Catallaxy Files

This is the portrait of Stalin by Picasso published in the French literary (and Communist) newspaper Les Lettres françaises after Stalin’s death was announced on 7 March 1953. The portrait became controversial, as noted in Antony Beevor’s book Paris After the Liberation. From pages 377 and 378 of the revised (2004) Penguin edition:

When Stalin’s death was announced on Friday, 7 March 1953, [Louis] Aragon called in Pierre Daix and rattled off a shopping list of features to honour Stalin in a special issue of Les Lettres françaises — ‘an article by Joliot, one by me, an article by Courtade, another by Sadoul, one by you. We must have something by Picasso.’

Since Picasso had always refused to do a portrait of Stalin from a photograph, Daix sent a telegram to him at Vallauris saying, ‘Do whatever you want’, and signed it ‘Aragon’. Picasso’s drawing of Stalin, which depicted him as a curiously open-eyed young man, arrived at the very moment Les Lettres françaises went to press. Daix took the picture in to Aragon. He admired it and said that the party would appreciate the gesture. While it was being set into the front page, office boys and typists crowded round the picture. Everyone thought it ‘worthy of Stalin’. Daix was overjoyed to be the one who had commissioned Picasso’s first portrait of the Soviet leader and rushed it down to the printers. But a few hours later, when the edition had been run off, the mood in the building had completely changed to one of fear. Journalists from [the Communist newspaper] L’Humanité, passing by, spotted the drawing and cried out that it was unthinkable that any Communist publication should consider printing such a representation of ‘le Grand Staline’.

Pierre Daix promptly rang Aragon at his apartment; Elsa Triolet answered. She told him angrily that he was mad to have even thought of asking Picasso for such a drawing.

‘But really, Elsa,’ Daix broke in, ‘Stalin isn’t God the Father!’

‘Yes, he is, Pierre. Nobody’s going to reflect much about what this drawing of Picasso signifies. He hasn’t even deformed Stalin’s face. He’s even respected it. But he has dared to touch it. He has actually dared, Pierre, do you understand?’

Aragon rose to the occasion and took full responsibility upon himself. It was almost as if somebody had to face a court martial for treason. But for the staff of Les Lettres françaises, the worst was still to come. Daix found secretaries in tears from the insults screamed down the telephone at them by loyal Communists protesting at the sacrilege. Some even said that it portrayed Stalin as cruel and Asiatic, which was what his enemies wanted.

Many of the people mentioned were not bad. Misguided, yes, but not evil. Yet they worshipped one of the great tyrants in history. Unlike their comrades living in the Soviet Union, the Communists living in France did not have the apparatus of the State pressing them into conforming to the will and worship of Stalin. Yet they did — probably out of a combination of peer pressure and false idealism.

This reminds me of today’s proponents of extreme action on anthropogenic climate change. I think many are well meaning, but terribly misguided. Like a pack, they pounce on anyone who dares utter a heresy. Some are believers; some are opportunists — there are numerous rent-seeking opportunities in the fight against climate change.

Hopefully the movement will collapse, as did support for Stalin a few years after his demise.

Mike Smith, formerly of 2UE, was interviewed today on Sydney Radio station 2GB. Simply fantastic. Listen to the whole thing.

(HT: Gab)

Following on from yesterday’s post on the intellectual failure of the left, Nick Gruen keeps digging. Having been shown up on his “IPA sponsored Monckton” claim, he tries to the blame the CIS.

Thanks for the clarification. Someone on the CIS told me that the IPA sponsored the trip. If that’s wrong I apologise.

But Greg Lindsay puts paid to that.

Nick, we at CIS knew who brougt Monckton to Australia and it wasn’t the IPA. After all, we do read the papers and there were endless articles about the whole venture.

Ouch.

Then we have this from Gruen (emphasis added).

I was trying to find a way to put it charitably. I’m not sure of the precise words, but he didn’t challenge for a minute that Monckton was as I’d characterised him – sufficiently disreputable as to discredit anyone who went out of their way to associate themselves with him. He said that it was on another topic. From memory he’d rung me for some comment on the budget and asked me to respond to some entirely predictable thing the IPA had said. I asked him why he was quoting the IPA at all on the subject – what was their special expertise? – and he said they he was quoting their view because he wanted to quote someone to represent that side of the debate. I didn’t ask him why he didn’t just make up the quote – but I could have.

Those damn pesky journalists – actually phoning around for quotes rather than just making them up on the spot? This finding real people with opinions rather than just making it up will have to stop. If journalists did their jobs, who knows which government programs and/or backbenchers they might criticise.

There is no ecstasy to compare with the insanely intense pleasure that comes when your team wins. Last night was the most incredible finish in English football ever. My team, since the early 1970s, is the unfashionable and largely unloved Queen’s Park Rangers which I have been following since my time working as a gardener for the London Borough of Hammersmith. Where I lived, I could have followed Chelsea or Fulham instead but it was QPR then and it is QPR now. And they took part in a game that is never going to be forgotten by anyone who watched it and cared about the result.

QPR, to ensure that it stayed in the Premier League, had to win away to Manchester City. The alternative was that Bolton had to lose or draw. For Manchester City, they had to win the game to win the League. They and Manchester United were something like 19 points clear of everyone else, but they were tied with each other. If both won, MC would take the title. If MC lost or drew, it would go to MU. But if MC won, QPR would be out of the Premier League unless Bolton did the honourable thing and lost themselves. QPR therefore had to do the impossible and win away to Manchester City.

On the last weekend of the season, at midnight  to us but 3:00 pm in England, all ten games kicked off at exactly the same moment. QPR held out for half an hour but eventually City scored. But the phrase “against the run of play” was invented to describe this game. In the only attack QPR made in the entire first half, they drew level on a disastrous error by the City fullback and the half ended 1-1. Meanwhile, Bolton was ahead in its game 2-1 so QPR absolutely had to win to stay up.

In the second half around ten minutes in, the nitwit of a QPR captain, in the most important game his team would play for years, elbowed one of the City players and was sent off. So for the rest of the game, needing to hang on, it was ten v eleven. And then, in what was possibly the most unbelievable moment I may ever have witnessed in sport, QPR scored an absolutely brilliant goal and it was 1-2 where it stayed all the way until the 93rd minute. Everyone back defending, and if they got the ball down the field it would go. No Ranger player went past the half way line.

And then the game at Bolton ended and it had drawn [which ensured QPR would stay in the Premier League no matter what]!! And there were still two minutes left at MC v QPR and in those two minutes Manchester City scored the two goals they absolutely had to score if they were to win the game and the league. So whether QPR fell apart just then because they knew the Bolton result or whether they just lost because they were not as good a side and this was Manchester City’s year of destiny, who can know? But the absolute pleasure of watching this game, where QPR almost did the impossible and even when it didn’t still ended up with what it had come to town to get, has left me as happy as anything in sport has ever done.

Still more evidence of the total intellectual failure of social democracy. Don Arthur put up a post linking to a new book on Social Justice edited by Gary Johns.

The purpose of the book is to assist those wedded to the principles of social justice, of whom there are many, to understand that helping the poor is not straightforward. There are many counterintuitive schemes to help the poor; they have little to do with the right to income transfers. Indeed, most people have a non-egalitarian conception of fairness, based on merit and effort, with equality running a poor third. In these cases, social justice is seen as a form of insurance, not a right.

Social justice often overplays its hand; this book is a chance to find better ways to help the poor.

What does Don say?

In a recent book on social justice, former Labor politician Gary Johns argues for “a major reconsideration of social justice as a rationale for the welfare state”. In his essay ‘When too much social justice is never enough’ Johns suggests that social justice is primarily about the redistribution of wealth and income while egalitarianism is the pursuit of a more equal distribution of material resources.

So Don is to pointing to a legitimate argument and invites debate. How do two of Australia’s leading social democrats respond?

John Quiggin

It might be more useful to identify Johns as “IPA hack”

Of course, the fact that he’s long been a shill for the most dishonest lobby group in Australia doesn’t invalidate his logical arguments. But it does mean
(i) the implication in the ID “former ALP politician” that this is someone whose views on social justice have any particular weight is false
(ii) any factual evidence he produces should be assumed false, if it can’t be checked, and selectively quoted to build a case otherwise

So – nothing to say.
Nicholas Gruen

I was recently asked to comment on some IPA piece by a journo. I said to him “you mean the IPA that sponsored Lord Monckton to tell us about the evils of the carbon and resource rent tax in Australia? Don’t you think that by importing such disreputable people a body like that loses its credibility. After all the CIS as I understand it refused to participate in the trip”. He was quite flummoxed by this and said that it seemed a bit extreme to judge them by something they’d done.

Turns out that the IPA didn’t sponsor Lord Monckton’s Australian visit. So not only did Gruen not know what he was talking about, he owes the journalist an apology. Not sure how that comment relates to Gary John’s book either. He continues with some waffle – at least making some effort.

This is the standard of commentary from two of our leading (and taxpayer funded) social democrats. No contribution on the substance just abuse.

William Nordhaus recently published a long op-ed in the New York Review of Books that got quite a lot publicity. He in turn was responding to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Nordhaus says,

But one of the difficulties I found in examining the views of climate skeptics is that they are scattered widely in blogs, talks, and pamphlets. Then, I saw an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal of January 27, 2012, by a group of sixteen scientists, entitled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” This is useful because it contains many of the standard criticisms in a succinct statement. The basic message of the article is that the globe is not warming, that dissident voices are being suppressed, and that delaying policies to slow climate change for fifty years will have no serious economic or environment consequences.

My response is primarily designed to correct their misleading description of my own research; but it also is directed more broadly at their attempt to discredit scientists and scientific research on climate change.

So Nordhaus then addresses several questions

• Is the planet in fact warming?
• Are human influences an important contributor to warming?
• Is carbon dioxide a pollutant?
• Are we seeing a regime of fear for skeptical climate scientists?
• Are the views of mainstream climate scientists driven primarily by the desire for financial gain?
• Is it true that more carbon dioxide and additional warming will be beneficial?
As I will indicate below, on each of these questions, the sixteen scientists provide incorrect or misleading answers. At a time when we need to clarify public confusions about the science and economics of climate change, they have muddied the waters. I will describe their mistakes and explain the findings of current climate science and economics.

You’d think that was a valuable contribution. Now Bob Murphy has shown that Nordhaus was a bit naughty in his explanations.

Nordhaus identified six allegedly misleading claims made by the skeptics in their WSJ article, and proceeded (in his mind) to dismantle their bogus views. In the interest of brevity, I will in this post focus on just four of the claims. As we’ll see, it is Nordhaus who is playing fast and loose with the readers. Many of the objections raised by the skeptics are indeed legitimate.

The result is quite devastating. David Friedman and David Henderson have summaries.

I particularly enjoyed this bit of the Murphy critique.

It’s also interesting that Nordhaus invites his readers to not get caught up in the tiny details, and instead to take a step back and survey the grand picture of global temperatures. I agree. In that spirit, I suggest it can be misleading to focus—as Nordhaus does—on deviations of temperatures. Instead, let’s look at a graph of actual global temperatures, using the same three standard data sets that Nordhaus used for his own graph. (All we’re doing here is adding a base of 14 degrees Celsius to the deviations that Nordhaus plots.) The graph looks like this:

SOURCE: Data sets cited by Nordhaus, with 14C base global temperature added to deviations.

Seen in this light, it’s still true that temperatures of the last decade are higher than at any point since the late 19th century, yet this chart isn’t nearly as scary as the one Nordhaus showed.

To be clear, I’m not accusing Nordhaus of anything deceptive regarding the format of his temperature chart. There are good reasons that climate scientists tend to work with temperature deviations, rather than absolute levels.[1] Furthermore, without more information to guide our charting decisions, choosing a y-axis range of 0–20 Celsius degrees—as I’ve done in the graph above—is just as arbitrary as Nordhaus implicitly choosing a range of 14–15 degrees in the graph he used. Even so, when experts such as Nordhaus are presenting their material to the layperson, these nuances can get lost in the shuffle. Nordhaus thought his readers would “benefit from stepping back and looking at the record of actual temperature measurements,” and I agree.

I agree too. That graph is awesome and you’d have seen something like it before. Alex Robson and I created a graph like that in 2007.

As you can see not much has changed in the last 5 years.

Update: Due to popular demand I’m showing the second graph updated to the end of 2011.

I guess it’s not surprising that the trade unions are on the backfoot after the on-going HSU fiasco.

Even if you suspend all logic and documented evidence by accepting the delusional Thomson account, this means that other unionists have acted in both illegal and dispicable ways.  There is no way out for the union movement in Thommo’s pathetic attempt to weasle out of the dilemma in which he finds himself.

And now we are being told by the breathless President of the ACTU, that trade unions are already very highly regulated.  Really?

• The financial records and notes of registered trade unions must only comly with the Australian Accounting Standards – Reduced Disclosure Requirements;
• The financial records of most unions are impossible to figure out because there are separate branch accounts, state registered union accounts and national offices are generally a shell.  There is no requirement for consolidation as in the company sphere.  (Try to figure out the HSU accounts, even after all these years of controversy.)
• At the Fair Work Australia site, there are many examples of unions not meeting their regulatory obligations on time.  Indeed, for the HSU national office, the last audited accounts are for 2007!
•  The penalties for wrongdoings specificed in the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Act are generally a tenth of what is provided under corporations law - a slap over the wrist with damp lettuce.  For example, many penalties under the ROA are $2200, whereas the penalty for the equivalent wrongdoing for listed companies are in excess of $200,000.  In any case, penalties never seem to be imposed ;
• Under section 174(1), a trade union member must write to a designated person in a union to resign from the trade union; being unfinancial does not negate their membership or being counted as a member.  Indeed, without a written resignation, that member is regarded as a creditor to the union.  (There is quite rightly a fuss about this arrangement in respect of gyms but it is seen as OK for unions.)

This what Kearney had to say:

UNIONS will get help to prove their finances are in order following the Health Services Union (HSU) scandal, ACTU president Ged Kearney says.

The public needs reassuring about the union movement after alleged spending rorts at the HSU’s East branch created a feeling of great disappointment and despair, Ms Kearney says.

“Unions are very highly regulated, but clearly there is a concern in the community that there needs to be some rigour,” she told AAP.

The ACTU’s three-day triennial congress, which starts in Sydney on Tuesday, is to discuss plans to not just bolster good union governance but also to prove it.

“We’ll be looking at some sort of mechanism whereby we can say to our members this is something that you can use to prove that your union has fair and readable governance procedures,” Ms Kearney said.

CAN YOU HEAR THAT WHIRR OUTSIDE YOUR WINDOW? THAT’S THE SOUND OF SHREDDING MACHINES IN VARIOUS TRADE UNION OFFICES WORKING NIGHT AND DAY AS THEY ATTEMPT TO CLEAN UP THEIR ACTS PRIOR TO REAL REGULATION (AND NOT LIKELY FROM THIS GOVERNMENT) BEING INSTITUTED? 

A bit wonky – a reply to a question I got asked at Core Economics that blew out to 1,600 words.
Read the rest of this entry »

I would also strongly recommend Steven Kates’ Free Market Economics. An Introduction for the General Reader which is in countless ways one of the best introductions to economics ever written; and this assessment includes amongst other things the author’s superb ability to put economics into perspective in terms of the history of economic thought.

I keep going back to this fantastic book. Lucidly written, it can be read with tremendous gain (to students of economics of any level, beginner to advanced scholar) in a few days, maybe even in just two days. At the same time, it is so substantial as to invite countless returns for further appreciation.

As a person strongly influenced by the Austrian school (including its post-Misesian anarchist wing), what gives me a special kick is the fact that the author, who ‘heretically’ recognises a substantial role for government and the state, offers an accurate and brilliant account of a free economy.

Of course, this places Kates much closer to (the great Austrians) Mises and Hayek than to the anarchist successor school, whose anarchist stance I do not share at all, while recognising the school’s considerable intellectual achievments.

I hope Georg Thomas won’t mind my retrieving his kind and generous comment from the thread that followed my putting up a reading list in the history of economics the other day. And I hope you won’t mind if I say that this is how I think about the book myself.

Moreover, the book is, in my view, unique. It explains everything found in an introductory text on economics but in no chapter is its explanation the same. Everything is saturated in the role of the entrepreneur and builds from the crucial importance of uncertainty.

It never assumes there is no government, but instead assumes that there is and that this government will make laws and regulations that are sometimes a net benefit but are also usually the very reason economies underperform and all too frequently fall into recession.

It explains value added across an entire chapter. The fact of the matter is that without understanding value added properly it is impossible to understand good policy from bad. And so far as I know, this book is unique in explaining this crucial part of economic reasoning at the introductory level.

In teaching supply and demand it assumes no one can ever know where either of those curves actually is, a very different way of thinking about markets. The traditional form of marginal cost pricing is shown to be an inane framework that provides no insight into how either prices are set or volumes determined. Instead it explains the margin as the dividing point between the present and the future which the farther into one looks, the less that one can know anything relevant about what is going to take place.

It disdains Keynesian economics even while explaining modern macro, showing why it is an insulting form of nonsense, and I might add, is the only book to my knowledge anywhere to do so. If you know of another written within the last forty years, you must let me know.

Instead, it explains prosperity and recessions using the classical theory of the cycle which was based on a proper understanding of Say’s Law. It is definitely, and I do mean definitely, the only place in the world you can find out about Say’s Law and how Keynes mangled its interpretation leaving the world’s economies in the mess they are in with no theoretical guidance system with which to find our way out.

And as the title makes clear, the point of the book is to explain why there is no other means to manage an economy than through the free market which is not the same as laissez faire.

How to Get the Book

The book is available in paper from the Edward Elgar catalogue for £23.96. And if you would like to read it in an electronic format, this is where you should go which is taken from the Elgar website:

www.ebooks.com
www.books.google.com/ebooks
www.google.co.uk/ebooks

View our ebooks that are with Dawsonera
View our ebooks that are with EBL
View our ebooks that are with Ebooks.com
View our ebooks that are with MyiLibrary
View our ebooks that are with EBSCOhost
View our ebooks that are with Ebrary
View our ebooks that are with Google

Here is the link to the google ebooks in the UK where the price is a mere $A29.00.

You surprised by this?

France’s new Socialist president owns three holiday homes in the glamorous Riviera resort of Cannes, it emerged today.

The 57-year-old who ‘dislikes the rich’ and wants to revolutionise his country with high taxes and an onslaught against bankers is in fact hugely wealthy himself.

Every time I think about Craig Thomson I am truly disgusted by it. I think there was a story the other day that there have been mass resignations from the HSU but so far I have not come across any statements from one of its present or past members. After all, the HSU is supposed to represent them in public and I suspect these are people with very few public speaking skills. I would therefore love someone to go and find an orderly or two and ask them how they feel.

Whatever else we might do and say on this side of the fence, there is a consistency and honest that surrounds it. We are all for people becoming wealthy, and we even have a standard mechanism for finding one’s way to riches which is to produce something that someone else is willing to pay for. We are content to leave everyone to lead their own lives with minimal interference from others. We want the government out of our lives to the greatest extent possible and we want to keep most of the income that we earn for ourselves. Parties of the right have been instrumental in legislating the social safety net but have refrained from the grand stupidities such as wars on poverty.

The instance of a politician on the left living a life in total contradiction of the words they speak is a commonplace. Al Gore is almost the perfect example of someone with a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do mentality. They are everywhere.

Listening to Julia Gillard about how she wants to level our incomes even as she changes the rules on superannuation that affect we citizens but from which she and her fellow legislators are protected has almost disappeared into the flow of events, so common an occurrence it really is.

Sure she cares about the people on low income, which we know because she tells us so herself. But if she really did in any kind of serious way she could not possibly be introducing a carbon tax along with much else she has been party to. She seems to be a bitter bitter woman and the only revenge we will have, which is not much at all but it’s all there is, is to know she will be deservedly remembered for a very long time as the worst Prime Minister this country has ever had.