Thursday 31 July 2014

Devoid of Purpose [update 2]

Our roving correspondent Suzuki Samurai has some advice for Jamie Whyte, after the response yesterday of the Racist Relations Commissioner to his call for equality before the law.

Good on the Whyte man calling for Susan Devoid's resignation. But Baldy should grow some and make it ACT policy to get rid of that whole worthless commission; that would show us he means it.

Or, in other words:

Grow some balls, baldy.

UPDATE 1: And there’s more:  “ACT out your principles,” he says.

The first principle you learn when playing squash is to return to (or hold) the 'T'; this is the middle spot on the court, thus the most strategic position being that it is equidistant to all four corners. The truth of this is evident when you see fat blokes that follow this principle winning games over much fitter, but less strategic, opponents.
    In politics one could say that the 'T' represents a political party's principles – have them, and stick to them, and you can snipe, defend, and be more likely to smash your opponents off the public court.
    ACT's Jamie Whyte has got himself some mileage out of Susan Devoy's response to his recent speech about special treatment for Maori. His calling on her to resign is a tasty morsel of political point-scoring, giving him and his party some unexpected media coverage.
    This is an opportunity for him to shake off the past weirdness of Archbishop John Banks -- and to show that, unlike Aunty Don Brash after Orewa, he'll not lose his nerve!
    So I say: Go on Jamie, show all of us that ACT has balls: show a full list of all the ministries, departments, commissions, quangos, and other second-hander groups your party will decommission, how much each one has cost, and how much the taxpayer will save once these moochers have been eliminated.
    I see a strategy. Come out this weekend and announce your party's principles on getting nanny government out of the way.  Announce with it your intention to not just get rid of Susan's non-job, but the whole worthless commission she doesn’t work for. Then poke a stick into another hole to get a reaction next week, following it up with the announcement they will be the next bunch of moochers to go. And then do it again, and then again, and then again, announcing one after another the quangos full of cockroaches that will be axed. 
    Have a go. It might be worth voting for your lot, if you have the gumption. 

UPDATE 2: From Lindsay Mitchell:

He just called for the role to be abolished on NewstalkZB. He explained how these quangos (and even charities) thrive on the very problems they apparently want to solve.

Looks like Suzuki is now obliged to vote.

Wednesday 30 July 2014

ECONOMICS FOR REAL PEOPLE: The Epitome of the Financial Collapse

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Here’s the note about tomorrow night’s session hosted by our friends at the Auckland Uni Economics Group:

The most spectacular collapse of the 2008 financial crisis was Iceland’s financial system. It was wiped out, and it nearly wiped out the country.
    How could such a developed and sophisticated economy collapse so spectacularly? And what has happened since?
  Turns out this is one of the most important questions that can be asked about the ongoing world economic malaise,  because the Icelandic experience mirrors the experience of many other developed countries, but in microcosm – making it very easy to understand.
    In other words, understand why the Icelandic economy experienced a boom and then a spectacular bust and you will understand causes and consequences of the continuing economic crisis.
    And note: the real reasons for the collapse of Iceland‘s economy will probably come as much of a surprise to you as it did to them.
    Come along and learn more!
        Date: Thursday, 31 July
       Time: 6pm - 7pm
        Location: Case Room Two, Level Zero, University of Auckland Business School, Grafton Rd
                              (plenty of parking in the basement, entrance off Grafton Rd)
All welcome!
We look forward to seeing you there.
Auckland University Economics Group

This man is a racist [update 2]


image

ACT leader Jamie Whyte

is calling for a taskforce to identify and repeal laws which he says give special treatment to Maori, saying that "the principle that the law should be impartial has never been fully embraced in New Zealand.”

That’s enough for Maori Party leader Te Ururoa Flavell to play the racism card :

Dr Whyte is vying for the "redneck sector of the voting community,” [says Flavell] and there is "no doubt that there is an element of racism in those comments."

This from the leader of a race-based party, sitting in a race-based seat, elected to parliament by a race-based electorate to argue for race-based law.

This man is a racist.

UPDATE 1:  If you can get your head around this page of pseudo-academic jargon-ridden bile poured over Whyte’s position, you’ll be on your way to seeing how postmodernists can call non-racism racism, and vice versa.  (I’d say “make black white”…  but racism.)

UPDATE 2: More drivel, from alleged pundit Tim Watkin, who ‘argues,’ “Jamie Whyte's speech insisting "race has no place in the law" ignores the fact that the law has never been blind to race, let alone wealth, history and any number of other things.” And then proceeds to argue the law should continue not being blind to race.
Because, apparently, racism.

2 sides of Charlie Christian [updated]

Today is, or would have been, Charlie Christian's birthday.

Guitarist Charlie Christian was one of the pioneers of electric guitar and jazz guitar.  In the early days, he had to make his own amps and pickups, the volume of the guitar and the skill and inventiveness of his horn-inspired picking style making it a lead instrument in big bands and small groups.

Here are two contrasting performances: from 1939, one of his first recordings with Benny Goodman’s Sextet, soloing on Rose Room (the perfect accompaniment to a dry martini) …

… and a rare recording of Charlie Christian “after hours” at the legendary Minton’s Playhouse, helping invent bop with a band including Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke. (Another 27 minutes here!)

[Hat tip Jazz on the Tube]

Repeal Prohibition, Again!

imageThis is big.

The New York Times is not the paper it was, but it still regularly sets the news and political agenda. And the New York Times  has now come out four-square for marijuana legalisation, saying the US Government should Repeal Prohibition, Again.

It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished. It has been more than 40 years since Congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol.
The federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana.

It should.

This is big.

Moral equivalence in Gaza

Why is there a prevalent view that Israel and Hamas are, at best, morally equivalent – and, at worst, that Israel is morally inferior? Take John Minto and his friends, for example, who want everyone to shun Israel, but make no mention of shunning the people who take millions in international aid and turn it into networks full of tunnels, thousands of rockets, and suicide bombs and bombers.

It’s like judging a rapist and a rape victim the same, and suggesting all that’s needed is mediation. Or, worse, that all that’s needed is the rape victim to lie down.

There’s a simple way to see things.  In the context of the present conflict, it’s true to say that if Hamas were to lay down their weapons, there would be peace. But if Israel were to lay down their weapons, there’s be no Israelis.

Take another example: Israel tries to use its weapons to protect its citizens. Whereas Hamas uses its citizens to protect its weapons.

As Hamas itself says, they love death as Israelis love life.

There are no grounds for moral equivalence between live-lovers and death-worshippers.

Elan Journo argues we’re entitled to judge a country on these bases, and should:

So why are so many libertarians either morally neutral on the conflict, or if they have a view are opposed to Israel, and supporting Hamas? Strange, you’d think. Yaron Brook has a theory, based on his observation that because so many anarcho-capitalist libertarians are not so much pro-freedom, but anti-government – leaving their end-game being opposing comparatively free governments, like Israel and the U.S., and being in favour of dictatorships, like Hamas.  Brook offers the following explanation:

I think that the libertarians who tend to be anti-Israel tend to be in the [Murray Rothbard wing] of the libertarian movement. They tend to be anarchists. They tend to have a deep rooted hatred of government. And it’s interesting [because] they tend to hate free governments more than they hate totalitarian governments. They tend to focus their hatred much more on the American government [and] on the Israeli government than they do on Hamas.
   
If you’re libertarian, that is if you claim to care about individual liberty, Hamas should be one of the top most hated regimes in the world. You should be celebrating that they are being destroyed and that the Palestinian people might have a chance to be freed from such a totalitarian evil regime like Hamas is.
   
And yet, libertarians don’t seem to care about the Hamas government, or actually support it, and they focus all their ire [and] all their hatred [and] all their focus on the Israeli government, a government that is in relative terms a rights respecting government, at least as rights respecting as any Western government. Essentially there’s free speech in Israel. There’s freedom of contract. There’s private property, not as much private property as those of us who believe in liberty would like, but much much better than 90% of the countries in the world.

But as an explanation of libertarian support for Hamas, it begs the question, says Paul Mirengoff. Why would those who have a deep hatred of government be more supportive of a totalitarian regime than a semi-free one?  Walter Hudson, he says, “offers a plausible, and rather elegant, explanation”:

[I]t occurs to me that advocacy of anarchy requires one to minimize the legitimacy of foreign threats while demonizing any action which government takes to protect citizens. After all, if government can be seen acting properly in defence of liberty, that stands as evidence against anarchism. In this way, anarchists masquerading as libertarians have boxed themselves into a philosophical corner which requires them to become apologists for evil.

Same reason, you might recall, that Murray Rothbard ended up denying that the Soviet Union constituted a cold-war military threat.

Tuesday 29 July 2014

Boring is a strategy too [updated]

Is there anyone truly excited about this election? Commentators are bored by it. Bloggers are bored by it. The half-a-million (and growing) non-registered to vote are clearly bored by it. Even politicians making deal-or-no-deal seem bored by it.

There is one fat German who’s not bored by it, but he’s produced far less of real interest than those bored by it all might have hoped.

There is an election campaign currently underway, not that you’d know it.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but the big issues this week  appear to be which deals are being made where, or not; what a minister said to a quango; what the polls are telling politicians; and (who would have guessed it) fears of low voter turnout.

Boring.

Turns out it’s not just me that’s bored out of my mind by the election campaign.  But boring is a strategy too. If people are bored, they’re not disgruntled, and only the disgruntled show up in large enough numbers to throw out a government.

Boring is a strategy too, one presently working like all hell for the incumbents. Incumbents who are barely being challenged by anything of any substance.

Mind you, it makes even small things stand out. Like moas. And scarfs. And apologies, or lack thereof. And any other road bumps between now and when a large majority decide to stay home from from the polls.

That could make things interesting, if you like that sort of thing.

But in the meantime, here’s the Manics:

UPDATE: Where I see boredom, Bob Jones sees material for “a wonderful comic operetta.” With the minor parties, anyway,

Monday 28 July 2014

Peak politician

You don’t hear the Greens talking about “peak oil” anymore, and there’s a simple reason for that. The simple reason is that even the Greens now realise “peak oil” is bollocks. Fracking changed all that. So now, they’re against that.

So we are still nowhere near peak oil, and given how resource economics work, unlikely ever to approach it.

However, we’re a small country, with few naturally occurring sources of hot air and blowhard, and it looks like we might have now approached peak politician.

The evidence for this frightful state of affairs grew even greater over the weekend, with the announcement of a recycled politician needing dialysis several times a day as a candidate for the Mana Party in Te Tai Tonga.

Georgina Beyer, who when last heard from was withdrawing from work while whinging about not picking up political appointments is the latest political retread to enter the hustings.

Because with so many parties this election year with so few real differences between them, and with only so much locally-produced hot air and blowhard available, there just aren’t enough politicians to go around.

Poor lambs.

Planning for the Unpredictable

Guest post by Randal O’Toole

How do you plan for the unpredictable? That’s the question facing “planning” organisations writing transportation plans for their regions. Self-driving cars will be on the market in the next 10 years, are likely to become a dominant form of travel in 20 years, and most people think they will have huge but often unknowable transformative effects on our cities and urban areas. Yet not a single regional transportation plan has tried to account for, and few have even mentioned the possibility of, self-driving cars.

Instead, many of those plans propose obsolete technologies such as streetcars, light rail, and subways. Those technologies made sense when they were invented a hundred or so years ago, but today they are just a waste of money. One reason planners look to the past for solutions is that they can’t accurately foresee the future. So they pretend that, by building ancient modes of transportation, they will have the same effects on cities that they had when they were first introduced.

If the future is unpredictable, self-driving cars make it doubly or quadruply so. Consider these unknowns:

  • How long will it take before self-driving cars dominate the roads?
  • Will people who own self-driving cars change their residential locations because they won’t mind traveling twice as far to work?
  • Will employers move so they can take advantage of self-driving trucks and increased employee mobility?
  • Will car-sharing reduce the demand for parking?
  • Will carpooling reduce the amount of vehicle miles traveled (VMT), or will the increased number of people who can “drive” self-driving cars increase VMT?
  • Will people use their cars as “robotic assistants,” going out with zero occupants to pick up groceries, drop off laundry, or do other tasks that don’t require much supervision?
  • Will self-driving cars reduce the need for more roads because they increase road capacities, or will the increase in driving offset this benefit?
  • Will self-driving cars provide the mythical “first and last miles” needed by transit riders, or will they completely replace urban transit?

Planners  in Seattle and Atlanta asked participants at the recent Autonomous Vehicle Symposium to help them incorporate self-driving cars in their regional transportation models. Yet the consensus was that no one has any idea about the answers to the questions I asked above. The only prediction that people could come close to agreeing on was that self-driving cars will increase miles of driving as people take advantage of greater mobility more than they increase carpooling.

Self-driving cars are not a black swan amidst the flock of urban planning “knowns”; they are a whole flock of black swans, any one of which could completely sink even the most accurate predictions about all the others.

Some of the planners believed they could make guesses about the effects of self-driving cars and use them to make “sensitivity runs” to estimate the possible magnitude of the effects of self-driving cars on cities. But even if they made such runs, they would have no idea which runs will come close to reality.

“There are no models in planning practices that can predict the emergence of new modes and forms of mobility,” admitted one planner. “Our models haven’t even got the Internet yet. They haven’t got the cell phone. They’re not going to have autonomous cars.” Another agreed: “ITS [intelligent transportation systems] is 25 years old, but our models still don’t account for it.”

We are about to introduce a new technology that will completely transform our society in unpredictable ways, and many of those transformations will start changing travel behaviours and land-use patterns well before 20 years are up. The fact that plans are revised even every five years doesn’t help because many of those plans include costly investments in projects that take decades to complete. Even if new information reveals that those investments are no longer appropriate, once begun the political pressure to complete the projects will likely be too great for future officials to resist.

This means it’s not enough to simply rewrite transportation planning models. We need to rewrite the entire process of urban planning, following four principles:

  1. Instead of writing 20-year plans that pretend to know what a city will need in the distant future, planners should only write short-term plans that solve today’s problems without foreclosing options for the future.
  2. Planning processes should be streamlined so that it no longer takes 10 or more years to plan, design, and build facilities that, a few decades ago, were built in a couple of years.
  3. Urban areas should avoid infrastructure projects that take decades to complete and would make sense only if people completely changed their lifestyles.
  4. New transportation facilities should be “generic” in the sense that they can be used by a wide variety of modes and easily adopted for whatever modes become dominant in the future.

If some of these suggestions sound familiar, that’s because I’ve made them before, particularly in my 2007 book The Best-Laid Plans. The future is unpredictable even without self-driving cars, and I’ve had little faith in the ability of long-range plans to cope with those unpredictabilities. But now even the planners are willing to admit that they can’t cope with the unpredictable effects of this new technology.

I hope that at least some of them are willing to tell that to the politicians  who create the legal requirement for their “plans.”


Randal O’Toole is a Cato Institute Senior Fellow working on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues, and author of the books Reforming the Forest Service, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths. In his book The Best-Laid Plans, O’Toole calls for repealing planning laws and proposes reforms solving social and environmental problems without heavy-handed government regulation.
This post first appeared at the Cato at Liberty blog. It has been lightly edited for local context.

Friday 25 July 2014

Quote of the day: On growing up

“That's one of the hard things about growing up that I'm starting to see
all too often: life isn't just a matter of crossing off a neverending list of
accomplishments, it's more a case of watching on helplessly as yet
another thing is added to the list of things you'll never do.”

- Bob Murphy, Western Bulldogs utility, ‘Father Time ... slam dunked

Thursday 24 July 2014

How Regulation Kills Innovation

A guest post this morning from Greg Beato,  and our friends at Laissez Faire Books, who introduce it.

We've talked recently about  disruptive technologies, and there's a reason for that. The world you live in is very hesitant to change. It's difficult to make a significant or meaningful change. This isn't something new to modern times. Take a second to think back through history and come up with some other big game changers.

Henry Ford's assembly line that made the Model T affordable is a good one. How many cars does your family have in your driveway?

Don't forget the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk. A trip across the Pacific used to take months. Now it takes hours.

Then there's the rise of computer giants Microsoft and Google. You're reading this via email right now, correct? Still taking photos on emulsion film, or do you take digital photos on your phone?

These ideas changed the way the world functions. The way you live your life. They ended the old business models and created something different, allowing new entrepreneurs and innovators to take that new model and create something even better.

It's the very definition of laissez faire: what happens to the world when people are left to play, tinker, have fun, and innovate a better tomorrow. We're currently living in our ancestors' imaginations, and the future consists of what we can dream up today.

But there are those who aren't too keen on this line of thinking. They're the people who have too much invested in the status quo, who want to keep things just the way they are because they're reaping the advantages. They're the people you really need to look out for. They'll stop at nothing to make sure things stay the way they've always been.

For example, the taxi companies that are so mad about ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft.

Or the hotel industry that thinks Airbnb threatens their high hotel rates.

Or even the Fed with Bitcoin. Imagine what the Fed thought when they found out about an anonymous currency they can't control that's actually gaining traction throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Governments at all levels are more likely to side with the status quo than embrace the new technology. They have special interests they need to take care of. They don't want to rock the boat and potentially give up the power and control they've accumulated. And that's dangerous.

Because in a free market, the old guard can't so easily keep out a new idea or technology that threatens to put them out of business. They might be able to force them out of the market, but they're not strong arming-people under the cover of law. Additionally, they can't prevent you from choosing the less expensive or better-quality option. That's how a functioning free market works.

But once you get the grey ones involved (or any of their relatives at the city, or local level), things get a little hairy.

Suddenly, you're not allowed to open up shop unless you fill out the right forms and get approval from the right people. In fact, in some places, there are boards that determine whether the industry needs additional competition. And those boards... are made up of current businesses.

That's right. The people with the most incentive to keep competition out are the ones manning the gates. And the people in power actually think this is a good idea, that it actually helps consumers.

Fortunately, new technology is like gravity. When someone finds a new, better way of doing something, that force is unrelenting. Never-ending. Unstoppable. So the companies that benefited from the old way of doing things, along with their government sponsors, can fight tooth and nail to keep things the way they are... but I wouldn't put money behind them. Progress will win out.

Now, with the power of disruptive technologies in mind... let's turn to today's article. Reason's Greg Beato thinks there's another sector of the economy ripe for a new business model. Unfortunately, the guys in D.C. (as well as governments throughout the rest of the U.S.) have spent the last four years building a new (and insanely expensive) system to manage it, which will impact us even here in New Zealand.

The ACA created a massive piece of regulation that affects millions of people and businesses, raising costs for everyone involved. Now new technologies are popping up that offer better (and less expensive) ways to do what the law requires, and the U.S. government is trying to shut them down.

That’s bad for everyone.

Smart Apps vs. Obamacare

Health care costs in the U.S. have been rising so steadily for so long that containment barely seems possible. Even optimists don't dream of cutting the price tag. As its official name -- the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- suggests, Obamacare aims for affordability, not radical reduction.

But at a time when we're all walking around with more computing power in our pockets than NASA used to send Apollo 11 to the moon, perhaps we should be setting our expectations higher. Is it really so hard to imagine, in 10 years or so, the advent of advertising-sponsored health care? Or at the very least, bulk-purchased cardiology readings for a Netflix-like $8.99 monthly subscription?

The device that could potentially enable such scenarios already exists. The Alivecor Heart Monitor, above, approved for over-the-counter use by the Food and Drug Administration in February 2014, is a shell that fits over iPhones and Android devices. It converts electrical impulses from a user's fingertips into ultrasound signals, which are then picked up by the phone's microphone and processed using Alivecor's app.

Users can email the single-channel electrocardiogram (ECG) produced by the Heart Monitor to their physicians, or they can pay a small fee to Alivecor directly through the app for analysis by a cardiac technician or board-certified cardiologist within 24 hours.

Currently, the heart monitor costs $199. The ECG analysis ranges from $2-12 a pop. In comparison, two researchers who published a study in the February 2014 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine queried 20 Philadelphia area hospitals about the fee they charged for an ECG-and found prices ranging from $137-1,200.

So Alivecor's fees are already quite nominal. But imagine if, say, Google or Amazon decide to incorporate such functionality more seamlessly into their devices. ECG analysis would likely be offered for free or near-free, in return for opt-in consent to share this information with advertisers and other third parties. When you have a heart attack in the future, the beta-blocker coupons will arrive faster than the ambulance.

imageIn 1997, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen introduced the concept of "disruptive innovation," the process by which a "simplifying technology" combined with a "disruptive business model" upsets established markets and radically broadens access to goods or services.

The Model T is a classic disruptive innovation. The PC is another. In a September 2013 white paper published by the Clayton Christensen Institute (CCI), Ben Wanamaker, executive director of CCI's health practice, and Devin Bean, a research associate at CCI, examine the disruptive potential of Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

In their estimation, some aspects of Obamacare encourage disruptive innovation, at least theoretically. To accommodate the millions of new consumers that the individual mandate has created, the "already burdened" health care system will potentially turn to "new care delivery models that leverage less-credentialed practitioners to deliver care for more routine health concerns."

Similarly, employers who are mandated to provide care for their employees will look for the least expensive options available, creating "opportunities for new and disruptive entrants" to offer cheaper alternatives to traditional forms of coverage from established providers.

But while Obamacare creates new health care consumers, it also dictates the kind of health care these consumers must purchase, which severely inhibits innovation. As the CCI white paper suggests, minimum "essential" benefits that can only be purchased through tightly regulated insurance exchanges "put a floor on the low end of coverage."

Because of these policies, Obamacare simultaneously "overshoots the needs of many customers while preventing innovation that could fundamentally lower the cost of care by requiring that insurance plans mimic the legacy state insurance markets."

Obamacare, in short, puts the weight of law behind the status quo. To illustrate this fact, Wanamaker and Bean offer an historical hypothetical. If Obamacare had existed in the 1940s, insurers would have had to offer sanitarium care for tuberculosis treatment, because that was the standard level of care back then.

And even when antibiotics emerged as a cheaper, more effective form of treatment, health care options that didn't include sanitariums would not have been permitted -- at least until legislators got around to removing that service from its mandated package of minimum essentials.

In addition to "lock[ing] customers into outdated, expensive treatment options," Wanamaker and Bean maintain, Obamacare-compliant health plans will, "by virtue of the benefits they cover," funnel most care into "traditional venues of care-the hospital and doctor's office." So ultimately, all the entities that have been in charge as health care costs have soared achieve further entrenchment via Obamacare. Washington loves an incumbent!

"When you are young and healthy, you may not think you need health insurance. But life is unpredictable," goes an Obamacare recruiting pitch at NYC.gov. "Health care is expensive. Making sure that you are covered is very important." Granted, even one-percenters who can afford concierge genetic sequencing can't foretell car crashes or autoerotic asphyxiation mishaps.

But new technologies are making our medical destinies far more predictable than they once were. And the high price of health care isn't nearly as predestined as the Obamacare pitch insists.

In reality, we are heading toward a world of highly distributed and comparatively cheap diagnostic tools that will allow patients to self-collect health data more assiduously than a team of ICU nurses. The Cellscope Oto (left) turns your smartphone into a digital otoscope for viewing the inside of a person's ear.

The Scanadu Scout (right) , a small, puck-shaped device scheduled to hit the consumer market in 2015 with an estimated retail price of $199, is an attempt to approximate the tricorder of Star Trek fame-a sensor-rigged device that can quickly monitor your temperature, blood oxygenation, respiratory rate, and more, then make an automated diagnosis using intelligent algorithms.

In addition, simple but ingenious innovations, such as "smart pill bottles" that track whether or not you've taken your medication, or predictive analytics programs that identify which patients are least likely to stick to drug therapy regimens and thus need more intervention from caregivers, promise to significantly improve outcomes.

Eventually, all of the data that devices like the Scanadu Scout produce will be stored, shared, and compared as never before, producing more accurate patient histories, more closely tailored diagnoses, and better predictive insights.
The transition to this new world won't always go smoothly, of course. Making powerful diagnostic tools available to people who remain completely stymied by the self-checkout line at CVS promises to be a recipe for both comedy and tragedy.

But health care is on the verge of becoming far more individualised, far more contextualized and collaborative, and most of all, far more ubiquitous. And as this happens, the Affordable Care Act will start to look more and more anachronistic, a 20th-century solution imposing itself onto a rapidly shifting set of 21st-century conditions.

Indeed, imagine if, in the late 1990s, the federal government decided to ensure our right to affordable music by making every American purchase a monthly subscription to the Columbia House Music Club or Tower Records. That would have been great for the Columbia House Music Club, Tower Records, and, say, Sisqo, but would it have been great, in the long run, for the American people?

If you want to pay hundreds of dollars for a traditional ECG, many health care providers will accommodate your desires. But as the Alivecor Heart Monitor suggests, cheaper alternatives exist.

Obamacare doesn't prohibit consumers from pursuing these new cheap alternatives. Nor does it prohibit companies from offering products and services that could radically reduce prices. But unfortunately it will be a long time before you can expect an iPhone a day to keep doctors and insurance agents completely at bay.

As long as those $2 ECGs from Alivecor can detect a pulse, you're going to have to keep paying substantial premiums to Aetna or Blue Cross each month. Essentially, Obamacare establishes an obsolescing way of doing business as a pre-existing condition.


Greg BeatoGreg Beato is a contributing editor for Reason magazine. He has written for dozens of publications, including SPIN, Wired, Business 2.0, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
This article originally appeared here on Reason.com. It has post has been reposted here from Laissez Faire Books.

Wednesday 23 July 2014

Economics for Real People: How Economies Grow

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Exams are over, holiday have finished, and students are hard at it again. That means Auckland Uni Economics Group meeetings start up again. Here’s what’s on tomorow night:

Hi everyone,
We hope that you are all set for another semester of classes. And more importantly, we hope that you are all set for another great semester of Economics Group seminars.
Economic ideas, as we have seen, change the world and any student of economics must be familiar with the range of ideas that exist. This is especially important as economists struggle to explain what has happened in recent years to the world's financial system.
So far this year, we have looked at such topics as: The Broken Window Fallacy, The Division of Labour, and (most recently) The Clash That Defined Modern Economics.
This week we resume our programme by looking at How Economies Grow (or, in other words: Capital and its Structure).
What does growth look like? What exactly grows? What part do savings and credit creation play? And what’s the difference between growth and progress—and how do different schools of economic thought differ on this and other related questions?

    Date: Thursday, 24 July
   
Time: 6-7pm
   
Location: Case Room Two, Level Zero, Business School (OGGB)
                          (plenty of parking below, entrance off Grafton Rd)

All welcome to attend. We look forward to seeing you there.

PS: Check us out on the web at http://www.facebook.com/groups/191580464208836/

It’s not investors driving up house prices [updated]

image

See that bit of paper above? That’s a building permit from 1975.

Cost of the permit: $3.

That is not a misprint. The cost of the building permit in 1975 was three dollars. (That’s thirty dollars in today’s devalued money.) 

The most recent permit I received from council cost my clients nearly ten thousand dollars. That, too, is not a misprint. A ten with three zeroes.  Sure, it was for more than just a garage, but this might suggest to you one of the reasons house prices are way higher now in terms of what you and I earn than they were in 1975.

Think about it. Could it be that the cost of producing them has been made way higher?

Quote of the Day: Artist as revolutionary


Venus, Michael Newberry, 2008, oil on linen, 48 x 48 inches
Artist Michael Newberry painted that glorious nude, above. Venus. Inspired by "the feeling/image/theme…: a beautiful woman free to be, from the inside outwards."
Yesterday, he posted these cogent thoughts:
There is a lot crap going down worldwide: religious warfare, American fascism, unethical scientists promoting political agendas, educators that want government policy to rule young minds, instead of individual teachers and parents - I see so much stupid stuff going down and so few right answers it's painful. And when I ask what could I do about it, I realize that I am.
    Few of you will make the connection but the beautiful female (or male) nude in art is a symbol of individual freedom and happiness. That is one of the reasons that religions repudiate godlike nudes - if people are unique, happy, and free then religion or government have no hold on them.
    So instead of taking up arms, or political power, or infiltrating teachers unions I paint about freedom. I have a hope that brilliant individuals will move obstacles out of their way, not take any shit from anybody or government, and will and continue to reach their outer reaches of fulfilment - and in doing so will become examples to others about what a well lived life looks like.
Amen.

Tuesday 22 July 2014

Offended yet?

Oops.

Manurewa MP Louisa Wall and the South Auckland group Warriors of Change are offended. They’re offended by some year-old cartoons.

Cartoons by Al Nisbet about the Government's breakfast in schools programme ran in The Press and the Marlborough Express in May last year.
    One depicted a group of adults, dressed as children, eating breakfast and saying: "Psst ... If we can get away with this, the more cash left for booze, smokes and pokies."
    The other depicted a family sitting round a table littered with Lotto tickets, alcohol and cigarettes and saying: "Free school food is great! Eases our poverty and puts something in you kids' bellies."

Louisa and her made-up allies are so offended they’ve rolled out their feelings of offence before the Race Relations Commissioner, the Human Rights Commission, and now the Human Rights Review Tribunal, all in hope someone will stop laughing long enough to take her seriously.

Offended?

What sort of “warrior” picks a fight over a cartoon, for Galt’s sake?

You say you’re offended? I say so what.

Here’s Steve Hughes.

[Hat tip Ian J.]

Capitalism vs. crony capitalism

Guest post by Richard Ebeling

In the minds of many people, the term “capitalism” carries the idea of unfairness, exploitation, undeserved privilege and power, and immoral profit making. What is often difficult to get people to understand is that this misplaced conception of “capitalism” has nothing to do with real free markets and economic liberty, and laissez-faire capitalism, rightly understood.

During the dark days of Nazi collectivism in Europe, the German economist, Wilhelm Röpke(1899-1966), used the haven of neutral Switzerland to write and lecture on the moral and economic principles of the free society.

“Collectivism,” he warned, “was the fundamental and moral danger of the West.” The triumph of collectivism meant, “nothing less than political and economic tyranny, regimentation, centralization of every department of life, the destruction of personality, totalitarianism and the rigid mechanization of human society.”

If the Western world were to be saved, Röpke said (and after the war, he did more than most to save it), it would require a “renaissance of [classical] liberalism” springing “from an elementary longing for freedom and for the resuscitation of human individuality.”

What is the Meaning of Capitalism?

At the same time, such a renaissance was inseparable from the establishing of a capitalist economy. But what is capitalism? “Now here at once we are faced with a difficulty,” Röpke lamented, because, “capitalism contains so many ambiguities that it becoming every less adapted for an honest spiritual currency.”

As a solution, Röpke suggested that we “make a sharp distinction between the principle of a market economy as such . . . and the actual development which during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has led to the historical foundation of market economy.”

Röpke went on, “If the word ‘Capitalism’ is to be used at all this should be with due reserve and then at most only to designate the historical form of market economy . . . Only in this way are we safe from the danger . . . of making the principle of the market economy responsible for things which are to be attributed to the whole historical combination  . . . of economic, social, legal, moral and cultural elements  . . . in which it [capitalism] appeared in the nineteenth century.”

In more recent times it has become common to use the term “crony capitalism,” implying a “capitalism” that is used, abused, and manipulated by those in political power to benefit and serve well connected special interest groups desiring to obtain wealth, revenues and “market share” that they could successfully acquire on an open, free and competitive market by offering better and less expense goods and services to consumers than their rivals.

Corrupted Capitalism vs. Free Market Capitalism

This facet of a corrupted capitalism is, unfortunately, not new. Even as the classical liberal philosophy of political freedom and economic liberty was growing in influence in Europe and America in the nineteenth century, many of the reforms moving society in that freer direction happened within a set of ideas, institutions, and policies that undermined the establishment of a truly free society.

Thus, the historical development of modern capitalism was “deformed” in certain essential aspects virtually from the start. Before all the implications and requirements of a free-market economy could be fully appreciated and implemented in the nineteenth century, it was being opposed and subverted by the residues of feudal privilege and mercantilist ideology.

Even as many of the proponents of free market capitalism and individualist liberalism were proclaiming their victory over oppressive and intrusive government in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, new forces of collectivist reaction were arising in the form of nationalism and socialism.

Three ideas in particular undermined the establishment of the true principles of the free market economy, and as a result, historical capitalism contained elements totally inconsistent with ideal of laissez-faire capitalism – a free competitive capitalism completely severed from the collectivist and power-lusting state.

The Ideas of “National Interest” and “Public Policy.”

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the emergence of the modern nation-state in Western Europe produced the idea of a “national interest” superior to the interests of the individual and to which he should be subservient. The purpose of “public policy” was to define what served the interests of the state, and to confine and direct the actions of individuals into those channels and forms that would serve and advance this presumed “national interest.”

In spite of the demise of the notion of the divine right of kings and the rise of the idea of the rights of (individual) man, and in spite of the refutation of mercantilism by the free-market economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, democratic governments continued to retain the conception of a “national interest.”

Instead of being defined as serving the interests of the king, it was now postulated as serving the interests of “the people” of the nation as a whole. In the twentieth century, public policy came to be assigned the tasks of government guaranteed “full employment,” targeted levels of economic growth, “fair” wages and “reasonable” profits for “labor” and “management,” and the politically influenced direction of investment and resource uses into those activities considered to foster the economic development viewed as advantageous to “the nation” in the eyes of those designing and implementing “public policy.”

Capitalism, therefore, was considered to be compatible with and indeed even requiring activist government. In nineteenth century America it often took the form of what were then called “internal improvements” – the government funded and subsidized “public works” projects to build, roads, canals, and railways, all which transferred taxpayers’ money into the hands of business interests interested in getting the government’s business rather than that of consumers in the marketplace.

It also manifested itself through trade protectionism meant to artificially foster “infant industries” behind high tariff walls. Selected businesses ran to the government insisting that they could never grow and prosper unless they were protected from foreign competition, at the expense, of course, of the consumers who would then have fewer choices at higher prices.

Today, it still includes public works projects, but also manipulation of investment patterns through fiscal policies designed to target “start-up” companies considered environmentally desirable or essential to “national security.” It also takes the form of pervasive economic regulation that controls and dictates methods of manufacturing, types and degrees of competition, and the associations and relationships that are permitted in the arena of commerce and exchange both domestically and in international trade.

In the misplaced use of the phrase “American free market capitalism” there is little that occurs in any corner of society that does not include the long arm of the highly interventionist state, and all with the intended purpose and resulting unintended consequences of political power being applied to benefit some at the expense of many others.

Perversely, the interventionist state in the evolution of historical capitalism has come to mean in too many people’s eyes the inescapable prerequisite for the maintenance of the market economy in the service of an ever-changing meaning of the “national interest.”

Central Banking as Monetary Central Planning

Whether in Europe or the United States, the application and practice of the principles of a free market economy were compromised from the start with the existence of monetary central planning in the form of central banking.

First seen as a device for assuring a steady flow of cheap money to finance the operations of government in excess of what those governments could extract from their subjects and citizens directly through taxation, monopolistic central banks were soon rationalized as the essential monetary institution for economic stability.

But the German economist, Gustav Stopler, clearly explained many decades ago in his book,This Age of Fable (1942), the government’s control of money undermines the very notion of a real free market economy:

“Hardly ever do the advocates of free capitalism realize how utterly their ideal was frustrated at the moment the state assumed control of the monetary system . . . A ‘free’ capitalism with governmental responsibility for money and credit has lost its innocence. From that point on it is no longer a matter of principle but one of expediency how far one wishes or permits governmental interference to go. Money control is the supreme and most comprehensive of all governmental controls short of expropriation.”

Once government controls the supply of money, it has the capacity to redistribute wealth, create inflations and cause economic depressions and recessions; distort the structure of relative prices and wages so they no longer reflect the values and choices of the buyers and sellers in the market; and generate misallocations of labor and capital throughout the economy that brings about imbalances of resource uses inconsistent with a market-based pattern of consumer demands for alternative goods and services.

Then, in the face of the market instabilities and distortions caused by the government’s mismanagement of the money supply and the banking system, the political authorities rationalize even more government intervention to “fix” the consequences of the boom-bust cycles their own earlier monetary central panning policies created.

The “Cruelty” of Capitalism and the Welfare State

The privileged classes of the pre-capitalist society hated the market. The individual was freed from subservience and obedience to the nobility, the aristocracy, and the landed interests.

For these privileged groups, a free market meant the loss of cheap labor, the disappearance of “proper respect” from their “inferiors,” and the economic uncertainty of changing market-generated circumstances.

For the socialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, capitalism was viewed as the source of exploitation and economic insecurity for “the working class” who were considered dependent for their livelihood upon the apparent whims of the “capitalist class.”

The welfare state became the “solution” to capitalism’s supposed cruelty, a solution that created a vast and bloated welfare bureaucracy, made tens of millions of people perpetual wards of a paternalistic state, and drained society of the idea that freedom meant self-responsibility and mutual help through voluntary association and human benevolence.

A “capitalist” system with a welfare state is no longer a free society. It penalizes the industrious and the productive for their very success by punishing them through taxes and other redistributive burdens under the rationale of the “victimhood” of others in society who are claimed to have not received their “fair” due.

It weakens and then threatens to destroy the spirit and the reality of individual accomplishment, and spreads a mentality of “entitlement” to what others have honestly produced. And it restores the fearful idea that the state should not be the protector of each citizens individual rights but the compulsory arbiter who determines through force what each one is considered to “rightfully” deserve.

Peaceful and harmonious free market competition in the pursuit of excellence and creative improvement is replaced by the coerced game of mutual political plunder as individuals and groups in society attempt to grab what others have through a redistributive system of government force.

Free Market Capitalism was Hampered and Distorted

The ideal and the principle of the free market economy, of capitalism rightly understood were never fulfilled. What is called “capitalism” today is a distorted, twisted and deformed system of increasingly limited market relationships, as well as market processes hampered and repressed by state controls and regulations.

And overlaying the entire system of interventionist “crony” capitalism are the ideologies of eighteenth century mercantilism, nineteenth century socialism and nationalism, and twentieth century paternalistic welfare statism.

In this warped development and evolution of “historical capitalism,” as Wilhelm Röpke called it, the institutions for a truly free-market economy have either been undermined or prevented from emerging.

As the same time, the principles and actual meaning of a free-market economy have become increasingly misunderstood and lost. But it is the principles and the meaning of a free-market economy that must be rediscovered if liberty is to be saved and the burden of “historical capitalism” is to be overcome.

The socialists and “progressives” twisted and stole the good and worthy concept of liberalism as a political philosophy of individual rights and freedom, respect and protection of honestly acquired private property, and peaceful and voluntary industry, production and trade. It was usurped and made into the “modern” notion of liberalism as paternalistic Big Bother government controlling every aspect of life in the name of the “social good.”

Restoring the Ideal of Free Market Capitalism

The word “capitalism” was used as a term of abuse by the socialists almost from the beginning. But it also meant a system of creative and productive enterprise and industry by free and self-guiding individuals, each pursuing their peaceful self-interests through honest work, saving, and investment. The “self-made” man of capitalism was an ideal and model for the youth of America. The man who was motivated by his own independent self-responsible vision, who built something, new, better, and greater as a reflection of the potential of the reasoning and acting human being who sets his mind to work.

His wealth, if successfully accumulated, was honorably earned in the marketplace of ideas and industry, not plundered and stolen by force and political power. No individual is robbed or exploited on the truly free market, since all trade is voluntary and no man could be forced into an exchange or association not to his liking and consent.

Free competition sees to it that everyone tends to receive and earn a wage that reflects the estimation of his productive worth to others in society. Each individual is free to improve his talents and abilities to make his services more valuable to others over time, and earn the commensurate higher wages from possessing more marketable skills.

Wealth accumulated enables investment and capital formation for the production of new, better and more goods and services wanted by the consuming public, the majority of whom are the very wage-earning workers employed in the production and manufacture of those goods under the market-determined guiding hands of successful businessmen and entrepreneurs.

Free Market capitalism makes the consumer “king” of the marketplace who determines whether businessmen earn profits or suffer losses, base on what they decide to buy and how much they are willing to pay.

It is free market capitalism that helps make each man and woman a “captain” of their own fate, with the freedom about what work and employment to pursue, and the liberty to spend the income they earn in their own personal, desiring way to live the life they value and want, and that gives meaning and purpose to their own life.

No person need put up with humiliation, abuse or disrespect from a bureaucrat or political official who has control over their fate through the power of government planning, regulation and redistribution.

Free market capitalism offers people opportunities and choices as consumers, workers and producers, with the liberty to change course whenever the benefits from doing so seem to outweigh the costs in the eyes of the individual.

Free market, or laissez-faire, capitalism makes this all possible because it rests on a deeper political philosophical foundation based on the idea and ideal of the right of the individual to his own life, to be lived as he desires and chooses, as long as he respects the equal right of others to do the same.

Free market capitalism insists that there is no higher “national interest” above the individual interests of the separate citizens of a free society. In a system of free market capitalism government should no more control money and the banking system than a limited government should control the production and sale of shoes, soap, or salami.

And free market capitalism calls for each individual’s peacefully earned property and income to be respected and protected from plunder and theft, and that includes any created rationale and attempted justification to rob Peter to redistribute to Paul through the coercive power of government.

The good name of “capitalism” has to be recaptured and restored, just as the good name and concept of “liberalism,” rightly understood, should be returned to the advocates of individual liberty and free enterprise.

But this task requires friends of freedom to explain and make clear to others that what we live under today is not “capitalism” as it could be, should be and properly really means.

The reality of that “historical capitalism,” about which Wilhelm Röpke spoke, is the “crony capitalism” that must be rejected and opposed so that free men may some day live under and benefit from the truly free market capitalism that is the only economic system consist with a society of human liberty.


Richard M. Ebeling is a professor of economics at Northwood University. He was formerly president of The Foundation for Economic Education (2003–2008), was the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College (1988–2003) in Hillsdale, Michigan, and served as vice president of academic affairs for The Future of Freedom Foundation (1989–2003).

Loyal, but why?

If the saccharine-sound of Dave Dobbyn singing Loyal makes your teeth grind, there might be more to your loathing than just the awful nasal whine. It might be that loyalty, in the way he whines about it, is not the value it could be, or – given how popular the sappy song is – people think it is, or would like it to be.

Loyalty is a sub-species of integrity – a reflection of consistency between your principles and your actions. Psychologist Michael Hurd reckons however that, very often, we choose sports teams, friends, even lovers on the basis only of vague or unidentified feelings.  Feelings we never examine any further.  That’s fine when it comes to sports teams (unless you find yourself supporting Collingwood, or England), but not for higher values.

“When it comes time to be loyal — or disloyal — to friends or associates, we’re unclear on what we’re actually being loyal to. As a result we’re left with nothing else but feelings.
    If someone annoys you for a trivial reason, you’ll reject or back away from them without really knowing why, and you might later come to regret it. If someone betrays you for a very big reason, you’re lost without a set of conscious convictions to guide you

Your “loyalty” is based on little more than habit, which offers no guidance on what to do next. Just nagging doubt. On the other hand…

If you live your life consciously, by a set of conscious convictions and principles, then you deliberately select your friends and loved ones accordingly. If you value integrity and honesty, for example, then you not only seek to practice it, but to  find people who do the same. Ditto for any other virtue you consciously hold near and dear to your heart and mind: intelligence, intellectual honesty, productivity, and rationality.
    If you value your ideals consciously, and you seek to uphold them in daily life, then your friends and spouse will be very important to you. They’re important to you because they embody and actualize — in your eyes, and hopefully in reality — your most cherished values. Loyalty in that context is “easy,” in that betraying people who embody what’s important to you would go against everything  you think and most deeply feel.

This is obviously part of a bigger point about holding, developing, and testing your convictions and principles consciously.

It’s generally considered more cool, normal or socially acceptable not to hold any conscious convictions — or, if you do hold them, not to hold them “too strongly.” Or, if you must hold deep, intense or conscious convictions, then at least don’t let anybody know it.
    Not only is this boring and shallow; it makes something most of us do consider virtuous — loyalty — impossible. I suspect this is one reason why so many get attached to their dogs (or cats). These animals possess a consistency and integrity (on a nonconceptual level) of which humans are more brilliantly capable, but rarely display.

Here’s Dave Dobbyn.

Hell no. Just joking.

How the Welfare State begins …

image

Hat tip Power Line: ‘The Morals of the Welfare State

Quote of the day: “For every rocket fired on Israel, Hamas gets two in return…”

“For every rocket fired on Israel, Hamas gets two in return. Gazans just have to listen
to Israel when it warns them of attacks by phone, leaflets, radio or the final roof-
knocking warning and get away from Hamas. So if you paid attention in elementary
school math class, you’d know that if Hamas fired 0, Israel would fire 0×2=0.” He
adds, “If Israel still fires rockets without provocation, I’ll be pro-Palestinians as well.”
- Farid el-Nasire, co-creator of the Israel Under Attack programme, 
   quoted in ‘Where'd that rocket come from? New site shows you’

Hurry up and wait

Guest Post

Image: National Park ServiceHere's a story you can tell the next time someone says America needs immigration reform. It's the story of Norma Uy from the Philippines. Back in the '80s, millions of men, women, and children from around the world illegally entered the U.S. But Uy didn't want to go that route.

So 33 years ago, Uy got in line. That is, she started the legal process to enter the United States.

It took a long time, but she didn't want to carry the stigma of an illegal alien in America, even though President Reagan could have granted her amnesty if she had left in the early '80s.

Uy was patient.

Uy was resilient.

And eventually, Uy earned her spot in America.

Because in 2002, 21 years after she started the legal process to get into the United States, Uy finally got her ticket. Her visa to legally enter the United States.

These are the people you want to enter the U.S., right? People who follow American laws before they even enter the country. People who don't think they can earn their place by crossing into the U.S. under the cover of darkness.
Uy was the type of immigrant you want.

But there was a problem. And this type of problem is the root of the immigration situation in America.

When Uy applied in 1981, she had a 2-year-old daughter. A provision in the law allowed parents to extend their visa to their children. Twenty-one years later, however, her baby girl was a full-grown adult. And under current U.S. immigration laws, adults can't obtain a visa through their parents.

In other words, Uy's daughter had to get back in line. The same line that took her mother 21 years to get through.

So Uy faced a problem, one that many people who want to follow the law have to deal with. Should Uy leave her child in the Philippines and move to America? Or should she stay behind with her family and give up her chance at a better life?

This is the real issue behind the current immigration problem. The laws the U.S. has to control the borders and permit people to enter are so complex, and the wait so long, it's keeping out the type of people we should want to let in. Uy, or people like her, could have illegally found their way into the U.S., laid low for a few years, and gotten amnesty.

Now she's stuck in a no-win situation.

Here's something else to consider. The U.S. has had a rough time the past six years. Two presidents trying to meddle, control, and rein in the economy caused the problems of today. People are dropping out of the labour force, and any economic "growth" you hear about in the news is really Fed money manipulations (when that bubble pops, things are going to get real bad).

But even with all this, the country still has a problem with people wanting to live there. You don't see any headlines about Colombia building a wall on their border to stop immigrants from Central America. No one wants to go there. They want to go to the U.S..

People vote with their feet. And the U.S. should be proud that people are willing to leave the country where they were born and raised for a shot at something better. This has been an American theme since the discovery of the New World.

Now, before you start commenting to voice your complaint, I should clarify something. I don't think the borders should be open to everyone. We just need to make it as easy as possible for people like Uy and other law-abiding citizens to get in as soon as possible.

There are people you need to keep out. They'll be the ones trying to illegally enter the country if we make the immigration process simple, easy, and efficient. Everyone else will be hopping in line with the Norma Uys of the world, waiting a couple of months before collecting their visa and starting their new life in America.

But as long as immigration remains a political problem, that won't happen.


This post first appeared at the Laissez Faire Books blog.

RELATED:

Message to John Minto

Message from Pat Condell to John Minto, Martin Bradbury, Annette Sykes et al …

… and, to my surprise, echoed somewhat by Bill Maher:

Monday 21 July 2014

Quote of the day: On responding to Wagner

“… opera audiences … are responding to the heightened atmosphere
of the music-dramas which, as Thomas Mann put it, “implies that the
highest and best available to man is a life cast in the heroic mould.’”

- Simon Williams, Wagner and the Romantic Hero

The Middle East Friendship Chart

“Friendship” might be the wrong title. It’s not clear that Iraq, among others, is even friends with itself – let alone the Palestinian Authority and its separate heads.

image

Head to Slate for the full interactive chart.

[Hat tip Vinay Kolhatkar]

Politics as horse race

It’s not exactly a contest of ideas out there on the hustings.  Not that you’d know if any ideas were being debated, not if media reports were all you had to go on.

The media, as always, steer clear of ideas and talk only about the race. The polls. The “gaffes.” The details of the campaign to come, without the ideas around which campaigns are supposed to centre. Politics as horse race.

And the polls, the polls! If the polls are reported as your opinion about the parties, but all you heard about the parties is the polls, from whence and based on what would you form your opinions?

News reports are full of the race without the reasons, and the politicians without real mention of their politics.

David was on holiday in Queenstown. He spoke to a sexual predator, and his caucus talked to the media about David. John was on holiday in Hawaii. He spoke to Max and Bronagh, and his caucus talked up John and ignored Jonathan. Not much learned from any of that.

Act isn’t part of the race, except in Epsom, so we only hear about Act-and-Epsom. Colin Craig is standing in some other electorate, and might have  a deal done. What he stands for, other than general creepiness, you wouldn’t really know from reports.

The Greens are wearing suits and trying to appear sensible, so few pointed questions are being asked. DotCon/Hone/Harre/InterMana are trying not to appear sensible, attracting questions mostly about how they’re all getting on.

Mind you, we did hear over the weekend that John Minto wants to banish the Israeli embassy and remind us he opposed the 1981 Springbok tour; and that Winston wants to tax foreigners and promote himself as the apostle of common sense. We learned these things over the weekend, if from that we really learned anything at all.

And we learned that DotCom has a September gimmick to bury John Key. And if it’s true that Glenn Greenwald were to take the time to visit, this last at least has legs.  If his visit is not just an idle claim thrown out by an attention-seeker (will any NZ journalist bother to ask Greenwald himself?), he’s unlikely to be visiting just to swap cooking recipes with Laila Harre.

Mind you, I wonder how many voters actually care if John Key knew about DotCom before or even after the raid on DotCom's house? Or if there’s anything more that would be reported.

Not if there were a poll out that weekend.

China, my China

Our regular Asian/Australian correspondent Suzuki Samurai has more book recommendations for you…

The twenty-first century, it is said, is going to be China's century. The story is a fascinating one, and will be more so as it unfolds. Alas, the masses of information that most people use to form this story they get from China's propaganda apparatchiks through an often gooey-eyed and incurious western media – bushels more chaff than wheat. There is little doubt however, that China is a far better place than it was just a few decades ago. How it navigates the stormy waters of their gargantuan debt, culturally embedded corruption, nationalistic fervour of it's territorial claims, and, albeit slow, demands for political emancipation* will show us what has changed at root.
    Is this a new China? Or is it going to be new, with Chinese characteristics? There are many hundreds of books written about China. Below I mention just a few I commend to your attention which I think gives something of an insight into the story of China's complicated, sad, and truly bizarre recent history.

Lets start with two on Mao:

Mao: The Unknown Story
Book by Jon Halliday and Jung Chang.

This book has already been reviewed on this blog (actually, I think the editor has my copy) [true story – Ed.].
     I'd like to add that while Mao was but a blip in the Chinese timeline, this maniac's impact was so destructive and obscene it's worth another look to get an idea of what a shambles the place was in when he died an unfortunately painless death in September 1976. This book has of course been criticised for embellishments and spurious claims. However, if these criticisms have any validity, they can't take away the fact that if just one chapter in this book of 992 pages were true it would still put Mao at the top of the “Complete Evil Bastard” leader board. Which is a very bg board.
    Which brings me to another book on Mao and more importantly, his court...

The Private Life of Chairman Mao
A Memoir by Zhisui Li.

Li was Mao's personal physician for nigh on two decades, an unenviable job for anyone averse to tending to a stinking, sexually predatory, disease-spreading ball of puss whose indifference to suffering in others would combine to form an addled mind with immeasurable power over life and death; including of course, the Doctor's.
    What Sinophiles will find instructive in this book is how Mao's court functioned (if by “function” you means chaos), which of the main players in this game of chaos went on to be part of the current China, and, to my mind most importantly, how culture and politics overlap in China.

How China Became Capitalist
by Ronald Coase & Ning Wang

This book is more scholarly than the previous two mentioned. Centenarian & Nobel Laureate in Economics, Ronald Coase, (with Ning Wang) has written a very detailed political and economic look at how China got to where it is now from the miserable leftovers of Mao's regime.
    In short, China became capitalist hap-haphazardly, accidentally, and at times it looked like not happening at all. With some well intentioned, but ignorant, pragmatists having to outmanoeuvre old guard communist hard-liners at every juncture, they still managed to not-so-much put in place policies to enable capitalism to flourish, but were able to 'test' ideas by allowing small-scale trials that the population at large were engaging in themselves.
    Once news of these trials got through to the power brokers, they'd allow it elsewhere, and so on and so forth. This spontaneous flourishing of enterprise became unstoppable and, they knew, very necessary if China was ever going to become a rich and powerful country – this last being especially important to Chinese.

Which rounds off nicely to a  book which should be of interest to anyone that wants to have a crack at doing business in China...

Poorly Made in China
An insiders account of the tactics behind China's production game.
by Paul Midler

The name of this book would suggest you might want to avoid doing business in China. Actually Midler is all for it. In simple language, real example, and anecdote he shows what to look out for - and there is a lot to look out for, that's for sure.
    When not writing, Midler is an expert in the hold-your-hand kind of way; that is, for the right fee he'll show you how to get the deals done in China. He speaks the language, and has heard it all. The book itself is at once hilarious and astonishing. Chapter after chapter of real examples of the shenanigans and rip-offs that inexperienced wide-boys will weather should they go in head first and ill-prepared. This book is good fun, but essential to anyone who wants to dive in and get their widgets made in China.

Here’s Brian Eno:


*Commentator Gordon Chang reports that there are many hundreds of thousands of protests of more than five hundred people in China per year. This data he often uses to suggest that there is growing disillusionment with the government. Actually, the protests I've seen, heard, and read about are usually ones attacking some local bureaucrat, maybe a mayor, and sometimes property developers. When mentioning the government, the protesters invariably say they respect or even love the government and that they call on the government to do more to help them fight the targets of their aggression. As for demanding democracy: nonsense.