I am thinking of doing a blog, how many times a week do you think I should post?…

NPOV, couldn’t agree more as far as I’m concerned. I personally don’t see the logic that if you value personal autonomy you should vote conservative. But many classical liberals do and I suspect that they, and their intellectual heirs, will stay on the conservative side for the forseeable future because they are, for whatever reason, conservatives at heart. I hope I’m wrong by the way and I do accept that argument can sway some of them (probably those that were having doubts anyway).

Regardless of the brain architecture which leads in part us to our respective views of the world, until the 2007 election there was no party, not one, where a classical liberal could give their [1] vote and feel they were even vaguely ‘at home’. In that case it just comes down to voting the stereotype that Labor is more of a big-government party than the Liberals.

Still, it’s a fascinating question. I recall that there was research that conservatives and liberals (in the US sense) have different personality types. But causation is harder to establish. Do we hold certain worldviews due to neurochemistry? Or does the political company we keep make the difference?

4. Employ an arts practitioner in every workplace

Who is going to try that on at a building site or the wharfs?

Define creative arts funding as a share of GDP

We do if you look hard enough.

I reckon you’re right on the money to identify something odd about the way most classical liberals lined up with the Howard Government.

And until the last election, the alternative was …?

I think you, and Nicholas in his comment, are looking for the solution to this puzzle in the right sort of place. There’s got to be something deep and primal in the way people the world over and throughout history have so often divided into identifiably conservative and progressive camps, regardless of the contemporary intellectual landscape.

Some people say that the first recorded use of the word “freedom”, depicted in cuneiform as a slave being returned to his mother, was in an inscription recounting the reforms of Urukagina (ruler of a Mesopotamian city state some 4,500 years ago):

“He freed the inhabitants of Lagash from usury, burdensome controls, hunger, theft, murder, and seizure [of their property and persons]. He established freedom. The widow and orphan were no longer at the mercy of the powerful: it was for them that Urukagina made his covenant with [the god] Ningirsu.”

If you consider the political debate implied by the inscription (see here for longer extracts, starting page 6), what is striking is how modern it all seems: a leader taking on the powerful in the interests of the punter, with some deregulation and some political symbolism thrown in. If that Tower of Babel thingo hadn’t happened, you could have dropped Urukagina straight into the Hawke Cabinet and you’d hardly have noticed.

Similarly, I wouldn’t mind betting that if you studied a neolithic community in the New Guinea Highlands today, you’d soon work out who the rightwing nutjobs were and who had a bleeding heart. I have a sneaking suspicion that you could do the same with chimps, if they talked proper. Not making racist comparisons here – just suggesting that the impulses that drive our political alignments are, literally, older than the hills.

I suppose all this makes me a little sceptical about a coming realignment of self-described classical liberals, even over time. Some people are just made to be Tories, for whatever reason, and no amount of intellectual argument from first principles is going to peal them away from the conservative camp.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism

Having read that, I think I’d happy classify myself as a “social liberal”.
But how many that call themselves classical liberals these days really believe that the State has no role to play in enabling positive liberties?

Look at this list of ideas that the ACT summit will put forward to the national summit (via Andrew Leigh):

1. Create more tax incentives for venture capital investment.
2. Build a high speed Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne rail line.
3. Sign a treaty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
4. Employ an arts practitioner in every workplace.
5. Define creative arts funding as a share of GDP.
6. Mandate superannuation to invest in venture capital.
7. Develop the concept of a ‘wellness footprint’ and associated metrics through a central body.
8. Promote wellness through all stages of life.
9. Housing construction in Canberra to be the most sustainable in Australia.
10. Raise public transport participation rates from 7% to 50%.
11. Greater support for parents and families.
12. Create ’super regions’ (pop about 1 million).
13. Equitable education and training.
14. Recognise the importance of teachers.
15. Redesign and reconceptualise schooling in the ACT.
16. Canberra as a global city.

As Andrew says,

I have to hand it to those creative folks: they’re very creative in the ways they ask for government money.

As Andrew Norton says,

Oh dear. If this is a sign of what is going to happen at the real 2020 the idea is as bad as many people say it is.

How can anyone intelligent enough to spell ‘liberal’ sign up to such a collection of incredibly crap, vague, pointless and egocentric ideas? I’m disappointed that I let myself be sceptically optimistic about this impending farce.

NPOV - I’m curious about protectionism as a foreign relations issue.

Its a foreign relations issue in that wherever we have tariffs other countries don’t like, they jack up their tariffs in areas we don’t like as revenge.

The only way to stop that cycle isn’t to insist they drop theirs first, as the US, India, Japan and France are doing with their agricultural tariffs right now, it is to drop them, show you are serious, show you are the good guy, and encourage them to do the same. Meanwhile your citizens benefit from the cheapest possible consumer goods.

In “Free to Choose”, Milton Friedman describes not lowering your tariffs because another country wont as hurting yourself twice, not just once, because the other country often jacks up their tariffs further in response.

Also free trade has been shown to prevent war, anyone who really thinks the US and China will ever go to war is kidding themself.

There’s also implications for helping developing nations, at the moment most African nations can’t sell their agricultural products to the worlds largest developed nations because of protection in the developed country.

Sorry. I thought lame jokes were civil.

It can be hard to tell what’s what. When in doubt, add a smiley.

My challenge is to stop things getting out of hand without having a chilling effect on discussion. Poor suffering superusers.

“Please remember the policy. I am quite happy to edit your posts from here on.”

Sorry. I thought lame jokes were civil.

As to Sinclair Davidson’s AFR article, it is but one ill-considered prejudice and half-truth followed by another. Take this for instance:

“As statistician and environmental sceptic Bjorn Lomborg has amply demonstrated, greens have a tardy attitude to inconvenient facts.”

No he didn’t. The book that launched Lomborg into the public eye- “The Skeptical Environmentalist”- contains at last count 319 errors- see here http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/errornumber.php The bloke is thoroughly incompetent and those who cite his work without doing their own fact checking are just plain lazy.

KP- shame on you for endorsing such a lemon

It might seem that way to you, but if it were that simple, why it is that nations seem endlessly locked in battles over free trade agreements?

Internal politics synching across borders, essentially. Agriculture in particular.

Our most “extreme” policy is the flat tax, and as has already been discussed, it is in fact less extreme than Hong Kong’s (their flat tax is 17% vs our proposed 30%)

Those interests are just as interested without the provocation of another country’s barriers, their arguments are however better received by politicians in that context.

Once they are in place the issue is one of machistic zero-sum bargaining - everyone wants to win and perceives every advantage derived by another as a loss.