Catallaxy Files

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.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILB0yIn6jBg[/youtube]

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.