In his famous 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, Ronald Regan recounted a story:
“Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”
I was brought back to this speech and this story when I opened my email this morning to an alert from Visual Capitalist, a wonderful website that produces graphics of important data sets. This morning’s alert was to show the richest and poorest nations in the world based on per capita income.
The Richest. Ireland #2, US #7, Australia #9, Canada #12, UK #18, NZ #22.
The top 3 richest are in Europe: Luxembourg, Ireland, and Switzerland. The 3 poorest are in Africa: Burundi, Sierra Leone, and Malawi. Europe versus Africa.
Looking at these charts should make one wonder. But in a world of diversity, there will always be rich and poor, but the important questions are why are the rich rich and the poor poor.
The social justice intelligentsia would have people believe that poor are poor because the rich are rich. As if the rich took wealth from the poor. They would also have people believe that poverty is a function of resources. Yet the poorest nations are in Africa where resources are ample, and the richest nations are in Europe where resources are sparse.
If recent history has shown anything, the drivers of longer term economic and social prosperity are not geography or resources. It is not climate or race. The difference is the software that these countries run.
It has been seen, time and time again, anywhere and everywhere, that the key ingredients, the five magic apps for prosperity are:
the rule of law;
limited government;
low taxes;
property rights; and
competitive markets.
Evidence? Sure. Look at North Korea vs South Korea, East Germany vs West Germany. Look even at North America and South America.
Capitalist South Korea fully lit at night. Anti-capitalist North Korea dark.
You will note that democracy is not on that list because these are the apps for economic and not political freedom. China has proven that you can increase a nation’s wealth by running these economic magic apps. But China has also shown that economic freedom creates pressures for political freedom which is why it is starting to delete these apps, and watching its economic prosperity slowly erode.
What is the lesson here? Well, these wealthy nations, including Australia, that have become wealthy and prosperous by running these five magic apps, by having the rule of law, limited government, low taxes, property rights and competitive markets are, slowly deleting these apps. And wealth and prosperity is slowly being deleted in parallel. The first sign of the economic atrophy is inflation. Next will come recession/depression. What comes next? Have a look at the nations that don’t run these magic 5 apps.
After economic freedom disappears, then political freedom will disappear.
As Ronald Regan said: “If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to”.
“To these people, the war is simply a continuous calamity which sweeps to and fro over their bodies like a tidal wave.”
1984. George Orwell.
We are at war.
We shall prevail at all costs.
(The reputations of many are on the line)
It’s time for you to shelter in place.
Hunker down.
When the wild dogs of the night come pouncing on you; call the helpline. You will feel less lonely. But be patient: they are busy and they are doing the best they can.
(I’m sure you’ll understand)
You know this is the right thing to do. Surrender your wishes, your passions and your aspirations. Make sacrifices. Don’t complain (you selfish prick!). We are here for you. We look after you.
It will be over soon. A quick operation with military precision. The objectives are very clear. We are authorised to report that we are winning. The enemy will try to adapt but we will defeat it every time. Every. Single. Time.
This is the stuff heroes are made of.
We ask that you do what the Nation demands of you.
Australia is implementing tangible measures to counter the security threats imposed by Communist China.
The AUKUS security pact has turned out to be a robust, bipartisan commitment and our PM has recently sealed the deal with India to strengthen the two countries’ trade and defence cooperation.
Australian PM Anthony Albanese, United States President Joe Biden and United Kingdom PM Rishi Sunak on 13 March 2023 in San Diego.
These actions are loud and clear: Australia no longer wants to put all its eggs in one big communist basket. The resulting key trading-partner risk threatens our democracy and sovereignty.
Despite the fast-changing political landscape, the Director of the Australia China Relations Institute (ACRI) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Professor James Laurenceson, continues to advocate for maintaining our dependence on Communist China and suggests, in his piece for the Guardian on 18 March 2023, that the AUKUS alliance must be accompanied by “reassurance to Beijing”, in that Australia should have no intention of impeding China’s economic growth or changing its One China policy.
While we acknowledge that Prof. Laurenceson is entitled to his view, Liberty Itch does not believe it is necessary to placate Beijing like we would a child with a dummy.
It is concerning that a UTS professor calls for Australia to sooth Beijing, ignoring security threats imposed by the human rights crushing Chinese state.
In fact, if any reassurance is required, it should be given by Beijing that they won’t invade or annex Taiwan, given the record-breaking increase in Chinese military activity towards the self-ruled democracy.
Liberty Itch isn’t in the habit of citing anti free market activists and former political candidates for the Australian Greens. However, even from that end of the political spectrum, Australian scholar Professor Clive Hamilton, in his book Silent Invasion, suggests that the ACRI served as a means of promoting China’s interests in Australia. He further suggested that the ACRI sought to influence Australian public opinion in favour of closer ties with China, despite concerns about China’s human rights record and its global domination agenda.
The Conversation has also reported on 5 June 2017 that the ACRI was founded with a donation of AUD$2.8 million from two affluent Chinese immigrants. The founding chairman of ACRI was billionaire political donor, Huang Xiangmo, who The Guardian reported on 6 February 2019 had his Australian permanent residency revoked and was deported in 2019 due to his deep links with the communist regime’s top ruling class.
CCP diplomat, Xiao Qian, and James Laurenceson, Director, ACRI at UTS.
Bob Carr, a CCP enthusiast and former Foreign Minister, was ACRI’s founding Director and succeeded by Prof. Laurenceson. Interestingly, both are advocating for ‘reassurance to Beijing’. They also share the same grievances towards the pro-democracy Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in Canberra.
Rather out of touch in the above video, Mr. Carr keeps talking about the old time, old strategy in dealing with China. His inability to accept the current geopolitical situation in relation to the CCP’s aggression towards Taiwan and the Chinese state’s new alliance with other autocratic countries in the Middle East is, to put in mildly, concerning.
Although Mr. Carr had to distance himself from the ACRI due to the above controversy and public outcry, Prof. Laurenceson continues to encourage Australia to align with Communist China, rather than with other democratic nations.
“If any country is a drag on Australia’s economy, it’s the United States rather than China”, said Prof. Laurenceson.
Bob Carr and James Laurenceson at the 2018 ACRI Launch
Such an argument aligns with the goal of the CCP, which aims to divert people’s attention towards economic and financial benefits rather than universal principles and values. Such a position has the potential to weaken Australia’s democratic partnerships and persuade its citizens to support China’s authoritarian, communist ideologies under the guise of economic advancement.
Most importantly, the ACRI routinely leaves out the severity and extensiveness of the Chinese state’s human rights abuses, nor does it discuss the depth and aggressiveness of CCP interference in Australia. The ACRI does not discuss how these issues negatively impact the Australia-China relationship.
Liberty Itch calls for more transparency from the UTS to reveal ACRI’s past and present funding sources, including all staff trips to China funded by the CCP.
The ACRI is supposedly an ‘independent, nonpartisan, research institute’. The head of this Institute, who claims to be on the payroll of a publicly-funded university, should not be ‘singing duo’ with Bob Carr and together acting like ‘relationship brokers’ between Australia and the Chinese Communist Party.
In the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America, people speak of the Spanish conquistadors as them. They invaded us, they murdered us.
This allows populist leaders to frame the entire historical narrative of the region as a story of oppression, blaming their countries’ current misfortunes on the atrocities of colonisation; 200 years on.
If blaming the Spanish Empire for the ex-colonies’ abysmal levels of poverty in the 21st century is not enough, the populist turns to the US Empire to explain away the misery. It is a crippling mentality promoted by corrupt leaders who benefit from keeping people down while avoiding responsibility for their own failures.
Blame: a crippling mentality promoted by corrupt leaders.
It’s the perennial revolution that goes around in circles promising to avenge the poor, only to enrich the revolutionaries.
White Australians, on the other hand, tend to identify with the English colonisers and blame themselves for colonial crimes against Aboriginal people. We invaded them, we took their land.
As a migrant to this country, I cannot share in this historical guilt.
Am I contributing to Australia’s cultural diversity as a productive member of society or am I an invader? Which one is it?
More importantly, has this pathological guilt done anything to improve the living conditions of Aboriginal Australians or has it been exploited by professional meddlers that make a living out of Aboriginal disadvantage?
Blame and guilt are two sides of the same colonial coin. Nothing good can ever come out of playing the blame game. Guilt, however, can be a healthy societal response to painful moments in our shared history. It can serve as a reminder of the importance to uphold an ideal of justice based on the natural rights of all peoples. This would be conducive to genuine compassion, appreciation, integration, and mutual respect.
Sadly, this constructive voluntary response is perverted with the institutionalisation of a collectivist mindset that classifies people today based on events that occurred before they were even born.
Once the state starts to treat people differently based on their race, all hope of reconciliation is lost.
The very idea that some people are incapable of improving their own condition without the condescending guidance of a centralised authority is an insidious form of neo-colonialism.
This isn’t to deny or ignore history. On the contrary, this is to look at history carefully while keeping your eyes wide open in the present.
Imagine for a moment a white Australian man that finds himself on the streets after a series of calamities destroy his former life. He struggles for a long time but finally finds the strength to pick himself up. He goes to a job agency but the only opportunities available are open exclusively to Aboriginal people because the agency has to meet a quota to receive extra funding.
Is this just the price that he has to pay for the crimes of his ancestors (who could have been great advocates of aboriginal rights for all we know)? Is any and every Aboriginal person inherently more deserving regardless of their own actions in the present simply because of what happened in the past?
Senator Lidia Thorpe. Blak Movement.
Like the poor in Latin America, Aboriginal people in Australia need individual agency over their own lives, with economic opportunities to thrive and prosper, not perennial displays of contrition and a bureaucratic melee that costs a lot (for the benefit of public servants and consultants) but delivers nothing.
In 2010, the Department of Finance’s Strategic Review of Aboriginal expenditure concluded: “The history of Commonwealth policy for Indigenous Australians over the past 40 years is largely a story of good intentions, flawed policies, unrealistic assumptions, poor implementation, unintended consequences and dashed hopes.”
For many in the Indigenous Industry that are now enjoying a comfortable retirement, this has been 50 years of money well spent.
The Voice and the apparatus that would support it are manifestations of the same colonial mentality that sees Aboriginal people as a problem to be solved rather than equal citizens in pursue of their own happiness.
Recently, the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams, became the subject of a furore where he encouraged people to not associate with black people on the basis of a poll run by Rasmussen Reports.
Importantly, Mr. Adams said that this was the “first” poll that had caused him to change his behaviour.
The irony is, what was reported about the poll was entirely different to the responses given in it. The poll surveyed a thousand people across the United States of America. The pop-up in Mr. Adam’s podcast said “Rasmussen Reports BLACK AMERICANS ONLY: “It’s okay to be white” 53% agree, 26% disagree, 21% not sure.”
The pop-up was materially misleading. Rasmussen’s own data is below:
From this data you can see that, for a start, Black Americans were not the only people surveyed. In fact, Black Americans only made up 13% of the thousand people surveyed, proportionate to the American population overall. Further, the actual question that was asked was not whether it was “OK to be white”. The actual question asked was:
Do you agree or disagree with this statement: “It’s OK to be white”.
Now as someone trained in statistics, I can tell you that this question is terribly phrased because it gives rise to ambiguity. The ambiguity is that there is a considerable difference between being asked whether it is “OK” to go around saying “It’s OK to be white” versus whether people are whatever “OK” means if they have white skin.
Like so many divisive things, it originated from a 4Chan troll and was designed to generate dissent and anxiety. Later, it was adopted by neo-Nazi groups as a response to “Black Lives Matter”.
So if I were asked that question, I’d answer ‘No’ because I would not be happy to be associated with neo-Nazis. I will not say “It’s ok to be white”, not because I don’t like white people or are prejudiced against people due to their ancestry or the level of melanin in their skin, but because I am conscious of the trolling origin of the phrase.
When statisticians craft surveys, it is done for one of two reasons:
either we are trying to acquire data to understand the world around us; or
we are trying to use the survey to “manufacture consent” as Noam Chomsky would say, that is, using the questions in the surveys to attempt to elicit a response to drive a narrative.
This particular Rasmussen Survey was poorly designed and because it bothered to ask the question in such ambiguous terms, it appears to have been intended to manufacture a narrative to the effect that Black Americans do not like White Americans. Ironically, it failed obtain the data to support that narrative.
How to interpret the Rasmussen statistics
You can see from the pop-up in Mr. Adam’s podcast combined with the lazy reporting of the survey that people were of the view that a thousand Black Americans were asked whether “it’s OK to be white”, but this is not the situation.
Looking at Table 1 (above), it is evident that only 13% were black of the thousand people surveyed.
Moreover, of those 13%, or 130 people, only 26% of them were of the view that it was NOT OK to say “it’s OK to be white” because 18% on the 5-point Likert scale opted for “strongly disagree” and 8% opted for “somewhat disagree” (totalling 26%).
So how many people does that amount to?
It turns-out around 34 people out of those 130 felt that the phrase was unacceptable.
It is statistically invalid to extrapolate from a mere 34 people to suggest that, across America, 26% of all black people think it is “not OK to be white” because even the sample size of 130 people is too low for the size of the population to draw that qualitative conclusion.
Another problem with the survey was that many people reading it incorrectly conflated the “not sure” response with suggesting that it was “not OK to be white” to reach “we’re not sure that it is OK to be white”.
In statistics, a “not sure” or “don’t know” response suggests that the respondent:
doesn’t have an opinion on the matter either way;
doesn’t understand the question; or
finds the question ambiguous.
There’s no reason to conflate a “not sure” with the negative any more than there is to conflate it with the positive. The respondents answering “not sure” can’t be conflated with other groups. Interestingly, the “not sure” answer tracks well across all races, so it might suggest that the ambiguity of the question made them unsure about answering that question positively or negatively.
Survey Biases
So why would I not consider the survey result to suggest that black people think it is not OK to be white? Rasmussen did not say how it conducted the survey, whether by phone or online, so I will cover both options.
I have a problem with online and phone surveys generally because of how they get people to answer the questions. Firstly, in order to get someone to answer political surveys such as this, you need people to decide that they want to respond.
If the survey is online, then you are getting people who feel strongly enough about the survey to go and log in and participate.
If they are cold-called by telephone, then you need them to answer the phone and then listen to the spiel, hand over their demographics and then decide to answer the survey.
Scott Adams. Cartoonist. Creator of the syndicated Dilbert comic strip.
If they are from a set of people who have pre-agreed to answer surveys, then it is usually because they have been promised some form of benefit in response for answering, such as to go into a draw for a cruise. We don’t know what kind of survey it was because Rasmussen has not revealed that information to the public.
In statistics, we have a concept called “response bias”. The only people who tend to respond to surveys have strong feelings about the questions being asked one way or another.
If it were people cold-calling in a telephone survey, we aren’t told how many people refused to participate.
If it were a “log in here and tell us what you think” survey, then there’s always a question as to who is likely to respond and whether they are “genuine” respondents.
If it were a pre-agreed pool of people who were responding, then this might explain the relatively large number of respondents who answered “not sure”.
Genuine responses
How do readers know that the people who are responding that they are black (or white, or other) are from the background that they say they are? We don’t have access to the demographic questions or the means by which Rasmussen says that they were aware of the racial identity of the respondents.
Clearly a number of other questions were asked to ascertain demographics, but how, in fact, does Rasmussen know that these demographics are accurate?
Again, we have no data on that.
When newspapers do polls online, a real problem is that occasionally someone will decide that they wish to “stack” the survey and will write a script and respond multiple times. We don’t have any data as to how Rasmussen tries to deal with such issues for online surveys.
One other interesting factor is that we don’t know the educational attainment of the people responding. Generally, we test for educational level because we’d expect that there could be differences of attitude depending on the level of education that a respondent has attained.
It’s an area of the survey demographics that hasn’t been asked but which we would usually test to see whether it was an important variable because the received wisdom is that the higher the level of educational attainment, the lower the level of prejudice.
Whether this is true in any given set of people varies but, because it has been a variable in other cases, it is usually included as a variable to see whether there’s a “cause” other than blind prejudice.
So should the survey have persuaded any person that black people are of the opinion that it is not ok to be white?
If you are of the view that the opinion of 34 people across all of the US can represent the 47 million black people across the US, then you might be persuaded. Whereas 130 out of the thousand people represents the 13% of the US population that is black, it is a very small, self-selected population from which to draw ANY valid conclusion.
This is why, if a student had presented this survey to me as an assignment, I would have given it a fail grade.
As an attempt to set white people against black people by “rage farming”, a new “word” apparently added to the dictionary in the USA, I fear that it has worked all too well.
One of the best ways to make a set of people hate each other is to say “those people over there are out to hurt you” or “those people disapprove of you or your lifestyle”.
Despite the fact that over 74% weren’t happy to disagree with the statement “it’s ok to be white”, the theme of the news reports arising out of it was that black people don’t think it’s OK to be white.
You should not trust news reports and podcasts that blindly accept statistics.
Sometimes, the purpose of those statistics is to manipulate you. This is why you should check the statistics behind any survey that has “inflammatory” conclusions or questions.
The 1999 Venezuelan Constitution, sponsored by the late Hugo Chávez as the foundation for his nascent revolution, has been described as “the non-sexist Magna Carta.”
The writers of the document went to great lengths to use the Spanish masculine and feminine forms throughout the text. For example, presidente and presidenta are both used in quick succession to refer to the role of president, even though it is grammatically correct to use the masculine form to refer to both genders. This unnecessary repetition makes for a very cumbersome read. Chávez himself spoke like this, occasionally making up absurd gender-neutral words.
Hugo Chávez. President of Venezuela, 1999-2013.
The National Institute for Women was established in October 1999. Then in 2009, the Institute became part of the newly formed Popular Ministry for Women and Gender Equality.
“Our main political program is mainstreaming gender into every sphere of Venezuelan public and political life. Within all government programs — health, education — we want everyone to know about and think about gender issues.”
Was Hugo Chávez simply a man ahead of his time, a true visionary, a prophet for a new progressive movement that was about to take over the world?
Today, of course, progressives try to distance themselves from him, knowing as we know now the devastating results of his revolution, in a country with enough resources to be another Dubai. But make no mistake, everything that Australian progressives stand for today was put into practice by Hugo Chávez more than two decades ago.
You only needed to hear Hugo Chávez speak to understand how the concept of class struggle and anti-capitalism was expanded to include gender, race and colonialism.
A group of bad people always oppress a group of good people. The entire history of humanity is explained by this cartoonish good-guy versus bad-guy categorisation.
Group membership is what determines your moral value. The oppressed, as a group and regardless of their individual actions, are entitled not to equal treatment but to indefinite retribution. The oppressors, also as a group and regardless of their individual actions, are forever guilty and beyond salvation.
This is, for example, how official large-scale seizures of land, property and businesses are justified while sectors of the population are actively encouraged to take back what is ‘rightfully theirs’. Your legal claim to property can be overridden by fuzzy claims of oppression.
Climate change is of course an anti-capitalist dream and Hugo Chávez was an outspoken campaigner for climate action.
Many in the West today might be surprised to learn how much they have in common with the father of 21st century socialism. If they are being honest, they would admit to finding his speech at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 riveting and forward-looking.
“Let’s not change the climate, let’s change the system! And consequently, we will begin to save the planet. Socialism, this is the direction, this is the path to save the planet, I don’t have the least doubt. Capitalism is the road to hell, to the destruction of the world.”
A few short months after that crowd-pleaser of a speech, Chávez was back home trying to make people use less power.
Equity and climate change are the high moral ground from where an undeterred expansion of government control is presented as a solution. The virtuous ends that unequivocally justify all means.
This is the vindictive culture that tore Venezuela apart. These are the teachings of Hugo Chávez. And too many well-intentioned Aussies are listening.
C.S. Lewis said it best when he wrote:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) is considered by many to be America’s greatest African American. Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King make up their top three.
Born into slavery, Douglass became a free man and rose through the ranks to eventually become the first African American to receive a vote for nomination for President of the United States. His final years were spent as Consul-General to the Republic of Haiti.
Frederick Douglass. Freed slave, author, newspaper man, antislavery activist.
Following the American Civil War and the emancipation of America’s slaves, Douglass was asked, “What should be done for these (former) slaves?”
“Nothing!” he replied. “Leave us alone. By freeing us, you’ve done enough already.”
“If you leave us alone, we’ll work our way up. We will create pathways for others to follow.”
The value of getting one’s foot onto that first rung of the ladder cannot be overstated.
I mention this because a number of years ago an application was made to amend the Australian Fast Food Industry Award and dramatically increase the wages of junior employees.
It was unarguable that junior employees’ wages were very low at that time, but this had the significant benefit that many young people from lower socio-economic areas were able to get jobs and, to paraphrase Frederick Douglass, “work their way up.”
Appeals to reject the application fell on deaf ears and a substantial increase in the Award wage occurred.
This had the perverse effect that middle-class college students started applying for the jobs – and getting them. One franchise-owner said to me …
“Why wouldn’t I employ the college kids? They’re smart, articulate, reliable, their parents drop them and pick them up in a BMW! The lower socio-economic kids were not as good, but hey, they were cheaper.”
No-one was sacked and replaced, but over time the poor kids were replaced by wealthier kids.
Let’s face it, some people don’t have a lot going for them. They come from dysfunctional families, aren’t blessed with particularly high IQs, and have other problems. The one thing they do have going for them, however, is their ability to compete with more fortunate young people on price.
They may not have been as articulate or refined as the wealthier kids, but they were prepared to work for less.
Not anymore. We have taken away from them that one last remaining labour market advantage they had over the rich.
This form of price-fixing is at the heart of labour market regulation. It’s called ‘centralised wage fixing.’ It is putting the power to dictate to someone what they can and cannot work for – regardless of what they want – into the hands of people completely remote from the ones whose lives they are about to ruin.
When people, young people in particular, are excluded from full participation in community and working life, the social costs are enormous – drug and alcohol abuse, crime, domestic violence, poor health, depression, frustration, boredom, bikie gang recruitment, civil disorder, teenage pregnancy, even suicide. This is what happens when young people don’t have a job. They are locked out of the labour market at exactly the time they are biologically ready to enter into relationships, get married and start a family.
Now no-one is arguing against a welfare safety net, but we have to allow people to get a foot on that first rung of the ladder.
The current political battle is not between Left and Right, rich and poor. It’s between freedom and authoritarianism. It’s between those who, like Douglass, want to help people become self-reliant by removing barriers to entry to things like jobs and housing, and those who see those without jobs and houses as political opportunities to get themselves elected. “It’s not your fault”, political opportunists say. “You are a victim. The system did this to you. That rich kid took your job. Vote for me and the government will look after you. I’ll remake that cruel and nasty free-market capitalist system.”
Not only is this economically stupid, it is morally reprehensible.
This month, there were reports of a Chinese ‘spy balloon’ flying over the airspace of the United States.
Back home, we next had an announcement from Senator James Paterson (Liberal, Victoria) that there were more than 900 CCP surveillance cameras installed in various Commonwealth departments, including Defence and Foreign Affairs offices.
It’s unnerving to discover Beijing’s surveillance of democratic nations, its governments and individual citizens.
However, in the midst of these concerns, Liberty Itch found a quiet moment to chuckle on receiving an image with the following message:
ALERT! Is it a UFO? No. Is it a Chinese spy balloon? No. It’s … what we think of CCP denials!
If you believe in free markets and freedom, and are not familiar with the work of Thomas Sowell, then drop everything now, and Google his name.
And if you have time, watch some YouTube videos of him. I guarantee that you will not be disappointed.
If you have more time, read one of his books. My personal favourite is A Conflict of Visions.
Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Very quickly, Sowell is an economist and social commentator. He was born in 1930 to a very poor family in North Carolina in the US. When he was quite young, his father died and he was sent to live with family in Harlem, New York. A smart and precious youth, he saw the metaphorical light when he was introduced to the public library.
Moving forward, Sowell had a stint in the US military during the Korean war. And because of this, he was a late starter at university – in his mid-20s. But he did his Bachelors at Harvard, then his Masters at Columbia and finally his Doctorate at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman.
All along the way, Sowell was a self-declared Marxist. This was true even while working with George Stigler and Milton Friedman. And then it all changed.
He became a titan of free markets and liberty.
What happened?
He went to work for the government!
When asked in an interview what changed his mind, Sowell replied: “Facts”. See for yourself here.
I bring up Sowell because one of his most important observations was that “Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”
Which brings me to Australia.
While the Albanese government is getting much of the blame for our current inflation and interest rate ills, they are not entirely at fault. They aren’t helping matters, but they aren’t entirely at fault.
Much of the fault lies at the feet of the Liberal-National Coalition Government of Scott Morrison. They could not have timed their election eviction any better.
Decades of economic history have shown that private property, rule of law, free and competitive markets, and limited government drive prosperity anywhere and everywhere.
And anywhere and everywhere includes Australia.
Nowhere has a nation improved its lot through expanded government. You can’t tax, spend or regulate a country into prosperity, much as the Morrison Government tried really, really hard. When it came to increasing taxes, increasing government spending, and increasing regulation, the Morrison Government was Whitlamesque.
Our current inflation ills are a problem of supply, of constricted supply. Constricted by too much government spending, too much taxation and too much regulation. We won’t spend or save our way out of this.
What is required is a supply side revolution to get the foot of government off the throat of Australians.
How many more sales can a business owner make if he did not need to fill in the ATO, ABS, Austrac, ASIC, and other forms designed by people to keep themselves busy? Who do you think is paying for Scott Morrison’s bank tax? Certainly not the bank shareholders. How much would your cost of living pressures ease if your groceries were cheaper because your supermarket did not need to employ a battalion of compliance officers.
Yes. Some of our inflation problems are imported. Much of them are home grown.
The inflation of the 1980s and 1990s was not just vanquished through high interest rates. Governments all around the world, from Ronald Reagan in the US to Margaret Thatcher in the UK to Bob Hawke in Australia all led major economic programs to deregulate, to liberate, to reform. This is the opposite of what the last 20 years of Australian government has done. To regulate, to subjugate, to deform.
Ronald Reagan. Margaret Thatcher. Bob Hawke.
As Zhuangzi wrote in 369 BC: “Good economic order results spontaneously when things are left alone”.
We will not escape from our economic problems with business as usual. Treasurer Jim Chalmers has a window of opportunity to redirect the national economy. But he must change direction, because otherwise we will end up where we are headed … Venezuela … where everyone is a trillionaire. But a trillionaire who still can’t afford to feed themselves or their family.
MAKING GOVERNMENT REDUNDANT
Here at Liberty Itch, we love practical initiatives which undermine the need for government.
Afterall, if we’re constantly fighting government bloat within the...
