Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 27 October 2003

Ali bin Ramsey of the Saddam Times, aka the Sydney Morning Herald, found time to pour fulsome praise on Geoffrey Barker, a fellow comrade as well as colleague (Forget Bush, the joke is on the Kelly gang 22/10). In an uncontrollable bout of journalistic incest Ramsey described Barker as "erudite." If I didn't know better I would think old Ali was joking.

By lavishing undeserved praise on Barker the venomous Ramsey did draw attention to what passes for learning and intellect among lefty journalists. I still recall with considerable humour a pathetic article by Barker in which he tried to use marginal utility theory to demolish President Reagan's proposals for an anti-missile defence system, thereby confirming the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Barker is pompous writer who wastes a great deal of paper and ink in revealing his political prejudices and economic illiteracy in the evident belief he has something of value to say. As an example of his arrogance let me return to an article he wrote for The Australian Financial Review in October 1998 in which he launched another attack on the free market, making the ridiculous claim that the then international financial situation was a "crisis of economic theory." (By the way, Barker hates free market economics even though he doesn't know a thing about it).

Apparently convinced of his deep knowledge of economic thought, Barker argued that the crisis "destroys [economists] claims to scientific insight", and so on. To demonstrate the depth of his erudition he quoted the view of Lester Thurrow that economics is nothing but an ideology. (Barker seems to think that quoting those whose views accord with his own ideology makes him right.)

Warming to his theme, he sneering referred to Hayek's brilliant Road to Serfdom as a "holy text for free market ideologues." Get the message? Don't debate the book, do not even quote from it — just sneer and smear, which is precisely what Ramsey does. Quoting from Keynes, we were told that Hayek had conceded the point that "a completely unplanned economy was not possible . . . [and] as soon you admit that the extreme is not possible, and that line has to be drawn . . . you are done for . . ." Of course, Barker thought Keynes' response "superb" while Hayek's response was . . . . . Come to think of it, Barker didn't say what it was.

Having some familiarity with Hayek's work, being one of those dreaded free-market ideologues, I can shed some light on the subject. Hayek was a leading member of the Austrian School of economics, the economics of which explained why central planning must always fail and why interventionism invariably leads to further intervention. Regardless of what Keynes thought, Hayek and the other Austrians never made the patently absurd claim that any economy could ever be unplanned.

On the contrary, their understanding of market forces made it abundantly clear that planning is an integral part of the economy. But planning by individuals and not the state. To them it was individual planning versus central planning. It was their genius that finally showed why central planning was always doomed to descend into tyranny and economic collapse.

Barker asserts Keynes had charged Hayek with confusing moral and material issues. Such a charge would be plain nonsense. No one seriously acquainted with Hayek's work would ever make it. Barker finished by enjoining Prime Minister Howard to liberate "The Theory from the rigidity that has defined it in recent years." This is just pompous, ignorant claptrap.

(Incidentally, Keynes called the Road to Serfdom "...a grand book…. Morally and philosophically I find myself with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in a deeply moved agreement." Strange that Keynes' praise managed to slip by Barker, isn't it?)

No where in any of the articles in which Barker maligned free-market theory did he explain what was wrong with it. Instead, he abuses its advocates as "ideologues" and "economic fundamentalists" without making any attempt to engage them in debate. In fact, he even refuses to respond to criticism, preferring to hide behind the paper's editorial skirts, so to speak. The word for this is intellectual cowardice.

Austrians who studied Asia did predict the financial implosion and the subsequent depression, explaining in detail its cause, which was credit expansion — the Keynesian prescription for growth. Unfortunately, Australian newspapers, including The Australian Financial Review refused to publish the Austrian viewpoint, preferring to publish the likes of Barker's bigoted outpourings instead.

So what was it that Barker recently wrote in last Monday's Australian Financial Review that so impressed Ramsey?

"The demands of Australian patriotism are becoming too onerous. Loyal Australians are now expected, on demand, to join uncritically in simultaneous shows of mass grief and triumphal nationalism.

"…. Australians could argue politics, economics, religion and sport, remember their honoured dead with reverence, and get on with life with all its pleasures and pains, loves and hates. Not any more.

"In a potentially sinister evolution, bloated and seemingly interminable spectacles of grief and glory have become authoritarian politics continued by other means ... Opposition or even scepticism is unseemly and unpatriotic, an affront to Team Australia ... "

So according to Barker and his fellow swamp creatures at Fairfax Press anyone who criticises the government is attacked as unpatriotic, and that this is a "sinister" symptom of creeping dictatorship. This isn't just another lefty crock — it's a malicious lie by a malicious little man. The same patriotic Australian who justified leftwing thugs breaking up Hanson's meetings on the grounds that "they serve as witnesses and messengers for vast numbers of Australians appalled by Ms Hanson" (The Australian Financial Review 3/6/97).

Whatever the vast majority of Australians thought about Ms Hanson and her policies, they never supported the use of thuggery, unlike Mr Barker, to shut her up. When one thinks about it, the intellectual cesspit otherwise known as the Fairfax Press is the best place for Barker, Ramsey and their ideological ilk.

The following reports reveal Ali bin Ramsey's undying humanitarian principles and his relentless pursuit of honest journalism.

Ali bin Ramsey throws a fit now that Australia is at war with Saddam

Shredding people is such fun

Saddam's human shredding machine

Gerard Jackson is also Brookes' Economics Editor