Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

It is now clear that Tony Hodges, Prime Minister Gillard's now former Media Adviser, rang  UnionsACT secretary Kim Sattler on Thursday 26 January. Ms Sattler is quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying : "I spoke to Tony Hodges on the phone. He mentioned that Tony Abbott had made a statement about the embassy, that it shouldn't exist at all, ... I do now accept that wasn't what was Tony Abbott said." The same day ("Australia Day") Ms Sattler  according to the Herald Sun  posted this statement on her Facebook page: "Tony Abbott just announced the Tent Embassy should be closed down and a huge crowd from the Embassy went to greet him and he had to be rushed away with a police escort!" On Saturday 28 The Prime Minister  is quoted in the Sunday Telegraph as saying : "At no point did Mr Hodges say to Ms Sattler that Mr Abbott had suggested that the tent embassy be torn down or removed in any way," Ms Sattler says Mr Hodges told her ...

It is heartening to potentially see emerging to legitimacy in contemporary polemics the notion that employment, with all its attendant rights and long term benefits for the employed, may not be an optimal relationship for the encouragement and fostering of success and prosperity in small business. This article, " The Growth Agenda - the Self Employment Option " by Dr Madsen Pirie of the Adam Smith Institute advocates for "all small and medium enterprises to treat their workers as self-employed people under contract". He argues that "employers could take on extra people on a self employed basis without imposing any additional burden on themselves". This argument strikes me intuitively as quite compelling. Inevitably any discussion of possible changes to the existing structures for workers' rights can provoke unnecessarily over emotional responses from the entrenched conservatism of trade unions and their enablers in protecting prevailing guild privi...

Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens both died this week. They will both live on for a while though, because they each occupy a special place in my mind. They were both prominent fighters for human freedom against oppressive regimes. One, exorted the West with his intellect, wit and words to acknowledge its responsibility to fight for the ideals of freedom and against hypocrisy. The other was a politician, poet, playwright and philosopher who won a long fight with Soviet totalitarianism that will always inspire others. They were both in their own way heirs to the legacy of the contrarian genius of George Orwell, who helped define the 20th century's intellectual resistance to all forms of totalitarianism. Vaclav Havel  seems likely to go into the pantheon of our civilization's heroes of human freedom. In April 1975, after the Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring with tanks and installed a new puppet in power, ...

US Someone recently emailed me this quite compelling explanation for why Standard & Poors downgraded US sovereign debt: • U.S. Tax revenue:  $2,170,000,000,000 • Fed budget:           $3,820,000,000,000 • New debt:             $1,650,000,000,000 • National debt:      $14,271,000,000,000 • Recent budget cut:      $38,500,000,000 Let's remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget: • Annual family income:                              $21,700 • Money the family spent:                           $38,200 • New debt on the credit...

It seems that there are many benefits flowing to people who live in societies that value and encourage economic freedom  (lid dip to  Glenn Reynolds ).  A carbon tax seems inimical to more economic freedom. It raises the cost of energy. It requires a large and intrusive bureaucracy to collect and administer it. Business has more red tape to comply with. There are redistributions and reallocations of wealth that are susceptible to gaming. How can the risk of taking such backward steps in our economic freedoms be considered worth it for the seemingly very remote possibility that taxing carbon dioxide emissions might help slow global warming if other nations do it too? Especially whilst the rest of the world just looks on? Only people who put a nil or low value on economic freedom would be likely to treat such a trade-off as worthwhile. They do not seem to realise just what a valuable thin...

If your objective is to save the planet, then this tax will  not help . If your objective is to create prosperity, then this tax  will help to impoverish us . Though if your objective is to increase the size and power of government, then this tax would have to be a winner. Here we are, yet again, accidentally having some easily accessible stuff that other nations are prepared to pay up for, and we decide it would be nice, in the name of helping Mother Earth, to deliberately make it more expensive for industries to set up or continue here. And we are going to make it more expensive now, before the rest of the world has done it too, to show the world how morally sophisticated we are, even when such sacrifice won't actually help the planet stay cool. Brave? Yes. Sensible? No. A carbon tax will inevitably cost us economically productive jobs. A carbon tax deliberatel...

Whatever toxins may come along with it, the Tea Party movement has been a wonderful example of grass roots democracy in action in the flagship democracy. Citizens holding their overlords in government to account for their sense of entitlement and profligacy with the taxpayers' dime, is an empowering and encouraging prospect.  The Democrats former (and in many cases continuing) moral righteousness about Guantanamo, Global Warming, Iraq, Afghanistan and the well-being of workers, has not been met in office with any actions materially different from the previous Republican administration, even when the Dems controlled both the House and the Senate. Obamacare, the one possible legislative success of Obama's first 2 years, at the moment just looks like an even more gigantic bureaucratic fiscal snafu than usual, at a time when the US can least afford it. And America seems to have gone morally backwards in many areas under Obama, in spite of all the hope: more wars , more une...