THE PROTECTIONIST FALLACY NEVER STOPS POPPING UP

An old fallacy debunked once again: "Whenever an expert touts a totally new theory, invention or miracle medicine, a healthy dose of skepticism is called for. The recent writings of Paul Craig Roberts fit the mold. He claims that two centuries of economic thought in support of free trade, dating back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, have been overturned by new developments and his own unique insights. But reality is more straightforward, and far less ominous, than he depicts.... In his Aug. 6 column, "Seeking Jobs in the U.S.A.," he claims that American workers face an unprecedented threat from low-wage countries such as China and India, where an endless supply of workers can now substitute for millions of middle-class American workers at a fraction of the wage"

For those who do not know it, the great satire of the protectionist fallacy is Frederic Bastiat's wonderful petition to the French parliament on behalf of candlemakers.

Australia has a record of foolish protectionism too. Alfred Deakin was one of Australia's early Prime ministers -- beginning in 1903. He is generally well-spoken of by historians but his legacy in the economic field is distinctly dubious. My recent link to an article on his policies by economist Alan Wood has inspired one of my readers to take another look at his lasting destructive effect on Australian prosperity. See here

Any reduction of government attempts to prop up failing industries is good for the taxpayer: Senators from tobacco states -- yes, from tobacco states -- are now negotiating to end federal support of the crop with a buyout."

This article describes the anti-globalists as engaged in 'moral colonialism'

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ELSEWHERE

Wayne Lusvardi has been having some fun with the California election. Even if you are not a Californian, you should read this.

A lot of economists seem to be worried about the immediate future of the U.S. economy -- with the large deficits currently being run up needing to have their effect before long. The Australian economy seems heaps healthier by comparison.

Our friends, the Saudis: “There have been signs for months that Saudi Muslim extremists have travelled to Iraq to take on US-led forces. Internet memorials to those who died fighting the Americans have popped up and Saudis are quietly swapping tales said to be from the front lines. Many of the men going to Iraq had fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Bosnia and were experts on guerilla warfare... Saudi officials, sensitive to any charges extremism may be emanating from the kingdom, have categorically dismissed the possibility their citizens are fighting in Iraq.”

Once again, it is the Democrat party against the people, just as it has been ever since the party learned that they could confiscate the earnings of one citizen in order to purchase the loyalty (and vote) of another. And though they've gotten away with portraying themselves as 'the party of the little guy,' the grim reality is that they are the party that flourishes by keeping the 'little guy' little, and thus dependent on them."

"Everyone recognizes that giving a kid in a failing public school the option to attend a private school is better for that kid. However, liberals argue that if we allow kids the right to pick their school, the result will be a wholesale abandonment of the public school monopoly. (Of course, why liberals think public schools are so inferior an option that they can’t compete with private schools is another matter altogether.)"

The Invisible Hand has been reading the German press and says that it is sheer European arrogance to think that they understand America. I like this comment: “Show me a European who doesn't think they know more about the world than George Bush. Then consider, who is the greater fool?”

Danegerus has a good spoof on Greenie and EU attitudes towards technological innovation that is alarmingly close to how they really think. He is particularly referring to “The Stockholm Convention” on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs).

I received an interesting email from an Australian reader that does in my experience mirror what a lot of ordinary Australians are saying. She is pretty fed up with our PC media and the multicultural gospel that they preach. I do not agree with everything she says but think it is worth a moment to read the sort of stuff that would never get through the filters of our mainstream media so I have posted it here.

Chris Brand has put up some more of his inimitable posts. For convenience, I have transferred the latest ones here. Of particular interest is his report that a general factor of intelligence has now been found even in mice!

The Wicked one has another Irish joke up.

My latest academic post here (or here) is another one of my attacks on the woolly thinking that is so characteristic of academic psychology. I point out that the originators of the “A-B” personality concept (which supposedly predicts heart disease) say mutually contradictory things about what it is.

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HOW IMPORTANT IS YOUR VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE?

Dennis Prager makes a point about Left/Right differences that we often hear: "At the heart of liberalism is the naive belief that people are basically good. As a result of this belief, liberals rarely blame people for the evil they do. Instead, they blame economics, parents, capitalism, racism, and anything else that can let the individual off the hook”

The latest upload of one of my published academic articles here (or here) presents some survey evidence on that claim. It is undoubtedly true that Leftists do usually talk as if we can trust the innate goodness of humankind to make their do-gooder programs work out in practice but do they really believe it? Is a different view of man really basic to who is Leftist and who is Rightist?

Rather surprisingly, my survey showed no relationship at all between a cynical view of man and whether or not you are conservative. People in the community at large who were cynical about human motivations were just as likely to be Leftist as conservative. That does tend to suggest that the “trusting” view of man sometimes expressed by Leftists is just a ploy to help them win arguments -- not something that they really believe. Leftists as well as Rightists realize that man is basically selfish but only conservatives try to take realistic account of that in the policies they frame.

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ELSEWHERE

"To hear [Democrats] tell it, California will transmogrify into Alabama circa 1955-65, if Proposition 54, the Racial Privacy Initiative, is approved by the state's voters in October. The ballot measure [says]: 'The state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin in the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment.' This sounds to this California voter like the 'colorblind society' that has been held out as ideal since a young Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Montgomery, Ala., back in 1955 to lead a boycott of the city's segregated bus system."

Great news for Australia: “John Howard has put the kybosh on a carbon trading scheme designed to reduce greenhouse gases, after heeding industry's protest that it would drive investment offshore.”

"Is the Arab world ready for democracy? National security adviser Condoleezza Rice says the Bush administration both seeks and expects to transform the Middle East into a democratic region. Although the goal is laudable, the administration will be disappointed with its effort to establish a stable democracy in any Arab nation home to a large Muslim population. That's the verdict rendered by history, the contemporary reality of the region, and our own government experts." I think I have to agree with that.

“Interested Participant” has an amusing post about the USA importing Canadian garbage.

Most of Australia is desert so there are always big cries for the government to spend taxpayer’s money on irrigation. An economist explains some of the fallacies involved in that.

New tolerance movement needed? "Most people used to have the mindset that as long as you minded your own business and didn't steal, defraud or harm another human that you should be left alone. They may not have agreed with you about what charities you supported, or failed to support, but they would never use force to make you support their preferred charity... Let's keep in mind one thing though as we consider using the force of government to impose our morality upon all. Someone else may consider your peaceful lifestyle to be immoral and worthy of forceful government intervention ..."

"We once had great working-class neighborhoods in our cities. Most of them have been obliterated by forceful planning, and the current 'nanny' attitude is keeping them from naturally reoccurring. If we can reverse that attitude, the working poor can again have REAL neighborhoods. All that is required is the adoption of a hands-off attitude, allowing the market to develop by itself. That will probably require electing officials who are not determined to force any sort of 'revitalization' on others."

“The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) is a United Nations Environment Programme Convention, which bans or regulates industrial chemicals and pesticides..... The convention is already killing the poorest Africans by denying them chemicals like DDT. Furthermore, the treaty promotes the Precautionary Principle in international law. Its aim is to eliminate chemicals via a legally binding international agreement, but the entire treaty has very little scientific or moral legitimacy."

I recently passed on a post from a fellow blogger about the short life-expectancy among homosexuals. Seablogger has replied with a theory that homosexuals in committed relationships are much more likely to have a normal lifespan. I am still surprised that the much shorter homosexual lifespan is generally unknown. As a libertarian of course, I personally do not give two hoots about what homosexuals do with their own bodies -- as I have previously pointed out in my post of July 22nd.

New Australian blogger Alan Brain seems to be mainly a space exploration enthusiast but his post of 21st on agricultural protectionism gives it a well-deserved blast.

The Wicked one has a post about a battle that the Italians actually WON in World War II.

Amusing: I am now starting to get email advertising targeted at Jews. I am an Anglo-Celtic atheist with Presbyterian roots but I am as pro-Israel as a Zionist so that is one sort of spam that I take as a compliment. I think that the Israelis are the most heroic people in the world today.

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POLITICAL PARTIES AND CONSERVATISM: SOME SURPRISING HISTORY

In a modern democracy, any political party that aspires to win power through the ballot box has to be a centrist party. You have to do your best to offer something to everybody. That’s how you get most votes. Winning over some of the other guy’s voters is the name of the game. Being any kind of a purist just means you will be out of power and thus in no position to push ANY agenda.

An amusing result of this situation is that you sometimes have to go out of your way to do things that you do NOT believe in. For instance, Leftists have to show that they can control government spending or they will not get any conservative votes and conservatives have to support welfare measures of they will not get any left-leaning votes.

So we have the situation today when GWB got into power as a “caring” conservative and promptly tried to prove it by the sort of bone-headed policies that the Left advocate -- such as protecting inefficient steel producers at the cost of American consumers, supporting a potentially huge blowout in Medicare costs and turning a budget surplus into a deficit. Before we get too mad with GWB, however, it is worth noting that the same sort of thing has been going on for a long time -- as Jerry Frankel points out. If GWB’s rhetoric is conservative and his policies socialist, it is also true that past Democrat Presidents have matched their interventionist rhetoric with substantial cutbacks in actual government intervention. Carter and Clinton did more deregulation than GWB has. They did it because America is a conservative country and to impress the American public they needed to do conservative deeds to counterbalance their Leftist rhetoric.

The same has happened in Australia where nominally socialist governments under Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating made enormous changes towards deregulation and privatization and in New Zealand it was the socialist Lange government that cut back welfare and freed up the economy.

And even in the late 19th century, Germany’s Prince Otto von Bismarck, the man who created the world’s first welfare State -- with old-age pensions and worker’s compensation for injury etc. -- was a landowning traditionalist (Junker) who was otherwise a fierce opponent of the socialists of his day. And the great 19th century British conservative Prime Minister who gave Britain’s Conservative Party its name (Disraeli) was also noted for bringing in measures to improve the lot of the industrial worker.

Britain’s Tony Blair, however, seems to be the present-day politician who understands all this best. He is a Leftist leading a very Leftist party so understands that to get his Leftist policies widely accepted he has to talk conservative -- which he regularly does. And of course he puts some conservative policies into effect too -- such as his support for the Iraq war. He is probably such an effective centrist because he can genuinely see merit in all the policies he promotes.

But one thing that NOBODY seems to be able to do anything about is the constant growth of government spending -- as economic historian Randall Holcombe points out.

What we can therefore be glad of in the English-speaking countries of the modern world is WHERE the centre lies -- and that centre does include substantial respect for individual liberties and individual enterprise. Thus NO party can go too far at chipping away our liberties without risking loss of power. The English-speaking countries are conservative countries so regardless of who is in power, the individual will still have to be treated with substantial respect. But even in such countries the location of the centre is not totally fixed. Two great 20th century conservatives -- Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan -- moved it substantially to the Right and moving it further in that direction is our big hope for the future and the reason we have to keep the argument going. If we convince the people, the politicians will follow -- no matter what political party they belong to. That’s democracy.

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ELSEWHERE

The anti-democratic judiciary again: "Only one in five Americans approve of the federal court order under which workers removed the Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of Alabama's state judicial building Wednesday, according to a new poll."

More abandonment of standards in the Left-dominated schools: "An independent panel appointed to look into why an alarming number of high school kids bombed out on the June Math A Regents Exam has found the statewide test was too hard. So the scores will be bumped up so that many of those who failed will get passing grades."

There is a rather fun post here about one of the fruitier candidates in the California Recall election.

Natural selection at work: Millions of hard-working Americans are migrating out of high-taxing Democrat-controlled States (such as California) into lower taxing American States -- and gaining huge advantages in purchasing power out of it. We saw a related process in my home State of Queensland some time back. A conservative Queensland government abolished death-duties (inheritance taxes) -- causing so many retirees to move to Queensland that all other Australian States had to abolish death-duties too.

Where are the monuments to communism's victims? There are many monuments to the victims of the National Socialist Hitler but both Stalin and Mao killed more people than Hitler did.

New site: ecoNOT is a newly launched site dedicated to the debunking of "environmentalism" (which its author defines as excluding normal "conservationism"). There is an associated blog here with some good entries on crime etc.

My latest academic upload here (or here) is a review of a book on racial attitudes by British and Indian social scientists which concludes: "The prejudice manifested by the majority of the population is an essentially normal process".

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A NEGLECTED PROBLEM OF HOMOSEXUALITY

Interested Participant notes that, despite cutbacks elsewhere, the University of Michigan can still offer a course that teaches initiation into homosexuality! Lots of people object to that, of course but Interested Participant mentions one big reason why they should object to encouragement of homsexuality: “the median age at death of male homosexuals is 40 compared to 75 for married men. For female homosexuals, median age at death is 45 compared to 79 for married women. The differences are explained by 1) very high homicide and suicide rates, 2) high death rates from motor vehicle accidents, and 3) high death rates from sexually transmitted diseases (especially AIDS).”

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MARTIN LUTHER KING’S “DREAM”

An acerbic and very accurate comment from Thomas Sowell: "There is nothing new about organizations and movements beginning with idealism and ending up as cynical rackets. Nevertheless, it was painful to listen to speakers who addressed a scattering of people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech. ... the speakers on the 40th anniversary of that occasion clearly rejected the idea of a color- blind society. These were no longer demands for equal treatment but for special benefits, based on the color of their skin. Speakers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson certainly can't afford to be judged by the content of their character."

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ELSEWHERE

Fun! One of my correspondents has noted the Berkeley claim that Stalin was conservative because he resisted change once he was in power. He comments: “Have you considered pointing out to the Leftist College Prof crowd that *they* are presently in power in the university?” And they certainly monopolize that power. So are THEY conservative? I am sure that they would really LOVE that suggestion!

Houston school officials appear to have put forth glowing data on students' college plans that bear small relation to the hard reality most students face. That Leftist teachers might put out false statistics that look like nothing so much as the percentage of votes that the leaders of Communist countries used to get at “election” time is hardly a coincidence. Leftists are so hooked on lies that they are not even clever about it.

Jeff Jacoby is having a bit of fun with the Leftists who cannot understand why U.S. crime keeps dropping. What a puzzle!! But, as he says: “[The] downward trend ... first appeared in the 1980s, not long after the nationwide crackdown on crime got underway. The dramatic drop in criminal activity followed an equally dramatic boom in prison construction and a sharp surge in incarceration rates. The conclusion is obvious: Stricter punishment has led to lower crime.” Only a Leftist would find that puzzling.

I have referred to Galileo a couple of times recently. This reference covers some of the complexities of his relationship with the Church. Although his treatment was unjust, there was some sympathy for his views among the clergy.

For decades, “wind power” has been THE Greenie answer as an alternative to coal, oil and nuclear power. Now that technology is beginning to make wind-power look like a more viable proposition, however, the Greenies are saying that they do not want it because of its “visual pollution”. When will people realize that the Greenies are just irrational wreckers whom NOTHING will satisfy?

"While most of official Washington was captivated with the fight on the Senate floor to pass an energy bill before Congress left town for its August vacation, a vicious campaign was under way behind the scenes to smear two leading scientists for pointing out serious flaws in the science behind the theory of human-caused climate change."

There has been a recent claim that birth-order determines whether or not you are conservative or liberal. The evidence on birth-order effects has always shown them to be very slight however. The big influence on political orientation is genetic. The twin studies show that your politics are even more strongly inherited than how tall you are. You are either born with the personality needs that make you a Leftist or you are not. That is why arguing with Leftists is generally so futile. Only aging makes them more conservative, usually.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again.

The Tugboat Potemkin has once again emitted a few angry sparks from its aging Leftist chimney in the form of a great huff over the fact that Andrew Bolt mentioned the psychiatric problems of a children’s book author. Frankly, if I had a child that was being given books to read that were written by a mentally disturbed person, I would want to know about it. Impressionable minds and all that. The Tugboat may stand for censorship of relevant information in the name of political correctness but I think the right to know trumps that every time. As a libertarian, I am against ALL censorship.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I look at attitudes to Aborigines (blacks) in Australia. The main finding was that no one type of person was much more likely to be critical of blacks than any other. There was however a 5% overlap between conservative voting and attitude to blacks. This means that nearly as many Leftists as Rightists were critical of blacks. Since Australian blacks are a pretty sorry lot by most objective criteria, the slight preponderance of conservatives among their critics probably reflects greater conservative realism.

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“FRONT PAGE” ARTICLE UP

I had five articles published in “Front Page Magazine” last year (here, here, here, here and here) but I have been a bit lazy this year. But my first article for this year has now appeared. It is here. It deals with the Berkeley nonsense about the psychology of conservatism. “Front Page” seems to have nearly a million readers these days so out of that I am hopeful of getting a few more regular readers of this blog.

I have given the links to other posts on this blog about the Berkeley nonsense a little further down this page.

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LESSONS FROM VIETNAM FOR IRAQ?

The Left are always telling us that we should have learned from Vietnam to stay out of Iraq. This military writer has a rather different view. Some excerpts:

Iraq is no Vietnam, but there is a lesson from Vietnam that our commanders in Iraq will ignore at their peril: To win, we must think and act differently than our training and military education prepare us to do.

During the Vietnam War, some of the fiercest fighters the war ever saw were soldiers who were known as combat bums and as troops who had gone native.

What they had in common was an obsession with winning, even at the cost of career advancement within the U.S. military.

they began to adopt the lifestyle of the locals in Saigon and elsewhere, and they began to think "out of the box." Ultimately what emerged was an extremely unique style of counterinsurgency warfare - one that may save us both in Iraq and in our current war against terrorism.

It is worth our while today to learn from the Vietnam-era "combat bums" who went native to fight their war. Of all the combat bums, few left us a more worthwhile legacy than John Paul Vann, who fought in Vietnam first in uniform and then later returned to Vietnam as a civilian advisor.

Typically the counterinsurgency leader leaves the familiarity and safety of U.S. institutions and begins to live among the local population - the same people who are recruited by an adversary such as Osama bin Laden and the like. Sometimes this type of mission will include overseeing civilian projects that will improve the lives of the locals. But in all cases, the leader cuts as many ties as possible with the U.S. government and, by primarily relying on his intuition, learns to move among the people like "a fish through water."

A successful counterinsurgent will begin to build trust with the local population...

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ELSEWHERE

Yawn! “Yasser Arafat on Wednesday asked militant groups to halt attacks on Israelis”. He has done so many times before. The Palestinians know he has his fingers crossed (or should that be “crescented”?) when he says such things.

The Australian foreign minister has given the churches a well-deserved blast for politicking instead of concentrating on pastoral matters. He particularly referred to the obnoxious behaviour of the Anglican Primate of Australia, who “had blamed the Bali bomb attack on Australia's close alliance with the US.”

Good to see that Australia has succeeded after a long chase in arresting another ship poaching in its fisheries. Because we manage our fisheries in a responsible way, there are always pirates from other nations trying to steal the fish that we protect.

Ordinary Americans have still got what it takes: “According to a recent poll for the Associated Press, nearly three out of four Americans favor manned spaceflight”

More Canadian absurdity: Canadians are now not allowed to smile for their passport photos.

The second part of this article is most amusing. Leftists are always saying that governments are in the pockets of “the multinationals”. It seems however that the labor unions have sold their souls to Coca Cola! The first part of the article is good too: Having a laugh at the Europeans who condemn Americans as warmongers and then want America to intervene in Liberia and such places.

Hooray! Blimps are back. I have always thought that it was irrational that the crash of the Hindenburg discredited airships. Far more people die in modern airliner crashes.

The Wicked one has some more jokes up: An Irish joke, a New Zealand joke and a Schwarzenegger joke.

I have a post on PC Watch about FAT!

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I look at who gets heart disease. Lots of things lead to heart disease but the type of personality you are is one of them. I show that dominant, aggressive people are at higher risk but that being ambitious or always rushing about frantically are not dangerous at all.

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THE BERKELEY NONSENSE ABOUT THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSERVATISM

Below are posts on this blog over the last month that give more details of how dishonest and distorted the study by Jost et al. was:


The research that the Berkeley group ignored

Their ignorance of history

Conservatives are happy, not angry and fearful

They are seeing their own faults in conservatives

Their way of measuring “dogmatism” is self-contradictory

Another strange belief by one of the Berkeley authors

The folly of using students as your source of information

There is no such thing as a general tendency towards intolerance of ambiguity

Their “Right Wing Authoritarianism” questionnaire is in fact agreed to by lots of Leftists too.

There is no such thing as a general tendency to accept any authority. It depends on the authority.

There was no such thing as a single Nazi “type” and the Berkeley group did not study real Nazis in any case.

The Berkeley theory was in fact borrowed from the Nazis.

SMOKING AND LIBERTARIANISM

The Rev. Brian of American Realpolitik runs a great site for humour which I enjoy visiting. He is a serious humorist (!), however, so I was pleased to get his response to my post on the Bloomberg anti-smoking laws. He writes:

Actually John, the problem with the Bloomberg policies is that people aren't really allowed to segregate. A true libertarian solution would be to let it up to the business to decide. Smokers would gravitate to places where they were welcome, and non-smokers would gravitate to places that catered to them.

Bloomberg has simply banned smoking in publicly accessible buildings. If a bar or restaurant wanted to offer a well-ventilated smoking section they would not be allowed to.

I agree entirely that banning the provision of areas set aside for smokers is unacceptably authoritarian and totally unnecessary. But I have lived through too many years of smokers polluting up all public places to agree that controlling their incursions on other people’s liberties can be left to voluntarism.

Sam Ward also has an interesting comment on the issue.

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EDUCATED ARROGANCE

Bernhardt Varenius of Anti-Socialist Tendencies has drawn my attention to this article. I have yet to find an article written by a Leftist that I find worth fisking but this one tempts me. There is so much about it that is wrong-headed and self-congratulatory. I hope one of my fellow bloggers does a real job on it. I will content myself with taking up his initial point about Leftists being more likely to be highly educated. He thinks that shows that conservatives are stupid. He is right that there is a tendency for Leftists to have more formal education but he fails to ask WHY that connection exists. It would not be because of the heavy Leftist indoctrination that people almost always get in the universities and colleges these days would it?

But WHY are university and college teachers so Leftist? Too easy! They know that they are smart so therefore think that they should be the ones running everything. So they HATE it that people want to run their own lives! And that’s what makes a Leftist. We know what’s good for you is the Leftist credo.

OK. There is one more point that I cannot resist fisking: He says that conservatives were the ones way back who supported the flat earth theory. How he knows that he does not say. What I CAN tell him was that the people who most vigorously resisted Galileo and his ilk were the clergy of the day. And who were the highly educated people at that time? The clergy! So much for the wisdom gained from a higher education!

Parting shot: And it’s not so long ago that the leading intellectuals of both Britain and America were supporting Hitler’s eugenic ideas. Such wisdom!

Reference:
Pickens, D. (1968) Eugenics and the Progressives. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press

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ELSEWHERE

I commented recently on the absurd intrusiveness of the Federal Boxing Administration proposed for the USA. I am afraid Australia looks even more infatuated with government intervention. The State government of Western Australia is well on the way to setting up a Department of Fashion! (PDF). As one of our newspaper columnists commented yesterday (no longer online): “Not that juvenile crime, hospital waiting lists or crowded classrooms should take priority.”

I have said very little about Iraq’s “missing” WMDs because I see it as irrelevant. We went to war because Iraq gave strong indications of having them and that was a good piece of conservative caution. Those who wanted to trust Saddam were the incredible ones. For those who think the issue does now matter, however, a member of Australia’s major Leftist party has written a good short refutation of the whiners here.

Crime Keeps Falling: “Violent and property crimes dipped in 2002 to their lowest levels since records started being compiled 30 years ago, and have dropped more than 50 percent in the past decade, the Justice Department reported” Tougher policing and sentencing deserves SOME of the credit for that but so does the private sector. Bruce Benson explains.

Sensible: “Prime Minister John Howard has stepped up his campaign to keep older workers in the job market by asking for reform plans from a panel of top business advisers.”

A worry for New Zealanders!: A GHANAIAN man was jailed for two years for having sex with a sheep. (via Chris Brand) For my U.S. readers: The relationship between New Zealanders and their sheep is an old joke in this part of the world.

Arlene Peck is pretty scathing about the masculinity of Arab men. Her last sentence is amusing.

In my latest academic upload here (or here) I report a survey of what jail terms people in the community see as appropriate for various crimes. Needless to say, I found that people generally wanted sentences that were many times longer than what the courts actually hand out. I concluded that the judiciary is a major antidemocratic force in the community.

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“RIGHT TO SMOKE” NONSENSE

A lot of libertarians seem to get their knickers in a knot over the ban on most smoking in public by New York Mayor Bloomberg. They seem to think that the policy violates some “right” to smoke. But if person X has a “right” to smoke, then person Y has a “right” to breathe clean air. But the two “rights” are obviously in conflict. The only way to give the maximum freedom to both parties is then to segregate them -- which is what Bloomberg is doing -- perfectly libertarian in my view. Smokers see it all as unfair only because (being addicts) they are so used to trampling over the liberties of non-smokers who would like to breathe unpolluted air.

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GREENIE WATCH

"It has long been clear that the anti-sprawl movement is anti- minority. That racism is not purposeful or mindful on their part, but rather naive and mindless. Like the socialist planners who thought they could do better than the market, but wound up impoverishing millions, these anti-economists would prefer to restrict land use without raising prices. But it is an unavoidable fact that whatever is made more scarce costs more ..."

“Myths and lies spread by the green movement about the consequences of genetic modification (GM) are preventing the use of new crops that could alleviate third-world famine, an international conference has been told in Melbourne. "Genetic engineering has been turned into this Frankenstein technology and a lot of it is due to ignorance," last year's Nobel Prize winner, South African scientist Professor Sydney Brenner told the conference. Kenyan scientist Dr Florence Wambagu said anti-GM campaigners "play around with the anxiety of the public and make them more anxious with myths and lies". Wambagu said poverty, and not development or genetic modification, were causing the loss of bio-diversity in Africa and the continent faced a food deficit without new technologies.” More here

This review of a history of the last 200 years by Mokyr points out how technological innovation is the main influence that has been responsible for our enormous material progress in that time and foresees further huge advances if the political system does not stifle it -- a very real possibility given the influence of the anti-progress Greens and the power of vested interests that would tend to lose out by people being given more choices.

The Bush administration has decided to allow thousands of the nation's coal-fired power plants to upgrade their facilities without installing costly anti-pollution equipment, as they now must do. Industry and EPA officials said recently that the new rule would encourage plant improvements, provide greater regulatory certainty and reduce dangerous emissions. The decision will save billions for consumers and encourage the badly need installation of new capacity. Needless to say, the Greenies and the Democrats are against it.

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ELSEWHERE

The ever-meddlesome U.S. Congress is now in the process of setting up a Federal Boxing Administration! As Forbes says: “With all the big problems facing the nation these days-- like a power grid that has trouble delivering power-- you might think that politicians in Washington would be focusing on basic issues.”

Sheer insanity: “Military involvement by the United States and its NATO allies may be necessary to create stability between Israel and the Palestinians, a key senator has said in the US.” Now THAT really would be a quagmire!

French tax cuts! “French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin will this week announce tax cuts to revive an economy that is nearing recession... With unemployment at a 3-year high and gross domestic product down 0.3 per cent in the second quarter, Raffarin is under pressure to lower taxes further to boost consumer spending. The government reduced income taxes by 5 per cent in 2002 and 1 per cent this year.”

Sieg Hillary? "Until Herschel's discovery of Uranus in 1781, it was considered a matter of certainty that there were six planets. But the fact that everyone knew this to be true did not make it so. In like manner, college students and other insufferable connoisseurs of all human wisdom "know" that the historical Nazi Party epitomizes the extreme right-wing.... These supposedly right-wing extremists were calling for national health care, social security, state-run schools, communal land development and centralized government control.

Apostate Ibn Warraq campaigns for the right not to be a Muslim: "But what has been virtually ignored is that there are Muslims, both in the Muslim world and outside it, who want nothing to do with Islam, moderate or otherwise. Most keep their feelings to themselves. Those Muslims who disown or even criticize their faith publicly are likely to be accused of apostasy, a crime punishable by death under Islamic law."

"Every week we read that something we believe is bad for us actually has beneficial health effects. One week it's coffee, the next is pizza -- and every other day it's red wine. But can these stories really be true? That depends how you interpret the facts."

The Wicked one says that interlinked electricity grids are more efficient and provide cheaper power but that more interlinking may nonetheless be quite reasonably opposed.

In my latest academic upload -- of an article published over 20 years ago -- here (or here) I discreetly mock the conceptual confusion of my fellow psychologists when they talk about authoritarianism, dominance and assertiveness. I tried to get them to think more clearly and rigorously but it was a losing battle from the start.

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