Short Kicks: The furniture is revolting

Still working hard on business stuff so no time for anything more than Short Kicks.

- As Piping Shrike rightly points out, the current leadership tension over Tony Abbott's increasingly woeful performance on so many issues is not going to have a happy ending for the Liberal Party. Backbenchers are leaking, journos are hyperventilating, it's #ruddmentum all over again. But as with the disappointing Rudd return, there is no thought that replacing Abbott with any of the clowns in the current front or back bench would lead to any different policy agenda. Perhaps getting rid of PPL and Abbott's other pet projects would be enough in itself. I doubt it. The only logic that works for the Libs at the moment is the same logic that they relentlessly mocked Labor for, in that they could write off the next election result but with a short term honeymoon poll bounce they could "save the furniture" by minimising the losses with a view to jagging the next one.

- As such, Abbott may look like a galah on the national stage on a daily basis but he is showing a some rat cunning regarding internal Liberal Party politics. His cabinet reshuffle seems to be focused mostly on making everyone else look bad in comparison to him, even though that is a negative-sum game. Sussan Ley has already been thrown to the wolves through the public humiliation of announcing the backflip on GP co-payments. Shifting Scott Morrison to Social Services is very shrewd, I think, because it means Morrison can wear all the blame for terrible decisions that Abbott makes as he tries to shaft his gray power voting base with tax hikes and welfare cuts in a vain attempt to balance the budget. Abbott has left Hockey as a shag on a rock for the most part during the failed budget negotiations, even though there have been leaks to try to pin blame for Abbott's dud policies on the PM. Turnbull is busy being shoulder-deep inside the Telstra cow, planting fiscal timebombs. Abbott has also allowed the media to scrutinise Julie Bishop without coming to her aid particularly, and since there's never been much substance there, that's a bad thing for Bishop's aspirations. Morrison is still the only hope for the Libs, but only if he makes a move before he gets too much of the Abbott stink on him.

- Meanwhile, though I got excited about Palmer populism last year, the cat of reality was quickly belled by Lenore Taylor and the public has reacted by abandoning PUP in the polls. Palmer has now stiffened up somewhat on other budget measures, but it's too late for his electoral fortunes as I suspect he has lost his chance to be the new face of people power. My analysis was not wrong as such, because the opportunity for Clive was real at the time - I merely overestimated him. Oh well, what can you expect from a billionaire. If only we had an Elizabeth Warren type in the Australian parliament.

Short Kicks: Je suis occupé

Not much time for blogging as work has me flat out like a lizard drinking, having launched CricketFan as the first addition to the FanSports Network (which had previously only consisted of FanFooty) and shortly to officially add FanLeague. Time for some short kicks!

- The Charlie Hebdo story has been done to death elsewhere. I had a blog post brewing in my mind which would have mentioned the word "arsehole" about 250 times, because my opinion is that the fact that some Islamist arseholes blew some French arseholes away for being arseholes has drawn a predictable response from libertarian arseholes in their seemingly unstoppable campaign to Let Arseholes Be Arseholes should not mean that non-arseholes should give in to any of the arsehole-aligned factions. I was also going to draw some allusions between the childishness of Charlie Hebdo and the English tradition of Private Eye and Viz of publishing obscenity as a kind of white privilege - back in the 1960s they might have been fighting a real battle against power and privilege, but by now that sort of thing is just kicking down. That post will never be written now, as I haven't the time. I'm sure you're all sad about that.

- What is Henry Ergas doing writing about Islamism? He's an economist of some renown (or some previous renown). His competency is not acting like every other hack political commentator. I know Krugman freelances a lot in his columns, but at least he maintains some semblance of aloofness from the culture wars.

- Saw the third Hobbit movie. Was disappointed that the film rather squibbed on the fate of the gold. There was an opportunity for a Pikettyesque narrative about the 99% rising up against the elite to bust open the trove of hoarded wealth and kickstart a new era of prosperity with some good old-fashioned redistribution. Instead, we were treated to a string of sequences of the mayor's sidekick Alfrid acting all craven and covetous, over and over, as an impossibly crude parody of the bourgeoisie. It was a middling attempt at lowbrow humour, a classless dig at the middle classes of Middle Earth.

Institutionalism as a political credo

I have mentioned here and there about my personal philosophical standpoint. It was here that I started putting it into words for the first time, but it's long past time I should have laid it down in this blog so that readers can understand where I'm coming from. I will try to keep this as short and punchy as possible, since philosophy is by nature overly wordy and introspective. I expect this won't be the last post I make on this subject, of course, but as a first attempt it will by necessity be broad-brush.

I am an institutionalist. The little-used word "institutionalism" has most currency in sociology to refer to a conversation about individuals and their interactions with institutions, but in my mind institutionalism can be, and is, a political credo, thus I am using it to describe what I believe. 

DEFINITIONS

To me, institutionalism is a way of thinking about and acting through and for collective interests. To be an institutionalist is to want society to strengthen and improve its institutions, not tear them down. An institutionalist will not defend an institution for the sake of it - some are not worth saving, as they have not changed with the times - but other institutions are timeless, and most are there for a good reason and should be protected from the vicissitudes of short-term political machinations.

Institutions are groups of people who have either been tasked by the state or have taken it upon themselves to act according to a set of principles for the betterment of society. Institutions help society recover from shocks, and work towards the amelioration, minimisation and (if possible) solution of longstanding problems. These are public goods, and should be maximised where prudent.

Institutionalism is a credo whereby the health and wellbeing of a society and its citizens can be defined as only being as good as the institutions which support it, such that rigorous adherence to the principles behind the institutions is paramount to the welfare of society. To the extent that institutions can be criticised or reformed, it should only be critiqued in reference to those basic principles. Where an institution has failed in its duties, it must be brought to account for abrogating its responsibilities to uphold those principles.

Political systems are only one subset of the bodies which can be defined as societal institutions. The current system sees political institutions as having primacy over all others - albeit that courts retain a seldom-used veto power in this respect - which is derived from its ultimate accountability to the people through democratic elections. This has proven to be less than perfect in practice, and institutionalism is a credo which would have this structure modified.

The reason that bodies with democratic accountability have been placed at the apex of the institutional pyramid is that institutions can tend over time to accrete power and influence (and corruption) beyond that intended by the principles of their founding, and every institution should ultimately be accountable to the general populace. Any dilution of accountability will tend to weaken institutions and thus society in the long run.

Unfortunately, due to the stability of many types of institutions and the nature of the Peter Principle of management, some of their inhabitants almost inevitably evolve into "elites". Where the elites are professional and competent this does not matter, and in fact is a good thing. The ideal institution has the most capable people running it according to the principles of its founding, and any deviation from proper operation is deprecated and removed. However, in some institutions the fundamentals of meritocracy are cast aside in favour of nepotism, empire-building and other managerial sins.

However, the current system has failed as well, because it is politics that has succumbed most deeply to elitism. Perhaps due to its inherent nature, politics attracts the kind of elite who acts not on principle or for the benefit of society, but on behalf of the elites themselves. This is anathema to the proper operation of institutions, and thus is the opposite of institutionalism. In fact, the recent rise of elitism as a political credo with an express policy of destroying institutions is the raison d'etre of institutionalism.

CONTEXT

In the 1960s, the German intellectual Rudi Dutschke advocated a "long march through the institutions of power" to create a new society which had democracy at its core. (I should stress at this point that when I googled that phrase just before writing this section, that was the first time I had seen or heard his name.) Dutschke's catchphrase is repeated these days most often by the right to describe a supposed process that has happened since the 1960s whereby the left has effectively "captured" institutions to adhere to leftist principles. Of course, by making that assumption they see Dutschke's vision as now being something to roll back, even if very few in the left ever would have heard of Dutschke or knowingly followed his teachings, in the same way that the right talks a lot more about Saul Alinsky nowadays than the left ever did.

I am upfront about my formulation being a reaction to the right's modern agenda to destroy institutions. There is no use denying it; in fact, I embrace it because it illustrates how radical the modern right has become. By now it is cliched to make the point that the traditional role of the left as radicals seeking change and the right as conservatives defending the status quo has been switched about. The so-called "culture wars" were lost a generation ago by the right, as societal values shifted towards liberalism.

Institutionalism can be thought of as a conservative philosophy, therefore, if what passes for "conservative" thought these days is instead seen as radical. The things conserved in institutionalism if it is implemented today may be different to those that would have been a generation or three ago, but that is because institutionalism should be responsive to shifts in public values.

OTHER ISMS

Despite above allusions, institutionalism does not equate to collectivism, as it can be used to further what would traditionally be called anti-collectivist interests. Some institutions are built to oppose collectivism - albeit they are a collective of people sworn to do so - and there is nothing wrong with that.

Institutionalism is also not populism. Populism describes any number of wildly differing policies which share the common element of support from 50%+1 of the voting public. Just because something is popular does not mean it is good for society. Institutionalism as properly implemented should fit within the Venn diagram circle of populism, but it is not equivalent.

Any credo devised since at least 1980 has to deal with the dominant -ism of the age, which is liberalism. Institutionalism is not post-liberalism, about which I have written recently. Similarly, though, institutionalism seeks to fix the problems wrought by liberalism, and hope not to introduce new problems of its own. One of the main tenets of liberalism, particularly in economics, is to treat a large swathe of institutions as obstacles to maximum freedom so as to provide a pretext for dismantling them. Of course, institutionalism stands in direct opposition to this - provided that the principles behind those institutions are worth defending on behalf of the people.

Apart from the ongoing battle between liberalism and everything else, which liberalism has been winning since at least the Reagan era, the other war of -isms which is most cogent in 2014 is elitism versus populism. Indeed, most if not all -isms can be boiled down to defining one group of people as an elite who are supposed to be benevolent protectors of the people, in the vain hope that they will never abandon accountability. In this sense, institutionalism is a more "meta" credo than others, since it describes the same sort of effect as most other creeds. Hopefully it can become more than just a collection of motherhood statements, nevertheless, and in future posts I will make recommendations for change rather than mere affirmations.

BEST AND WORST PRACTICE

This will no doubt be fodder for many more blog posts, but the signature example I can think of is the high professionalism of the Australian Electoral Commission (its executive management team from 2012 is pictured at the top of this post) in comparison with the American system of "democracy" which had its nadir in 2000. The AEC is an exemplar of best practice in institutions. First, it is supported by a legal framework which enables them to remain perfectly non-partisan, as it does not rely on political parties to provide its staff. Second, its charter is to remain responsive to the needs of the people by setting electoral boundaries according to strict population quotas and adhering to an open process. In contrast, there is no federal body in the US with power over the setting of electoral boundaries or the operation of elections, which has resulted in state-based elected officials implementing massive gerrymanders for the benefit of lazy local politicians.

Those familiar with the AEC's recent stuff up which claimed the heads of several of the pictured public servants might already be chortling about me holding up the Commission as a paragon of anything, but I would argue that the commission's reaction to this scandal is perfectly instructive, and compares infinitely more favourably to the 2000 US federal election result leading to the national disgrace of Bush v Gore. The AEC's processes were exemplary; management resigned, the organisation was humbled, and those remaining will work harder next time to make sure everything goes perfectly. Since Bush v Gore, meanwhile, the US Supreme Court has become monstrously partisan and has slashed voter rights in a string of decisions, weakening American democracy for party political motives. The AEC and the superstructure supporting it are institutionally sound, while the American system is a farce. I could (and will) go into far more detail on this and other examples.

CONCLUSION

The picture at the top of this post represents all that is good about institutionalism. It is a group of people chosen by merit to apply themselves to the production of a public good - in this case, democracy - and for the most part they carry out their solemn duties without fuss or incident. This group happen to be public servants, but this work happens a lot in the bureaucracy of business too, with all the fine people employed in corporate governance who ensure that the private sector adheres to best practice as well. When they get things wrong, though, they take their responsibilities seriously enough that they will resign to uphold the principles that they failed. They recognise the importance of the role they play, and they retain enough shame to acknowledge when they fail and to wear the consequences. If only all institutions could work so well and with so much humility.

Labor and labour, Democrats and demography

If we are indeed in an era where identity politics wins elections, and the right is the natural winner of such contests because it's well versed in operating sans policy, what is to become of the left? This is the focus of a lot of navel gazing in America right now post the disastrous midterm elections. For example, this NYT piece lays out a battle between the populism of Elizabeth Warren and the elitism of Hillary Clinton. I've written before about elitism versus populism, which I think is the most important political dialectic of our age, so I'm very much on board with that characterisation of the situation.

The first possible solution is to do nothing. And yes, there are valid arguments for waiting for the cycle to turn by itself. Especially in America, the current trend of old white people having a disproportionate say in politics is an artefact of the Baby Boomer generation growing haggard and conservative. The boomers have dominated politics and general society since the 1960s, and this is their last struggle before their bulge finally disappears from the other end of the Python Stomach Of Demography. The Tea Party is filled with boomers who enjoyed the fruits of the welfare state, including free education in some cases, but they don't want to share the wealth any more and can't see the point of planning for beyond their own mortality. In the face of harsh electoral reality of voting patterns, it's a perfectly legitimate tactic by Generation X to shrug our shoulders, sigh and bide our time until we can wave the most selfish generation in history goodbye as they roll past in their pine boxes. We've waited this long, a few more years won't be so bad.

If you read a lot of American leftist bloggers - and I have been doing so lately - the clamour is now to embrace Warrenite populism, otherwise known as class warfare.

The Democrats will still keep the presidency most of the time and the Senate at least some of the time, but our country will remain stuck, our government will remain dysfunctional, and the people will suffer. The Democrats have to address middle class economic and social anxiety, and that means they have to focus on class more than race. This isn't a recommendation that the Democrats make winning over the elusive white male voter their top priority, at least not in the ways this has been attempted in the past. It's a recommendation that the Democrats begin focusing heavily on the issues that are making middle class folks from all backgrounds so anxious. I'm talking about the fact that people can't afford college, that their kids can't afford to move out of their homes, that formerly "good" neighborhoods are being decimated by opioid addiction, and that our infrastructure is crumbling.
Government action can't be seen as a wealth transfer from the middle-class to the poor or from whites to minorities, but as investment in our communities that used to be made as a matter of course.
The Democrats have to wage what the Republicans derisively call "class warfare" or this country is going to remain hopelessly polarized with no way in sight to stop the rise in income inequality.

There has been a lot of angst in the US left about the loss of the white male voter, as the Democrats have failed to offer the middle class worker much in the way of a helping hand even as the economy recovers from the 2007 crash. Wages remain stagnant, the recovery has produced a lot less jobs than previous such periods, and the guilty parties in the banks have not been punished while the middle class continues to suffer. Some of these things are not the fault of Obama, I know - I'm no supporter of the Green Lantern theory. Many Democrats are nonetheless just another part of the Washington village elite these days - albeit less of them since the Blue Dog Democrats were obliterated in the midterms - and the lack of a groundswell of support from elected officials behind Obama's jobs programs which are stuck in the GOP-blocked Congress speaks to their priorities. Warren isn't going to run for president, though, and the Clintons aren't known for being particularly leftist. I have a sneaking suspicion that Hillary will jump significantly to the left in the peaceful coronation that will be the Democratic nomination process for 2016 before stepping to the right during the campaign. She remains in control of the destiny of the party, so the conversation the left is having is mostly about where she will take it.

One other, related solution has been raised by various leftist bloggers: resuscitating unions. Newsflash: that's a dead parrot. Now, it's true that the right and the left used to be champions of capital and workers respectively, and that it is a big problem that the left's politicians in Western countries have moved away from unions and towards business, and this has caused a disconnect between the middle class and the left. Nevertheless, a reversion to the old Marxist dialectic is not going to work. Unions don't have solutions for the dilemmas of the future. As an example, witness this argument by Erik Loomis against the mechanisation of work. His postulation is that a Star Trek post-scarcity society is far less likely than a Player Piano scenario where automation removes human dignity.

Sure, such a technological utopian near future could free us all from work and allow us to live the creative lives of leisure we all think we deserve. Hey, that’d be great! It’s also totally ridiculous to think that is the outcome here. Far more likely is the exacerbation of what we are already seeing: a new Gilded Age of extreme income inequality as the global 1% completely controls everything and the global 99% is a threat that is put down with police power. I have to say that anyone who says this is not the likely outcome is probably ignoring how power operates and the insatiable desire of the rich to horde resources.

Erik has spent too much time living in the moment of the Great Interregnum, and has not lifted his head and remembered that it is possible to disrupt power. I lived through the 1990s as I believe Erik did, so he should recall that the wheel of history may grind slowly, but it does turn in the long run. Eternal corporate zaibatsus are not inevitable. He and other leftist bloggers make dark jokes about tumbrels dragging the 1% of the New Gilded Age to the guillotine, and for good reason because the French Revolution is another salient example of how elite overreach will always fail.

Erik's piece could have been written by some reactionary old racist in the 1850s playing up fears of the Yellow Peril. The White Australia policy was largely driven by unions reacting against Asian immigration, just as the Tea Party is reacting against Latino immigration in the present day. Substituting machines for non-white humans does not improve the underlying argument. The union reactionaries were wrong then, and the anti-robot nativists are wrong now. The correct conclusion is that Asians, Latinos and androids all add to the sum total of wealth in a society, and fighting against their advent is the wrong war to wage. Better to focus on the distribution of wealth than prevent the accumulation of it.

He's right, though, that the future doesn't hold much in the way of power among workers. When there are no workers left to unionise, what use are unions? The left has to move on past the old bearded German, not to abandon the principles of protecting the middle class from the depredations of capitalism but to seek other ways of accomplishing the same outcome in less combative fashion.

Thus we come to perhaps the most tantalising prospect: the left as technocrats. In this scenario, the government does not stick rigidly to a single ideology, but acts like a market research firm. If leftist ideology doesn't work under the microscope of A/B testing to maximise whatever outcome the public wants (and/or is good for it according to a more amorphous definition of leftism), try another one until something does work. The Piping Shrike has long thought that Labor's technocrat moment has passed since a brief era from 2007 to 2009 under Kevin Rudd, but I'm not sure that is quite true. His position on this required him to pooh-pooh the Gillard government's achievements almost in entirety, which seems to me to be rather uncharitable, and constantly praise Rudd for his anti-politics posturing (which produced short term electoral results) when it became clear that his technocracy skills were severely lacking. Rudd disrupted Labor's old way, but he didn't have a Third Way worthy of the name to replace it.

My vision of the solution takes some elements from all of these approaches. This post is already too long, though, and it will have to wait for my next post, which will be this blog's 100th.

UPDATE: Apologies to Erik, who reacted on Twitter my above comments rather strongly. I did not mean to imply that he was racist in any way. I will not amend the text, but I will explain here that I was using rhetoric to try to make a point. Evidently I made the point badly, and I should have been more sensitive to the implications of using such an argument. Sorry, mate.

No policy for you! Seinfeld identity politics

There are a lot of parallels between Australian and American politics at the moment. Last year, Tony Abbott won government by running an almost entirely negative campaign, such that he has no meaningful mandate to accomplish any policy goals of his own once in power. This year, the Republican Party gained control of the Senate in a wave election fueled by a similarly Seinfeldian campaign about nothing, dominated by short-term non-policy issues.

Last year, Abbott's main policy was that he wasn't Julia Gillard; more cogently, he represented an older, whiter, more traditional set of values than the progressive feminists and watermelon greens. This year, the GOP's main policy was that none of its politicians were Barack Obama; specifically, very few of them were non-white or were younger than baby boomer age.

Last year, Abbott swept into government despite the electorate largely preferring the left's policy platform. This year, Republicans now enjoy control of both houses of Congress despite America as a whole (as opposed to the minority who vote in mid-terms) consistently polling favourably towards the Democrats' policies.

So we come to the rise of what is called "identity politics". Policy doesn't mean much in this framework. Who you are is much more important than what you say or do. Tribalism has been used in politics to further policy ends, but this is tribalism as an ideology in itself. There is an argument to be made that this is just tribalism being used as a pretext for running far-right ideology, and there's something to be said for that since I'm sure there are operatives who think that way. Just as Seinfeld was a show ostensibly about nothing but really about the self-centred obsessions of borderline autistic arseholes, identity politics is now being used as a front for the Koches of the world to further their ideological goals. The effect is the same in any case: old white guys running the show and doing what they like.

It's a cliche of Australian politics by now that since the Hawke/Keating era, the big policy reforms have all been accomplished and there are no "low-hanging fruit" left, thus policy-based politics is bloody hard yakka. Most posts by the Piping Shrike riff off this meme, along with the related one about unions ceasing to be relevant and thus rendering Labor without a mission. The right never really had a mission either except to oppose the left, so they should be vastly more experienced at governing without policy.

However, it's much easier to run identity politics in America with its sharply delineated white, black, Latino and Asian communities, which despite generations of effort still remain segregated to a significant degree. Here in Australia, Abbott is reduced to the rather feeble formulation of "Team Australia" to push his version of identity. Pauline Hanson literally wrapped herself in an Australian flag, and Abbott's attempts to figuratively do the same just make him look rather lame. At least John Howard's green and gold tracksuits came from a genuine place in his heart, and didn't try to exclude anyone. It's just another example of Abbott's tin ear.

During this Great Interregnum, as the world (apart from China) deleverages together, we are in a global Green Room, waiting for the show to start. What's the next act? Is it China imploding? Is it Hillary Clinton turning the tide against austerity? Is it Germany losing its fear of Weimar-era inflation and removing their economic jackboots from the earholes of Europe? Is it a massive El Nino to finally remove all doubt as to the effects of climate change? Cue the bass guitar and synth riffs, and we'll find out after the break.

Wave comes in, wave goes out

The quantum entanglement of the quants over the 2014 midterm elections in America has collapsed, in the form of a wave for the Republicans. Sam Wang and Nate Silver were locked in a polarised battle of spin over which side had momentum. Wang's position was that the polls all showed that Democrats might hold the Senate. Silver pointed to the correlation of the "fundamentals" of midterms which all favoured low turnout which would lead to a particular result favouring the GOP.

Silver tries desperately not to run up the score, Bill Belichick style, in his declaration of victory, but the numbers he quotes (graphed above) do not lie: the poll of polls was off by four points. Only one US federal election in the last twenty years has been skewed to the Democrats at anything like that level.

The post-mortems are coming thick and fast with all sorts of post-justifications. This one from Lawyers, Guns and Money is representative, if only for this sarcasm-laden retort from the comments section:

The objectively smartest political strategy for the Democrats to pursue is to push for a platform that just happens to line up with the preferences of the author. I don't believe I've ever read a piece like this before on the internet.

Yes, there is a lot of talking one's own book in these post-mortems, which makes finding worthwhile analysis more difficult. There have been the Captain Obvious pronouncements about the adverse map in mostly red states, the Boomer-heavy demographics of the turnout, and the lack of motivation to vote for hope and/or change. In fact, it may be that not much at all can be concluded for the long term, unless a Supreme Court justice dies in the next two years. Waves come and go, as Markos Moulitsas explains with palpable disgust. There have been some weaksauce attempts to pin the losses on Hillary Clinton, but the map is much more favourable in 2016, and the tide will inevitably turn.

I think digby digs a little closer to the reason for that four point discrepancy.

Nobody seems to be talking about it today but ISIS and ebola and the Border and Ferguson were all huge stories in this campaign and I have to think these stories may have inspired the GOP turnout more than they're being given credit for. They are classic fear motivators for the conservatives and the timing was very good. I would not be surprised if they played a part in making the GOP victory as substantial as it was. And this could be a factor in 2016, so stay tuned.

My suspicion is that the polls aren't skewed as such, they just don't capture very late shifts in mood. Just as the wingnuts complained about Hurricane Sandy being a late boost to the Democrats in 2012, the left could have a justifiable whinge that the Ebola outbreak, building on the aforementioned scare stories, led to a more scared and conservative electorate, and/or scared off people who self-identified to polling outlets as "likely voters" into discouraged non-voters. Why didn't it show up in the polls before election day? How can I prove this conjecture? I can't, I suppose, unless I had control over some expensive polling infrastructure. That Schrodinger's cat will have to stay in its box.

One foot in the nursing home, the other in his gob

I am still reading a lot of poliblogs in between childrearing, just not posting much. I really should learn how to do shorter posts.

In that vein, I can't help but note how comprehensively stupid this piece is. Steve Kates, the most foolish man in Australia, not only posts complete faff from Ohanion and Cole attacking FDR's role in saving America from the Great Depression, he treats the linked press release as if it is new when it was written more than ten years ago, and the poliblogosphere's absolute smashing of the thing to pieces occurred three years ago when the authors got some undeserved WSJ publicity.

And if you don't like that repudiation, try this much similar C&O article mere days after Obama's inauguration, no doubt intended to scare him off any FDR-like heroics in the face of another Republican-created economic disaster, and compare it to actual reality since its publication in 2009. Wherever austerity has been tried, it has only exacerbated the pain. Wherever stimulus has been applied, it has worked (until, as in Japan recently, sabotaged by further austerity). Austrian economics teaches us nothing about how to solve today's problems. While no one is trying anything like the New Deal these days - more's the pity, because that's a lot of what we need right now - Keynesianism is still the best way to understand and address the situation in which we find ourselves.

It's as if Kates is not actually a professor of economics at RMIT at all, but some emaciated hermit who lives in a deep, dank hole, is fed via a bucket on a rope by Sinclair Davidson and for education is only allowed access to dot matrix printouts of Powerline and Drudge links. He's a cross between a victim of Buffalo Bill and a Japanese holdout. It's the only lucid explanation for his ongoing display of economic Aspberger's syndrome. Nobody can be that clueless.