Club Troppo

I don't have time to make the point I want to make at any length, but Chris Berg reminds us that dynamic tension can be a good thing in government and is, I think absolutely necessary to really good government. He is optimistic about Clegg and Cameron in the UK and in their ab...

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Jorg Guido Hulsmann, professor of economics at the University of Angers in France has written a magesterial biography of Ludwig von Mises , running over 1100 pages. This allows sufficient space to permit generous coverage of the historical and intellectual background with clos...

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Ed Prescott's a very clever fellow. Far cleverer than me. Then again it's pretty clear, it has been pretty clear for a long, long time, that he's crazy. But don't take my word for it. Take our friend Paul Krugman's .

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Yes folks, it's on again! Well it's probably not on, but someone wants me to pontificate on tax reform as one of a range of issues in some 'vision' pieces. I get to paint my own picture. But I wanted to throw things out to the crowd. What things did Henry get right, what wrong...

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From the NBER digest. U.S. hospitals were excluded from collective bargaining laws for three decades longer than other sectors because of fears that strikes by nurses might imperil patients' health. Today, while unionization has been declining in general, it is growing rapidly...

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One of the exciting things about Web 2.0 is the many ways in which it can cut through the rigidities and plain dysfunctional aspects of existing institutions. In this post on the Kaggle website, Anthony Goldbloom draws attention to the many ways in which Web 2.0 'marketplaces'...

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Amazing picture. HT Alan Davies at The Melbourne Urbanist This photograph, via Paul Romer , shows students in Guinea who go to the airport to study for exams because they don’t have electricity at home. The BBC reports that petrol stations, airports and even spaces under secur...

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I wrote up my own views about the power of 'consensus politics' here . Specifically I suggested that three aspects of a leader's performance involve whether: unity or division is emphasised there is a cult of the strong leader as opposed to the leader being seen as an orchestr...

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With Gillard as our new PM, a compromise has been done on the RSPT, rewarding the big mining companies for their negative campaigning. In this first post-mortem, I have some mopping up to do regarding two as yet undiscussed ‘reports’ brought out on the old RSPT, one by Ernst a...

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At Foreign Policy's Passport blog , Joshua Keating writes: "In a too-good-to-check item , the Daily Mirror reports that rapper Snoop Dogg recently attempted to rent the entire nation of Liechtenstein for a music video". Anyone prepared to do a bit of Googling will find the ren...

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Ayn Rand denounced social work as "monstrously evil". In a letter to philosopher John Hospers she declared that to "choose social work as a profession is to choose to be a professional parasite ." Ed Kilgore of the Progressive Policy Institute sees a Rand-like hostility bubbli...

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In a delightful doco, "In the Hands of the Gods", Diego's injunction is to "Love the ball, love the game". I love the sentiment and its simplicity. And I love the fact that he can still say it after all the game has brought him, and wrought upon him. Now on the sidelines, he i...

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At Catallaxy , Rafe pings Club Troppo for getting "excited by a report from the US which suggested that a large proportion of Republican voters have really silly ideas, indeed they are practically insane. Interesting to read that this result came from a survey commissioned by...

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From my recent Fin Column. Recent articles in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - sister publications of the AFR - told us that Warwick McKibbin has concerns about the Labor government’s stimulus programs. As those newspapers say, McKibbin is a prominent economist: he is t...

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I don't doubt Krugman's right to suggest we're in the early stages of a Third Depression . The last few years have been a first instalment in what will prove to be a drawnout, volatile and painful downturn. I also agree it's "primarily [about] a failure of policy". Where we di...

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The front page of today's Sydney Morning Herald: We have Phillip Corey describing the changes to the Rent Tax . Dwarfing this, and by far the largest story on the front page : How a $7m advertising campaign saved a fortune . Thank god that when it comes to a major issue we hav...

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Alekhine was one of the greatest chess players that ever lived (I guess this is as opposed to those who haven't lived, but I digress). In WWI in 1916 he was wounded. I don't know if he was blinded by the war, but he played this blindfold game of chess. With a comical start, it...

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In a new high watermark in he said she said journalism the ABC news tonight had a story of a school that 'someone said' had been "paid off" to keep silent about education spending overruns. The story seemed to be this: Some school community had complained that they couldn't ge...

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I hate to say this but all my forecasts over recent months seem to be proving right. First, we have over-done monetary policy (see my contributions in Club Troppo, January 29 and February 4th 2010). Second, our expansionary fiscal policy was on the right scale (although misman...

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Grossly unfair but wickedly funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PE_vr0t3FA

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