Club Troppo

I think Peter Costello gives a good account of himself here (reproduced below the fold). This will fill some with horror of course. It’s difficult to understand what one is doing when one is deciding whether or not to allow a foreign takeover and if so on what terms. Costello argues that he negotiated better terms for the BHP Billiton arrangement than his predecessor Paul Keating negotiated for a similar exercise with CRA-Rio Tinto. His case is that these ‘better terms’ involved BHP Billiton remaining an Australian oriented company with its central functions in Australia. Of course a sufficiently ‘pure’ free market line would ask why it’s better to have headquarters here than whatever other jobs might have materialised if the headquarters had left. A more reasonable question is ‘what did we pay for keeping BHP Billiton here – in terms of a lower price for buying BHP shares. (By the way, the ‘we’ is shareholders of BHP shares – although if one is seeking to assess ‘national interest’ presumably we don’t care about foreign shareholders – unless our actions might somehow lead other foreign shareholders to shun Australia as an investment destination.)

Who knows? I certainly don’t. But . . .  (Continued)

If at least one agency in the Victorian Government wasn’t too flash at helping Victorians when the fire was raging, some true believers in there are making amends, using an embeddable panel, complete with a Google Map to notify the public of Bushfire Events as per below. The original page on which the map appears is here. And the code which you can use to put on your own blog is this.

<<iframe src="http://vicbushfireevents.appspot.com/" title="Events" border="1" align="left" frameborder="0" height="900" scrolling="no" width="950"></iframe>> [Remove the first and last < and > sign.  I had to put them there to get the thing to actually display the code rather than the item embedded below.]

So the economy has problems. Spare a thought for the citizens of New York where the bedbug plague is reaching crisis proportions with a 34% increase in official complaints last year.

There are lots and lots of people who are having a devastating experience with bedbugs,” said Renee Corea, who helped start the coalition New York vs. Bed Bugs after being bitten. “We are already regarded as the most highly infested city in the United States.

Bed bugs are traditionally associated with the lower orders, and cases were reported in the 1970s in Surry Hills (in Sydney, immortalized by Ruth Park in The Harp in the South).

This is not new, it was an issue in 2007 but it was not something that the hospitality trade wanted the world to know about. What is more, the affliction had moved out of its traditional haunts to attack rich and poor alike.

The blood-sucking nocturnal creatures have infested a Park Ave. penthouse, an artist’s colony in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a $25 million Central Park West duplex and a theater on Broadway, according to victims, exterminators and elected officials.

Once linked to flophouses and fleabags, bedbug outbreaks victimize the rich and poor alike and are spreading panic in some of the city’s hottest neighborhoods.

“In the last six months, I’ve treated maternity wards, five-star hotels, movie theaters, taxi garages, investment banks, private schools, white-shoe law firms, Brooklyn apartments in Greenpoint, DUMBO and Cobble Hill, even the chambers of a federal judge,” said Jeff Eisenberg, owner of Pest Away Exterminating on the upper West Side.

The “Austrian” is Gerard Jackson who puts out weekly bulletins of opinion and commentary. This is his rejoinder to The Weekly article by the PM.

He accuses Hayek of treating the market as a “game” “specifically a game of ‘catallaxy’”. Thereby dishonestly giving the impression that like all games it is one of winners and losers. What Hayek actually said is that the market process is

‘a wealth-creating game (and not what game theory calls a zero-sum game), that is, one that leads to an increase of the stream of goods and of the prospects of all participants to satisfy their needs, but which retains the character of a game in the sense in which the term is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “a contest played according to rules and decided by superior skill, strength or good fortune”.’

He was making it abundantly clear that market itself is not a game, it is a process that left free from the hands of meddling politicians will raise society’s living standards. That Rudd does not agree with this does not give him the right to distort Hayek’s opinions.

The Prime Ministerial speech should have resulted in coast to coast mirth and disbelief, as if he had stood up and delivered a long defence of creation science last week. Due to the ignorance of the intellectuals and the commentariat, or maybe just their political bias, and the inertness of the Conservative forces, nothing much happened. Interestingly,when Mr Rudd gave his first anti-Hayek speech two or three years ago The Economist picked up his mistakes within the week.

Like Australians generally, bloggers are donating generously to the Victorian bushfires relief appeal, over at John Quiggin’s place and LP.  And this morning news here in Darwin praised the old diggers at Darwin RSL for raising $20,000 over the weekend, while earlier news revealed that local philanthropist and former Senior Australian of the Year Tony Milhinos has donated an astonishing half a million bucks.

The compassion is heart-warming.  But I can’t help asking the obvious question that no-one in the MSM has bothered to consider.  Why?  Why at least are we still being exhorted to donate when the Red Cross Appeal total has already passed $100 million?  That’s almost $15,000 for every single one of the 7,000 men, women and children made homeless.  

(Continued)

Economic conservatives never really trusted Richard Nixon. Faced with rising inflation the president resorted to price and income controls declaring: "I am now a Keynesian in economics". Almost everyone agrees that his timing was terrible. As Keynesians struggled to make sense of the stagflation that ensued, neoclassical economists like Milton Friedman successfully seized the opportunity to press the case for freer markets and smaller government. According to many commentators, Keynesianism was dead.

Now that the tables have turned again, journalists are taking another look at Nixon’s comically bad timing. Last year an editorial in the Nation recalled:

In 1971, after announcing wage and price caps to curb inflation, Richard Nixon famously declared, "We are all Keynesians now." But moments after the phrase escaped his lips, it was no longer true. Indeed, the thirty-seven years since then have seen a nearly full-scale repudiation of Keynes at home and abroad, as neoliberalism remade our political economy and ushered in the new Gilded Age.

On the weekend, the Australian’s Michael Stutchbury did the same thing:

Richard Nixon declared "we’re all Keynesians now" in 1971, just before the whole idea was about to be discredited by 1970s "stagflation".

The funny thing about these stories is that the "we’re all Keynesians now" quote doesn’t belong to President Nixon — it belongs to Milton Friedman.

(Continued)

It’s pretty easy to touch a nerve with bloggers, says cartoonist Gary Trudeau. Since most of them are not getting paid, he says that narcissism is the only explanation for what they do. Trudeau is the creator of Doonesbury, a popular syndicated comic strip. And last year his character Rick Redfern, lost his job as a journalist with the Washington Post and took up blogging as a way to pay the bills.

Editor & Publisher‘s Dave Astor asked Trudeau what bloggers thought of the strip. "Well, ever since I started writing about bloggers a few years back, there’s been some defensiveness," he wrote. Paul Briand, who blogs at Boomer Angst, certainly feels that way. Like Redfern, he was once a working journalist but lost his job when the paper downsized:

It’s hard as a blogger to be viewed with the same seriousness as a journalist. Anyone can be a blogger, but can anyone be a journalist? I don’t think so. There’s an elevated level of ethics, fairness, research and writing ability that define the latter. It said anyone can be a blogger by putting your name over whatever you want to write, however you want to write about it.

The strip has touched a nerve with non-journalists too. At Red Room, Raul Ramos y Sanchez writes : "As one of the millions of bloggers mentioned in Trudeau’s strip, I felt defensive. Was I one of the narcissists?" But Sanchez argues that blogging may be "ushering in a new wave of democracy into the once-exclusive world of news and editorial opinion". On this view, bloggers are not just looking for attention, they are participating as citizens.

What’s even more interesting is the way that professional journalists are getting defensive about bloggers. When bloggers brag that they are breaking stories, setting the agenda and interpreting the facts better and faster than the ‘mainstream media’, journalists hit back. But most of this journalistic antagonism towards blogging seems over the top. Amateur blogs are no more likely to replace professional journalism than amateur musicians are to replace professional performers and recording artists. So why get so upset about a few deluded narcissists?

(Continued)