A fascinating piece from the NYT magazine.

Here’s a cached report from the SMH in which President of the NSW Law Society John North denounces mandatory sentencing laws which are, of course, the ultimate method of ensuring proportionality. He’s right about mandatory sentencing, but this contradicts his criticism of the sentence imposed on gang rapist X.

At the Crossroads by Jane Kelsey. Jane has been one of the most prominent critics of free-market ‘reform’ in NZ. I’m reviewing her latest books (which echoes the titles of at least three Australian books taking radically different views) for New Zealand Economic Papers. I’ll post the review on my website in due course.

David Morgan is back from paternity leave

Everyone and their dog has piled on to the predictable handful of critics of the 55-year jail term handed down to gang-rapist X. I just want to make one more observation on this. The people who have protested about the ‘disproportionate’ nature of the sentence are precisely those who in normal circumstances (that is, community outrage over a light sentence) would be stressing the importance of the judge’s discretion to take account of all the circumstances in a particular case, rather than following some sort of mechanical rule of proportionality. For example, I don’t remember any of them protesting about the disproportionately light sentences (later doubled on appeal) that were handed down in the first of the trials. These guys appear to have no consistent legal philosophy, unless you call always siding with criminals a philosophy.

Peasons I’m glad to be a leftwinger these days is that I don’t have to be nearly as embarrassed about the people on my side. It used to be, for example, that a lot of leftwingers were whiny complainers. There are still some, but whining is now far more prevalent on the right. Worst of all are ex-lefties like David Horowitz, who’ve kept their whining style even as they’ve reversed their political views. But there are plenty of others
The big whine is, of course, the continuous complaints about media bias. But lately there has been added a form of right-wing political correctness, in which rightwingers try to silence critics by crying religious persecution. An example I saw recently was the head of the ,
Australian Family Association, writing in the Age. He said ” Today, when moral and ethical debates are being waged, we constantly hear voices telling us that the church, or religious people, should keep their personal convictions to themselves.
The latest example is Terry Monagle’s article, The new Catholic ascendancy”,

And here’s what Monagleactually wrote about the new Catholic ascendancy
“Admirably, and unlike Catholic conservatives of a previous era, they are unafraid of debate and of staking their political careers around a set of ideas they care about. They draw connections between areas of private morality and public policy that have been ignored.”

Monagle went on to argue that the Catholic right was wrong and dangerous, but he made no suggestion they should keep quiet.

According to these numbers in NYT, Jack Grubman (former telecom shill at Salomon) collected a commission of about 0.001 per cent ($30 million) for his role in the greatest wealth destruction in history.

The obvious parallel for the current situation of the US is that of Japan a decade ago. As Paul Krugman notes, the factors that once appeared to distinguish the US from Japan (better corporate governance, more scope for fiscal and monetary policy, the absence of a real estate bubble) have disappeared. The prospect of a decade-long period of slow growth now appears plausible.
But, as I’ve observed in the past, Japan’s performance over the 1990s isn’t quite as bad as it looks . The average growth rate has been about 1 per cent, against a sustainable rate of around 2.5 per cent. Over this decade, annual average working hours have fallen by about 200 per year, from 2100 to 1900. The increase in leisure is approximately equivalent to additional growth of 1 percentage point per year. This is why a decade of slow growth has produced only a modest increase in unemployment.
It is now the US, and not Japan that has the longest working hours in the developed world. There is every prospect that, over the next decade,working hours will fall back to more reasonable levels. This will be good for American workers, whose working hours are difficult to rationalise as sensible choices. But it will be bad for advocates of American hyperpower, just as Japan’s lost decade has been bad for advocates of a resurgent Imperial Japan. Neither group has reacted well. As I pointed out here, the bursting of the bubble is already releasing some noxious gases.

For those who can’t get enough of my rants , some pieces of mine have recently been reposted at On Line Opinion (an essay on mandates originally posted here) and at australian policy online ( a review essay on Ken Loach’s film The Navigators, originally published in the Canberra Times.

Boris Johnson, Tory MP writing for the UK Telegraph OK, so it’s war on Iraq: now please tell us why

“Yes, it’s war, war, war; and yet politicians and public have never seemed foggier about how or exactly why we are going to achieve our ends. One day, we are told the proposed war is justified by Saddam’s role in September 11, a shady Prague meeting between one of his Ba’ath party members and Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. The next day, we are told that may be a load of bunk.

One day, we’re told the war requires an American army of 250,00 men. The next day, it’s going to be an aerial blitz, which will hardly require any ground forces. One day, Tony Blair assures the Commons he will provide a dossier explaining why military action is necessary against Saddam. Yesterday, John Prescott was evasive not only about the whereabouts of this dossier, but about whether Parliament would be consulted at all.

No wonder the polls show that the public is leery. People of goodwill, people who want Saddam gone, are scratching their heads and wondering whether they can really support this war at all.”

It’s not often I agree with the Telegraph, but this is spot-on. I’d love to see a democratic government in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein on trial in The Hague, but I don’t see this as a likely outcome of what currently looks more like a family feud.

By the way, “peaceblogger” seems to be one of these mysterious “memes”. I made the obvious riff on “warblogger” to describe Jason Soon, he picked it up and now it’s in Slate. My first thought was that this had been around for ages, and I was just guilty of unconscious plagiarism. But a Google search reveals only 9 instances, nearly all in the last month or two.