ELSEWHERE

Hooray! Russia says it will not ratify the stupid Kyoto “Greenhouse” protocol. That means it is DEAD!

Amazing! Afghan warlords handing over their weapons. There may be hope for the Afghans yet.

The Spanish have got guts: “Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar has ruled out withdrawing Spanish forces from Iraq, only hours after a state funeral for seven Spanish intelligence agents killed in an ambush south of Baghdad”.

Further to my post yesterday about GWB being a real conservative despite his big spending, there is now a whole website dedicated to explaining that idea.

This article also argues that the GOP and the Dems are now equal as big spenders. A reader comments: "I think it was Milton Friedman who argued that recent US experience is that the most successful fiscal conservative option for voters was having Congress under one party and the White House under the other, then the natural partisan antagonism between them acts as brake on vote buying by either group. Essentially this is an Adam Smith solution, exploit politicians' competitive nature and self interest rather than rely on them to do what in principle is the right thing!"

Thomas Sowell has a great story about being one of Friedman's students here

The Australian Labor Party, Australia's major Leftist party has just got a new leader. And is the bourgeois Left upset! The new leader is not a very likable figure in my view but he seems to be a great realist with a good grasp of economics -- anathema to the feel-good dreamers of the Left. Australia is very fortunate in having a lot of conservatism in both its major political parties.

Australia has had a national sales tax for years and the sky has not fallen in: "I've spent the past few years supporting the concept of a national sales tax. Now, though, I'm beginning to have some second thoughts. ... Among my concerns about the national sales tax is the mechanism created to facilitate collection. ... It seems more encompassing, widespread and easier to manipulate. Think about the ease with which the government could easily 'tweak' the tax rate by a hundredth of a percent here and there when it needs more money? Think about the power of a government that has the ability to tax everything we consume, every service we utilize. But even more important to this debate, the national sales tax does nothing to fix the real problem with our tax system: TOO MUCH TAX."


Michael Darby has just put up a big collection of posts under the following headings: Huge Rally of Vietnamese Australians;
Celebrate Capitalism Day Sunday 6 December;
Dear American Soldier in Iraq;
Why They Lost The Referendum;
Liberal Party State Council Official Voting Results;
Nile MLC backs Prime Minister Howard on Drugs;
Cathy Buckle on Zimflation;
Anti-Democracy Agitators;
Evidence of an Iraq … Al-Qaida connection;
Jihad for Allah's Sake;
NZ Labour's Ideological Sop;
Trade: free, fair and forgotten;
Why They Hate W.

My latest upload of one of my published academic articles is here or here. It is about how you assess what social class a person belongs in. It is a highly technical article but the finding in plain language was that the thing that makes the biggest difference is a person's own view of what class he is in -- and the second biggest influence is whether he is a manual or a non-manual worker.

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