Not PC

Friday Morning Ramble: The ‘Waitangi/Rand’s Day’ edition

2012-02-03T11:10:00.001+13:00

Yesterday was Rand’s Day: Ayn Rand’s birthday. Not everyone wants to celebrate that, but I do.
Not every country has a reason to celebrate its birth. We are one of those happy few, yet we don’t.
So how about more Rand and less Waitangi today. Deal?

This Waitangi Day ‘celebration’ is likely to be as fractious as every other Groundhog Day celebration of the nation’s birth has been since Geoffrey Palmer stuck his oar into race relations, and the Marxists figured they could use the Treaty as a wedge issue.
Rather than repeat myself as I do every year, let me instead just link here to what I said last year, and would have said again on Monday if you’d let me.
Why not print it out and read it out loud to your breakfast companions on Monday.
Why not celebrate One-Law-For-All Day instead? - N O T P C
Big news yesterday was Facebook’s launch as a public company. But why would you invest in them when their revenue model is so, well, lame.
Is a 0.014% ad CTR Facebook's weakest link? – Z E R O H E D G E
The unbearable vagueness of Mark Zuckerberg – F I N A N C I A L T I M E S
Ten Reasons not to invest in Facebook – F O R B E S

“A new report says that Facebook has created over 450,000 jobs. Unfortunately
photos posted on Facebook have ended 550,000 jobs.”
- Fallon

This is the guy who says we have to live with less?
Cameron buying 2,600 acres of land in NewZealand – A P
Ministerial briefings to new ministers are being censored. This incenses the political opposition. These briefings, says Eddie at The Standard, “give the public (via the media) an insight into on coming challenges in portfolios, elaborate on how election promises will be converted into real policies, and—most importantly—reveal things the government is planning. So, it's disturbing that the Nats are censoring them,” says Eddie.
“Arrogant and unresponsive,” says Labour’s Clare Curran.
“Cult of secrecy”! says Idiot/Savant. “We should not tolerate it.”!
So down with censorship; and all power to transparency!
On the other hand, information about school performance (or lack thereof) must be kept from prying eyes, says Trevor Mallard, who wants to make school level assessment information more secretive than security information held by the SIS.
So down with transparency; and all power to censorship!
Don’t bother to examine such a blatant contradiction. Ask yourself only what it achieves.
For your eyes only – Eddie, T H E   S T A N D A R D
Is Amy Adams’ work programme a state secret? – Clare Curran, R E D   A L E R T
No right to know – Idiot/Savant, N O   R I G H T   T U R N
The hypocrisy of Robin Duff - W H A L E   O I L
More on Education and OIA- K I W I B L O G
Eric Crampton finds much to celebrate in Treasury’s briefing paper.
Treasury! O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R

Good advice from Imperator Fish:
“With all these folk swearing off the booze for February, it is important
that the balance of the universe be maintained. Time to up my game.”

It’s a slam dunk. New Labour MP Raymond Huo takes aim at the Chicago School of Economics: it’s all their fault, he says, “that particular school of thought … is one of the main reasons the western world is in the doldrums.” From the financial crisis, to growing income inequality in Europe and the United States, to leaky buildings … it’s all their fault for promoting unfettered free market and deregulation!
Naturally, since he’s writing on a blog, numerous more intelligent commentators leap to their keyboards to put him right—both politely and succinctly.
It’s a slam dunk.
Everybody loves Raymond – W H A L E O I L
Auckland welcomed its 1.5millionth citizen this week. But how will the city accommodate its growing population with the grey ones so firmly in the way?
Are we there yet? Auckland welcomes 1.5 millionth citizen – Phil McDermott, C I T I E S M A T T E R
“Once again I am shocked at how easily and automatically so many intellectuals are willing to use compulsion to solve problems.”
Another anti-freedom conservative: David Brooks – S T E P H E N H I C K S

"Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoiding death."
- Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged

With the coming to these shores of Charter Schools, it’s time to take up the catchphrase “Separation of School and State!”
Restore the Separation of State and School – T H E U N D E R C U R R E N T
You’ve all heard the Keynesian litany from every alleged economist from Krugman to Hickey to Morgan: the world’s economies are collapsing and there’s a worldwide shortage of demand; governments are deeply in debt and can’t provide the necessary investment to make up the shortfall.
What a shame they’re talking crap.
Is government spending really "investment"? – K R U G M A N I N W O N D E R L A N D
Oh, for those of you wishing to gain some insight into our genius overlords' thinking, these four “classes” by Ben Bernanke (Central Planner in Chief) might be of interest.
You could call them a “Master Class,” i.e., lessons the Class of your Overlords.
Make sure you pack some difficult questions.
Bernanke to teach class on Fed at GW in March – M A R K E T W A T C H
Antarctica is melting! says Al Gore, Richard Branson, James Hansen and Kevin Trenberth.
Um, no it’s not, points out Steven Milloy.
Al Gore’s ‘melting’ Antarctic claims refuted by reality – J U N K S C I E N C E
Some people buy gold. Others buy cheese. Here’s how to make your fancy cheeses last.
How to make your expensive wedge of cheese last for weeks – F O R B E S
World-Wide Factory Activity, by Country.
World-Wide Factory Activity, by Country. - W A L L S T R E E T J O U R N A L
You know what’s holding us all back here? Don’t worry, the Ministry of Economic Development has all the answers.
Most notably, they’ve determined that what ails us economically is not their fault. Got that? It’s not taxes, regulations, public sector idiots or bureaucracies getting in our way. No, says the Ministry, it’s not that at all.
No, it’s all our fault.
Arseholes.
Ministry suggests poor management holding economy back - R A D I O N Z

"The man who lets a leader prescribe his course
is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap."
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

A message from Nancy Pelosi:
Do Whatever, Taxpayers will Pay For It - T H R U T C H
Want less inequality? Then how about less government? “Between 1997 and 2010, Govt spending on social services increased by almost 20% more for households in the top half of income spectrum.”
Stephen Whittington - T W I T T E R
A modest proposal to solve inequality at a stroke…
Income inequality and broken families — a modest proposal – S T E P H E N H I C K S
Do smokers pay for themselves? Do junk food eaters get any benefits from their eating?
Healthist bean counters say no. But what would these arseholes know.
Anti-paternalism – O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R
Gimmie some sugar – O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to
achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
- Ayn Rand

Guess what? Yesterday was Ayn Rand’s Birthday—and some folk had a great idea to make February 2nd, Rand’s Day, a day worth celebrating!
Randsday is Justice Day. Give YOURSELF a present.
Rand'sDay - A Y N R A N D M Y T H S
And why is a philosopher who died thirty years ago still have Tea Partiers, political commentators, and politicians still taking (and arguing) about her now?
ppy Birthday, Ayn Rand -- Why are you still so misunderstood?
– Don Watkins, F O X N E W S
Ayn Rand: 10 more great quotes on her birthday
Ayn Rand: 10 great quotes on her birthday
- C . S. M O N I T O R

"The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny
individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."
- Ayn Rand

From our environmental page … there is hope for the weka, but only if the grey ones get out of the way.
Hope for the weka? - O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R
And on Waitangi Weekend, it’s appropriate that environmentalists ask themselves: “Were Maori environmentalists?” Most NZ environmental law assumes they were. So if they weren’t…
Were Maori environmentalists? - N O T P C , 2 0 0 6
Some environmentalists don’t like oil drilling because of oil spills. But what if you could fight oil spills with cool technology like this?
Magnetic soap made for oil spills - F U T U R E O F T E C H N O L O G Y

"Money demands that you sell, not your weakness
to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason."
- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

You think that Wank Phone in your pocket was invented just last week? Last year?
No, there were folk writing about them way back in 1978!
HP Calculators in 2025, As Predicted In 1978 - G E E K P R E S S
Want to create a great company? Get rid of your bozos.
Why Every Company Needs A "No Bozos" Policy - F O R B E S
Competitive advantage for entrepreneurs.
Want to Stand Out From the Crowd? 3 Tips on How to Do It. - F O R B E S
In Praise of Private Equity: "Private-equity or venture capital investors don't owe society a thing"—Jonathan Hoenig
In Praise of Private Equity – S M A R T M O N E Y
Know what the worst thing about growing up poor and making it later on? You have stupid habits that are hard to shake.
The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor – John Cheese, C R A C K E D
5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor - John Cheese, C R A C K E D
Sometimes you need to remind yourself what a thieving arsehole Donald Trump is.
Donald Trump’s eminent-domain empire – M I C H E L L E M A L K I N
Sexting for Grammar Nerds. You know how you are.
Lucy Carter – T W I T P I C
“The myths of all major religions are so absurd that any new religions would be wholly different. The reason is simple: they're fantasies based on the desire to believe. Science, in contrast, is based on observations of empirical facts. That's the difference that makes all the difference!” – Dian Hsieh
The Impossibility of Re-Creating Religions – Diana Hsieh, P O L I T I C S W I T H O U T G O D
I don’t know about you, but I never knew Salvador Dali illustrated an edition of Alice in Wonderland! The master surrealist meets the Mad Hatter!
Salvador Dalí Illustrates Alice in Wonderland, 1969 – B R A I N P I C K I N G S
Wow! Now this is good news. Hell, it’s great news! The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation has finally allowed the great man’s beautiful drawings to be sold as beautiful prints at affordable prices.
Time to fill your boots and buildings up with gorgeous drawings like these while the NZ dollar helps you out!
Frank Lloyd Wright Archival Reproductions Now Available – P R A I R I E M O D

[Thanks to readers Shaun H, Julian D., Paul van D. and hat tips to Thrutch, Anne McElhinney, Stephen Hicks, Bosch Fawston, Noodle Food, Geek Press, ]

Keep watching.
More later.
PC

Cabin porn

2012-02-02T14:16:00.001+13:00

Anybody fancy a snug little cabin many miles from everything that troubles you?

Then the website Cabin Porn is just for you.

But maybe not exactly what you might think….

(Yes, Virginia, it is safe to view at work.)

GUEST POST: Christchurch people say “enough is enough!”

2012-02-02T11:33:00.001+13:00

Guest Post by Hugh Pavletich

At noon yesterday some 4,000 local citizens gathered next to the Civic Building in Christchurch to express their anger at the poor performance of the Christchurch City Council. Many of these people had never attended a protest in their lives before—as New Zealand’s Television Close Up programme “Anger in Christchurch” (Video 3.45 min) explained last night.

Rev Mike Coleman (a leader who has emerged in the east of Christchurch and chairs the Wider Communities Action Network representing the devastated people of the east) ably chaired the protest meeting, facilitated by Peter Lynch and his team, who also spoke. Members of the public who wished to do so were asked by Rev Mike Coleman to express their views as well.

The beloved Christchurch Wizard also spontaneously contributed his well-received views too.

This was very much a spontaneous outpouring by the wider Christchurch community. They left heartened and emboldened from this important gathering.

Within the Close Up programme, Andrea Cummings of North New Brighton is featured. Andrea and her husband, who run a small lawn mowing repair shop, spontaneously became the focal point of their community through the earthquake events – meeting the communities immediate needs and distributing food parcels where required.

As Andrea explains within the interview, this had to happen because the Authorities – and particularly the Christchurch City Council – were not set up to respond because of their centralised structure.

The Simmering Discontent Continues

While there had been deep concern in Christchurch for many years about the poor performance of the centralised Council structure, incapacitated by bureaucratic bloat [the writer has written extensively on these issues – latest October 2011 - Christchurch earthquake recovery: The political circus], the “final straw” was the Council’s decision on the advice of its consultants to award the Council Chief Executive Tony Marryatt a $68,000 14% pay rise mid December 2011.

The public fury was immediate.

Peter Lynch, a local resident with no prior involvement with politics, was so incensed, he set up a Facebook page - No Pay Rise For Tony Marryatt - announcing publicly that there was to be a protest 1 February 2012.

The “blundering” Council decision announcing this extraordinary pay rise to a largely “invisible” Chief Executive of the Council Tony Marratt was followed soon after by an equally odd announcement by the Earthquake Recovery Minister Hon Gerry Brownlee, urging the local elected representatives and citizens to “settle down” and support the Council authorities. Brownlee “threatened” dissenting local representatives (those supporting clean local government) with dismissal, as reported by the local morning daily The Press soon after – “Quake Minister Gerry Brownlee Scolds Council.”

Normally, the summer Christmas breaks in New Zealand are when the country shuts down for a month and the media “goes to sleep” because there is so little news to report.

In Christchurch this year however, following the political blunders of both the local Council and the Recovery Minister Brownlee, the atmosphere was very different, with the public and the local media erupting with “enough is enough.”

South Islands major daily The Press led the extraordinary public conversation, with other print, radio and television media participating as well. The Press however had been covering these issues for a period of 17 months, since the time of the first earthquake event 4 September 2010.

In normal times, Local Government issues tend to attract little media or public interest. But with the earthquake events still persisting (in excess of 9,500 shakes to date), the performance of the political authorities at both the local and national levels, came under increasing scrutiny – as they failed to perform to an acceptable standard.

The Emerging Focus on Solutions

The critically important public conversation over this time has meant that the wider public has an increasingly better understanding of the problems and what the solutions need to be. While there is loose talk about the possibility of “rates revolts” and other approaches, the three major changes required are emerging –

(1) The need for a fresh mid term election as soon as possible – likely April / May.

(2) A replacement Council Chief Executive (realistically – only a newly elected Council can do this).

(3) Abolish the Councils centralised structure and replace it with a One City/Many Communities model – where the “control” is at the local level. This is clearly essential for both elementary reasons of risk management and because, as the TVNZ Close Up programme highlights, the importance of local communities being able to respond quickly and effectively to the needs of local people.

As the writer pointed out in a brief address to the people gathered at yesterday’s protest meeting, some 17 months following the first earthquake event 4 September 2010 the recovery has still not yet got underway in Christchurch – simply because the “top down” approach, with bureaucracies incapacitated with bloat and weak political leadership, have not been able to respond to the community’s and businesses’ needs.

The atmosphere with respect to the Christchurch City Council bureaucracy is that it has long been At War with its communality and business.

In development and construction terms, Christchurch has long been considered a “disaster zone” well before the first earthquake struck September 2010. The writer has covered these issues extensively within earlier articles [see Performance Urban Planning].

The Christchurch Rebuild Disaster

The situation has only worsened since the time of the first earthquake – and is best illustrated by the new housing consent construction performance through 2011.

Christchurch, with a population of some 370,000 people, consented just 750 new conventional housing units over that period (with 150 relocatables deducted) – a miserable consent rate of just 2 units per 1000 population - well below replacement levels in a normal market, let alone through an earthquake recovery.

By contrast, to the south and west of Christchurch is the county of Selwyn with a population of about 40,000, which over the same period consentedwell in excess of 400 new residential units through the year – a consent rate of about 10 units per 1000 population.

To the north of Christchurch is the county of Waimakariri, of (again) some 40,000 people, which consented around 500 new residential units in 2011 - a consent rate of about 12 units per 1000 population.

So the construction volumes in these two smaller and more responsive Local Government areas are some 5 and 6 times greater than Christchurch on a population basis.

Christchurch in essence is being “hollowed out” as people and businesses are departed for these adjoining counties and other centres throughout New Zealand and Australia.

New Zealand’s Woeful Home Building Performance

Statistics New Zealand announced recently building consents granted in 2011 represent the lowest level in 46 years.

The situation is even worse than these “bald figures” from Statistics NZ suggest – because taking account of the population changes over this 46-year period are not properly taken in to account. New Zealand’s current population is about 4.414 million, and with only 13,662 residential consents issued during 2011 this suggests a low consenting rate of 3.09 consents per 1,000 population. Some 46 years ago in 1966, New Zealand's population was 2.711 million. Adjusted for population, if the consenting rate per 1,000 population in 1966 was 3.09, that would mean that just 8,376 residential consents were issued in that year. It was likely substantially higher then.

The 2011 consenting rate per 1,000 population figure is therefore likely to be the lowest since the Great Depression, or in history. As noted above, the Christchurch situation is even worse still – throughout a supposed recovery.

Blundering Politicians Protecting Mates

To date, the political authorities have persisted with their “blundering responses” to the wishes of the earthquake ravaged city of Christchurch.

Within The Press today there is “Talk Of Rates Revolt as “serial political blunderer” Local Government and Environment Minister Hon Dr Nick Smith is reported to have said that a fresh new mid term election is “highly unlikely,” further compounding the political problems for his Government.

In essence, the current Government has just three options – first, do nothing; second appoint Commissioners; or third, allow a fresh mid-term election so that the locals can directly deal with the local political problems and inadequacies.

The current Council is clearly seriously dysfunctional, and the Smith “non-solution” of appointing Kerry Marshall as an “Observer” in a vain endeavour to dampen the protest down backfired by the Monday. When the Council’s Chief Executive Performance Review saw the light of day Monday, after it was “extracted” under the Official Information Act by the diligent media, Smith’s ham fisted plans were already in tatters. Contrary to earlier public statements by local politicians talking in glowing terms about his performance, justifying the $68,000 pay rise, the Review itself when it finally saw the light of day clearly illustrated otherwise.

The Government will not appoint Commissioners (contrary to the current public musings by Smith), because this would immediately collapse the local public support for the National Party, which did undeservedly well in Christchurch at the last General Election November 2011. The support for the National Party is in no small measure because the Opposition Labour Party is so internally conflicted and confused. As a political participant in local issues, it is currently “missing in action.”

Further to this, the appointment of Commissioners by the Government to the Canterbury Regional Council (Environment Canterbury), was not popular and has not been successful to date.

While Local Government Minister Smith is technically highly ranked in the Cabinet, in reality he is very much seen as “yesterday’s man” so far as political influence within Government is concerned.

Common Sense Must Prevail

It therefore seems likely, that as the local political pressure intensifies and Christchurch and citizens communicate directly with the politicians involved, that Prime Minister John Key and his Government, must see it as “desirable” to allow the local Christchurch people to sort out their own problems - with a fresh mid-term election.

Hugh Pavletich is a Christchurch entrepreneur, the owner of website Performance Urban Planning and the co-author of the Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, 2011 .

Quote of the Day: No, Dr Brash, inflation targeting has not "worked well." Not ever. [Updated]

2012-02-02T06:22:00.003+13:00

"The financial-market crisis is not over but has grown into a vicious sovereign-debt crisis. Nevertheless, monetary policy makers of the major economies go on to practice the same sort of policy that has led to the crisis. Following the model of inflation targeting, they continue to disregard the quantity of money and the amount and kind of credit creation. As they did before, central bankers cut interest rates as low as they can. Few seem to remember that the monetary-policy concept of inflation targeting was adopted with the promise that low and stable inflation rates would produce financial and economic stability. Reality has not confirmed this assurance. On the contrary, inflation targeting was instrumental in bringing about the current financial crisis...."

- Antony P. Mueller, "Inflation Targeting Hits the Wall"

it has become a rule to ignore the expansion of monetary aggregates and to install extremely low interest rates. Inflation targeting has led monetary authorities to ignore not only money and credit growth but also asset prices along with other variables such as the exchange rate. By the rationale of inflation targeting, monetary policy has become blunt and ignorant by design, and in this respect a repetition of an earlier failure has occurred just at a time when the future head of the Federal Reserve felt sure that he could promise that "we won't do it again" and let the US economy fall into depression. Not different from other areas of policies, in monetary policy, too, the only lessons that are learned from history are the wrong lessons.

As was revealed by the recent release of the transcripts of the meetings of the Fed in 2006, central banking is a fraudulent institution where the men at the top act like deliberate ignoramuses.

How about we kill the planners instead? [update]

2012-02-01T16:59:00.001+13:00

It looks like planners helped to kill people in Christchurch. From the ongoing Christchurch inquiry:

The building at 605- 613 Colombo St, … was green stickered following the September earthquake. The Boxing Day aftershock caused much more significant damage to the building, and it was red-placarded. [On February 22 it killed four pedestrians and crushed eight passengers on a bus.]
    Consultation between the owner and its engineers resulted in a decision to demolish the building but, because the building had a heritage classification, the city council required that the demolition application be a notified consent application. This process would have taken some months.
    There was no protective fencing in front of the building at the time of the February earthquake.
    Ann Brower, a lecturer specialising in regulations [who was pinned under rubble on the bus], said: "There's some irony in the fact that it was a failure in regulations that nearly killed me and which did kill those closest to me [on the bus].''
    …[T]he collapse of the facade of the building at 603 Colombo St killed Joan Weild, 76, and Graham Weild, 77, and Israeli backpackers Ofer Levy, 22, and Gabi Moshe Ingel, 22, who were walking in the street nearby.
    The heritage classified building was severely damaged following the September earthquake and was yellow-stickered. Following Boxing Day, it was red-stickered. Make safe works were to be completed before January 31 2011.
    But no make-safe works were completed on the building and instead a decision was made to demolish it. As this building was also heritage classified, the process involved a notified consent, which was to take months…

An entirely avoidable tragedy.

[Hat tip Julian D.]

UPDATE: That was then: Here’s Councillor Frau OberGruppenFuhrer Sue Wells speaking out on CTV after the first quake to tell building owners, sorry to ORDER building owners, that they may not even THINK about demolishing their dangerous buildings, not without the express, explicit, paid-for permission of one her grey ones. The bitch.

And now? … “‘An engineer lashed out at city council processes for being “too time consuming” at the Royal Commission of Inquiry today, after paperwork delayed the demolition of a red-stickered building which later collapsed in the February quake – killing four people…’

Feel free to email Sue and tell her or any other councillor what you think: sue.wells@ccc.govt.nz .

It’s those fantastical ‘Treaty of Waitangi Principles’ again

2012-02-01T10:53:00.001+13:00

Here we are again, having the same tired, washed-out old arguments:

YET AGAIN WE SEE all the political classes jumping into the trough for a mud wrestle over the so-called “Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi,” with the National Party wanting to diminish their impact in the partial sale of SOEs, the Maori Party wanting to use the bout to boost themselves, and Browntable iwi leaders hoping to further feather their nests.

The impossible-to-define "principles of the Treaty" were a late and pragmatic addition to law some twenty-five years ago—and a leading lesson in the dangers of pragmatism in politics. As you might not know, the “the principles of the Treaty” are not part of the Treaty at all, just a recent accretion adding great confusion and a huge amount of expensive litigious activity. Not least because to this day they have still not been adequately defined.

FOR THOSE UNAWARE OF the history of these “Principles,” you might be surprised to hear that were never there at the Treaty’s signing; they only emerged in recent times, and only because of the appalling political judgement of a former ACT Party luminary. A rushed addition to legislation that for the first time put the destructive ideas of “biculturalism” and race-based political “partnership” on the table, into the courts, and into the bank accounts of folk who saw the “Principles” as their main chance at piles of money.

So take a bow Richard Prebble while we tell the story of the birth of these “Principles” that have poisoned politics ever since.

Like Rodney Hide when he first got his feet under a ministerial table, Richard Prebble was so excited to “get things done” he didn’t care how he did them. So when, as Minister of State-Owned Enterprises in the Fourth Labour Government, he wanted to sell state-owned enterprises (a good thing), to quieten down the race-based dissent that started to affect the Labour’s relations with its Maori voting base, he asked his colleague Geoffrey Palmer to insert a section in the new State-Owned Enterprises Act the phrase “principles of Treaty of Waitangi,” insisting that “decision-makers” must have regard to these Principles. Here’s all their now infamous Section 9 said:

Nothing in this Act shall permit the Crown to act in a manner that is inconsistent with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi.

What were these Principles? No one knew.

Had they ever been defined? No, they hadn’t.

Did these two clowns have any idea what they might have started? Not a bit of it.

So in order to get the sales under way, these two simply brought these Principles into being without ever defining what these Principles are.

RICHARD PREBBLE DIDN’T CARE. He just wanted to sell things. And Geoffrey Palmer didn’t care, because his life’s work was based around writing legislation so vague, so ambiguous, that it allowed the courts to define things any way they wanted to. This, said the Idiot Palmer, is how you make law “flexible”: by giving the courts bullets which they could elect to fire in any direction they wished.

So much for the legal acumen of Geoffrey Palmer and the political nous of Richard Prebble. Because in the time it takes to say Motunui, a huge number of claims based on these newly-fangled Principles were rapidly being manufactured and presented, and the courts were beginning to dream up all sorts stuff to fill up Palmer’s empty vessel.

This is where the fictions of “biculturalism” and race-based political “partnership” were born. And this was the beginning of the deluge of claims based on these twin fictions—a deluge unseen by the twin geniuses how gave birth to the legislation (“In the course of a relatively few years,” said the woeful Palmer for example, “most of the outstanding issues in this area will be settled. Most of the claims now are known…” )

The result is that to this day no-one knows with any kind of clarity what these “principles” are supposed to be. They were a legal fiction waiting for courts to define and redefine, and for litigants to quarry in an attempt to make their fortune—which they did, in their droves.

And because, over time, they were inserted in all their vagueness in virtually every piece of quasi-constitutional legislation written since, they became a poison that soon infected every piece of legislation they touched.

What that poison did—as subsequent court cases quietly morphed these “principles” into something ever more lucrative for the lawyers who lived off them—was to transfer the Treaty’s clear and straightforward promise of legal protection of and the recognition of rights into the sort of vague, indefinable mush that help lawyers afford large launches.

THE NET RESULT OF evoking principles that didn’t exist was to to create a Treaty that had never existed at all, except in the wet dreams of a lawyers and activists. And lo, a whole Gravy Train was created to feed off this New Thing.

It’s been a hard Train to stop now it’s got rolling.

It set the platform for a whole generation of youngsters to join the Grievance Industry and become, as virtually their sole occupation, professional Maoris. Three of this ilk, ironically, are now propping up John Key’s National government and throwing a tantrum over this very issue. Many others simply see the tantrum as yet another opportunity for a lucrative dip into this trough.

And it allowed the then Minister of Injustice Doug Graham to mellifluously opine a few years later that “The sooner we realise there are laws for one and laws for another, the better.”

That this piece of human excrement is on this very day before the law courts for fraud—for which his defence has been to limit his dishonesty by talking up instead his incompetence—is perhaps an appropriate contemporary comment on the fraudulent “Principles” themselves.

The Governor resigns. Not before time. [Updated]

2012-01-31T15:55:00.001+13:00

It was no surprise that news of Alan Bollard’s forthcoming resignation from the job of Reserve Bank Governor was followed almost immediately this morning by calls to “shake up the monetary policy.”

Directly out of the blocks before the starter’s gun was even trousered was Ganesh Nana from BERL, never backwards in coming forwards when it comes to being proved an idiot, who opined that the new governor “needed to be ‘actively involved'’ in all avenues of economic policy setting”—in other words, not just focussing on interests rates as a means by which to attempt to control inflation, Bollard’s replacement should be empowered to pull every lever he can find in the pursuit of every policy objective he (or Mr Nana) might think of.

This was bad enough. What was worse, however, was to hear the response of former Reserve Bank Governor Don Brash to this rank stupidity. Not what he said about how no foreigners need apply for the forthcoming job. Sadly, that sort of provincialism is now par for the course in this pathetic authoritarian backwater. (Just ask the receivers of the Crafar farms.) No, it was how Brash had the boldness to say that monetary policy, when focussed only on” keeping inflation under control” by manipulating interest rates, has “worked very well.”

“Worked very well”?

Yeah right.

'Here we sit in 2012, not half-a-dozen years since an orgy of malinvestment and a world’s record housing bubble was inflated in every developed country by the policies of their central banks—the popping of which in large part caused the depression which we are still enduring—and we have a former central banker telling us that the policy that played a leading part in this disaster (a policy that, in the name of a non-existent price stability, spatchcocks together an unstable mix of rampant monetary inflation with a stuffed-shirt bureaucrat dictating interest rates) has “worked very well.”

What a crock.

That a stuffed-shirt bureaucrat is unable even to do this job well, let alone what Messrs Nana, Hickey, Morgan et al would like them to, should be apparent just from the record. But if you want to see just how far from “on top of things” these central bankers are, , just how far from being “experts” these these desiccated economic dictators are, just read the now-released 2006 transcripts of the US Federal Reserve Open Market Committee, i.e, the shysters who “oversee” the economy. These morons don’t have a clue what they’re doing. They really don’t. It’s just laughable. Page after page of “what bubble?” “aren’t we great!” and “can I get the same retirement plan as Alan.”

Or read Alan Bollard’s own book Crisis, which reveals him and his so-called “experts” permanently engaged in a game of “What the Fuck is Going On Out There?!” If there was one “expert” whose record was exploded by the global financial collapse it was surely Alan Greenspan. And if there was a chook with its head cut off during the global financial crisis, it was Alan Bollard.

The point is not that we need better experts in charge. The point is that the people in this job don’t lead the markets at all. Despite their now-exploded claims to omniscience, they just dictate to markets what they will pay for money while staying inside playing catch-up. As I’ve been at pains to point out here at NOT PC over recent years, it is their attempts to lead the market however that caused and causes such calamities as we are now enduring—and will continue to endure as long as the alleged experts continue to insists that things are “working well” [Brash], or that central-bank-based solutions to recovery can be found and acted on [Bernanke].

Not true. Not possible. As The Privateer says in his latest newsletter [hat tip Louis Boulanger],

“Before even a hint of a genuine recovery can take place, there has to be recognition of what it is that the financial world must recover from. What the financial world must recover from is a system whose vital components - money, prices and interest rates - are all controlled by edict and not by the voluntary interaction of people exchanging goods and services in the marketplace.”

I’m all for “changing the role of the Reserve Bank governor. I’m all for “shaking up the policy settings” of an economic dictator who has no place in a free market.

But what I’d like to do is give him less work, not more. Radically less work.

And I wouldn’t even mind if it was a foreigner who was paid not to do it.

UPDATE: Libz Propose Winding Down Reserve Bank

The Libertarianz Party is asking John Key to consider postponing and possibly cancelling any replacement for retiring Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard, ...

Those programmers!

2012-01-31T13:09:00.001+13:00

Those programmers! Always yammering. Always chattering.

Here’s the sort of shit those programmers area always saying. Watch until the end.

[Hat tip Geek Press]

Justice?

2012-01-31T10:54:00.001+13:00

No, apparently it’s not just me who’s wondering.

While I’ve been recuperating over the last week, a man has been thrown in jail, his property seized, his bank accounts frozen, and his business shut down—yet no evidence has been filed in a New Zealand court to assert, let alone prove, his guilt.

It seems too that up to 76 NZ police officers were involved in the raids on Mr DotCom’s home and business, “working with four FBI officers and backed by the Armed Offender’s Squad.”

What on earth is going on?

What New Zealand law(s) allows foreign officers of the law (e.g FBI) to operate within our borders like this?

What New Zealand law(s) and/or international treaties allows for an arrest warrant to be issued without any evidence against the accused even being presented to a New Zealand judge?

I’m no fan of copyright theft, of which Mr Kim DotCom and his MegaUpload site is accused, but there was a time when justice demanded that evidence be adduced before incarceration, and guilt be proved before property is seized, businesses are shut down and livelihoods destroyed.

What on earth has happened to our justice system?

I think we should be told.

[Hat tip Willy S.]

Google Ads

2012-01-31T08:21:00.000+13:00

I’ve just got rid of Google Ads on this blog.

The amount I was earning was worthwhile, but I got sick of advertising things I wouldn’t personally recommend.

Seeing Google Ads pushing Gareth Bloody Morgan’s bogus “investment” vehicle this morning was the last straw. I wouldn’t just not recommend putting your money with him, I would personally recommend you didn’t—not if you wanted to get it all back.

So now I have no ads. Perhaps for the time being, or perhaps until someone makes me an offer.

What have you got?

The Great Depression and the Broken Window Fallacy

2012-01-26T12:19:00.001+13:00

Yaron Brook discusses the economics of the Great Depression, with an explanation of the broken window fallacy, the most common error in economics.

From his talk 'Why Bad Economics Won't Go Away.'

GUEST POST: The absence of PC explained

2012-01-25T20:35:00.000+13:00

Dear readers of Not PC,

Peter suffered a herniated disc. He's in a lot of pain, and hasn't been able to update his blog; or do much of anything really.

Stay tuned; hopefully he'll be back online soon. In the meantime have a look at the 'REGULAR READS' links on the left of the blog for some excellent writing from elsewhere on the Web.

Cheers
Julian Pistorius

P.S. I blame it on the vegetarianism.

P.P.S. There is no substance to the rumours of an assassination attempt by a rabid Ron Paul fan.

Friday Morning Mini-Ramble

2012-01-20T11:12:00.001+13:00

How enjoyable was it yesterday to see so many bloggers and website owners going on strike yesterday over the misguided Stop Online Piracy Act. For one day, the internet shrugged at the projected imposition of security through censorship. And maybe the reptiles in Congress listened. Maybe.
In other news, I’m still waiting for my call-up to be one of the bloggers interviewed on Radio NZ’s Kiwi Summer series. No, not really. I reckon Martin Bradbury has more chance of a call-up, wouldn’t you think?
Anyway, on with the show here. A small one, this morning, of a few things that caught my eye.

So what is it central banks are going to inflict on us worldwide? Inflation, or deflation?
Out of Mises’s frying pan – Sean Corrigan, C O B D E N C E N T R E
How Deflationary Forces Will Be Turned into Inflation – Thorsten Polleit, M I S E S I N S T I T U T E
Speaking of central bank inflation … “It's important to watch what European Central Bank president Mario Draghi is doing rather than what he is saying, and right now he is madly printing euros out the backdoor.”
The Dancing Draghi – E C O N O M I C P O L I C Y J O U R N A L
Bernard Hickey hasn’t got a clue about economics. We can all agree on that. But, speaking for all of us who’ve stopped watching terrestrial TV, he can still recognise bad TV when he sees it.
Bernard Hickey was forced to watch some TV ads during the holiday rain and was stunned with what he saw
– I N T E R E S T . C O . N Z
Food Minister Kate Wilkinson justifies her new Food Bill banning some fresh foods and giving police power to raid private kitchens without a warrant on the basis of, basically, some very dodgy figures.
Food Bill - O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R
Reader Paul Van Dinther has made the world press with a Google Earth simulation of the path of the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that went aground last week off the coast of Tuscany. Onya Paul!
Track the Costa Concordia's course via a digital simulation - L . A . T I M E S
Anybody else wondering how Gareth “Captain” Morgan managed to be paid $50 to $100 million for a company handling only $650 million in Kiwisaver accounts, the fees on which are a risibly low multiple of the taxpayer-funded purchase price—as Mark Hubbard says, “as I'm going to own this business, can I please have a look at the valuation used to make the offer.” Particularly so since a large lump of the capital being handled is his own (which he’s now threatened to withdraw whenever he has a tantrum) and his company has achieved success only in turning himself into a megaphone and other people’s capital into manure? A And will he be voluntarily paying capital gains tax on his taxpayer-provided windfall, as he demands others be forced to do? People would like to know.
Gareth Morgan Investments Sale To KiwiBank - Some Questions – N O M I N I S T E R
Gareth Morgan: What the hell has happened to him? – Mark Hubbard, S O L O
Gareth Morgan sells to Kiwibank – W H A L E O I L
Egalitarian impulses will sink a struggling economy.
Death by Wealth Tax – Richard Epstein, D E F I N I N G I D E A S
If you want affordable housing in Auckland, then it’s time to throw out the council’s Auckland housing plan. Mind you, if you don’t want affordable housing, just continue supporting the status quo.
Throw out Auckland housing plan says Productivity Commission – D U G A H O L E
The Productivity Commission Report on Affordable Housing - O W E N M c S H A N E
From the “we wish it were only in America” file: The New York Times reports that energy producers are being fined by the U.S. government for not selling a biofuel that doesn't even exist.
Make-a-Wish Politics – G U S V A N H O R N
Sadly, one law that wasn’t written into statute.
“Dressing psychiatrists like wizards on the witness stand” - O V E R L A W Y E R E D
Universities are making it tougher for students to get into university. “Good!” says one mother whose youngster has missed entry.
Universities raise the bar - L I N D S A Y M I T C H E L L
In case you missed it last year, U.S. economists (including, be aware, some who are just alleged economists) explain the last year in terms of their favourite charts
Economic experts explain 2011 in charts – W A S H I N G T O N P O S T
Ever thought about the morality of making a profit. In a free society, "creating value" and "making a profit" are just two sides of the same coin!
Why Is Creating Value Good, But Profits Bad? – Paul Hsieh, P A J A M A S M E D I A
This is the Montessori eucation website you’ve been waiting for.
Aid to Life – A S S O C I A T I O N M O N T E S S O R I I N T E R N A T I O N A L E
And the article about Montessori you’ve always wanted.
The Montessori Method: Educating Children for a Lifetime of Learning and Happiness
- O B J E C T I V E S T A N D A R D
Want to learn about Ayn Rand and Objectivism? Here’s the teaching website you’ve been waiting for.
Ayn Rand Campus – A Y N R A N D I N S T I T U T E
Speaking of which, here’s a new project that tries to match students who want to read Rand with donors willing to buy the books.
FreeObjectivistBooks.org
And since Objectivism is a philosophy for living, it should come as little surprise that some of the best ways to do business are in line Objectivism's ethics and epistemology.
SMART Goals and Philosophy – John Drake, T R Y R E A S O N
“Normal science progresses through the collection of observations (or measurements), the conjecture of hypotheses, the making of predictions, and then through the usage of new observations, the modification of the hypotheses accordingly (either ruling them out, or improving them).
In the global warming ‘science,’ this is not the case.”
On IPCCs exaggerated climate sensitivity and the emperor’s new clothes – S C I E N C E B I T S
How did great artists become great? By intense engagement with the great works of the great minds.
How great artists become great – S T E P H E N H I C K S
I love it when people I like recommend my favourite books…
’Trustee from the Toolroom’ Review - Rachel Miner, T H E P L A Y F U L S P I R I T
Don’t give up the Oxford Comma yet! "The Oxford Comma is not only stylistically necessary, it is logically necessary and its absence can lead to absurdities."
The Logical Necessity of the Oxford Comma – Jason Stotts, E R O S O P H I A
Today is the last Big Day Out. Speaking for myself, who’s never been a fan of stadium gigs, I still endured it three times. It was a mess. You couldn’t get around. You couldn’t get a beer. If you wanted to be treated like cattle, you’d come to the right place. And if you wanted the sound of your favourite music to be delivered in a manner that no music deserved, you couldn’t ask for more. (Mind you, it did bring out the Stooges.) Nevertheless, as an antidote to all the undeserved the BDO nostalgia, here's Gary Steel on why he too just can't care about its death.
BDO DOA? Gary Steel, W I T C H D O C T O R
And don’t say you’ve never wondered…
What's the best animal to slice open and crawl inside to stay warm? – T H E S T R A I G H T D O P E
Finally, here’s a small piece of advice for New Zealand readers: Do yourself a favour. Buy a @DresdenDolls ticket.
If you like punk cabaret; if you enjoy the music of Kurt Weill; if you like smart, sharp women; if you like music with melody and guts performed with humour, attitude and pizzazz; if you like any part of these, then do yourself a favour and get along to Dresden Dolls on Wednesday 25th at Christchurch’s Aurora Centre for Performing Arts, Friday 27th January at The Powerstation, Auckland, and Saturday 28th January in Wellington at The Opera House. And look out for ninja gigs.
Upcoming Shows – A M A N D A P A L M E R . N E T

And to finish on something completely different, here’s one of my favourite sopranos, Gundula Janowitz, singing sing the duet "Sull'aria" from The Marriage of Figaro with Lucia Popp at the Paris Opera. Gorgeous! [Hat tip http://www.greatoperavideos.com]

That’s all from me.
Have a great weekend.
Peter Cresswell

‘Solar Hemicycle,’ by Frank Lloyd Wright

2012-01-19T20:03:00.000+13:00

A 1992 tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s second house for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs—built in 1944—a house he called his “Solar Hemicycle”—with expert guidance by Katherine Jacobs herself.

Scum rises to the top

2012-01-19T07:43:00.000+13:00

As a reward for all his sterling work in Christchurch—including barring businessmen’s access to their own property, evicting people from their own homes, shutting down the CBD while simultaneously closing off the city limits, and (as a consequence) making sure new homes are beyond the price of those who need to buy them—in other words, for pretty much everything his mailed fist has done since the earthquake to make the city worse, to do to the city and its spirit what the earthquake couldn’t, plus all his acts of self- aggrandisement in “running” a dysfunctional council, and mayoral aggrandisement in promoting Mr Parker—for these achievements and more council “Chief Executive Officer” (sic) Tony Marryatt ~~has rewarded himself~~ has been rewarded with a pay rise equal to the size to which the Grand Chancellor used to tower over his city.

Now, why did I say “sic’ after the use of his officially appointed title? Let Joe Bennett explain:

The sickness, as always, shows up in the language. Mr Marryatt, for example, is known as a CEO. But he is not a CEO. A CEO runs a competitive business that has to earn money. The council is a monopoly that does not have to earn money. It just demands money from ratepayers. So Mr Marryatt's job is merely to oversee the spending of a guaranteed income. Spending is easier than earning.
Mr Marryatt's role used to have the more accurate title of town clerk.
I think we should revive it. It is an honourable title but it stresses that the role is clerical. No-one pays a clerk half a million bucks.

That Clerk Tony’s pay hike is even contemplated in the current environment is reason enough for campaigning and marching against it on 1 February.

KiwiBank and Gareth Morgan up a tree … [updated]

2012-01-18T15:09:00.001+13:00

So KiwiBank is to buy out Gareth Morgan Investments, including the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme—a case of the politically appointed “People’s Bank” buying out the self-anointed “People’s Financier.”

KiwiBank’s CEO Paul Brock reckons “The ‘aligned values’ of the two businesses reinforced the decision to buy rather than build.”

Rarely has a truer word been spoke. Their “values”are aligned—and in more ways than one:

KiwiBank was set up by a political tool with truckloads of taxpayer money to help resurrect the tool’s political career. Meanwhile, the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme was set up by a political fool eager to use his notoriety to attract money from gullible fools, and to suck down loads of taxpayers’ money.
As a bank KiwiBank is simply a welfare case; a bank set up with taxpayers’ money to do things profit-seeing banks wouldn’t and unable to survive in the market without frequent injections of ever-increasing tranches of OPM to prop up its credit rating—at the extraction of which from successive Ministers of Finance it has proved outstanding. Meanwhile, the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme has taken advantage of what is little more than a welfare programme for suits, at the exploitation of which it has proved exceptional.
And finally, KiwiBank has delivered the worst return on capital of any bank in the country. While year on year the Gareth Morgan KiwiSaver Scheme has proved to be the worst performing KiwiSaver scheme in New Zealand.

These are two entities clearly made for each other.

So now the directors of Gareth Morgan Investments are eager to get a payday for their consistent underperformance. And with this buyout of industry-leading underperformers, KiwiBank has once again confirmed their own.

UPDATE: Taking time today out of his busy schedule writing another book about how good he is, Gareth Morgan responded today to criticism of his funds’ less than stellar performance (his balanced fund has returned a negative - 0.1% per annum since inception; its “growth fund” a negative -3.4% p.a.; its conservative fund faring better at a positive 2.4% p.a, which still however sees his investors losing against inflation) blaming, in order, the ignorance (of others), the financial illiteracy (of others), and the league tables produced by ratings agencies Morningstar and Fund Source—who shamefully use actual figures instead of the ones provided by the voices in Gareth Morgan’s head—before pausing to point out his funds had done brilliantly against the “benchmarks” in his head.

He also said a “key focus” for GMI with respect to its KiwiSaver funds was “wealth preservation,” at which performance he maintained anyone criticising his growth portfolio’s return of negative 13.1% just doesn’t understand risk like he does.

He then touted for KiwiBank’s Kiwisaver work, before heading off to the travel agent to book his next holiday.

#SOPA = Silence Opposition Permanently Act [updated]

2012-01-18T11:42:00.001+13:00

The US Congress votes today on their Stop Online Piracy Act, aka SOPA, aka the Silence Opposition Permanently Act, which if passed will do as much to Stop Online Activity here in EnZed as it will in the United Police States of America.

Here’s a quick Q&A on this abomination.

Q: Is there a problem with online piracy?
A: There sure is. Every day online the creators of films, music, literature and inventions are having their property downloaded without reward, making their future pursuit of their careers increasingly impossible.

Q: Will SOPA protect intellectual property?
A: No. The proposed six-strikes-and-you’re-arrested is a legal blunt instrument as imperfect as it is thuggish. So, since anyone determined enough to steal will still be able to do so, online piracy will continue, while a few high profile innocents are shut down or even arrested to demonstrate the Act is “working.”

Q: So what is the purpose of SOPA?
A: Government control of the internet under the guise of protecting intellectual property.

Q: What will it do to the internet?
A: It will put it in the deep freeze. By holding bloggers, programmers, web hosts and ISPs responsible for infringements about which they will not even be aware—on the basis of possibly vexatious complaints and on pain of arrest and even jail—SOPA will chill debate, mangle links and block internet activity

Q: What are the problems in law?
A: The principle of innocent before being proven guilty is totally overturned. And by giving government control of the internet to the government, the internet will be introduced to the lethal virus of censorship—especially dangerous in election periods when a simple complaint will be sufficient to shut down a political opponent .

Q: Should intellectual property be protected?
A: Yes, of course. But in damaging the case for intellectual property, as SOPA’s measures will, it will be more effectively destroy the case for intellectual property than the lame arguments put up by apologists for intellectual theft.

Q: Should SOPA be opposed?
A: Hell, yes!

Diana Hsieh has a much fuller discussion here and links aplenty explaining why SOPA should be opposed.

UPDATE:

NZOA: He who has the gold makes the rules [update 2]

2012-01-18T10:20:00.001+13:00

After TV3 screened the documentary ‘Inside Child Poverty’ just three days before the last election, causing screams of horror from the ruling party*, NZ on Air** is now considering*** banning broadcasters from screening such documentaries ever again so close to election day.

The problem, they say, is that the documentary was too “politically charged” to be screened just days away from when folk would be electing their favourite politicians.

What the hell?

I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing the documentary myself, so I can’t judge whether or not it made its case****. But it would not be possible to tell the story of poverty in New Zealand without involving politics. And frankly, if a documentary about poverty is not “politically charged” then it’s not telling the whole story.

And while I know many would like to see elections being just a saccharine show of politicians with polished teeth and shiny-suited spin doctors telling you what to think*****, but if organisations are banned from telling stories like this in election week then I guess we’re well down the road to making elections just a dumbed-down ritual of bluster and box ticking; A political popularity contest with uncomfortable issues banned from the feast like pariahs, for fear of upsetting the ruling classes.

So documentaries that frighten the horse will be banned, doing to free speech what the Japanese like to do to whales.

Yes, this is censorship pure and simple. But, quite seriously, that’s what you get when the money to pay for your documentaries is doled out by government flunkies. That’s the Faustian pact agreed to by documentary makers—take this here money doled out by the flunkies, but don’t be surprised if the flunkies (and their political masters) tell you what to do with it, and when. In simpler terms, it’s the old time-honoured rule, he who has the gold makes the rules.

When the money comes from the political process, its use is unavoidably politicised. That means either censorship, control, or the establishing of an establishment—which is a different and even more insidious kind of censorship than the one to which most folk are already aware; one establishing a sort of “welfare state of the intellect,” doing to the denizens of culture what the welfare state does to its recipients.

So here’s the take-home message I’d invite you to contemplate: Don’t like production of your documentaries coming under political control? Then take their funding out of the political trough.

* * * * *

* NZ on Air was “spooked by political interference” reckons Tom Frewen at Scoop.

** Who, back in the day we used to call by the richly-deserved name of NaZis On Air, for what we thought were fairly obvious reasons.

*** Apparently the announcement was made by “NZ On Air board member Stephen McElrea (who, in Tom Frewen’s marvellously dry turn of phrase, ‘also happens to be John Key’s electorate chairman and the National Party’s northern region deputy chairman’) [who] has used his dual position of authority to demand answers from the funding body and, simultaneously, make implicit but forceful statements about what constitutes ‘appropriate’ policy material for such a funding body to support.” [ref: Kiwipolitico]

**** Karl du Fresne called it "a disgracefully simplistic, emotionally manipulative programme." But that’s the sort of thing the DomPost pays him to say. Meanwhile, Lindsay Mitchell corrected some of the doco’s “sensationalist” figures. And Martin Bradbury’s Tumeke! blog wrote a press release for the doco’s makers.

***** Which was the frank intent of both the Red Team’s Electoral Finance Act, and The Blue Teams’s subsequent Electoral Finance Act Lite—about which respective opponents were either incensed or disinterested, depending on which team at the time was proposing the saccharinisation .

UPDATE 1: New links added. Picture, courtesy Scoop.

UPDATE 2: New related thread at Twitter (#NZOnAirSongs) has thrown up a few new song titles, including:

Don't fight political corruption, Marsha, its bigger than both of us
Beige Frost
There Is No Election In New Zealand

Mere desire v burning ambition

2012-01-17T14:46:00.001+13:00

Are you burning with ambition?

Or merely harbour a desire for success in your chosen field?

That’s the difference that really makes the difference, you know—as actor Kevin Spacey explains…

[Hat tip Diana Hsieh]

If you want to get things done, find an introvert

2012-01-17T12:30:00.001+13:00

If you want to get things done, then don’t work in an open plan office.

Most of us now work in teams [notes the New York Times], in offices without walls, for managers who prize “people skills” above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
    But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.
    One explanation for these findings is that introverts are comfortable working alone — and solitude is a catalyst to innovation…

SOME teamwork is fine and offers a fun, stimulating, useful way to exchange ideas, manage information and build trust.
    But it’s one thing to associate with a group in which each member works autonomously on his piece of the puzzle; it’s another to be corralled into endless meetings or conference calls conducted in offices that afford no respite from the noise and gaze of co-workers. Studies show that open-plan offices make workers hostile, insecure and distracted. They’re also more likely to suffer from high blood pressure, stress, the flu and exhaustion. And people whose work is interrupted make 50 percent more mistakes and take twice as long to finish it. ….
    [Creative people] many of whom are introverts, are unhappy…. Privacy also makes us productive… Solitude can even help us learn…
    Conversely, brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity… decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases.

Ground zero in junk economics [updated]

2012-01-17T10:56:00.001+13:00

M.I.T. is a world leading university.

And no, Virginia, I’m not talking about the low-rent second-rate impostor out in Otara. I’m talking about the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The world-leading M.I.T.

The world-leading M.I.T. has a tale to tell that illustrates again the power of ideas to move the world, for good and for bad.

It has produced some 76 Nobel laureates, and around one-third of US astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin. It has been home to some stellar physicists, such as Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. To some explosive chemists. It’s mathematicians are as adept as their stories (John Nash) are Oscar-winning.

M.I.T. has produced some of the world’s leading hard scientists.

In economics however the story is both the same and very different. Sure, its economics graduates are everywhere—but given the catastrophe they produced in recent years (and are continuing to produce) I don’t mean that in a good way.

Central banking is filled with former attendees of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university … At MIT, [Bank of England Governor Mervyn] King, 63, and then-professor Ben S. Bernanke, 58, had adjoining offices in 1983, spending the early days of their academic careers in an environment where economics was viewed as a tool to set policy. Earlier, Bernanke [now head of the US Federal Reserve] and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, 64, earned their doctorates from the university in the late 1970s, Draghi with a thesis entitled “Essays on Economic Theory and Applications.”
[Bank of Israel Governor Stanley] Fischer, 68, advised Bernanke’s thesis on “Long-Term Commitments, Dynamic Optimization and the Business Cycle,” and taught Draghi. Greek Prime Minister and former ECB vice president Lucas Papademos and Olivier Blanchard, now chief economist for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, earned their doctorates from MIT at about the same time.
Other monetary policy makers who have passed through MIT’s doors include Athanasios Orphanides, head of the Central Bank of Cyprus, Duvvuri Subbarao, governor of the Reserve Bank of India and Charles Bean, King’s deputy in the U.K.

Not to mention Paul Samuelson, the writer of the textbook schooled modern Americans in the complex wrongheadedness of the Keynesian disease; New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the man with more all-round wrongheaded advice than Mr Keynes on speed; Lawrence Summers, adviser to both Obama and Bill Clinton; and Christine Romer, head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

These are the people who define “mainstream economics”—the very “macroeconomic” theories that got us into the hole.

Their advice, then and now, is to keep digging.

Given the results of its graduates then, by which I mean the state of the world today, its clear that while M.I.T.’s hard sciences departments should be lauded for their graduates’ achievements, its economics degrees are as much a piece of junk as the bonds still being peddled by European governments.

[Hat tip Tyler Cowen. Arnold Kling comments.]

UPDATE: Peter Boettke suggests, with a bit of nudging, that one primary difference between mainstream economics and Austrian economics is that mainstream theory “can’t handle the complexities of the real world…”

Quote of the day: Downgrade edition

2012-01-16T14:31:00.001+13:00

In case you hadn’t heard, European government debt was downgraded over the weekend.

Not before time.

After four years of attempting government “rescues” of their respective economies by borrowing to bolster “demand”, and two years of belatedly realising that they couldn’t afford the borrowing, and the expected recovery was nowhere to be found, the mainstream rating agencies finally noticed something was wrong.

So the ratings have finally been downgraded—but not yet the economic theory on which the profligate borrowing was based. And talk still continues about , even as the causes of the economic crisis of the last few years continues to be all but ignored.

Which brings me to the Quote of the Day, from page 8 of L. Albert Hahn’s 1949 collection The Economics of Illusion:

As far as government interference itself is concerned, one should never forget that serious economic disturbances are the consequences of basic maladjustments. The effect of correcting or not correcting such maladjustments is infinitely greater than any artificial creation of demand by government in an economy that, in most sectors, is still free. Therefore an economic policy that concentrates on artificially filling up an investment or spending gap rather than on fostering adjustments – and thus creating demand in a natural way – is doomed to fail in any severe crisis.

Don Boudreaux has more.

Climate models “yet to demonstrate an ability to confidently predict climate change”

2012-01-16T10:34:00.001+13:00

As I blogged last year, temperature “predictions” by alleged climate scientists have failed over recent decades to match the measured surface temperature record. “Predictions” from 1990 for example expected a temperature trend of between 0.2 to 0.5 degree C per decade—a rate that has quite simply failed to materialise.

The record is even worse when compared to the satellite temperature record over the last 33 years—which, unlike the surface measurements, measures temperatures in the upper atmosphere, precisely where the “predictions” say most warming should occur. The thirty-three year temperature update, released in December, shows temperatures well below computer model predictions.

The end of November 2011 completes 33 years of satellite-based global temperature data… Globally averaged, Earth’s atmosphere has warmed about 0.45 Celsius (about 0.82° F) during the almost one-third of a century that sensors aboard NOAA and NASA satellites have measured the temperature of oxygen molecules in the air [explains John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, where the satellite record is recorded and maintained].

This represents a global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978 of just +0.14 C per decade. Says Christy:

   This is at the lower end of computer model projections of how much the atmosphere should have warmed due to the effects of extra greenhouse gases since the first Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) went into service in Earth orbit in late November 1978, according to satellite data processed and archived at UA Huntsville’s ESSC.
    “While 0.45 degrees C of warming is noticeable in climate terms, it isn’t obvious that it represents an impending disaster,” said Christy. “The climate models produce some aspects of the weather reasonably well, but they have yet to demonstrate an ability to confidently predict climate change in upper air temperatures.” …
    While year-to-year temperature variations measured by the satellite sensors closely match those measured by both surface thermometers and weather balloons, it is the long-term warming trend on which the satellites and the surface thermometers disagree, [Christy’s colleague] Roy Spencer said, with the surface warming faster than the deep layer of the atmosphere.
    If both instruments are accurate, that means something unexpected is happening in the atmosphere.
    “The satellites should have shown more deep-atmosphere warming than the surface, not less” he said. “Whatever warming or cooling there is should be magnified with height. We believe this is telling us something significant about exactly why the climate system has not warmed as much as expected in recent decades.”

“Something significant” for which climate models are signally unable to account.

Read the whole analysis here.

[Hat tip Jeff Perren]

Thinking positive

2012-01-16T09:36:00.001+13:00

There’s plenty of reasons for a person to feel negative about life in Christchurch. Or not...

Don’t try this at your next lecture

2012-01-13T14:53:00.001+13:00

"How (not) to communicate new scientific information: A memoir of the famous Brindley lecture."

[Hat tip Geek Press]

Golfing on top of the world

2012-01-13T14:17:00.001+13:00

If you’re going to play golf, then this is probably the way to do it.

Like Rory McIlroy. On top of the Burj al-Arab.

Education as an aid to life

2012-01-13T14:01:00.001+13:00

Here’s a recommendation from our friends at NZ’s Maria Montessori Education Foundation:

Dear Friends and Advocates for Young Children.

The new website Aid to Life is now on-line and it is superb!

http://aidtolife.org/

It is primarily a resource for parents, guiding them through how to support their young child’s development from 0-3 years. A wonderful parent resource!

There is information about movement, independence, dressing, and more—complete with videos to help parents.

Highly recommended. Please pass this it on!

Kind regards,
Carol Potts

I have.

No blogging

2012-01-12T14:57:00.001+13:00

Sorry.

No blogging today.

I’ve been assassinated by a crazed Ron Paul supporter.

What would entice them back?

2012-01-11T14:26:00.001+13:00

Recovery authorities are asking business, property owners and customers what would entice them back into Christchurch's quake-stricken CBD.

An Enterprise Zone would.

But never in a million tears would they consider that…

Ayn Rand Campus

2012-01-11T13:21:00.001+13:00

The Ayn Rand Institute’s ‘Online Campus’ has just gone live, a major new educational initiative promising “free courses on Ayn Rand and her ideas in an innovative and interactive learning environment!”

That’s what it says on the label, and it’s looking pretty good.

Initial course offerings include:
•       Ayn Rand: A Writer's Life
•       Ayn Rand: Radical Thinker
•       The Ayn Rand Bookshelf
•       Anthem
•       We the Living
•       The Fountainhead
•       Moral Virtue
•       Philosophy of Education
•       Philosophy: Who Needs It

New courses will be added regularly—the first release post-launch will be an in-depth look at the novel Atlas Shrugged, taught by Dr. Onkar Ghate and appearing in February. The full, public launch of ARI Campus is slated for September of 2012.

Looks like a great online resource!

Organon Architecture’s 2011 Top 10

2012-01-11T12:30:00.001+13:00

Yes, I know it’s 2012 already. But 2011 ended so busy for me I didn’t have a chance to do my semi-regular Top 10—i.e., in the spirit of Epic Beer’s own Top 10, listing the top ten things we achieved at Organon Architecture did in 2011:

1. New offices!
2011 started badly for me, for reasons many of you know. But productivity picked up in July when I opened my new office on Dominion Road—about halfway down, as it happens. Safely sequestered therein, we’ve produced a mountain of work and lots to celebrate.
And being about 400m from Eden Park, it wasn’t a bad location from which to enjoy the World Cup!

2. ‘Art & Architecture Afternoons’
The new offices, corner of Valley and Dominion Rd, now play host to informal Friday afternoon ‘Art & Architecture Afternoons’ from 4pm every Friday. The “art” part is supplied chiefly by local artists Jasmine Kamante and Jesper Sundwall, whose studio is fortuitously just up the road, and between us we have a few plans for presentations in 2012—starting on the 20th. Feel free to drop in and chat.

3. Orders!
Order books are still full, with some exciting new work and renovations going on—and not every architecture practice can say that this year!

4. Bungalows!
In the words of Paul Litterick, “Man is born free, yet everywhere is in villas.” And this year again, no one’s asked me to renovate a villa—folk are getting more excited instead by California Bungalows. Good news, and a very healthy trend indeed. That said, there was one reluctant sale by a client of a very special California Bungalow (right)—news made better by the sale price which more than covered our fairly extensive renovations.

5. Kebyar
I’m still really enjoying my Kebyar membership, which keeps me in touch with like-minded architects overseas (since there’s few enough of them locally).

6. Home Show
Thanks to my sister, a landscape architect, I was persuaded to share a stand at the Whangarei Home Show—the first time I’ve tried that method of promoting the practice. It was fun, and from it came two delightful clients and the prospect of a few very interesting things emerging…

7. Topping out
I was delighted that a project first begun back in 2003 (right) is finally seeing the light of day, with topping out on the top storey all but complete in the last days of 2011. It’s all set now for completion in 2012.

8. New website
Yes, I know, I’ve been promising this for years—pretty much since the year I first cobbled it together--but this year it’s not just long, long, loong overdue (one client suggested if I don’t update it I should just unplug it) but will actually emerge.
Or so I’m promised.

9. New logo
With the move to new offices, I was persuaded by hotshot graphic designer Graham Clark from Clark Design & Marketing that I should change my logo. Quite frankly, I think what we came up with is pretty damn striking.
You can see it at the top of the page.

If you like it, give Graham a call and he’ll do something just as sharp for you.
Tell him I sent you.

10. Good Work
Not that I’m one to boast, but I think 2011 finished with good variety and some pretty good work in the bag—both renovations and new work. Here’s a small selection.

So it didn’t start too well, but in the end not a bad year at all, really.

I look forward to topping it this year.

Hope you had a good year too. Keep enjoying the good life--and don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Cheers
Peter Cresswell

[Cross-posted at my Organon Architecture blog]

Beer

2012-01-11T10:01:00.001+13:00

Horrors! I’ve gone through nearly this whole holiday period without a post on beer!

My apologies, gentle readers. Let me remedy that now.

Let me remedy that by talking about affordable beer. And “by talking about affordable beer” I mean talking about what someone else has said about affordable beer. About affordable good, tasty beer.

In fact, let me just quote that someone else, who from hereon in I will call Kevin---chiefly because that is Kevin McLellan’s name. So let’s talk about good beer value, and New Zealand’s best value beer: and Kevin’s detailed, meticulous, rigorous study of this critically important subject.

I enjoy drinking quality beer [says Kevin]. That doesn't mean that I need beer brewed by a silent Belgium monk and costs as much as a pint of saffron… I need to pay the mortgage and I need to know that the beer in my fridge is value for money.
So how do I know that I'm getting value for money? Up until now it has been calculated on-the-fly based on experience, gut-feel and some badly applied maths. I was having a bit of a slow day recently so I decided to devise the beer value formula. I had no idea how this formula would work. All I knew is that it would need to prove that Epic Pale Ale is the best value beer that money can buy in New Zealand…
I worked out a standard cost - $per/100ml – … [and] added a new column to show the Ratebeer overall score. Seeing that Epic scored 97/100 and Heineken 7/100 I knew I was onto something. Now for the formula - I simply divided the Ratebeer score by the cost. The result of this division is effectively how much quality is bought with every dollar spent.

A good start. And what he found—Hallelujah!—is at least half-a-dozen easily available, good value, tasty bottled beers to help the daily restocking of your fridge, with the aforementioned Epic Pale Ale (which took no manipulation whatsoever to achieve top spot with a score of 95.1) and Little Creatures Pale Ale, 82.4, on top spot, and Yeastie Boys Pot Kettle Black (co-brewed by former NOT PC beer columnist Stu) holding up third place with a score of 77.0.

And with shops full of Coopers’ Sparkling Ale (65.6) and Original Pale Ale, and a new local $2.50 “craft” beer hitting the shops since Kevin’s definitive, scientific, peer-reviewed study, there’s no shortage of ways to keep your fridge fully stocked.

It’s summer. So why not start your restocking this afternoon?

PS: My own beer of choice over our holiday break was fill-your-own flagons of Leigh Sawmill Pale Ale, collected regularly direct from the brewer. Good value with a score of 76.1—and, if you’re in Auckland, available in fill-your-own flagons at the Herne Bay Cellars in Jervois Road.

“Let them eat bonds!” Before they eat themselves.

2012-01-10T11:36:00.000+13:00

Despite conventional wisdom, government bonds are not a good investment. The endgame for government bonds is either default or default—either outright default or default by central bank-created inflation.

And as the Euro crisis (really a govt debt crisis) plays out, it’s clear enough that endgame is coming soon.

“The government bond market is still skating on thin ice,’ says Detlev Schlicter, and with it “the entire financial system.”

Read about it here at Detlev’s ‘Paper Money Collapse’ blog.

And learn about his thesis here, in his recent talk to London’s Adam Smith Institute, described by 'Libertarian Home’s Andy Janes as “very impressive, if terrifying.”

He argues that the present financial crisis is far from over; generally misunderstood and misrepresented, it is far from being a ‘crisis of capitalism’. Detlev traces the history of failure of paper money systems and lays out why present policies pursued by various governments and institutions are misdirected and counterproductive.

Thank Galt for warming, eh.

2012-01-10T09:00:00.001+13:00

A reader (thanks Greg) has spotted the warmists’ latest spin, trumpeted by no less than their favourite outlet the BBC.

They are now not trying to hide the decline [notes Greg]. In fact they admit that things are getting colder--but now the spin is that global warming [sic] is slowing down an ice age. This is somewhat like Obama claiming that while unemployment under his watch has sky-rocketed under his administration, it would have been worse if not for him.

So now that the warmists’ religion is collapsing under patently transparent nonsense, what’s going to replace it as the chief weapon in the anti-industrialists armory?

Guess.

‘Body and Soul’

2012-01-10T07:50:00.000+13:00

Could this be the greatest jazz solo of all time? The good folks at Jazz on the Tube sure think so.

Coleman Hawkins, ‘Body and Soul’

Ron Paul

2012-01-09T13:01:00.000+13:00

I’ve had to discuss Ron Paul frequently over the holiday break. Not because I brought him up. For some reason, friends wanted to talk about him. Here below are links saying a little of what I tried to say about him in response, summarised by those more knowledgeable about the subject than I.

Short summary? Ron Paul is not a libertarian. He

rejects the Jeffersonian principle of a "wall of separation" between religion and government;
is anti-immigration (“to the right of most Republicans” says Vodka Pundit Steve Green);
is anti-abortion (Paul describes "the rights of unborn people” [sic] as “the greatest moral issue of our time," and "abortion on demand" as "the ultimate State tyranny");
“plays footsie” with racists and kooks;
is a hypocritical supporter of pork-barrel earmarks for his own congressional district;
is opposed to free-trade agreements (like NAFTA); and
is appallingly “blame-America-first” on foreign policy.

In addition, he is a Creationist—a point of view disqualifying the holder from intelligent discussion of, well, virtually everything.

In short, then, and to repeat, he is not a libertarian: he is a “states-rights” religious conservative, with all the intellectual confusion that implies—yet his growing public prominence as a self-proclaimed spokesman for the ideas of liberty gives grave concern for the fate of those ideas.

And you, sir, are no libertarian – ABC (Australia): T H E D R U M
The Great Society's Great Defender –Mark Steyn, W E E K L Y S T A N D A R D
Ron Paul Doesn’t Want To Talk About His Newsletters Anymore – O U T S I D E T H E B E L T W A Y
"...his views on foreign policy alone singularly disqualify him to run as president."
– Michael Moeller, S O L O
On Foreign Policy, Our Founders vs. Ron Paul – W O R D S B Y W O O D S
"Ron Paul defended the states' rights view..." – Michael Moeller, S O L O
Ron Paul's advocacy of "states' rights" extends to more than just social issues
– Michael Moeller, S O L O
Kook Paul – Gregster, S O L O
Ron Paul on Foreign Policy - Diana Hsieh, N O O D L E F O O D
Ron Paul on Israel - - Diana Hsieh, N O O D L E F O O D
Videos: An Early Look at the Election and GOP Candidates - Diana Hsieh, N O O D L E F O O D

UPDATE: Clearly, Ron Paul is far from the secular freedom lover many would like him to be. Argues Gus Van Horn,

he functions as a Trojan horse for the religious right even as he pretends that personal freedom is as obviously good and uncontroversial as breathing on a regular basis. (Personal freedom is good, but this is neither obvious nor uncontroversial.)

So what then about his claims to being a lover of freedom? What exactly is Paul's vision of "a free society"? On that subject, this Open Letter to Ron Paul is an eye-opener, written by one Duncan Bayne in response to this article by Paul criticising the 1993 BATF & FBI assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco. Says Bayne:

While I agreed with many of your criticisms of BATF and FBI tactics & strategy, it became apparent to me that your article was not primarily concerned with those criticisms: the main thrust of the article was to whitewash the monstrous evil committed by David Koresh and his followers. You wrote:
‘The community of faith that once lived at Mount Carmel in Waco, Texas, believed the promise of a free society.’
“This is the "community of faith" that sacrificed twelve-year old girls to Koresh so they could serve as his 'wives' - some of whom bore his children. If that level of barbarism - a religious community complicit in the slavery and rape of young girls - represents anything approaching your idea of what is a ‘free society,’ then I don't want you having any say in how society operates.

Too true. There is no need to defend the barbarism and paedophilia of Koresh’s supporters in order to attack the BATF and FBI goons who killed them. Yet Paul is happy to embrace the barbarity, and in doing so demonstrates the Objectivist argument against irrational libertarianism. Without a rational philosophical foundation, argue Objectivists, without a decent "philosophical infrastructure," politics becomes a dangerous pursuit of empty words, floating abstractions, and range-of-the-moment compromises. How can you call libertarians allies in freedom, ask hardcore Objectivists, when libertarians such as Ron Paul can't even agree on what the word "freedom" stands for? And how can you call someone an advocate of freedom at all when their vision of a "free society" apparently includes the the freedom to rape twelve-year-old girls?

It's clear, just as Van Horn charges, that freedom is neither obvious nor uncontroversial. In fact, personal freedom can and does (and must) be predicated on the base of reason, not of subjective whim. As Michael Berliner points out in this article on Ayn Rand,

She understood that to defend the individual she must penetrate to the root: his need to use reason to survive. ‘I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism,’ she wrote in 1971, ‘but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.’ This radical view put her at odds with conservatives, whom she vilified for their attempts to base capitalism on faith and altruism. Advocating a government to protect the individual's right to his property, she was not a liberal (or an anarchist). Advocating the indispensability of philosophy, she was not a libertarian.

The point could hardly be clearer. Van Horn concludes:

The fight for freedom is, as I have pointed out, a war on two fronts: the political and the intellectual. Of the two, the intellectual is the more fundamental, and cannot be lost. The longer enemies to freedom like Ron Paul can masquerade as friends, the longer it will take for people to become aware of the actual requirements for a society that respects individual rights.

That he can masquerade as a friend to freedom at all demonstrates how far the intellectual battle for freedom still needs to travel.

Because the harsh fact about Ron Paul is that on the few occasions he takes off the tinfoil hat and talks Austrian he’s damn good. But when he’s wearing the tinfoil headwear, as he does the rest of the time, he’s rotten.

Why Wikipedia doesn’t make money

2012-01-09T09:12:00.001+13:00

Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales explains why making money isn’t his primary goal—to the surprise of those who think it should be for an Objectivist.

[Hat tip Diana Hsieh, who Jimmy quotes in his Ford Hall Forum speech]

Welcome back

2012-01-09T09:02:00.001+13:00

Welcome back everyone.

How was your holiday?

Mine was a beauty.

And thanks for asking.

So what’s been happening with everyone?

“Balloon Race,” by David Knowles

2012-01-09T08:21:00.000+13:00

“Balloon Race” by Wairarapa artist David Knowles is posted this morning to mark the tragic accident over the weekend—and to remind us of the spirit that animates the sport, and produces this sort of spectacle.

Let the tragedy not destroy it.

Your pocket guide to festive drinking

2011-12-20T15:32:00.000+13:00

Observed Alexander Pope, “Drink is the feast of reason and the flow of soul.”

So drink sensibly this Festive Season, i.e., start early, then lash yourself securely to a bar.

And tell the wowsers to go to hell. It’s what hell was invented for. For wowsers. For wowsers who try to deliver “Good News” like this:

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife,
and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he
cannot be my disciple.--[Luke 14:26]

Because even if this was his birthday (which it isn’t) that’s not someone whose disciple you’d want to be, or something you’d want to celebrate. Ever.

At Christmas time we don't say "sacrifice and repent," we say enjoy yourself and thrive! Especially enjoyable when you know Islamic "scholars" find "saying Merry Christmas worse than fornication or killing someone." So hold your drinks high, shout loudly “Merry Christmas and a Salacious Saturnalia,” and celebrate the Season as a time of unabashed earthly joy.

Because it’s entirely self-evident that flourishing and being happy about it is good for you.

So as Tom Waits once said, “Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends.” Here’s the Champagne Song from Die Fledermaus to get you started with the appropriate toast: “It’s not how much you drink, it’s what you drink. A toast to King Champagne!” (Kiri’s toast starts about 2:00 in.)

And here’s the drinking song from Verdi’s Otello, sung by an unusually ebullient bunch of Laplanders*. The loose translation is ‘Wet Your Throat,’ but you hardly need an ace translator to work out what they’re singing about.

* Well, almost. Finland is pretty close, right?

Books, books, books, books…

2011-12-20T10:03:00.001+13:00

I’ve been trying to limit my pile of holiday reading this year.

I thought reading books on my iPad would help reduce the stack. But I suspect I’ve overdone it again.

So what’s on your holiday reading list this year?

Vaclav Havel (1936-2011)

2011-12-19T10:47:00.001+13:00

THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT HISTORICAL event of the last fifty years was the collapse of Communism, and with it the liberation of hundreds of millions from slavery.

One of the most important figureheads in that fall died last night: Vaclav Havel, dissident playwright, Velvet Revolutionary, the first president of the free Czechoslovakia he and his colleagues wrested from the Soviets, and the man who successfully guided the Czech Republic from communism to relative freedom.

His story is as inspiring as his understanding that authoritarianism can never last; that the collapse was inevitable; that authoritarian rule is inevitably the victim of a "lethal principle" that will always destroy it:

"Life cannot be destroyed for good," he wrote in a widely-circulated samizdat letter in the last years of Soviet rule. “A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy crust of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undermining it. It may be a long process, but one day it has to happen: the crust can no longer hold and starts to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something new and unique."

HAVEL—PLAYWRIGHT, POET, MAGAZINE editor and a dissident against totalitarian rule since the mid-sixties—led the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ which overturned the Communist government of Czechoslovakia, and remained as President of the new country until he retired.

The Velvet Revolution was a revolution of ideas - ideas that in the end saw the Communists concede rather than confront them; Havel won with his principles, which he developed in his many battles to beat the Bolshevik bastards back. He and his supporters were regarded as a major threat by the communists not because of their numbers, but because of what they said. More particularly, the communist government knew that when Havel said something, HE MEANT IT.

Vaclav Havel had no intention of ending up in his country’s presidential palace; it was his fight to keep his own magazine, Tvar, alive and un-banned that got him involved in politics, but the way he fought eventually brought down a government. His fight was based on ideas, it was based on principle, and it required an almost ineffable patience.

Havel learnt a crucial lesson in the power of principle very early in his career. He learned to never rely on the “moderates”—that it is these creatures who are your biggest enemies; it is them who will knife you in the back while smiling. He learned this when he was sold out by his own fellow writers and imprisoned; sold out by souls so cowardly, so in thrall to the Soviets - so craven - that they would rather die on their knees than even give thought to the notion of standing up for their own freedom. Havel and his supporters learnt then that if they were ever to achieve anything they must stand up for themselves. They did, and eventually they won their country.

Two years before the ‘Velvet Revolution’ there were no outward signs that his years of struggle would ever have any tangible effect, yet Havel remained adamant that the struggle was worth it; he was convinced that totalitarianism contained within it a ‘lethal principle’ which would eventually kill it. He described this principle in a illicit ‘samizdat’ essay widely-circulated in the desolate years after the Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring

[Havel] described a society governed by fear - not the cold, pit-of-the-stomach terror that Stalin had once spread throughout his empire, but a dull, existential fear that seeped into every crack and crevice of daily life and made one think twice about everything one said and did.
The essay was, in fact, a state of the union message, and it contained an unforgettable metaphor: the regime, the author said, was "entropic," a force that was gradually reducing the vital energy, diversity, and unpredictability of Czechoslovak society to a state of dull, inert uniformity. And the letter also contained a remarkable prediction: that sooner or later, this regime would become the victim of its own "lethal principle." "Life cannot be destroyed for good," [Havel] wrote. “A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy crust of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undermining it. It may be a long process, but one day it has to happen: the crust can no longer hold and starts to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something new and unique." *

"Life cannot be destroyed for good." Fifteen years after Havel wrote those words in a samizdat pamphlet those streamlets burst forth, sweeping away communist regimes from Berlin to Bucharest and carrying the playwright Vaclav Havel from the ghetto of dissent to the world stage. Those extraordinary events of 1990 enrich that letter with new levels of meaning.

HAVEL FIRST BECAME INVOLVED in political resistance in the mid-sixties in his efforts simply to survive; to keep alive his small literary magazine, Tvar, in the face of pressure from the Communist Party to close it down. In resisting, he discovered what he called "a new model of behaviour":

When arguing with a center of power, don't get sidetracked into vague [nitpicking] debates about who is right or wrong; fight for specific, concrete things, and be prepared to stick to your guns to the end.

That model of principled behaviour served him well:

On Tuesday morning, November 28,1989, Havel led a delegation of the Civic Forum to negotiate with the Communist- dominated government. The issue was not a magazine this time, it was the country. Ten days before that, the "Velvet Revolution" had been set in motion by a student demonstration in Prague; that was followed by a week of massive demonstrations culminating. in a general strike on Monday, November 27. Early Tuesday afternoon, following the meeting, the government announced that it had agreed to write the leading role of the Communist Party out of the constitution. We do not know what was said at the meeting, but I don't think we would be far wrong to assume that the discussion stayed very close to the concrete issue of amending the constitution, and that the Civic Forum delegation stuck to their guns. A principle that Havel and his colleagues had learned decades before now stood them in good stead.

By the end of that month, Havel was President of the country in a process that readers of Atlas Shrugged could easily recognise. The battle begun simply to save Havel’s magazine had ended by saving the people of Czechoslovakia.

Yet he recounts how he began this battle simply by resisting pressure from his local 'Writers Union' to 'persuade' him to close the magazine. He quickly realised that his real enemies were not the Soviets. His real enemies were all those who Lenin had once called his ‘useful idiots’ – all those like the Writers' Union who are prepared to compromise with their enemies and to sell out their friends - supposed allies who, in accepting servitude for themselves, happily impose it on others.

In the end though and despite his resistance, [the banning of Tvar] became more and more inevitable. The Central Committee of the Union had to make it appear as though they were doing it on their own initiative, but in fact they were ordered to do it by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Left to themselves, the anti-dogmatics [as the wowsers were descriptively called] would not have banned us, but we weren't worth a rebellion inside the party so they did it anyway. Of course they explained it to us in their traditional 'anti-dogmatic' way: The struggle for great things - the general liberalization of conditions - demands minor compromises in things that are less important . It would not be tactical to risk an open conflict over Tvar, because there is bigger game at stake [etc., etc]. … This is [the very] model of self-destructive politics. …

We argued that the best way to liberalize conditions is to be uncompromising precisely in those "minor" and "unimportant details, such as the publication of this or that book or this or that little magazine. Our argument was not heard. Nevertheless, a kind of hangover from this experience remained in anti-dogmatic circles. And it began to spread rapidly when we refused to accept their ultimatum silently, and refused to accept the rules of the game as they had played it until then.

Havel and his Tvar team mobilised to defend themselves, organising petitions and meetings amongst their fellow writers, refusing - in Ayn Rand's words - to accept the sanction of the victim. Used to more compliant behaviour from their victims, this unusually principled resistance got under the skin of the Central Committee:

I think our efforts had a great importance, one that has not been recognized, even today. We introduced a new model of behaviour: don't get involved in diffuse … polemics with the centre, to whom numerous concrete causes are always being sacrificed; fight "only" for those concrete causes, and be prepared to fight for them unswervingly, to the end. In other words, don't get mixed up in back-room wheeling and dealing, but play an open game.

I think in this sense we taught our anti-dogmatic colleagues a rather important lesson; … They realized that many of their former methods were hopelessly out of date, that a new and fresher wind was blowing, that there were people - and there would obviously be more and more of them - who would not be stopped in their tracks by the argument that a concrete evil was necessary in the name of an abstract good. In short, I think that Tvar had an educational effect on the anti-dogmatic members of the writing community. Suddenly here was the party taking us, a handful of fellows, more seriously than the entire anti-dogmatic "front." And they were taking us more seriously for the simple reason that we could not be so easily talked out of our convictions.

In 1969, Havel wrote to Alexander Dubcek, the face of the brief 'Prague Spring' before it was crushed by the Soviets, pleading with him to leave political life rather than let himself be used as a propaganda pawn. Dubcek did leave office. Reflecting on that letter seventeen years later, Havel wrote:

I had written that even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance. In this I found, to my own surprise, the very same idea that, having been discovered by many people at the same time, stood behind the birth of Charter 77 and which to this day I am trying - in relation to the Charter and our "dissident activities" - to develop and explain and, in various ways, make more precise.

In an interview two years before the Soviets fell, when from the outside things still seemed apparently hopeless, Havel reflected that years of seemingly hopeless resistance had indeed produced effects, though not ones that everyone would notice :

[Our various actions], of course, have wider consequences. Today far more is possible. Think of this: hundreds of people today are doing things that not a single one of them would have dared to do at the beginning of the seventies. We are now living in a truly new and different situation. This is not because the government has become more tolerant; it has simply had to get used o the new situation. It has had to yield to continuing pressure from below, which means pressure from all those apparently suicidal or exhibitionistic civic acts. People who are used to seeing society only 'from above" tend to be impatient. They want to see immediate results. Anything that does not produce immediate results seems foolish. They don't have a lot of sympathy for acts which can only be [practically] evaluated years after they take place, which are motivated by moral factors, and which therefore run the risk of never accomplishing anything. …

Unfortunately, we live in conditions where improvement is often achieved [only] by actions that risk remaining forever in the memory of humanity [as] an exhibitionistic act of desperate people.

Havel, reflects that it is the sum total of these many 'hopeless acts' of 'exhibitionism' that in the end force change; that only by not lying down in the face of an apparently hopeless struggle are these crucial and very tangible victories achieved:

To many outside observers [the many small victories of principled action] may seem insignificant. Where are your ten-million strong trade unions? they may ask. Where are your members of parliament? Why does [the President] not negotiate with you? Why is the government not considering your proposals and acting on them? But for someone from here who is not completely indifferent, these [small signs] are far from insignificant changes; they are the main promise of the future, since he has long ago learned not to expect it from anywhere else.

I can't resist concluding with a question of my own. Isn't the reward of all those small but hopeful signs of movement this deep, inner hope that is not dependent on prognoses, and which was the primordial point of departure in this unequal struggle? Would so many of those small hopes have "come out" if there had not been this great hope "within," this hope without which it is impossible to live in dignity and meaning, much less find the will for the "hopeless enterprise" which stands at the beginning of most good things.

Freedom lovers everywhere might reflect on Havel’s words, and his experience. We must sometimes seem to be such an apparently "hopeless enterprise" as he describes, engaged in a doomed an unequal struggle.

But we can learn from Havel that such an apparently "hopeless enterprise" can eventually ignite success. As he suggests, if our own actions are to ever become "the beginning of … good things" we must always let our hope "within" motivate us to action.

We must realise we ourselves are the change we hope to make in the world; that our ostensive enemies are really only paper tigers supported by nothing but lies; that our real enemies are the inertia of thousands with heads full of mush, and our so-called friends with nothing in their souls but marshmallow.

Havel himself had to spend four years in jail before his battle was won. Little wonder. Power does not concede without a struggle. As former American slave Frederick Douglass said, struggling for freedom in the century before Havel’s: " The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! "

The struggle for freedom goes on, its path lit by heroes like Douglass and Havel.

We mourn the loss of Vaclav Havel, and celebrate his life.

* * * *

* Quotes are from the book Disturbing the Peace.

Quote of the day: Christopher Hitchens, (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011)

2011-12-17T09:33:00.001+13:00

"My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to
have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere,
any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this
can pick a number, get in line and kiss my ass.”
- Christopher Hitchens, Free Speech Debate at University of Toronto, 2006

Have a Salacious Saturnalia!

2011-12-16T10:29:00.001+13:00

Those cunning secularists, perverting the “reason for the season”! We hear the same complaints every year, from Fox News to the Vatican, that "Christ is being taken out of Christmas," about the "War against Christmas" (TM) -- about the "widespread revolt" against "Christian values” and “Christian symbols” –about the prevalence of "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas" greetings…

Here's what I say to those complainers: Get a life. Learn some history. And try a Christmas joke:

Q: "What's the difference between God and Santa Claus?"
A: "There is no God."

Ha ha ha. The harsh fact is, customers, Christ was never even in Christmas --except in fiction and by order of the first Popes.

None of the four gospels gives any notion of what time of year (let alone in what year) the supposed Nativity occurred. Only two gospels mention the virginity of Mary and only one has any mention of a "manger" [i.e., a trough]. Nowhere is there any record of a "stable." Wise men and shepherds are likewise very unevenly distributed throughout the discrepant accounts. So that the placement of a creche surrounded by a motley crew of humans and animals has no more Scriptural warrant than does The Life of Brian. Moreover, the erection of this exhibit near the turn of the year is actually a placation of the old Norse gods of the winter solstice - or "Yule" as the pre-Christians sometimes called it.
I myself [says Christopher Hitchens] repose no faith in any man-made text or made-man redeemer, so when it's Christmas I say "Merry Christmas" with a clear conscience, as I respect Ramadan and Passover, and also because "Happy Holidays" is so thin and insipid. I don't mind if Christians honor the moment by displaying, and singing about, reindeer (a hard species to find in the greater Jerusalem/Bethlehem area). Same for the pine and fir trees that also don't grow in Palestine. I wish everybody joy of it.

And so do I. I just wish the Christians would leave off bashing us over the head with their myth—and their values.

Jesus wasn't even born in December, let alone at Christmas time: he was born in July* -- which makes him a cancer**. Just like religion.

And God doesn’t even like Christmas trees, for Chrissake!

Historians themselves know the "reason for the season," and it's not because of anything that happened away in a stable at a time of a non-existent census. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury knows the truth, conceding a couple of Christmasses ago that the Christmas story and the Three Wise Men - the whole Nativity thing itself -- is all just "a legend."

And I like myths and legends. I’m even happier when we remember they’re stories, not historical accounts.

Fact is, 'Christmas' itself was originally not even a Christian festival at all. The celebration we now all enjoy was originally the lusty pagan festival to celebrate the winter solstice, the festival that eventually became the Roman Saturnalia (right). This time of year in the northern hemisphere (from whence these traditions started) is when days stopped getting darker and darker, and started once again to lengthen. This was a time of the year for optimism. The end of the hardest part of the year was in sight (particularly important up in Lapland, the pagan home of the Norsemen where all-day darkness was the winter rule), and food stocks would soon be replenished.

All this was something worth celebrating with enthusiasm, with gusto and with plenty of food and drink and pleasures of the flesh -- and if those Norse sagas tell us anything, they tell us those pagans knew a thing or two about that sort of celebration! They celebrated a truly Salacious Saturnalia.

One popular celebration involved having a chap put on the horns and skin of the dead animal being roasted in the fire (worn with the fur side inside and the blood-red side outside ), and giving out gifts of food to revellers. This guy represented Satan, and the revellers celebrated beating him back for another year by making him a figure of fun (I swear, I'm not making this up). Observant readers will spot that the gift-giving and the fur-lined red outfit (and even the name, almost) are still with us in the form of Santa. So Happy Satanmas, Santa!

SUCH WERE THE celebrations of the past. But the Dark Age Christian do-gooders didn’t like the pagan revels. Instead of bacchanalia, these ghouls of the graveyard wanted instead to talk about suffering and their sores, and to spread the misery of their religion worldwide; instead of throwing themselves into such lewd and lusty revels, they thought everyone should be sitting at home mortifying their flesh – and very soon they hit upon a solution: first they stole the festivals, and then they sanitised them. Instead of lusty revels with Satan and mistletoe, we got insipid nonsense around a manger along with Magi, stars and shepherds dreamed up almost out of whole cloth. (Just think, the first 'Grinch' who stole Christmas was really a Pope!)

So given this actual history, it's somewhat churlish of today's sanitised saints of sobriety to be complaining now about history reasserting itself and folk claiming Christmas back for their revels.

BECAUSE THE VERY BEST OF Christmas is still very much pagan, thank Odin. The mistletoe, the trees, and the presents; the drinking and eating and all the red-blooded celebrations; the gift-giving, the trees and the decorations; the eating and the singing; the whole full-blooded, rip-roaring, free-wheeling, overwhelming, benevolent materialism of the holiday -- all of it all fun, and all of it fully, one-hundred percent pagan. Says Leonard Peikoff in 'Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial', the festival is "an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life." I'll drink to all that, and then I'll come back right back up again for seconds. Ayn Rand sums it up for mine, rather more benevolently than my brief introduction might have led you to expect:

“The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men—a frame of mind which is not the exclusive property (though it is supposed to be part, but is a largely unobserved part) of the Christian religion.
The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: ‘Merry Christmas’—not ‘Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance....
“The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying is good for business and good for the country’s economy; but, more importantly in this context, it stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decoration put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.

And so say all of us. I wish you all, wherever you are a Cool Yule, a Salacious Saturnalia, and a very Happy Christmas.

And while I’ll be posting occasionally between now and next year, I’ll see you back here again to give it the full press in the New Year.

Be as good as you can be while I’m gone.***

PS: Here’s some related Hot Facts from the Hot Facts Girl. Concentrate as well as you can…

* Yes, this is simply a rhetorical flourish. Jesus' birth may have happened in March. Or in September -- or not at all -- but it certainly did not happen in December. More on that here.

** "A cancer. Like religion." Think that's harsh? You should try Landover Baptist's Bible Quizzes. Or Sam Harris's 'Atheist Manifesto.' Ouch! [Hat tip for both, good old Stephen Hicks] And, I confess, I pinched the quip from Australian comedy team The Doug Anthony All Stars.

*** Panic not, I won’t be away long. I’ll be posting occasionally over the summer break, and be back for good around the second week in January. Or so. Enjoy your holidays. I will be.

Classical realism, in NZ

2011-12-15T13:17:00.001+13:00

I’ve just been to a wonderful show by two hugely talented artists at the start of their careers, artists the like of which you thought you’d never see again.

The “show was a presentation for Angela Mackie’s ‘Art History Cathedral Lectures’ – a whole enormously valuable experience on their own. So rather than listen to me, Here’s what Angela had to say about these two talented souls:

Classical Realism – Thursday 15 December 2011

Two European artists who trained (and met!) in Florence, became engaged in Paris, and married in Auckland – Jesper Sundwall and Jasmine Kamante (center, below, talking to exhibition attendees)– are our guest artists and speakers at our last lecture of the year on Classical Realism. They will be talking to you about their rich experiences training in the Classical Tradition in modern day Europe, and the journey that led them there. In addition, a selection of their drawings and paintings will be exhibited for sale at the lecture.

Jasmine Kamante, of Persian extraction, has had a passion for drawing portraits from a very young age. She began her art studies in New Zealand with a Bachelor of Visual Arts, specialising in glass and clay sculpture. Jasmine then spent three intensive years studying classical drawing and painting techniques in ateliers in Florence and Paris. Now a classically trained artist, she specialises in figurative narratives. Jasmine currently works full time in her studio in New Zealand.
Jasmine's extensive studies of the human figure and, indeed, her own delightful personality and enquiring mind give her an empathy for her subjects which translates into accurate and honest representation of their facial expressions and body language. Her eclectic training has enabled her to blend a variety of techniques to produce exquisite work which has a sense of volume and movement.

Jesper Sundwall (above) is an artist from Stockholm, Sweden. He studied at Parsons School of Design in Paris and New York, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours in 1997. He designed for New York clients such as Rolling Stone Magazine, Sony and Korg for six years. During this time Jesper also studied at New York Art Academy. He then went on to pursue his passion for art and hone his painting and drawing skills by studying at an atelier in Florence. He now paints full time in his studio in New Zealand.
Jesper's body of work showcases carefully considered, representational still lifes and figures. His works display a sensitivity that animates even the most inorganic of subjects. With expertly placed brush strokes, he manages to capture the varying tactile qualities of different materials and textures so well that you want to reach out and touch the subject.

And, yes, these works and many more are for sale at Jasmine’s and Jesper’s websites.

An atheist Christmas?

2011-12-15T07:35:00.000+13:00

Q: Is it appropriate for an atheist to celebrate Christmas?

A: “Yes, of course…

The secular meaning of the Christmas holiday is wider than the tenets of any particular religion: it is good will toward men...
    “The charming aspect of Christmas is the fact that it expresses good will in a cheerful, happy, benevolent, non-sacrificial way. One says: ‘Merry Christmas’—not ‘Weep and Repent.’ And the good will is expressed in a material, earthly form—by giving presents to one’s friends, or by sending them cards in token of remembrance…
    “The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only ‘commercial greed’ could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.”
            - Ayn Rand

Sing Happy Christmas

2011-12-14T16:24:00.000+13:00

My favourite Christmas song, performed by my favourite…oh, shite, why don’t I just let you hear it.

This is great. Shane McGowan’s great Fairytale Of New York, sung by Christy Moore with all the poignancy and accuracy it demands—none of which will be exhibited when I and my crapulous friends sing it later tonight.

Enjoy.

And Happy Christmas.

Perigo! for Xmas

2011-12-14T15:18:00.000+13:00

Perigo!: 8.00pm on Stratos, Freeview 21 & Sky 89

I’ve just been told that over the Xmas break Stratos will be screening the Best of Perigo!, 6 favourite episodes of the Perigo! show re-screened, starting with Lindsay’s interview with the dear, departed Roger Kerr this Thursday at 8.00pm on Stratos, Sky 89, and ending with his Ayn Rand Special—about which he said, “This is it for me … I couldn’t be prouder.”

These are the shows, in the order they’ll go out:

1 - Roger Kerr
2 - Muriel Newman
3 - Don Brash 2
4 - The Mad Butcher
5 - Deborah Coddington
6 - The Ayn Rand Special

Set your telly now.

“Prepare for European default”

2011-12-14T13:50:00.000+13:00

“Prepare For a European Default.” That’s the stark message from both GMO Investments and Kyle Bass on the inevitability of Europe's demise.

Why inevitable? Because the huge need for capital and the dire dearth of it available. Capital needs are almost EUR300 billion. Short of the central bank printing money (with everything that implies) no-one is gong to risk their own capital on this rapidly opening black hole. Says Bass: “There is no saviour large enough with a magic potion of capital to stave off this unfortunate conclusion to the global debt super cycle."

Time for banks, investors and pontificators to start treating “sovereign loans,” i.e., government debt, as the risky asset class it really is, says GMO.

Here’s Bass, who made a fortune predicting previous crashes:

NOT PJ: What's the Reason for this Folly?

2011-12-14T11:32:00.000+13:00

"All I want for Christmas," says guest columnist Bernard Darnton, "is Christmas"

I wasn't one of those who bought a house near the top of the market with a hundred-percent mortgage and then extended the loan six months later to buy a bloody great big shiny new TV, so the recession (if not the Christchurch earthquake) has so far passed me by.

The worst effect of both is that austerity is still fashionable, even amongst those who aren't feeling the pinch. I had hope it would be a passing fad I could easily ignore, much as I ignore most passing fads. Not having a bloody great big shiny new TV I don't usually find out what the passing fads are until they've passed by, reached their destination, gone to the pub, and are having a lonely drink to drown their sorrows having been deserted by their followers.

Regarding the TV thing, I should add that I don't have anything against shiny expensive gadgets – Note to Santa: I quite like shiny expensive gadgets – it's just that I don't want a top notch telly when the programmes are so crap. Shite in high-definition is still shite.

The worst aspect of austerity-as-fashion-accessory is that it has invaded that stronghold of glorious consumption, Christmas. I know there are supposed to be religious reasons for Christmas – Jesus or Sol Invictus or something – but as far as I'm aware no verse in the Bible mentions the real highlight of Christmas, a fat bloke dressed as a Coke can.

This year once again our family has decided to cut back. That is, one person in our family has decided to cut back and told everyone else to comply. I certainly wasn't part of this daft decision, being merely a hanger-on by marriage. (And I only find out about this stuff after the fact. Mrs Darnton does all the present buying and associated carry-on at our place.) I don't think any of us is in financial trouble. I suspect the dig-for-England mentality is just a bit of vaguely Puritan middle-class guilt. A bit like when your mother told you to eat your dinner because people were starving in Ethiopia. Which makes as much sense as putting your coat on because it's cold at the North Pole.

We are now subject to strict present buying rules, which have been laid down by the central authority. Each participant is to buy one present, addressed to a designated recipient, up to a legislated maximum value. Excruciating Christmas morning horrors await.

The primary failure of the centrally-planned Christmas is that not everyone knows the plan. The Christmas Control Authority has been too polite to tell some people that the trimmings have been trimmed. Those without inside knowledge of how the systems works will arrive arms laden and expecting full festivities. Their generosity will be cruelly punished.

The Christmas Control Authority has also become the clearing house for problematic gift-buying decisions. Those who've been assigned a difficult relative or someone they don't know well seem to believe that a bureaucracy clever enough to make up all these rules also knows exactly what everyone wants. No. Expect resources to be misapplied to the novelty sock and amusing coffee mug industries. I'm almost praying for scorched almonds.

On the upside, the atheists are going to have a good time regardless. While the churchgoers are going to church (if they can find one here in Christchurch their God didn’t turn to rubble) the atheists will get in a two- or three-bottle head start to make the proceedings bearable, perhaps even entertaining. Without an explicit liquor ban, this will be the festive outlet of choice.

The question for next year is: will the failed experiment result in a return to laissez-faire or yet another round of regulation to correct the problems caused by the first lot. I wish you a raucous and regulation-free Christmas and hope that Santa hasn't been turned back from your place for the crime of overloading his sleigh.

Quote of the day” Paper money is …

2011-12-14T11:05:00.001+13:00

Paper [money] is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.
- Ayn Rand, from “The Money Speech” in Atlas Shrugged

The art of war, by cartoon [updated]

2011-12-14T08:49:00.000+13:00

Cartoonist John Cox explores design and the Occupiers’ feeble efforts at “change.”

Who is John Cox?

Coffee fuelled the Age of Enlightenment

2011-12-13T16:42:00.001+13:00

Who knew that when the Turks fled Vienna in the sixteenth century, the bags of strange dark beans they left behind would take over western Europe, and eventually fuel the Age of Enlightenment!

Steve Johnson, the author of The Invention of Air spells out in the video excerpt below what Stephen Hicks and I have known for some time:

When the sweet poison of the Treacherous Grape[2]
Had acted on the world a general rape; …
Coffee arrives, that grave and wholesome Liquor
That heals the stomach and makes the genius quicker.

Coffee was the Great Redeemer!

The massive, heavy body types of seventeenth-century paintings had their physiological explanation in high beer and beer-soup consumption… The insertion of coffee achieved chemically what the Protestants sought to fulfil spiritually [by] ‘drying’ up the beer-soaked bums and replacing them with ‘rationalistic, forward-looking bodies’ typical of the lean cynics of the nineteenth-century.[4]

Notes on the Eurozone crisis

2011-12-13T11:05:00.000+13:00

Guest post by Libertarian Sus

So British PM David Cameron is getting it in the neck for saying F.U. to the E.U. But what’s new?
I bring you a few excerpts from Yes Minister 30 years ago which, if they had been taken seriously, may have helped avoid the entire situation.

(Note to younger readers and Americans: Yes, Minister was a clever Brit-com in the 1980s. PM Margaret Thatcher reportedly never missed it in that it was so close to the bone. Jim Hacker, a wet, naive plodder, was a senior MP, with the odious Sir Humphrey his personal secretary, i.e., a civil servant and thus, the real political power base. It later morphed into Yes, Prime Minister when Jim became the PM which saw Sir Humphrey holding the national reins. Humphrey was fantastically vile. The EEC was the forerunner of the EU.)

This is genius:

Episode Five: The Writing on the Wall

Sir Humphrey: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it's worked so well?

Hacker: That's all ancient history, surely?

Sir Humphrey: Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing [the EEC] up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work. Now that we're inside we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased; it's just like old times.

Hacker: But surely we're all committed to the European ideal?

Sir Humphrey: [chuckles] Really, Minister.

Hacker: If not, why are we pushing for an increase in the membership?

Sir Humphrey: Well, for the same reason. It's just like the United Nations, in fact; the more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes.

Hacker: What appalling cynicism.

Sir Humphrey: Yes... We call it diplomacy, Minister.

Episode Five: The Devil You Know

Hacker: Europe is a community of nations, dedicated towards one goal.

Sir Humphrey: Oh, ha ha ha.

Hacker: May we share the joke, Humphrey?

Sir Humphrey: Oh Minister, let's look at this objectively. It is a game played for national interests, and always was. Why do you suppose we went into it?

Hacker: To strengthen the brotherhood of free Western nations.

Sir Humphrey: Oh really. We went in to screw the French by splitting them off from the Germans.

Hacker: So why did the French go into it, then?

Sir Humphrey: Well, to protect their inefficient farmers from commercial competition.

Hacker: That certainly doesn't apply to the Germans.

Sir Humphrey: No, no. They went in to cleanse themselves of genocide and apply for readmission to the human race.

Hacker: I never heard such appalling cynicism! At least the small nations didn't go into it for selfish reasons.

Sir Humphrey: Oh really? Luxembourg is in it for the perks; the capital of the EEC, all that foreign money pouring in.

Hacker: Very sensible central location.

Sir Humphrey: With the administration in Brussels and the Parliament in Strasbourg? Minister, it's like having the House of Commons in Swindon and the Civil Service in Kettering!

Sayonara Kyoto [update 4: Sayonara climate activism]

2011-12-13T09:53:00.001+13:00

After two weeks of conferencing and a couple of late nights over the weekend, delegates to the Durban Climate Conference emerged yesterday bearing … something.

Actually, nothing. Nothing at all. Well, nothing except political folk trying to spin failure as success. A “historic agreement” to meet again later.

Don’t take my word for that. Even the warmists agree. Take Greenpeace International’s head man Kumi Naidoo, for example, who says,

“Right now the global climate regime amounts to nothing more than a voluntary deal that’s put off for a decade.”

This conference was the last chance to resuscitate the Kyoto agreement before it expires next year. Which means Kyoto is now dead.

And in a decade, Kyoto will be dead, buried, and have a large granite headstone over it.

What a shame.

The biggest news to emerge from the conference was the inclusion of developing countries like China and India in agreements. But what did they agree to? They agreed to meet again later. To take part in more talks to produce another agreement to met again, where they will no doubt agree to meet and talk again.

Because neither the Chinese nor the Indian politicians want to voluntarily put the heads of their own producers in a noose. They will leave that sort of stupidity to the idiots of the west.

In other news, carbon prices hit a record low on the European exchange (the only place where you can buy this sort of hot air), trading at a record low of 6.77 euros.

And Nick Smith has been demoted from the front bench.

UPDATE 1: I endorse this comment from Julian, below:

And Canada has just invoked its legal right and pulled out of Kyoto. Are you listening Mr Key? Why are you hampering NZ business?

UPDATE 2: [Hat tip G-Man]

Don't pretend we know what causes climate change – John Robson, T O R O N T O   S U N
Not only is the Kyoto Protocol technically flawed, the so-called science behind it is utter twaddle. Never mind complicated things like non-linear mathematics or, indeed, mathematics of any sort. The alarmists can't possibly know how to predict the future of Earth's climate because they can't explain its past…
    Ask the warmers with their spuriously precise predictions of a "greenhouse effect" involving floods, famines, hurricanes a'blowin and a bad moon rising: Can you plug in known year 1000 data and have your computer model produce a Medieval War Period ? If not, why should anyone believe you can plug in year 2000 data and predict 2215 or 2875?
    It's not just the Middle Ages.…
    [Even so] should we encounter sudden temperature change, the best defence would be wealth: productive resources able to replace failed agricultural systems, energy to heat or cool ourselves to survive new climatic patterns, new irrigation or drainage systems. The worst defence would be to inflict massive harm on our economies in pursuit of environmental phantoms.
    It's not just that Kyoto couldn't stop man-made global warming if it were happening. It's that the whole process is driven by fake science.
    If they can't explain the past they can't predict the future. And if they won't discuss the past, you know they can't explain it.

Long Faces in Durban – Jack Kelly, R E A L   C L E A R   P O L I T I C S
Unseasonable cold greeted delegates to the U.N. conference on climate change in Durban,South Africa, Nov. 28. They were chilled more by the impending collapse of one of the most brazen scams in the history of the world.
    The warnings of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the world faced doom from anthropogenic (man-made) global warming were based on peer-reviewed scientific literature, the IPCC chairman claimed. But when Canadian writer Donna LaFramboise checked the 18,531 references in the 2007 report, she found 5,587 were newspaper and magazine articles written by non-experts, unpublished theses and pamphlets produced by environmental groups.
    IPCC reports supposedly were written by leading scientists. Ms. LaFromboise found many authors were graduate students selected more for political connections and "diversity" than for expertise. This explains, in part, why these reports contain so many factual errors.
    Fraud is a better explanation….
    In a review of Ms. Lafromboise's book … Judith Curry, chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, said she "feels duped" by the IPCC, which she supported until December 2009. That month someone posted on the Internet 1,000 emails in which prominent scientists discussed how to hide a decline in global temperatures, evade Freedom of Information Act requests and smear scientists who disagreed with them. The U.N. climate change conference a couple of weeks later then flopped, in part because of the flap those emails caused.
    Just in time for the Durban conference, 5,000 more emails have been leaked. In this batch, scientists admit the science supporting anthropogenic global warming is weak and depends on data manipulation.

UPDATE 3:

India Proudly Sinks the Durban Climate Change Talks – R E A S O N M A G A Z I N E
America no longer is the only villain in the climate change melodrama. Canada this week formally withdrew from the Kyoto Treaty in order to avoid being slapped with $14 billion in fines next years for failing to deliver on its promised cuts. Canada’s environmental minister Peter Kent maintains that Canada would have to resort to extreme measures, like pulling all motor vehicles from its roads and shutting heat off to every building in the country in order to meet its targets. (He blamed the Liberal Party for agreeing to the treaty “without any regard as to how it would be fulfilled.”)
This may or may not be hogwash, but with most of the major “polluters”—America, Canada, India and China—ducking and dodging, I think it is safe to start singing a requiem to a global climate change treaty. [Emphasis mine]

UPDATE 4:

The Great Global Warming Fizzle – Bret Stephens, W A L L   S T R E E T   J O U R N A L
The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.
How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject…
     Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
    As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
    This week, the conclave of global warming's cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years…
    Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.
    The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won't be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won't make a move unless the West does…
    Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent's heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.
    All this has been enough to put the Durban political agenda on hold for the time being. But religions don't die, and often thrive, when put to the political sidelines. A religion, when not physically extinguished, only dies when it loses faith in itself.
    That's where the Climategate emails come in…
    The reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren't going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn't turning green. Florida isn't going anywhere…
    Any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.

UPDATE 4:

Durban Climate Change Outcome Rubbished – Dr Richard McGrath, L I B E R T A R I A N Z
Libertarianz leader Richard McGrath today labelled freshly-demoted cabinet ministers Nick Smith and Tim Groser as "useful idiots in the farce that was recently played out in Durban, South Africa."
    "As is the norm for these Climate Change junkets, there was plenty of hot air, and - thankfully this time - little in the way of commitment to further crippling industry and productivity.”
    "The Libertarianz Party believes individual New Zealanders should be left free to respond to any perceived human influence on global temperature in their own way. They don't need failed politicians such as Smith and Groser to tell them what to do, to punish their attempts to better their lives, and to regurgitate the junk science of charlatans such as Jim Salinger and Phil Jones…
   "The Libertarianz Party calls for an end to the idiocy of the ETS, which unfairly and senselessly penalises New Zealand farmers and industry for no gain."

Reshuffle…

2011-12-13T09:22:00.001+13:00

Amongst all the commentary about yesterday’s cabinet reshuffle littering cyberspace, there is one worth reading. At Imperator Fish. It begins thus:

The King of the Gods, Zeus, yesterday announced a reshuffle of his pantheon, in an effort to freshen up his front bench.
Getting the pantheon line-up right was always going to be one of the trickier tasks facing the Father of Gods and Men, and he will have had to manage some bruised egos during the process.
One of the biggest beneficiaries is Hades, King of the Underworld. The Ruler of the Dead has been a strong performer over the last term and has been rewarded with an elevation to number four in the pecking order. Hades keeps the pits of Tartarus, but also assumes responsibility for economic development, science and innovation, tertiary education and associate finance.

Read on here.

Crikey!

2011-12-12T17:18:00.001+13:00

There once was a boy called John Banks

2011-12-12T14:44:00.000+13:00

Once upon a time there was a boy called John Banks.

When he was a very, very young boy he was in a gang with ‘Piggy’ Muldoon. He was one of Piggy’s favourites. Sometimes when Piggy would smile at him and pat him on the head. Those were the nights that John enjoyed most.

He thought back to them when he became mayor of a very small council called Auckland City.

He was mayor of a very small council, but he wasn’t content.

He wasn’t content because John didn’t want to be mayor of a very small council. A man who was one of Piggy’s favourites deserved better, he thought. And because he didn’t want to be mayor of a very small council, he borrowed a lot to make himself look bigger. It worked for Piggy, he thought. Well, for a while, anyway.

So, like Piggy, he borrowed an awful lot. He borrowed nearly one billion dollars, more than any mayor had ever borrowed before! And boy, did he and his small council have fun spending it. He felt really big, and really, really important. And people liked him, or seemed to.

Things were good.

For a while, anyway.

But John still wanted to be mayor of a big council. Of a really big council.

So when his friend Rodney amalgamated all the small Auckland councils into one big one, John knew what to do.

Unfortunately, his arch-enemy Len knew how to do it better.

So when Len did him out of the job Rodney had made for him, the job running the big council, John was really jealous. And he was especially jealous when Len said his big council was going to borrow 3.2 billion dollars, a quarter of that just to cover Johns’ debts. And he was green with envy when Len promised to crank up the debt to six billion dollars in five years time.

John was jealous, but he said nothing. He said nothing, because John had a new job. Another job. A job wearing yellow, drinking cups of tea in public, and telling people who run things they should borrow a lot less.

And no-one else wearing yellow seemed to notice what John had learned from Piggy. Or that he dribbled occasionally whenever someone mentioned Len. Or Len’s borrowing.

But at least they weren’t mentioning his.

Quote of the day: Your life belongs to … ?

2011-12-12T13:55:00.000+13:00

The left: Your life belongs to society. The right: Your
life belongs to god. Ayn Rand: Your life belongs to you.
- Yaron Brook, from his talk “Ayn Rand and
the Tea Party: A Recipe for Cultural Change”

Labour: Choosing the least worst

2011-12-12T11:25:00.001+13:00

After several weeks of their primary contest, the Labour Party caucus is about to choose a new leader.

The choice for their next Prime Minister appears to be between a blunt pencil* and a vicious braggart.

Tough choice.

But is it any worse than having to get behind a leader who thinks Smile and Wave is an economic policy?

* Thanks to Leighton Smith for the metaphor.

Watch out, there’s a (new) watchdog about [updated]

2011-12-12T10:40:00.001+13:00

The Law Commission has been dreaming up ways to “regulate” bloggers, and new ways to regulate mainstream news.

Their proposal includes a new “code,” and an “independent regulator.” “Independent” in the sense of being being an agent of government, but paid for by those it regulates. And “voluntary” in the sense of “do what we suggest, or we’ll make you.”

Naturally, the bigger bloggers are generally happy with the suggestion—in the same way and for the same reasons that bigger companies are generally happy with more regulation.

They’re happy because the more regulation there is, the more difficult it can be made for their smaller competitors.

And because they generally get to write the code.

So expect a new watchdog to be announced once the pretence at “consultation” over this is completed.

And free speech, once again, to diminish.

UPDATE: Russell Brown is less enthusiastic than the Blue Team bloggers. But still concludes

Not everyone will be comfortable with the proposals in the paper, but the Law Commission has, I think, admirably fulfilled its brief of providing a basis for discussion.
And, finally, the role of a free and robust press in a democracy is strongly and repeatedly emphasised in this discussion paper. Given that the minister who commissioned this review did not think to say so, I am particularly glad the Commission has.

What’s going on in Europe?

2011-12-12T09:47:00.001+13:00

What’s going on in Europe economically is impossible to understand without getting your head around what’s happening in Europe politically.

And it’s virtually impossible to understand what’s happening in Europe politically without having some idea of the on-going European political project: the European Union, or EU.

Because while the European Union had its beginnings in the benevolent notion that free trade would give Europe the peace it has so rarely enjoyed historically—the idea best summed up by the great Frederic Bastiat as “if goods don’t cross borders then armies will”—it has in more recent decades been more interested in regulation than in trade, and more in political union than in economic prosperity.

This is one reason that everything in Europe looks upside down economically—overspending “cured” by more spending; over-borrowing “cured” by more borrowing; debt “fixed” by the creation of more debt, and IOUs “written off” by the creation of more IOUs.

Where other countries kick cans down the road, the European Union kicks whole kegs. And this is a keg that won’t take much to explode.

So the house the European Union has built is now incredibly fragile, both economically and politically. Which is why even the relatively tepid “No"!” flung in the face of Europhiles over the weekend by British Prime Minister David Cameron was enough to give them conniptions.

If you want to start understanding why, and to understand what’s been happening in Europe politically, might I suggest you start with Liberty Scott’s excellent primer on the subject, the first part of a series:

What's going on in the EU? Part One: What's good. – L I B E R T Y S C O T T

[Hat tip Craig]

PSA: Pen-pushing Socialism Addicts

2011-12-12T09:30:00.001+13:00

The government is spending more than it takes in.

It’s spending a lot more than it takes in, at a time when it has a lot less.

It is spending a lot more at a time when it has a lot less because some alleged economists tell them this this is A Good Thing.

Because cutting costs is politically difficult when you just want to be liked.

And because cutting spending is logistically difficult when public sector unions resist every cut in spending, and go apoplectic when cuts in salaries are even contemplated. Even if a lack of cuts loses jobs.

It’s no different here in EnZed than anywhere else.

Except maybe Puerto Rico.

[Hat tip Andrew B]

Friday Morning Ramble: From the childish to the ridiculous

2011-12-09T10:55:00.001+13:00

Morning readers. Here’s a few things that interested me. They might grab you too. But first, a message from our sponsor:

To take ideas seriously means that you intend to live by, to
practice, any idea you accept as true.
- Ayn Rand

Labour’s David Parker explains how government turns $150 million into $33 million.
Reserve Generation – O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R
Dim Post rewrites classic Kiwi literature as if written by celebrated Herald columnist Shelley Bridgeman.
Shelley writes the classics - D I M P O S T
“With the demise of ACT and the disappearance from Parliament of oddballs and eccentrics like John Boscawen and Hillary Calvert, NZ First is stepping up and filling the void.” Thank goodness.
"You talkin' to me?" – I M P E R A T O R F I S H
Despite their party’s relative electoral success, not all Greens were happy campaigning on holidays swimming in rivers, pink batts for children, and jobs constructing windmills.
Back of the brain niggles – G B L O G
Surprise, surprise. Christchurch’s council did everything they could to stop Christchurch’s volunteer hero.
Civil society and earthquake recovery – O F F S E T T I N G B E H A V I O U R
Letter of the week in The Press: “Remember every time you enjoy a latte … you are lucky to have the benefits of capitalism,” begins The Press’s letter writer of the week…
In praise of capitalism – H O M E P A D D O C K
How Occupy Wall Street reduced the unemployment rate.
http://ht.ly/7NbwU
The British Industrial Revolution: A Tribute to Freedom and Human Potential.
http://bit.ly/uIy2Pn
5 Reasons Money Can Buy Happiness. [Hat tip Stephen Hicks]
5 Reasons Money Can Buy Happiness - C R A C K E D
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-money-can-buy-happiness/. A
Why stimulus fails. A case study.

Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble admits the Euro bail-out fund won't halt the Euro crisis—but sees this as too good a crisis to waste: he’s talking political union. "We can only achieve a political union if we have a crisis," Mr. Schäuble said.
Wolfgang Schäuble admits euro bail-out fund won't halt crisis - T E L E G R A P H
Wolfgang Schäuble seeing opportunity in Europe's crisis - N E W Y O R K T I M E S
“I watched the ECB announcement press conference last night. You can find it below. I recommend you watch it in full. The Q&A session at the end contains the most important parts. After watching it, I am still in shock.”
Europe’s last hope collapses - Z E R O H E D G E
It had to happen…
Hitler Hears About The Collapse Of The Eurozone … Z E R O H E D G E
Government debt, aka sovereign debt, used to be thought of as a risk-free investment. That’s one theory that’s now been thoroughly exploded by reality.
The Risk of Sovereign Debt – David Howden, M I S E S E C O N O M I C S B L O G
Keynes vs Hayek was the economic “Fight of the Century.” Yet it is said Hayek abandoned the fight after Keynes published his General Theory. Or did he?
Hayek’s Critique of The General Theory: A New View of the Debate between Hayek and Keynes
- David Sanz Bas, Q U A R T E R L Y J O U R N A L O F E C O N O M I C S
Detlev Schlicter’s well-reasoned warnings about the coming collapse of paper money have made the pages of The Guardian! Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight's economics editor (and the guy who fronted the recent LSE/BBC4 Keynes v Hayek radio show), picks Detlev Schlichter's Paper Money Collapse as one of his five economics books to give people for Christmas. [Hat tip Samizdata]
Books for giving: economics – T H E G U A R D I A N
Want to understand Detlev’s argument without buying his book? Then try this:
Peter Schiff dismantles the many economic fallacies in Obama's latest speech, ending with this important point:
"The reason the middle class is getting squeezed [and] the reason [it] is disappearing is because those freedoms that created it are also disappearing. It's because the 'simple theory' [of capitalism] has been abandoned by so many people and replaced with this nonsense that President Obama believes in, and of course the more we pursue these policies, the more people are going to leave the middle class and the more people will be impoverished." [Hat tip Objective Standard]

Here’s a link to Ross England’s winning entry in the U.S. Atlas Shrugged Essay Contest. Note to local Objectivists: Time to start organising for the local competition next year, right?
I Won!/Read Atlas Shrugged! - T H I N K T W I C E
"Who says Public Goods can't be financed without taxes? Here's 15 ways to fund roads and healthcare without forced coercion from the State. Let's be more imaginative.”
Financing of Public Goods in a Free Market Society – B L A Z I N G T R U T H
Pirate radio stations were free-market heroes, bashing down ridiculous government restrictions on radio broadcasting by taking their signal out into international waters to escape the grey ones. But what if you could do the same thing to get around ridiculous immigration restrictions?
New Startup Hopes to House Immigrants in International Waters – M O T H E R O F E X I L E S
A scientist explains in layman terms “why rather than being a refutation of factual knowledge, quantum physics is a testament to the fact that knowledge is possible, and can be obtained with certainty."
The Certainty in Quantum Physics – W I T L A B
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. Except no-one puts them away entirely. Nor should they. Here’s The Damned, and they’re playing Auckland in January.

And so are the Dresden Dolls…

And to close with something completely different, from the finale of Wagner’s opera Siegfried ( on screen around the country this weekend) here’s the dawn. And if you’re wondering why she’s sleepy, well, you would be too if you’d been awakened after an eighteen-year sleep. “Hail the Sun!”

Thanks for reading
Have a good weekend
PC.

The sound of one hand clapping

2011-12-08T16:35:00.000+13:00

Earlier this week I offered tips on how to talk like a wanker.

Today I offer you a video on how to appreciate non-music like a wanker: which is, whatever posturing nonsense is going on up there on stage, just sit there like a pseud pretending there’s really something going on.

Here’s a “concert performance” of John Cage’s famous 4’33”—a godsend if you can find it on a West Auckland jukebox, but a complete joke in a concert hall.

Watch a pair of BBC wankers talk about it, and a whole concert hall of pretentious twats who showed up specially for the occasion…

“Bloody aristocracies of industry” killing other people’s jobs

2011-12-08T13:10:00.000+13:00

Striking Maritime Union “workers” at the Ports of Auckland have sent Maersk shippers to Tauranga instead, losing Auckland workers their jobs and Ports of Auckland 52 ship calls, 82,500 containers and nearly $20m in revenue annually. “Maersk have explained to us,” said Ports of Auckland, “that the possibility of further industrial unrest has been central to their decision to shift the service to Tauranga.”

This is on top of the damage caused by the strike itself, on which Ports of Auckland has put a $300 million price tag on the disruption to trade with about 4700 containers affected, and retailers fearing Christmas stock will be stuck on the wharves.

Another striking example (yes, sorry about the pun) of what industrial relations economist W.H. Hutt observed:

Unions gain at the expense of other labour, not capital, and
the transfer reduces total output.” *

Or as Vedder & Gallaway put it in 2002:

“Unions transfer income from the unorganized to the organized, and depress total income to such a degree that even organized workers are poorer.”

Yet still the strike threats continue, the latest threatened action slated for two 24-hour periods in the days leading up to Christmas, which will hurt retailers wanting to re-stock shelves for the Boxing Day and New Year's sale.

The Maritime Union don’t care who they hurt. Their basic premises are the same as every unions has ever been:

the erroneous idea that workers own their job;
the advancement of one group of workers at the expense of all others;
the placing of the union’s interests above even that of its members…

Let’s consider these propositions.

Employees own their labour services. But they don't own their jobs. The erroneous idea that workers do own their jobs is one leg of what gives unions their power to destroy.

Workers are certainly entitled to withdraw their services when they choose, but nothing in justice gives them the right to exclude others by from replacing them. There is no right, in justice, that gives one group of employees the right to exclude others—especially not by force.

They do not own their jobs.

Yet law has been written that protects this non-existent right. It is law that advances one group at the expense of many others, and places the interests of union leaders above that of of their members—who are all too frequently called upon to help destroy the very employers, customers and supply chains on which their own prosperity depends.

Don’t get me wrong. Folk should be free to voluntary join whichever organisations they choose. That is a genuine right worth protecting. But the extent to which industrial unions have been granted legal powers to forcibly exclude others from replacing their services—to wage strike action against employers and businesses, to run pickets shutting down companies and forcibly excluding supplies, customers and replacement labour—is the extent to which governments have given unions power beyond right to damage the welfare of everyone, including their own members.

William Thompson was a colleague of Robert Owen, and a founder of so-called “scientific socialism.” Which is to say that he was no friend of business. Yet he observed that the union’s “excluding system depended on mere force and would not allow other workers to come into the market at any price…”

“Thompson can hardly be regarded as a biased witness against working-class bodies. He was, we are told, of the most kindly and gentle disposition, but when he considered the workmen’s combinations of his day he was moved to passionate condemnation of them. To him they were ‘bloody aristocracies of industry... [The] excluding system depended on mere force and would not allow other workers to come into the market at any price…It matters not,” he said in 1827, “whether that force…be the gift of law or whether it be assumed by the tradesmen in spite of the law: it is equally mere force.”
“Gains [of the unionised few] were always ‘at the expense of the equal right of the industrious to acquire skill and to exchange their labour where and how they may.’ This is the founder of scientific Socialism speaking - not an employer.” **

Antediluvian unions like the Maritime Union could not survive without the sort of “legislation beyond right” that protects their non-existent ownership of job placements. Yet today pro-union legislation remains a sacred cow—a set of destructive legal principles based on poor logic and ideological quicksand. As William Jevons pointed out in his 1883 book Methods of Social Reform and Other Papers:

Firstly. The supposed struggle with capitalists in which many Unions engage, for the purpose of raising wages, is not really a struggle of labour against capital, but of certain classes or sections of labourers against other classes or sections.
Secondly. It is a struggle in which only a few peculiarly situated trades can succeed in benefiting themselves.
Thirdly. Unions which succeed in maintaining a high rate of wages only succeed by PROTECTION—that is, by levying contributions from other classes of labourers and from the population in general.
Fourthly. Unionism as at present conducted tends therefore to aggravate the differences of wages between the several classes of operatives; it is an effort of some sections to raise themselves at the expense of others.”

“An effort of some sections to raise themselves at the expense of others.” So it is too with the minimum wage, which as Eric Crampton shows assiduously in repeated posts, raises wages for those in employment at the expense of those who aren’t, while reducing total incomes all round—yet raising the minimum wage is still a favourite of the likes of Matt McCarten’s Unite union, which is happy to impoverish those youngsters who a high minimum wage makes unemployable just so Matt McCarten can advance his own power.

Hence the reason I have no time for Matt McCarten. Or the Maritime Union.

At the end of the day what the Maritime Union leaders want at the Ports is more power and prestige for themselves. Yet for some reason those outside the Union whose incomes are reduced by their actions can still be heard offering support. They should listen to William Jevons, who concluded:

“The Unionist overlooks the fact that the cause to which he is so faithful, is only the cause of a small exclusive class; his triumph is the injury of a vastly greater number of his fellow-workmen, and regarded in this point of view, his cause is a narrow and selfish one, rather than a broad and disinterested one. The more I
admire the perseverance, the self-forgetfulness, the endurance, abstinence, and a hundred other good qualities which English workmen often display during the conduct of a great trade dispute, the more sincerely do I regret that so many good qualities should be thrown away, or rather misused, in a cause which is too often a hurtful one to their fellow-men.”

At a time when jobs are scarce, money is short and everyone is having to tighten their belt, perhaps all sides might reflect on that.

Because as these economists and social reformers remind us, the extent to which these unions and every other are successful in their successful in their demands and destructive in their means of achieving them, they harm every other group in society.

As they almost always do.

* (Paraphrased in John B. Egger’s biography of William H, Hutt, from Hutt’s 1973 book Strike Threat System: The Economic Consequences of Collective Bargaining)

* * Quoted in Hutt’s earlier book Collective Bargaining.

Last dictator standing

2011-12-08T10:49:00.000+13:00

An ad for chicken, yes, chicken, that you can enjoy over and over again.

Or you could, if armed chums of the featured dictator hadn’t started threatening the chicken seller if they didn’t drop the ad.

Arseholes.

At least there’s more on YouTube.

[Hat tip Karen B.]

Health, wealth and happiness

2011-12-08T09:59:00.001+13:00

“I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love.”
- The Beatles

Money may not buy you love, although careful observation suggests it doesn’t seem to hurt your chances, but it certainly does buy you good health and better life expectancy:

Click to enlarge.

Prosperity is a good thing. Would you trade up to five years of your life for less of it?

[Chart by Gapminder, Hat tip Stephen Hicks.]

Office drinking

2011-12-08T08:50:00.000+13:00

Since office Xmas party time is almost here again, here’s a handy drinking guide for your next office Xmas party, including tips to adjust your intake. For example, if:

• Your immediate boss is drunk enough to be slurring his or her speech. +1 drink
• There is no real food at the party. -2 drinks
• You have a meeting the next morning before 10 a.m. -1 drink
• There are shareholders at the party. -1 drink for each one you'll have to meet
• You have a crush on someone at the office, and either they, or you, is married. Have zero drinks — trust me
• You have a crush on someone at the office and you are both single. +1 drink, and make sure you don't have anything in your teeth
• Wrestling of any kind breaks out among co-workers. +3 drinks
• That intern actually does have some pretty good weed. +1 joint

In the end, what you really want to do is let yourself have a good time, while keeping in mind that things can get out of hand much more easily than you might think. But if they do, it's not like ripping off your shirt and singing ABBA to your boss is the end of the world, right? Right?

More handy Xmas hints soon.

Including good places to hide the office bottle.

Now this is funny…

2011-12-07T20:10:00.000+13:00

[Hat tip Marginal Revolution]

We are the 99%

2011-12-07T16:34:00.000+13:00

[Hat tip Curt Holmes]

Inequality, according to the OECD [updated]

2011-12-07T11:55:00.000+13:00

SPEAKING FROM PARIS, PROBABLY between bites of foie gras, the OECD has sniffily suggested that the rich-poor gap widened in the period between the mid-eighties and the mid-nineties, and have stayed that way ever since.

People’s incomes became less equal. That should be no surprise.

It should be no surprise because as folk get wealthier, the gap between higher incomes and lower incomes do become larger. Transplant Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and J.K Rowling to New Zealand, and overnight you raise the “income gap.” That’s just the nature of arithmetic, I’m afraid. As the income “spread” gets wider, so-called “inequality” increases.

But the news should also be no surprise to New Zealanders in any case, because from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties Sir Robert Arsehole Muldoon treated everyone equally.

That is to say, he treated everyone like shit.

And so-called “richer” folk got treated more like shit than most, paying capital gains taxes, taxes on higher incomes at around 66%, and “ad hoc” taxes everything from caravans, to lawnmowers to backyard boats—paying and paying just to keep bankrolling Muldoon’s accelerating borrowings, by which means he pretended he was keeping the country above water.

So when Muldoon was removed and the process was begun of removing the shackles he placed on the country, it’s no wonder “income inequality” increased. Because people were finally allowed to get rich. Or at least, not so poor.

That was a good thing. Folk on lower incomes found it somewhat easier to move up to earn higher incomes; folk with good ideas found it easier to get out and make money from them; and folk with capital to invest found it easier to invest and earn money from their investments. It’s called “mobility,” a concept that describes the dynamic situation in which the folk who make up the various income “classes” are constantly churning, constantly changing, constantly being refilled—and the freer the place is, the more easy it is to take advantage of this and move yourself up the pay scales.

It’s one reason so many of this country’s richest folk got there not by breeding but but hard work, why so many are self-made men and women—with the very richest beginning his days as a panel-beater, and now able to buy and sell some of the world’s largest companies.

It’s called mobility, and it’s one-hundred times more important that an enforced equality.

SO THAT WAS WHAT happened from 1985 to 1996, the period the OECD deplores. People got freer, and were allowed to get richer. The OECD’s report writers obviously hate that sort of thing.

The bad thing was what happened afterwards. What happened afterwards was nothing, for most of the late nineties—which was bad enough since there were still many shackles that remained—and then as the new century dawned new ones were put in place. And those shackles have stopped the mobility.

By putting even moderate earners on an effective marginal tax rate of 95%, Working for Families has made it harder to increase your take-home income. By regulating businesses into the ground, governments made it harder and harder to start and run a business. By telling employers they had to pay youngsters more than they were worth, they made it harder for those youngsters to get their first foothold on the economic ladder. And by educating youngsters that not offending people is more important than being able to read and write, schools made it harder for youngsters from poorly-educated homes to make themselves employable at all.

Things got worse, not better. This was the decade in which things stood still again. People were made neither more “equal” nor less. It was just made harder to do either.

BUT HERE’S A SIMPLE fact to contemplate, and some of you might have to sit down to take it in: people are not equal.

There, I said it. People are not equal, and their “outcomes” will not be the same. People who run faster will win more gold medals. People who think more acutely will write better software. And people who look hotter will get more sex.

That’s not “injustice.” That’s just reality. And nothing any politician or report writer can do can change that. As Ayn Rand used to say,

If there were such a thing as a passion for equality (not equality de jure, but de facto), it would be obvious to its exponents that there are only two ways to achieve it: either by raising all men to the mountaintop—or by razing the mountains.

Naturally, the exponents of forced equality always end up advocating the latter. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia that translated as emptying the cities of people and killing everyone with the spark of intelligence in their eyes. In today’s political environment, it translates simply as “soak the rich.” And voices are already out there this morning calling for “the rich” to be variously soaked, stolen from and boiled in oil. (Isn’t it amazing how simple envy can make folk lose their marbles.)

AND OTHER VOICES WILL be out there soon, if they’re not out there already, talking perfumed nonsense about how they aren’t for the Procrustean Bed of enforcing equality of outcome—they, these enlightened folk, are interested only on equality of opportunity, by which they mean further violation of individual’s freedom to pursue the many opportunities that reality offers them.

Because reality has no short supply of opportunities, just as long as one is left free to follow them. Opportunities are everywhere.

"An opportunity is merely an occasion on which successful action is possible. It is a situation that an individual can take advantage of to his gain.
What needs to be realized about opportunities is, first of all, that there is no scarcity of them; they arise again and again. The second thing that needs to be understood is that what is important in connection with them and deserves to be fought for, as a matter both of justice and universal self-interest, is not that vicious absurdity “the equality of opportunity” but the freedom of opportunity.

Opportunities are everywhere. It's not the abundance of opportunities that is a problem, but the paucity of vision that is unable to see them.

So it’s not some bogus “equality of opportunity” that folk should think about and promote, it’s freedom of opportunity, by which we mean the ability to exploit the opportunities afforded by reality, without being stopped by government.

That’s what mobility is really all about.

Let’s raise everyone to the mountains.

Quote of the Day: On the “Spending Cap”

2011-12-07T11:21:00.001+13:00

John Banks’s Spending cap proposal is pseudo-conservative window
dressing.
Limiting increases in government spending to population growth
and inflation, unless the Finance Minister goes to Parliament. Isn't
that what a finance minister does whenever they present a budget?
- Stephen Berry, posting in SOLO’s “Banksification of ACT” thread

Bankers’ secret bailout [update 2]

2011-12-07T06:21:00.000+13:00

Remember TARP—the so-called “troubled assets” “relief” programme that cost US taxpayers US $700 billion? The programme that every bank "had to have", but few are now prepared to defend?

Remember those bailouts?

Guess what?

While that money was being shovelled out the front door, a whole new tranche of bailout billions was being ever-so-quietly shovelled out the back.

Did I say billions? What an I talking about.

The amount given away under the veil of secrecy was US$7.77 trillion!

That’s right, US$7.7 trillion. Secretly created by the Fed out of thin air, loaned to the banks at zero interest … and then “borrowed back” at a higher rate in order to help banks who’d stopped bothering even trying to help themselves.

US$7.7 trillion! Just given away.

Sort of puts the failed TARP programme into perspective, huh?

At times like this, you need Jon Stewart.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

[Hat tip David Henderson]

… National Australia Bank [ASX: NAB] had to borrow USD$4.5 billion from the US Federal Reserve during 2008 and 2009.
And Westpac Banking Corp [ASX: WBC] needed USD$1.09 billion in January of 2008 and 2009…
Westpac and NAB needed the loans because they were on the verge of going belly up…
For the past two years you’ve had to put up with a constant drone of commentary from the mainstream telling you that Australia’s banks are different… this bombshell from the Federal Reserve proves otherwise. And it proves we at Money Morning Australia have been right to call the Aussie banks for what they are.

UPDATE 2: The Fed has lashed out at the 'errors' in Bloomberg’s reporting of the secret bailout. The Fed says Bloomberg falsely reported that $7 trillion was created out of thin air and used to secretly bail out banks.

The Fed is correct: $7 trillion was counterfeited and handed out to the friends of Federal Reserve. The real number is not $7 trillion, it was a mammoth sixteen trillion dollars that was counterfeited and handed out to the friends of Federal Reserve. SOURCE: page 144 of this document: www.gao.gov/new.items/d11696.pdf

How to talk like a wanker [updated]

2011-12-06T15:44:00.001+13:00

Want to talk like a wanker? Then here’s a list of phrases that will help define you, the most hated buzzwords of 2011, (along with the percentage of people who said they hated it):

think outside the box (16%)
circle back (15%)
synergy (14%)
it is what it is (13%)
touch base (13%)
at the end of the day (13%)
let’s take this offline (12%)
low-hanging fruit (11%)
value-added (11%)
proactive (10%)
paradigm shift (9%)
best practice (9%)
going forward (8%)
take it to the next level (7%)
30,000-foot view (or any other multi-thousand foot view) (7%)
win-win (7%)
on the same page (7%)
leverage (6%)
a lot on my plate (6%)
robust (6%)
work smarter (5%)
impactful (4%)
rockstar (4%)
holistic (4%)
no-brainer (4%)
net-net (3%)
do whatever it takes (3%)
plus-up (2%)
flawless execution (1%)

My own top five most-hated have to include “best practice,” “wow factor,” “quality” used to smuggle in conformity, “impact” used as a verb, and “thinking outside the box” used like it means something.

All of these are like nails on a blackboard for me.

And anyone who calls for that last is, by definition, not even capable of it.

[Hat tip Geek Press]

UPDATE: More sewage:

“step change” … uughh!

“

Charter schools, what are they? [update 3]

2011-12-06T09:00:00.000+13:00

A 2007 Cato Institute podcast interview with Herb Walberg, author of book School Choice: The Findings, summarises the American Charter Schools system.

Here’s two take-home quotes from the discussion:

“competition is good for customers … to the degree to which there is choice … they put pressure on public schools to perform better.”

Hence the teacher unions coming out quickly to protect their patch.

However, it’s not all rosy in the garden. There is

“… a crowd-out effect especially in big cities, where …charter schools tend to be eating up [existing private] schools.”

And

“…in addition to that, parents who … realise their kids are not learning in the public system [remove them] … and so put less pressure on school authorities to improve.”

UPDATE 1: Libz Applaud Charter School Development

Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath said this morning he was pleasantly surprised by the deal struck between ACT and the National Party which would allow for the introduction of charter schools in New Zealand.
     “This is a significant move away from the tired and out-dated system of state schools, which are little better than juvenile prisons churning out tens of thousands of functionally illiterate youths each year.”
    “My party is particularly impressed by the adherence to principle represented in this radical reform.”
    “National have stuck true [for once] to their core values of individual freedom and choice, personal responsibility, competitive enterprise and limited government. Likewise, ACT’s founding principles state that individuals are the rightful owners of their lives and therefore have inherent rights and responsibilities; also, that the proper purpose of government is to protect such rights and not assume these responsibilities.”
    “While the two Davids flounder about in the wake of the worst election result for Labour in living memory, the two Johns have come up with a breakthrough in education that my party hails as a bold move in the right direction - toward greater ownership of education by students and their parents rather than by teachers’ unions.”
    “Let’s hope John Banks can continue to abide by ACT’s liberal values. The Libertarianz Party will cheer him when he does, and pull him up when he veers away from the path of freedom.”

UPDATE 2: More comment on Charter Schools from Eric Crampton, Charter Schools:

First, a note of caution in all the American studies - charter schools operate under regulatory constraints and vehement opposition from American teachers unions, both of which may affect observed results.
Upshot: charter schools do better, and because they're outside of collective bargaining and because they face the risk of shutting down if parents don't choose to send their kids there.
Other evidence?
- In another randomized trial, Caroline Hoxby finds substantial gains for students winning entry to charter schools in New York.
- New Orleans moved heavily towards charter schools after Katrina; outcomes improved.
And it's great fun to watch all those who rallied for MMP now whining about post-election coalition deals. You guys should have ticked the box for FPP.

UPDATE 3: Dave Guerin at the Ed Blog has a good roundup, with links to more blog commentary, of the arguments for and against charter schools.

Families Commission: A good start

2011-12-06T08:50:00.001+13:00

TVNZ News: “The Families Commission will remain but the number of commissioners will drop from four down to one…

That’s a good start.

But it’s still one too many.

The bursting of the global housing bubble is only halfway through [updated]

2011-12-06T08:46:00.001+13:00

New Zealand homes are overvalued by 25 per cent and the country is one of nine under threat of a housing bubble burst, says the Economist magazine in a report titled “House of Horrors.”

The bursting of the global housing bubble is only halfway through, says the Economist, and next in line to hear the pop will be New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.

It described the nine countries as being at the same stage as the United States towards the peak of its housing bubble. And we know how that ended up.

Here’s the Economist’s summary sheet:

Which highlights two things:

Renters are getting a much better deal than landlords; and
The Economist’s figures on incomes to home-prices for NZ is very different to those found by Demographia in their annual reports…

Perhaps the Black Caps were watching Chris Martin videos?

2011-12-05T17:38:00.001+13:00

Perhaps the Black Caps were watching Chris Martin batting videos?

That can surely be the only explanation for what happened in their second innings against Australia?

[Hat tip Tim Blair]

History of war in pictures: 1000 years of conflict in five minutes

2011-12-05T12:23:00.001+13:00

It’s not entirely accurate , but this graphic presentation of the wars and battles of the last thousand years—with explosions (not always) showing the number of casualties—is sobering viewing.

Since the birth of history, men have been finding reasons to kill other men en masse and to gain values by conquest.

They never have. They have succeeded only in destroying values, and lives.

“If men want to oppose war,” argued Ayn Rand, “it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged ‘good’ can justify it -- there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.”

Herewith, Exhibit A:

Herald: “a new liberal party seems the only viable solution”

2011-12-05T11:12:00.001+13:00

The Herald editorial writers weigh in the future for ACT and its members under John Banks, concluding “a new liberal party seems the only viable solution”:

Act's lone MP, John Banks, has been making all the right noises about the party's negotiations for a confidence and supply deal with National. There would be gains for Act in the areas of "choice, responsibility and private enterprise", he said after a second round of talks with John Key. The wording was designed to emphasise Mr Banks' affinity with Act's founding principles, and to draw attention away from his previous existence as a Cabinet minister in two National governments. He was, in effect, trying to persuade Act's dwindling number of supporters that he was one of them. It would be understandable if few were convinced…
His true colours were revealed when Dr Brash backed the decriminalisation of the personal use of cannabis. This advocacy tallied with Act's promotion of individual freedom and personal responsibility. It was to be expected from a party that embraced classic liberalism. Yet Dr Brash's initiative was rejected out of hand by Mr Banks, confirming that he was very much a social conservative.

A social conservative who only joined the party to get National across the line. Now that it has …

Act exists in name only….
     The party's brand has been badly tarnished by a succession of scandals.. Now its only MP does not fit the Act mould. There appears every reason for the supporters of its principles to call it quits and establish a new liberal party. They could do so in the knowledge that there will always be a niche constituency for their core philosophy…
    It has been suggested that Mr Banks, for his part, would fit far more snugly with the Conservative Party… If Mr Banks were to leave Act and join the Conservative Party, it would, in many ways, serve the interests of both parties…
    [In any case, as Stephen] Whittington has intimated, Act appears beyond repair. A new liberal party seems the only viable solution.

I agree. And I’m prepared to be part of it.

Why?

Because the ideas and principles that powered both Libertarianz and the ACT Party* are too important to die—as they will do under Banks. Members of both parties, me included, now need to accept that we’ve done a poor job in our respective parties of promoting those principles.

But this is the low point. We can learn from what went wrong with both parties, and from their ashes commit to doing a better job this time.

Who’s with me?

* * * *

* That powered both parties? Well, yes. The ACT Party’s principles were written by Ian Fraser, who left the ACT Party before its first election to found Libertarianz (where he expanded on them). Those principles are as important now as when he first wrote them:

that individuals are the rightful owners of their own lives and therefore have inherent rights and responsibilities; and
that the proper purpose of government is to protect such rights and not to assume such responsibilities.

If a new party can’t coalesce around those principles wHile learning the lessons of the past, there’s something wrong.

Project ACT is over, bar the shouting [updated]

2011-12-04T12:49:00.001+13:00

Former ACT candidate Stephen Whittington has now said what was obvious as soon as the good ship ACT crossed the finish line last Saturday with only party hopper John Banks inside the boat: that Project ACT is over.

On his Facebook page Mr Whittington called Mr Banks "economically ignorant and interventionist", in response to the Epsom MP's comments opening the door to Conservative Party leader Colin Craig…
"Banks' post-election comments [on Mr Craig] certainly clarify that there is no liberal future in the Act Party.”

And nor is there, as Whittington himself made clear enough in his election night speech to his own supporters:

The media will report that the ACT Party has hung on. In reality, John Banks, with the resources of the ACT Party thrown behind him in Epsom, has hung on. ACT, a liberal party now represented by an MP who has such questionable views on homosexuals and ethnic minorities, and sees it as his personal mission to suck up to National as much as possible, exists in name only…

This is hardly just Whittington’s opinion, it is the opinion of many others as well.

And it’s not just opinion: it’s a simple statement of fact.

Sure, now it can hold its caucus meetings on the back of John Banks’s Harley the ACT caucus is going to be free of all its traditional infighting. But a party-of-one represented only by a bigot and a spendthrift (an overspending mayor, he left the Auckland council nearly one billion dollars in debt) is not a natural repository for social and economic liberalism.

The ACT Party is now the Banks Party. Having failed to get a second MP into Parliament, the brand of ACT will be the brand of Banks.

Which leaves long-term ACT supporters having to ask themselves what they were in politics for, and what they are loyal to:

are they loyal to liberty and the ideas of social and economic liberalism, and they voice they thought promoted them?; or
are they simply loyal to the ACT flag, regardless of who is carrying it and what that flag flies over?

Whittington’s own answer seems to be that those loyal to liberty and the ideas of social and economic liberalism need to recognise reality and find (or make for themselves) a new home.

Which leaves feral ACT flag-flyers like Cactus Kate incensed. On her blog yesterday, she threw a tantrum. She attacked former hero Whittington (who only weeks ago she was talking up) and told former colleagues “if you don't like where ACT is headed, stay around and be constructive and work with John Banks.”

But why would you?

With the captaincy of Banks, ACT is already dead and buried. It has no unique voice, and no more fundamental reason to exist than the Peter Dunne Party.

And with Banks at the helm, ACT is already on the the rocks as a vehicle for social and economic liberalism. So the only reason to stay around and work with Banks is to support Banks. Which means to help bury both ideas.

That might be okay for ACT tribalists like Cactus who just like waving a yellow flag. But for those who got into ACT because they value freedom and responsibility and who saw ACT as the repository for those values, then the time has come to confront reality. Time to move on.

Time to find (or build) a new vehicle.

UPDATE: No surprises about Cactus’s tantrum. As a one-time deputy leader of ACT once observed,

Act sees [politics] as primitive combat, with a need to destroy a colleague's reputation to justify an otherwise inexplicable decision.

Or as I’ve often said about those in politics who eschew ideas:

…For them, politics isn’t a battle of ideas, it is a battle of warring political tribes.

Time for intelligent people to put the toxicity, tantrums and tribalism aside, and focus on the bigger goal.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: On John Banks & ACT

2011-12-03T17:09:00.001+13:00

“The likelihood of Banks transforming himself into a standard-bearer for [ACT’s] values and principles is as great as that of Ahmadinejad converting to Judaism.”
- Lindsay Perigo, from his post “The Mortification of ACT: Malpractice by Cactus”