So the federal election of 2016 is consigned to the dust bin of history and the peepole have spoken in their massively indecisive way with the delivery once again of a virtual hung parliament, Claytons hung, the hung parliament you have when you're not having a hung parliament. A massive outright majority of one to the conservative side. Of course if you ask SLOMO, aka Scott Morrison, our Claytons federal treasurer, the LNP won so massively that the majority could be rubbed in the oppositions' face like a pile of dog shit, and now the point of even looking at the Canberra shenanigans escapes me. We none-the-less need to learn something from the exercise.
Saturday, 27 May 2017
Friday, 7 April 2017
SIHSECCN
Joelle Gergis ARC DECRA Climate Research Fellow, School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne
I have actually been blogging for several years now about this stuff and it basically stands to reason that a warmer atmosphere will have more water vapour. The 7% rise per mean degree Celsius rise cited here is surprisingly large, but then I am not a meteorologist. If the water vapour component rises it then is only a question of if, when and where extra rain will fall.
Global warming is cited as mean degree Celsius rise in surface ocean temperature. People who have studied mathematics at all will recall that the 'arithmetic mean' (called an average by non-mathematical people) is a measure of central tendency. As such, by definition, in a data set of temperature measurements at different geographical locations, data points will adopt the normal distribution bell curve centred on this mean. Therefore, an equal number of data points will be above as below this mean value.
A consequence of this is that there will be geographical locations which become wetter, as our self-induced human-species-existential-climate-change nightmare (SIHSECCN) unfolds, and also those which become drier. For the wetter/drier dichotomy one can substitute hotter/colder.
So an element of luck is introduced to the universe of human suffering. If you are lucky you will occupy land which gets cooler, but as mean global temperatures continue to rise these spots will comprise half of the land area. it's a poisoned chalice anyway because those who occupy the cooler spots will be conquered and/or subjugated by those who occupy the hotter regions.
Australia was once called the lucky country in a tongue-in-cheek book title. Now we will see how tongue-in-cheek this actually was.
As an afterthought: since we are forced live a cutthroat neoliberal existence, where are all the budding little entrepreneurs damming the floodwaters and selling the extra water back into the market? Probably the same place as the ones paving the deserts with solar panels and selling pristine electricity to the general population. In the future.
"A rapidly warming climate means that storms are now occurring in a “super-charged” atmosphere. As temperatures increase, so does the water-holding capacity of the lower atmosphere. The oceans are also warming, especially at the surface, driving up evaporation rates. Global average surface temperature has already risen by about 1℃ above pre-industrial levels, leading to an increase of 7% in the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere."
I have actually been blogging for several years now about this stuff and it basically stands to reason that a warmer atmosphere will have more water vapour. The 7% rise per mean degree Celsius rise cited here is surprisingly large, but then I am not a meteorologist. If the water vapour component rises it then is only a question of if, when and where extra rain will fall.
Global warming is cited as mean degree Celsius rise in surface ocean temperature. People who have studied mathematics at all will recall that the 'arithmetic mean' (called an average by non-mathematical people) is a measure of central tendency. As such, by definition, in a data set of temperature measurements at different geographical locations, data points will adopt the normal distribution bell curve centred on this mean. Therefore, an equal number of data points will be above as below this mean value.
A consequence of this is that there will be geographical locations which become wetter, as our self-induced human-species-existential-climate-change nightmare (SIHSECCN) unfolds, and also those which become drier. For the wetter/drier dichotomy one can substitute hotter/colder.
So an element of luck is introduced to the universe of human suffering. If you are lucky you will occupy land which gets cooler, but as mean global temperatures continue to rise these spots will comprise half of the land area. it's a poisoned chalice anyway because those who occupy the cooler spots will be conquered and/or subjugated by those who occupy the hotter regions.
Australia was once called the lucky country in a tongue-in-cheek book title. Now we will see how tongue-in-cheek this actually was.
As an afterthought: since we are forced live a cutthroat neoliberal existence, where are all the budding little entrepreneurs damming the floodwaters and selling the extra water back into the market? Probably the same place as the ones paving the deserts with solar panels and selling pristine electricity to the general population. In the future.
Tuesday, 4 April 2017
Trouble with Bubbles
Timo Henckel Research Associate, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Australian National University
Yes, Autumn is upon us again and the ides of march only passed a few weeks ago, so what a good time for the battle of the b-word to go bounding around the balustrades of the political discourse once again? This article is an eloquent explanation of asset bubbles in general, why this discourse never goes away and the characteristic of macroeconomics which draws me to it, sewn together with a succinct summary of cutting edge psychological macroeconomics. Anyone who is trying to comprehend economics to a level sufficient to understand the news should read this.
Essentially, the discourse never goes away because this field of study, probably more so than any other, is divided into political schools which are for ever in conflict with each other. So we have the 'Saltwater' school centred around the Ivy League Universities of the New England region in the USA, championed by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, of 'The Conscience of a Liberal' fame; the 'Freshwater' school centred around Chicago, championed by Joseph Stiglitz with the US Federal Reserve as its mouthpiece; the 'Austrian' school, centred on the EU, championed by Angela Merkel; and last but not least, at the cutting edge of understanding, the school which has no name at this stage, but has a strong Australian contribution, which I shall now dub the 'Keensian' school after its Australian contributor, my friend Steve Keen centred in England. There are probably other schools in this turbulent field which I have missed but I think these are the main ones.
The Saltwater school is neo-Keynsian, fairly closely following the tenets espoused by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930's in response to The Great Depression, and put into practice by FDR in the New Deal of those years. It practices a legally regulated market, laissez-faire government in the good times but intervention in the market to correct market failure when necessary, redistribution of wealth through taxation leading to an optimisation of social justice. As presently practiced in the Nordic Countries, its political expression is Democratic Socialism.
Favourite of the right-wing of the political spectrum, the Freshwater school is neo-classical in that it promotes economic paradigms which predate the Keynsian revolution and in fact go back to the 19th century. It promotes the idea of an unregulated market and minimal government intervention in the market. Since its inception the USA has conducted a huge experiment in socio-economic engineering by applying these principles to its society, until the shock of the Great Depression forced Keynsian ideas to the fore and the New Deal was born. When the New Deal principles stopped working in the 1970's (remember stagflation headlines) freshwater economists such as Milton Friedman hijacked macroeconomic practicum ushering in the great socio-economic experiment of the past 30-odd years beginning with Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Politically, this school expresses the neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies.
Another love-child of the right, the Austrian school, draws heavily on the work of Friedrich von Hayek and his seminal work "The Road to Serfdom" (1944, University of Chicago Press). It is characterised by austerity policies and insists on budget and trade surpluses and is practiced in parts of Europe. Hayek wrote this in reaction to the work of Keynes and it has been adopted by the right of the political spectrum as its guiding light.
Finally we have the Keensian school. A critique of the classical paradigm of economics has been ongoing since the publication of "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith in 1776, which forms part of the bedrock of modern macroeconomics to this day. Many of the assumptions on which modern economics is based are vastly over-simplified. In the theoretical 'market' all practitioners are assumed to be perfectly rational 'utility optimisers', meaning everybody in the market acts in a rational way to increase their wealth. The Keensian school recognises this assumption as utter nonsense because all practitioners are human beings who do not always act rationally, and employs modern psychology to attempt to better predict market behaviour, so that governments can proactively intervene in markets to smooth the massive gyrations characteristic of these things.
Henckel summarises this new field thus:
Asset bubbles are a market failure. It is a function of government to correct market failures in such a way as to minimise social pain caused by them. It would make a lot of sense if economists, the supposed experts in such things, told us how to go about this. Instead here we have full admission from one of its highest academic practitioners that there is no agreed definition of 'asset bubble', and if you can't define it, you can't say for certain that one exists; and if one doesn't exist, then why would you do anything about it? This sounds a lot like a justification for laissez-faire government. It plays strait into the hands of right-wing parties.
As mentioned above, the modern academic field of economics started with the publication of "The Wealth of Nations" (Smith, Adam, 1776). With close to a century's head start, the modern academic field of physical science began with the publication of "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (Newton, Sir Isaac, 1728{English}, 1687{New Latin}). Thus began a rivalry and jealousy that has lasted nearly 250 years. Economist looked on physical scientists, with their higher social standing; their absolute physical laws; their precise mathematical tools; their evidence-based scientific method, and were overcome with envy, so they endeavoured to mimic them.
You see economics had always been classed as a 'social' science, not a 'real' science at all, and economists wanted to be seen as real scientists, so economic theoreticians, from the start, adopted the bits of physical science they thought would make them look more like real scientists. Physics uses precise mathematical tools they saw: "if we use precise mathematical tools too everyone will think we are real scientists", they thought to themselves. You can hopefully perceive desperation holding back my innate urge to unleash caustic wit in waves of ridicule upon this entire pretentious practice.
So this is why I find this topic so interesting.
My primary training is in physical science. I became aware of economics quite late, but have studied both of these fields to a high level. At masters level the economics being taught was laughable from a scientific perspective. I have to think this is the highest level of economics available. All of the bits of scientific methodology which make it work are tossed into the dustbin by economists. For nearly 250 years they have focused on the one aspect of physics they think will deliver them the status of true science: precise mathematical tools delivering absolute economic laws. This article shows that they can't even get the basics right. When a scientist says 'precise' that person means all the words, variables and concepts used have exact, black-and-white definitions, agreed and understood by all scientists. Asset bubbles have no definition of this sort, so any attempt to use precise mathematical tools to describe or analyse them is doomed.
This is not the only example: in fact economics is riddled with ambiguous concepts and abused methodology, but I shall leave it to my illustrious readers to find more.
In its quest to become a real science economics continues to evolve. It straddles the nexus between precise, austere, rational, logical, austere reality and messy, ambiguous, irrational, emotional, human reality. One day the twain may be met.
Yes, Autumn is upon us again and the ides of march only passed a few weeks ago, so what a good time for the battle of the b-word to go bounding around the balustrades of the political discourse once again? This article is an eloquent explanation of asset bubbles in general, why this discourse never goes away and the characteristic of macroeconomics which draws me to it, sewn together with a succinct summary of cutting edge psychological macroeconomics. Anyone who is trying to comprehend economics to a level sufficient to understand the news should read this.
Essentially, the discourse never goes away because this field of study, probably more so than any other, is divided into political schools which are for ever in conflict with each other. So we have the 'Saltwater' school centred around the Ivy League Universities of the New England region in the USA, championed by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, of 'The Conscience of a Liberal' fame; the 'Freshwater' school centred around Chicago, championed by Joseph Stiglitz with the US Federal Reserve as its mouthpiece; the 'Austrian' school, centred on the EU, championed by Angela Merkel; and last but not least, at the cutting edge of understanding, the school which has no name at this stage, but has a strong Australian contribution, which I shall now dub the 'Keensian' school after its Australian contributor, my friend Steve Keen centred in England. There are probably other schools in this turbulent field which I have missed but I think these are the main ones.
The Saltwater school is neo-Keynsian, fairly closely following the tenets espoused by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930's in response to The Great Depression, and put into practice by FDR in the New Deal of those years. It practices a legally regulated market, laissez-faire government in the good times but intervention in the market to correct market failure when necessary, redistribution of wealth through taxation leading to an optimisation of social justice. As presently practiced in the Nordic Countries, its political expression is Democratic Socialism.
Favourite of the right-wing of the political spectrum, the Freshwater school is neo-classical in that it promotes economic paradigms which predate the Keynsian revolution and in fact go back to the 19th century. It promotes the idea of an unregulated market and minimal government intervention in the market. Since its inception the USA has conducted a huge experiment in socio-economic engineering by applying these principles to its society, until the shock of the Great Depression forced Keynsian ideas to the fore and the New Deal was born. When the New Deal principles stopped working in the 1970's (remember stagflation headlines) freshwater economists such as Milton Friedman hijacked macroeconomic practicum ushering in the great socio-economic experiment of the past 30-odd years beginning with Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Politically, this school expresses the neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies.
Another love-child of the right, the Austrian school, draws heavily on the work of Friedrich von Hayek and his seminal work "The Road to Serfdom" (1944, University of Chicago Press). It is characterised by austerity policies and insists on budget and trade surpluses and is practiced in parts of Europe. Hayek wrote this in reaction to the work of Keynes and it has been adopted by the right of the political spectrum as its guiding light.
Finally we have the Keensian school. A critique of the classical paradigm of economics has been ongoing since the publication of "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith in 1776, which forms part of the bedrock of modern macroeconomics to this day. Many of the assumptions on which modern economics is based are vastly over-simplified. In the theoretical 'market' all practitioners are assumed to be perfectly rational 'utility optimisers', meaning everybody in the market acts in a rational way to increase their wealth. The Keensian school recognises this assumption as utter nonsense because all practitioners are human beings who do not always act rationally, and employs modern psychology to attempt to better predict market behaviour, so that governments can proactively intervene in markets to smooth the massive gyrations characteristic of these things.
Henckel summarises this new field thus:
"This misconception is the consequence of human behaviour and traits that depart from the fully rational paradigm so often assumed in formal economics. Instead, as behavioural economists argue, people exhibit a number of biases.
These include, for example, the desire to find information that agrees with their existing beliefs (called confirmation bias) or the tendency to form decisions based on the most readily available information (called availability bias). People experience and seek to resolve their discomfort when they have two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values and they also employ simple abstractions in thinking about complex problems and events (framing).
People are poor intuitive statisticians and care more about avoiding losses than about experiencing gains (called loss aversion). The list of flaws in human behaviour goes on. Moreover, humans, social animals that we are, compete with and emulate our peers, herd like sheep and act on rumours."
Asset bubbles are a market failure. It is a function of government to correct market failures in such a way as to minimise social pain caused by them. It would make a lot of sense if economists, the supposed experts in such things, told us how to go about this. Instead here we have full admission from one of its highest academic practitioners that there is no agreed definition of 'asset bubble', and if you can't define it, you can't say for certain that one exists; and if one doesn't exist, then why would you do anything about it? This sounds a lot like a justification for laissez-faire government. It plays strait into the hands of right-wing parties.
"Economists disagree on how to define a bubble, or even whether bubbles exist. Intuitively, a bubble (and this applies to any asset, not just real estate) exists when the price of an asset is over-inflated relative to some benchmark. And here’s the rub: no one can agree on what that benchmark should be."
As mentioned above, the modern academic field of economics started with the publication of "The Wealth of Nations" (Smith, Adam, 1776). With close to a century's head start, the modern academic field of physical science began with the publication of "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (Newton, Sir Isaac, 1728{English}, 1687{New Latin}). Thus began a rivalry and jealousy that has lasted nearly 250 years. Economist looked on physical scientists, with their higher social standing; their absolute physical laws; their precise mathematical tools; their evidence-based scientific method, and were overcome with envy, so they endeavoured to mimic them.
You see economics had always been classed as a 'social' science, not a 'real' science at all, and economists wanted to be seen as real scientists, so economic theoreticians, from the start, adopted the bits of physical science they thought would make them look more like real scientists. Physics uses precise mathematical tools they saw: "if we use precise mathematical tools too everyone will think we are real scientists", they thought to themselves. You can hopefully perceive desperation holding back my innate urge to unleash caustic wit in waves of ridicule upon this entire pretentious practice.
So this is why I find this topic so interesting.
My primary training is in physical science. I became aware of economics quite late, but have studied both of these fields to a high level. At masters level the economics being taught was laughable from a scientific perspective. I have to think this is the highest level of economics available. All of the bits of scientific methodology which make it work are tossed into the dustbin by economists. For nearly 250 years they have focused on the one aspect of physics they think will deliver them the status of true science: precise mathematical tools delivering absolute economic laws. This article shows that they can't even get the basics right. When a scientist says 'precise' that person means all the words, variables and concepts used have exact, black-and-white definitions, agreed and understood by all scientists. Asset bubbles have no definition of this sort, so any attempt to use precise mathematical tools to describe or analyse them is doomed.
This is not the only example: in fact economics is riddled with ambiguous concepts and abused methodology, but I shall leave it to my illustrious readers to find more.
In its quest to become a real science economics continues to evolve. It straddles the nexus between precise, austere, rational, logical, austere reality and messy, ambiguous, irrational, emotional, human reality. One day the twain may be met.
Tuesday, 28 March 2017
The Old Australian Cultural Cringe
Ross Gittins knows his stuff and this article makes a great case against the business tax cuts. Why do something that only benefits foreign companies??? Same reason we don't have a minerals super profits tax (or at least a resource rent tax). Same reason we allow foreign companies to ruin our farmland and drinking water with fracking and the great barrier reef with coal mining. Fake government that won't stand up to the lobby groups.
This is just another expression of that 'old Australian cultural cringe' which the coalition in particular is addicted to. They live in the past when Britain ruled the waves and Australia was just a supplier of raw materials for the factories of the mother country, except now we can just substitute 'Big Business' for 'Britain' and a spade becomes a spade. They have sacrificed our sovereignty on the alter of capitalism.
It comes to the point where we don't control our own property, our own destiny, our own lives. Control has been handed to the big multinationals. All they have to say is 'give us special treatment or we will take our business elsewhere', and people swallow this bunkum. So what if they do?
Wednesday, 8 March 2017
Working Class Heroes
Capitalist elites have always sent the poor; the not-so-well educated; the downtrodden (who are trodden down by the myth of competition and the false competitive nature of the human species projected onto reality by these elites), out to die in the pits of of industrialised warfare.
Always remember: we are all born brothers and sisters of the same genome, designed by our creator to live in bounteous peace and harmony on this plentiful planet.
The only things preventing this from happening are the Capitalist Elites controlling the reins of political power and projecting their warped concepts of value, price/cost, work, labour....etc. onto the reality they have created restricting the the spread of knowledge to they own ilk.
The accuracy of John Lennon's assessment is somewhat eloquent:
"If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
First you must learn to smile as you kill,...
...
A working class hero is something to be"
Sunday, 5 February 2017
Ideology vs. Rationality
"If 2008 was the year of the financial crash, 2016 was the year of the political crash. In that year we witnessed the collapse of the last of the four major economic-political ideologies that dominated the 20th century: nationalism; Keynesian Pragmatism; socialism; and neoliberalism. In the 1970s and 80s the centre right in many countries abandoned Keynesianism and adopted neoliberalism. In the 1980s and 90s the centre left followed, largely abandoning democratic socialism and adopting a softer version of neoliberalism.
In 2008 that consensus was rocked, last year it crumbled. Some will cling on to the idea that the consensus can be revived. They will say we just need to defend it more vigorously, the facts will eventually prevail, the populist wave is exaggerated, it’s really just about immigration, Brexit will be a compromise, Clinton won more votes than Trump, and so on. But this is wishful thinking. Large swathes of the electorate have lost faith in the neoliberal consensus, the political parties that backed it, and the institutions that promoted it. This has created an ideological vacuum being filled by bad old ideas, most notably a revival of nationalism in the US and a number of European countries, as well as a revival of the hard socialist left in some countries."
Yes indeed, politics started polarising alarmingly from the shock of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. France, the US and Australia all took a jump to the left with the election of mildly progressive governments. This produced a reaction in the conservative forces in these countries which has witnessed the revival of some of the most destructive right-wing ideologies of the 20th century: fascism, national socialism, extreme nationalism, superficial populism, demagoguery. Hopefully it will all settle down eventually to a new consensus ideology based on rational fact and evidence-based policy. Has anyone seen any pigs in the sky lately?
Democratic Socialism is the way to go but conservatives are very good at demonising it, asserting its equivalence to Stalinism and the worst forms of 20th century communism. How totally absurd??? All you have to do is observe and analyse the highly successful European countries following this ideology. The Nordic countries lead the way. Perhaps it is time for a new Viking influence across the globe. The postwar period in the US was a reasonable approximation also but they walked away from it.
No one appears to have analysed the inevitable consequences of following extreme neoliberalism coupled with globalisation of capital. Financial capital flows across borders, while human capital is constrained. This allows pockets of low labour cost to develop, which are then used by multinationals to build their factories, maximising their profits by minimising labour cost. It's all so artificial, in fact it amounts to extreme market failure, for the jobs which go off-shore are not replaced in the host economy. Widespread poverty results, the gap between rich and poor widens, wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands.
If there were free movement of human capital a natural hierarchy of income, or equilibrium, could be established through market mechanisms. The trend is really egalitarian. Those making obscene amounts of money would have their income reduced to an adequate level while the poor would have their's lifted to an adequate level. Democratic Socialism attempts to do this through taxation and income redistribution, but it is actually the endpoint of an unfettered market where all factors of production are allowed to move freely through the market. Such a reality would require a single world market. Until this happens Democratic Socialism is the best we can hope for.
Which brings us back to Keynes. In his later years the prescient one was asked where he thought it was all going too end. Where we were headed in other words. He replied that there would be an extended period of cheap money (low interest rates) which would cause there to be such an abundance of all material things that everything would be so cheap that all people could have everything they want. I call this the Keynsian Capitalist Utopia (KCU) and I believe we are actually already living in this utopia but artificial market failures, such as the above mentioned immobility of human capital, are masking its full effect. Since 2008 we have seen hyper-low-interest rates in many countries, even going negative at times. In its ninth year of very cheap money, the GFC reaction has seen governments printing money nonstop, bailing out big banks and trying to get their economies growing again, but inflation is minimal and employment is low. If the KCU were allowed to become real, all the financial elites would be wiped out, so I believe they must be manipulating the market, as they have always done historically to maintain the status quo and their position at the apex 0f the social hierarchy.
The thing about ideologies is that extremes are destructive but most have good, positive, progressive aspects as well as the destructive. If we had some sort of rationalism as our ideology we could pick out the good bits and combine them into something beneficial. As one uses the right tool for the right job, we must find the right ideology to guide our fortunes in the 21st century.
In 2008 that consensus was rocked, last year it crumbled. Some will cling on to the idea that the consensus can be revived. They will say we just need to defend it more vigorously, the facts will eventually prevail, the populist wave is exaggerated, it’s really just about immigration, Brexit will be a compromise, Clinton won more votes than Trump, and so on. But this is wishful thinking. Large swathes of the electorate have lost faith in the neoliberal consensus, the political parties that backed it, and the institutions that promoted it. This has created an ideological vacuum being filled by bad old ideas, most notably a revival of nationalism in the US and a number of European countries, as well as a revival of the hard socialist left in some countries."
Yes indeed, politics started polarising alarmingly from the shock of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. France, the US and Australia all took a jump to the left with the election of mildly progressive governments. This produced a reaction in the conservative forces in these countries which has witnessed the revival of some of the most destructive right-wing ideologies of the 20th century: fascism, national socialism, extreme nationalism, superficial populism, demagoguery. Hopefully it will all settle down eventually to a new consensus ideology based on rational fact and evidence-based policy. Has anyone seen any pigs in the sky lately?
Democratic Socialism is the way to go but conservatives are very good at demonising it, asserting its equivalence to Stalinism and the worst forms of 20th century communism. How totally absurd??? All you have to do is observe and analyse the highly successful European countries following this ideology. The Nordic countries lead the way. Perhaps it is time for a new Viking influence across the globe. The postwar period in the US was a reasonable approximation also but they walked away from it.
No one appears to have analysed the inevitable consequences of following extreme neoliberalism coupled with globalisation of capital. Financial capital flows across borders, while human capital is constrained. This allows pockets of low labour cost to develop, which are then used by multinationals to build their factories, maximising their profits by minimising labour cost. It's all so artificial, in fact it amounts to extreme market failure, for the jobs which go off-shore are not replaced in the host economy. Widespread poverty results, the gap between rich and poor widens, wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands.
If there were free movement of human capital a natural hierarchy of income, or equilibrium, could be established through market mechanisms. The trend is really egalitarian. Those making obscene amounts of money would have their income reduced to an adequate level while the poor would have their's lifted to an adequate level. Democratic Socialism attempts to do this through taxation and income redistribution, but it is actually the endpoint of an unfettered market where all factors of production are allowed to move freely through the market. Such a reality would require a single world market. Until this happens Democratic Socialism is the best we can hope for.
Which brings us back to Keynes. In his later years the prescient one was asked where he thought it was all going too end. Where we were headed in other words. He replied that there would be an extended period of cheap money (low interest rates) which would cause there to be such an abundance of all material things that everything would be so cheap that all people could have everything they want. I call this the Keynsian Capitalist Utopia (KCU) and I believe we are actually already living in this utopia but artificial market failures, such as the above mentioned immobility of human capital, are masking its full effect. Since 2008 we have seen hyper-low-interest rates in many countries, even going negative at times. In its ninth year of very cheap money, the GFC reaction has seen governments printing money nonstop, bailing out big banks and trying to get their economies growing again, but inflation is minimal and employment is low. If the KCU were allowed to become real, all the financial elites would be wiped out, so I believe they must be manipulating the market, as they have always done historically to maintain the status quo and their position at the apex 0f the social hierarchy.
The thing about ideologies is that extremes are destructive but most have good, positive, progressive aspects as well as the destructive. If we had some sort of rationalism as our ideology we could pick out the good bits and combine them into something beneficial. As one uses the right tool for the right job, we must find the right ideology to guide our fortunes in the 21st century.
Monday, 23 January 2017
The First Myth
This myth that both parties are as bad as each other is bunkum. If both parties are the same why bother changing your vote. It's promulgated by the conservatives to maintain the status quo where they have a stranglehold on power.
What they are doing to this country is so destructive. Much more and there will be no way back and we will wind up as an irrelevant backwater whose only value is its willingness to bend over and be raped for its raw materials.
To take just one example, our coal reserves have zero value in a world that doesn't burn coal to produce energy. Even right now technology is being produced to generate electricity without burning fossil fuels. LNP policy is to continue with coal, defund education so that we lack the skills to contribute to this technological revolution, and deny us a fibre network fore internet delivery making us physically unable to head in this direction, while the political elites run around wasting money on useless junkets for them and their families and friends.
The reality is that the only alternative to an LNP government is an ALP government or some sort of coalition of the left. I am now a member of the ALP even though my position in the political spectrum is well to the left. Politics is about compromise and it is when extremists come to power who refuse to compromise at all that bad things happen.
Back in 2011 I gave the electorate the benefit of the doubt. The poor people were just hoodwinked into believing the LNP myths racism and misogyny by a conservative controlled mainstream media. It's not their fault I thought. The forces of light just need to campaign harder.
I've now decided that the people really are sheeple, too stupid to think logically, recognise evidence- based reasoning, easily frightened through misinformation and post truth reality put out by elite-controlled MSM, and at the end of the day too lazy to be bothered to think. I have some sympathy for them. Really their reality has been formed by the wrecking-ball extremist neoliberal policies pursued by western "democracies" since 1980. This discredited ideology is based on myths and false assumptions. I've been rattling on about this fact for more than eight years now.
As a card-carrying member of the ALP I am in a position to know a few things you may not be aware of. The ALP has reformed itself to some degree at least. They are about grass roots campaigning now and there are significant points of difference which should be considered when deciding who to vote fore. There is an outstanding progressive policy agenda but the following needs to be implement in addition to this.
The ALP needs to throw off its starry-eyed grass-roots political naivety and realise how biased this so-called "democracy" has become towards the ruling kleptocracy, keeping it perpetually in power to the extreme detriment to our society; our spiritual and material well-being. They should aggressively publicise this simple message:
"The LNP is the party of the rich. They represent the interests of the rich. If you are not rich NEVER VOTE FOR THIS PARTY"
Things change and people need to change accordingly
.
Pardon me but my soapbox just disintegrated
The reality is that the only alternative to an LNP government is an ALP government or some sort of coalition of the left. I am now a member of the ALP even though my position in the political spectrum is well to the left. Politics is about compromise and it is when extremists come to power who refuse to compromise at all that bad things happen.
Back in 2011 I gave the electorate the benefit of the doubt. The poor people were just hoodwinked into believing the LNP myths racism and misogyny by a conservative controlled mainstream media. It's not their fault I thought. The forces of light just need to campaign harder.
I've now decided that the people really are sheeple, too stupid to think logically, recognise evidence- based reasoning, easily frightened through misinformation and post truth reality put out by elite-controlled MSM, and at the end of the day too lazy to be bothered to think. I have some sympathy for them. Really their reality has been formed by the wrecking-ball extremist neoliberal policies pursued by western "democracies" since 1980. This discredited ideology is based on myths and false assumptions. I've been rattling on about this fact for more than eight years now.
As a card-carrying member of the ALP I am in a position to know a few things you may not be aware of. The ALP has reformed itself to some degree at least. They are about grass roots campaigning now and there are significant points of difference which should be considered when deciding who to vote fore. There is an outstanding progressive policy agenda but the following needs to be implement in addition to this.
"The LNP is the party of the rich. They represent the interests of the rich. If you are not rich NEVER VOTE FOR THIS PARTY"
Things change and people need to change accordingly
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Pardon me but my soapbox just disintegrated
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