Brookes News Update

Bernanke's monetary policy likely to generate more instability: Further strengthening in the growth momentum in the US money supply raises possibility that economic activity will strengthen and that the Fed runs the risk of setting the platform for a higher inflationary expectations and higher price inflation
Is the Australian economy facing recession?: Australia's manufacturing problems have not been caused by China's massive demand for resources - which is largely driven by China's loose monetary policy - but by the RBA's loose monetary policy
Fidel Castro's true wealth: Because `Forbes' named Castro among the world's richest heads of state in 2005 he is terribly upset. He ought to be. As one of the world's biggest political gangsters he's a lot richer than that. The whole of Cuba, including its hapless people, belong to him and should be included as part of his assets
Natural resources: The market knows best, not Bracks and other meddling politicians: With all the arrogance of a Soviet-style planner Bracks is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on grossly inefficient wind generators and is also locking away natural resources
True leadership needed on illegal immigration: The root cause of our illegal immigration dilemma stems from the overwhelming availability of illegal employment in the US. Hiring illegal immigrants, employers also create the incentive for otherwise law abiding foreign nationals to become law-breakers
The Church is keeping Marx alive in Brazil and undermining the rule of law: Despite the lessons of history Marxist clergy in Brazil are preaching violence and the necessity for a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship
The question of illegal immigration and a border fence: Illegal immigration is now taking centre stage. How long will it be before the Government succumbs to public pressure and takes drastic action?

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ELSEWHERE

An email from Sean Gabb (in good form): "Those who contribute additional funds [to the Libertarian Alliance] may be eligible for our Top Top Secred Dinners held in a cellar deep below Buckingham Palace. Here you will meet prominent members of the Royal Family and others of the Illuminati. Last month, our dinner was graced by the presence of Her Majesty the Queen, who for the occasion assumed her lizard form and sacrificed a virgin. Those of you who may be familiar with the welfare policies of the Blair Government and the corrupt and pornographic nature of our media will appreciate the trouble we faced in providing Her Majesty with a semi-attractive virgin from the working classes under the age of five. I am proud to say I did find one during a nocturnal prowl through Doncaster. Her loved ones have been silenced by the promise of a quintuple rollover jackpot win for her mother on the National Lottery this August and the admission of her latest "uncle" to the Big Brother household."

Ritalin Making Kids Sick: "Accidental overdoses and side effects from attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder drugs send about 3,100 Americans -- 80 percent of them children -- to hospital emergency rooms annually, a federal survey has found."

Arrogant do-gooder: ""Online poker players will have to fold their hands if a Virginia congressman gets his way. Today, the House Judiciary Committee will mark up a bill introduced by Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R) that would ban much online gambling, including bets on sporting events and games of chance -- namely poker, which has enjoyed a boom in recent years."

Well-deserved award: "Sara Carter of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario, Calif., has been named the recipient of the 2006 Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration. This award, presented since 1997 by the Center for Immigration Studies, is intended to promote informed and fair reporting on this most contentious and complicated issue. Traveling frequently from California to Arizona and Texas and Mexico, Ms. Carter broke story after story related to the dangerous conditions all along America's southern border. Rare has been the week in the past six months that Ms. Carter hasn't appeared on a cable news program discussing her latest scoop. It was Ms. Carter who broke the story that our government was alerting Mexico City to the locations and membership and other details of the Minuteman Project civilian border-watch group".

In defense of consumerism: "I'm beginning to think that the epithet 'consumerism' is just another word for freedom in the marketplace. It's true that the market is delivering goods, services, and technological advances by leaps, day after day. People claim that they are so inundated with techno advances that they don't want anymore. Say no to the latest gizmo! But we really don't mean it. No one wants to be denied web access, and we want it faster and better with more variety. We want to download songs, movies, and treatises on every subject. No amount of information is too much when it is something specific we seek. And that's not all."

Taxing questions: "Do you think your taxes are too high or too low? Though I expect that well over 90 percent of you are thinking 'too high,' many in the media and political class keep telling us taxes are too low. The left-leaning intelligentsia, in their arrogant smugness, claim we just don't know what is good for us. Yet, they are the ones who ignore the empirical evidence and are unable to distinguish between variables and constants. As a prime example, a May 7 editorial in The Washington Post, advocating higher tax rates on the rich, states: 'Economics cannot predict how high taxes can be raised before they reach counterproductive levels.'... The left has a notable ability to ignore the fact that low-tax-rate states tend to create more jobs and grow more rapidly than high-tax-rate states. We see this throughout the world, but one of the greatest laboratories of the benefits of tax competition is that between the 50 U.S. states"

Why we overregulate: "Assume you are a mid-level bureaucrat in a government regulatory agency, and you know your pay and title depend on how many regulations you are responsible for administering, and the number of people who work for you. Do you think you would push for more or fewer regulations? Assume you are a corporate regulatory compliance officer, and again you know your pay depends in part upon the number of regulations you must comply with, and the number of people who work for you. Would you tend to favor a world with more or fewer regulations?"

One for the Straussians: "The demonization of Leo Strauss, in short, is one of the most dismal signs of the times. The shamelessness and baseness of much of what has been written about him is redolent of the propaganda of the 1930s, Auden's "low, dishonest decade."That is why "Reading Leo Strauss" (Chicago, 256 pages, $32.50), a sober new study by Yale professor Steven Smith, feels so heartening.By returning to the source and examining what Strauss actually wrote, Mr. Smith lets the breeze of reason into the feverish sickroom of ideology. He portrays a Strauss who cherished democracy as the best bulwark against tyranny, and who valued intellectual honesty above all. By the time Mr. Smith is done, nothing is left of the Strauss caricature except the ignorance and malice that fathered it.



For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

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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