Brookes News Update

The Wall Street Journal is distorting the truth about immigration: For some weird reason the Wall Street Journal has become obsessed with defending the alleged benefits of increased immigration: even to the point of wilfully ignoring historical and economic evidence to the contrary
The falling dollar: why commentators are getting it wrong: Looking at New Zealand we find that from March 1996 to January 2006 it expanded M1 by 111 per cent. For Australia it was 114 per cent. These are massive increases and should be taken into account when considering the falling exchange rate
Why the Liberal Party is getting it wrong on labour market reform: Australia has a touch of the "French Disease" Thousands have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the Liberal Party's labour market reforms. Meanwhile, the Party finds itself unable to successfully counter anti-reform arguments
Bernanke and the yield curve: Is the US economy heading for a significant slowdown? The yield curve suggests that this might be the case
Liberal Party's labour market reforms attacked by people who destroy jobs: The Liberal Party's labour market reform legislation has brought every lefty journalist wriggling out the political woodwork. What is interesting about these journalists is their utter ignorance of economics and history
How journalists turned a leftwing terrorist into a heroine: A vicious terrorist campaign is being waged in Iraq by reactionary forces, the main targets of which are innocent Iraqis. But to many in our media these sadistic thugs are not terrorists but 'freedom fighters', 'militants' or even the 'resistance'
Iranians give the regime another slap in the face : Millions of Iranians stayed home rather than celebrate the Mullahs' takeover of their country

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ELSEWHERE

A good critique of the confusion in America's "moderate" Left here. Excerpt: "Marxism was not only a catastrophe for all the countries in which Marxists took power, but a disaster for the reformist Left in all the countries in which they did not," according to Rorty. The Nation, by contrast, is wistful for the Soviet Union, whose presence "encouraged thinking and acting toward alternatives that would be neither capitalist nor Communist." The unrequited hope seems to be that if there are enough "annual meetings of an immense variety of groups, organizations and networks" someone will finally figure out how to make two plus two equal five. The case for capitalism doesn't require the belief that it is the best set of arrangements imaginable - just the best available".

It figures: "The secretary general of Italy's largest Muslim organisation, the Union of Islamic communities in Italy (UCOII), has called on Italian Muslims to vote for the Party of Italian Communists at the general election. Hamza Piccardo sent an email late Tuesday to Muslim centres saying that the party's leader Oliviero Diliberto had been sensitive to the needs of Muslim inmates when he was justice minister in the late 1990s"

A good article here about the destructive effects of polygamy. It does help to explain the aggression emanating from Muslim societies -- which have always allowed polygamy. Excerpt: "The social dynamics of zero-sum marriage are ugly. In a polygamous world, boys could no longer grow up taking marriage for granted. Many would instead see marriage as a trophy in a sometimes brutal competition for wives. Losers would understandably burn with resentment, and most young men, even those who eventually won, would fear losing. Although much has been said about polygamy's inegalitarian implications for women who share a husband, the greater victims of inequality would be men who never become husbands."

Immigration realism: "Forget the long-running bipartisan concern about creating an educated, highly skilled workforce. What the U.S. economy desperately needs is more high-school dropouts - so desperately that we should import them hand over fist. Such is the logic of the contention by advocates of lax immigration that the flow of illegal labor from south of the border is a boon to our economy. But it doesn't make intuitive sense that importing the poor of Latin America would benefit us. If low-skill workers were key to economic growth, Mexico would be an economic powerhouse, and impoverished Americans would be slipping south over the Rio Grande. The National Research Council reports that an immigrant to the U.S. without a high-school diploma - whether legal or illegal - consumes $89,000 more in governmental services than he pays in taxes during his lifetime... If we really need more poorly educated workers here, we can always rely, unfortunately, on the public schools to produce them indigenously."

The high cost of free lunches: "People like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, recognized that a constant threat to their regimes came from a strong middle class. And so they either killed them, imprisoned them, or re-educated them by means of whips, clubs and electrodes. American liberals, deprived of such tools, have had to settle for the next-best weapon; namely, the very good friend of just about every tyrant who's ever lived, the tax collector. It is the easiest means by which to destroy America's middle class. The less of their own money that Americans get to keep, the more dependent they become on the federal government to provide health, education and housing."

Telecompetition or binary bureaucracy? "Do we want more government control of technology, or do we want less? That's the million-dollar question as the House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. Joe Barton, Texas Republican, moves to rewrite the 1996 Telecommunications Act. A lot is at stake. The committee can unleash the market's raw potential by getting government out of the way. Or it can give lawyers, politicians and bureaucrats license to dictate the evolution of technology."

I used to be a keen motorbike rider in my youth. My brother still is a keen biker. So I was personally disturbed to hear of the unjustified "raid" on a California motorcycle club by the thuggish BATF just reported on Strange Justice. If memory serves me rightly, the BATF or its predecessors were last heard of in connection with the Ruby Ridge assassination, the Waco holocaust and the Elian Gonzales abduction. I think that dealing with the Mafia would be a more pleasant prospect.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. On Social Security see Dick McDonald and for purely Australian news see Australian Politics (mirrored here). I also post several times a week on "Tongue-Tied". There is an archive of my "Tongue-Tied" posts here or here

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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