenged.

The CIS work from a bedrock of neo-classical theory. There is no debate in the CIS, John, because substantive arguments are not contested. This is why Jackson’s strict Austrian arguments on carbon taxes, manufacturing, labour markets and on down a rather long list of serious matters have been ignored. Likewise, Shostak’s material.  Put it another way, if anything of their analysis and commentary is defective, why doesn’t the CIS set out where, what and why?

Capital theory, for instance, is a very important part of Austrian theory. I fail to see how the CIS can claim to be Austrians, can criticise Jackson’s analysis, and his criticisms of CIS’ claims (carbon taxes springs to mid like a hot rod colt on the race track) without addressing what is the core of the case that Jackson set out very carefully, politely and impeccably, using Austrian capital theory. Jackson isn’t ‘lilly livered’; he’s a man, so he can take the criticism. So what’s holding the CIS back? How is it to be explained that there is no debate, John? To repeat, that the CIS publishes some of  Hayek’s opinions does not make them Hayekians. 

Next, as John states, the CIS claims to be “one of the most successful promoters and defenders of classical liberal ideas”. There is a contradiction involved here.

The Austrians are ‘classical Liberal economists’. Classical Liberalism is a major subject in its own right. In theology, philosophy and history, classical liberalism in Europe was taking a pounding. Statists and central planners dismissed them as Romantic dreamers. The reason can be roughly summed up, most of these classical liberals lacked the very thing required to defend and advance classical liberalism, free market economics. In Germany and France, the advance of Statism and central planning, was matched by ‘marginalisation’ of free market economics. It was on the verge of being lost. It was the work of Bohm-Bawerk, Menger and von Mises that prevented this disaster. Hayek, who was already an economist, joined them because he was persuaded by the intellectual power of their work.

In other words, John, the Austrian school is firmly grounded in the history of economics and economic theory. And what does this classical history reduce to but free markets. The whole development of economic theory was guided by understanding markets and the real economic laws that the free market manifests, the quest for truth. The distinction is, the Austrian school extended this with seminal work and making theoretical advances  -  Bohm-Bawerk, Menger, Mises, Hayek. What is this addition to theory? Capital theory, theory of busts, and a nest of other theories, all sound, all a solid extension of economic theory. They were not inventing the wheel.

As all sound men in a sound field, they were not about reinventing the wheel. Neither did they pretend to be original. They understood themselves as standing within a tradition of seeking truth and advancing the powerful body of free market thinking. These are humble men and it stamps the work of Jackson and Shostak today.

It is a tremendous contrast to ‘neo-classical economics’. As I say, I am not an economist, I’m a layman, but why is it that I can appreciate the place of the Austrian school and the ‘club’ cannot, in particular, the self-proclaimed Hayekians the CIS. There is nothing there. It shows, there is no Austrian economist in the CIS, and there is by no stretch of the imagination any genuine debate.

John claims that the CIS and IPA are  two of  “the most successful promoters and defenders of classical liberal ideas”. Something blows the pretence right out of the water and it is contained in the opening remarks to this item and the citation of Roberts.

The Left in Australia now carefully avoids directly attacking free markets, which is why they stopped saying free markets. They have altered to indirect attack by narrowing their polemics to what has been falsely fixed in the public eye as the free market position, “neo-classical economics” and “neo-Liberalism”.

Quiggin used to attack directly, but after Jackson’s devastating counter attacks, Quiggin turned to using the  expressions ‘neo- classical and neo-liberalism’. My estimation, after attempting to attack free markets explicitly and Hayek with it, Rudd was told to confine himself to very brief remarks and only mention those two (anti-free market) tags. The O’Neill columns are rather useful illumination of all this. Jackson tore apart Rudd’s nonsense, and exposed him for the ignorant little fatuous man that he is. (The Currency Lad rightly called Jackson’s counter attack a “tour de force”. The Right, of course, ignored Jackson’s demolition of Rudd in, Prime Minister Rudd’s misbegotten assault on the market goes unchallenged.)

The Age reported a CIS function. Greg Lindsay had invited Kevin Rudd as a guest speaker. When Rudd claimed he is an ‘economic conservative’, the Right found itself cheering - Rudd must be pro what they stand for. It never occurred to them the expression is meaningless; as the IPA also made plain on its site, through Roskam,  and felt betrayed when Rudd turned on them.

Whatever gave them the notion Rudd was even a neo-Liberal? There was nothing Rudd said and did when he was on the Opposition benches to suggest this at all. Rudd is hollow, and not an Leftist ideologue but it was reasonably clear back then that if he was made Leader and then Prime Minister, the hard Left will cheer. I observed it and wrote it up on MT back then. Today the hard Left is cheering, loudly.

Rudd freely, at the function, delivered a tirade against free markets and, The Age gleefully observed, when he finished Lindsay sat in embarrassed silence. He had no defence, and so had nothing to say and thus he could not stand up and eviscerate Rudd. Rudd and his advisers walked out knowing they faced no deadly opposition from the CIS, IPA, and the rest of the ‘clubmen’.

Now let me say this:

A genuine Austrian school think tank would have relished Rudd agreeing to address it. They would have armed themselves by studying Rudd’s speeches to date, his advisers, his actions to date, including under Beattie’s Cabinet. They would prepare for anything that Rudd might have said and then let him say it and then stand up in the response speech and pulverised every falsehood and nonsense that he uttered and left him and his advisers crumpled up and blubbing. Not the CIS.

That, John, is a devastating manifestation of what the CIS is not, a genuine free market think tank and entrenching this fact, there is no economic debate. It is not the CIS that pays the price, as it were, for this myopia. It is ordinary Australians who must bear it.

Now for Chris Berg:  

First off, I owe Chris an apology. He said that “I have offered to publish Gerard Jackson in the past.” I believe you Chris. It is only out of a sense genuine curiosity, therefore, that I ask you to name the articles or article that you offered to publish.  This comes as a genuine surprise, particularly after your replies in a certain correspondence. After all, Chris, you did, if I recall correctly, make it plain to me that you would not publish Jackson. So there does seem to be a little confusion here.

It is very important, Chris, to fully clear up this misunderstanding on my part. Therefore, furnish me with the details and I will certainly write a full and complete apology showing where I have misled readers. I appreciate, Chris, the fact that publishing integrity is very important, and I wish to make amends in this unqualified way.

One other thing Chris. You say,

I have never met Frank Shostak, I have never met anybody who has met Frank Shostak, I have never seen any contact details for Frank Shostak. I certainly don’t have a policy of not publishing Frank Shostak, as you seem to believe I do.

Now, let me understand this, you are the editor of the IPA’s Review and claim to be dedicated to the free market cause. As an editor, you have not sought out Dr. Shostak so that he can help advance the work the IPA claims to do? One of the two finest Austrian school economists, because you’ve “never seen any contact details”?  Chris, are you trying to tell readers that you have not read Brookesnews where contact details are available.

Chris objected:

Furthermore, it may surprise you that the IPA has nothing to do with the state trustees office or the office of public advocate or anything like that. You seem to believe that anything the Liberal Party has ever done bad is the fault of the IPA.

Chris, the Kennett-Stockdale policies were based on the anti-free market, privatisation notions of the IPA and CIS. The Cabinet was advised by them. The STO-OPA-VCAT was converted on those false and disastrous assumptions. The Bracks and Brumby Cabinets have maintained this shocking operation against many Victorians.

Chris, economics and polices is not a game and they are not to be decided and set by an insular few. Too many Victorians, and I mean a large number, have been put through hell because of this, and many times more have had their accounts hoovered. This is large scale. It actually does require an uncompromising criminal investigation.

I have never, Chris, said nor would it occur to me the blanket generalisation you imputed,

You seem to believe that anything the Liberal Party has ever done bad is the fault of the IPA.

What has clearly happened is as I stated. The set-up and what has unfolded as the consequence was all due to arrogance and anti-free market economics right at the very beginning. This ties in very neatly indeed with remarks made in the response to Mr. John Humphreys.

There was no debate and so, reinforced by Kennett’s arrogance, there was no feedback and so no checking, and so no correction. The same with ‘privatisation’, this was not putting the ‘government monopolies’ on to a genuine free market basis. It was how to retain them under the appearance of genuine enterprises. The objective remains the same, they are ‘cash cows’ for Cabinets, at the expense of customers. Amusingly, Kennett stated this publicly only this year and recommended it to the NSW ALP Cabinet. This is bad enough, but what the Bracks and Brumby Cabinets have proceeded to do with them shows how bad it is. Again, all due to a ‘closed shop view’, with no debate entertained at all.

We can run this right through a long list of causes. What of, for instance, labour markets? It wasn’t only the HR Nicholls Society that wrecked this cause, though they were the lead wreckers. However, the IPA and CIS, the “Right” even refused to us any of the statistics and economic case studies Jackson used to defend free labour markets! This was sheer pettiness. How can they be taken seriously when they do things like this? And forget about analysing and tackling the vitally important issues that his articles contained. These are the same people who let the enemies of free labour markets get away with murder.

For example, in 2005 The Age published an article by Kenneth Davidson attacking free labour markets. He used a paper written by New Zealand Treasury officials. They claimed that free labour markets cheapened labour and reduced investment. Other opponents of free labour markets took up the same argument. There was not a peep from the Right. Des Moore, Ray Evans, John Stone, for example, remained stonily silent, including the CIS. Fortunately Jackson, using Austrian theory, stepped into the breach and completely destroyed the argument.  Naturally his work was completely ignored by the Right. If it were not for him this argument would have still remained unchallenged.

Liberal Government and labour market reform: more fallacious attacks

In 2006 the Sydney Morning Herald published an article by Ross Gittins. Using the work of Professors Paul Frijters and Bob Gregory he argued that lowering labour costs would have no significant effect on the demand for labour. Once again there was silence from the Right. Once again Jackson saved the day by stepping into the breach and completely destroying the argument. And once again his work was ignored by those on the Right, particularly the H. R, Nicholls Society, who claim to value a “diversity of opinion”, leaving me wondering what exactly do they mean by “diversity”.

Minimum wages and capital accumulation: lefty economists fail again

All of this is just more evidence that the Right’s claim to value differences of opinion is bogus and self-serving.

Disasters, Chris, a litany of disasters and all due to the ‘club’.  The ‘one view, closed club’. All ‘in each others pockets’, reinforced by its control over the Victorian Liberal Party. Victorians and Australians bear the brunt of the consequences, Chris, and not that lot and I say this, Chris, you carefully consider the STO-OPA-VCAT set-up and its many victims - it draws things out rather forcefully. This attempt to wriggle around and out when the evidence is uncompromising and overwhelming is not a good look. 

A reply to ESS

ESS considers that I 

smeared von Mises by describing his work as polemical!!!! You turd. You are in no position to describe Mises work a polemic. No wonder the Mises Institute won’t publish your rubbish.

Next to not reading the von Mises Institute for reasons indicated in the article of yesterday, I have not approached them to have articles published. It would never occur to me to seek publication in economic journals full stop, for the very good reason stated a number of times, I’m a layman. Furthermore, I’m not seeking to have articles in any journals published. I’m content with what I am writing on MT, because of a job that must be done.

(There is something but I haven’t fully developed it as yet, and it is not in economics and thus not for an economics journal. It requires depth in shcolarship. I have let it sit and unless it is completely worked up there is no point in even considering publishing it.)

To describe von Mises’ Planned Chaos as a polemical tract is no insult to it and von Mises at all, as anyone who is well read knows. For the benefit of ESS, it is a particular type of genre that is honourable and is an ancient tradition. It is for the purpose of public debate, involving attacking other positions, irrespective of whether sound or not. The art of polemic is to apply and relate fundamental learning that explains and arms the layman, while eviscerating the other position. Irenaeus did this in a stunning, for the times, and humorous tract against Gnosticism, Adversus Haereses. With that single tract he single-handedly killed it stone dead.

One day I picked up a rarity because such texts are not published in Australia, in the original Greek. Unfortunately, that day, having read about 15 pages I laid it down and left it behind at a bus stop. The book was a second century AD polemic against Christianity. It was at once both technical and hilarious. Polemics between Christians and non-Christians was lively and debates hard fought, because vital principles were at stake and the public had to be persuaded.

Polemics is not about shifting an opponent, though it is a bonus if it occurs. It is about discrediting the opponent’s position and explaining why this position is good, to convince the voting public. This is what Planned Chaos was about, and it is why the Left crumpled up in pain.

Von Mises’ polemical tract assumes economics. The Left knew it, and still know it and they knew and know there is no answer to it. They knew it hurt them where it really counts, the voting public. Jackson’s Brookesnews articles are excellent polemical tracts for Australians today and so is Shostak’s and let me illustrate -

Can technology prevent a recession?

Both of them nail points and explanations and shred hostile positions crisply and swiftly.

ESS asks, “Dougie, how do you get to read Dr Shostak if you don’t read the Mises Institute…” Let’s spell it out for ESS in big letters, Brookesnews publishes Dr. Shostak. ESS has now admitted that he doesn’t read Brookesnews, which is amusing since he set himself up as its greatest critic.

I won’t comment on the rest of ESS’s remarks but to observe one thing Chris Berg evades. ESS and Yoyo, not me, dragged Dr. Shostak’s name and Jackson’s in with malice, to smear them. It was Ess, Chris, who stated in comments that you told lies about Jackson.

Now, Chris, as you can appreciate, I don’t need ESS’ malicious ‘contributions’ to launch criticism of the IPA, CIS, HR Nicholls Society, and Online Opinion. He and Yoyo is a problem for you and the IPA, not me. And ESS is unmistakeably malicious.

Keep it up, ESS, and I shall have to ‘boot’ you. I enjoy robust fights, not squashing delinquent, tantrum throwing children - it’s not sporting.

Through the Australian Taxation Office.

The objective is to seize more private property but the increase in the already extensive police state powers is central to this land grab. To keep hammering it, not only Paul Keating but the Right also under Costello engaged in extensive police state powers acquisition through the Australian Tax Office. Peter Costello had a tad over a decade in office and this economic illiterate failed to come to grips with the RBA and the poison it pumped out (noting that this morning the ATO has announced another round of monetary expansion, fool’s gold), and committed his own lousy fiscal policies. He also presided over a tremendous increase in Government consumption, and saw taxpayers milked to set up ‘alternative energy’ scams.

Costello brays he has spent his life defending liberty. Well, Costello and his Rightwing mates are bloody liars.

The last number of months, to confess, I have not paid as much attention to all that the Cabinet is putting through Parliament and this is a mistake. Firms paid to do this as part of their services to clients, such as KPMG, relate it for a fee of thousands to firms who seem to lack initiative and have their own bright young things go to Hansard, troll through it and do what the KPMGs of Australia do, merely summarise it and draw out implications. Ha! I do a better job of this than the KPMGs of Australia and I have not charged thousands. I’ve posted such material up free to readers on M.Ts. in the past.

[’KMPGs of Australia’, for it’s not to pick on KPMG. Though putting that larcenous slob called Steve Bracks on $5,000 a week for a few days of idleness interrupted only by gas bagging to the likes of Rudd on how to build the new monument to the diseased cult of socialism in fascist form, Ruddistan, is good reason to have a dig at KPMG.]

Well, some bodies ,who look forward to 2010 gloomily, told me the taxed will be drowned in a mountain of paper work  aimed at extracting more private property. This arose out of the matter of the Cabinet’s decision to intimidate Australians into cutting their tax deductions by sending letter threats implying recipients really have committed a heinous crime, ’so come clean or we hoover everything we can lay our grubby hands on’.

It indicates the Cabinet, as Costello and the Right, and Keating and the ALP before them, has slipped in thousands of new novelties. The bumpf contains a nasty increase in the tax grab. More of what are euphemistically called criminal offences and with punishing fines attached. New ’causes’ too, no doubt, incarcerate those who dare to protect their savings.

This is all besides, Rudd has acted to steal more out of superannuation funds. Then their is the pension age increase. That has only one force: cut pension payouts by ensuring many more Australians are dead and buried before claiming it/or receive it only for a few months. Unlike parasites in Parliament on fully taxpayer kept, untaxed, CPI indexed “Parliamentary” pensions.

Rudd is still, of course, working on his scheme that he announced soon after the 2007 election: to compel super funds to hand over Australians’ savings so that he can continue his great big shopping strip spree. Taken with carbon taxation and much else besides, the politicians, also States’ and local councils’, will swallow up Australians and bury them. As for Wayne Swann:

On the radio this morning he, like the big infant that he is, clapped his little hands in glee and cried:

“The OECD has given the Governments’ stimulus package a big tick of approval. It’s proof that we are doing the right thing.”

Kenyesian arsenic is keynesian arsenic, so while the OECD and Wayne Swann draw big bright ticks on butcher paper with giant coloured crayons. Australians stand by watching manufacturing collapse, savings wiped out, and the Cabinet destroying how much more? It’s not a mystery, bye the bye (except for the likes of snake-oil seller Saul Eslake) why ASX indexes are on a long trend down, and why Super funds are looking forward to the value of the funds being sliced over the year ahead by a large factor -

This is a mystery to the likes of Rudd, and Terry McCrann who believes there is a real economy and a separate ‘thingo’ called financial markets. To follow McCrann, the even steeper and deeper cut in energy firm prices has nothing to do at all with the anti-energy policies called carbon taxes. Nothing at all, eh, McCrann!

It won’t be a mere $50b shop until you drop spend up, that is for sure, and even $300b will seem the height of prudence compare to the damage and carnage this lot will cause. For, why worry when Rudd, Swann and Penny Wong will kill the pain by destroying capital outright with carbon taxes. Australians, reduced to primitive savagery, won’t have to worry about bloody parasites in Federal and States’ Parliaments and local councils destroying their savings. It will be, no doubt, of some comfort to the newly made unemployed the knowledge that millions will soon be joining them in a spiral downwards into a condition that is unspeakably horrific to contemplate.

It doesn’t disturb the Right. They have done good work in discrediting the free market case, reinforced by Greg Lindsay and the CIS laying out the grand plan to ruin Australians completely via carbon taxation. CIS & IPA- defenders of free markets, ha!

They have taken the Leftist motto to heart: tell big lies, tell them often, corrupt language and, one day, they will be accepted as the truth and so on to the final victory - all will be reduced to the desired condition of living under socialist hell.

Well done Greg Lindsay, the Kemps, Ray Evans, Des Moore, Michael Kroger, Peter Costello and their sychophantic boot lickers pretending to be journalists Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair. Malcolm Turnbull, and the rest of the retarded cretins who have wrecked the Liberal Party and solid causes. This lot really took it up to the Left, which is why the hard Left roll about laughing every day:

This is true as sources related, with an amused smile. Sources such as Leftists journos who refer to that lot by their proper name - Buffoon. , happily related.

Or, Union heavies, who mused that if that lot didn’t exist, they would have had to invent them. And, they couldn’t believe their luck those clowns in the HR Nicholls Society - and that means Peter Costello too, were used as the source of advice on labour markets.

What a spiffing, tremendous job the Right have done: their bit in the great putsch to reduce Australia to a stinking dung heap lorded over by plastic jackbooted twerps who believe they really are MPs as opposed to the parasites they truly are and gorillas pretending to be public servants. Spiffing. Just spiffing.

A case study in treachery

We have established that Greg Lindsay and his CIS (see in, eg., Scoop: Right-wing names and Greg Lindsay (CIS) involved in major scandal they wish kept concealed,, are engaged in deliberate lobbying for carbon taxation. It is accurate to say, Greg Lindsay is the CIS.

We have established a range of interests seeking to enrich themselves, to the misery of millions of Australians, through the imposition of carbon taxation. It might be noted, since it is lobbying for carbon taxation, and that interests connected to the CIS expect to make fortunes out of it, has the CIS’ not for profit status under the Tax Act ceased?

 Noting the CISpretend expert in Austrian economics, Nicholas Gruen (The CISand the Right, masters of Austrian School and Hayek?) advises companies to accept strangulation at the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, is advising the Rudd Cabinet on its grand fascist design, and serving as a one man cheer squad for Rudd, Swann, and Mad Green Cult Mullahess Penny Wong, he has been too busy to do Lindsay’s public dirty work, betraying Australians to the capital mass destruction tax plans of little tin pot thugs. So he has used a whining, slimy, lying brat called a John Humphreys.

John Humphreys is a Ron Manners ’scholar’ at the CIS.  I presumed it is Humphreys’ reward for being Greg Lindsay’s propaganda music box for thugs machine, at Ron Manners’ expense. Apparently not, as a clarification on Prodos’ site explains in:

John Humphreys and Greg Lindsay promote Carbon Tax for Australia

Ron Manners informs me (Prodos) that John Humphreys’ Mannkal Scholarship is not for work relating to Climate Change policy.

Then, what is it for, Mr. Manners? Meritorious work in helping politicians, bureaucrats, and charlatans pretending to be scientists, perpetrate a violent, totalitarian act against Australians? Come to that, why is Mr. Harold Clough, an heir to the Clough fortune built out of engineering, also funding the IPA and CIS,whose service is to help Cabinets wipe out firms with taxation (including regulation), shield the rotten RBA and its fraudulent monetary policies, and now finish off Australians totally with carbon taxation?

Clough assumes as does Manners, he is really in there fighting for free markets and smashing the Left. Who needs the treacherous Left, when the venal CIS and IPA are doing a great job of turning Australia into a swamp fit for the diseased Left and ruling pigs. This warrants the likes of Clough and Manners rewarding them with generous donations?

Perhaps Clough and Manners would explain it to heads of many firms who are now beginning to realise what it is that is being done to their shareholders, and the other employees of the firms that they are entrusted to successfully run, inclusive of fighting lying parasites in Canberra - the very types that made the rotten regimes of the 20th century possible?

Ah, b.s. It is Humphreys’ reward for being the face of Greg Lindsay’s treachery the, propaganda effort that only serves the diseased Left, headed byRudd, and Right-wing slobs who stand with them diseased Left on carbon taxation and much more besides. Let’s name a few: Ian Campbell, David Kemp, Malcolm Turnbull, Greg Hunt.

The bill for Capital Mass Destruction Day (via carbon taxation) has been introduced. It should never have got to this stage, but for the Right and liars pretending to be free market warriors - the IPA and CIS.

Prodos, under the article linked above, has included a ‘you tube’ video of a CIS “round table coference” featuring Humpheys repeating the very lies Greg Lindsay first told to excuse the criminal fraud of carbon taxation. These treacherous bastards display the fuhrer streak in full, leaving no-one in doubt that Australians will do as the Right and the Left, under Rudd, dictate.

Lindsay, through Humphreys, has never rebutted Jackson’s evisceration  from within strict economic reasoning of his propaganda lies.

Funnier still is, Lindsay has tried to dismiss the mountains of hard evidence from around the world demonstrating carbon taxes destroys capital as mere fabrications. In March last year alone in the U.K., tens of thousands of employees were laid off per week as companies collapsed because the Blair Brown last year killed efficient energy production. Growing food shortages and riots as the carbon tax called the ethanol fuel scheme destroyed food production. Collapse in share prices in coal based energy companies, with investors further withholding capital funds, and companies have to stop major new expansion plans.  This is a summary of a very few examples written up, but consider this item in view of the fact the supply of capital funds to energy companies are drying up already:

ETS ‘may bankrupt power stations’

AUSTRALIA’S electricity generators have warned the Rudd Government that power stations could face insolvency this year under an emissions trading scheme that forced such rapid change it risked “blowing up in their faces”.

The National Generators Forum told a Senate committee yesterday that many power stations would simply not be able to afford the 100 to 200 per cent increase in operating costs under the current plan to require them to buy more than 80 per cent of necessary emissions permits. This would leave some insolvent and all struggling to find $50 billion in new and refinancing capital over the next five years.

But that is the point to carbon taxation. And this is what Lindsay and his connections are seeking, the destruction of efficient coal based energy production for what:

Well, it looks very much the case, for his mates Ronnie Walker, Hugh Morgan, de Crespigny and their ‘nuclear power company. The other connections are the Yates brothers through the Peking based Peony Company, which hopes to make a fortune out of compliance dictates, and the Macquarrie fund has sunk a small fortune overseas into ‘alternative energy’ scams which, unsurprisingly, have all gone belly up but hey, Rudd is throwing billions more of stolen property at ‘alternative energy’ scams, in addition to what lying bastards such as Bracks and Brumby have thrown down that sewer.

Greg Lindsay has conceded all the Green lies, he holds them to be true. That is, carbon emissions causes global warming. He asserts this as a given. He has never had the guts to face direct debate with the tens of thousands of scientists who are up in arms because the claim is, as a lie, also an assault against science. The latest scientist to take up the cudgels is, of course, Professor Plimer. Having slimed economists, perhaps Lindsay and his dead Humphreys parrot, and also on these matters, that pretend Professor in a pseudo-University, “Professor” Sinclair Davidson might care to smear Plimer?

Greg Lindsay asserts that destroying coal based energy firms renders ‘alternative energy’ efficient and that this is a free market development. This inane drivel is pumped out as serious, solid economic reasoning! But let’s draw out another novel consideration: The deliberate destruction of capital is itself a totalitarian act of destruction on a massive scale that also involves the collapse of firms which, naturally, rely on the cheap, efficient power those firms generate.  Lindsay his connections are obligated to explain and defend before the public in what sense is such a savage, totalitarian measure a free market action?

Lindsay is a treacherous liar. This man claims to head a free market think tank, and defends them. A think tank that pretends to fight for Liberal Party causes. Well, apart from those connections that seek to enrich themselves by ruining millions of Australians through carbon taxation, Lindsay ands his pals have betrayed the genuine Liberal Party, and are now a willing party to deliberate violence against millions of Australians.

 This and the item immediately below are lead in, a warming up for something to be unloaded. Anyway, this item recapitulates a few important matters, and includes mention of a bit of tripe that Chris Berg and Professor Sinclair Davidson wrote that Davidson has not yet defended. You see, besides these two retarded delinquents calling for “Industry Policy”, to the delight of Kim Il Carr, Davidson contends the inverse of the J curve is false. I might muse, I have written to some friends who are most interested in reading Davidson’s novelty. No doubt Davidson can entertain investors, entrepreneurs and so many employees watching manufacturers be ground up and destroyed by the  weights of taxes 9regulation is a deadly tax) and the recession caused by rotten central banks and their criminal monetary policies. But, I suppose it will be hypothetical, because carbon tax in destroying capital makes such concerns seem rather trite, passe, and yesterday’s worry.

Dollars, manufacturing and free trade, Jackson, Brookesnews

In October 2008, I published correspondence between Mr. Gerard Jackson and Mr. Ron Manners that had been transmitted BCC to a long list of names. Someone wanted it put to the public - after all, while loathe to publish private correspondence, who sent me  must have appreciated I would not bury it because of its force:

Scoop: Mr. Ron Manners acknowledges the “Right” have caused great damage in Australia

It was followed up the next day with an open challenge to Mr. Ron Manners:

Mr. Ron Manners will reverse his decision To fund the IPA and the CIS.

Having failed to extract guarantees from the Kemps and Greg Lindsay that they would apply his donations  to genuine hard fighting, only to see the hard earned siphoned off into the wallets of these treacherous, professional bludgers, Mr. Manners could have at least had them sign an iron clad contract to ensure the Mannkel Foundation Scholarship Fund would buy guns. I mean to say, the Army leaves nothing to chance and makes sure recruits leave boot camp one way only, as fighting men, reinforced by an ironclad contracts all recruits must sign. Not Manners. No, he was content to receive a photo opp. 

Scoop: Jackson Manners Correspondence II

In May, another packet of correspondence was Bcc’d and I happily publish it. This correspondence was, as the documents show, initiated by Mr. Jackson, in response to some claims by Mr. John Roskam (one will have more to say about Mr. Roskam and the IPA’s claim to have defended the free market cause and we anticipate it by saying, they are a pack of mendacious, lying, zimmer-frame bound, rubber knife wielding retarded fishwives. That’s right Roskam, a pack of bloody liars, the lot of you.)

Roskam boasted in the IPA Review,Thursday, 14 May 2009 :

You heard it here first.

The IPA was the first to tell you the Rudd government was ‘Whitlamesque’. Some of you wrote back to me saying - DON’T BE RIDICULOUS! But look at the ‘Underlying cash balance’ (ie deficit/surplus) column of table 1 in this budget paper from Tuesday night.

In The Australian last Friday, Alan Wood talked about why the IPA is the only organisation willing to speak out on the economic consequences of the emissions trading scheme. (My original piece in the Australian Financial Review is here.)

(To repeat, we will attend to this joker in another item.)

So, from that, Mr. Jackson wrote a letter to Roskam, and sent it to Mr. Ron Manners:

Dear Mr Roskam:

Your mail-outs are very informative and perform a necessary public service.

Now I think you would agree that it is essential that if a think tank is to maintain credibility it must as a matter of course defend any ideas it promotes. In this respect I find the IPA somewhat disappointing. Two years ago you published Islam and the free market by Chris Berg and Andrew Kemp. To put it bluntly, it was an appalling paper and one that the IPA refused to defend. (Mr Berg’s response on his blog was so poor that it is not worthy of comment). In January 2007 you published Thumping the Table: Key Questions for the Labor Party’s ‘Industry Policy’ by Sinclair Davidson and Chris Berg. This was another paper that left much to be desired. Unfortunately, the IPA refused to defend it as well.

 Could you please explain to me the reason for the IPA’s policy of refusing to defend its own publications.

 Regards

 Gerry Jackson

This was Mr. Manners’ response:

I suspect that IPA is busy defending our Nation from its real enemies.

To win the war, soldiers must keep moving forward, and not waste time dragging the “wounded”

Gerry, why are you so unhappy?

Ron (the Happy Libertarian)

Ron Manners

Mannwest Group Pty Ltd

& Mannkal Economic Education Foundation

[My comments:

1. The IPA has never defended genuine Liberal causes. What they and the CIS have done, Mr. Manners, is with the rest of the Right destroy the fight for the genuine free market causes, and as advisers to State and Federal  Cabinets boosted measures that cripple free markets, rooted in the anti-Free market garbage they have pumped out ad-infinitum. Worse, with the CIS, as advisers to the Kennett Cabinet, are thus also responsible for Vic Inc., and for the conversion of the STO and OPA into a crime syndicate and, Mr. Manners, you, have no clue as the thuggery, the viciousness of what has been dealt to many Victorians. This is what the Right and their clunker tanks are responsible for, Mr. Manners, and you, Mr. Manners, fund these good for nothing bastards who have helped establish Brackistan.

2. Say that again, Mr. Manners, for it is a very strange notion that the best defence is no defence? In the fight against the Left and for solid principles, attack means defence, and the bums you fund Mr. Manners don’t even rate as fifth rate retarded mediocrities, which is why the Left howl with laughter at the IPA, the CIS, and the HR Nicholls Society - and notice, one of the HR Nicholls Society, which destroyed the thoroughly sound fight for free labour markets, is now a Director of the IPA, Michael Kroger, who has also destroyed the Victorian Liberal Party, and has stuffed Federal Parliament seats with dribbling nincompoops who happen to be Kroger-Costello stick puppets (this is what the Right consider talent).

What the IPA and the rest of them have been very bust at, Mr. Manners, is smearing talent, trying to suppress talent, including within the Liberal Party, promoting themselves. To fight sound causes requires brain power and principles, these venal cowards have neither and it shows. So, Mr. Manners, you list the campaigns they have waged that have terrified and crushed the left; I can’t. Their incompetence mixed with stupidity and hubris is why there is a Rudd Cabinet, and why the Coalition Opposition are a gang of gibbering buffoons -

Helen Kroger realised her promise early this year. In the Senate, she asked: “Will the Minister for Defence give a guarantee Australia’s servicemen will receive their slouch hats this year?” First there was stony silence and then when it dawned on the ALP Senators that they had heard correctly, they doubled in pain, from laughter. I fell out of my chair, rolling about in gales of laughter is dangerous. She should never depart from the daily Dick and Dora scripts diligently prepared by Krogerite pen pals.

“Busy”, implies effort. Even a mere glance at their ‘out-put’ shows they do not apply themselves to anything but how to get hold of shareholders’ funds (euphemistically called donations). They hold out begging bowls, Mr. Manners, and find enough fools in corporate Australia to fill them. It’s a swindle, Mr. Manners, a fraud since they are accepting payment for work they have never done and cannot do. It shows, firms are being ground into tiny little bits because of bastards like them.

3. In war, soldiers do not leave the wounded behind. They rescue their comrades in arms. So, that remark in it is literal and metaphorical senses is an insult to men who won’t leave the wounded behind. A bloody insult, Mr. Manners.

On the other hand, Mr. Manners, you are funding venal cowards. This lot aren’t men, Mr. Manners. They won’t be found serving Australia under arms where enemy are. Not this lot, Mr. Manners.

Funnier still, in ‘civvy street’ with no risk of being shot at by a determined enemy, they are terrified of leftists. They are afraid of the Left Mr. Manners because any confrontation means for them instant humiliation, because they are ignorant, intellectual pygmies. Even Professor Quiggin bounces your ‘guns’ around. Rubber balls bounce well Mr. Manner, and that is what your funds have bought, rubber balls (there is only one other reason The Age aka ‘The Spencer Street Soviet’ happily publishes their tripe - for a good laugh).

4. “why so unhappy”. What an infantile remark. When I read that, it reminded me of the 1980’s watching ‘adults’ saying, ‘be happy’.  And how glib.

What is at stake is more than serious. We have Cabinets whose actions mean a very time ahead for Australians, measures that give joy to the diseased Left, and all because of the Statist Right and their ‘clunker tanks’. These disasters, Mr. Manners, didn’t occur in the last few years. The Statist Right, with their lousy policies and lousy economics, reinforced by their clunker tanks, IPA, CIS and HR Nicholls Society, set them in train decades ago. Now we have Ruddistan. These pompous, conceited asses, Mr. Manners, don’t give a fig about the consequences of lousy economics, they don’t give a stuff about the impact of lousy policies on Australians. I remind you Mr. Manners of:

The cornerstone of freedom, of free markets, of prosperity for many is absolute property rights and they are the ground of common law. The Right in Victoria, and advised by the clunker tanks, did their bit to completely usurp Victorians of their Rights. It wasn’t simply the left alone under Bracks and Brumby who did this.

The Right are as culpable as the Left. This is before trawling through what Right-wing Ministers, including that economic illiterate called Peter Costello, are responsible for when they held appointments in the Howard Cabinets. The Statist Right’s sheer contempt for all but themselves is transparent. (Costello recently asserted that he has spent his life defending liberty. He’s either a fiction writer air-brushing his fat ‘career’, or a liar)

Von Mises pointed out, Statism can lead to socialist regimes. Well, Mr. Manners,the Right laid the foundations for Brackistan and Ruddistan, and you have the bloody nerve to come out with that facile advice, ‘be happy’.

Is that your position, Mr. Manners, Libertarianism? If it is, then be clear on it, libertarianism, as inchoate as it is, is not genuine Liberalism. Next to wrecking the genuine free market cause, the Right and not just the Left have caused great damage to institutions, try the judiciary and courts in Victoria Mr. Manners and the words, mockery of justice. And what do you find in ‘happy, clappy land’ called IPA and CIS, a bunch of lying, libertarians who, far from defending genuine principles, have supported increasingly police state measures. They have not simply helped to sap common law through regulation, Mr. Manners.  And now we see the CIS engaged in a lobby campaign for Carbon taxes, which will destroy production in  Australia, and requires totalitarian rule to enforce carbon taxes of all types.

Oh yes, Mr. Manners, your studs are steeped in the pleasure principle, their own pleasure, and they see nothing wrong in inflicting pain on many Australians, stripping them of their inalienable property rights, grinding them under crushing tax burdens, including regulations, and then to wipe them out completely with carbon taxes. These shallow, hollow bastards, Mr. Manners are good libertarians. But then, Mr. Manners, they are professional, wealthy, kept parasites so libertarianism comes easily to them.

Lastly, that remark is a bloody insult to Mr. Jackson and I remind you, Mr. Manners, the parasites have spared no effort to smear Mr. Jackson, in order to ruin his reputation as a fine economist before others. A man Mr Manners who, unlike the thugs you fund, who does the work required to run the genuine Liberal cause accurately and fights the hard Left from the front. This is in addition to the question of:

Are there other Australians as good as Mr. Jackson, and Dr. Frank Shostak?

The problem, Mr. Manners, is that we have not found out, because the Right and their slimey pets that you fund make sure no genuine talent is encouraged and advanced within Liberal ranks. So, Mr. Manners, you have the hide to insult someone equipped to do the work and does it, and protect the treacherous, whining, slobs you consider are free market warriors. Yet, as we observed last year, you confessed the bums you enrich are bums.]

Mr. Jackson’s reply:

Are you absolutely clueless, Ron? They published an outrageous paper on manufacturing that damaged the free market cause and all you can do is try and to get stuck into me.

Yes, Ron, I am unhappy.

I am unhappy with the arrogant incompetents who wrecked labour market reform.

I am unhappy with people who misrepresent Hayek and Austrian thinking.

I am unhappy with people who are too gutless to tackle the left directly.

I am unhappy with people who think pointing out the gross errors of our right-wing is some form of treason.

I am unhappy with people with so-called free marketeers who are too cowardly to defend what they write.

I am unhappy with people who refuse to engage in open debate.

I am unhappy with people whose response to a reasoned criticism is personal abuse and lying.

And I am particularly unhappy with people like you who back these bastards and then have the bloody nerve to criticise me. Do you think no one noticed that not only did you refuse to condemn Humphries’ lying and abusive tactics, you actually rewarded him? You need to be reminded that those corrupt bastards at the CIS are proposing a tax that would devastate industry and savage living standards.

And let me remind you of something else, Ron, – before I lose my temper and tell you what I really think – unlike your pals I don’t get paid to defend the free market. It is not a living for me but a cause.

Try to get this through that skull of yours: this lot don’t want “soldiers” – they want bylines and donations. It’s the left – not the right – who do the recruiting.  

Finally, Mr Manners, don’t you ever again dare insult me or treat me with disdain.

Jackson’s reply is right.  No comments needed but one:

“ It’s the left – not the right – who do the recruiting. ” That is correct, and the Left search far and wide for new talent: pointed up by the telling thing; they readily take on any of the  man in the street who has ability, and spurn the sort of drivelling undergraduate shits that have totally wrecked the Liberal Party, and lounge in the comfy, kept clubhouses called the IPA and CIS. In contrast, Mr. Manners insults Jackson, funds bums, and for good measure, happily accepted that lying halfwit, John Humphreys, busily doing lobbyist,Greg Lindsay’s (carbon tax lobbyist on behalf of vested interests connected to Lindsay and the CIS) bidding as the front man.

Oh, and the CIS’s “Hayekian  Professor”, Mr. N. Gruen, must warrant a Mannkal Foundation Chair. Gruen is ignorant of Hayek and what that means, von Mises and Austrian school economists.  Gruen is receiving fees, transfers from much abused taxpayer, as an adviser to the Rudd Cabinet. Gruen was recently cited in a news report as an ‘expert economist’ who praised Rudd’s economic policies. This is another demonstration of the intellectual calibre of the Right. I now await Gruen’s public explanation of why the ALP Cabinet’s fascist policies are the epitome of capitalism. And there is a boon attached: it will provide another photo opportunity for Mr. Manners.

A note on Mr. Gruen has made a tidy sum out of advising companies on how to accept murder through regulation. After all, Gruen’s business website only boasts of how he helpfully massages companies into accepting a drawn out, painful death by helping them to co-operate with politicians and bureaucrats as they devise the best way of strangling firms. Mr. Manners’ guns at work.

Ah! I had it recently from a chum in the city that an effort was mounted to fight the W.A. Government’s strangulation of mining ventures. Mind, this effort was mounted after the Cabinet had introduced the bills. A magnate told other miners he would fight the Cabinet, and asked for contributions. They got nothing for their money and that’s easy to spot, because there was no public bloodbath, with rotten politicians and bureaucrats writhing in the streets in pain.

This looks very much like the Right’s standard modus operandi of grabbing the money, stuffing it in their bank vaults and, needless to say, not doing the job they were paid to do. The contributors, my city friend told me, foamed at the mouth when they were told their precious funds were handed over to duds.

On the strength of the above, it is probable the duds were either the IPA or the CIS, or both in tandem. But who was the fool who promised the other miners a victorious fight and blew the funds on idle parasites? My chum was reluctant to divulge the identity, knowing full well that I would use the info. Perhaps he will divulge it in due course. I’ll prompt him by sending him this item.

The firm and its size is a market phenomenon; the market decides the size of the firm. Coase nailed this. What drives the formation of firms is capital formation and scale of capital. Interestingly, this is reflected in the development of Common Law with the emergence of joint stock companies. Interesting but not surprising because free markets, which are rooted in inalienable property rights, is the ground of Common law.

Telstra

Is not a free market firm. Monopolies exist only when politicians impose them, and that is the origin of Telstra, under its first name, Telecom. Concentration, how many firms, bye the bye, contrary to the fiction bound falshehood of perfect competition, is not the definition of a competitive market. More-over, to speak of market is if, as in this case, telecommunications is homogeneous, is nonsense. There is no single market in telecommunication. So numbers of firms and capital scales, and what needs to be put in place, physical capital, in any period, has not been discovered by entrepreneurs and investors as guided by the valuations of customers. The whole shambolic business of telecommunications in Australia is due to what monopoly amounts, a political-bureaucratic attempt to beat markets and that is how monopolies are formed, as bureaucracies.

The Right, addicted to the fiction of perfect competition assumed breaking up monopolies or, as in the case of Telstra, ‘privatising’ them but hedging them by regulations to effect perfect competition, eliminates the burdens imposed through monopolies. There is a problem internal to Telstra’s investments that rubs against the regulations imposed on it, its shareholders’ inalienable property rights in the capital. Trujillo has fought a rearguard action on this on the count of; if Telstra develops new technology, it is under the regulations immediately forced to supply the new equipment to other firms. There is nothing wrong with fighting this at all.

Consider it. You develop new comms equipment for business or consumers and it is others who get to reap greater profits because they get to reduplicate that which they did not have to invest from development to production.  You would, rightly, jump on toes, legs and arms of politicians and bureaucrats for overthrowing your property rights and demolishing the value of the capital you have sunk - because the expected future earnings stream has been sliced a-priori, on the strength of nothing more than the diktat of capricious nobodies. Trujillo cannot be attacked for defending the property of investors on this count.

The departure point is the problem that Rudd’s farcical con cannot resolve, the ‘last mile’. Rudd taxing Australians for an initial liability of $42 billion (before future costs) to install fibre optic line as the answer to Telstra’s copper cable misses the problem by hundreds of miles. It is also why the Right are wrong, as typified by an article by Alan Moran in the Institute of Public Affairs‘ IPA Review:

Where’s the breadth of vision in Rudd’s broadband plan?

First, to observe, Moran is right in stating,

With the $43 billion allocated to the fibre-to-the-home network, Rudd claims to be saving us from the global financial crisis by boosting demand as well as providing infrastructure for a more productive tomorrow.

What informs Rudd’s plan is the consumption fallacy, which is problematic because the Right also adhere to it: consumption drives economic growth.

If it did, why do firms bother raising capital funds and those who extend them, savers supply entrepreneurs? Consumer spending should do the work, and this is what Rudd’s con assumes. Iff he and Swann were consistent, they would not be plotting to relieve taxpayers of billions of dollars, for by some miracle consumers alone will bring it into being.

It is no mere crack, because there is no grip on capital theory but this doesn’t disturb Rudd. The Right are voids in capital theory too, so he cannot be disturbed. By Jove, the likes of Professor Sinclair Davidson, Chris Berg, Greg Lindsay, Nicholas Gruen, and others are corkingly funny. It, capital theory, has further devastating force, which will be footnoted below.

Where Moran is astray is two counts. The first, as above, Telstra the monopoly was not cured by ‘privatisation’ and the assumption informing this, the fiction of perfect competition.  The second is, the problem of the last mile:

The discussion paper on national broadband is little more than a thinly veiled proposal to force Telstra to disgorge its copper network and divest its Foxtel system or to otherwise co-operate with the Government on pain of facing regulatory discipline…

Any board must be ultra-cautious about investing in a facility that faces subsidised new competition, government hostility and punitive pricing regimes. Telstra’s fixed-line investment as a result of these factors has remained low and is falling. This has brought about a deterioration in the Australian service, which is likely to accelerate as a result of the intensified attack by the Government on the main private sector provider…

With a government business there is a great temptation to shut out competitive solutions - after all, it will be argued, we need critical mass to ensure economies of scale.

This will leave us hostage to a system that might be technologically bypassed but which will be shielded from competition to preserve the government monopoly.

What Moran assumes is; firms will not invest in capital that is open to freeloaders, in this case the latter are competitors, real or potential, of Telstra. Samuelson committed the same mistake, assuming the conclusion, when he asserted ships would not pay for U.K. lighthouses. Ships do pay for lighthouses and the reason is, shipping firms concern to protect ships and cargoes from destruction, and a genuine humanitarian concern it is too.

Even better, while it is speculative, ships’ insurers might also have paqid lighthouse firms for the service. The reason is straightforward, to minimise risk liabilities, and also for shipping firms, it keeps premiums down, illuminated by the return to the good old days of piracy on the high seas which is causing real headaches for insurers and insured.

Another example is Grand Central Station, New York. I can appreciate the likes of Rudd and the CIS, and IPA, assuming Government built it. No. It was railroad firms who jointly built it.

The reason was simple. They needed a station to connect their interstate rail services. It was to their considerable advantage to split the cost and build a single, shared station.  It was co-operation, without force, nor attempts to prevent it, to do it.  What, from te myth of perfect competition is said against co-operation between firms? It’s an offence, it is collusion, and firms must act blind. On this basis, those investments would not have been built because it would have eliminated to cut costs down to the bone. Likewise, it was firms who built the canals of England, to solve their logistics requirements.

Now, following Moran and Samuelson, no firm should have done that, on the assumption it ‘does not pay’. Train, ship and canal boat did/do pay. What happens at airports used by numbers of airlines! Notice something? What it means costs are kept as low as possible through the spread.

Joint investment in ‘the last mile’ of telecommunications, because telecommunications firms need it if they are to enter earnings the only way they can, connecting house and firm. We can say why, it is integral to the capital structure of firms.

The culprit is cost, due to Telestra’s monopoly over it. Telstra has no incentive to discover how to build line at lowest cost. It has every incentive to multiply costs, and exact punishing prices from other firms who might use it. Monopolies are not in the business of serving customers; they are about extraction high prices, for politicians. This is where Trujillo can be attacked for defending the indefensible.

Trujillo is asserting; without monopoly over the final mile, it will not be maintained, upgraded, and extended. That, Telstra’s share price will crumble with it. To the contrary, if telecommunications had developed in free market terms, there is the real consideration it would have been faster as well as at far lower cost than under Telecom-Telstra. That, Telstra might have realised far more valuable increases in capital as a consequence. What this means is the release of capital for new investments of higher value.

In Why copper was beaten Alan Koehler supplies some interesting comparisons, introducing them by observing:

…since Telstra put too high a price on its last-mile copper network, the customers decided to go elsewhere.

The nitty gritty of pricing and costs is telling:

…in Singapore. The Straits Times reported this week that 100Mbps residential services will be selling for $S75 a month or less ($81.50) from next year.

The firm that won the tender for a 100Mbps fibre network, Starhub, will be selling wholesale access to it for $S21 ($23) a month, which is much lower than SingTel currently charges for wholesale access to its copper (up to $S34 or $37 a month for 10Mbps services)

Trujillo is pinning some of the value of stock in Telstra to its capacity to extract monopoly prices. What should concern investors is interest, rate of earnings over time. This has been butchered by both major parties, as the price collapse on the last float of Telstra capital dramatically demonstrated (and I told friends and acquaintances not to purchase T3 for the reason and also because the Right and the Left believed they were entitled to extract a price far higher as a multiple of earnings).

There is no doubt about it, politicians and their advisers have abused investors in Telstra, badly, reflected in the heads of Telstra trying to compensate shareholders with high dividend payouts - but this shows, capital is being wasted, not effectively employed and that means all are losing, shareholders and customers. The irony is that this is all very damaging to Telstra over time. Why should investors stump up valuable capital to see it abused?

Not that it is entirely the fault of the heads of Telstra. In privatising Telstra, Left and Right couched it in regulations aimed at ensuring it remained a monopoly and the telling symptom is regulations aimed at forcing Telstra to destroy capital by subsidising consumers, inclusive of pseudo-business, and extracting revenues. They have all whipped up public passions over this, including the Right, as a number of their MPs have bluntly stated in Parliament. It has been entrenched by the aspect of the dirty floats of Telstra, with still after T3 politicians through Cabinet still exercising a controlling share in the company.Here, as only one instance, is a recent article on this serious matter:

Tensions between Telstra and Future Fund

According to The Australian Financial Review, senior figures from Telstra and the Future Fund met on March 30 where the Fund raised concerns for the telco’s strategy towards the federal government in the wake of its exclusion from the bidding process for the national broadband network.

Now, all this Trujillo properly objects to. He and the board simply desire to retain monopoly structure without the encumbering reasons why politicians impose them.

Be clear on this, I’m not attacking the integrity of Trujillo. There are those who do operate in free markets are irritable because of it, resent it. They believe in free market competition for all but their own; hence bouts of putsches for protectionist policies. Trujillo is working honourably for his company.

He’s pushing its interests, absent of a genuine free market structure of prices informing action and company structure and scale, and quite enjoy watching Trujillo biffing politicians and bureaucrats. This involves matters that require Austrian school exponents. Australia is fortunate it has at least two of them, Mr. Jackson and Dr. Frank Shostak. I say, Mr. Manners and Mr. Clough, aren’t you a tad embarrassed by a false a purchase, your stables of studs - IPA and CIS are really geldings? Or, perhaps you were blinded by the sun and so couldn’t check for the obvious, whether they came equipped with balls.

Summation

The question of telecommunications today and into the future was generated not in recent years but in the lead up to ‘privatisation’. There was no solid intellectual examination and debate prior to ‘privatisation’. It was assumed that this was the market refounding of the monopoly and its correction.  Rudd’s telco con, if executed promises only greater damage, and as another bureaucratic, central planning approach to supplying telecommunications. Rudd and Swann have no way of discovering what is required, when, and the capital structure and its increase over time to develop it. It promises only greater confiscation and destruction of savings. This lunacy is rooted in the anti-intellectualism, arrogance, and conceit of the Right, who prsided over the non-free market mess.

I have raised the above because of an article I read some years ago, which I recollect in outline. It was published in The New Australian, by Mr. G. Jackson. In that article, Mr. Jackson examined ‘privatisation’ and raised considerations that challenged the assumptions behind the putsch for ‘privatisation’, given in the contrast to genuine free market reform of government monopolies. He made the central point, ‘privatisation’ does not necessarily end the monopoly. After all, the monopoly can retain its structure on that basis.

The assumption of the fiction of perfect competition compounds any errors in reasoning, which can cause great damage if applied. Indeed, the ‘privatisation’, as opposed to genuine free market reform of the Victorian Government monopolies in energy and water supply is testament to the danger today. Who did this, the Right under Kennett, as advised by the IPA and CIS. There was no debate and, because he is anti-intellectual and an economic illiterate, did not and could not consider the problems and the need of alternative sources of advice, matched by vigorous debate. He simply acted and the result, the dangers have been realised under Bracks and Brumby.

Alan Kohler wrote,Telstra needs real competition. This, from perfect competition fiction, is the myth if concentration is decisive. Look at it another way, there are other telcos already. Why aren’t they jumping in? The market is not a free market, and politicians and their advisers made sure of it. Consider what happens in a genuine free market:

Economic profits is a signal for investors and entrepreneurs to jump in and rectify the problem, inefficient supply. An entreprenuer in a free market seeing another’s costs being blown out, not serving customers, and making up earnings by piling up prices will jump in. In a free market, consequently, investors in the failure will sack those they employed to run their company and replace them with those who are competent to run capital in a free market. But, the telecommunications market is not a free market, leaving many Australians complaining of what summed up is the problem, Telstra is still a monopoly. The fight over the final mile is due to this.

Rudd’s con won’t correct the problem. What, replace an old monopoly with a new $42+ monopoly over the final mile. Worse, it not only contains the same problem, it means further massive distortions  in capital allocation in telecommunications and, considered, capital destruction. It entails an explosive cost blowout and not elimination and reduction. Where are the customers in all this. As badly abused as they are today, and more - forced to pay for the con and pay spiraling prices.

It’s not the final mile, its maintenance and development that is the problem. The mainstream media commentariat are missing this essential point, as also did the IPA. Canals, railways, and lighthouses demonstrate why. Companies can co-operate and pay for universal facilities and cut the costs of building them right down.  What Rudd is planning bears no relation to this. His plan is to have a firm or two execute what he will dictate to Australians.

$42 billions and bonds

How much in bonds does Rudd aim to ‘raise’?

Companies issue bonds to raise capital funds for maintenance and addition to production capacity. This is sound, based to the valuation of capital, priced according to expected future earnings. This is capital allocation in underlying assets. This is not what Rudd’s bond issue is. It is debt raising, another heavy tax burden imposed on some but not all Australians should it pass the Senate, to fund not capital investment but consumption.

The immediate burden will not be borne by those who purchase the bonds, in expectation of being paid interest and on the maturation of the bonds, the return of the principal they supplied to Rudd for his con. This a confiscation of wealth, savings, from many Australians, to some Australians - politicians, bureaucrats, and bond holders.

The road to pelf, however, is a rocky and dangerous one also for those who buy the bonds. The Cabinet can ‘pay’ the interest and on maturation the principal in several ways or a combination:

1. The sly tax of inflation, monetary expansion by forging money. As it is, how will Rudd pay for the now over $52 billion keynesian spend up? Print hundred dollar bills round the clock? Add on the $42 billion pluc telco plan and hey, he can buy the monolith money printing machine.

Oh, Glenn Stevens of the RBA could help him out, with new rounds of monetary expansion but even now it is hitting the skids. Monetary expansion creates the false impression real savings are far higher than they are. This is why some banks did not pass on  the laterst interest rate cut, and others only a fraction of it. Economic laws cannot be defied. Firms are not screaming out for financing for nothing.

2. Raise existing taxes. This would go down a treat with many already hard pressed Australians, and sack more precious capital.

3.  Compel Australians to use his grand NB and pay sky high prices for the ‘privilge’. I can see many Australians carting their telecommunications equipment off to the nearest garbage dump.

He’s plotting to issue bonds in nothing that exists, that will take a long time to build and what does that mean for earnings? When is it supposed to hit ‘earnings’. So, how are bond-holders to be paid out but by making many others poorer, assuming the bonds aren’t shredded by inflation.  It’s worse:

It also means taking capital away from sound production. This means further impoverishment of other Australians, shareholders to employees, and employees are shareholders through superannuation plans. Joy in the morning - buy a bond in a non-existent, pseudo business, watch the superannuation shrink in the afternoon and find a nice pay cut in the post in the evening. (Yes, I’m being sarcastic, it is not simplistic what occurs).

Not only is capital diverted, but capital formation is hampered, because it is capital that is taken from where it can be soundly used and so how is it to be replaced?  Since this is so, accumulation is inhibited. Look at what is happening. Rudd plans to pile up debt and indulge in a spending spree. Take with all his grand plans, including carbon taxes, the Rudd Cabinet can ruin the vast majority of Australians and what do the Right say but:

‘Yay! Go ahead. Grind the serfs into the dust’ , as Greg Lindsay and his CIS, and the Kemps and their IPA through Professor Sinclair Davidson and Chris Berg have made very plain. If Manners and Clough reckon this is defending free markets, good luck. Though,