Monday 30 April 2012

They endured David Cunliffe, but of vision there was none [update 4]

LABOUR’S DAVID CUNLIFFE yesterday released his economic vision for New Zealand in a community hall in Blockhouse Bay.

At least, we were told to expect by sundry bloggers, commentators and Mr Cunliffe himself to expect an “an economic vision worth fighting for,” “some ideas around economic development”—”a signal of where Cunliffe would take the party if he was in charge”-- “the most important speech given from a high ranking Labour Party politician since David Lange articulated NZ's independent foreign policy in the 1980's”—but it was in vain that I scrolled through his speech in search of either vision, or plans, or proposals for the future—or anything that might possibly make it “important.” 

I didn’t expect to agree with it, but I at least wanted to know what it is, this “vision” of his of “economic development.”

Now, his speech to the faithfully invited did indicate where he might take Labour if he were in charge, i.e., even further down the gurgler from where it is now, but what it mostly contained was not vision but bullshit, bluster and ego-driven ennui: a litany of historical errors and a mess of shop-worn cloth-cap clichés.

But there was nothing at all about economic development. Nothing at all to even suggest he understands how economies do develop. And if there is any “vision” at all in David Cunliffe’s head, the evidence is those visions are somewhat like those of Saint Joan’s—which is to say of himself at the head of some “True Labour” Column.

Perhaps he has forgotten she was burned as a heretic.

The whole sorry speech deserves a good fisk, but who has the time. So let me just pluck out a few of his more farcical pronouncements on history, on economics, and on politics… [Cunliffe’s flaccid prose is in italics.]

The major reason that voters didn’t vote for Labour, and sometimes didn’t vote at all, is simply that Labour failed to inspire voters that it was a credible alternative to National.

Really. No shit.

You hear the National government talking about the need to sell assets because we have so little money in this country. Do you know why we have so little money in this country? It’s because a large percentage of our economic assets are overseas-owned.

No, it’s so much spending of the spending in this country is poured down government holes instead of building up the capital structure—which means so much that New Zealanders do save goes to better homes overseas where they can find decent investments, instead of here.

And because so few large assets are easily bought by wealthier foreigners. (Cunliffe does realise that every purchaser of an asset has to hand over money to the local owners first, doesn’t he, who can then re-invest it here to make greater profits—essentially doubling available local capital with every foreign purchase?)

While the hippies were out protesting in the streets [in the 1970s], a professor at the University of Chicago called Milton Friedman, was selling his students the idea that taxation was evil and that businesses worked best when they were deregulated.

Actually it was Ayn Rand arguing that taxation is theft. Unfortunately, Milton Friedman and his Chicagoites just wanted to make taxation more “efficient.” Which they did: the total tax take under Roger Douglas and David Lange’s Labour Party went up to its highest ever level; something about Friedman would be delighted and Douglas was. But Rand would not be.

Does this sound familiar? It should be. The Republican Party in the US, the Conservative Party in England and the Labour Party in New Zealand enthusiastically took up Friedman’s philosophy, which is now called neo-liberalism.

This will be news to Ronald Reagan’s Republicans, who followed the blatherings of supply-siders, more than Friedman’s Chicago-ites. (Friedman had to go to Chile to try his ideas out properly.) And Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives were followers more of UK-resident Hayek than that crass American from across the ditch. (Thatcher was famous for banging down Hayek’s book Road to Serfdom Constitution of Liberty on the cabinet table exclaiming “This is what we believe!” No similar stories exist about Friedman’s Free to Choose.)
And the “philosophy” is only called neo-Liberalism by people to the left of Jane Kelsey and Tim Hazeldine.

Neo-liberalism has become such a dominant economic philosophy that it is now the only economic philosophy taught in many universities.

This will be news to anyone studying politics or economics in virtually any university in the world, even in Friedman’s Chicago home-base. And to anyone studying under Jane Kelsey or Tim Hazeldine.

Friedman revived a belief in the “invisible hand” of the market. It was a fairy tale that Adam Smith had said a century earlier would automatically deliver the best of all possible economic worlds.

It was actually two centuries  before Friedman became popular that Adam Smith produced his analysis of what made nations rich--in the eventful year of 1776 to be precise. (Maybe Cunliffe  should have studied history at Harvard instead of poetry?) Adam Smith’s answer to the question of what made them rich was, famously, division of labour.
But “Silent T” apparently knows nothing of this, since the reader will search in vain in Cunliffe’s many turgid writings for anything understanding what Smith might have said, or for anything in Smith suggesting division of labour would “automatically deliver the best of all possible economic worlds”—or for knowing what else might have happened in 1776.  Because Smith observes in some detail that  the division of labour, and the freedom it requires, allows new resources to be produced and discovered and put to their best, most highly-valued use, producing more wealth and infinitely more real harmony than the pressure-group warfare of Mercantilism that Smith’s opponents (and “Silent T”) invariably seem to favour.
And for those who fail to see the economic plan in the free market, rest assured there is one. It’s called the price system.

Of course many of the rogues who benefited from [‘neo-liberalism’] have never believed [Smith’s story] – they remember how they got rich…
The people who were the most enthusiastic supporters of neo-liberalism were … advisors to government.

If he had read Smith’s Wealth of Nations (described by PJ O’Rourke as the study of why some places are as rich as hell and others just suck), Cunliffe would have noted Smith’s derision in passages like these at the type of “businessman” who gets rich by government favour:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.” 
Note too that Cunliffe’s “vision,” or what there is of it, calls for more government subsidies for business, not less. Ask yourself what type of “businessman” this policy will favour.

Did you know, for example, that British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, regularly lunched with Rupert Murdoch, the far-right media boss? Tony, apparently, used to test which policies would be acceptable to Murdoch.Thus we have a far-right media boss influencing the policies of what was supposed to be the party of the people. It’s shameful.

This is blatant hyperbole, heading off into Ian Wishart territory.
But perhaps Cunliffe just prefers the media owners, media people, and media trainers that Helen used to lunch with-and with whom he would like to break bread if he ever manages the ascent of the greasy pole.

I think that’s a major reason that nearly one million voters deserted us at the last election. It wasn’t because we failed to communicate our policies. Quite the opposite. Those voters saw that our policies – with the exception of asset sales – were mostly the same as National’s.

Largely because National’s policies were copied from Labour.

The good news, if you can call it good news, is that the economic myths that drove the world into this current mess are starting to unravel…Europe’s current economic crisis was caused by bankers who loaned money on riskier and riskier ventures until the whole structure collapsed.

Um, actually Europe’s current economic mess was caused by government’s borrowing to pay (first) for their bloated and obese welfare states, and (second) to pay for the failed stimulunacy that has left them in a deeper hole and still digging.

And you know what? Despite all the promises that the European economic austerity measures would turn this tragic situation around, the opposite is occurring.

And you know what? The only governments in Europe attempting anything remotely like austerity are Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Estonia (whose government currently has the only balanced budget in the Eurozone). These are the few Europeans who are doing even relatively well
As for the UK government itself, despite the political rhetoric Cameron and Osborne have imposed the very opposite of austerity.  For the past five years their deficit has been between two to five times that of New Zealand…

Austerity economics does not work. It did not work in the Great Depression of the 1930s and it will not work in the Great Recession of the current decade.

Once again Cunliffe’s history fails him. It actually did work: in every place that it was tried. What didn’t work was the Keynesian stimulus of Roosevelt’s America: their recovery had to wait until 1946-47, when govt spending plunged after the war and ten million came home to start producing things instead of shooting at other soldiers.

When you start closing down your government services and firing your workers, those people have no money to spend. Because they have no money to spend, the local businesses suffer. So they start firing staff. And so the economy goes into deep recession, with no easy way out.

Spending doesn’t stop when you close down your government services. It just changes its form: the money that was taken to buy government waste and pay back government’s debt is left in the producers’ hands and spent instead on private production and capital formation. So instead of spending it on arseholes to play with paperclips, the money can be spent instead on new capital goods—on production instead of consumption—on industry not on bureaucracy.
This is what actually produces wealth (as Adam Smith could teach Cunliffe) and why cutting government leads not to recession, but to prosperity.

You know, these problems that we face today stem from a lack of appropriate regulation or a lack of enforcement of existing regulations. The global financial crisis was caused by unregulated banking…

This is a complete fantasy. The three areas of the US, European and local economies that are and were most heavily regulated are the production of money, the production of housing and banking. It is no accident that it was the intersection of these three industries where the crisis began. Perhaps Mr Cunliffe could read about the true causes of the crisis before he travels the country spouting his fantasies.

Leaky building syndrome was caused by deregulating the building industry…

What planet is this moron on? There has been no “deregulation” of the building industry. It has become more regulated by the decade, not less. And the causes of leaky houses was plain enough: poor building systems mandated, approved and allowed by government agencies unqualified to vet them (agencies like the BIA whose names were changed after the debacle to avoid litigation) and inspected, assessed and approved by councils unqualified and too inexperienced to know what they were looking at.

SO ANYWAY, WE’RE NEARLY two-thirds through this grand-standing “positioning paper” and still yet to see a “plan.” Perhaps this is it:

Do I favour supporting positive businesses? You’re damned right I do. Businesses help create jobs and economic growth. I want to see a future Labour government get stuck in and do more to help the economy grow.
Do I support all businesses? No way. Businesses that let workers die unnecessarily, or abuse and exploit their workers, or steal from old people: all these business need a strong, legal response from the state.
All this requires regulation…

This is all that can be found in his diatribe that even remotely approaches his promised delivery of a “simple, credible economic development plan.”

And all it amounts to is three paragraphs of tax, subsidise and regulate--a vision promised by a man whose biggest “achievement” as minister was to eviscerate the country’s biggest business and nationalise its infrastructure.

In other words, it’s a wet dream for a command economy—a plan without a plan, and vision without any vision; a plan like that of Karl Marx’s, of which Ludwig Von Mises observed it “just assumed roast pigeons would in some way simply fly into the comrades' mouths, while omitting to even consider how this miracle is to take place.”

It is a sign of Labour’s desperation that anything in that could be taken for vision.

UPDATE 1: Canterbury University’s Paul Walker, who writes at the Anti Dismal blog, responds:

Does Cunliffe know anything about economics? This speech is awful. A few quick points.

"While the hippies were out protesting in the streets [in the 1970s], a professor at the University of Chicago called Milton Friedman, was selling his students the idea that taxation was evil and that businesses worked best when they were deregulated."

Friedman wanted markets regulated, but he knew that the best form of regulation is competition

"Does this sound familiar? It should be. The Republican Party in the US, the Conservative Party in England and the Labour Party in New Zealand enthusiastically took up Friedman’s philosophy, which is now called neo-liberalism."

As Friedman (see “Capitalism and Freedom”) said himself his philosophy is call classical liberalism.
"Neo-liberalism has become such a dominant economic philosophy that it is now the only economic philosophy taught in many universities."

Do any universities teach courses in "economic philosophy"? Most economics departments will teach many things I'm sure Friedman would not like, they will argue that there are many reasons for market failure and government interventions.

"Friedman revived a belief in the “invisible hand” of the market. It was a fairy tale that Adam Smith had said a century earlier would automatically deliver the best of all possible economic worlds."

No one says that. Adam Smith never said that and no economist today says that. The best you will get is that markets are better than the alternative.

"You know, these problems that we face today stem from a lack of appropriate regulation or a lack of enforcement of existing regulations. The global financial crisis was caused by unregulated banking…"

Unregulated banking?!! One of the big problems with banking was over regulation. People believed that the government has made banking safe and no business is safe. The moral hazard problems the government caused are still with us.

Paul concludes, “If this speech is an indication of the quality of economic advice Cunliffe is getting he needs to change his advisers.

Much more here at his post  “Just what does David Cunliffe know about economics?

UPDATE 2: No, my mistake. “It’s a cracking speech,” says Russell Brown this morning.

Well, that’s me and Paul told then.

UPDATE 3: Eric Crampton: “That Cunliffe seems to think he can use Bernard Hickey as trump card over Milton Friedman suggests he has little grasp of modern economics. Or of anything else.”

UPDATE 4NZ Classical Liberal blogs:

Cunliffe outlines plan for economy; forgets plan
Drawing attention to his speech on Red Alert, he titled his post Economic Development Ideas, and in his introductory remarks promised to tell us what a Labour economic development plan should contain. Yet nowhere in his speech is there a specific policy to be found…Despite devoting at least two thousand words to the failures of neo-liberal economic policy, not once does he deign to sully his flowery prose with anything so base …
    Cunliffe’s speech may well have its merits as a means of motivating Labour’s base and laying the groundwork for a leadership challenge.  Measured against its stated goal of articulating a new economic plan for New Zealand, however, it is nought but facile verbiage, bereft of ideas, wanting of genuine thought and devoid of purpose beyond rhetorical attack on economic freedom.
    Before his next speech, perhaps Cunliffe would do well to reflect on the words Churchill once dedicated to a waffly Labour politician of his own time: “We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought.”

Quote of the Day: On political ‘donations’

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the
first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
                         - P.J. O’Rourke

“Whatever Julia says…”

No, this is not a spoof interview with John Clark.

This is a real interview: with Australian MP Bill Shorten, something called a “workplace relations minister,” showing all the intellectual independence of a castrated newt.

The subject of the interview was originally Peter Slipper. It became Bill Shorten.

And his moment in the sun has now gone around the world.

Saturday 28 April 2012

ECONOMICS FOR REAL PEOPLE: Planning without central plans

And in other news…

… Monday evening will see the second meeting for this semester of the Auckland Uni Economics Group. Here’s their note advertising the show:

ECONOMIC HARMONIES, IV: Planning Without Central Plans

It’s said that the market can’t plan; that without a central planner no planning can get done.

But as Stalin’s Great Grain Famine demonstrated, central planning couldn’t even produce grain—a simple commodity complex neither in production nor distribution.

It’s a mystery to many people how the market feeds people—feeds them, clothes them, houses them, provides them with iPads, iPhones and the collected works of One Direction—but just because they can’t see the planning themselves doesn’t mean there’s none there.

The market has a plan. It’s called the Price System.

The Price System is the means whereby hundreds of million individual decision-makers can coordinate their plans without ever having met each other.

This is the “Visible Hand” of the market that is all but invisible to those who can see only central planning, and not the products of the millions of interactions that ‘are the products of human action but not of human design’ representing the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market.

So this Monday at the Auckland Uni Economics Group we discuss the Price System and Economic Coordination—offering:

  • a horse auction,
  • answers to many questions, including
         * price signals: what exactly do they communicate?
         * who exactly sets prices?
          * on costs of production (and how so few economists understand their import)
          * if price reflects value, then why are diamonds (which merely glitter nicely) more expensive than
             water (which is the very stuff of life!)?

All this and more, including five simple principles to  help you understand how the market almost automatically coordinates the economic activity of every person on the planet, and why the result is order rather than an “anarchy of production.”

Come along and be both entertained and educated!
Riko Stevens
UoA Economics Group 

PS: Note that due to popular demand all meetings are now being held on Monday evenings instead of Thursday evenings. We hope to see you there!

PPS: Many of you have been asking if you can bring friends along, especially friends who are not students—or not economics students. Our answer: of course!  The more the merrier.

Logic!

After weeks of talk, we've decided to kick off a course on Logic tomorrow morning in Mt Eden.

The course is Leonard Peikoff's Introduction to Logic, a four ten-lecture series featuring sessions on Basic Logical Theory, Informal Fallacies, Deductive Reasoning and Inductive Generalisation, Definitions and The Aristotelian Syllogism.

Yes, it's late notice. Sorry. But there it is.
[If anyone’s especially ken we can quite happily repeat the sessions at a more convenient later date.]

Sessions starting tomorrow will be at my office in Mt Eden, Level 1, 236 Dominion Rd: just down the road from Eden Park. If you're keen to join us at 10:30am tomorrow, or on subsequent Sundays, either call or text Riko Stevens, 0277 487021. ]

What: Introduction to Logic lecture course (four audio lectures in total)
Where: Organon Architecture offices, Level 1, 236 Dominion Rd (just down the road from Eden Park)
When: Tomorrow, Sunday, 10:30am

See you there!
PC

PS: I’ve corrected the course content now. Sorry If I’ve created any confusion.

Thursday 26 April 2012

ANZAC Day AFL in Wellington, 2013

image
A sight for Wellington eyes: St Kilda’s Nick Riewoldt marking over Gold Coast Suns’s Karmichael Hunt (which he’d do all night if Karmichael keeps jumping like that)

It was reported first by Rod Shaw on the World Footy News blog, and now all but confirmed today that as of next year the St Kilda and Brisbane Lions AFL teams will play an Anzac Day AFL premiership game at the Wellington Cake Tin—as a complement to the regular Essendon-Collingwood Anzac Day thriller at the MCG—with plans still afoot for St Kilda to play up to four “home” games at the Wellington stadium every year for the indefinite future.

Apparently Councillor John “Mystery” Morrison was part of a delegation of Wellington councillors taking the trip to the MCG this year to join 86,900 fans cheering on the game that has become an Anzac Day tradition in Melbourne, won this year in a breath-taking finish by Collingwood. Unavailable for comment after the game (rumours that the hospitality proved too much are hereby confirmed as being totally unfounded), before leaving for Melbourne, Morrison and businessman John Dow – a key figure behind Wellington hosting three pre-season AFL games between 1998 and 2001 – told the Dom Post:

It's still got a fair way to travel but we've had positive talks about St Kilda being associated with Wellington and looking to play up to two, maybe even three, major club games against opposition like Collingwood, Essendon or whoever.
    So the two factors make it pretty interesting, that we've got a club who wishes to be in partnership with us and we've got the governing body. We're talking about this partnership arrangement kicking off next year with an Anzac Day game here. I think that's a particularly good marketing ploy.

This is magnificent news for New Zealanders keen to follow the world’s most libertarian sport, fantastic news for those working on the game at grassroots level here, great for Wellington (the Hawthorn club’s similar involvement with Tasmania has proved highly beneficial for both), great for fans like myself who will be making the pilgrimage from all over,* and furthermore it’s just what the stadium was built for. (Yes folks, the AFL played a part back at the design stage in making it the oval it is.) And as NZ-born Brisbane Lions’s chief executive Malcolm Holmes points out, for teams like theirs the travel time is comparable to that of visiting Tasmania or Perth. So no travel problems either for the teams. Everybody wins!

Can’t wait!

imageThis year just the MCG on Anzac Day, next year Wellington as well!

* Which, to be fair, may not be entirely beneficial for Wellington. Although I’d expect the Malthouse at least to prosper.

How to look after high-tech guests without the hassle

image

Looking after guests staying over these days is more complicated than just leaving out some linen and pointing them to the end of the hall where the bathroom lives.

Joelle Alcaidinho and commenters at the Apartment Therapy blog suggest a few tips to help the stay of your high-tech visitor be a happier one, including:

  • leave them a USB docking/charging/whatever-the-hell-it-is station for their exclusive use
  • leave your WiFi password on the fridge so they can easily connect—and you can find it yourself when you forget it for the fourteenth time
  • leave them a large plug box with multiple overseas adapters
  • if you have one of those fancy schmancy digital locks, set the guest up with their own code on the front door so they don’t need to be given a key to lose
  • keep an extra local SIM card so overseas friends don’t have to waste time looking for one themselves
  • and if you’re really keen, “programme a ‘Goodnight’ button in the living room that will arm/lock/turn off all the lights if they stay up later than you do.”

Any other essentials to help look after high-tech guests without the hassle?

UK Recession: “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” [updated]

Overnight we heard news the UK is “back” in recession—back in recession because it recorded an “official” decrease in GDP for the quarter of 0.2% after a contraction the previous quarter of 0.3%.

What I find astonishing is anyone thought the anaemic, malinvested, over-taxed, over-regulated, flatlining place was ever out of recession. You know, seriously out of recession. Did anyone believe it apart from Keynesian money manipulators and the few people who still take government GDP numbers seriously?

The measurement of so-called Gross Domestic Product doesn’t measure production at all, it measures spending. And it doesn’t even measure all the spending in an economy—it pretty much just measures consumption spending.  Which leaves largely unmeasured (except by the tax men) all the spending on production that actually keeps an economy going.

So the measurement of Gross Domestic Product is more accurately a measure of Net Domestic Consumption. Something with which governments can too easily fiddle, either by boosting their own spending or encouraging their central banks to “ease” quantitatively.

That the UK’s figures for this fiction are still flatlining despite all their fiddling is a measure of just how anaemic, not to say non-existent, the UK’s recovery really is.

But despite five years of increasingly desperate fiscal and monetary irresponsibility, some folk are still saying the real problem is the UK government hasn’t been fiddling enough.  Their QE programme should have been even more profligate, say numbnuts about the programme that has left the UK another year poorer and deeper in debt. “Their austerity measure didn't work,” bleats the likes of Scott Yorke and sundry other commentators like Bryan Gould et al whose knowledge of economics could almost fill the head of a pin.

Well, as Murray Rothbard, used to say (in so many words) , it’s no crime not to know anything about economics, but it’s pig-ignorant to comment as if you do.

Austerity? The only governments in Europe attempting anything remotely like austerity are Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Estonia (whose government currently has the only balanced budget in the Eurozone). These are the few Europeans who are doing even relatively well

As for the UK government itself, despite the political rhetoric Cameron and Osborne have imposed the very opposite of austerity.  For the past five years their deficit has been between two to five times that of New Zealand. And…

…despite some very modest spending cuts [records Sean Rosenthal at the Mises Daily], it is now taxing more and spending more than it ever did. Although British spending as a percent of GDP fell mildly from 51.1 percent in 2009 to 49.8 percent in 2011, this level still signifies a massive increase in spending from 2007 levels of 43.9 percent of GDP. Similarly, although the British deficit as a percent of GDP fell from 11 percent in 2009 to 9.4 percent in 2011, this deficit still amounts to a huge surge compared to the 2007 level of only 2.8 percent and, with the exception of this recession, exceeds all other deficits in Britain since World War II.

The British government is spending more than it ever has. It is taxing more than it ever has. And its deficit is more than it ever has been—except for the depths of the war that virtually bankrupted it.

And it hasn’t worked. And why would it? As Tory MP Daniel Hannan vainly tried to tell then-PM Gordon Brown back in ‘09, “you cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.”

So as the Chinese philosopher LaoTse sagely observed, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

It’s time, in other words, for current PM Cameron and his Treasurer George Osborne to try something else.

They could do worse than try the same approach that saw the British economy regain its previous peaks just four years into the Great Depression of the 1930s (even while the deficit-spending US was about to go into another trough).

But that would be precisely the opposite of the profligate approach both Labour and the Tories have taken in the five years (and counting) of this Depression.

UPDATE: And in related local news:

There has been a billion dollar deterioration in the NZ government's forecast financial position in just two months, with a 2014/15 surplus of NZ$370 million picked in February now projected to be a NZ$640 million deficit…
   
Despite the new forecasts however, English said the government was still committed to reaching an operating surplus before investment gains and losses in the 2014/15 year…

Yeah right.

And he proposes to do that not by cutting his spending but by increasing it.

So if you believe in that 2014/14 operating surplus, I have a building full of printing presses to sell you.

Do high taxes & prosperity go hand in hand?

Tuesday 24 April 2012

ANZAC EVE: Reflections on war

Anzac Eve is the perfect time to reflect on the reality of war. And I do. Every year.  Here’s how I began last year’s written reflection:

War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.
      - Sir Henry Maine (1822-88)

Charles Sargeant Jagger's Royal Artillery Monument at Hyde Park Corner, London

“It is well that war is so terrible,” said General Robert E. Lee after the slaughter at Fredericksburg, “otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”

But fond of it humans have been for most of our history. For thousands of years war has been an intrinsic part of the social and political order. For most of human history, armed  conflict has been the accepted method by which ambitions are achieved. It took more than mere wishes to change that tragic history. It was not simple pacifism that did it. It was only the realisation (developed over many centuries) that the interests of human beings are essentially harmonious that eventually allowed the “invention of peace”—however sporadic has been its application.

Wars are not natural events or accidents, like earthquakes, landslides or hurricanes. No, like economic depressions, totalitarian dictatorships and murder by concentration camp, wars are neither acts of nature nor 'Acts of God': Wars are acts of man -- of men who seek to achieve their values by violence, resisted by those who rise to defend their own lives, their values, and their sacred honour.

Wars are the result of aggression by those who see value only in force, and who see other human beings as chattel…

Click here to read more…>>

Austrian-born economist Ludwig Von Mises saw more than his share of war and its results. The invention of peace, he wrote in 1949, can only come about with the rejection of the roots of war. Which is to say, to reject the spirit of conquest and the notion that values can be attained through aggressive government action; which is to say, to reject statolatry—which is to say, to reject the warrior code and embrace the code of the trader…

Total War:
The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging commodities and services, fight one another…
War and the Market Economy:
Of course, in the long run war and the preservation of the market economy are incompatible. Capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations. But this does not mean that a nation which is forced to repel foreign aggressors must substitute government control for private enterprise. If it were to do this, it would deprive itself of the most efficient means of defense. There is no record of a socialist nation which defeated a capitalist nation. In spite of their much glorified war socialism, the Germans were defeated in both World Wars.
    What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really means is that war and high civilization are incompatible. If the efficiency of capitalism is directed by governments toward the output of instruments of destruction, the ingenuity of private business turn out weapons which are powerful enough to destroy everything. What makes war and capitalism incompatible with one another is precisely the unparalleled efficiency of the capitalist mode of production.
     The market economy, subject to the sovereignty of the individual consumers, turns out products which make the individual's life more agreeable. It caters to the individual's demand for more comfort. It is this that made capitalism despicable in the eyes of the apostles of violence. They worshiped the "hero," the destroyer and killer, and despised the bourgeois and his "peddler mentality" (Sombart). Now mankind is reaping the fruits which ripened from the seeds sown by these men…
The Futility of War:
What distinguishes man from animals is the insight into the advantages that can be derived from cooperation under the division of labor. Man curbs his innate instinct of aggression in order to cooperate with other human beings. The more he wants to improve his material well-being, the more he must expand the system of the division of labor. Concomitantly he must more and more restrict the sphere in which he resorts to military action. The emergence of the international division of labor requires the total abolition of war. Such is the essence of the laissez-faire philosophy...
    This philosophy is, of course, incompatible with statolatry. In its context the state, the social apparatus of violent oppression, is entrusted with the protection of the smooth operation of the market economy against the onslaughts of antisocial individuals and gangs. Its function is indispensable and beneficial, but it is an ancillary function only. There is no reason to idolize the police power and ascribe to it omnipotence and omniscience. There are things which it can certainly not accomplish. It cannot conjure away the scarcity of the factors of production, it cannot make people more prosperous, it cannot raise the productivity of labor. All it can achieve is to prevent gangsters from frustrating the efforts of those people who are intent upon promoting material well-being.
    The liberal philosophy of Bentham and Bastiat had not yet completed its work of removing trade barriers and government meddling with business when the counterfeit theology of the divine state began to take effect. Endeavors to improve the conditions of wage earners and small farmers by government decree made it necessary to loosen more and more the ties which connected each country's domestic economy with those of other countries. Economic nationalism, the necessary complement of domestic interventionism, hurts the interests of foreign peoples and thus creates international conflict. It suggests the idea of amending this unsatisfactory state of affairs by war. Why should a powerful nation tolerate the challenge of a less powerful nation? ….
    Such was the ideology of the German, Italian, and Japanese warmongers. It must be admitted that they were consistent from the point of view of the new  teachings. Interventionism generates economic nationalism, and economic nationalism generates bellicosity. If men and commodities are prevented from crossing the borderlines, why should not the armies try to pave the way for them?
    From the day when Italy, in 1911, fell upon Turkey, fighting was continual. There was almost always shooting somewhere in the world. The peace treaties concluded were virtually merely armistice agreements. Moreover they had to do only with armies of the great powers. Some of the smaller nations were always at war. In addition there were no less pernicious civil wars and revolutions.
    How far we are today from the rules of international law developed in the age of limited warfare! Modern war is merciless, it does not spare pregnant women or infants; it is indiscriminate killing and destroying. It does not respect the rights of neutrals. Millions are killed, enslaved, or expelled from the dwelling places in which their ancestors lived for centuries. Nobody can foretell what will happen in the next chapter of this endless struggle.
    This has little to do with the atomic bomb. The root of the evil is not the construction of a new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest….
    Modern civilization is a product of the philosophy of laissez faire. It cannot be preserved under the ideology of government omnipotence. Statolatry owes much to the doctrines of Hegel. However, one may pass over many of hegel's inexcusable faults, for Hegel also coined the phrase "the futility of victory" (die Ohnmacht des Sieges).
    To defeat the aggressors is not enough just to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.

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Guards of the Dead by Austrian sculptor Franz Metzner, in the Crypt of the Monument to the Battle of the Nations created to commemorate the battle that was the beginning of the end for Napoleon’s dictatorship, after whose fall Europe enjoyed nearly a century of (almost) laissez faire and its longest interlude of peace ever … before the rising tide of statolatry and aggressive nationalism combined to create another bloodbath.
Ironically, the monument itself was built to commemorate the victory of the people over an oppressive ruler —but in commemorating the victory of ‘Der Volk”  it became for some a commemoration of the maturation of the Germans as an organised ethnic group, and hence was to become the locus of the same aggressive nationalism “the people” had opposed, but this time in German garb.
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Man who invents Gaia backtracks on warmism: I was too ‘alarmist,’ says Lovelock.

It was in the 1960s that chemist James Lovelock first offered up the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, i.e., the notion suggesting “all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.” A notion that in hippier hands became the speculation that “Mother Earth” isn’t just a metaphor but a reality, and she is out for revenge.

Despite his impeccable scientific credentials, Lovelock went on to embrace any amount of silliness himself. In his 2006 book, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back, he turned full-on catastrophist, arguing  our “lack of respect” for Gaia is already testing her capacity to minimise the effects of our addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, making it inevitable that most of the earth will rapidly become uninhabitable.  (In his most recent book, "The Vanishing Face of Gaia", he reckoned human civilisation will be hard pressed to survive at all.)

In that same year he told The Independent newspaper “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”  In 2008 he told The Guardian “By 2040, parts of the Sahara desert will have moved into middle Europe.”  And in 2010 interview he told The Guardian that democracy would have to be "put on hold" to prevent the coming calamity:

Even the best democracies agree [sic] that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

In short, Lovelock was your regulation big-government, deep-ecology, celebrity climate alarmist talking up catastrophe and hanging out with the Al Gores, James Hansens and Tim Flannerys of the celebrity warmist world .

But that was then.

Now he’s saying something more inconvenient for them.

In a telephone interview with msnbc.com says he now thinks he and the other “alarmists” (his word) had been “extrapolating too far.":

The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened. The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now. The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time... it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added...

Asked if he was now “a climate skeptic,” Lovelock said:

“It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I'm not a denier.” He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role. “It (the sea) could make all the difference between a hot age and an ice age,” he said…
As “an independent and a loner,” he said he did not mind saying “All right, I made a mistake.” He claimed a university or government scientist might fear an admission of a mistake would lead to the loss of funding.”

James Lovelock has had an epiphany.

Time for those administering our Emissions Trading Scam and doing out the funds to fellow warmists to do the same.

[Hat tip Climate Depot and Leighton Smith]

James Cameron: Hypocrite

It’s nice to know the calibre of some of the folk moving here, isn’t it. While the Prime Minister flatly tells people showing incredible gumption to piss off, we get this flatulent hypocrite flying here to tell us that we should live with less, while he…

PS:  Proposition 23, to which the aging hippy is donationally opposed, would suspend California's Global Warming legislation requiring energy companies to do the impossible by reducing their carbon output to 1990 levels.

And it’s true for New Zealand as well…

[Hat tip Catallaxy Files, where you can go to read the magnificent words by Ryan Houck]

Monday 23 April 2012

It’s not the helicopters you have to worry about

Listen up all you folk opposed to “The 1%.” And all you others opposed to rent-seeking and privilege.You need to know who it us you really oppose.

Mark Spitznagel, founder of “black swan” hedge fund Universa (where Nassim Taleb among others shares a desk), points out your enemy: it’s the central banks, and the means by which the expand the money supply—as they’ve been doing relentlessly in recent years.

[Central banks don’t]t expand the money supply by dropping cash from helicopters. It does so through capital transfers to the largest banks.
    A major issue this year … is the growing disparity between rich and poor, the 1% versus the 99%..
    The source is not runaway entrepreneurial capitalism, which rewards those who best serve the consumer in product and price (Would we really want it any other way?) There is another force that has turned a natural divide into a chasm: [central banks like] the Federal Reserve. The relentless expansion of credit by “The Fed” creates artificial disparities based on political privilege and economic power.
    David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher*, pointed out that when money is inserted into the economy (from a government printing press or, as in Hume's time, the importation of gold and silver), it is not distributed evenly but "confined to the coffers of a few persons, who immediately seek to employ it to advantage"…
    The Fed doesn't expand the money supply by uniformly dropping cash from helicopters over the hapless masses. Rather, it directs capital transfers to the largest banks (whether by overpaying them for their financial assets or by lending to them on the cheap), minimizes their borrowing costs, and lowers their reserve requirements. All of these actions result in immediate handouts to the financial elite first, with the hope that they will subsequently unleash this fresh capital onto the unsuspecting markets, raising demand and prices wherever they do.
    The Fed, having gone on an unprecedented credit expansion spree, has benefited the recipients who were first in line at the trough…

Do we really want it that way?

[Hat tip Daniel Gross]

* Yes, that David Hume. Poor philosopher, sound economist.

Smile & Wave at the Passionless People

After the weekend’s polls, poor old Scott Yorke is wondering what his Labour Party has to do to get a break.

Asset sales, the Crafar Farms issue, the Sky City pokies deal: every time there's a poll on these issues (however unscientific), the results are damning.
So if people hate these policies, why do the polls say it's business as usual for National?

Scott offers five suggestions to explain this apparent conundrum. Let me offer one more.

The clue to this one was supplied by thinking about the release of Gordon McLauchlan’s Passionless People sequelIf McLauchlan is right, then NZers would generally rather sit down to a nice tea than take an abstract idea seriously—even one to which they are supposedly violently opposed.

"New Zealanders don't give a stuff about anything too much,'” he says with just a bit too much relish.

New Zealand has become "a broken country, and no-one wants to fix it.” And New Zealanders have lapsed "into a lack of passion bordering on inertness.” If a New Zealander feels a bout of passion coming on, "he goes and paints a roof.”

So a smile and a wave and a relaxed backroom deal or two is apparently the right approach for folk like this.  You don’t want to overbalance on the roof.

Mind you, there is another answer that Scott doesn’t really canvas either. It is that , bad as this lot are, we are so scarred by nine years of Helen Clark that anything that comes in her colours is going to take years to trust again. (Which is why so many of even Smile and Wave’s detractors are now supporting the Greens’s Ginger Whinger instead of Labour’s Mr Invisible.)

You could object that Smile and Wave has failed to overturn anything that was introduced by Helen Clark—even things to which he was previously “passionately” opposed—so is no different to her in substance. But that would be to take ideas seriously.

PS: There is actually one other possibility to consider.

“There's no question that the Key government has been taking a hammering in the media,’ says Scott.  But I wonder if NZers truly take their piss-poor media seriously any more?

Sunday 22 April 2012

ECONOMICS FOR REAL PEOPLE: Monday, Monday, Monday!

Here’s the note on this week’s discussion at the Auckland Uni Econ Group (which, by the way, has now switched to Monday evenings for the rest of the year):

Hello All,

First off: We have changed our meetings to Mondays at 6pm, due to there being a lot of other events on Thursdays.
This week we continue looking at the Economic Harmonies with Part III of our series, asking: What Really Makes the World Harmonious?

  • Remember how economics teaches us The General Gain From the Existence of Others?
  • Remember how the Division of Labour makes us all more productive?
  • Remember how Comparative Advantage and the Pyramid of Ability show us we all have a place in production … how trade raises the value of everything … do you remember the lesson of The Double Thank You Moment?
  • Remember the Miracle of Breakfast--and how Paris  (and New York) Gets Fed?

These were all the lessons of the Economic Harmonies—the greatest lesson that philosophers could learn from economics (and economists should learn from their own science).

Well, this week we look at the foundations on which the very existence of all of the these miracles rest—the six institutions that underpin all the Gains From the Existence of Others, without which human economic life would be characterised less by harmony and more by plunder!

Come along this Monday to continue your exploration of economics, and hear about these very special six things.

    Date: Monday, 23rd April
    Time: 6pm
    Where: Seminar Room 219, Level 2, Auckland University Business School Building (Owen G. Glenn
                       Building)

We look forward to seeing you there,

Riko Stevens
The UoA Economics Group

Friday 20 April 2012

FRIDAY MORNING RAMBLE: The “crony” edition

The tarnish is finally and deservedly wearing off Smile and Wave with the realisation that there’s nothing at all behind the smile, and that he doesn’t stand for business in general—only for particular businesses to whom he’s eager to grant favours. It’s called “cronyism,” and it’s as phony as he is.

Paul Hsieh’s latest OpEd discusses why there’s so much “money in politics” everywhere, and why a free market in economics is the only proper solution.
The Best Congress Money Can Buy? – Paul Hsieh, R E A L   C L E A R   M A R K E T S

Strike, strike, strike. If only Dickens had written about a Tiny Tim whose father remained unemployed due to labour-union barriers.
Unions and the Other Tiny Tim – Christopher Westley,  T H E   O T H E R   T I N Y   T I M

From the FFS file: a National Party blogger boasting about National Party spending! “So total government expenditure increased 21% under National, from Labour’s last term. If you compare to the last term of National’s 4th Government it is a whopping 131% higher. It is also 92% higher than Labour’s first term.”
This is a responsible Governments? Yeah right.
Government Expenditure – K I W I B L O G

Nice to see some balls from a local CEO for a change: TelstraClear boss Allan Freeth says Government broadband is "network socialism" dampening investment. And announces a plan to gazump the govt’s lack-lustre efforts.
Crown fibre nothing - TelstraClear launches 100Mbit/s cable service -  N B R

And now, some good news. Poverty in New Zealand is decreasing. “It decreased over the 2000s but has yet to fall to mid-eighties levels. But what is actually growing right now? The number of people clamouring about, and the level of noise being made about poverty and inequality.”
Something is growing but I'm not sure it's poverty or inequality – L I N D S A Y   M I T C H E L L

Left-winger John Moore decries the steady shift of NZ’s left-wingers from supporting internationalism to today’s knee-jerk xenophobia.
 Leftwing Xenophobia in New Zealand – John Moore,  L I B E R A T I O N

Since many people support the Greens because they see them as a liberal minded and pro-individual choice party, and for most people Russel Norman’s Greens are the real opposition, I thought I’d do another simple illustrative check up on how freedom-loving the cuddly munchkins are these days. 
When I last did this exercise back in 2005, the word ban appeared on the Greens’s website only 165 times.
And now? The word “ban” now appears a whopping 2,870 times. Only one of which is an announcement opposing a ban.
Search for “ban” on Greens’s’ website – G R E E N S
Greens - reading the bans – N O T   P C ,  2 0 0 5

Was the Titanic tragedy an early failure of the regulatory state?
The Real Reason for the Tragedy of the Titanic – W A L L S T R E E T J O U R N A L

Former Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla has admitted for the first time his regime stole babies, kidnapped thousands of opponents and murdered them.
Argentina's Videla admits killings - H I S T O R Y  N E W S  N E T W O R K

That was then. Now they just rape investors.  "Argentina can kiss goodbye being treated seriously again by investors for another generation."
Argentina’s grab of oil firm: bad idea, worse timing – M I A M I   H E R A L D

We’ve said it before: the only ones to win from democracy in Egypt will be the Muslim Brotherhood, i.e., the creators of Al Qaeda. And what does the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate for president of Egypt believe? What kind of Egypt would he seek to create? “The mission is clear: restoring Islam in its all-encompassing conception; Subjugating people to God; instituting the religion of God; the Islamization of life…” In other words, an Islamic dictatorship.
What Does the Muslim Brotherhood Intend? – C O U N C I L  F O R   F O R E I G N   R E L A T I O N S

So, what is what is a proper immigration policy?
The Unethical Nature of Current Immigration Laws: Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights contra Current Immigration Rhetoric – Andrew Ryan,  M O T H E R  O F   E X I L E S

Santiago Valenzuela busts the common immigration myth that regulations prevent the exploitation of migrant workers.
Immigration Myth: Immigration Regulations Prevent the Exploitation of Workers
- Santiago Valenzuela, M O T H E R O F E X I L E S

“It is now official: drilling for shale gas by fracturing rock with water may rattle the odd teacup, but is highly unlikely to cause damaging earthquakes.”
Time to start frackingMatt Ridley,  T H E   R A T I O N A L  O P T I M I S T

In the last decade, something astonishing has happened that has escaped the attention of nearly everyone. America is no longer number one.  “Chris Mayer, author of the absolutely essential and eye-opening book World Right Side Up, believes this slide is going to continue for the rest of our lifetimes and beyond. The implications of his thesis are profound for investors. It actually affects the lives of everyone in the digital age.”
It’s a New World, and America Is Not Leading It – Jeffrey Tucker,  L A I S S E Z – F A I R E    B O O K S

In Arizona, pregnancy can now legally exist two weeks before conception.
Arizona Passes Abortion Law That Says Pregnancy Begins Before A Child Has Been Conceived 
– H U F F I N G T O N   P O S T  ( U K )

Twitter’s posting of their so-called “Innovators Patent Agreement” is a very poor IPA indeed—it’s the sign that instead of patent protection we’re heading for a world of trade secrets—which does not promote innovation but stifle it.
Twitter’s IPA”: The Rise of Trade Secrets and the End of Innovation – S T A T E  O F   I N N O V A T I O N

The dangers of nannying: When the state lumps trivial crimes with barbaric ones, it undermines our moral priorities says Walter Williams.

The European Union is becoming ever more dangerous. While it is still unclear where future developments will lead the European Monetary Union, the costs and risks of remaining within the system are already immense and rising. The EMU provokes conflicts between otherwise peacefully cooperating nations. Redistribution is always a potential cause of social stress.
The Eurozone: A Moral-Hazard Morass – M I S E S   D A I L Y

“Every politician, central bank, and regulator in the developed world spent 2008 and 2009 saying, ‘This must never happen again.’ ‘This’ was the financial meltdown that almost took down the world economy.” Yet after engineering that first one, they’ve spent the intervening period making another one all-but certain.
Financial Crisis II: European Governments fail to learn from history – Johan Norberg, R E A S O N

Funny. I used to enjoy annoying Scotsmen by telling them that an Independent Scotland would be broke in a week—that Scotland is a nett bludger on the rest of Britain. Now, the Economist has this cover with the same message:

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“Week after week, [White House economic adviser Christina] Romer would march in with an estimate of the jobs all the investments in clean energy would produce; week after week, Obama would send her back to check the numbers. ‘I don’t get it,’ he’d say. ‘We make these large-scale investments in infrastructure. What do you mean, there are no jobs?’ But the numbers rarely budged.”
The entire Obama presidency in one anecdote – T H E   A M E R I C A N

Oh yes, and there was also last month’s Executive Order signed with little fanfare by Obama giving him the power, in certain circumstances, to assume control over the energy industry—along with the rest of the economy.
Perhaps he learned the trick from Gerry Brownlee?
Obama’s Quiet Executive Order: Reaffirming and Expanding Federal Powers 
– M A S T E R   R E S O U R C E

And for a supposed constitutional law expert, turns out he knows nothing at all about constitutional law.
Unprecedented Presidential Posturing – Peter Schiff, T O W N   H A L L

Meanwhile, in the UK, there are still voices in the mainstream who do understand freedom.
UK is wrong to have turned its back on individual freedom – Allister Heath,  C I T Y   A . M .

The debate about climate change and its impact on polar bears has intensified with the release of a survey that shows the bear population in a key part of northern Canada is far larger than many scientists thought, and might be growing.
Healthy polar bear count confounds doomsayers – G L O B E  &   M A I L

Why are so many people still attracted to Marxism despite the history of totalitarianism and genocide? Bradley Thomson explains the appeal.

The US Federal Reserve is pursuing an unprecedented interventionist policy with our money.  At the same time, it is struggling with the idea of transparency.
A republic, if you can keep it – Russ Roberts, C A F E H A Y E K

So how to get recovery going when that recovery has been bogged down by Keynesian mismanagement? “The Keynesians, sad to say, show no understanding of how the economy works. They think they can lever employment up or down by pushing buttons – as if the economy were hydraulic. They show no grasp of the concepts that would be necessary to restore us to prosperity and flourishing. In an old image that applies well to the posturing of today’s self-styled Keynesians, ‘the Emperor has no clothes’.”
Phelps on Keynes vs. Hayek – Russ Roberts, C A F E    H A Y E K

The tragic mistake of economics explained:

Implicitly, uncritically, and by default, political economy accepted as its axioms the fundamental tenets of collectivism.
Political economists—including the advocates of capitalism—defined their science as the study of the management or direction or organization or manipulation of a “community’s” or a nation’s “resources.” The nature of these “resources” was not defined; their communal ownership was taken for granted—and the goal of political economy was assumed to be the study of how to utilize these “resources” for “the common good.” . . .
Political economy was, in effect, a science starting in midstream: it observed that men were producing and trading, it took for granted that they had always done so and always would—it accepted this fact as the given, requiring no further consideration—and it addressed itself to the problem of how to devise the best way for the “community” to dispose of human effort.
            From “What Is Capitalism?” in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal:

Edgar the Exploiter? To get the full picture of the virtues of the free market, we must bring the consumer into the picture.
Edgar the Entrepreneur – Daniel James Sanchez, M I S E S   D A I L Y

So, does the government-imposed minimum wage really help the poor? Yaron Brook answers. [If you would like to ask Yaron a question, you can submit it here.]

Here’s a quick pro-tip from Diana Hsieh on how not to argue against environmentalists: “Don’t attempt to dismiss concerns of environmentalists by claiming that the earth has been around for 6000 years, and that’s a long time, so surely this mine won’t cause any problems.” (She kids you not.)
How Not To Argue Against Environmentalists – N O O D L E   F O O D

Someone has blundered! Melbourne Theatre Company puts on a play featuring a female skeptic climate scientist.  Can you believe it?
Abbott again, or was it the IPA? Skeptic stars in Melbourne play – C A T A L L A X Y   F I L E S

“Ayn Rand once observed that ideas are the ultimate driving force of history, and the most consistent side in an ideological war will eventually win. If this is true, then it pays to study the ideas of any movement that arises in a country.
Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution, by Tea Party Patriots co-founders Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin, is both a general framework of the Tea Party’s philosophical ideas and a broad long-term agenda for the Tea Party over the next 40 years. Running 210 pages, this indexed book is described in the inside cover as ‘the first comprehensive, forward-looking document outlining a plan to restore America to its prior greatness’.”
Book Review: Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution – F O R B E S

Look at these neat little units by American outfit Sett Studio, and so easily constructed. Wouldn’t it be great if this sort of technology was allowed around Christchurch to help fix the exploding housing problem? 

Investing for retirement isn’t all about money. Here are “six essential retirement investments that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with well-being.”
6 Top Retirement Investments Not About Money – Y A H O O   F I N A N C E

Screaming silently. 
Middleton sisters 'avatars of aspiration' in annual list – G U A R D I A N

When might it be moral—and practical!—to break the law. Watch the video!
Video: The Morality of Breaking the Law – Diana Hsieh.  N O O D L E   F O O D

“Living is what you’re doing when you’re too enthralled to notice. Dying is what you’re doing when all you can  do is notice.”
Psalm – Greg Swann,  S E L F   A D O R A T I O N

Just thank goodness you weren’t sitting next to her in the plane!  “I planned to take advantage of a long-haul flight from San Francisco to Auckland, guessing that there were likely to be long periods of time when no one was using the lavatory on the 14-hour flight. I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style.”
Amazing airplane lavatory self-portraits in the Flemish Style by artist Nina Katchadourian 
– 2  M O D E R N   B L O G

The Auckland Philharmonia really nailed this at the Town Hall last night. If you weren’t there, you missed out.

I love the “small bands” swing-band leaders like Benny Goodman set up to play more improvisational fare.  And I’ve been fascinated to discover that Artie Shaw had such a band, the Gramercy Five—and it included a harpsichord!
Hip to the Harpsichord: Artie Shaw's 1940 'Summit Ridge Drive' is seductive swing 
W A L L   S T R E E T   J O U R N A L

And since Rigoletto will be playing in Auckland very soon, here’s the famous quartet from the final scene inside and outside the murder house (and I don’t mean they’re going to the dentist’s!). And you don’t get much more famous in the opera world than Joan and Big Lucy.

Thanks for reading.
Have a great weekend!
PC

[Thanks and hat tips to Laissez Faire, Amanda Morrall, Dawn Walter, Neil Gaiman, Paul Hsieh, Ann McElhinney, Cathy, Matt Ridley, Allister Heath, Chris Keall, Martin Kramer, Liberty Scott, We Stand FIRM)

Thursday 19 April 2012

EVENT: "The real goal of the green climate crusade"

Here’s a  live-stream internet event for tomorrow to put into your electronic diary. 

Environmentalists claim that our use of carbon-based energy is altering the climate, making us more vulnerable to climate disasters. Human survival, they insist, requires the immediate abandonment of fossil fuels in favour of carbon-free sources. So why do environmentalist groups vehemently oppose projects involving every alternative form of energy ever proposed to replace fossil fuels--including wind farms and solar power plants? And why do they ignore the dramatic degree to which industrial development under capitalism has reduced the risk of harm from severe climate events? Before we rush headlong into drastic climate policies and energy rationing, a critical examination of these policies is urgently needed.
Dr. Lockitch will address these important issues and answer audience questions.

This event will be livestreamed free at www.livestream.com/arsg

Who:  Dr. Keith Lockitch, fellow and instructor at the Ayn Rand Institute. Dr. Keith Lockitch has a PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. His writings have appeared in publications such as the Washington Times, Orange County Register and the San Francisco Chronicle.

What: A lecture examining what is really behind global warming alarmism
Where: Smith Hall 231, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (and livestreamed worldwide)
When: Friday, April 20, 2012
Time:  12:30 p.m. NZ time

As with yesterdays livestream event, if you’re anywhere near Mt Eden and would like to join us here to watch this on a big screen and have a quick chat about it afterwards, feel free to climb up the stairs at the Organon Architecture offices on the corner of Valley Rd and Dominion Rd, i.e., Level 1, 236 Dominion Rd, Mt Eden—opposite The Dominion.