There Is No News*

Over a period of eighty years, hundreds of critics have been laboring to improve the taste of the American people in music, literature, drama and politics. And today, as a result, Nevin, Tobani and Tosti are program favorites over Brahms, Beethoven and Bach; James Oliver Curwood is thirty thousand times more popular than James Branch Cabell; Anne Nichols is fifty thousand times more popular than Hauptmann; and Calvin Coolidge is President of the United States. [George Jean Nathan, The House of Satan (London: Knopf, 1926), p. 99.]

Many people find it difficult to comprehend how taking Aboriginal children away from their parents could have been so popular an idea. Perhaps they would find it easier to understand if they were provided with a different degree of the same type of situation that is still popular today: government schooling.

Children are forced to attend school, where their teachers are forced to teach what the government decides. As every schoolboy knows, this is for their own good, because their parents cannot be trusted to educate them. Now, the government might be right; children may be better off away from their parents and at school. But forcibly taking children away from their parents, even if only for six hours a day, and with the best of intentions and even the best of results, is still a forceful activity, synonymous with kidnapping.

In the future, perhaps, we will look on compulsory attendance and compulsory curriculum at schools differently. Maybe we will have people who had absolutely nothing to do with it apologising on our behalf. Maybe certain victims of poor schooling would value that.

Mencken made a similar comment:

[The mob] looks for leaders with the necessary courage, and when they appear it follows them slavishly, even after their courage is discovered to be mere buncombe and their altruism only a cloak for more and worse oppressions. Thus it oscillates eternally between scoundrels, or, if you would take them at their own valuation, heroes. Politics becomes the trade of playing upon its natural poltroonery — of scaring it half to death, and then proposing to save it. There is in it no other quality of which a practical politician, taking one day with another, may be sure. Every theoretically free people wonders at the slavishness of all the others. But there is no actual difference between them. [H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1926), p. 50.]

What next? Will drunks, dole recipients, criminals, idiot journalists and other left-wing Australians demand that the Rudd government apologise for the policies of the Howard government? It would be an improvement over what the Rudd government is doing now.

The Rudd government’s planned Australia 2020 conference, where “the best and brightest minds from across the country [will] tackle the long term challenges confronting Australia’s future,” is misguided.

Although the Prime Minister’s acknowledgment that the Labor Party does not include “the best and brightest minds” deserves praise, the fact that the idea was developed or at least approved by the Labor government invites skepticism. Who, for example, chooses “the best and brightest minds”? Should it be done by logical argument? If so, you don’t need the direct participation of “the best and brightest,” for if you can accurately choose which is a logical argument, then you hardly need to contact their author; there are no copyright issues with policy proposals.

And going beyond the “three year electoral cycle” is all well and good, but what happens at election time when the Rudd government has abolished the Welfare State, the Department of Education, the Department of Health, etc? The best and brightest minds would advocate this, but it would surely mean Labor losing the next election, for one could not imagine the Liberal Party practising and praising classical liberal principles.

Political economy is quite a straightforward, simple and specialist discipline. It involves acknowledging that if you tax one group of people to give money to another, then one group benefits at the expense of another, and, consequently, the incentive for everyone (both tax-recipient and tax-payer) to satisfy customers rather than government diminishes. It also involves acknowledging that taxation is not voluntary, just like robbery is not voluntary. Allowing a bunch of pretentious academics to escape from university and practise political economy is like organising a robbery with genuine masterminds and long term planning behind it.

The best government is always made up of the less optimistic, who rightly believe that neither they nor anyone else are qualified to rule. But with a collection of self-proclaimed and government-sanctioned experts, one doubts whether the “experts” will not ask for a large scale confiscation of the property of civilians (through taxation) to fund their schemes. Chances are they are ignorant of economics, and will neither consider going through voluntary channels and approaching business with their ideas, nor try convincing the populace before they try convincing the government.

1. That daily reading the newspaper is a sign of intelligence.
2. That some newspapers are better than others.
3. That some universities are better than others.
4. That some political parties are better than others.
5. That brain is a fish food.
6. That voting is a solemn thing, but politics is not.
7. That it is one’s duty to vote, but not to understand the issues.
8. Both that global warming can be prevented by using less fossil fuels and that petrol prices are too high.
9. Both that celebrities are never happy and that everyone wants to be like them.
10. That Iraq was an honest mistake.

What generally unpopular positions do you currently hold?