Club Troppo

[photopress:kimbo.jpg,full,pp_empty] FEDERAL Opposition Leader Kim Beazley has committed a major blunder , confusing grieving TV host Rove McManus with White House strategist Karl Rove.

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When Milton Friedman visited Australia in 1975 the Institute of Public Affairs declared it "a breath of fresh air." But their enthusiasm had limits. "Friedman is a proponent of the free market doctrine in its purest form" said the IPA Review (vol 29 No 2). And for an organisat...

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Another paper confirms the importance of default options in influencing a range of decisions about retirement planning. I've written on this a few times . When will we get going on this agenda? The abstract of the paper is over the fold. Many workers in the U.S. and around the...

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Economist Milton Friedman died today in San Francisco . Friedman was not just a Nobel Prize winning economist, he was a celebrity. He wrote for Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine and was interviewed by Playboy . In 1980 he and his wife Rose produced a television series f...

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I've just finished reading a book entitled " Grooming, gossip and the evolution of language " (Amazon link - but no pages to view) by Robin Dunbar a 1996 book written in a highly entertaining style for a lay audience. In my ignorance of the field, I found the book highly ente...

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Economists have a proud history of leading social causes of great value. The fight against slavery is my favourite cause of economists with Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill in the forefront. That's where economics got it's nickname of the 'dismal science' (from Thomas Carlyle w...

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Jason Soon has more on the debate over Nordic social democracy and Friedrich Hayek's road to serfdom thesis. It began with an article in the Scientific American where Jeffrey Sachs annoyed Hayek fans by saying: Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous...

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Fred Argy has written a letter to the AFR protesting changes to cross-media laws. In it appears, to me at least, the incredible implicit assertion that Fox News is bad for American democracy. Because I think he is an intelligent man and I quite respect his opinion on most subj...

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A while ago I categorised the referendums at the federal level to see what voters were rejecting. It turns out it was centralisation; or the constitutional increase of power to the Commonwealth Government. Of the twenty-seven referendums for increased centralisation only three...

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Public transport is all the rage amongst the left of centre. It has a community feel to it which gives us a warm inner glow in these days which are heirs to the plummeting of social capital. It yields benefits in many forms. It typically generates less pollution than cars and...

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[photopress:nz_news.jpg,full,pp_empty] New Zealand is to get its first 24-hour news channel. News 24 will be launched late next year. Of course, it will be 24-hour news from 1950.

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also featuring: Ireland A v Australia A, Limerick, 15 November 2006 cross-posted for the first time to sidelined . Australia A v Ireland, 15 November 2006 Australia A play the Ireland A tonight, which might not seem like big news but in the greater scheme of things will be a p...

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Needing little encouragement from Justices Kirby and Callinan, the Henny Penny brigade are off and running over today's Work Choices decision by the High Court. Tim Dunlop titles his post "The States are Dead" over at Rupie's place. Meanwhile, the hard core lefties over at Lav...

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Colin Wicking beat me to the punch with a comment on this morning's High Court decision in the WorkChoices Case . My only excuse is that my sort of commentary forces me to read the actual judgments rather than just the headline outcome. Nevertheless, although the judgments are...

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It is a rare for me to agree with Janet Albrechtsen. Still rarer for me to hear her say, almost verbatim, an idea that I have bored my friends with for years. In yesteday's Australian she draws attention to the corrupting influence of political donations and finishes with a rh...

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This storm - on Saturn - really looks like it has an eye.

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Sometime commenter Spog sent me the diagram and the commentary below on the question of churning. He's produced an excellent diagram illustrating the incidence of churning. It seems to work approximately as one would hope, to target assistance where it's most needed - subject...

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One of the fun things about Don Arthur's posts is following the links. I followed a link to Peter Boettke and a few links later came upon this (pdf) fine statement of the early and (for so long) enduring American commitment to modesty in international affairs. I guess isolatio...

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"Hayek was wrong" says Jeffrey Sachs . For decades classical liberals have relied on Friedrich Hayek's 1944 book The Road to Serfdom to warn that tax increases lead to tyranny. But in a recent article for the Scientific American , Sachs argues that high taxing Nordic countries...

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