For those interested in Randian scholarship, the most recent issue of Cato Unbound presents a critical discussion of Rand’s moral and political ideas between four philosophers with different views of her work and its significance. Of particular interest from a critical perspective is Roderick Long’s response essay.

Leading the charge in pushing for ALP’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” has been Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong. However, Penny’s real conviction (or lack thereof) on the matter may have been revealed by the following unlikely story:

Scientists have found camels to be the third-highest carbon-emitting animal per head on the planet, behind only cattle and buffalo. Culling the one million feral camels that currently roam the outback would be equivalent to taking 300,000 cars off the road in terms of the reduction to the country’s greenhouse gases.

Given that Australia’s feral camel population is already considered an environmental problem, you’d think this one would be a slam dunk, but the story continues:

But Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told The Australian there was little point doing anything about Australia’s feral camels as only the CO2 of the domesticated variety is counted under the Kyoto Protocol.

But what about the planet, Penny?

Forget the absurdity of not counting feral animals for a moment (though that is a story in itself), but if you sincerely believe that carbon is a serious pollutant, would you not wish to do something about it? Just because it doesn’t “count” towards the bureaucratic Kyoto protocol, surely it still counts towards carbon going into the atmosphere? The only logical conclusion from this is that she doesn’t really believe what she says – that she does not consider carbon to be a serious pollutant.

[Hat Tip: Andrew Bolt]

This video for some reason reminded me of that famous moment when the Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceaucescu, several minutes into what turned out to be his last ever public speech, was suddenly interrupted by a crescendo of jeers and whistling from his formerly placid subjects. The doomed dictator could do nothing but stand frozen on the balcony with a stunned look on his face as his aides darted around in terrified confusion. This turned out to be a decisive moment in history – Ceaucescu and his even more unpleasant first lady would soon be brought before the firing squad - and it was caused by a mere change in crowd psychology, spontaneous and unexpected, as fear turned to defiance and then contempt.

Obama’s tin-eared gaffe, which was rewarded with a derisive groan from the audience, will probably not lead to his and his wife’s execution by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. However, this moment has encapsulated a very real change in public sentiment. Obama started out as a messiah-like figure whose very presence, with the help of his deep masculine baritone, would work miracles for the American public; now he is justly an object of ridicule.

The government continues to protect us (and our children):

Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women. Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them. Australia has also banned pornographic depictions of female ejaculation, a normal orgasmic sexual response in many women, with censors branding it as ‘abhorrent.’

This has all been good publicity for The Sex Party, who broke the story.

[Via Instapundit]

An article in The Australian reports on the ridiculous consequences of the Fair Work Act requirements for minimum hours of work. Here are some of the victims of this outrageous policy:

But Matthew and five other youths, all aged between 16 and 18, have been sacked from the Terang and District Co-operative, 210km southwest of Melbourne, because the Rudd government’s Fair Work Act won’t let them work less than three hours a day.

Both the youths and their employer had wanted to continue their longstanding arrangement and are furious the new law does not allow for the flexibility needed to keep them employed. Co-operative general manager Mr Duynhoven said those of his employees still at school could only get to work by 4pm, after school finished, and the store closed at 5.30pm, so there was only 1.5 hours of work available.

Julia Gillard has defended the system:

A spokesman for Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard said the new system was fairer.

“The government does not think it’s unreasonable to have a set of minimum standards for employees, including the minimum number of hours they can work across Australia, as has been brought in under the simplified modern system.”

It’s always about the fairness. How could anybody think this is a fairer system? For that matter, how could anyone think such a system is simpler? News.com.au has some further comments in defense of this assault on workers from Kevin Rudd:

Asked why the youths couldn’t be allowed to work for 1.5 hours, Mr Rudd continued to defend the system.

“One of our concerns is you can have an employer who says, ‘Come in for half an hour a day here and a half an hour a day there’ … very unsuitable for young workers often,” he told Fairfax Radio today.

Very unsuitable for young workers? It’s extremely suitable for young workers – especially those studying – but that’s not the point. This policy kills jobs, hurts business, and deprives youth of a very good way of gaining work experience.

“We’ve got to be very careful about industrial relations systems which enables people, incrementally, to be exploited,” he said.

In what possible way could offering someone a couple hours work be exploitative?

Fair Work Australia would speak to the employer concerned today, Mr Rudd said.

I’m sure he can’t wait.

UPDATE: Reading through the comments of the news.com.au article can be quite depressing

I have not really figured out what the ring of fire in the chart below is saying but I thought it looked interesting and topical and colourful so I thought I’d share it.

The Ring of Fire

It is taken from an article at PIMCO (an investment management firm).

Australia isn’t inside the burning hoola hoop and apparently that’s a good thing.

A new year, a new idea. I thought I’d try out putting together a monthly e-zine bringing together some of the best writing from the libertarian blogosphere. The title of the e-zine is stolen from a previous idea from Jason Soon — “free radical”.

If you would like to help out in this project, please contact me (john.humphreys99@gmail.com). And to publishers of other Australian blogs, please re-post the e-zine to your blog.

The first edition is now available.

The suggestion that Australian states should compete for business and investment is sometimes viewed as fanciful.  The states relinquished their income tax powers during the Second World War and are now heavily reliant on the federal government for revenue. Their residual taxation powers are pretty limited and many of their regulatory functions have been referred to the federal government.

Nonetheless, competitive federalism does exist in some parts of the world. In Switzerland, it is working exactly as it should. Swiss cantons, which have considerable independence from the federal government, are actively competing to attract business and investment.

An article in the Wall Street Journal describes what is happening: 

Low taxes have long given Switzerland a strong hand in the battle to lure the operations of big multinational companies. Now, an intramural war is on in which individual Swiss states are competing harder for business.

Switzerland’s cantons are offering low tax rates to tempt multinationals to establish regional headquarters or other operations in their jurisdictions. In doing so, other states are trying to take business away from Zug, the canton that has mastered the game of attracting business to such a degree that it is beginning to run out of space.

Switzerland as a whole is battling with countries such as Ireland, the Netherlands, the U.K. and Germany for business. While Switzerland’s research universities, efficient public sector and strong intellectual-property protection are attractive, its low tax rates are a huge draw.

Switzerland’s federal corporate tax rate is 8.5%. When average cantonal and municipal taxes are included, the average corporate tax rate in Switzerland is 21.2%, compared with about 30% for Germany and 25.5% for the Netherlands, according to KPMG.

But in Switzerland, cantons—which enjoy far more autonomy than U.S. states—are the main drivers in luring multinationals. Two-thirds of total taxes are levied by the cantons, which have wide autonomy on social-security contributions, business permits and construction rules.

There is additional detail in the full article, but you get the picture. Rather than seeing business as a cow to be endlessly milked, which every level of government in Australia seems to regard as absolute truth, the Swiss cantons are vying to bring business into their locations. Particularly big multinational businesses. And taxing them less, not more.

The closest we come to that in Australia is when one of the state governments reduces payroll tax by 0.25%. (And keeps spending as if the revenue never stopped as well.)

I’m not optimistic that we will ever get competitive federalism working properly in Australia. But Australians are rarely keen to try something that nobody else has attempted. With Switzerland setting an example, at least that objection does not apply.

Most people accept anti-defamation laws as a legitimate restriction on free speech. For a starters, the laws have always existed so it just seems normal to keep them. If we remove them then society would be plunged into chaos as everybody accused everybody of being a paedophile, a thief, or a murderous nutcase… and if those rumours are believed then they could cause lots of damage to the victims, such as loss of work and/or loss of friends. And that’s just not fair.

Perhaps. But before we give up on fully free speech we should fully understand the arguments.

Defamation involves (1) somebody lying about you, leading to (2) other people holding a bad opinion about you, leading to (3) a bad outcome for you because of lack of trade. None of these things are nice. But they are all voluntary and, all else being equal, none of them should be illegal.

There are two common confusions at this point. First, some people suggest that they “own” their reputation and so if you damage their reptuation then you have effectively stolen from them. This is clearly untrue. A reputation comes from people’s opinion, and each person owns their own opinion. If you have an opinion about me, that opinion is owned by you, not me. So you are entitled to change your opinion at any time for any reason and you have not stolen from me.

Second, some people take the bad outcome to be proof that something must be wrong. But here they misunderstand two very different sorts of bad outcomes. There is an important difference between stealing something (so you have made somebody worse off) and refusing to give something (so you have refused to make them better off). With defamation, the bad outcome comes because people refuse to interact with you. People may refuse to buy from you, or people may refuse to be your friend. But in a free society nobody has an inherent right to the property or friendship of other people.

So in a perfectly free society (where all human interaction is voluntary), defamation would be legal. But sometimes the voluntary outcome is not the best outcome, and so we should consider whether the government should over-ride freedom to try and create a better outcome.

The goal of anti-defamation laws is to ensure that other people can’t ruin your life by spreading lies about you. That is a worthy goal. But does it work?

As David Friedman showed in his popular economics book “Hidden Order“, the best way to establish a good reputation is to actually be a good person. If most people like you and trust you, then even if some people said bad things about you, you will build a good reputation. If most people don’t like you and don’t trust you, then even if some people vouch for you, you will end up with a bad reputation.

For the vast majority of people, this is how reputation is built and maintained. Some people may lie about you, but ultimately the truth is more likely to win out. Or as Thomas Jefferson said “The man who fears no truth has nothing to fear from lies”. And more to the point, the majority of people cannot afford the cost or deal with the complexity of defamation laws, which effectively puts them out of the hands of lower and middle-income families. For most of us (and for most people around the world and through history) it is as though defamation laws don’t exist.

This may lead to the conclusion that defamation laws are irrelevant, but there is one way that defamation laws do change behaviour. Larger organisations and high-income people are able to afford the cost and so are in a position to sue people (or threaten to sue people) who they see as lying about them.

The problem with legislating about lying is that one person’s lie is another person’s truth… and we don’t have a perfect angel available to uncover who is right. In some cases it’s subjective. In some cases we guess at the truth. In some cases people may know the truth, but be unable to prove it. A law against lying  can easily turn into a law against saying anything unapproved by an official authority.

Of course, large organisations and rich people are the least in need of anti-defamation laws because they are most able to loudly and convincingly defend their reputation. But anti-defamation laws gives them another weapon. For people talking about or writing about large organisations or rich people, the threat of being sued (even if there is only a 10% chance of being found guilty) is a strong incentive not to say anything negative. This stiffling of free speech is very real, but impossible to measure; we cannot count the number of statements that were not said.

The consequence is an uneven playing field where larger organisations and rich people have an extra advantage over the rest of us.

A more balanced playing field would be achieved by having an independent 3rd party (like a court or another trusted institution) making a determination, but without any legal sanction. It could be like a non-government “court of truth” where people go to defend their reputation, but without restricting freedom of speech. People could speak freely without threat of being sued, and people could rest comfortably knowing that they will always have the opportunity to defend their reputation.

A final problem with anti-defamation laws is that once you start undermining freedom of speech it becomes easy to find numerous other excuses to restrict free speech. Consequently, we are now facing a range of laws that prevent people from giving offense, such as anti-vilification laws. It is not nice to lie about people, or to vilify people, or to tease people or offend people… but that is what freedom of speech means. If we re-define “freedom of speech” to mean “saying only nice things approved by the government” then we are making a mockery of freedom.

At the Liberal Democratic Party’s National Conference on 24 January, Sir Roger Douglas gave a presentation that included a discussion of ACT NZ’s approach to presenting its policies, most of which are fundamentally the same as those of the LDP.

An approach that I found intriguing argues that traditional welfare state approaches to poverty, health care, education and pensions have resulted in second class citizens. It can be found in a publication called No Second Class Citizens (summary available here.)

Sir Roger is a former Labour MP who, as Finance Minister, radically transformed the New Zealand economy, cutting tariffs and subsidies, reducing labour regulation and privatising or corporatising many activities.  As he says, his goals have never changed.

The goals I have today are the same as those I had when I was in Labour. I am just as concerned today as I was then about poverty. I am just as concerned today as I was then about opportunity. I am just as concerned as I was then about second class citizens. But where I have changed is what I see as the cause of second class citizenship.

Second class citizenship, he says, is caused by the welfare state.

New Zealand has two classes of citizens. And we have two classes not because the Government isn’t doing enough for the poor, but because what the Government does for the poor denies them choices, destroys the incentives they have to get ahead, and subjects them to political abuse.

We have created a system that taxes and regulates opportunities for most out of existence, and destines many to poverty.

And yet, nearly everyone still believes the only solution is more of the same.

On the very goals that the welfare state has sought to achieve, no one could genuinely argue that it has succeeded. Even the modern day proponents of the welfare state, be they in National, the Greens, or Labour, all know it has failed.

But they think they have the solution. They think the solution is more money. I have never heard a politician from those parties come across a problem that they believe could not be solved with just more money. That is why, regardless of who has been in power, the budgets for welfare, education, and health have all shown an almost inexorable growth.

His solution, and where ACT and LDP policy differs from all the other parties, is to return control of money to individuals to enable them to run their own lives.  That means less expenditure by governments on behalf of individuals, and more expenditure by individuals on behalf of themselves. Specifics include lower taxes, individual health insurance and education vouchers.

This solution, of course, is not novel to anyone on this site. The main difference with Sir Roger is that he expresses it in terms that reflect concern for those left behind.

An emphasis on fewer negatives rather than more positives, perhaps.

I’m wondering whether a similar approach would work in Australia, given our perceptions about egalitarianism. What do you think?