Catallaxy Files

Some of the commentators have noted that the budget has become a trap for Abbott who will be wedged into supporting wasteful schemes like the cash for schoolkids clunker. Others marvel at the amount of political credibility that hangs on a wafer thin “surplus” confected with smoke (but no mirrors as Henry observed).

The administration has taken the road of buying votes with handouts to low and middle income folk at the expense of the productive base that generates the jobs that could put low and  middle income people on the road to self-sufficiency.

Add on the other poison pills of Fair Work, the CO2 tax and several hundreds or maybe  thousands of  pieces of  red and green tape, and the next Government inherits a poisoned chalice.

The Government has some of the mentality of the suicide bomber. They must realise that they are going to go down the tube regardless of  bribes and spin.  They appear to hate the current Opposition, capitalism and the well-off so much that they seem to be prepared to blow up the economy out of sheer spite. Is there some other explanation?

Looks like sanity prevailed in this case with denial of a judge-only (no jury) trial for  man who feared that a jury would be prejudiced against wife-beating.

This is Peter Klein in Washington pretending to be a macroeconomist.

Peter is an Austrian at the Uni of Missouri, with a special interest in entrepreneurship. He is also a Critical Rationalist Scholar, as is Joe Agassi.

Part of his testimony.

In the remarks below I evaluate the Federal Reserve System—and the institution of central banking more generally—from the perspective of an organizational economist. While I strongly disagree with many of the key policies of the Federal Reserve Board both before and after the Financial Crisis and Great Recession, my argument does not focus on particular actions taken by this or that Chair and Board. The problem is not that the Fed has made some mistakes—perhaps addressed by restating its statutory mandate, scrutinizing its behavior more carefully, and so on—but that the very institution of a central monetary authority is inherently destabilizing and harmful to entrepreneurship and economic growth.

Jo Nova reports

Australian Taxpayer funds in 2012 are supporting around 50 projects about “climate change” or “greenhouse gases”. One David McKnight has got $95k to study how Australian governments “spin” the news.

Check out the list of “projects to watch”.

DP120104797
Rethinking climate justice in an age of adaptation: capabilities, local variation, and public deliberation

Schlosberg, Prof David; Niemeyer, Dr Simon J
Total $250,000.00
Primary FoR 1606 POLITICAL SCIENCE, The University of Sydney
Project Summary
This project aims to produce recommendations, designed by citizens and stakeholders, for climate adaptation policies in three regions of Australia. These recommendations will be based on a definition of climate justice that incorporates basic needs and resources to be protected, as identified by potentially impacted communities.

—————————

DP120100961
Sending and responding to messages about climate change: the role of emotion and morality

Hornsey, Prof Matthew J; Fielding, Dr Kelly
Total $197,302.00
Primary FoR 1701 PSYCHOLOGY,  The University of Queensland
Project Summary
Climate change represents a moral challenge to humanity, and one that elicits high levels of emotion. This project examines how emotions and morality influence how people send and receive messages about climate change, and does so with an eye to developing concrete and do-able strategies for positive change.

Also check out the piece she wrote as a rejoinder to McKnight a couple of years ago.

DAVID McKnight’s criticism of The Australian over climate change (“Sceptical writers skipped inconvenient truths”, Inquirer, December 11) makes for a good case study of Australian universities’ intellectual collapse.

Here’s a University of NSW senior research fellow in journalism who contradicts himself, fails by his own reasoning, does little research, breaks at least three laws of logic, and rests his entire argument on an assumption for which he provides no evidence.

This is a worry as well, indoctrination in the schools.

Some of my best friends have come from Melbourne, but sometimes you have to wonder about them, what is it that makes them so unique and special, like another species maybe? They say men are from Mars and women are from somewhere else, but where do  Mebourne people come from? Joe Hildebrand designed a questionnaire to explore this important frontier of the social sciences. h/t Andrew Bolt (but he is an exception).

1 You are having a dispute with your next door neighbour over four inches of fenceline. Do you:

A) Call a QC
B) Call Ray Hadley
C) Dust off the old tree poison
D) Offer them some home-made organic chutney

On a more frivolous note, John Docker wrote a book on Australian cultural elites to compare Melbourne and Sydney. He suggested that the intellectual life of Sydney was heavily influenced by Professor John Anderson at Sydney Uni from the 1930s to the 1960s and his  militant anti-communism and atheism contrasted with the heavy influence of the Catholic church and leftwingers  in Melbourne.

Yes, it really is. h/t Tim Blair.

What would a Big Budget look like?

A sharp uptick in temperature in 1977 produces the appearance of  warming “trend” over several decades. Interesting but what has CO2 got to do with it?

Even most skeptics agree that the world has been warming during the last 50 years, but there is apparently no significant underlying warming trend in 46 out of 47 years of data. Something decidedly unusual happened to the world in 1977 and we don’t know for sure what it was. The world got warmer, and the change “stuck”. But there were no extra emissions of CO2 in that year, so there is no reason to pin this to CO2.

How long will it take before people stop talking about “carbon pollution” and “the big polluters”?

Nice point by Judith on the Bolt Report. The trick of bringing expenditure forward (the money for schoolkids bribe) so it is off budget next year and keeping expenditure off the balance sheet (NBN and Green Rorts Money) would be illegal for company accounting in the private sector.

Is it my imagination or is Bruce Hawker looking a bit weary and  resigned to the inevitable this week?

Michelle Grattan is alarmed that the impending landslide will spoil the balance between the parties that is required for a healthy democracy.

Even those anxious to get rid of the Labor government should acknowledge it might be best to have a robust opposition to face an Abbott government.

Can someone explain to the likes of Grattan and Oakes that a healthy democracy needs frank and fearless reporting, “speaking truth to power”, as the saying goes? And free speech.

Pity we can’t have a cleanout of  journalists from time to time as well.

UPDATE. In the meantime we need more of this, Gerard Henderson’s Media Watchdog.

Suggested the other day that the welfare state has been sunk by debt. Actually there are two icebergs that hit this particular Titanic, the other is the burden of regulation. Look at Chris Berg’s study of  the explosion of regulations in Australia since the 1970s. He just looked at Commonwealth and State legislation but the rot runs down to the level of local councils that pile on to help the process. Read Kafka to get the flavour.

Sweden has kept afloat, so far, because they have moved some distance on deregulation. People who refer to Sweden to defend the welfare state need to look closer at the way the Swedes do it. Not that it will save them in the long run, especially as they are no longer a monocultural society. They are hanging on because so much of the tax take is churned back to people at all levels of income, and it is churned back more efficiently than the US health and welfare systems.