Catallaxy Files

While reading the story of Niall Ferguson’s marriage break-up this leapt out at me.

As a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, he was once so penniless he bought a wedding ring on his credit card and sold it to a pawn shop to raise some cash.

While not encouraging this sort of thing, that is very smart and gets around the punitive rates that banks charge on cash advances.

The other quote that should be emphasised relates the Ferguson’s mistress Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

In all the years I have known Ayaan, she’s never had a boyfriend. She’s gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it’s tricky to find guys.

Yes. One would think so.
Update: Jason is onto this already.

I suspect this is supposed to be funny. This kind of fascism should neither be amusing nor admirable.

(HT: Andrew Bolt)

Update: What the ad might be saying

As long as it’s my neighbors and not me being hauled off to reeducation camps and I can still drive my cool car, I’m okay with things.

An effective ad would have been

This ad would have been awesome if an ‘67 stingray roared to life and broke through a green police barricade while the driver chomped on a cheeseburger and gave the cops the finger

In one of the great betrayals in Australia’s history, Malcolm Turnbull today abandoned any pretense of support of small government and liberalism by throwing his weight behind the considerably corrupted Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

The CPRS as originally introduced by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong was fatally flawed. But following amendments forced on Labor by Malcolm Turnbull, the CPRS was horribly distorted with an obscene potential to embed rent seeking behaviour in most companies and build up crony capitalism.

In theory an emissions trading scheme can provide a sound market-based means of capping carbon emissions. But a necessary condition is for a world-wide trading scheme. It is clear that there is no such scheme. And it is clear that there is no possibility of such over the next decade.

Under these circumstances, for Australia to introduce a perfect ETS would be silly. But to pass the amended CPRS would be lunacy. It would be considerably superior to introduce an appropriate carbon tax, which would be more efficient and less prone to corruption and rent seeking. The dead weight cost of the CPRS is magnified with relatively low emissions reductions targets – the community bears this cost. It does not deliver least cost abatement – more likely it delivers maximum cost abatement.

Better still would be to be serious and allow nuclear power – after all, two of the new generation nuclear reactors would achieve the five per cent reduction in emissions as per the target signed on by both the Government and the Opposition and would allow for greater emissions reductions in the future. The future of energy is nuclear - fission at present and eventually fusion.

On 2 October 2009, at an address to the Foreign Correspondents’ Association, Turnbull said:

… the rush to legislate before Copenhagen is completely indefensible, and I have to say genuinely to you, I find it completely baffling. The summit will be in December. The Parliament sits again in February. For the sake of sixty days why would you not want to be better informed?

Well we are now better informed. Copenhagen was a disaster for those wanting common action across nations. It proved that Turnbull’s comments were right – but applied post Copenhagen too.

Today Turnbull said

The planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues then truly catastrophic consequences will ensue, from rising sea levels to reduced water availability to more heatwaves and fires.

Such statements amount to dogma not scientific inquiry.

He further stated that

The scheme will raise a substantial amount of revenue over the period to 2020, but it is not designed—nor should it be—to raise additional net revenue for the government, as taxes do, since the funds raised by the sale of permits will be returned to compensate lower income households and assist businesses

this shows he does not understand the nature of taxation – which is to obtain resources from the general community to fund government projects. Taxes are not designed to raise additional net revenue for the government – no government seeks to maximise surpluses.

But he correctly stated

All of us in this House know that industries and businesses, attended by an army of lobbyists, are particularly persuasive and all too effective at getting their sticky fingers into the taxpayers’ pocket. Having the government pick projects for subsidy is a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale, and there will always be a temptation for projects to be selected for their political appeal.

This applies in spades to the corrupted CPRS.

When Malcolm Turnbull crosses the floor to vote in favour of the CPRS, he should keep his seat on the right side of the Speaker. Then the Prime Minister can make him the new Climate Change Minister and allow him to passionately argue the case for the CPRS which he so strongly supports.

You know that Canberra is different when a so-called Minister in the local government, Simon Corbell, can write in the Canberra Times today that

Measures to address climate change must not only be reasonably efficient, they must also be inspiring, and they must capture public imagination and empower individuals, communities and nations to make the shift to a sustainable future.

Unfortunately no, Simon. If you really believe that action must be taken to counter AGW – no matter how futile such action would be in Canberra – then efficiency must be the relevant test. What about an inspirational project that is ineffective and costly? Wouldn’t that – once understood – damage the credibility of the Government’s response to climate change?

Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Bolt links to a magnificent scene from The good, the bad and the ugly. The score was written by Ennio Morricone. Here is another of his compositions.

The relative newcomer on the block, Menzies House, has some interesting material and claims:

Founded in January 2010, Menzies House is the leading Australian blog for conservative, centre-right and libertarian thinkers and activists.

Of course we at Catallaxy claim:

Australia’s leading libertarian and centre-right blog

Perhaps we are both right: after all post-modernism allows for all opinions to be equally valid.

But what about you, dear readers, how do you rate Menzies House and Catallaxy Files? What should we do to improve the quality of this blog (now that we have a relatively settled platform following some inconvenient problems with the website).

This morning on Insiders* they were pointing out a Barnaby gaff. I had missed it during the week but Lindsay Tanner made a meal out of it on Meet the Press. Fair enough, numbers should be Joyce’s bread and butter. But Milton von Smith thinks there is much more to the story than first meets the eye.

Senator Joyce made the apparently unforgiveable error of saying that Labor’s spending over the forward estimates would be $1.4 billion, whereas the real figure is much higher: $1.4 trillion.

Labor’s attack on Senator Joyce would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic.

The attack comes from a government that has increased real spending by 18 per cent over the last two years. This is the most rapid increase in spending since that economic powerhouse ‑ Gough Whitlam ‑ was in charge of our nation’s finances.

This from a government that has promised to spend over $1 billion per day in 2012-13.

And this from a government that will run up the largest deficit in our nation’s history. Not once. Not twice. But four years in a row: they will break the previous record in each and every year between 2008-09 and 2011-12!

Tanner was saying that the Coalition frontbench is the weakest economic line-up in Australian history. Time will tell, right now that is speculative. Based on actual budget outcomes right now the weakest economics line-up is on the Treasury benches.

It is Tanner, after all, who is directly responsible for the financial wreckage that is now this nation’s public finances.

Tanner has never seen a wasteful spending program that he didn’t like. He has cut as many dollars of spending from the budget as he has released credible cost-benefit analyses of his own policies: nil.

Tanner has delivered government waste in such creative ways, on such a large scale, and on such a huge number of programs that it has to be seen to be believed. His has been such an incredibly poor effort at economic management that is unlikely to be ever matched again.

Tanner will likely never deliver a budget surplus. He’s obviously trying to replicate the last Finance Minister who achieved that dubious distinction: Kim Beazley.

Ouch! I don’t think Milton von Smith likes Tanner. But he’s right. Given the broken promises on cutting spending and the inability to balance budgets I really don’t think this government, and Tanner especially, is in any position to be pointing fingers.

* Not sure about having the token conservative sit on the couch.

One of the more incorrect arguments put forward over the last few years has been the notion that only scientists can evaluate science. Everybody else must just believe. But we all read novels – and you don’t have to be a best-selling author to know the difference between good writing and bad writing. More or less that analogy applies to most things. Milton Friedman told us that we don’t have to understand trigonometry to play pool or mechanics to drive a motor car and so on.

The other point to emphasise is the public choice arguments made by James Buchanan. He makes the argument that economists give advice as if they were advising an onmiscient, omnipotent dictator. That advice isn’t always appropriate in a democratic society that requires agreement and cooperation. The convergence of these two ideas is crunching the AGW lobby at the moment.

A lot of the people are pointing to a new BBC survey that shows that the number of people who don’t think global warming is occurring is up to 25 percent. The interesting graphic in that study is this:

“It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period,” Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News.

“The British public are sceptical about man’s contribution to climate change – and becoming more so,” he added.

“More people are now doubters than firm believers.”

So let’s unpack some of that change. Popular support for the AGW hypothesis is down 15 percent. The ‘happening but AGW unproven’ view is up only 6 percent. The last two categories that are hostile to the AGW hypothesis or AGW lobby are at 25 percent, just one percentage point lower than the ‘firm believers’ on 26 percent and probably within the margin of error.

The Canadian Globe and Mail picks up the story.

None of this is to say that global warming isn’t real, or that human activity doesn’t play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they’ve discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: “Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead.” That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.

“I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper skepticism,” says John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He is a staunch believer in man-made climate change, but he also points out the complexity of climate science. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed.” In his view, it’s time to stop circling the wagons and throw open the doors. How much the public will keep caring is another matter.

The BBC have published an essay spelling out a view of scientific practice that the AGW lobby should consider very carefully and adopt sooner rather than later.

So we have a three-fold revolution in the demands that are placed on scientific knowledge claims as they apply to investigations such as climate change:

To be warranted, knowledge must emerge from a respectful process in which science’s own internal social norms and practices are adhered to
To be validated, knowledge must also be subject to the scrutiny of an extended community of citizens who have legitimate stakes in the significance of what is being claimed
And to be empowered for use in public deliberation and policy-making, knowledge must be fully exposed to the proliferating new communication media by which such extended peer scrutiny takes place.
The opportunity that lies at the centre of these more open practices of science is to secure the gold standard of trust.

This is especially true for scientific work that informs policy making. By contrast we have not had anything like that at all. The actions of the ClimateGate crowd have very much brought the scientific endeavor into disrepute. Here is how the WSJ describe it:

Will the parade of dime-store doomsayers, high-tech patent-medicine merchants and bureaucratic grant-grubbers establish a fourth stock scientist: the cheat, the humbug, the phony? Call him Professor Marvel, who wasn’t a whiz of a wiz if ever a wiz there wasn’t.

…
Perhaps such spectacles won’t penetrate too deeply into the public consciousness. But I suspect they already have. Just this week I was chatting with a friend who, over the years, has helped her kids slog through the obligatory science-fair projects.

“The experiments never turned out the way they were supposed to, and so we were always having to fudge the results so that the projects wouldn’t be screwy. I always felt guilty about that dishonesty,” she said, “but now I feel like we were doing real science.”

The Centre for Independent Studies has a program of events includind presentations on research in progress.

The first event of the year was a report by Elise Parham on the proposed Bill of Rights. The report “Behind the Moral Curtain” is on line here and there is also an audio on the same page.

Of course everyone is in favour of rights but the question is whether rights can be engineered in a political process that has proved around the world to be a vehicle for special interests. The title of the report hints at the “trojan horse” nature of this kind of legislation that looks so good and turns out to be poisonous. Discussion on the night raised a number of horror stories of  rights gone mad.

The conclusion of the paper:

Charters of rights are another tool in the political game. A national charter of rights would represent  a variety of interests and ideologies, like any other law. It would inhibit the rights of some in favour of the rights of others, like any other law. The profoundly important difference to other laws is that a charter would be a legal trump so that its contents would be potent in effect.
The manipulability of a statutory charter makes it a dangerous political tool, particularly in the long run. There is already evidence that a range of interest groups, legal intellectuals, and others are attempting to have their interests and causes preserved by such a law. Once a charter becomes subject  to  that kind of manipulation,  it  allows  the  infuence of  those  few who get  their  rights suffcient protection to dominate the rights of everyone else.
Although a human rights charter has an  important and  luring moral undertone,  in practice it is not clear that a charter would preserve those moral imperatives as it continues to grow and change through the lobbying of various groups. In a foretelling of the potential for this change,   AHRC President Catherine Branson QC told a human rights gala dinner in July 2009:
“[W]e  should  remember  that  ensuring  the  best  protection  of  human  rights  is  an ongoing process …” Australia is at an interesting stage in what I believe is a journey towards better rights protection. Tonight there is much to celebrate, but we should also remember that we have a long way to travel yet.
When this journey gets under way, what onglomeration of interests will be dictating the way government, judges and eventually the Australian community will live?
We can only imagine.

One the differences between the Rudd government CPRS and the Abbott proposal is transparency. The Abbott proposal sets up a government clearing house so it is transparent that the taxpayer will picking up the tab for running the scheme. That hasn’t been the case with the CPRS. Until today.

The Canberra Times reports

The Australian Climate Change Regulation Authority group was formed inside the Department of Climate Change in June last year, and given $81.9 million this financial year.

Departmental papers said the authority must be ready to begin work ‘’should Parliament pass the relevant legislation later in 2009”.

The Coalition and Greens have twice blocked the bills designed to create the authority: in August and December last year.

But the organisation has continued to recruit staff and aims to employ about 200 people by June, ”to administer the operations of the proposed” authority.

So far the taxpayer has shelled out $82 million for a scheme that has been rejected twice by the Parliament and is not scheduled to begin, even if it had been approved, until July 1, 2011. I don’t know how much the Abbott clearing house would cost but I’m thinking $82 million per year for a scheme that doesn’t yet exist is a bit steep.