Take a gander at this series of photos showing the VW Phaeton Factory in Dresden. Then consider for a moment why Germany is the worldâs number one exporting nation , and weâre just digging up coal to flog to China. (Via Jwalk)
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In a letter to the Australian published today I raise two distrinct issues - both controversial. The first is whether Work Choices and Welfare to Work offers the ONLY way of boosting labour force participation or whether, as I believe, there is an effective alternative. This i...
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As usual a vintage performance from Krugman on Milton Friedman . Appreciative, critical, fair and informative. Enjoy.
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One of the themes of what passes for my 'professional life' in economics has been this. We're a small country and it's a big world. Now that might not be news to you, it's certainly wouldn't appear to be news to any of the politicians or officials that are endlessly intoning i...
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For no particular reason I happened upon and then started reading the Economist's guide to business etiquette in various great cities in the world. Reading this one on Paris was a little like visiting there again - so I post it over the fold for your amusement and reverie. The...
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HBO just aired Alexandra Pelosi's Friends of God . Given that the maker of the documentary is the daughter of the current Speaker of the House, it could be expected that the documentary would be politically charged - but like any good documentary maker there are no judgements:...
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Andrew Leigh reckons we should adopt the Eureka flag as Australia's national flag. Nice idea, except that Howard would just use any such suggestion as a diversionary dog whistle ... Together with Wednesday's omnibus edition, today's Missing Link should provide readers with an...
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The Fin has published my Australia Day column and as a matter of record it's published over the fold though Troppodillians have already discussed it and proposed improvements to it in its earlier form . I wasn't able to fit in many of the very worthy thoughts of Troppodillians...
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Hayek regarded 'social justice' as a mirage -- an unattainable ideal. Chasing this mirage would destroy the market and put society on the road to serfdom. In a 'socially just' society, the distribution of wealth and income would reflect some ideal pattern. Under egalitarian 's...
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Today's Missing Link is a huge omnibus edition, partly because of the week's gap in publication of ML (for various reasons largely beyond my control) and partly because Google Reader allows me to cover more blogs more thoroughly. I'm still continually amazed by the huge volume...
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Like most Australians, I accept that immigration has delivered many good things to Australia economic, social and cultural. The Howard Government's shift in the composition of immigration from family reunion to a person's ability to fill gaps in the labour market has also been...
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Ever since various RWDBs slated Best Blog Posts 2006 as a "lefty" benefit partly because it was judged by that notorious lefty Ken Parish, I've been idly concerned that perhaps I've started lurching in za socialist direction as I got older. As longtime readers of this blog wil...
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What with Troppo being down all weekend, I wasn't able to work on Missing Link , because I couldn't access my blogroll. However, once Jacques restored the blog to the land of the living, yesterday I set about logging all 150-odd blogs into Google Reader. I'd been meaning to do...
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Comets have been one of the disappointments of my life. We keep hearing of comets that are going to be huge - HUGE. This is when they're discovered or not long afterwards when the astronomers do their calculations on how big they could be. I don't know if the astronomers actua...
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In the last few days two articles caught my attention: one about a raid on a presumed illegal brothel and one about a Sydney city council using private detectives to gather evidence against presumed illegal brothels (as an aside, private agents employed by government agencies/...
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The decision to ban the Australian flag and items bearing its likeness is a curious one. It is apparently for Sydney and only on the 25th of January. Presumably organisers of the Big Day Out have determined this is an efficient 'politically incorrect' method to determine the l...
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[photopress:Hayek_Road_to_Freedom2.jpg,full,alignleft] If socialism is the road to serfdom then liberalism is the road to freedom. Friedrich Hayek is famous for defining freedom in negative terms . A person is free when they are not coerced. Left liberals define freedom in pos...
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For some time now I have contemplated posting here on Troppo on the French elections. More than anything else, I have resisted the temptation with diligent application of laziness. Second only to laziness has been the suspicion that very few people care about the French electi...
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Melbourne's Herald Sun today warns Melbourne's fashion conscious women about the dangers of those stylish extra large handbags WOMEN are risking health problems by carrying fashionably huge handbags. It's the load on the musculoskeletal system that's the real worry. The Herald...
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Martin Amis arrived back in Britain to find white, middle-class demonstrators marching with " We are all Hizbullah " placards. "Well, make the most of being Hizbollah while you can," Amis writes , "As its leader, Hasan Nasrallah, famously advised the West: ' We don't want anyt...
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Allan Gyngell and Michael Wesley write in Making Australian Foreign Policy : Changes in foreign policy direction are rare but important. The most significant postwar changes in the focus of Australian foreign policy came with the election in 1972 of the Whitlam Government, whi...
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It was a forty degree stinker on Tuesday this week in Melbourne. The sky was a smoky haze, and the sunlight orange from the bushfires raging around the State. At 4.00pm. The hottest part of the day, the power went out. It wasn't just any old power failure. It was a doozy. With...
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Courtesy Daily Flute Wednesday's Missing Link is running a bit late. Maybe if I don't mention it they won't notice it's actually Thursday. As for Best Blog Posts 2006, Little Timmy Blair doesn't think much of it. The posts are too long, he reckons. The only real blog is a link...
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You're a sensible person. I can tell. You're smart, well informed and decent . When you take a stand on an issue you've got good reasons. If only everyone was like you . But sadly, no matter how patiently you explain yourself, some people can't or won't see the light. It's lik...
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The usual clich© routinely trotted out on Australia Day goes like this. We're always been great at sport. Not to put too fine a point, we've err . . . punched above our weight. We've more recently been congratulating ourselves on the end of our 'cultural cringe'. In fact our c...
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The story so far. In our last exciting installment , we argued that there are three fundamental aspects of economic life that prosper in markets are 1. the pursuit of self interest 2. the generation and utilisation of information and knowledge throughout the economy, not just...
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I've been meaning for a while to draw attention to cartoonist Jon Kudelka's excellent site 101 uses for a John Howard Today's Missing Link is a bit shorter than average (only 13 highlighted posts), partly because there haven't been as many posters as usual over the weekend and...
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Last week, Eygptian blogger Wael Abbas (NB he writes in Arabic!) was credited by French newspaper Le Figaro with striking a major blow against oppression, thanks to three of the ubiquitous incidents of material progress a mobile phone with integrated videocamera, the multimedi...
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The Financial Review asked me to write an op ed for them on prospects for reform in 2007 with an international flavour. (Actually they asked for international economic influences on Australia in 2007 and I sold them the idea of an op ed on reform. The result was published on o...
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Back in 2002, then aspiring US presidential candidate John Kerry began arguing that "the war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation". To my ear back then, this sounded like one of Kerry's more thoughtfu...
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In view of Nicholas Gruen's very sensible post below about extreme animal liberationists, I feel it's my duty to draw readers' attention to an alliance that many may find surprising perhaps even disturbing. Uber-Right Wing Death Beast Tim Blair is promoting animal lib organisa...
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Best Post Predictably, the blogosphere is full of posts about GW Bush's "Iraq surge" policy announced yesterday. At least, that's true of the left and centrist blogosphere. I can't find even a single post about it amongst Australian RWDB bloggers. Can anyone point me towards o...
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I've just been on hols with my kids to (aaahhh!) the Gold Coast. We visited Dreamworld, Sea World and, in the middle of the renamed 'Steve Irwin Way', the Australia Zoo where Terry Irwin impersonated the late Steve in a croc show and Bindi Irwin sang with the Crocmen and other...
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Back in late 2005, a brilliant young US moderate-left commentator named Matthew Yglesias and his colleague Sam Rosenfeld penned a prescient essay for The American Prospect called " The Incompetence Dodge" . They began by noting how many policy figures were coming to the conclu...
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George Bush's announcement of extra troops for Iraq is significant not for its announcements of actions, but for its official admission that Iraq is a horrible mess. See the official US government PDF for details. The scariest bit is the official admission that the Coalition c...
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Previously published - in edited form - in the SMH yesterday - 10th January. Parents, teachers and coaches often tell their charges that 'you only get out of something in proportion to what you put into it', or words to that effect. Economists are interested in this idea too....
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Am I the only one to have programmed the glossary of my word processor with lots of personally tailored shortcuts? I hardly think so. When I type "cssn" in Microsoft Word, my dictionary says that the word "cssn" doesn't exist. Then the program turns to my glossary and finds th...
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Bill Leak cartoon from the Oz As you may have noticed, Missing Link has been, well, missing for a week longer than planned. I have no excuse other than holiday season torpor. However, as Mark Bahnisch pointed out in a comment this morning, time, tide and the blogosphere wait f...
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Today US President George Bush told lawmakers that he would be sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq . And Australia? What will we, as a " firm and faithful friend " who is "in there with the President in the fight against terror" be doing to help? Send a small additional contr...
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Outside of the arguments of political parties, ideologies, policies etc; government is predominantly an administrative structure. We would expect government to be relatively fluid as it changes in size, shape, boundaries and structures in order to remain at maximum administrat...
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I meant to post a note saying that the ABC are re-running a fantastic series "Prisoners under Nippon" at 11.00 am on weekdays. Made (I think over a year or more) in the early-mid 1980s it's a remarkable piece of radio. Go check it out.
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Sun Microsystems is open-sourcing Java under the GPLv2 license . Naturally this made Richard Stallman very happy who was recently quoted as saying: It'll be very good that the Java trap won't exist any more. It will be a thing of the past. I have spent the majority of the last...
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Here is Ken's and my introduction to the Best Blog Posts of 2006. They will be published at the rate of two a day throughout January at Online Opinion. . As regular Troppodillians will note, this post is written at a very introductory level. Indeed for those who don't even kno...
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I get irritated when people throw the word 'definitive' around. So ignore the headline which is - in the words of Lady Bracknell - altogether too sensational. But in a recent post of mine that seems to have found its way into the side bar of recent comments for a surprisingly...
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Lennon and McCartney, Lerner and Lowe, Rogers and Hammerstein, Gilbert and Sullivan, John and Taupin, Lloyd-Webber and Rice. Were any of these guys quite as good on their own as they were with their partner? Are these gains from trade? Well in some cases one of the partners co...
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