Miranda Devine asserts that it is time we made good manners all the rage and mentions the new fad for ‘civility’, being promoted by a variety of groups on the political right.

Might I suggest that civility begins at home. Devine herself is one of a group of right-wing print commentators (others are PP McGuinness and Piers Akerman) who routinely substitute abuse for argument. The same phenomenon is found, in even more marked terms, on radio and in the blogosphere. (For those with the patience to follow it, there was a long discussion of this in Ozblog circles recently. You can start here

More interestingly, this emphasis on civility contrasts markedly with derision of ‘political correctness’, understood to mean the substitution of approved euphemisms for accurate but hurtful descriptive terms (‘gravitationally challenged’ for ‘fat’ to take a standard, if apocryphal, example of the style). As far as I can see, the PC program demands an extension of civility to groups who were previously denied it. The problem is that new euphemisms wear out pretty fast unless they are accompanied by a change of attitudes. It’s much easier to substitute, say, ‘disabled’ for ‘crippled’, than to change the attitudes which are associated with those terms.

The well-known excesses of PC, and the obvious nastiness of many advocates of ‘civility’ can be summed up by saying that it’s all very well to talk the talk, but you also have to walk the walk. Civility is a highly desirable social quality, but it can only be sustained if it’s backed by genuine goodwill towards other members of the community. I can’t say I see much of this from Miranda Devine, or from other recent converts to the cause of civility.

Note: There’s more on this from Ken Parish

Those who enjoy the “Private Eye” style of diary may find some amusement in the blogging debuts of John Howard: P.M. and Simon Crean MP.

As well as satirical fun, ‘Simon’ raises a serious point that has also struck me. Despite lots of discussion about how Howard is bestriding the political scene like a colossus and Crean is failing to make an impact, most recent opinion polls suggests Labor would win an election held today. Labor is trailing on primary votes, but with the decline of One Nation and the Democrats, most of the third-party votes have gone to the Greens, whose preferences generally favor Labor very strongly. Of course, opinion polls aren’t election results, but the Federal scene contrasts sharply with the states, where incumbent Labor governments enjoy massive leads in the polls.

As Shaun Carney points out, the bursting of the housing bubble is likely to change everything. The Howard government has relied critically on low interest rates and affordable home ownership as a source of contrast with its Labor predecessors, and the housing boom can’t have hurt either Carr or Bracks. If the collapse is as bad as I expect, Howard will be in deep trouble. The impact on the Victorian and NSW governments, both closer to an election than Howard, is harder to predict, especially as the consequences of a housing downturn will take time to work themselves out.

Tim Dunlop gives some useful links on the relationship between inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity, a topic to which I plan to return

Paul Krugman proposes his economic plan for the US. As he says, it’s not rocket science. He plans to supplement expansionary monetary policy with $100 billion of short-term fiscal stimulus, offset by a scrapping of the long-term tax cuts proposed by Bush.

Given the increasingly alarming parallels with Japan though, it’s worth observing that Japan did much of this. The big problem has been the failure to tackle the corrupt and debt-laden financial system. I’d say the US needs something much the same – a sharp tightening of financial standards and some big bankruptcies among financial institutions – before there will be a sustained recovery.

Science fiction writer and right-wing commentator Jerry Pournelle has some interesting thoughts on the decline of the US labor market for less-skilled workers. He links to the NYT piece on the growth in disability benefits I flagged a couple of weeks ago in the Fin. I don’t share his IQ determinism, but this isn’t central to the argument. The case would be even stronger if ‘human capital’ (innate ability plus education & training) were used instead. (Thanks to Peter Lawrence for alerting me to this).

Liberal MP Julie Bishop backs the IMF push for a top marginal tax rate of 30 per cent. Actually, given the way these things work, it’s more likely to be an ambit claim from within the ‘official family’ (Treasury, Treasurer’s Office and RBA) than a suggestion originating from the IMF itself. Ken Parish has already put up a substantial critique, as well as proposing more work for me in the form of an estimate of the revenue cost (I’ll do it soon, I promise!).

There’s only one thing left to bug me. In my interview with Terry Lane on the National Interest, I said that the incentive case for lower tax rates was nonsense and that a stronger argument was that based on the claim that high tax rates promoted tax avoidance. Sure enough, this was the point Julie Bishop ran with. I don’t know if she was listening but, if so, she obviously missed my observation that New Zealand had tried a 30 per cent top marginal rate, found it did no good, and abandoned it.

2 million voters have selected the World’s funniest joke

Steven Den Beste argues that US opposition to the International Criminal Court reflects attachment to the Bill of Rights. If den Beste is worried about attacks on the Bill of Rights (which is undoubtedly one of the key documents in the history of democracy) surely he could look a little closer to home. As I understand the position of the Bush administration, anyone in the world, including US citizens living in America, can be declared an ‘enemy combatant’, seized and held incommunicado and without trial indefinitely, inside or outside the US. At one point, the government was also claiming the right to execute such ‘combatants’ after a ‘trial’ by a special court with no requirement to adhere to any notion of due process. I’m not sure if this is still the case, but current US reality is far worse than anything that has been imagined about hypothetical abuses by the ICC.

In a recent post on the concession of failure by Czech free-marketeer Vaclav Klaus, I made the bald assertion that the neoliberal program has failed in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe and, most recently, in its heartland, the United States. Naturally, the comment thread was full of challenges and queries. No-one had the nerve to challenge my judgement on New Zealand, but the others were controversial. Ken Parish raised questions about the US. John Ray asked about the view, which he attributes to discredited Blair spin-doctor Peter Manderson that ‘we are all Thatcherites now” And someone with the imaginative pseudonym ‘Anonymous’ asked the question on everyone’s lips ‘What about Estonia?’.
To start with the last question first, I don’t claim to be an expert on Estonia, though I know that it has pursued a more free-market policy than other Eastern European countries. A quick Google search reveals the news that Unemployment in Estonia reached 14.2 percent in the first quarter, up by 0.6 percent year-on-year. More to the point, Estonia, like the Czech Republic, is lining up to join the European Union. As Vaclav Klaus notes, this means signing up for the EU social charter and becoming a social democracy. Anonymous and others can live in hope that EU enlargement will trip over the various obstacles in its path (Cyprus) or that the voters of Estonia will prefer free-market ideology to European citizenship, but I think its safe to say that Estonian neoliberalism is on its deathbed.
As regards the UK, I have pointed out on a number of occasions that, while Tony Blair came to office advocating a version of the Third Way that amounted to little more than “Thatcherism with a human face”, his government has gradually reverted to traditional social democracy, raising taxes in the last budget and, more recently, breaking the taboo against mentioning redistribution. All that is left of the Third Way is the Public Finance Initiative, and this sorry excuse for a public investment policy cannot last much longer.
Finally, there is the United States. A couple of years ago, when the unemployment rate there was 3.9 per cent, I observed that the debate between social democracy and neoliberalism turned on whether this exceptionally good performance could be sustained. This question has been resolved in the negative. Even assuming a sustained recovery in the US (most unlikely in my view), it is now clear that there is little if any payoff, in terms of employment and social mobility, for the massive inequality and poverty generated by neoliberalism in the US.

Update My view that Blair’s Third Way is dead is developed further here, here, and here, and has been endorsed by publications as disparate as The Guardian and The Telegraph. I couldn’t find a really good link for the Telegraph, but this interview with the self-described “last Blairite in the Cabinet” indicates the prevalence of the view I’ve been putting since the middle of 2001.

A good day at The Hague