Australia will need to follow US in lowering business imposts

Posted on 7:36 am, December 10, 2016 by Alan Moran

From my piece in yesterday’s Herald Sun

Australian politicians recognise that a Trump presidency will bring radical change in US.  But none of them understand that this also creates a competitive threat.

Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is backed up by measures that will reduce other countries’ relative attractiveness for investment and business generally.

As well as bluster about punishing companies that export jobs, Trump promises a massive increase in incentives for them to stay in the US and for other companies to move there.

Trump is promising to lower company tax to 15 per cent.

And while Australian politicians are regulating gas exploration and forcing more costly and less reliable electricity into the system, Trump is going to abandon all subsidies and fully unleash shale and coal seam gas production.  The US will pull out of the Obama-designed Paris Climate Agreement at a time when Australia is adding costs by re-affirming support for that doomed program.

Forty years ago, Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew said that Australia risked becoming the white trash of Asia.  We dodged that bullet with the economic reforms and privatisations of the Hawke-Keating, Kennett-Stockdale and Howard-Costello administrations.

Since then, political interventions have taken us downhill again.

Our natural endowment could make us the world’s richest country.  But to achieve this we have to unlock the regulatory straightjackets that stifle productivity in mining, agriculture, construction and elsewhere in the economy.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 35 Comments

Open Forum: December 10, 2016

Posted on 12:01 am, December 10, 2016 by Sinclair Davidson
Posted in Open Forum | 1,228 Comments

Berg and Davidson on 18C and free speech

Posted on 4:45 pm, December 9, 2016 by Sinclair Davidson

My good friend Dr Chris Berg* and I have an article in the latest issue of Agenda: A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform.

The paper examines two Australian freedom-of-speech controversies between 2011 and 2013 – the debate over section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, and the debate over the Gillard Government’s print media laws. These controversies featured rhetorical and ideological debate about the limits of free speech and the nature of human rights. The paper applies a ‘subjective political economy’ framework to these debates in order to trace the effect of increased perceived ‘disorder costs’ and ‘dictatorship costs’ of freedom of speech restrictions. The paper concludes that policy change is driven by exogenous changes in perceived institutional costs. In the case of the Gillard Government’s media laws, those costs were borne by the Gillard Government, and one would not expect print media laws to be a major political issue in the absence of a further exogenous shock. In the case of section 18C the revealed dictatorship costs of legislation, which includes the words ‘offend’ and ‘insult’, suggest the section 18C controversy will endure.

* Chris’ PhD thesis was passed last week. He undertook an exhaustive economic history of prudential regulation in Australia from the 1890s through to 2008.

Posted in Freedom of speech | 28 Comments

There will be no carbon tax under a government I pretend to lead

Posted on 3:09 pm, December 9, 2016 by Steve Kates

Via Andrew Bolt, sabotaging Josh Frydenberg. The story: Josh Frydenberg in the deep freeze as Coalition colleagues overheat. What does any of this have to do with Frydenberg since it is universally understood that Malcolm is a global warming loon. If this is true, then they are all as stupid as each other:

Josh Frydenberg’s ministerial colleagues are blaming him for derailing the government’s ­energy price campaign against Labor and embarrassing Malcolm Turnbull by contravening a cabinet decision to keep the climate policy review “low key”.

What does the word “low key” mean? Low key is only low key if no one pays any attention to what you said. If they think Frydenberg is the problem, then they are the problem. And to be specific, it is Malcolm who is the problem, and until he goes, the problems will continue, as voters drift off to find someone with a bit of common sense to vote for.

Posted in Federal Politics, Global warming and climate change policy | 79 Comments

General James Mattis – nominee for US Secretary of Defence

Posted on 2:24 pm, December 9, 2016 by I am Spartacus

Mattis said the following to his Marines as a rule to live by in Iraq.

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.

Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments

Time to get serious

Posted on 2:15 pm, December 9, 2016 by Sinclair Davidson

So we have had a quarter of negative GDP growth, flat wages growth, rising mortgage rates …

What has the government being talking about? Taxation of backpackers – when there are hundreds of thousands of Australians on the dole being paid to sit on their bums. A new star chamber to bash unions (the Lord’s work to be sure, but I’ve come to realise that I dislike star chambers more than trade unions).  Then this week the government thought they could sneak a carbon tax past us without anyone noticing.*

Now I read in the media that there is a bit of a bun fight – was it Frydenberg to blame or Turnbull to blame? Who cares? Between the two of them they stuffed up. Each should know better. The electorate has little interest in emissions reduction*; not when they are worried about the economy, their job, their wages, and their mortgage rates.

It is time for our friends in Canberra to be a tad less self-indulgent.

* Remember this is the same government that retified the Paris Accord the day after the US election – so we know their agenda in this space.

** It is snowing in Victoria in the second week of December.

 

Posted in Economics and economy, Global warming and climate change policy | 22 Comments

Treasury endorses Say’s Law

Posted on 10:22 am, December 9, 2016 by Steve Kates

It is not said in words, but the reality of what they have concluded is that Say’s Law is right and Keynesian economics is junk science. A stimulus takes an economy backwards, makes things worse. This is not about this program or that. This is about the very principle of trying to revive an economy from the demand side based on unproductive forms of public spending. They also don’t use the phrase Say’s Law, and may not even be aware that Say’s Law was specifically designed to explain that a public spending stimulus not only will not work, but will make things worse. So read this from the front page of The Oz today: Stimulus a waste, damaged industries.

A damning Treasury-commissioned independent review of the former Labor government’s unprecedented spending response to the global financial crisis has found it was a “misconceived” waste of money, fundamentally weakened Australia’s economy, almost destroyed parts of the manufacturing sector and ­inflicted more long-term harm than good.

The review is also scathing of government failure on both sides of politics to address the budget crisis triggered by the $100 billion fiscal stimulus project, which has saddled the nation with the ­fastest-growing public debt in the world. “There is no evidence fiscal stimulus benefited the economy over the medium term,” says the paper, to be released today.

It says the stimulus was “misconceived”, with an emphasis on transfer payments and “unproductive expenditure such as school halls and pink batts”.

And I do wish to emphasise that this is not a critique of how things were done, but that these things were done at all. You want to understand the theory, you can either go back to John Stuart Mill or Henry Clay or any of the pre-Keynesian classics. Or you can read my Free Market Economics in which it is all set down in cold print.

LIBERTY QUOTE AS I LOGGED IN: Not really funny but all too accurate:

The politician, acting on a modified Keynesian maxim that in the long run we are all out of office, does not care if his successful cure of unemployment is bound to produce more unemployment in the future.

— Friedrich von Hayek

Where are all the geese now who were responsible? All No care and no responsibility. It is macroeconomic theory that has to go or another “stimulus” is just around the corner.

Posted in Classical Economics, Economics and economy | 31 Comments

Popper on paradigms in 1932

Posted on 4:33 am, December 9, 2016 by Rafe Champion

While Popper was writing the original German version of The Logic of Scientific Discovery during the early 1930s one of the issues on his mind was the rearguard action of Newtonians to resist the scandalous novelty of Einstein’s new theory. He used the term “conventionalism” to describe the attempt to retain an established theory against interloping novelties. This indicates that he was addressing the matter of paradigms (and the difficulty to challenge them) long before Kuhn entered the fray.

He saw that theories can be “immunized” against criticism in several ways – by means of ad hoc hypotheses, by shifting definitions, ignoring inconvenient observations and even by challenging the competence of rival investigators. Kuhn added the string of incommensurability to the conventionalist’s bow and another one is the charge of ideological or political bias.

These conventionalist strategies raised the issue of the social nature of science and the norms, traditions and conventions of the scientific community which he touched without elaboration in chapter 23 of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and in the final sections of The Poverty of Historicism.

“Thus I was led to the idea of methodological rules and…of an approach which avoided the policy of immunizing our theories against refutation.”

The next step in the evolution of his ideas in 1932/33 came as he applied the critical approach to the test statements of the empirical basis and he recognised the conjectural and theoretical nature of observation statements. That in turn led to the recognition that all languages are theory-impregnated (the theory-dependence of observations) thus calling for a fundamental change in our perception of empiricism which hitherto had sought the solid foundations of knowledge in the data of observations or inputs from sensory organs.

“It also made me look upon the critical attitude as characteristic of the rational attitude; and it led me to see the significance of the argumentative (or critical) function of language; to the idea of deductive logic as the means of criticism…And it further led me to realize that only a formulated theory (rather than a believed theory) can be objective, and to the idea that it is this formulation or objectivity that makes criticism possible; and so to my theory of a ‘third world’.”

That evolution of thinking is sketched in the final section of chapter 2 in Objective Knnowledge (1970) moving from demarcation and induction to the rules of the game, to theories of language and the ideas of objective knowledge and the evolutionary link between language and critical thinking. As Jarvie demonstrated in The Republic of Science, all those themes were present in Popper’s first published work and it took a lifetime to draw out some of their implications.

Posted in Philosophy, Rafe | 15 Comments

Election fraud American style

Posted on 11:56 pm, December 8, 2016 by Steve Kates

The re-count in Michigan has been brought to an end, but this is far from the real story. This is the real story: REVEALED: Michigan Recount Uncovers Serious Voter Fraud in Detroit- VOTES COUNTED UP TO 6 TIMES. None of this will be reported in any of the mainstream media but this is probably a large part of the reason why the counting has been stopped.

In Detroit, one of the chief ways they engage in voter fraud is to count the same ballot MULTIPLE times. This is just ONE way. They also do some shady stuff with absentee ballots etc.

Once they started the Michigan recount in earnest, and knowing he would be exposed, the Detroit City Clerk Daniel Baxter all of a sudden started claiming that the optical scanners which read the paper ballots did not work the day of the election. Baxter blamed the discrepancies on decade-old voting machines. That is his cover story. Nothing like this was mentioned until he realized their voting fraud scheme would be detected.

Baxter’s claim is that, when trying to push the ballots through the readers, the ballots would be stuck and they’d have to push them through again thus ‘ACCIDENTALLY’ resulting in a double count. He says the poll workers sometimes ‘FORGET’ to adjust the machine count and instead let the ballot count twice.

Want more:

In one Detroit Precinct, a recount team was given a box of ballots with an unbroken seal where everything appeared proper and in place. The tag on the box said there were 306 ballots. The book said 306, and the ticket said 306, so that means there should be 306 paper ballots on the box. When they pulled out the ballots, there were exactly FIFTY paper ballots in a locked sealed box that again was supposed to have 306. The official canvasser approved count for this precinct was 306. For FIFTY ballots.

It looks like Detroit counts each vote more than SIX TIMES! No wonder they get such high turnout rates!

Here’s another story dealing with the the vote counting fraud: Detroit Voter Fraud so Extensive Half of Initial Votes Ineligible for Recount…. And the details:

Michigan’s largest county voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, but officials couldn’t reconcile vote totals for 610 of 1,680 precincts during a countywide canvass of vote results late last month.

Most of those are in heavily Democratic Detroit, where the number of ballots in precinct poll books did not match those of voting machine printout reports in 59 percent of precincts, 392 of 662.

The level of fraud is staggering. Another swamp that will need draining over the next four years.

Posted in American politics | 42 Comments

Thursday Forum: December 8, 2016

Posted on 10:00 pm, December 8, 2016 by Sinclair Davidson
Posted in Open Forum | 632 Comments