The Trumping Factor

Quadrant article -June 2010 issue

Politics
The Trumping Factor

Peter Smith

One of the mysteries of life is that once you have established that someone is an economic socialist or an economic conservative you can then go on to predict with a fair degree of accuracy their views across a range of contentious non-economic matters. Of course, you can also proceed by going from another non-economic matter and reach the same end. I choose to start the process with economics because of my own background in economics but also because it is through economics and Karl Marx that the modern cultural Left–conservative divide originates.

It has puzzled me for some time. You are having coffee with someone who you are still getting to know and venture out of mundane conversation into some news item. From your companion’s response you will know immediately that you will either agree about everything of importance or about nothing. There is seldom an in-between.

The question I will try to address is why those on the Left think as they do across a diverse range of subject matter and issues—and why those on the conservative Right think as they do. Is there a common factor that once understood makes sense of the fall of views? My geographical context is the Anglosphere (the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand) and Western Europe. I am not sure that the same Left–Right divide applies in the rest of the world.

As a broad generalisation, and without trying to be exhaustive, those on the Left tend to have economic views as follows:

• Free markets produce chronically unfair outcomes that must be corrected by government intervention to redistribute income and wealth.

• Cyclical downswings must be countered by Keynesian stimulus spending.

• People are entitled to a minimum level of income, adequate shelter, quality education and health (and now to child minding services).

• Globalisation has a range of deleterious side effects on local communities.

• Wealthy nations have a duty to provide substantial aid to poorer nations.

To some extent the demarcation between Left and conservative views is one of degree and emphasis but it is still easy enough to spot the differences. An economic conservative would want a minimum of intervention and then to improve opportunities rather than to equalise outcomes; would disagree about the worth of stimulus spending; would replace the concept of entitlement with one of aspiration; would point to the benefits of globalisation in increasing prosperity; and would not see foreign aid as an obligation but as a transfer payment from domestic taxpayers, with an attendant need to assess its affordability and effectiveness pragmatically.

Now consider the position of those on the Left and conservatives on a number of issues across three different subject areas: biology, the environment and politics. To some extent I have put the Left and conservative positions in too sharp a relief. But I think the general thrust and character of the different positions is fairly close to the mark. In some cases the positions are not diametrically opposed but have a different emphasis or focus. Again, the issues brought into play are meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive. I have also deliberately left out some particularly contentious issues: abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, capital punishment, even though they tend to exhibit a political divide bias, because to an extent views on them are greatly influenced by religious affiliations. I have also left out Darwinian evolution, even though scepticism about the completeness of Darwinism is more prevalent among conservatives than among those on the Left, again because positions are often decided (inappropriately) on religious grounds. Scientists like Richard Dawkins are as bad as Creationists in giving Darwinism the cloak of an alternative “religion” when it is purely a set of scientific hypotheses that is still work in progress.

Biology

Those on the Left tend to believe that there is no difference of substance, apart from the superficially obvious, between men and women. Conservatives believe that there are innate differences, which can bear on performance.

Those on the Left tend to believe that there are no differences of substance, apart from the superficially obvious, between different races and cultures. Conservatives believe that there are innate differences which can bear on performance.

Environment

Those on the Left are more likely to place environmental protection above economic growth than are conservatives. Consistent with this they are more likely to accept and want to counter perceived threats to the environment, such as man-made global warming, without the same regard for costs as conservatives.

Those on the Left support the development of green energy and oppose nuclear energy. Conservatives support any form of energy provided it can stand on its own economic feet and meet appropriate and measured environmental and safety requirements.

Those on the Left support taxing or otherwise impeding or preventing the development of energy sources, particularly fossil fuels, which despoil the environment. Conservatives are not opposed to imposing taxes to compensate for environmental damage, provided such damage is objectively assessed across all energy sources. And provided any consequential costs of imposing taxes, for example, in lessening the international competitiveness of local industry, are brought into account.

Politics

Those on the Left believe that American “imperialism” has caused much harm in the world. Conservatives believe that America has been a powerful net force for good in the world.

Those on the Left believe that the Palestinians often have right on their side in their conflict with Israel. Conservatives believe that Israel’s security is non-negotiable.

Those on the Left readily accept, whether it is true, false or indeterminate, that indigenous peoples were cruelly and extensively exploited by colonisers and, accordingly, they support apologies and reparations. Conservatives believe that indigenous disadvantage should primarily be tackled by improving opportunities for advancement rather than by looking to the distant past. Of course, those on the Left also support improving opportunities for indigenous people, but accompanied by a grievance agenda which they believe is justified.

Those on the Left tend to be more critical than celebratory of their nation’s past. Conservatives tend to be more celebratory than critical of their nation’s past.

Those on the Left favour opening doors wider to refugees. Conservatives believe that immigration should primarily be geared to the national interest.

Those on the Left believe in nuclear disarmament and peace. Conservatives believe that eliminating the West’s nuclear weapons would be too risky whatever international disarmament agreements and monitoring policies are put in place; and that freedom can only ever be assured by a preparedness to go to war.

Why Only Two Camps?

The objective is to assess whether there is a common factor that cuts across different subject areas in a way which makes sense of the dispersion of Left and conservative positions, and explains their predictability. After all, why should those who believe in government intervention to modify the outcomes of capitalism necessarily believe in man-made global warming? Why should those who believe in the primacy of free market capitalism be, on the whole, sceptical about man-made global warming? Why should those who passionately advocate using green energy, support making apologies and reparations to indigenous peoples? Why should those who believe that America has done net harm; that Palestinians have more right than wrong on their side; and who favour nuclear disarmament, also tend to dismiss any idea of performance-related gender and racial differences? Why in other words are we in only two camps? Why aren’t there many camps? As an example, why aren’t there lots of economic conservatives belonging to peace movements?

It is understandable having only two camps when we consider warring nation-states. It doesn’t matter what your views happen to be across a number of matters, your nationality trumps them all. Something is also doing the trumping when it comes to Left and conservative views. There are a number of potential candidates: intelligence, socio-economic status, personality type, or what might be loosely called “gender orientation”. I will suggest that the latter, more rigorously explained and defined, seems to offer an answer which best fits the evidence.

It is fairly clear that whatever is doing the trumping, it isn’t intelligence. Even though both sides often express exasperation with the other’s inability to grasp “the point”, neither side has, or believes it has, any measurable edge on intelligence. It is also clear that socio-economic factors are not the trumping factors. In Sydney, upmarket Balmain leans Left. Billionaires can be found on either side, as can professionals, like lawyers, engineers, economists and doctors. You can’t say that actors and entertainers can be found much on the conservative side, but then again we have the late Charlton Heston’s line that more closet Republicans live in Hollywood than closet gays. The media and academia tend to be Left but it is by no means a monopoly.

Personality might come into it but on examination this seems unlikely. There are many variants of personality. Sixteen seems to be the magic number when you search online. I quickly found three different sets of sixteen personality types in one search, which gave me no confidence at all in the science. But the “Big Five Factors” in psychology are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, each contrasted with its opposite. (See, for example, Handbook of Personality, by John, Robins and Pervin.) When I looked at the various personality types, however they were described, it seemed unlikely that they could explain what makes Left and what makes conservative. I have known, and observed, extroverted people (externally-focused people) and introverted (internally focused people), conscientious and cautious people, and maybe a few disagreeable and neurotic people. They appear to be distributed among the Left and conservatives. So I doubt that personality type is the trumping factor. This leaves what I called “gender orientation”.

Social welfare entitlements have grown rapidly in scope and size since the end of the Second World War. Government entitlement spending is growing at unaffordable rates across Europe. The example of Greece has been in the headlines. President Obama is busy extending entitlements in the United States, seemingly with ambition to match the European model; and we recently had Tony Abbott promising new parents six months leave on generous pay. Providing people with entitlements might be considered a nurturing and protective thing to do. This appears to be quintessentially feminine in its orientation.

There is a view that Western society is becoming more feminised. I Googled “feminization of society” and got 640,000 references. I looked up “masculinization of society” and got only 50,000 or so references; and, at least on the first page, they were mostly about physiology rather than sociology. I also recalled two recent articles in Quadrant. Patrick McCauley in the September 2008 issue wrote entertainingly that for some years, “Australian Rules football has been in the hands of feminine social engineers who wish to establish equity and social justice in the football community”. Michael Evans, writing in the January-February 2010 issue on stoicism and the military, commented that “radical feminism” is one of a number of developments since the 1960s representing the “greatest challenge to the Western profession of arms”.

Any number of conservative views can be found suggesting that feminisation and the Left’s agenda go hand-in-hand and, moreover, that this agenda has been responsible for feminising Western society. In this context, the growth of the nanny state and a culture of entitlement are often cited as epitomising the Left’s agenda.

While I will return to the question of whether feminism is on the march, my main focus is on the influence of feminism and masculinism on the Left–conservative (L–C) divide. Football, the military, a culture of entitlement span a wide area suggesting that the influence of gender orientation may be far-reaching. The question arises as to whether a feminine–masculine (F–M) divide could account for the entire L–C divide? Is it the trumping factor?

First, it is necessary to think of feminism and masculinism in rather different ways than the obvious. Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who gave the United Kingdom its welfare state, and President Roosevelt, who through the New Deal started the process in the United States, hardly epitomised femininity, at least to my mind.

I turned to the Encyclopedia of Sociology (Macmillan, 2000) and specifically to a paper by J.E. Stets and P.J. Burke titled, “Femininity/Masculinity”. The feminine temperament in Western culture is characterised as “passive”, “co-operative” and “expressive”; the masculine temperament as “aggressive”, “competitive” and “instrumental”. These characteristics of temperament (a person’s nature as it affects their behaviour) cut across women and men. The import of passive versus aggressive and co-operative versus competitive is fairly self-evident. In this context, “expressive” means a commitment to, or socialisation with, others (arising out of, say, affection or kinship) as an end in itself; as against “instrumental”, meaning a social action purposefully pursued after evaluating the costs and consequences in order to achieve practical goals.

I will use the Stets and Burke categorisation of feminine and masculine temperament to assess whether the F–M divide might be the trumping factor in explaining the L–C divide across economics, biology, the environment, and politics.

If we look at the economic positions held by those on the Left and by conservatives, a pattern emerges which is consistent with the F–M divide, as it is exhibited in the expressive–instrumental divide. In particular, the Left’s position is characterised by a lack of calculation. The overriding objective is one of showing commitment to others. That is the be-all and end-all. The conservative position on the other hand is goal-oriented and full of calculation. Will stimulus spending actually work? Can we afford those entitlements? Do the benefits of globalisation outweigh the costs? A lot falls into place when the L–C economic divide is put in context of the expressive–instrumental divide. It is why those on the Left can think conservatives lack empathy and why conservatives can get exasperated with those on the Left who celebrate yet another new entitlement without regard to its cost and achievability. President Obama was fond of citing cases of apparent hardship in supporting his health care agenda—stories of people falling ill and being forced to sell their homes. This has obvious appeal to those whose temperament is more expressive than instrumental.

The other components of the F–M divide—passive–aggressive and co-operative–competitive—also have explanatory powers in the economics area. Capitalism is underscored by a determined and energetic (aggressive) pursuit of profit and reward. It is competitive in its nature. It is understandable that those with a passive and co-operative temperament would favour intervention to moderate the outcomes that capitalism produces; built as it is around aggression and competition.

Though it is a leap to turn from economics to biology, the F–M divide retains its explanatory power. The L–C biological positions I have identified refer to different views about whether innate performance-affecting differences exist between different groups. Performance is the key in this case; and it is evident that those whose temperament is weighted towards being expressive, co-operative and passive will not so much focus on performance. Consequently they will have no imperative to look for innate differences or acknowledge them. On the other hand, those whose temperament is weighted towards being instrumental, competitive and aggressive will very much focus on performance. Consequently, they will have an imperative to discover and identify innate differences, if such differences exist. The F–M divide again therefore fits well with the L–C biology divide.

Among other things, the Left’s support for affirmative action falls out of the biology divide. Affirmative action is based on the view that any under-representation of particular groups in particular occupations is because of environmental factors, rather than because of innate differences in abilities between different groups. If that is the case, affirmative action makes more sense than it does if there are in fact innate differences. Conservatives think that there may in fact be innate differences. Harvard president Larry Summers suggested at a conference about women in science in 2005 that there may be innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for the hard sciences. Universities these days are not the place for outspoken conservative views; particularly on touchy biological matters, as now ex-president Summers discovered.

At first glance, it is not immediately obvious that the L–C environmental divide can be explained by the F–M divide. After all, environmentalists are not particularly passive in pursuing their objectives. Nevertheless, the lack of attention to the achievability and costs of proposals put forward by environmentalists (for example, on moving to green energy or in combatting global warming) has the hallmark of an expressive temperament. Moreover, the actions taken by environmental zealots often have a Mahatma Gandhi quality about them: chaining oneself to a tree, or standing in front of bulldozers. Finally, environmentalism can be seen as co-operative action opposing an individualistic competitive credo—capitalism—which puts economic advancement ahead of the interests of the planet. All in all, the F–M divide does a fairly good job of explaining the L–C environmental divide.

The political divide covers a wide canvas, but one of the major themes running through it is a view about Western civilisation’s military and economic dominance, and how it was achieved. Dominance is only ever achieved through being purposeful (instrumental), determined and energetic (aggressive) and competitive. It is understandable therefore that the outcome of this process is celebrated by conservatives and regarded with an amount of distaste by those whose temperament is largely governed by opposite characteristics. Nor is it surprising that the epitome of dominance, the United States, is regarded with particular odium by those on the Left. This also explains the Left’s empathy with those it regards as victims of the process: Palestinians, indigenous populations, and Third World countries who continue to suffer at the hands of the “rapacious” West. It explains national “self-loathing”, which conservatives have particular difficulty in comprehending, as a logical outcome of despising the process that put us, as a nation (whether that nation is United States, Australia, the UK or some other Western nation), in the position we are in.

On immigration and refugees, an expressive, co-operative and passive temperament does not focus on costs and potential threats. Conservatives with their opposite temperament precisely focus on costs and threats. On disarmament and peace, an expressive, co-operative and passive temperament always searches for a negotiated outcome. Republicans in the United States were extremely sceptical and scathing of proposals by President Obama to negotiate with Kim Jong-il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They implicitly knew, whether they acknowledge it or not, that Kim Jong-il and Ahmadinejad are like them, mainly instrumental, aggressive and competitive, and that appeasement would not work. As Ronald Reagan put it: “If history teaches us anything; it teaches: simple minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly—it means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.” President Obama is largely “governed” by a temperament opposite to that of President Reagan, and it is hard to understand his actions against the lessons of history unless that is understood.

My hypothesis is that the L–C divide can be explained by the F–M divide. The temperament of those on the Left, I suggest, is weighted more towards being expressive, co-operative and passive than it is to being instrumental, competitive and aggressive. The temperament of conservatives is weighted in the opposite direction. This explains why Left and conservative views fall predictably along “party lines” across all subject matter, related and unrelated. It explains why the two sides exasperate each other in reaching quite different conclusions based on the same information and evidence.

Personally it helps me to deal with views that I otherwise find inexplicable and hard to deal with. I was copied in on an e-mail exchange between two neighbours of mine both decrying the attention given to the so-called boat people. One wrote that we are all (in Australia) descended from boat people as though that finished the debate. By the way, they both believe in man-made global warming. I haven’t tested their other views; I am too afraid to, it might ruin our future coffee chats.

Where does all this lead? A first point to make is that one kind of temperament is not better than the other. Individuals and societies need to have a balance of feminine and masculine characteristics. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time for being expressive and a time for being instrumental; for being passive and for being aggressive; and for being co-operative and for being competitive. One could imagine a society having only masculine characteristics being totally uncaring and being constantly at war economically and militarily; and one with only feminine characteristics being subjugated economically and militarily. Neither is appealing. Balance is the key. This leads on to whether we have the right balance now; and back to the view previously canvassed that Western society is becoming progressively more feminised.

If it is right that gender orientation explains the positions of those from the Left and conservatives across all subject matter, then a process of induction clearly points to Western societies becoming more, and too, feminised. Entitlements and the promise of entitlements are everywhere growing, even though most governments outspend their revenue and are heavily in debt. Green political parties are gaining increasing support, even though the implementation of their policies would cause impoverishment. There is widespread support for disruptive and expensive (and likely ineffective) policies to counter an unproven climate threat. Off-shore drilling for oil is often resisted and disallowed because it might cause limited environmental harm. Affirmative action is an accepted part of public sector employment policy; except when it is particularly egregious, as in the recent case of the New Haven Connecticut firefighters refused promotion because too few black firefighters passed the applicable exams. Western governments acquiesce to large inflows of displaced people and refugees, even though the numbers involved are clearly straining social cohesion and budgets. Apologies to indigenous populations are de rigueur whatever the rights and wrongs. Wars can never be prosecuted without dealing with trenchant media criticism and what in an early age would have been called defeatism. The United States and its allies have singularly failed to deter North Korea and Iran from developing nuclear weapons. President Obama has committed the United States not to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state that is a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, even if the United States is attacked with chemical or biological weapons. In making this commitment, Obama has reportedly removed ambiguity about the United States’ nuclear policy. Having a quite different temperament, President Reagan no doubt saw advantage in ambiguity to confound and confuse potential enemies.

A priori it is problematic to say that this or that societal balance of feminine and masculine temperament is right or wrong. However, sometimes the evidence speaks for itself. It helps in acknowledging this evidence to have a masculine-weighted temperament; but in some areas the facts become insistent whatever your temperament. Greece is finding out that it can’t go on doling out entitlements that outstrip its ability to go on borrowing. Other Western countries, not least the United States with its massive public debt, will all eventually come up against financial constraints of the kind we are all used to in our personal lives. At some point comes a hard realisation that a country is simply a collection of people who cannot go on forever paying themselves more than they earn. The problem is that a long road of undermining self-reliance will have been travelled before that point is reached. And it is difficult to know whether it can ever be substantially retraced.

The lessons can of course be harder for countries that lose the will to wage war. Unfortunately, the barbarians are always at the gate and it’s an unequal battle unless a Churchill or a Thatcher or a Reagan or a Bush is around to draw a line in the sand. And they are less likely to be around if society continues to become more and more feminised.

Why Western society is becoming more feminised, I don’t know. Sociologists are insistent that temperament is not hard-wired, but learnt. This certainly accords with the evidence. It is hardly likely that relatively more people are now being born with a Left-temperament bias. An iterative process may be involved, with the entitlement society engendering dependency which, in turn, engenders claims for more entitlements, rather like an addiction. That appeals to me because it has an economic base to it that I can understand. It may also have something to do with the rise of the feminist and gay rights movements or with the increasing predominance of women in early childhood education, or with other social or physiological factors that I don’t understand.

I read a piece which suggested that the purposeless (my word) social networks created by Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and the like, were playing a part in feminising society. This made sense in so far as “expressive” social interaction for its own sake is a characteristic of a feminine temperament. It is not promising if it is true, because the internet will not go away and it has been with us for only a relatively short time. Its full impact has still to be felt. Whatever the cause of feminisation, it would be nice to think that its unbalanced growth might be countered in some way before it irretrievably drags down Western civilisation.

Peter Smith is a former CEO of the Australian Payments Clearing Association. He wrote “Taxing the Rich and Spreading the Wealth” in the March issue.

National Fishing

Article from June Quadrant magazine

Environment
The Green Torpedoes That Sank the National Fishing Fleet

Walter Starck

Snip..Snip.. for brevity!

Regular consumption of seafood (two or more meals per week) has been found to provide significant health benefits in three broad categories. These are cardiovascular; immune system related; and conditions involving neurological development and functioning. Regular seafood consumption correlates with low levels of heart disease as well as reduced incidence of asthma, arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, hypertension, migraine headaches, certain cancers, age-related maculopathy and some kidney diseases. It has also been shown to enhance brain development and has indicated significant cognitive and behavioural benefits for children. In adults it has been found to be significant in reducing aggression, depression and moderating schizophrenia as well as enhancing cognitive functioning in old age. The old wives were right. Fish really is a brain food and mismanaging our fisheries is quite literally stupid.

The difference in incidence of these disorders between countries with high levels of seafood consumption and our own population would save billions of dollars each year in our health care system and contribute hugely to a greatly improved quality of life for millions of people, if only we would realise this and implement it.

Although government and health care professionals are aware of the desirability of greater seafood consumption and some efforts are being made to promote this, no formal cost-benefit assessment has been conducted and there is little appreciation of the actual magnitude of potential benefits either financial or societal. Worse still, any real increase in consumption is being thwarted by restrictions on supply and prohibitive prices for seafood resulting from the gross mismanagement of our marine resources by a bloated, incompetent and often malign bureaucracy. These may seem excessively harsh words but they are both considered and warranted.

Briefly, here are some key facts:

* Australia has the largest fishing zone (EEZ) per capita in the world. It is over 6 million square kilometres in area. While the global average for EEZ area is about 2 hectares per capita, Australia has close to 30 hectares per capita.
* The Australian annual fishery harvest rate is the lowest in the world at around 37 kilograms per square kilometre (or 370 grams per hectare) while the global average rate is over twenty times greater.
* The natural productivity of Australian waters is not low. Primary productivity (PP) of the oceans is continuously monitored by satellite at one-kilometre resolution. The average for Australia is higher than that of New Zealand, yet the New Zealanders produce over twice the total catch from an EEZ area half as large and with only an eighth of the more productive shelf area. It is also higher than that of Papua New Guinea, yet their waters produce half again as much as our total catch with only one-third the EEZ area and a thirtieth the shelf area. Even Japan has a lower average PP, one-quarter of the EEZ area and about a fifth of the shelf area, but they produce thirty times more catch.
* Two-thirds of Australia’s domestic seafood consumption is imported. All of these imports come from resources much more heavily impacted than our own. Our largest supplier is Thailand. It has an EEZ area almost twenty times smaller than Australia and about a tenth of the shelf area, but a total catch about fourteen times larger.

The reason for this astounding disparity in our fishery production compared to that everywhere else can be explained in one word: bureaucracy. We have the most restrictive and onerous fishery management in the world; it is also the most costly per unit of catch. In many of our smaller fisheries, management costs are greater than the GDP of the sector—money could be saved by paying the fishermen not to fish at all and doing away with the management. Despite all this expensive management, Australian fisheries are in widespread decline. The latest Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics statistics show that the gross value of Australian fisheries production has declined by about 30 per cent in real terms over the past decade and exports have declined by 44 per cent. However, nowhere is this due to overfishing or a collapse of stocks. Everywhere it is due to restrictions, requirements and management imposed costs.

You hear a lot of eco-waffle regarding marine resources—words like sustainability, precaution, threatened, endangered, biodiversity—but the reality is not nearly so urgent or dramatic. These are emotive terms dressed up to sound scientific. They are used to lend an aura of importance to hypothetical speculations when seeking extravagant funding for theoretical solutions to imaginary problems. The simple truth is that no marine fish or invertebrate has ever been exterminated by fishing and none in Australia are even remotely threatened in this regard. The only truly endangered marine species in Australia is the Australian fisherman.

Our fisheries management is not about saving endangered species or beneficial use of resources. It is all about bureaucratic empire building, grant-seeking researchers and political pandering for green votes. The reality is out there, over the horizon and underwater where the truth is safely inaccessible. Anyone can claim anything and who’s to know. Spending $1.7 billion a year to import a renewable resource we already have in abundance, paying for it by selling off non-renewable resources and calling this sustainable management is beyond stupid.

The situation with our aquaculture is, if anything, even worse. Aquaculture is the fastest growing sector in world food production. During the past three decades global production has increased by over 1200 per cent with an average compound annual growth of around 9 per cent. Australia, with some 60,000 kilometres of mostly uninhabited coastline well suited for aquaculture, a mild climate and unpolluted coastal waters, clearly has vast potential, yet development of the industry is now declining after a weak start.

A comparison of Australian aquaculture production with that of a sampling of other nations is instructive. Thailand and Vietnam each has only about an eighth of Australia’s coastline; but each has around thirty times greater aquaculture production than Australia. The EU has over forty times greater production. Even New Zealand has more than double Australia’s production. Although the small size of Australia’s industry has been attributed to higher cost structure there is obviously something more to it than this. Certainly Australian costs for land, labour, equipment, energy and feedstock are at no disadvantage to Canada, France, Japan, Norway, the UK, or the USA, yet all have hugely greater aquaculture industries.

Again, the real reason is simply bureaucratic over-regulation. Despite the world’s best natural conditions for it, aquaculture in Australia has been strangled at birth by an impossible morass of regulations. These impose far greater costs, delays and uncertainties than anywhere else. Apart from a few exceptions that became well established before regulation made new operations uneconomic, aquaculture here has actually been declining in recent years while it continues to boom elsewhere. At the same time, our farmers and graziers are facing similar mismanagement and decline, all of which is reflected in the fastest-growing food prices of any OECD country. Projection of trends over the past couple of decades indicates that within another decade we will be net importers of food, dependent on others to feed us, if they can.

The only sector booming here is bureaucracy. Our environmental and resource management agencies have become sheltered workshops where otherwise unemployable third-rate academics are allowed to proclaim themselves experts about things few have ever seen briefly if at all. Even though genuine scientific understanding is usually very limited and often wrong, they pretend to manage distant industries by remote control from air-conditioned offices hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. The result has been steadily declining production, dying industries and devastated families, but ever-increasing management costs. Even recreational fishers have been mindlessly and needlessly burdened with elaborate restrictions. Everyone is now paying for this obscene charade at great cost to mind, health and pocketbook. Green politics and bureaucracy are killing the fishing industry and, in doing so, also killing millions of Australians. This will not stop until an awakened public demands it.

Incidentally, in looking into the protective effects of seafood in regard to smoking, I was surprised to find that there also appears to be good evidence published in respected medical journals which indicates that for some health conditions smoking itself has protective value. Ulcerative colitis and Parkinsonism are examples. Of course, this is probably not politically correct to mention and for once I won’t go further. However, the next time you hear some politician righteously paying out on the tobacco industry, just remember who is holding the smoking gun and demanding we stand and deliver.

Walter Starck grew up in a family of fishermen on an island in the Florida Keys. He has a PhD in marine science from the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Miami. He was a pioneer in the study of coral reef biology and the development of undersea technology. His fishery experience includes all three of major oceans and the Mediterranean Sea.

Some facts about pedophilia

Mr. Sam Miller, Guest Speaker
First Friday Club of Cleveland
Thursday, March 6, 2003, 12:00 p.m.

When I first discussed my subject with Mr. Ginley, I told him the title of this speech would be “From Bed Sheets to Business Suits” he seemed flustered — he did not understand my point. So I changed the title to “Kangaroo Journalism”. I presume most of you are familiar with this and are suffering because of it.

I’m going to say things here today that many Catholics should have said 18 months ago. Maybe it’s easier for me to say because I am not Catholic but I have had enough, more than enough, disgustingly enough.

During my entire life I’ve never seen a greater vindictive, more scurrilous, biased campaign against the Catholic Church as I have seen in the last 18 months, and the strangest thing is that it is in a country like the United States where there is supposed to be mutual respect and freedom for all religions. This has bothered me because I too am a minority in this country. You see, unfortunately, and I say this very advisedly, the Catholics have forgotten that in the early 1850’s when the Italians, the Poles, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, all of Catholic persuasion, came to this country looking for opportunity — because of famine, (particularly the Irish) they were already looked upon with derision, suspicion and hatred. Consequently the jobs they were forced to take were the jobs that nobody else wanted — bricklayers, ditch diggers, Jewish junkmen, street cleaners, etc. This prejudice against your religion, and mine, has never left this country and don’t ever forget it, and never will. Your people were called Papists, Waps, Guineas, frogs, fish eaters, ad infinitum. And then after the Civil War, around 1864, the fundamentalists, conservatives, Protestants and a few WASP’s began planting burning crosses throughout the country, particularly in the South. And today, as far as I’m concerned, very little has changed. These gentlemen now have a new style of clothing — they’ve gone from bed sheets to gentlemen’s suits.

There is a concentrated effort by the media today to totally denigrate in every way the Catholic Church in this country. You don’t find it this bad overseas at all. They have now blamed the disease of pedophilia on the Catholic Church, which is as irresponsible as blaming adultery on the institution of marriage. You, me have been living in a false paradise —wake up and recognize that many people don’t like Catholics. What are these people trying to accomplish?

From the Sojourner’s Magazine dated August 2002, listen carefully to a quote, “While much of the recent media hype has focused on the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal, relatively little attention has been given to the high rate of sexual misconduct in the rest of American Christendom. This is truly a crisis that crosses the borders of all religions.

Now let me give you some figures that you as Catholics should know and remember. For example, research by Richard Blackman at Fuller Theological Seminary shows that 12% of the 300 Protestant clergy surveyed admitted to sexual intercourse with a parishioner; 38% acknowledged other inappropriate sexual contact. In a 1990 study by the United Methodist Church, 41.8 percent of clergywomen reported unwanted sexual behavior by a colleague; 17 percent of laywomen said that their own pastors had sexually harassed them. Phillip Jenkins concludes in his book “Pedophiles and Priests” that while 1.7% of the Catholic clergy has been found guilty of pedophilia, 10% of Protestant ministers have been found guilty of pedophilia — this is not a Catholic problem. This is a problem of pure prejudice.

Why the papers, day after day, week after week, month after month, see fit to do nothing but come out with these scurrilous stories…when I spoke recently to one of the higher-ups in the newspaper I said, this is wrong…he said…why do you want us to shoot the messenger? I said no, just change the message….change the message. He said, how? I said I’ll tell you how.

Obviously, this is not just a Catholic problem. And solutions must be broader and deeper than those carried out by Catholic cardinals. The whole church has a responsibility to offer decisive leadership in the area of sexual misconduct—whether it is child abuse, sexual exploitation, or sexual harassment.

Recently, churches have shown unprecedented unity on issues of poverty and welfare reform. Now it is necessary to call for a broad based ecumenical council addressing the issue of sexual misconduct in the church, not only the Catholic Church, all churches, including synagogues. Its goal would be transparency and openness in developing stringent, forward-looking guidelines, consistent with denominational distinctions, for preventing and addressing sexual misconduct within Christian churches and church-related institutions. Such a council could include not only denominational representatives but also a majority presence from external organizations such as child protection agencies, law enforcement, psychiatric services, victims’ agencies, and legal and legislative representatives.

Crisis, the strange thing about the word crisis, crisis in Chinese is one word. Crisis in Chinese means, on the one side, a real crisis problems etc., but the other side means great opportunity. We have a great opportunity facing us. Crisis is often accompanied by an opportunity for extraordinary growth and leadership. We have that today, even though you are the lowest, by far the lowest of any organized religion today when it comes to sexual harassment. American churches have a unique opening to develop and adopt a single set of policies, principles, practices, and common language on sexual misconduct in Christian institutions that is binding across denominations. A system of cross-denomination review boards could be established to help compliance and accountability. A centralized resource bank could be formed that provides church-wide updates on new legal, financial, psychological and spiritual developments in the field. Guidelines, both moral and legal, could be established on how clergy, churches, and victims should best use civil and criminal actions in pursuit of justice and financial restitution for injury. A national database could be established with information on all applicants for ordination in any member Christian religion. Every diocese, conference, presbytery, and district could have a designated child-protection representative whose job is to ensure that the policies and procedures are understood and implemented and that training is provided.

Any religious institution or system that leaves power unexamined or smothers sexuality with silence—rather than promoting open conversation that can lead to moral and spiritual maturity—becomes implicated in creating an unhealthy and potentially abusive environment. An ecumenical Christian council authentically dedicated to strong moral leadership in the area of clergy sexual misconduct might move the church beyond the extremes of policing our own or abandoning our own.

For Christians, the true scandal is not about priests. It’s about a manipulation of power to abuse the weak. When Jesus said, “Whoever receives the child, receives me,” he was rebuking his followers for putting stumbling blocks in front of the defenseless. Church is supposed to be a place where one can lay one’s defenses down; where one is welcomed, embraced, and blessed. This can only be authentically expressed in a culture that requires absolute respect for each individual’s freedom and self-hood. Until all churches bow humbly under the requirement, the indictments by wounded women and children will stand.

Just what are these Kangaroo journalists trying to accomplish? Think about it. If you get the New York Times day after day, the Los Angeles Times day after day, our own paper day after day…looking at the record, some of these writers are apostates, Catholics or ex-Catholics who have been denied something they wanted from the Church and are on a mission of vengeance.

Why would newspapers carry on this vendetta on one of the most important institutions that we have today in the United States, namely the Catholic Church? Do you know, and maybe some of you don’t, the Catholic Church educates 2.6 million students every day, at cost to your Church of 10 billion dollars, and a savings on the other hand to the American taxpayer of 18 billion dollars. Needless to say that Catholic education at this time stands head and shoulders above every other form of education that we have in this country. And the cost is approximately 30% less. If you look at our own Cleveland school system they can boast of an average graduation rate of 36%. Do you know what it costs you and me as far as the other 64% who didn’t make it? Look at your own records, you graduate 89% of your students, your graduates in turn go on to graduate studies at the rate of 92%, and all at a cost to you. To the rest of the Americans it’s free, but it costs you Catholics at least 30% less to educate students compared to the costs that the public education system pays out for education that cannot compare.

Why? Why would these enemies of the Church try to destroy an institution that has 230 colleges and universities in the United States with an enrollment of 700,000 students?

Why would anyone want to destroy an institution like the Catholic Church which has a non-profit hospital system of 637 hospitals which account for hospital treatment of 1 out of every 5 people, not just Catholics, in the United States today? Why would anyone want to destroy an institution like that? Why would anyone want to destroy an institution that clothes and feeds and houses the indigent, 1 of 5 indigents in the United States, I’ve been to many of your shelters and no one asks them if you are a Catholic, a Protestant or a Jew; come, be fed, here’s a sweater for you and a place to sleep at night at a cost to the Church of 2.3 billion dollars a year? The Catholic Church today has 64 million members in the United States and is the largest non-governmental agency in the country. It has 20,000 churches in this country alone. Every year they raise approximately 10 billion to help support these agencies.

Why after the "respected" publication the New York Times running their daily expose’ on the Church finally come to the conclusion of their particular investigation, which was ongoing for a long time, and guess what — buried in the last paragraph –and guess what, in the last paragraph they came up with a mouse. In their article “Decades of Damage” the Times reported that 1.8% of American priests were found guilty of this crime, whereas your own Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome reported 1.7% - the figure I gave you earlier. Then again they launched an attack on the Church and its celibate priests. However, the New York Times did not mention in their study of American priests that most are happy in the priesthood and find it even better than they had expected, and that most if given the choice would choose to be priests again in the face of all this obnoxious P.R. the church has been receiving. Why wouldn’t the New York Times, the paper of record they call themselves, mention this? You had to read it in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times refused to print it. If you read only the New York Times you would begin to believe that priests are cowards, craven, sexually frustrated, unhealthy criminals that prey on the innocent, what a shame. Sometimes freedom of the press should have some type of responsibility too.

So I say this to you — instead of walking around with a hang­dog look, I talk to a lot of Catholics all the time, “how’s everything going?” … “Well, in the face of things I guess okay” … that’s the wrong answer, the wrong answer. Also, I ran into a fellow who said they started a discussion at some social function on pedophilia and he said, “I excused myself and left the room.” I said why did you do that, “Well you know how it is.” I believe that if Catholics had the figures that I enumerated here…you don’t have to be ashamed of anything. Not only are you as good as the rest, but you’re better, in every respect.

The Catholic Church helps millions of people every day of the week, every week of the month, and every month of the year. People who are not Catholics, and I sit on your Catholic Foundation and I can tell you, and what I am telling you is so. Priests have their problems, they have their failings just as you and I in this room do, but they do not deserve to be calumniated as they have been.

In small measure let’s give the media its due. If it had not come out with this story of abusive priests, (but they just as well could have mentioned reverends, pastors and rabbis and whatever,) probably little or nothing would have been done. But what bothers me the most is this has given an excuse to every Catholic hater and Catholic basher to come out loudly for the denigration of your Church. If some CEO’s are crooks it does not follow that every CEO is crooked, and if some priests are sexually ill it does not follow that all are sick. And your Church teaches that you’ve got to take in the sick and a priest who is this way has to be taken in and cannot be thrown out the 21st story of a building. He’s got to be looked upon and given the same type of health that you would give anybody who has a broken leg or cancer or whatever.

The Church today, and when I say the Church keep in mind I am talking about the Catholic Church, is bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. The agony that Catholics have felt and suffered is not necessarily the fault of the Church. You have been hurt by an infinitesimally small number of wayward priests that, I feel, have probably been totally weeded out by now. You see the Catholic Church is much too viable to be put down by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, take your choice, they can’t do it, they’re not going to do it and sooner or later they are going to give up, but you’ve got to make sure that you don’t give up first.

In 1799 a notice was placed in a French newspaper that a citizen Brachi had died in prison. Little did the people realize that this was Pope Pius VI who had occupied the Chair of Saint Peter for 25-years. He had been taken prisoner by Napoleon’s forces and died in prison as an indigent. At that time the thought was that this was the end of the Catholic Church, this was 200 and some odd years ago. And the reason was that there was no Pope to succeed him at that time. But you fooled them then, and we’re going to fool them again.

I’ve been talking more or less about the United States of America as far as the importance of the Church; let’s bring it home to Cuyahoga County and the seven surrounding counties. In education you save the county 420 million dollars per year. Wherever there’s a Church, and most other churches have fled the inner city, there’s a Catholic Church, and wherever there’s a Catholic Church there’s an absence of drug dealers. You talk to any bank that has real estate mortgages in the inner city, and they will tell you that the one thing that keeps up the value in that particular area is your Church. I’ve seen for example on Lorain near the Metro Catholic Schools there at the Church the nuns used to go out in the morning with brooms and sweep away the drug dealers from around the particular area. On Health and Human Services, the homeless, adoption, drugs, adult care and so on you saved the county 170 million dollars a year. At the end of the day the difference that your local Catholic institutions make in the eight counties that comprise this diocese are several billion dollars per year. Why don’t we hear about this? Why, because it’s good news. If some priest was caught with his hand in the collection plate it would be front page news. But the fact that you have thousands of students being education free, as far as the rest of the country is concerned doesn’t make news. Why? Because it is not newsworthy, it’s not dirty.

I’m not here to deny freedom of the press, but I believe that with freedom comes responsibility, and with rights you have an obligation. You cannot have rights that are irresponsible. Unfortunately our society today is protected by all rights and ruled by some of their wickedness. Anybody who expects to reap the benefits of freedom must understand the total fatigue of supporting it.

The most important element of political speech, as Aristotle taught, is the character of the speaker. In this respect, no matter what message a man brings in it shouldn’t it collide with his character.

The other day I was shocked when I opened up America, a Catholic magazine, and my good friend Cardinal Keeler, whose a very dear friend of mine, was being fingerprinted by the Baltimore police — not for a crime but as part of the new law put in place that all members of the Church hierarchy must be fingerprinted.

Amos of the Old Testament accused the people of Samaria in words that seared and phrases that smote. They “cram their palaces,” he said, “with violence and extortion.” They had “sold the upright for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals” — from Gucci, no doubt. But he also said that all this could be reversed, if only the people of Samaria would turn away from their own self­ absorption and toward those who, however silently, cry out for help. “Then,” promised Amos, “shall your justice flow like water and your compassion like a never-failing stream” (Amos 5:24)

The worst feature of contemporary society is its tendency to leave each of us locked up in himself or herself, connection-less. To lessen this isolation we have developed all kinds of therapies, spiritual, psychological, and physical—from groups that meet and talk endlessly all day long in spas, week spas, month spas, life spas. But none of these things, from primal screams to herbal wrap, seem to be doing the trick, any more than the huge houses and wine parties that the Samaritan did.

What we need to do is open our heart to the plight of others, even some of your priests who have been condemned, they’re human beings and they should be shown the same type of compassion we have shown anybody who is critically ill. We need to open our hearts to the plights of others, like our hearts were a dam, so that indeed our justice and compassion may flow to all. What is essential is that each of us steps forward to hold out our hand to someone. There is no other way to walk with God.

One of the biggest Catholic bashers in the United States wrote — “Only a minority, a tiny minority of priests have abused the bodies of children.” He continues, “I am not advocating this course of action, but as much as I would like to see the Roman Catholic Church ruined. I hate opportunistically retrospective litigation even more.” He now he’s talking about our tort monsters. “Lawyers who grow fat by digging up dirt on long-forgotten wrongs and hounding their aged perpetrators are no friends of mine.” I’m still quoting this man, “All I'm am doing” he said, “is calling attention to an anomaly. By all means, let’s kick a nasty institution when it is down, but there are better ways than litigation.” These words are from a Catholic hater.

I never thought in my life I would ever see these things. Walk with your shoulders high and your head higher. Be a proud member of the most important non-governmental agency today in the United States. Then remember what Jeremiah said “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” And be proud, speak up for your faith with pride and reverence and learn what your Church does for all other religions. Be proud that you’re a Catholic. Thank you.

Quadrant article May 2010


Carbon and Our Climate

Einar Vikingur

The Earth Does Three Waltzes

What I would like to do is to take you through my own journey from being an accepter to a resister on the role of carbon in our climate. I did not have a “Road to Damascus” moment; it came together gradually, and in a sequence. Some stuff was almost incidental, sometimes from way in the past, but it all turned out to be relevant as I pieced the story together. In other words, I am not a bloke who read Professor Ian Plimer’s Heaven + Earth and converted—no, I did my own work. I am interested in the science and what its conclusions should drive, and that is good policy.

When I became wary of the explanations for climate change (while accepting that something is happening to our climate), I began to wonder about what had occurred as the planet’s climate altered in the past. Why had it gone through these wild cycles of hot and icy and back and forth many times? One factor, which immediately appealed to me because the mechanics were real, calculable, and rather majestic, was what the whole Earth did as it moved and rotated and generally carried on its business of being a molten-core metallic rock flying about the Sun. Further, it seemed to me that the Sun itself had a place in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, and that arm itself was moving around the core of our galaxy. Come to think of it, the whole show was moving through a supposed void, but one actually stuffed with gas clouds, particle streams, dust, and the occasional burst or stream of radiation from supernovas (exploding stars), quasars and pulsars (both intense sources of energy), and various other interfering bits and bodies.

Whilst the picture as a whole is very complicated, what the Earth itself does is quite simple and regular, and it has been worked out with great exactitude. I knew the basics of orbital mechanics, buried somewhere in my education, but I did not know that an engineer from Serbia, called Milankovitch, had spent years around the time of the First World War working out the details of the Earth’s orbital journey. What he described is no fantasy, not an issue anyone questions. He showed that the amount of heat delivered to our planet by the Sun varies in three precise cycles, the interaction of which produces a net result which changes constantly and which is affected by the uneven distribution of land between the Earth’s two hemispheres.

First, the Earth’s orbit moves between being nearly circular to being slightly elliptical—I word it in this odd way because the change is very small. To put it another way: sometimes the circle is squeezed a little about its diameter and it takes about 100,000 years for the orbit to go through an entire cycle of changing shape. As it does so, there is a tiny but constant change in heat delivery to our planet.

Second, the Earth’s axis is tilted a little, and the amount of tilt changes in a cycle of about 40,000 years—and it is this tilt which drives the seasons, because it changes the amount of heat delivered to the two hemispheres as the Earth rotates about itself and revolves around the Sun (here the second cycle, tilt, interacts with the first cycle, orbital shape).

Third, the axis itself wobbles like a spinning toy top—so, not only is the tilt changing its angle, it is also wobbling in a cycle which takes about 20,000 years to complete. So, here is the third cycle acting on the second cycle which is working in the first cycle. Since the three cycles have different lengths, the net result was tricky to compute at first but is now well understood.

The net effect is that heat delivered to the Earth varies in ways which can be calculated. However, this does not mean we know the precise result, and that is because the Earth is not a perfect sphere with a uniform surface. The Earth has land in all sorts of awkward places and shapes and elevations—and it is covered by an atmosphere which is a chicken broth in one place and a pea soup in another (and vice versa tomorrow). Further effects are added from numerous and diverse sources such as sunspots, attenuation of solar radiation by interstellar gas clouds, volcanic eruptions, storage of heat and gases by the oceans and glaciers, various long and short cycles in the Sun’s energy output, cloud cover, reinforcing or damping feedback loops in the atmosphere—and so on. However, we do know the imprecise result: sometimes it gets very cold for very long and we have ice ages. Sometimes it gets warmer, and we have periods between ice ages, called interglacials. Sometimes it gets colder for a little while, and sometimes it gets warmer for a little while. Now, I am an Icelander, and owe my existence to a warm period because my ancestors were able to settle Iceland at the start of such a period eleven centuries or so ago (and many of them died during a cold period five or six centuries later).

The Milankovitch Cycles do not explain everything about our climate, but they do form a very important part of the story. For the layman and the scientist alike, they are a real, explainable, unarguable factor in our climate. For me, in my journey of understanding what lay behind the hyperbole of the excited and the ignorant, they were a milestone of clarity. I did not have to believe in anything other than gravity to accept that they were fundamental truth.

Tectonic Plates, Gobblers of Carbon

I next began to think about the element carbon, and all those terms bandied about such as the “carbon cycle”, “poisonous carbon dioxide”, “carbon sequestration”, and so on. Once again it was the fundamental long-term stuff which might hold the answers, so I asked myself questions such as: What happens to all this stuff pouring out of coal-fired power stations, volcanic vents, rotting trees, Mount Hekla in Iceland, my ridiculously powerful V8 car, and the breathing of six-odd billion people? Does it just bank up and lie in wait? Does it reappear in trees or dissolve in the sea, or what? I did find the answer, and it lies in a surprising place. What was generally described as the carbon cycle was actually just a blippy little sideshow in the bigger picture of how the Earth works. But there is a real carbon cycle, and I’ll describe it.

Let’s start with Mount Hekla, which erupts every now and again and chucks out enormous amounts of lava and hot gases (including carbon dioxide). The lava cools and becomes rocks, largely made from calcium silicon oxide. Over millions of years, this rock gets broken up and turned into pebbles and sand and eventually the calcium in it gets weathered away and dissolved. In fallen raindrops and lakes and seas the calcium combines with carbon dioxide to form limestone deposits, and the shells of crabs, and coral reefs and so on. Over tens of millions of years, everything becomes sludge on the sea floor; and yet that stuff never seems to build up. Mount Hekla erupts because Iceland sits on a joint between two tectonic plates being driven apart by circulating molten rock kept hot by the radioactive decay of naturally-occurring isotopes in the Earth’s interior (also the energy source for geothermal power, incidentally). But the sea floor’s sludge finds itself one day at a different type of tectonic joint, where one plate is driven into the Earth (taking the sludge with all this carbon dioxide locked up in limestone with it) and the other one stays on top. In the molten lava, the limestone combines with silicon again to make the same rocks, and then the Earth releases lava and carbon dioxide out of Hekla (or Vesuvius) to do the circuit again for millions of years.

This is the carbon cycle which regulates the amount of carbon dioxide in circulation, but it works on time-scales not easily grasped by a humanity which popped into existence microseconds ago in the geological way of thinking. It is also a cycle in which the quantities of material on the move dwarf anything we can do, including when natural variations such as eruptions occur. The natural variations are a part of the control loop which regulates the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Control loops are called that because they are systems which can deal with variations, and this one plays a role in regulating temperature over geological time. Variations are a part of how such a process works. The system is driven by tectonic plate movements, the idea of which was ridiculed by most of the scientific community for decades, until eventually it entered the mainstream as an unarguable fact.

The level of carbon dioxide is rising, but it is easy to calculate the number of tonnes required to produce the increase in concentration, and to demonstrate that humans contribute perhaps only as much as a tenth of the increase. There is evidence which indicates some recent rise in average temperatures, except for the past eight years. Humans are unquestionably making a contribution to the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and even a 10 per cent contribution would be a very serious issue if carbon dioxide were connected with this temperature rise.

The connection between carbon dioxide and temperature rise is such a simple story that when I first grasped it, I discarded it. However, I dug a bit deeper and made sure I understood the science.

What Is This Carbon Dioxide Stuff?

In the first two sections I covered two factors influencing climate, neither of which explain the whole picture. I do not for a moment claim to be able to give you the whole picture; the best I can do is to lay out the things which are proven to be truth, and try and draw some conclusions from those things in aggregate. Having described what happens with heat when the Earth moves about its business, and what happens in part with the regulating of that heat when the tectonic plates move about the Earth’s surface, I think we should take a look at what carbon dioxide does in more detail. Since many in the world speak continually about the wretched molecule (although most people know nothing about it), a bit of information might be in order. As governments everywhere rush to implement expensive measures to limit or cap release of the gas, should we not get to know the villain properly?

When sunlight is reradiated off the Earth, some of it is absorbed by the atmosphere. A molecule is hit by a bundle of energy which it can absorb, it wiggles about and bumps into other molecules—and a bunch of excited atoms and molecules is what heat actually is. If the bundle of energy had just passed back out through the atmosphere, no heating would have occurred. This trapping of heat is the greenhouse effect. Gases like oxygen and nitrogen (about 98 per cent of the atmosphere) do not trap heat. Carbon dioxide, methane, water vapour and ozone do—they are examples of greenhouse gases.

In a box of our air that contained 10,000 molecules, fewer than four of them would be carbon dioxide. It is pretty difficult to excite the others, no matter how much energy you can absorb. So, would it make a difference if we doubled or tripled the number of carbon dioxide molecules? The surprising answer is that it would not, and the reason is that carbon dioxide is very selective in the wavelength of energy it absorbs—it works only in a very narrow band. So, at any given moment, most of the tasty light for carbon dioxide is absorbed by a few lucky ones, and the rest of them just float around the place unexcited. If we add more of the stuff, a bit more energy gets absorbed, but mostly we just have more unexcited carbon dioxide doing nothing more than wait around to be absorbed by plants, or get dissolved in water, or combine forces with calcium to make limestone (and then get dragged into the roiling earth by a tectonic plate in a gazillion years).

The bottom line is that not only is carbon dioxide an uncommon gas, it is a pretty poor absorber of energy. Water vapour is another matter: it is ten times more common than our villain, and it absorbs energy across pretty well the entire spectrum. So, there is not only much more of the stuff, it also works much harder as a greenhouse gas. It also forms clouds and rain (and this action releases heat, too), reflects light back out, back in—does all sorts of stuff carbon dioxide could never hope to do. Clouds and their unruly behaviour are one of the main reasons why climatic computer modelling is so difficult to do beyond a few weeks, incidentally. It is also instructive to note that cloud formation is influenced by solar activity in an indirect sense—reduced emission of a wide spectrum of radiation from the Sun permits increased penetration of cosmic rays (mostly particles; it is a historical misnomer) into the atmosphere, increasing cloud formation as water condenses around the particles.

As an aside, the Earth’s magnetic field is one of the sentinels which deflect harmful radiation and particles from reaching us. The magnetic field is influenced by the movement of gigantic quantities of molten metal in the Earth, a movement which also drives the tectonic plates. The isotopes which provide the power were formed in nuclear reactions in the guts of stars which then turned supernova and distributed their material—and our own planet collected some as it coalesced out of dust clouds billions of years ago. Everything is connected, and there is rarely a single explanation for anything.

The paragraphs above can be backed up by numbers and calculations and graphs until the cows come home, none of which could be disputed. All the statements about absorption, rarity and heat release are undisputed facts of nature. What these facts scream at us is that it is impossible for carbon dioxide alone to heat up the atmosphere—this is such an important statement that I am going to reiterate a few things. There are not enough carbon dioxide molecules to do the job. The molecule does not absorb heat well, because it is fussy about wavelengths. There is a lot more water vapour than there is carbon dioxide. Water vapour is many times more effective as a greenhouse gas. Whatever heating is happening cannot be the work of carbon dioxide, except for a small portion. It is physically impossible. Whatever is happening, carbon dioxide cannot be blamed for it. What’s more, carbon dioxide is actually plant food and having more of it promotes plant growth. Greenhouse growers the world over pump into their greenhouses a carbon dioxide concentration several times that of the atmosphere.

I want to make an important point about cause and effect: if the Earth is heating up and carbon dioxide levels are rising, that does not mean one is the cause of the other. All the spectacular reporting about changes to glaciers and coral reefs only shows that warming is taking place. It does not show what is causing the warming, and all the physics evidence demonstrates that the cause has to be something other than carbon dioxide. I do not say that burning fossil fuels in a profligate manner should continue, far from it. I just say that we cannot blame fossil fuels for climate change (I do wish we would plant more trees, though, for a thousand reasons other than temporarily absorbing carbon dioxide).

The Deeds of Carbon Dioxide in the Past

In the first three segments we started with a Serbian engineer and his slide rule, and worked our way up to the physics of how carbon dioxide behaves in the atmosphere. What I would like to do now is return to geological time and what the gas has been getting up to as the climate has cycled through high and low temperatures. Surely this must be important, as carbon dioxide today is the same structure and is bound by the same laws as whatever of the gas was swirling around in the past.

It is possible to reconstruct the temperature and carbon dioxide relationship with startling accuracy for the past half a million years or so, using ice cores drilled out of the glaciers (which therefore have never melted) in Antarctica and Greenland. This work has been done several times, by different people in different places. The data has been analysed several times, in different ways, by different researchers. The conclusion is consistent, and beyond dispute: temperatures rise, and about eight centuries later the level of carbon dioxide rises. The temperature increase precedes the rise in carbon dioxide, and it is therefore not possible for temperature to have been driven up by the gas. As temperatures rise, from whatever cause, the oceans get warmer and this reduces the amount of gas which can be held in solution. The oceans therefore release the gas as a result of more heat—and that is the likeliest explanation as to why carbon dioxide concentration lags behind temperature increases.

As I worked through the science behind carbon and our climate, the ice-cores data was for me a sort of a coup de grace for carbon dioxide being the cause of temperature increases. The data demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the major causal link between the two was the reverse of what was the generally accepted one. Heat causes carbon dioxide levels to rise. Carbon dioxide does not cause heat to rise, other than as a minor contributor. I found this situation utterly astonishing, once I became confident that I understood the facts, because entire governments, large bureaucracies, swathes of the scientific establishment, and practically every commentator on the planet seemed not to have understood the facts.

I looked at things from different directions, I checked my logic, I wondered whether there was something I had missed. However, because I tried to focus on science grounded in proven facts, I always came back to the same thing: carbon dioxide is a minor player, a sideshow in the global warming story. So why were we all being told by so many clever and competent people that we were about to be engulfed by a cataclysm caused by this sideshow? And, incidentally, what was warming us up late last century?

My last part will try and answer those questions. I am not confident about my answers, but I think I am on the right track. The one thing I am certain about is this: carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of global warming, and therefore humanity (whilst there are too many of us) is not to blame. And in any case, should we be blaming or rejoicing? Does it occur to anyone that warmth is good? That we are in an interglacial right now, and should be afraid of cold returning? Haven’t humans thrived during warm periods (Medieval Warming) and suffered terribly during cold spells (the Dark Ages)?

What the World Should Not Do (and What It Might Consider Doing)

Remember the Millennium Bug? In the 1970s some dork (apparently) wrote code using only the last two digits for the year, and the result was supposed to be doomsday when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999. Billions of dollars were spent on upgrading equipment and software, thousands of boffins beavered away for years all over the world leading up to the magic moment—and nothing happened! At that time I was the chief information officer for one of the country’s biggest corporations, and I swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker. I spent millions of the shareholders’ dollars—and nothing happened. Along with everyone else, I had failed to dig until I found the facts. I was a member of the world’s biggest unintended con job and groupthink; just an unthinking member of the herd, and I have been ashamed of it ever since. You reckon groupthink could not happen on carbon dioxide and global warming?

Many have staked a lot on climate change and carbon emissions—they have become vested interests, captured by personal or institutional pride, and a certainty born of habit. But the known facts have changed since the game began, and everyone needs to have the courage to change with them. It will be easier for most than for the thousands of climate scientists who are now earning both a good living and a place in the sun (sorry). Worse still, the politicians and their bureaucrats are thick into this, and many of them would find it extremely difficult to reverse positions even if they understood the facts and wanted to recant. And much worse still, financial institutions the world over are sniffing out the money to be made out of carbon credits, permits trading, you name it, and they’ll think of a fancier name still (something like “leveraged derivatives twice bonded and once removed”?)—and these institutions therefore have every reason to believe in and encourage what is happening. This is what they are designed to do; it is their primary motive, unfettered by either kindness or malice.

Let’s get this straight: some warming has happened over recent decades—even though the measuring is dodgy and disputed, and the last eight years have been on a cooling trend. The population is large, and we are making a real mess of our home—and the solution to over-population lies not in coercion of anyone but in the emancipation and education of women. We have chopped down too many trees (I love trees). We are not investing enough in renewable energy, specifically on how to harness in a distributed way the ultimate source of all energy, the Sun. We are using up resources fast. We should allow fish stocks to recover (I love marine creatures of all kinds), and stop dumping so much rubbish into the oceans and into landfill. We need to work against religious bigotry and the resulting violence, and we need to feed and govern and protect all people properly, on the basis of liberty and compassion. What we should not be doing is wasting huge resources on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, because it would be on a problem which does not exist. The other problems do exist.

So, the world’s climate is changing yet again. We have a choice between homing in on a non-existent carbon problem, and thereby condemning half of the world’s people to continued poverty as they are forced to pay for expensive energy (the rich world’s prosperity is based on cheap fossil fuels), or we can adapt as the world changes its climate of its own accord. As we adapt, the cost and effort of a carbon focus and the economic dislocation it would cause could be redirected towards solving the problems we know to be real.

Incidentally, why has the globe warmed (a little) since about 1850? First, that was the end of the Little Ice Age, so it is hardly surprising a bit of warmth has been returning. We know that the climate has fluctuated in the big sense (ice ages) many times, but it also fluctuates in a smaller sense, in that it has warmed and cooled appreciably often, even during recorded history. What we are seeing now is such a fluctuation, and the cause is a combination of things—a net warming as a result of the Milankovitch Cycle interactions, the Solar System is perhaps coming slowly out of a very wispy interstellar gas or dust cloud which has been attenuating sunlight slightly, the Sun is in a different part of its radiation cycles—and a myriad of other factors quite beyond our ken as yet are just lining up in a particular way for a little while. This sort of thing has happened many times before, and will happen again.

The Likely Future

I have focused on the role of carbon dioxide and have not spent much time on what is likely to happen, but I think it is possible to describe the next few decades. We can all relax, actually, because the planet itself will answer the questions most emphatically by continuing the cooling which has been occurring since 2002. By 2030 we should be at the lowest point of the next sunspot cycle (and it will most probably be an unusually low one) a process that began in 2002. I say “lowest point” in the context of the effects on Earth, as there is a lag of several years as the planet digests the energy delivery and translates it into climate.

The Sun has many interacting cycles of activity (one of them cycles every 1500 years) of which the eleven-year Schwabe radiation intensity cycle is the simplest one, and the one that people focus on. The irradiance variation is thought of as quite small—perhaps only about 0.1 per cent variation, but that is a great deal of energy in absolute terms. However, there is a twist or three, and I love the way they work.

First, the Schwabe Cycle oscillates in length, and can go a year or so either way. If you plot the length over a couple of thousand years (there are various kinds of observational records of sunspots that far back) against intensity of magnetic disturbance, and then do some mathematical transformation of the graph, it emerges that intensity is proportional to length and varies in a 166-year cycle, called the Gleissberg Cycle—there is a weak period followed by an intense period every eighty-three years.

The second twist is that sometimes there is a phase shift in the Gleissberg Cycle, which means that a weak magnetic cycle is followed by another weak one (instead of weak and intense alternating)—but it happens eleven years apart (amazing—I cannot work out whether it is just a coincidence). The middle of the Little Ice Age about three centuries ago saw two weak periods in sequence—reduced irradiance coupled with more cosmic rays, resulting in more cloud cover, with a net cooling. The predictability of phase shifts is based on orbital mechanics, and therefore has a fairly high degree of certainty.

The third twist is that there is a lag of several years (about four to eight) as the Earth works out how to translate energy delivery into climate. This is where it gets complicated, and where computer modelling of climate cannot work beyond a few weeks.

When sunspots are active (and they are gigantic magnetic storms, about 40,000 kilometres across) the Sun’s magnetic field deflects cosmic rays (which are particles) entering the Solar System and reduces the amount which enters the Earth’s atmosphere. Since water condenses around the nuclei, fewer particles mean fewer clouds, reducing reflection of radiation back out to space. The net result is warming, which is amplified as there is also more radiation and magnetic energy available for the planet. The ozone in the upper atmosphere absorbs more ultra-violet radiation, and that energy eventually circulates down. There is also direct energisation of particles in the atmosphere from solar eruptions and storms during strong sunspot activity. This effect is an amplifier: more energy gets transferred to the planet than might be expected from increased irradiance alone.

When sunspots are inactive, the opposite happens—more particles from cosmic rays are available for cloud formation, more reflection occurs, and there is also less radiation, and less transfer of energy from solar magnetic fields into the atmosphere. The net result is cooling. This is a phase we are well into now.

The sunspots are driven by orbital mechanics, those lovely and predictable dances—the four gas giants shift the Solar System’s centre of mass from the centre of the Sun in a regular pattern, one which is well understood. The Sun therefore revolves around the centre of mass as well as rotating (the centre of mass can move as much as two to three solar radii from the Sun’s centre). The Sun has a metallic structure (this comes as a surprise to most people, but any element other than hydrogen for astrophysicists is a metal) and therefore movements of gigantic masses of metal generate sunspots (magnetic storms, remember) via the solar dynamo effect.

These are the reasons why it is possible to predict with a high degree of confidence that we will be in another Little Ice Age (not very cold actually) by 2030. I think it is a most beautiful symmetry, an exquisite demonstration of how a small part of the universe works.

Einar Vikingur has a BSc with first-class honours in organic chemistry, an MSc in guided weapons engineering, and a Bachelor of Modern Languages in Russian. He has worked in the mining industry for many years. He lives in Perth.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS OF DEMOGRAPHIC WINTER

Thursday, Apr 15, 2010

Don Feder, J.D.
BIO

Remarks to The World Congress of Families V, Amsterdam, Netherlands, August 2009

Many years ago, economist Richard M. Weaver wrote a book with a title both prosaic and profound “Ideas Have Consequences.

Those three words hold the key to understanding all of the social trends and political movements that confound us. Nothing happens in a vacuum. In human experience, nothing occurs spontaneously or haphazardly. For every effect there is a cause.

Demographic Winter didn’t just happen. Rather it is the culmination of societal acceptance of highly dubious ideas and policies.

The Japanese didn’t wake up one day and say: “Hey, let’s have the most rapidly aging population in the world. In the course of 20 years, let’s go from those over 60 representing 11.6% of our population to 21.2%.”

The Russian people didn’t suddenly decide to have a birth rate of 1.17, when 2.13 is needed just to replace current population. There has to be a reason – or reasons -- why a country’s population shrinks by 700,000.

In contemplating the fact that in the past 40 years, birth rates have fallen by more than 50% -- a startling statistic – the thoughtful person is compelled to ask: Why?

All over the world, individuals, governments and societies have embraced a set of assumptions that have led inexorably to rapidly falling birthrates.

The roots of Demographic Winter lie in the 1960s. It’s not a coincidence that this phenomenon first became noticeable in the late 1970s, about a decade after the Sixties, which resulted in the most profound social upheaval since the French Revolution.

The hallmark of the 1960s revolution was youth rejecting authority, especially parental and religious authority. Supposedly this was a sign of intellectual independence and sophistication. In reality, it was blind acceptance of a set of clichés and slogans in place of the time-tested wisdom of the ages.

Chief among these clichés was “do your own thing” – which roughly translates as “live for yourself.” If you live according to this axiom, you become the center of your own universe. Little wonder that my generation (the Sixties or Baby-Boom generation) – is known in the United States as the Me-Generation, in recognition of its innate selfishness.

My generation consists largely self-absorbed consumers, who monitor their emotional state incessantly, and worry compulsively about whether they’re getting enough love, recognition and emotional support from friends, family and society at large. We are dedicated consumers of mood-enhancing drugs, psychiatric services, self-help courses, and 12-step programs.

Along with self-expression came a lessening of feelings of responsibility for the things that really matter (count). Curiously, we feel responsible for endangered species, the planet and the ozone layer (things largely beyond our control) – but not to our families, our nation or our people.

In the past, people didn’t ask why have children -- any more than they asked why eat or why breathe. It was such a natural part of existence that it needed no rationale.

You had children because you had an obligation to your parents (in recognition of the sacrifices they made for you) to give them grandchildren. You had a responsibility to your family to assure its continuation. You had a responsibility to your people – so that they would not go the way of the Babylonian and the Phoenician.

You had children because, in the act of procreation, humanity finds its future. You had children to share the joy you felt at being alive.

All of the movements and trends that started in the Sixties culminated in industrialized nations being plunged into the depths of Demographic Winter. There are currently 59 countries, with 44% of the world’s population, that have below-replacement birth rates.

In the United States, birth-control pills came into widespread use in the early 1960s. Today, for the first time in history, just under half the world’s population of child-bearing age uses some form of contraception. In the United States, children as young as 12 are instructed in the proper use of condoms.

In America, abortion was legalized by judicial fiat in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade. Other Western nations began allowing abortion at about the same time – Britain in 1967 and in Sweden in 1974.

Like contraception, abortion is based on 1960s assumptions, chief among them that nothing should be allowed to interfere with your happiness (or what you’ve been told will make you happy), including children. In the United States today, there are cases of teen-aged girls having abortions because pregnancy would spoil the lines of their prom dress. In Russia each year, there are more abortions than live births. The Russian people are literally aborting their future.

Worldwide, there are approximately 115,000 abortions a day or 42 million abortions a year. We are allowing the slaughter of 42 million unborn children every year – each of whom has the complete genetic code of a human being, and who (if nature is allowed to take its course) will emerge from the womb fully formed in 9 months. But, from the perspective if choice, all that matters is that we “choose” not to let a child (whose existence we are responsible for) stand in the way our freedom, happiness, prosperity or tranquility.

Cohabitation also plays a significant part here. At its heart, the Sixties revolution was the Sexual Revolution. Once and for all, sex was divorced from marriage, commitment and morality. We’ve seen the initiation of sexual activity at an earlier and earlier age. Sex before marriage led to sex outside marriage, which led to multiple liaisons, divorce and what’s been called serial polygamy.

Given the impermanence of their relationship, cohabitating couples are more likely to be childless, or to have fewer children. In much of the Western world, marriage has become optional – a ceremony to mark a legal relationship, rather than an estate sanctified by faith and tradition. In France, last year, more people began living together outside wedlock than married.

Even with divorce, there is the perception that marriage will tie us down too much, limit our options. Hence marriage, once a central reality of existence, has become optional. We marry because we choose to, not because we are obliged to. Fewer marriages equal fewer children.

Same-sex marriage (so-called) – all the rage among Western elites -- completely severs the connection between marriage and children. Some couples choose not to have children. Others are unable to have children. With “homosexual marriage,” we’re applying the label to couples which, by their very nature, are incapable of reproduction – thus further removing the institution from its highest calling: child-bearing and child-rearing.

Men and women who do marry are marrying later and later in life – which also reduces the number of children issuing from these unions. (After age 35, it becomes progressively harder for women to conceive. The ability of men to father children also declines with age.) Marrying and having children are things we choose to do, not things we should do. If marriage or children interfere with education, career or an active social life – things society tells us are really important – guess which gets sacrificed? That’s a rhetorical question.

Then there’s our attitude toward children. Increasingly, we live in anti-child cultures. From cinema, to news media, to public education and academia -- children are presented as a burden and an annoyance, rather than a joy and a blessing.

The culture treats large families (today, defined as more than two children) as something freakish – the result of parental peculiarity or religious fundamentalism.

We are constantly reminded of the cost of children to society – in educational, medical and law enforcement expenditures.

What’s usually overlooked is the other side of the ledger: That the children of today are the workers, the producers, the innovators, the care-givers, and the taxpayers of tomorrow – those whose payments keep pension plans solvent, those who empty the bedpans in the nursing homes, operate factories and farms and keep the lights on all over the world. The family with four children helps to assure a comfortable old age to the voluntarily childless.

Ultimately, our culture of selfishness is based on a loss of faith. There is a direct relationship between religious observance and birth rates. Countries with high church attendance have above-replacement birth rates. The reverse is also true: Empty churches equal empty cradles and empty hearts.

I’ve yet to encounter a family with more than three children that didn’t have a firm foundation in faith – be it Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, or Mormonism, etc.. All of these faiths recognize the centrality of family. All stress the importance of having children. All support parental responsibility and authority. In other words, all are contra the ethic of our age.

Religion teaches responsibility to God and our fellow man. It makes individuals other- (outward) oriented. It teaches that our own lives aren’t the sum total of human existence, that there’s something higher – a grand scheme that tells us both who we are and why we are. In consequence, it provides the only real foundation for happiness.

There is a very simple formula to determine who’s having large families and who isn’t. Those who have faith in the future have children. Those who don’t, don’t. Where does faith in the future come from? It comes from faith.

The assault on procreation and families is led by the secular left. By putting these people in charge of our governments and our cultures, by allowing them to indoctrinate our children (in the guise of educating and entertaining them), by subconsciously assimilating their values (including radical autonomy, skepticism, secularism, environmentalism and population control), by closing our eyes to the reality and inevitable consequences of falling birth rates, we choose Demographic Winter.

“Choice” is the watchword of the anti-family left. The concept is more fitting than it could ever imagine. In thousands of ways, every day, humanity literally chooses its future – or non-future.

The wonderful thing about being human is that – unlike the animals – we can conceptualize. Besides conceiving children, we can also conceive ideas. By the application of reason, we can evaluate theories, accepting or rejecting them.

The ultimate test of an idea is its practicality. Does it work? The ideas that have lead to the tragedy of rapidly falling birth rates are disastrously wrong and must give way to better ideas.

On the eve of the First World War, Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, sadly commented: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Today, lamps are going out all over the world. Those lights are our children, who are being extinguished by the millions. If we don’t rekindle them quickly, the world will be plunged into darkness the likes of which we have not seen since the fall of Rome.

Wealth distribution, is it cost free?

March 2010 Quadrant article
Economics
Taxing the Rich and Spreading the Wealth

Peter Smith

A tale of two villages

There was once a particularly industrious and skilful man in a coastal village near the mouth of a river. He caught more fish than he could eat, while his fellow villagers just barely managed to feed themselves. The problem was that without refrigeration his spare fish spoiled. He had an idea of giving his spare fish to some of his fellow villagers in return for them forgoing their own foraging for food and building him a bigger hut. When his bigger hut was built he had an even better idea. In return for his spare fish, he commissioned the building of a bigger fishing boat for himself and something he had dreamt up in his spare time, which he called a fishing net. Now, with his bigger boat and net, he had many spare fish, and had the best idea of all. He employed some villagers to help him catch even more fish and sail upriver to neighbouring villages and towns, where fish were scarcer; to trade his fish for other goods and something called money. That was only the start; that village is now called “metropolis”.

There was another coastal village, equally endowed, in another place. A man in that village caught more fish than he could eat and it was decided that he would share his surplus with the others, so that they would have a little more to eat and would not have to work so hard. That village is now called “village”.

As a point of view, taxing the rich and spreading the wealth is guaranteed to win plaudits among the faithful on the Left: union or party members, intellectuals, anti-globalisation demonstrators, or Greens. When famously talking to Joe the plumber in the lead-up to the last US presidential election, Barack Obama said: “I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everyone.” Now President Obama intends to tax high-income earners as part of paying for an expansion of medical insurance in the USA. In the UK, Gordon Brown intends to raise the top income tax rate from 40 to 50 per cent. In Australia, Sharan Burrow talks about a “fairer distribution of wealth”, and the ACTU recommended a “wealth tax” to the Henry tax review. It seems unlikely that the “rich” (“those materially better off than most” will do as a loose definition) will escape unscathed from whatever is implemented out of this review. Taxing the rich to pay for improved and additional government services seems so easy and so palatable. After all, who will suffer? Only the rich and they can afford it.

Politicians on the Left are in thrall of taxing the rich because most people are not rich, and they have a suspicion that not too many of the rich will vote for them even if they don’t tax them heavily. It’s a win-win. But let us not be too party-political about this; there are plenty of examples of right-of-centre parties following the same course. It is to one extent or other a beguiling proposition across the political spectrum. For example, it wasn’t Keating that introduced the superannuation surcharge on the “rich” in the 1990s; it was Costello and Howard. Sinclair Davidson points out that at the end of the Howard years, the top 25 per cent income earners were paying a higher proportion of tax than they were at the start. The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill, voted down in the Senate, had a complementary household assistance component for the purpose of compensating “low and middle-income families”. In rejecting the bill, I don’t believe the Liberals or Nationals made particular objection to the fact that the well-off were not to be compensated.

All political parties, at times, see electoral advantage in redistributing income from the relative few who are well-off, to the many who are less well-off, by imposing much heavier taxation on the few.

In that supposed epitome of individual self-reliance, the USA, which has had more Republican than Democrat presidents, the Internal Revenue Service recently reported that, in 2007, the top 10 per cent of federal taxpayers (that is, those who paid any federal income tax at all) paid over 70 per cent of income taxes.

Taxing the rich, and taxing them more, is apparently costless to an overwhelming proportion of the population. For example, the expansion of medical insurance in the USA is seemingly a “free” good, if you believe only the rich will be paying for it. Everyone knows the rich will remain rich so, in practical terms, it is costless. What has been discovered is an almost bottomless pot of gold. It’s a form of magic; the gift that keeps on giving. But we know there is no such thing as magic; only conjuring tricks. So, it isn’t true. Why isn’t it true? That is the question. The answer isn’t of the kind usually trotted out. Adam Smith had the real answer; but first to the meretricious.

If we tax the rich too much, they will simply work less or stop working. There was a survey of motor vehicle workers in the UK in the 1960s. They were asked whether they thought their colleagues would work less overtime if the government were to increase tax rates. Over 90 per cent said they thought their colleagues would work less. They were also asked whether they would work less. Over 90 per cent said they wouldn’t. The rich will keep on working because that is what they do.

If we tax the rich too much, they will take their bat and ball and go and live elsewhere. No, they won’t, or at least not so many that it will matter. You have to be where your business or employment is located. It’s not easy to simply pack up and move. Anyway, most places that are pleasant to live in are much the same; the rich are taxed heavily. Quite simply there is nowhere for the rich to go. No, the rich will stay around; they will work just as hard and will simply pay more of what they earn into the public purse, to the extent that they can’t wriggle out of it.

What about the moral argument? Is it unfair to tax one section of population heavily, and won’t this cause disenchantment among the heavily taxed? Strictly speaking, it may be hard to justify on moral grounds; notwithstanding the reverse argument that the rich are morally bound to assist the poor. Why should those who are especially talented or who work especially hard pay a much larger amount and, under progressive taxation, a much larger proportion of their earnings into the community pot, than those who are less talented or who work less hard?

There is biblical support for taxing the well-off. Several times in both Old and New Testaments the Bible mentions tithing to support priests and the less well-off. Tithing is 10 per cent of income. It can add up to a larger proportion once you have separately supported the priests and the poor and so on; nevertheless it is still a flat proportion. There is nothing about progressive taxation, or some such similar concept, in the Bible; that has to be put down as a secular invention.

While it is hard to be definitive about the moral argument, the movie The Edge has something useful to say. In the movie Anthony Hopkins plays a very rich businessman married to a much younger and glamorous wife (played by Elle Macpherson), with all the pressures this brings. Alec Baldwin, playing none too savoury a character, at one point expresses faux sympathy for Hopkins while accompanying him in Hopkins’s private jet. Hopkins replies: “Never feel sorry for the man that owns the plane.” And nor should we. The rich will manage, and put up with things resignedly, and it is best we lose no sleep over their plight of paying abundant taxes. It is a tyranny, of the Alexis de Tocqueville kind, of the relatively poor majority over the relatively rich minority, but it is, perhaps, the least worst of all such possible tyrannies.

This brings us to Adam Smith. It is salutary and levelling that the eighteenth century provided the answer which eludes many current politicians and political and economic commentators, who don’t seem to understand, and certainly don’t acknowledge, that taxing the rich costs us all, rich and poor alike. It is not a free good for anyone.

Economic commentators have perhaps less excuse than others in failing to appreciate and bring into account Adam Smith’s insights. Economics did not begin with Keynes.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith writes of the landlord:

that the eye is larger than the belly, never was more fully verified than with regard to him. The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that of the meanest peasant. The rest he is obliged to distribute among those who prepare in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the different baubles and trinkets which are employed in the economy of greatness; all of whom derive from his luxury and caprice that share of all of the necessaries of life which they would in vain expected from his humanity and justice.

And he goes on:

The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity … they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and … advance the interest of society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

It is clear that Smith held little brief for the rich but he recognised that they did little damage and, if inadvertently (in his view), much good in spreading the wealth. Why they did little damage was because they saved rather than consumed most of their income. That is what the rich do. His observations told him that private frugality was the common inclination of those whose earnings allowed them the luxury of saving.

Brought up to date: with the most profligate will in the world, even the super rich usually have no more than a few wardrobes of clothes, ten cars, five houses, a luxury yacht and a private plane. You might say this is excessive (some might say it is obscene) and so it might be, but it adds up to very little in terms of soaking up the world’s resources; it is insignificant in fact.

The rich consume little more than the poor. What an insight of Smith’s that was and how it has been lost sight of. The rich save and only the rich have capacity to save very much. Consistent with this, Keynes, no less, pointed out that “a poorer community will be prone to consume by far the greater part of its output”.

Savings on one side represent investment on the other; and it is investment, particularly private investment, that produces growing prosperity. Smith understood that too:

In the midst of all the exactions of government, capital has been silently and gradually accumulated by the private frugality and good conduct of individuals, by their universal, continual, and uninterrupted effort to better their own condition. It is this effort, protected by law and allowed by liberty to exert itself in the manner that is most advantageous, which has maintained the progress of England towards opulence and improvement …

(The Wealth of Nations)

Taxing the income of the rich effectively requisitions private savings and investment for public purposes. It is not costless because it reduces private investment which otherwise produces increased prosperity for us all. While Smith had a somewhat jaundiced view of government spending—“Great nations are never impoverished by private, though they sometimes are by public prodigality and misconduct”—the worth or otherwise of such spending is not the point. The point is that it is not costless when it is paid for by the rich. The cost is the product and benefit of the private investment forgone.

In fact, calls for “taxing the rich and spreading the wealth” are for the most part no more than empty sloganeering suited to Tammany Hall-style meetings. This is not because taxing the rich more than the poor is a bad idea per se; in fact who else are you going to tax, if the poor have very little. It is because the costs and consequences of taxing the rich, and of taxing the rich more, are neither acknowledged nor seemingly understood. This fools people into thinking that something can be gained without cost, and so inevitably leads to the implementation of misguided and damaging economic policy.

None of this is saying that the rich shouldn’t be taxed as highly as they are or even more than they are. Nor is it saying that governments will waste the taxes raised—though they undoubtedly waste a good deal. It is saying that there is a cost of taxing the rich and that this must taken explicitly into account. Moreover, it is saying that this cost is private investment forgone which, a priori, we are entitled to think would have been of significant benefit because it would have been guided by market forces into satisfying real wants.

Contributing to the lack of understanding about the costs of taxing the rich is a very fuzzy idea about wealth. When you hear those on the Left talk about taxing the rich and spreading the wealth it is as though they were contemplating taking money that would otherwise be under a mattress. Apart from anything else, this thinking is a species of money illusion. It mistakes financial assets for real wealth.

The only consumable tangible manmade wealth we have, as of today, is already almost completely spread. For example, my immediate neighbours, though not very rich, are I suppose quite a bit richer than average yet they each possess only one house, one washing machine and one refrigerator; though admittedly two cars and maybe two televisions and the odd small boat here and there. The whole population of these possessions cannot be spread much more thinly to count for very much. My neighbours tend to eat only reasonable portions, as Adam Smith suggested they would so many years ago. Leaving aside houses, and household and personal possessions, all of the other tangible manmade wealth in the world is in the form of physical capital: infrastructure, commercial property, mines, plant and equipment. For the most part, this is fully employed making more physical capital or those familiar houses, and household and personal possessions. There is little or nothing left to spread. It is important to understand this. Spreading real wealth can only mean building more and bigger houses, making more and more expensive cars, making more boats, making more household goods of all kinds, and distributing them to those who cannot now afford them. How is it to be done? The answer is that it can’t; at least it can’t without redirecting resources and retooling factories to produce goods for immediate use and, in so doing, lessening future growth.

Financial assets, as distinct from physical assets, are concentrated. There are various estimates of this concentration but they are all broadly consistent. For example, Professor Edward Wolff has estimated that the top 20 per cent of households in the USA hold 92 per cent of non-occupied housing wealth. Australian ABS figures for 2005–06 show that the top 20 per cent of households held 60 per cent of wealth but this would be much higher if owner-occupied housing were removed from the figures.

The concentration of financial assets is used often to “demonstrate” how the system—capitalism—is unfair and defective: the rich have too much; the poor too little. Look at what good the rich could do if they gave their money away to the poor, you might hear it said. It is obscene that a relative few have so much when there is so much poverty. These are all understandable reactions, but that makes them no less superficial and misguided.

First, the concentration of financial assets is an inevitable consequence of the fact that only the rich save very much. Second, such saving provides the wherewithal to finance the building of physical capital; thereby increasing productivity and future growth. Without future growth, the availability of goods for those who are now deprived would be so much less. It is no accident that the developed world is more prosperous than it was and generally grows more prosperous each year. It all comes down to savings and the way those savings are used to build innovative and increasingly productive physical capital.

Financial wealth—the accumulation of past savings—has its counterpart in the stock of physical capital. This stock would not disappear overnight if financial wealth were spread much more thinly; but we could expect significantly more demand for houses and bigger houses, for cars and more expensive cars, for consumer durables and consumer services of various kinds, and so on. After all, stripped of money illusion, that is the purpose and effect of spreading the wealth. This would mean less future investment in physical capital and, potentially, a reduction in the stock and quality of such capital, depending on how much financial wealth was spread.

Without at all taking away from the benefits of philanthropy or government safety nets and even progressive taxation there is, in the end result, nothing of any materiality that can be done to relieve poverty without economic growth. Economic growth depends on investment. Investment depends on saving.

Of course, Keynesians would object to putting saving in the driving seat. For them, the virtue of saving was a pre-twentieth-century phenomenon; in a time of scarcity—in a time when the classical economists like Ricardo and Say were writing, when perhaps supply did create its own demand and there could be no long-lasting insufficiency of demand—but not now. They would say that the relative abundance we have now in developed economies means that saving is predominantly a curse rather than a virtue, and that we need to encourage consumer spending to maintain full employment. Simple observation suggests this is not true. The facts get in the way.

Leaving aside the fact that poverty is still with us to an appreciable extent, only few among us would say that all their material wants were satisfied. If you doubt that, have a look at credit card debt. Keynesians follow their master in endemically underestimating and understating the appetite of human beings for continual improvement in their material circumstances, and the concomitant ability of entrepreneurs and businesses to develop new goods and services that become the essentials of tomorrow. Only savings can fuel that process.

At our stage of civilisation only the comparatively rich save in quantities. Unequal income and wealth are therefore essential to combating poverty and improving everyone’s material circumstances; however much the Left or Keynesians have difficulty in understanding that. Policies of taxing the rich more and spreading the wealth more are not necessarily ruled out by this, once the consequences of reduced investment are understood. The point is that those consequences should be taken into account when such policies are espoused, to make sure there are offsetting benefits of at least equal value. Taxing the rich and spreading the wealth is not a free ticket to a more equal world.

Peter Smith is a former CEO of the Australian Payments Clearing Association. He wrote “Economics and Socialism Don’t Mix” in the December issue.

Growing up in todays world ????

Bill Muehlenberg’s commentary on issues of the day…
Kids Gone Wild

It seems there is not a day that goes by lately in which some headline informs us of yet another case of children and young people going off the rails. Violence, drugs, criminal involvement, gangs, and even murder are becoming increasingly common amongst our young people.

While plenty of explanations for this can be offered, surely the breakdown in discipline and boundary-setting is a big part of this. Indeed, family breakdown is a contributing factor. Many single-parent families (most of which are headed by mothers) are struggling as is, and the absent father increases the tendency to see discipline reduced.

Even where parental discipline is on offer, increasingly the state is taking options away from parents. Many nations have barred parents from the right to use corporal punishment. And as I noted elsewhere, some nations are now seeking to ban “psychological violence” in the home.

All of this contributes to a generation of kids raised with few boundaries and little discipline. Of interest here, a recent news story from the UK reported that the British Schools Secretary has refused to ban smacking at Islamic schools, even though it is banned in all State and private schools. The secretary claims he wants to avoid ‘upsetting Muslim sensitivities’.

But leaving the physical punishment debate aside for now, many of our “experts” want to effectively ban all discipline. Many are not only against any corporal punishment, but are increasingly against any sort of discipline which might scar little Johnny’s fragile psyche, or in any way harm little Sarah’s wobbly self-esteem.

Consider this incredible suggestion from one such Australian “expert”. Here is how a recent news report carried the story: “A Melbourne expert says naughty corners and time out in bedrooms are inappropriate because they shame and humiliate. The same goes for smacking, which education and parenting consultant Kathy Walker says makes children feel resentful.”

So our authority on children says we must not “shame or humiliate” our children. Sorry, wait one minute here. It seems to me that simply telling a child “no” in dozens of circumstances could be potentially shameful or humiliating. Will she next say that parents should be banned from telling their kids they cannot do things?

An even more urgent question I would have for this expert is this: Do you have any children? So often these bureaucrats and experts who wax eloquent on family matters and the welfare of children do not even have a family of their own.

But wait, it gets even worse. In today’s press was a story about a lunatic proposal to reduce bullying in schools. The plan? To not punish bullies, but rather, “empower” them! I kid you not. “Rather than being accused, suspected bullies are merely spoken to and encouraged to think of ways to help a bullied student cope.” Well, that should certainly make the bullies think twice, shouldn’t it?

Indeed, why haven’t we thought of this before concerning other anti-social behaviours? Instead of accusing rapists, we could “empower” them. They could be encouraged to offer their victims help in coping. Instead of punishing arsonists, we should just speak to them and “empower” them. Let’s also empower thieves, racists and murderers. Puh-leeese!

The truth is, children grow up in only one direction, and that direction is toward self. Self-centeredness comes naturally to all children. Indeed, everyone is essentially selfish and focused on number one. That is why we all need boundaries and we all need rewards and punishments.

In a perfect world there would be no need of discipline or ensuring that appropriate consequences flow from our choices. But this is not a perfect world, and we all tend to gravitate toward self. Turning what are basically selfish little brats into socially adaptable and civilised human beings is the stuff of years of careful parenting, helped out by the surrounding community.

In fact, there are only two major ways to ensure that we all don’t become a nation of savages: conscience and cops. We have an inward sense of right and wrong (a conscience) which needs to be trained and exercised. If we cannot lead socially acceptable lives by this inward moral compass, then society comes along with outward restraint: police, courts, laws and the like.

The more we dampen that inward moral voice, the more we have to depend on outward forces to maintain orderly, civilised behaviour. As the very idea of morality comes more and more to be seen as an out-dated concept, and as parental authority and discipline are being increasingly undermined, then we are simply left with the state taking on more of the role of boundary-setting and enforcement.

But there will never be enough laws or enough police to keep people – both young and old – in check, if we keep insisting that children can effectively run wild, and that parents cannot interfere with their development, for fear of wounding their sense of worth, or of humiliating them.

The truth is, things like shame and guilt are wonderful components of our inner moral life. They are essential features to keep the gravitational pull toward self in some sort of acceptable bounds. Without these inner checks and balances, we are much more prone to run amok, and even the most thorough police state will have trouble keeping the populace in control in those circumstances.

As a parent I do not at all have a problem with a bit of shame and guilt doing their work in my children’s lives. The aim is to turn them into polite, respectful and humane individuals, not little terrorists who respect nothing and no one. As one professor of psychology put it:

“When it comes to rearing children, every society is only 20 years away from barbarism. Twenty years is all we have to accomplish the task of civilizing the infants who are born into our midst each year. These people know nothing of our language, our culture, our religion, our values, or our customs of interpersonal relations. The infant is totally ignorant about communism, fascism, democracy, civil liberties, and the rights of the minority as contrasted with the prerogatives of the majority, respect, decency, honesty, customs conventions, and manners. The barbarian must be tamed if civilization is to survive.”

And these little barbarians will not be tamed if we get to the place where we are afraid to say no to our own children. When the forces of political correctness degenerate that far, then we might as well write off civilisation.