It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Is Howard defensible ?
The few commentators who were suggesting that the Howard government did not (at the least) know the general facts about Australia’s collusion with Saddam Hussein in stealing $300 million from the Oil-For-Food fund, and encourage the AWB quango to do ‘whatever it takes’ to push the deal through, have gone quiet after the latest revelation that our intelligence agencies knew all about the racket.
Is there a coherent defence of the Howard government’s actions in helping Saddam fund his regime, including its military, while calling for, and eventually participating in, war against him? I think there is, though not one we’re likely to see avowed openly.
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What I’ve been reading
What’s Left? The Death of Social Democracy by Clive Hamilton. The latest Quarterly Essay is a restatement of arguments Clive’s presented a number of times before. The central argument is that, since widespread poverty is no longer a problem, social democracy is irrelevant and what is needed is a postmaterialist politics of wellbeing.
Not surprisingly, I have a lot of problems with this.
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Weekend reflections
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Communications reform
My piece in yesterday’s Fin is over the fold. I go into full free-market mode attacking the government’s deal with the monopolists. Ken Davidson in the Age goes the other way, arguing for tight regulation in the public interest, but I can’t see this ever happening to Murdoch or even Packer jnr. On the other hand, I guess we’re not going to see their spectrum taken away and auctioned off either. On the whole, though, I think the only useful intervention here is support for a strong public broadcasting sector. As far as the commercial networks go, the best hope is to encourage the kind of outside competition made possible by digital technology.
The point on which Ken and I agree, I think, is that we now have the worst of both worlds: lots of intervention, but in the interests of monopolists, not the public.
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The traditionality of modernity (crossposted at CT)
As was pointed out in the comments to my karate post, the observation that most traditions are invented is getting somewhat traditional itself, going back as it does to the exposure of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery.
So maybe it’s time to turn all this around, and make the point that we are now living in a society that’s far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century, and in some respects more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages.
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Malaria Appeal
Over at Deltoid, Tim Lambert is holding a malaria appeal for The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. It’s the same deal as those we’ve had here. Tim will match contributions up to $300. Go on over and give what you can.
TV time
I don’t watch a lot of commercial TV these days. Apart from the news, Futurama is pretty much it. But I’ve noticed that programs no longer seem to start and end at the advertised time. I heard somewhere that this is a deliberate strategy to stop people changing channels. If correct, this is both deplorable and self-defeating. Deplorable because the TV networks have been given a monopoly by the government: if they want to keep it, they should at least act responsibly.
Self-defeating because there are so many alternatives, including DVDs and the internets, not to mention good old-fashioned books. The collective effect of this kind of gaming is that commercial TV as a whole is even less attractive.
BTW, I’ll be in tomorrow’s (thursdays) Fin, responding to Coonan’s media package. Shorter JQ: It s*x.
Guest post
Reader Jane Harris addresses the vexed question “How many umpires?”, first in econospeak and then in verse. The occasion is an AFL proposal to allow goal and boundary umps to award free kicks.
Comments welcome (rhyming couplets please)
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The interest rate bears …
… of whom I am one, are starting to growl again.
The cenral tenet of interest rate bearishness is that if interest rates are low enough to generate negative savings, as is the case in the US and Australia, they are too low to be sustained. The counterargument, put most forcefully by Ben Bernanke is that someone must be willing to lend at these low interest rates, and this lending must reflect a “global savings glut”. Bears respond that the supposed glut does not reflect savings by households or business, but is really a liquidity glut created by expansionary monetary policy around the world, which must eventually come to an end, or be dissipated in inflation.
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