The Greens’ policies would destroy the Australian economy
Gerard Jackson
Monday 16 August 2010
Senator Bob Brown has emerged as a destructive parasite. A green fanatic living at the public trough whose economic wish list would destroy the Australian standard of living, which is exactly what it is intended to do. Not only has the media overlooked just how elitist and loony Brown’s green economics really are so have our rightwing.
In a letter to The Australian (27 June 1991) he revealed his appalling economic illiteracy by defining logging and mining as “resource robbery”. According to this brilliant economic theorist and economic historian Tasmania is an example of a “post-industrial” society (despite the fact that the state had never been industrialized) because the economy “is not based on dinosaur industries like pulp mills, zinc mills and aluminium mills.” (Italics added.)
Posted in Exports cannot save the Obama economy
Gerard Jackson
Monday 16 August 2010
No matter how grim the economic situation some Pollyanna will find a silver lining that indicates a mother lode. And as night surely follows day we find that said silver lining was only tinsel. The current silver lining is the old fallacy of export-led growth. Some commentators are arguing that recovery in Europe will spur the demand for US exports which in turn will generate sufficient economic growth to restore full employment. I guess one needs a PhD from an accredited university to come up with this nonsense.
To begin with, the proposition that Europe is currently enjoying an economic recovery is a rather dubious one. However, the real objection is that the demand for exports — no matter how intense — cannot in itself generate growth. Even a Harvard PhD should know that economic growth is also defined as forgone consumption: the process of sacrificing current consumption in favour of greater consumption in the future by transforming present goods into future goods, i.e. capital goods. As a rule, this process is usually defined as capital formation.
The Government’s ‘alternative energy’ policies will be a disaster for the economy
Gerard Jackson
Monday 26 July 2010
The Liberal Party’s proposed $3.2 billion solar fraud is just another demonstration of its leaders cowardice and wanton disregard for future living standards. Regardless of what Greg Hunt asserts there is no “real choice” between the Labour Government’s destructive energy policy and the Liberal Party’s green pandering. They are both based on outrageous distortions and outright lies.
Few people realise that it is physically impossible for solar energy to meet the needs of a modern economy, or any economy above a medieval level of existence. This is because solar — including wind power — face insurmountable natural limitations. Even if this were not the case they would still be facing massive diseconomies of scale.
Will the Reserve’s tight monetary policy drive the Australian economy off a cliff?
Gerard Jackson
Monday 26 July 2010
For 2009 M1 rose by 4.5 per cent, though it needs to be stated that the expansion was an erratic. However, monetary growth stopped last January, fell the following month and then remained flat until March after which it contracted in April and May at an average annual rate of 7 per cent. This is what is called a deflation. Now I don’t believe for a moment that the Reserve is going to allow the money supply to deflate by a significant amount. But these figures do reveal how tight monetary policy has become.
Unfortunately, the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Treasury’s grasp of monetary theory is — to put it mildly — so poor (they don’t even have a usable definition of money) that they can make no connection between monetary growth and its consequences. This is why the Reserve says it needs to look at the CPI before it knows whether to raise interest rates, even though the money supply has been contracting.
The US economy is Obama’s mess and Democrats are panicking
Gerard Jackson
Monday 26 July 2010
If I were not such an admirer of the United States I should be inclined to say that in electing the rabid leftwing Obama to the presidency Americans deserve everything they are getting — and good and hard. But America is a generous and unique country and deserves much better than this. Regardless of what Obama and fellow leftists assert America is special. The first country in history to be founded directly on the principle of liberty and the “inalienable rights of Man”. That Obama and his merry band of bitter leftists mock this fact reveals their not-so underlying contempt for ‘their’ country’s traditions, history and citizens.
To comprehend why Obama refuses to change economic course one needs to understand the fact that he is a genuine leftist. In plain English: a socialist. Not the Marxist kind but the Mussolini kind. For these people economics is basically an ideology. There are no economic laws, only the Will of the Collective, meaning the state. As the Marxist economist S. G. Strumilin declared: “Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws”. (Cited in Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, Pimlico, 2002, p. 112.) Mussolini could not have put it better &emdash; and neither could Obama’s supporters. But economic laws do exist and defying them invites disaster.
Obama’s policies are a recipe for economic stagnation
Gerard Jackson
Monday 19 July 2010
Grim is one word that surely sums up the state of the US economy. Without a doubt the Obama administration is the most incompetent since the lamentable Carter sat in the Oval office. Now there are some who sincerely believe that Obama has deliberately set out to destroy the economy. What else could explain his ‘economic policies’? Ideologically-driven ignorance, for one.
When Obama first emerged into the political sunlight I warned that this character is a committed leftwing ideologue and a profoundly ignorant man. Americans are now — apart from the true believers who evidently live in an alternative universe — beginning to face up to the reality of the man and the magnitude of their electoral folly.
Why capital gains taxes retard economic growth
Gerard Jackson
Monday 19 July 2010
Obama’s impending tidal wave of taxes raises the question of how capital gains taxes affect economic growth. What most people do not understand, including those clamouring for tax reform, is that capital gains are economic profits and not accounting profits, and this is where capital gains taxes do the most damage. This has the effect of reducing the number of transactions because that is one of the ways of avoiding the tax. In other words, capital gains taxes are also transaction taxes where they are levied on realised gains.