Resisting the Ghouls

It is Day 3 of our universal house arrest (and I think that is a more accurate description than “lock down”) here in New Zealand, and I’m well set up to carry on working. I have every videoconferencing application known to mankind on my desktop Mac – Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype, Facetime, Jabber, etc. So far, the internet is working well despite everyone else in my household bingeing on Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV+. Yesterday afternoon I was even able to participate in my usual “Friday Fours” – the regular drinks I have with a group of associates – by videoconference. The biggest topic for discussion was how to buy alcoholic spirits in a Puritan lock down. Supermarkets, which are considered essential services and remain open, can sell beer and wine but not spirits. Other liquor outlets have to remain closed, unlike in Australia where “Bottle-Os” (take out liquor stores) are considered an essential service. You have to hand it to the Aussies, they have their priorities right!

I was listening to a podcast yesterday and one of the presenters was discussing Covid-19 with his elderly father, who was a doctor until retirement. The presenter asked how he would’ve coped with the virus in the heyday of his medical career during the 1960s and 1970s. The old man said they wouldn’t even have known it was a distinct virus, not having the DNA analysis we have today, and would’ve regarded it as just a form of influenza.

The story made me realise that some of our worst concerns are subject to what I would call information arrogance – a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. This is the problem with climate science – we know that an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere ought to lead to an increase in average temperatures, all things being equal. The problem is, all things are never equal in real life, and we understand very little about the influence of other factors in climate change such as cosmic radiation, the sun’s radiance, the formation of cloud, and the absorption of CO2 and heat in the oceans. The same is true of Covid-19. In most countries, we don’t know the true incidence of the virus because most people haven’t been tested. We don’t know the real mortality because we’re only testing people we think have already got it.

Perhaps the most unsurprising thing to me about the pandemic is that it is being exploited by the usual ideological thugs to push their dystopian agendas. We have already seen numerous claims that “there are no libertarians in a pandemic” and “we’re all socialists now”. The exploitation of these difficult circumstances by those on the left to justify their illiberal political views has been described by Brendan O’Neill of Spiked (an old leftie himself) as the “socialism of ghouls”. He goes on to say:

If your overarching thought upon observing a crisis of this magnitude is to feel ‘vindicated’, almost to welcome the crisis as an opportunity to promote your political worldview, there is something wrong with you. 

Indeed.

There has been much praise of China's response to the pandemic, despite that country’s regime being complicit in the spread of the virus. The idea that only a highly centralised authoritarian state could respond effectively to the virus outbreak doesn’t stand up to the most cursory examination. If China had been a more free and open country, instead of arresting those who sounded the alarm, the virus might have been confined to Wuhan. Other repressive regimes, such as those in Iran and Russia, have also botched the response. You could counter that Western governments haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory in responding to the virus and certainly the New Zealand Government underestimated the risk and responded too slowly, but others such as South Korea and Singapore have managed to bring the pandemic under control comparatively quickly.

We have heard much about how we are all in this together, but ultimately our response to the pandemic is personal and individual. We may be under the confinement orders of our governments, but we each have to take responsibility for how we respond to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. In particular, our ability to recover from this will depend on the decisions of millions of individuals - decisions about whether to invest, start a business, apply for a new job, buy a house, get married and have children, or take early retirement. Governments need to remember this once the pandemic is over. If they lock in the measures they have sold as a temporary necessity, and make all of us dependent on the state for ever after, we may never fully recover economically and socially, and the ultimate cost will be far higher than that of the pandemic itself.

Liberty has been the driver of the huge improvement in the health and prosperity of human beings all over the world for more than two centuries, and we are currently sacrificing that driver to bring this virus under control. The worst effect of the pandemic would be to make that sacrifice permanent.

Media mendacity makes for mistrust

In the James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, Agent 007 battles the megalomaniacal media king, Elliot Carver, who is not content with reporting on the news and decides to manufacture it by committing terrorist acts in the hope of starting a war between China and the United States. It seems that the mainstream media, so desperate for ratings or readership in their fight for survival, is now following the Elliot Carver model. Sure, they are not yet sinking British warships in their attempts to make news, but they are committing serious criminal acts to boost their ratings and readership.

Two recent examples are the case of the Australian Channel Nine news team who were involved in the seizing of two children in Lebanon, and the New Zealand TV3 reporter, Heather du Plessis-Allan, who fraudulently purchased a rifle from a gun shop over the Internet.

In the Channel Nine case, the exact facts of the sordid affair are hard to determine but the children were with their father in Lebanon when the Australian mother, Sally Faulkner, decided to have the children snatched on a Beirut street. Channel Nine paid for four 'child recovery experts' from a UK organisation called Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI) to grab the children. The operation was botched and the Channel Nine news crew along with the mother and the CARI team were arrested. Channel Nine has now paid a significant sum of compensation to the father to obtain the release of its new crew and the mother but has left the CARI team it employed to rot in the Beirut jail. The journalists even tweeted a photo of themselves drinking and grinning in an airport bar on the way home.

I don't know where the right or wrong is in the custody dispute between the parents in this case, but the actions of the Channel Nine news crew are contemptible on so many levels. They were foolish in the extreme, insulting to their viewers, and utter cowards in abandoning the men they had employed to carry out the operation.

In the New Zealand gun purchase case, Heather du Plessis-Allan set out to prove that anyone could buy a rifle online from a Christchurch gun shop without having a permit, and all she ended up proving is that you can't do that without committing fraud. She used a fictitious police ID number and signature to purchase the gun, which fooled an otherwise responsible gun shop owner to supply the firearm, and she and TV3 had the gall to present this as a failure of the firearms licensing system and misconduct on the part of the gun shop owner.

We all know the mainstream media have long since abandoned any pretence of neutrality and take sides in any controversial story they cover. They have become propagandists and political agitators for any cause they deem merits their support. In doing so they have utterly destroyed the public's trust in themselves, with a recent survey showing that only 9% of New Zealanders trust them.

The mainstream media have always claimed they deserve special status under the law. The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects the freedom of the press and in most Common Law jurisdictions the press enjoys similar special rights. But the mainstream media risk losing these protections for everyone when they they consider they are completely above the law.

New Zealanders on Christmas Island are not refugees

We have heard quite a lot over the last few days about the New Zealanders in Australia's refugee detention centre at Christmas Island. The media have tried to cast these people in the same light as the refugees that make up the largest proportion of detainees but this is clearly fallacious. So let us understand some facts about these people.

Firstly, they are few in number - just 40 in the Christmas Island detention centre and around 500 in total facing deportation from Australia out of a estimated total of around 600,000 New Zealand citizens living there. 

Secondly, almost all of them face deportation because they have committed serious crimes and because they are being deported upon release from prison. Many of them are appealing their deportation order. This is why they are in detention centres.

Thirdly, Australia, like most countries, does not deport its own citizens. We have heard sob stories of people who have been in Australia many decades being deported back to New Zealand, but these people must have been unwilling or unable to obtain citizenship or there would be no question about them being deported. New Zealanders can apply for permanent residency and then citizenship after just twelve months in that country. There are eighteen different categories under which New Zealanders can apply and it is actually encouraged by the Australian Government because they want New Zealand immigrants to be fully functioning members of Australian society.

Finally, New Zealand citizens do not qualify as refugees. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees defines a refugee as someone who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country." That definition does not apply to these New Zealanders.

I have written on this blog about my liberal views on immigration (most recently here and here). I think it is very much in any country's interests to accept all manner of people who want to live productive, independent lives in a new home and I have the utmost sympathy for those fleeing persecution in their original countries. But I accept that it also a country's right to deny entry or to deport those who are determined not to live productive, independent lives. The only issue I have with Australia deporting these undesirable New Zealanders is that we have to accept them back here. 

Perhaps we should put them on the Auckland Islands.

Give me a principled Marxist over an unprincipled Tory squib any day

There has been a great deal of comment about the removal of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his replacement with that country's sixth prime minister in eight years, Malcolm Turnbull. Tony Abbott deserved to be defenestrated - not because he was (as some pundits have claimed) too ideological, but rather because he compromised his ideology where he shouldn't have and didn't compromise it where he should have done so. He stuck to his guns on gay marriage in spite of the mood for change but broke a lot of election promises in areas such as health and education reforms, lowering taxes and repeal of the Orwellian Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. He did stand by his position on repealing the repressive climate tax (which Labor PM Julia Gillard had introduced after breaking her election promise not to), but that was a rare show of backbone in an otherwise invertebrate performance.

Malcolm Turnbull's admiration for John Key says everything any New Zealander needs to know about the new Australian PM. John Key may have his strengths (um...his common touch and a nice smile, perhaps?) but standing on principle is not one of them. Key promised in the 2008 election not to introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme and that went out the window with many of his other promises as soon as he was ensconced in the office at the top of The Beehive.

The interesting thing about principles in politics is that it is only those on the left are allowed to have them. Liberal Party politicians in Australia, Conservatives in Britain and National Party members in New Zealand are all condemned as too ideological if they stick to their ostensible principles like small government, free markets and freedom of choice in education and health. But you can have the most extreme left-wing views and the mainstream media and chattering classes will give you a free pass. You can be an out-and-out Marxist, willing to nationalise all manner of private businesses without compensation, want to withdraw from any Western defence alliances, and be a supporter of terrorist groups like Hezbollah, and your reward is to be elected Leader of the Opposition in Britain.

But I actually admire Jeremy Corbyn more than Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull or John Key. Give me a principled Marxist any day over an unprincipled Tory squib like David Cameron. At least you know where you stand with a Marxist.

Frailty of Global Economy is Obvious

This week we have seen the signs that the global financial crisis (or "GFC" as it has become known after five years of familiarity) is far from over.  The US stock market lost more than two percent of its value on Thursday, the Australia market suffered similar losses, China is reporting that business purchasing for the year is much lower than expected, and here in New Zealand our own stock market was down 1% (on top of news that GDP growth is an anemic 0.3% for the March quarter instead of the predicted 0.6%).

What caused the market jitters?  Well, US Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, made an announcement on Wednesday that set the cat amongst the financial pigeons.  Those of you who follow the US economy will know that the Federal Reserve has been 'printing' money and injecting it into the economy at a rate of $85 billion per month (that's a trillion dollars, or around $3000 for every man, woman and child in America, per year).  Ordinarily, printing money at that rate would produce fairly massive inflation but Bernanke, who is almost too clever by half, has been buying huge amounts of Treasury Bonds and mortgages (to the extent that the Federal Reserve is by far the largest purchaser of both), thereby keeping interest rates down and containing US Dollar inflation. 

Of course, all this money printing and economic sleight of hand can't go on forever.  You can't keep writing yourself cheques and expect everyone you buy stuff off to keep honoring them - well, not unless everyone else is completely stupid.  There have been signs recently that the world is starting to regard the US economy as much too risky and the US Dollar as something less than the iron-clad reserve currency it has been for many decades.  The reason the Federal Reserve has to buy all those Treasury Bonds is that China no longer wants them - not at the low interest rates the US Treasury expects to pay at any rate - and we're seeing the impact in the declining value of the US Dollar.

So what did Bernanke say that spooked the market?  Did he call an end to his trillion-dollar a year printing of money? Well, not exactly.  He signaled that he might start reducing it towards the end of this year with a view to ending it by the middle of 2014.  Hardly what you would call cold turkey, but enough for the markets to suffer their biggest fall this year.

I've been predicting in this blog that the world economy is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.  The economic situation in Europe is not improving and the US is plainly addicted to printing money.  There is no way out of this except for a major correction that restores equilibrium between the money supply and real market demand for capital.  Interest rates must go up signficantly to bring about this correction and that will force a corresponding correction in asset prices, particularly in major capital markets such as real estate and stocks.  This loss of equity will have huge flow-on effects for a while on on business investment.  In other words, before this is all over many more people are going to lose their savings, their houses and their jobs and we're all in for more pain before things get better.

Are Australians Smarter or Braver than New Zealanders?

It has been interesting following the political events in Australia this week with Julia Gillard pushing ahead with the carbon tax she promised the Australian electorate she wouldn't implement and polls indicating the Australian public are overwhelmingly against the proposal and ready to dump the Australian Labor Party for breaking its election promises.

The reaction to this political intransigence contrasts with our experience in New Zealand where the National Government last year pushed ahead with its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) against earlier promises, a betrayal that New Zealanders accepted with barely a whimper.

Australians have figured out that a carbon tax is a hugely expensive exercise in futility. They know that any carbon emissions savings that result from the significant increases in energy prices (and the cost of pretty much every other product and service in the economy) will be offset 100-fold by China's increase in emissions over the same period. Unlike Australians, New Zealanders seem to be too stupid to make the connection between the direct impact of the ETS on energy prices and the consequential price increases of almost everything in the economy.

Australians are smart enough to know that the science is far from settled and that actually global temperatures are not consistently tracking upwards with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels but rather have been static for the last ten years.

They are smart enough or brave enough to respond to Gillard's carbon tax proposals with, "Piss off, Mate, we're not having a bar of it!" (or words to that effect).

Australians are smart enough to know that if they don't dig minerals out of ground and sell those minerals to anyone who wants them, the only people who will suffer are Australians - unlike New Zealanders. And they are smart enough to know they need to reduce taxes to generate economic growth and create jobs - unlike New Zealanders.

The New Zealand National Government has given up on its goal of catching Australia in wages and living standards. Perhaps they have conceded that we're not smart enough or brave enough to get there.