Club Troppo

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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