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Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Australian Journalist Seeks to Re-invent Economics

Economics correspondant for the Sydney Morning Herald, Ross Gittins, has recently published a book called modestly, Gittinomics. He reviews it here. He deplores the lack of humanity of economists who simply predict human behaviour when it comes to making and spending wealth, and tries to imply that what they should be doing is telling us what is best from an overall societal point of view.

This is what economists would call normative economics (what should be), and the business of politicians and civic leaders, their job is positive economics (what large masses of people actually do). Most economics just measure and predict using highly complex models with so many variables you can get any answer you like. Overall their models have increased in accuracy in recent decades so that something like next year's GDP can be predicted, plus or minus 2%, as compared to plus or minus 4% a few decades ago - ceterus paribus. Which they usually are not.

Gittins goes on not to attack economists, but people but living the life they do. Maxing their credit cards, sacrificing their free time, family time, leisure time, etc in order to be able to appear just that bit better off than their peers, neighbours, relatives etc. He urges that we drop this vain pursuit, sacrificing a few GDP point for a better life style.

Note that it is Gittins view of a better lifestyle. That of an economic wowser - calling for sacrifice of what we really value for that which we should value. No doubt Gittins marches out of his office promptly at 5:30pm and enjoys the odd game of golf. But one wonder what it is that gives him the right to dictate to others how they should live their life? And to blame economists because people will work harder and longer if they can get that extra bit of cash to upgrade to a Statesman, or even a BMW and move to a better suburb, or afford a better school for their kids.

After all this is the universal appeal of capitalism - that it does give you that choice. After living nearly 30 years in China I can affirm that the stability of socialism, its equalitiarian nature, the guarantee of a job for life, etc was totally rejected by the vast majority of Chinese who just wanted the opportunity to be better. To get rich - gloriously or ingloriously - but rich. They fled China with relatively large and cheap accommodation and regular work, for life in Hong Kong living in a tony temporary shack on a hillside, taking work pulling goods between stores and market stalls for little pay until they could get enough to buy some goods for resale. They did it for the opportunity to better their families which was not present in China. They saw China as being stultifying - stifling all hope of advancement, enforcing the one acceptable simple life for an entire lifetime without any hope of improving the family's fortunes.

Sadly Gittins is like many arm-chair idealists. He has a concept of the ideal life and wants to enforce it - like, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao. It's a nice idea as an alternative but sadly idealists want to make it compulsory. You only have to look at Australia in the 50's with it's iron-clad 9-5 regime - no-one shall work outside those hours, especially on the weekends. Pubs will close at 6pm to enforce family togetherness. All workers had to join a union. Women were refused work. Alternative lifestyles were available for all only in asylums for the insane.

I don't recall anyone but a few wowsers being happy about that state of affairs and we all worked hard to overthrow this nanny-state and be allow to make their own work and leisure choices and create a society which has services available around the clock and all weekend. Yes we work hard, but we clearly get a lot more pay and enjoy a better material life as Gittins clearly regrets. There may be some nostalgic for the old days when we were all poor but the rich were few and mostly invisible. There are people like that in China too. But overall the vast majority want the opportunity to make their own choice. You can still do it. Plenty of people do. Early retirement is possible. One of my friends, an academic, retired when he was 40. He lives a simple life and lives off his savings and investments.

Gittins and his ilk are a dime a dozen in the popular media. Always demanding the government do this and do that to enforce their idea of an ideal life. As we have seen much of what they recommend, such as welfare entitlement, has had the negative effect of emiserating whole families who have become welfare dependant - stifling their initiative and condemning their kids to lifelong dependency as well. They need to be more aware of the paradox of unintended consequences and think through apparantly kindly but costly government programs. Former Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was greeted as a hero for legislating minimum wage for all aboriginals living on 'stations', or cattle and sheep properties in the Austalian 'outback'. Instead of the expected ennoblement, it led to the immediate emiseration of aboriginals and welfare dependancy. You can blame the property owners but they just did what they had to to survive the difficult life of a farmer. Writers like Gittins will always blame people for not being good enough for their systems!



Monday, March 22, 2004

Education - A Personal Rant

My teacher and mentor on China, Dr Adrian Chan, recently wrote to me about development in Australia. Adrian taught me a great deal about Chinese history, politics and philosophy and at the time was my political soul mate. After my arrival in China however I slowly began to realise that China, while implementing Socialism in the way it was understood in those days was a totally dysfunctional society, polity, and economic entity. People didn't work, companies didn't work, and government services were only provided with the greatest reluctance. A few years after I arrived in China, Adrian also arrived in China, albeit in Anhui, to teach as a foreign expert at the China University of Science and Technology which had been exiled there many years before. Like me he became disillusioned with the China he saw but his conclusions were different to mine. He believed China needed another revolution - this time a real socialist one!

Dr Chan is my teacher however and I have imbibed enough Chinese mentality to always respect and honour him as a formative influence and friend. Nevertheless his coments on the poor state of education in Australia and implying that it was the fault of the Liberal Howard government excited my passions. I am nothing if not passionate about my beliefs. I am the first to admit to being as rabid an economic rationalist now as I was a "Small 'M' Maoist" in my early days out of university. My arguments may well appear as doctrinaire in defence of economic rationalism as they were when I was a socialist. It's not to bad to believe in an ideal. I know I will never make an academic. In my family the arguments rage the strongest - one brother being a died-in-the-wool trade unionist and the other a Liberal Party activist.

Well, neither of them can stomach my eco-ratism. Nor will they ever accept Free Trade and the abandonning of protectionism which they both believe to be economic suicide and will never budge from that position. Neither are great readers so I will never convince them otherwise. Good Economics always appears to be counter-intuitive and hence is always bad politics.

So here is my response to Adrian. I am sure he will take it in good part and ignore it - and wonder that I have been in China so long and learned so little. I apologise to him in advance. I am a poor student and an ungrateful one.

Quote from my letter

Re education - yes there is a huge demand. The higher the fees - the higher the demand. OK it's eco-rat ideology but it is demonstrable. The US - with the highest fees in the world also has the highest rate of students going from Senior High School to university at over 50%. In the UK & Oz we are still aiming for 40% and that would collapse our budgets! Here in China when they had free tertiary education the rate was tiny - only since they began charging fees have they been able to cater for a rapidly increasing level of tertiary participation. Our fees are RMB 9000 per quarter and in a tiny town of 360,000 people we have nearly a 100 students and expect it to double this year. Our diploma and degree are not accreditted but the very fact of having a tertiary education completely in English (with white faces) makes our students very employable. OK the unis are not stupid - they have set up off campus private universities, or they 'franchise' private groups using the name, who charge high fees. One group run by the Guangzhou Uni has 10,000 students in such a unit!

Having lived in China and Australia I see clearly that any service provided free becomes abused by both client and deliverer. It generally sinks to a low common denominator as you know from your time here.

A Chinese American economist - Gregory Chow, from Princeton writes extremely well about China and uses it to demonstrate simple but compelling economic rules (i.e. rules of human behaviour) showing that when the service deliverers have no personal interest in the outcome then they will be reluctant to deliver the service. As you know from your time in China - service was a myth. If you didn't know someone it was given reluctantly and you only got the poor product above the counter and not the good product below the counter. You would have seen it at your school with poor teachers never encouraged to improve so long as they were in good with the principal. The whole school had no interest in delivering a good outcome. Of course many were good teachers, driven by that love of educating and tried their best - but from within a rotten, corrupt system which militated against much of an outcome. This was not just the political system which prized political outcomes over educational, but a wider phenomenum to do wth public ownership of goods which we also saw in the Australian school system.

You once said China needs another revolution. Well it's getting it! Hard working, good Chinese now have every incentive to achieve and to do their best. U.S. Universities are beginning to take notice of the very high educational standard of some of the newer mainland students. Our students are getting more and more demanding as they come in from highly competitive places such as Shenzhen. We are having to lift our game as we have to convince every student who comes here they are getting top level education. Two teachers have fallen by the wayside in the last two terms. Highly educated but not good enough teachers for our students whose feedback is zealously courted in 100% surveys each term and used to evaluate teachers. I teach 24-28 hours a week - not at high school level but at university level and I have to keep up strict university standards.

Australian high school teachers refuse to teach more than 850 hours a year (I do 1250). At the tertiary level I don't know what it is these days but it used to be 8 a week. OK so not every paper I give is the product of my own recent research. We have a corpus of lesson material which we just update from time to time. Our text books are updated as a new edition becomes available and so our material has to be updated. But if our examples are not recent or apposite to China we will hear about it.

I remember back in the 70's my Chinese teacher C.C.Sun saying "Chinese people love to work hard" - I walked away laughing, thinking he lived in the past. No-one in China wanted to work. Socialism had killed all incentive to work. Why work when you got paid no more than the guy who just turned up on payday? Now the incentive to work has been restored Chinese people are back at work: Becoming in two decades the manufacturing centre of the world. In pre-Open Door China the factories were there. Zhou Enlai ensured they were full of the latest machine tools. But the plans for them, the resources allocated, ensured they put out a fraction of their much touted "production capacity". Efficiency and quality were similarly casualties of socialism. The factory was rewarded for delivering goods. They couldn't hope to be efficient as the government kept allocating more workers whether they needed them or not. (Sound familiar? Think, QANTAS, TAA, The Electricity Commission, NSWGR, The Water Board, The Gas Company etc etc). Moreover the total emphasis on heavy industry ensured little was made of a consumer nature. We all know about the two suits people were allowed to wear - the green one and the blue one. Now Chinese people have whole shopping centres devoted just to clothing. They have a choice. Factories have to be aware of fashion and not just work to a government plan.

I see the same comparison in education in Australia. If we were a poor people who could not afford education then a universal system would be justified - but we are not poor - we are rich. We have enough money to spend frivolously on SUVs, holidays, junk food, and other leisure pursuits. Logically we should spend our money more responsibly on health and education, given the same level of choice as we have in our leisure goods, albiet a little more rigorously regulated to ensure a basic education is provided for all. Of course there are the indigent, who will never be able to provide for education or health and so we need a safety net for them.

We all believed in Gough Whitlam ( Australian PM 1972-1975) when he brought us those systems. But thirty years of experience should be enough to satisfy us that universal health and education, no matter how much you spent on it - did not raise health or education levels. Indeed it oversaw a serious decline in both. Not through maladminisatrion or Aussie bloodymindedness but through simple human behaviour - the employees have no interest in the desired outcome! That is why teachers - like all public servants spend their entire time debating not educational outcomes but entitlements (in student time!).

Dawkins (Education minister under the Hawke goverment 1983-1989) and then subsequent Education ministers have had the job of trying to make schools work but even (Opposition Leader Mark) Latham will not follow the road of a universal system anymore - he also is an eco-rat. Even Lindsay Tanner is an eco-rat. ACTU (Australian Council of Trade Unions) economists began the age of Economic rationalism. It was Hawke, advised by the John Edwards of the world, that led the unions and employers into the Eco-rat era - not the conservatives. Not Fraser. He was too much pro the bankrupt status quo - but a Trade Union leader (Hawke was head of the ACTU before becoming Prime minister). Since then of course the unions have recanted and gone back to bloodyminded feather-bedding and opposing the reforms which have made Australia a viable manufacturing country with a strong economy again.

Yes we have a large number of poor. Bob Hawke should have said "There is no longer any need for there to be poor children". Christ was right - The poor we will always have with us. Our social services are sufficient for the careful. Look at the way our (largely unemployed) Lebanese Muslims procreate just for the child endowment and other benefits! At least that is the hospital anecdotal reports.

Australians, like Chinese, are now back at work. Yes there are strains and sad stories in both places. But at least in both places now there is hope. And incentive to secure our families a better position in life ourselves rather than rely on the government. Consumerism is rife here in China. Keeping up with the Joneses: A home of your own and a car is everyone's right. But it is driving a healthy economy and an optimism you never saw here when you were here. Yes there will be problems. And social instability caused by the growing rural-urban gap is a strong possibility. But the government is very aware of it and working to ensure it doesn't happen.

I have agreed to stay on. Just recently with a friend we were talking of the love-hate relationship Chinese have with the West. They copy everything, often uncritically. But when there is a sign they are not accepted by the West as equals (US trade sanctions, Human rights denunciations, etc) you readily see another side. If I stay here long enough I am sure to be beaten up by the same students who say they love me now. I am aware of China's history. It's only a matter of time and some ham-fisted actions from Europe or the US. But obviously I love the place more than my homeland now. I will stay here as long as my health allows me. The people are good and I wouldn't stop loving them just because of some minor upheaval.

I hope your health improves and you can come back to your home-town again and see the incredible changes here: The new spirit of freedom and enterprise. It's the new China they sought to make with a socialist revolution, but it was a blunt tool, the wrong tool. The wheel will turn. There will come a day when the rich go too far and they will be overthrown again - the bureaucrats will strike back and we'll return again to government by bureaucrats and planners. But until that day I will stay here and hope to provide some insights to young Chinese students.

Of course I am proud of the changes we have made in Australia too, but it has long been obvious Australia has no place for me so here I am.



Tuesday, March 16, 2004

NSW Department of Education & Training (NSW DET) Acts as arm of Teacher's Union

Browsing the website of the NSW DET recently I came across the recent, large scale trial conducted at the request of the department into the benefits of smaller classes on educational outcomes. It was commissioned by the department in the context of falling enrollments in the public system as people gravitated towards the private education system. Hence with teacher numbers threatened the unions have been calling for smaller class sizes to justify the present establishment and even increase numbers.

But the trial was a travesty. They were conducted using smaller classes sizes and then the teachers and parents polled as to whether they thought the students had benefitted. Of course the vast majority of teachers claimed benefits in "learning outcomes, literacy and numeracy. The parents also felt their progeny had benefitted. The paper trumpetted the successful outcome.

One does not have to take too seriously the claims of the social sciences to being such, but even the most sympathetic supporter might have looked for some sort of back-to-back comparison of two similar groups of students in differing class sizes. One might have thought they would be subjected to identical tests of literacy and numeracy before and after the trail period to judge outcomes but no. The word of the relevant professionals and the credulous parents was judged to be sufficient!

A copy of the paper is available here (PDF).

The surprise is not the lack of rigour. One might have expected that in a self serving trial designed to promote the union cause of preserving teacher numbers. The shock is that such an unprofessional trail was commissioned by the department at public expense. Still we shouldn't be shocked. Bob Carr's Labor government has signally failed in all areas of needed reform it set for itself where unions were involved. They failed to reform rail. They failed to reform power generation. And they failed to reform public education. Entirely because of entrenched union interests. The Labor party is a creature of the unions and struggling to find relevence in a world in which union membership is less than 30% of all working Australians.



Tuesday, February 17, 2004

A Pox on Both Your Houses

I wrote the following to prolific anti-Leftist/Green blogger John Ray. He wrote in the context of a story in Australia announcing the government had devided to abolish a superannuation scheme (retirement allowance) for politicians which vastly over-rewarded them compared to the normal schemes for working people. Indeed the government contribution in this scheme was 160% of the polly's contribution compared to 9% for a regular scheme. The government in turn was reacting to an announcement by the new Labor Party Opposition leader Mark Latham, that abolition of the scheme would be a central policy plank of the party. Australian Prime Minister John Howard knew this was a vote winner and decided to take it off the board before it even had a chance of becoming an election issue.

"I note you refer to the Federal Super story suggesting a bi-partisan position on the matter. I suggest that whilst Labor might have been able to hold this position right up to the election - the moment they became government it would be dropped.

The majority of Labor politicians are nothing if not cynical grubbers after perk and privilege. Why, the Senate's only function from a Labor perspective, is that of superannuating burned out party hacks and apparatchiks. The party machine and backbenchers to a person, would round on Latham and forbid touching the super scheme.

Need I remind you of NSW Premier Jack Lang's attempt in the 20's to vote out the NSW Upper House by appointing sufficient party faithful who were sworn to vote the anachronistic chamber out of existence. Sadly their first act was to vote for the continuation of the chamber into perpetuity.

Howard himself apparently faced a revolt of his cabinet until he relented and agreed to make the move applicable only to new legislators, here indeed was a bi-partisan position. It would be unfair to attribute this avarice to politicians alone. Recent attempts to cut back the pay of teachers and public servants in Hong Kong met similar fates and indeed the public servants even got the Financial Secretary sacked. They eventually accepted a six percent reduction over three years in the context of a general drop of between 20-40% in local wages. Public servants are in a unique position to blackmail governments into capitulation by threats of non-cooperation so it is very difficult to bring about any reform which threatens their power, lurks and perks, or income.

Howard's bind was that whereas he knew this issue would die a violent death the day after a Labor victory, it could develop into an election winning issue. He was hence on a hiding to nothing. Latham's move was simply cynical opportunistic demagogy which he knew Howard would be very disturbed by, whereas he knew it was unimplementable in a Labor government."



Thursday, January 15, 2004

Economic Rationalism

Today I received an email from my brother Thomas, an active branch member of Australia's conservative Liberal Party. As is too often the case the rest of the family, including me, are die-hard Labor Party people so our family gatherings are characterized by vigorous political debate. The irony is that while I am a rabid economic rationalist, as are many in the former socialist inclined Labor Party, Thomas is more of a Keynesian - economic protection, job protection is his constant refrain. In his recent missive he bemoaned the policy of the NSW State Railways who refuse to source rolling stock from local firms if they are not competitive. Thomas worried about the short and long term economic damage. I returned with this reply:

Dear Thomas

I understand where you are coming from however decades of such a protective policy did not pay off in Australia developing a strong economy. Indeed it got weaker and weaker having to be protected by higher and higher tariffs. Meanwhile wages increased regularly, closely tracked by prices because the wages increases did not reflect productivity gains. We had a highly uncompetitive economy which was not delivering increases in standard of living to Australians, moreover we could export little besides mining and farm produce because our manufacturing was too inefficient.

Labour and manufacturing efficiency were discouraged at every set by policies of buy local, buy Australian. Local councils had exclusive rights to build all local roads, etc. This only resulted in inefficiency. While they promote, initially, local employment, the overall effect is to prevent the development of efficient industries and services. It means the costs of government and other services are grossly higher than if they had been delivered by private firms. Hence they are a further cost to industry making it harder for firms to be competitive.

This is not just my blind prejudice, or the sign of a Productivity Council overrun by Economic Rationalist Ideologues who know nothing about the real world. It dawned on all nations using this system since the end of World War II under the inspiration of Lord Keynes' General Theory. By about 1975 the system became so overloaded by government regulation and intervention that it finally imploded and even in England and the US, run by conservative governments - price and wages controls had to be implemented - usually only used in wartime.

Finally the message got through that only by opening economies to market forces and trade would the Western world enter a new phase of economic growth. In Australia Bob Hawke got the message from his trade union employed economists - they told him the Australian economy could not survive unless it was opened up and we stopped trying to make it grow in the iron lung of Keynesianism.

Hence Hawke's Accord, Thatcher/Blair's UK, Clinton/Reagan's tax and program cuts - hence the huge growth we experienced all through the 1990's and into the 21st Century. Yes it's true. Australia lost 800,000 jobs in the textile industry and now we import all our clothes from China. But now our manufacturing exports are the major part of all our exports. Instead of a fat, lazy bureaucracy we have a much slimmer, more efficient one where everyone has to justify his job. Instead of local councils squeezing the Golden Goose for more eggs while living off the fat of the land, we now have highly trained professionals supervising sub-contractors. Instead of firms used to fat contracts from the government we now have a competitive business sector making it's presence felt all around the world. It's not perfect of course. Nothing done by man ever is - but it works a lot better.

Sure there are sectors to be sorted out - free health, medicine and education result in poor quality services run and delivered by people whose first concern is their own interests and then a distant second, the interests of the clients. Australia is a rich country - only a small minority require education or health services free as a matter of survival or right. When you start getting something free you expect it all the time. Both parties are dedicated to reducing free health and education to a right only for those who cannot afford to pay. In the long run it will reduce taxes considerably as public health and education is a huge drain on the public purse which is just not justifiable.

I know you don't agree with me and you can always find a few remnant socialists who refuse to recognize economic reality and think everything should be free as a human right. Remember in societies where they tried it only worked at the point of a gun! Don't look for comfort from the Labor Party - Even leftist Lindsay Tanner has told the unions to pull their heads in. Australia's first interest is a strong economy and Labor ministers to a man are economic rationalists - a Hawke legacy - he hired the best economists in Australia and listened to them!

What is 'simple logic' in economics is often that. Real economic research sometimes comes up with what appears to be counter-intuitive conclusions. Trade union leaders thrive on the simple logic of job protection - George Bush will be hearing a lot of it over the next twelve months. He will make gestures and then undo them. Destroying inefficient jobs causes real pain, but produces strong growth which absorbs most of the unemployed as we now know. Australia has gone the hard yards and is enjoying the results. No matter how much whingeing you hear 6% unemployment in a country with a generous welfare system is excellent. In the European countries which still have strongly planned, regulated and protected economies which are supposed to produce full employment, the unemployment rate is between 8-12%.

Politicians might tell you otherwise but their economic advisors are telling them not to reward inefficient industries - if Australian firms cannot make more efficiently than overseas suppliers who have to pay shipping - then they should not be supported. Once we reduced tariffs and protection - instead of failing - our firms leapt at the challenge and became global champions - those like BHP Steel and Ansett who didn't - died. An efficient and modern One Steel and Blue Sky - took it's place. Look at how Qantas changed to become more efficient - sure it is well protected - but it produces the same services with far fewer employees and we can fly at much lower costs. New, efficient industries grow in the place of the dinosaurs!



Sunday, December 28, 2003

Friendly Diatribe

Aussie Expat's old friend Dr John Henningham is the retired professor of Journalism from the University of Queensland. He was the first Professor of Journalism in Australia, founder of an academic journal on the subject and a specialist on the subject of political bias in the media. Recently he retired from academe to found his own private college journalism, Jschool, in Brisbane. He left UQ when they decided to subsume the School of Journalism under the Department of Communications, a move which Henningham opposed mightily. Recently Dr Henningham took part in a discussion on the media in which he excoriated the teaching of journalism in Australia. This was my reaction which I sent to Dr Henningham and taken in good part since much of our communication is couched in this aggressive satirical style. He never fails to reply in kind - a healthy antidote to our sometimes puffed up self importance. Something only possible between the closest of friends.

A couple of weeks ago I was suffering from insomnia and I fiddled with the short wave radio until a program came on. It was the ABC media report via Radio Australia and featured this maundering, malcontent who suddenly found the good old Aussie university system which had fed him and his family in grand style for decades, wanting! While not mentioned the huge public service style pension he luxuriates on, he slammed the teaching of journalism as irrelevant because newspapers hiring graduates have to hold classes on how to operate a tape recorder and do shorthand(!).

This whingeing, whining buffoon complained that journalism graduates these days spend their time doing courses on "The Role of the Media in Society" and other such irrelevancies. I wanted to scream at the idiot that my old friend, Dr Professor John Henningham had himself pioneered these courses. That as Australia's first professor of journalism, as editor of the premier academic journal on journalism, he had created the entire academic industry of turning out educated and informed journalists. People who know that only the government knows what is good for us. People who know that Labor is the only legitimate government of Australia. People who know that giving more money to the poor is the only way to help them. People who have the courage to tell us that our system is rotten and corrupt and the worst possible while all others are better. People who understand that the Anglo-Saxon people are the greatest terrorists of all time. People who preach that only Afghanis should inherit the Australian continent while the Anglos should just breed themselves out.

I was so proud of this man and his unique achievement in creating the new breed of liberal journalist who is not just the conscience of the nation but the creators of our political values. The real and only opposition to our evil conservative political parties. I was so angered by this unprincipled and opportunistic attack on a hero who was struck down in his prime that I couldn't sleep further that night. I swore at the radio every time he attacked the academic representative who in vain sought to defend Professor Henningham's legacy from these scurrilous attacks.

What shocked me so profoundly was that this clown who sought to tear down the reputation of a great man was simply seeking publicity for his own school of journalism which apparently does little else but teach how to use a tape recorder, take shorthand (how dare he speak speak of irrelevancy!), misspell peoples names, fudge facts, steal stories from the internet, compose succinct prose while drunk, find computer modem outlets in pubs and brothels, slander the innocent, defame the good, and generally build a solid reputation for 'journalism' on the stinking pile of stinking corpses of those good men they have destroyed in the process.

How dare he! I screamed. How dare he!



The Internet Church of Ray

Christ you're a shambles Ray! Yes and a sentimental old fool!

Teary eyed at the Queen's Christmas address! Wait let me guess - no doubt at the Pope's entirely inaudible effort. Oh and of course His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas Sermon, Not to mention John Howard's Christmas message and Bob Carr's Annual Address.

You're not just a sentimental old fool you are positively senile! Any day now I expect you will announce that you have taken the Lord Jesus Christ as your Personal Friend and Saviour! You have been telling the Churches for so long what they should believe, surely the 'literal truth' of the Bible has at last been finally revealed to you. Garner Ted Armstrong having failed to carry the torch for his Father's Radio Church of God, John Ray takes up the Challenge of launching the Internet Church of Blog! Here are some suggestions:

Litany of the Internet Church of Blog

1. Thou shalt read no other blogs before mine. For I am a jealous Blogger who shall refute all those who write Leftist Blogs and sew confusion in their camps with clever sophistry and rational argument.

2. For Ray so loveth the World he gave all his only forgotten publications, that who so ever should read them, should not deviate Left, but blog Right-on forever!

3. The Blogs of Ray, which passeth all understanding and sew confusion amongst the compassionate, be amongst you, and remain with you always. (Useful as a curse!)

4. Ray sayeth: I am the Ray, the Plain Truth and the Right. Whosoever readeth my blogs, shall not deviate, but remain Rightist until death.

5. Remember the Sabbatical, for in six years did Ray create his "Works", but they shall be recycled until the end of time.

6. I believe in Al Gore the Father of the Internet, which was conceived by the military, made holy by Bill Gates and the Mother of All Windows, and rendered useful by Steve Jobs the maker of the mouse. But Only Ray has shown us the Way and he sitteth on the Right of Ghengis, and of Hitler, and of Howard, from whence he shall come to instruct and bore, this time, and forever more. Amen.

7. I believe in the Holy Windows, the Mighty Mouse, the wholly catholic Internet, the communion of Rightists, and the eternal resurrection and recycling of Ray's previous unread and unreadable academic detritus. Amen.

8. Oh Flog, who art in Blogland, hollow be thy head, thy writer's block come! All will be Right on Earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily blog. And forgive us our Liberalism, as we forgive them who vote Labor. And link us not to Green or Red sites, and deliver us to Libertarianism. For thine is the Blogland, and the Power to Inform or Mislead, for ever and ever. Amen.

9. Ray is my Shepherd, I could ask for nor more. He leadeth me past the Green heresy and has declared the air and waters pure. Yeah though I live in the hell hole of Socialism, I shall fear no evil, for thy scoff and thy invective will comfort me!

10. Ray shall prepare a government for me which shall anoint my head with privately provided education and my body shall be healed by privately provided medicine and Yea, it shall not be the loving kindness of the merchant which nurtures me but it shall be his own avarice which ensures I live in the house of Ray forever.

11. When the wicked man turneth away from is Compassionate Leftism and embraces Enlightened Self Interest and follows that which is Lawful and Right, only then shall he save his soul alive and live in the House of Ray, reading endlessly old Ray publications and praising Ray to eternity.

12. Almighty Ray, Father of Rightism and Libertarianism, who desireth not the death of one Leftist, but that they should turn from their compassion and live a life of self-interest so that Adam Smith himself may return from Heaven, for indeed, Ray hath produced it on Earth!

13. Oh come lets us sing unto Ray a new song. For he hath done marvelous things. With his own right hand and with his holy mouse, he hath shewn the Truth. He fed the multitude with five academic articles and two tracts, making them seem like a veritable intellectual banquet. He hath declared victory over Green and Left and his Righteousness hath prevailed. Yea even Global Warming he hath wished away by his words!

14. He hath remembered and shown the Truth of the House of Israel and scattered the Philistines in the imagination of his heart. And all the ends of the Internet hath seen his salvations.Yea he hath even joined the mighty Bi-centenarians of the Internet and we sing and rejoice and give thanks.



Saturday, August 16, 2003

Eating Humble Pie

Aussie Expat these days is the classic neocon. Having a spent good number of my youthful years trumpeting the doctrine of socialism as being the only one morally defensible, I now blog my frustration about the slow transition of the former socialist non-economies to 'politically correct' market economies. Pet targets of my ire have been the trade unions who seem to do nothing in the interests of the workers or the state: Merely acting to fatten themselves at the expense of the rest. Still, as a rationalist, one shouldn't expect them to act in any other way. I have to blame my former God, Gough Whitlam and his predecessors who gave them this power by making union membership all but mandatory.

Under one of my least favourite Labor Leaders, Bob Hawke, however the labour leaders lay down with the lions of commerce and agreed to co-operate in the necessary massive changes Australia would require if it was to survive with a strong, sound economy. As leader of the union movement, he had hired some of the country's best economists and, rather than being dragged kicking and screaming into the economic-rationalists abyss, the unions actually lead the way with the decrepit, moribund business sector tagging along tamely, apparently more afraid of change than the hitherto socialist unions.

After Hawke, whose accomplishment will be rated by history as one of the greatest acts of leadership in Australian history, the unions reverted to type once the middle-class socialist members realised that their own leaders had betrayed the socialists' cause. New leadership was elected and the movement reverted to type as the Accord tariff reductions bit and some 800,000 workers in the textile industry queued up at the employment office.

Apart from a brief and fiery stand over long delayed waterfront reform the unions drifted of into irrelevency with the permanent employees enjoying a luxurious lifestyle while making fiery announcements about attacks on working conditions.

One of the great reforms in recent years was to the system of superannuation. Companies used to nominate a super-fund for employees and make their payments from their pay. Now employees are encouraged to nominate their own fund. For many years unions had run investment funds for employees not eligible to company super and these were big beneficiaries of the reform.

Critics of this move at the time were scornful of this move saying the unions would use the funds at their disposal to prop up wasteful 'socialist' enterprises, green enterprises, or other union approved projects destined for failure.

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, here, revealed a little known fact, that for many years these unfashionable 'industrial' funds had clearly outperformed all the glossy 'retail' funds run by the big banks and other flash financial firms. Not by a small amount but by a quite substantial amount. It appeared the management of the union funds was more activitist, better advised and willing to take a gamble.

Aussie Expat is eating humble pie and scratching his head. A follower of ideological imperatives rather than a rational thinker, he is at a loss to explain it. My unionist brother on the other hand would have no problem. He's been telling me all along that the management have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Maybe he's right!



Monday July 28, 2003

The War in Iraq

Aussie Expat today received a note on an interview with former British pollie, Dennis Healey recorded on the BBC cllaiming that all the reservations against intervention in Iraq were proving to be true and that Blair would have to step down as he had badly misjudged the situation due to an obsession with his place in history. He further stated that if the US had gained UN support for the Venture then there would have been less threat of terrorism. Frankly I don't see the Arabs/Muslims/fundamentalists/Al-Qaeda sitting back and saying 'well if the UN are opposed to terrorism then the jig's up for us!' The Iraqis are doing their best to convince the US they are an ungovernable rabble that Saddam was just the ticket for.

Last night I watched a BBC doco on Iraq - John Sweeney I think the reporter's name was - did quite lot with the Shiite 'moderate' opposition party. Tried to get them to say Bush must be stupid not to be working with them. After all they were 'really' committed to a democratic theocracy! The whole program was shot through with such smug, moral certainty - seems only the BBC have got it right. After all the Brits have such a wonderful record in the Middle East.

Sweeney recorded the baying pack of journalists destroying a new appointee to lead the ministry of health. Then they sit back in their moral high chairs and say - well the US aren't doing anything about health services. What's going on? Why are they so ineffectual?

If the BBC are so damned anti-War why don't they run programs denouncing Churchill and saying Chamberlain's 'Peace in our time' was right and that Hitler would only have delivered the EU package 50 years earlier and with less regulations! Hitler didn't want war with the UK! What was Churchill doing dragging Britain into a fight it had no dog in? Who cares about Jews? (ok ok no-one did then, either). At the time Chamberlain was branded as an appeaser. Maybe they got it all wrong! But I find it hard to distinguish between the Chamberlain line and that of the BBC.

For 50 years the UN has been toeing the 'Sovereignty' line which asserts that whatever a tyrant does in his own country, be it genocide, torture, corruption, rape, then it's ok so long as the victims are local citizens only. It's true that Hitler invaded Poland and it is equally true that Saddam invaded Kuwait. The UK immediately declared war on Hitler. The UN authorized trade sanctions on Saddam which increased his power along with the suffering of his people.

'Peace in our time' is fine, but it is not, it is not, a justification for the moral high road - it is the cowardly road which asserts - "So long as they're wogs old boy, who cares?". Look at Canada - "Peace in our time" was the way to go. They loved it. But suddenly a Canadian citizen is beaten to death in Iran and they find out they also are part of the world which just might be shown to have a moral responsibility outside their borders. That the war on terrorism involves all free people, not just a few zealots who feel strongly about it or who are principal targets. When you aren't the target and opt out - where is the moral high road? When you suffer a tyrant to live because he is not oppressing anyone remotely connected to you. Is that a cause for smugness?

There are those who suggest that international law is a list of customary rules and regulations that we must (well, should) obey. There are others who suggest there are overarching, international principles of justice and equity which must inform decisions on international law - not just the application of rules and regulations.

Yes there is a long list of tyrants - and that is precisely because the UN and the international community have sought refuge behind the 'sovereignty' principal. This principle was shown to be false first at Nuremburg in the aftermath of WWII and then again finally, for the last time in Rwanda. We do have a moral duty to all people of the world. Our aid programs recognise that. Our refugee programs recognise that. Our laws on international labour recognise that. Only the tyrants in the UN line up to support in their own self-interest the 'sovereignty' principle.