Tom Stafford points to academic publisher Elsevier’s involvement in the international arms trade. Even the legal aspects of this trade are deplorable, given the excessive readiness of governments and would-be governments to resort to armed force, but the boundary between legal and illegal arms trade is pretty porous. For example, there’s evidence that the arms fairs organised by Elsevier subsidiary Spearhead are venues for the illegal trade in landmines. Tom has a number of suggestions for possible responses.
Month: September 2005
Section 328 in Japan
I’ve been arguing against attempts to apply Australian electoral laws, requiring that “electoral material” include the name and address of an authorising person to blog posts and comments. But, judging by a report in the Age, the situation is far worse in Japan
By Quigger’s beard
Professor Bunyip coins a bon mot at my expense, saying in relation to a dispute between Sharon Beder and Leigh Cartwright over the effects of the Reagan tax cuts on revenue that
some of the itchier creatures in John Quiggin’s beard are the intellectual betters by an order of magnitude.
of one participant. Unfortunately, Prof B is not a professor of economics, and he applies the epithet to the wrong party in the dispute[1].
Read More »
Neither fish nor fowl
John Howard’s blistering attack on Telstra management is an example of why I’ve always regarded partial privatisation as the worst of both worlds. Although I’m unimpressed by Trujillo’s performance so far, I have some sympathy with his position as CEO of a company 51 per cent owned by the Australian government. To whom is he supposed to be responsible? The private minority shareholders? The Australian public as majority shareholders? The government? The shareholding ministers? The Liberal Party?
Read More »
Back in Brisbane
The trip back home was long and tiring, but I’m glad to be home again, and Brisbane is beautiful as always. There’s a lot to catch up on – Internet news only takes you so far – and I have quite a few posts planned, but jet lag and backlogs will probably slow me down for a while.
Monday message board
I hope to be properly back on air soon, but in the meantime here’s the Monday Message Board. Civilised discussion and no coarse language.
An anti-market argument from authority
Miranda Devine’s latest piece on Kyoto (sent to me by Jack Strocchi) adds a couple of new (or newish) talking points to the debate. The first is the claim that New Zealand faces a “cost blowout” of $1 billion as a result of the treaty. As far as I can tell, this is a beat-up. The government had calculated that under existing policies, New Zealand would meet its Kyoto commitments with a bit left over that could be traded on international carbon emission credits markets. Now it looks as if they won’t, which means either changing the policies, buying credits or repudiating the commitments. Its hard to see how the availability of the second option makes NZ any worse off.
What’s more interesting is that Devine attacks not merely the carbon emissions market established under Kyoto, but the whole idea of emissions trading. This is fairly surprising since the whole thrust of environmental policy under the Howard and Keating governments, including the current government’s negotiating position on Kyoto, has been to encourage the used of market-based instruments, of which emissions trading systems are an archetypal example. Although problems can emerge with naive application of this kind of policy, it’s generally the right direction in which to go. The development of tradeable water rights in the Murray-Darling system and elsewhere is a prominent example of both the benefits and some potential pitfalls.
Read More »
Crooked Timber lunch
Today is my last day in DC and I had a very enjoyable lunch with several members of my group blog, Crooked Timber. The group was me, Henry Farrell, Maria Farrell, John Holbo and Micah Schwartzman, making one of the largest collections of Timberites in one place ever to take place. I also met bloggers Russell Arben Fox and Daniel Drezner, both in town for the American Political Science Association. I’ve had an enjoyable and productive time here, but I’ll be very glad to be back in Oz, and home in Brisbane.
Katrina, Kobe and Kyoto
The still-developing disaster of Hurricane Katrina has some obvious parallels with the Kobe earthquake ten years ago. Both were predictable (and widely predicted) events. The damage from Kobe took years to fix, and it’s already obvious that the same will be true of Katrina.
Equally significantly, weaknesses in the state response to Kobe had big psychological impacts in Japan. The earthquake came at a time when the Japanese economy was recovering from the bursting of a huge property bubble, but when triumphalist rhetoric about the strengths of the Japanese state, and the inevitable dominance of Japanese ways of doing business, was stronger even than during the 1980s. The failure of the initial government response to the disaster and the mismanagement and pork-barrelling that characterised the reconstruction effort went a long way towards reducing confidence.
Read More »
Simplifying taxes
In addition to spurious claims about the burden of the top marginal tax rate, one of the standard complaints about taxation in Australia concerns the excessive length of the tax code. There’s a fairly typical example in this SMH piece (sent to me by Jack Strocchi). Let’s start with Phil Ruthven, who says that all federal taxes could be replaced with a simple 10 per cent tax on all revenues (I assume this refers to gross turnover of businesses). He might be right, but such a tax would be economically disastrous. It’s sometimes referred to as a cascade tax, since it applies to the same item each time it moves down the processing chain, creating massive distortions. It is in fact, the same as the Easytax, proposed by Pauline Hanson a few years back, though she proposed only a 2 per cent rate. I analysed it in this post a while back.
A more defensible, but still incorrect claim is that the complexity of the tax code is generated primarily by concessions. I’ll respond to this in a later post.
John Quiggin 