"The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution."

"The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution. The revolution proceeds through conflict and strategic framing of polarised manufactured 'sides.' The issue is just an excuse (or mediator) to orient the conflict in the direction of Leftist 'progress'."

~ James Lindsay explaining the process of "dialectical progress"

FRIDAY MORNING RAMBLE: It’s mind-changing!

Ready to ramble round the interweb again?  Not counting the many fine posts here at NOT PC, Here’s the best liberty links I’ve spotted for you this week.

• This is how to honestly change your mind (in chronological order)
  1. “Maybe I’m missing something, but the TV3 story about Key and his vineyard sounds a bit daft to me: Key invested in the vineyard before he was elected and his investments were then placed into a blind trust – is he supposed to pretend he can’t remember buying a vineyard?”
  Maybe I’m missing something . . . – DIM POST
  2. “So the allegation is that Key transferred his assets into a company managed by his blind trust – but that he had visibility of the assets owned by that company. This contradicts his previous statements to Parliament. So they might have something there.”
  Okay now I see it – DIM POST
  3. “Shockingly enough it looks as if Labour’s latest attack against Key actually stacks up…”
  Stage 1 – DIM POST
• When you’re thinking about the eight-story prison rising beside the gateway to Auckland, towering over school playing fields blocking the view of the harbour and the city’s volcanic cones, just remember that that people who designed, built and gave permission for it to be built—which includes the council’s so-called Urban Design Panel—are the people that the Resource Management Act gives absolute say-so over the quality of the built environment.
  So why would you want to give them that power?
  Prison an "architectural monstrosity" - TVNZ
  Looming prison tower offends community – NZ HERALD
  "Architect" Phil Goff Invited To Give Speech Outside Mt Eden Prison – CAMERON BREWER
• Don’t get yourself too excited about the British Con-Lib government “slashing” their spending.  In just one short announcement of the cuts Liberty Scott counts four lies, two shifty evasions, one incompetent explanation—and a pretty limp-wristed attempt to cut anything very much at all.
  Much Ado About 1% – LIBERTY SCOTT
• “Chris Trotter writes an interesting piece on what may have lain behind National’s rejection of the Tuhoe ‘deal.’ Well worth reading.” [Hat tip Inquiring Mind]
  Coming Apart, Or Holding Together?  - CHRIS TROTTER
• “Over at the (low) Standard Marty G is proving once again that he doesn't know much about economics. He gives us Privatisation: The facts. Read them if you must. As a public service let me give some actual facts about privatisation.”
  Privatisation: the facts – ANTI DISMAL
  UPDATE: But there’s more!
  Privatisation: the "facts" – ANTI DISMAL
• Over at Kiwiblog and The Visible Hand, David Farrar and Matt Nolan show once again they know nothing about the Emissions Tax Scam, but plenty about spin.  Says Matt, quoted approvingly by the Manatee, “The ETS is a scheme to raise the funds to pay for our [sic] Kyoto Liability.  Even if you don’t believe in global warming, we [sic] have a liability that is based on carbon emissions.  As a nation, either people who produce the carbon pay for it – or everyone pays for it through higher taxes.” Or else “we” simply repudiate this simple scheme that Simply Simon Upton stupidly signed up to. 
  Fortunately their commenters “get” that, even if the spin doctors bloggers don’t.
  Nolan on ETS – NATIONAL PARTY SPIN BLOG
  National, Labour, Greens: You all get this, please help clear it up! - VALUE-FREE ECONOMICS BLOG
• But we need an Emissions Tax Scam to impress our trading partners, you say?  Bullshit, say the facts:
      Value of NZ trade with countries having some sort of trading scam themselves: $5 billion.   
      Value of NZ trade with countries having nothing of the kind: $34.5 billion.
      Countries outside the European Union who’ve shackled themselves with an Emissions
      Tax Scam: One.  Us.
  The Magical Twenty Nine Countries with an ETS – NO MINISTER
• So that’s just us and the European Union, then.  Oh, and California.  I wonder how are things going there…?
      “California, that former land of opportunity, was one of the first states to pass its own version of "cap and trade" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In 2007 when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the law, called AB-32, he said it would propel California into an economy-expanding, green job future. Well, a new study by the state's own auditing agency—its version of the Congressional Budget Office—has burst that green bubble.
      “The study released May 13 concludes that ‘California's economy at large will likely be adversely affected in the near term by implementing climate-related policies that are not adopted elsewhere.’ While the long-term economic costs are ‘unknown,’ the study finds that AB-32 will raise energy prices, ‘causing the prices of goods and services to rise; lowering business profits; and reducing production, income and jobs.’
      “The economic reality here is what the Legislative Analyst's Office calls ‘economic leakage.’ That's jargon for businesses and jobs that will ‘locate or relocate outside the state of California where regulatory-related costs are lower.’ The study says the negative impact on most California industries will be ‘modest,’ but energy-intensive industries—specifically, aluminum, chemicals, forest products, oil and gas and steel—’may significantly reduce their business activity in California.’”
   Cap and Flee: California refutes its own 'green jobs' policy - FLASH REPORT
• I haven’t watched it all yet, but regular reader Falufulu Fisi reckons that if you watch this five-part series on You Tube you’ll have a much clearer grasp of what I mean when I say that banks create money “out of thin air”; or when economists talk about “the organisation of debt into currency.”
  

• As they say:
  Debt Money-It’s the Ultimate Ponzi Scheme – DAVID McGREGOR
• What to do about North Korea?
  1) Perry de Havilland calls for the simplest solution, and his commenters explain to him why it’s not that simple.
  Crisis in Korea... - SAMIZDATA
  2) Hitchens hits it, especially in the last sentence!  The headline isn’t too bad either.
  How Kim Jong-il blackmails the West into supporting his evil North Korean regime. – CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
• Speaking of Hitchens, here he is talking to Kim Hill last weekend about, well, everything really. Agree or disagree, it’s wonderful to hear such pithy, articulate conversation.  Something to enjoy, and aspire to.
  Listen here. Download here.  40 min.
  Saturday Morning with Kim Hill: Christopher Hitchens – THE DAILY HITCHENS
• Okay, when is this going to get sorted:
  
  
  “According to the yellow CPI line our core state spending [sic] should now be around $40billion instead of the budgeted $64.7billion….”
  Crikey, even the Europeans know it’s time to sort this shit out, don’t they?  Don’t they??
  When and how?  - NO MINISTER
  Say It Isn't So! – RATIONAL CAPITALIST
• It’s already too late for America.
  Deficit Landmines Dead Ahead! – DOUG CASEY REPORT
• Who would have thought it? Second-hand appliance dealers conniving with beneficiaries to deceive Work and Income.  Looks like yet another confirmation of Milton Friedman’s Four Rules of Spending. Rule No. 3: “I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!” Or an X-Box.
  WINZ sting exposes beneficiary scam  - NZ HERALD
  Milton Friedman on the four ways you can spend money  - SIGNAL VS. NOISE
• “Of all the motivations for reforming the DPB, improving the lot of children is the most important… if [getting parents into] work isn't the answer then it must be more welfare. But if more welfare is given, more children will grow up on welfare and their expectations will be based on their environment and in 20 years time the advocates will still be calling for more welfare. More welfare is an ever-expanding downward spiral.”
  Cheaper to leave them on the DPB – LINDSAY MITCHELL
• Yet another story of how governments use the welfare state to manufacture their own voters. “A morality of sacrifice not only needs sacrificial victims, it also needs recipients. Hence it manufactures the latter in order to further immolate the former.” [Hat tip Thrutch]
  Cliff-Diving into Dependency, and Trolling for Democratic Votes – PAJAMA MEDIA
• Quite interesting...if we could buy a copier off the government...
  
  

• “In light of Randal Paul's views on abortion, reproduction, and end-of-life decisions, nobody should be asking whether Paul advocates too much liberty.”
  Rand Paul Wants Total Abortion Bans - ARI ARMSTRONG
• The Wall Street Journal and the Cato Institute have the third-to-last and second-to-last word on the Randal Paul kerfuffle. [Hat tip Vulcan’s Hammer]
  ”Even if Mr. Paul was speaking out of a principled belief in the rights of voluntary association, he was wrong on the Constitutional and historic merits. The Civil Rights Act of 1964—and its companion laws, such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965—were designed to address abuses of state and local government power. The Jim Crow laws that sprang up in the South after Reconstruction and prevailed for nearly a century were not merely the result of voluntary association. Discrimination—public and private—was enforced by police power and often by violence.”
  Rand Paul's Constitution: The Kentucky candidate's bad history  – WALL STREET JOURNAL
  ”Contending that only government power saved us from slavery and Jim Crow, it ignores the role of private power – the abolitionists, and the civil rights movement – that brought about that government power. More important, it invites us to believe that government had little or nothing to do with slavery and Jim Crow in the first place…”
  A Bum Rap for Limited Government – CATO
• Harry Binswanger gets the last word:
     ”Rand Paul (not named for Ayn Rand) is busily retreating from the principle of property rights, which he correctly applied to state his opposition to the portion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which denied the right of private businesses to discriminate on the basis of race.
      “What he should have said is that there's a right to be irrational, and racism is the most irrational form of collectivism.
      “Of course, that needs more explanation, because there's only a right to choose between rationality and (non-coercive) irrationality, not a primary right to be irrational. Rights exist to protect the exercise of rationality, which necessarily entails leaving people free to be irrational, as long as they don't initiate physical force.”
  What Rand Paul should have said [excerpt]  - HB LIST
• It looks increasingly likely that crony capitalism is at least partly to blame for the hash being made of the Gulf Oil Spill. Time to wheel out your public choice economists.
  “The familiar old trap is set: Do you want unfettered markets and oil spills or government regulation and safety?  The implied premise is that the oil industry operates in a free market. So, the argument goes, the only alternative is government regulation…[but] the Gulf oil spill occurred on property owned and managed by the federal government, and the operator-at-fault (BP) has been the most politically active in its industry.
  “Has BP been too busy spending money to [buy politicians, and to] impress the government and the public with how’“green’ it is to look after safety adequately?”
  ”…The free market will undoubtedly take the rap — but it’s an unjust rap. According to Reuters, ‘Like BP, both Transocean … and Halliburton, a contractor, also pumped money into the campaign war chests of senators who sit on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee.’
  ”I have a feeling the companies weren’t buying repeal of corporate favors.”
  The BP Spill: Self-Regulation, Public Property, and Political Capitalism – MASTER RESOURCE
• “Once again, an episode from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged leaps to life from behind closed doors in Washington, D.C. According to a recent report from The Washington Post, President Obama is angry about the British Petroleum oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico:

     ‘Since the oil rig exploded, the White House has tried to project a posture that is unflappable and in command.
    ‘But to those tasked with keeping the president apprised of the disaster, Obama’s clenched jaw is becoming an increasingly familiar sight. During one of those sessions in the Oval Office the first week after the spill, a president who rarely vents his frustration cut his aides short, according to one who was there.
    ‘‘Plug the damn hole,’ Obama told them.’

That’s the politician’s answer to every intractable problem: give orders, issue threats, and wait for obedience. But the creative human mind cannot take orders like that. Notice I didn’t say, ‘refuses to take orders.’ I said, ‘cannot take orders.’”
“Plug the damn hole!”  - VOICES OF REASON

• But don’t go thinking Obama is stupid—on foreign policy, or anything else for that matter.
  Obama: Neither Naïve nor Foolish nor Misguided  - RULE OF REASON
• “Everyone knows that the Obama administration’s decision to suspend consideration of applications to drill in the Arctic is driven by political considerations, some attempt to ‘respond’ to the BP mess in the Gulf. But what strikes me as just how willy nilly the state acts toward the goods and services that fuel civilization itself. The decision makes us all poorer on the margin, increases ‘dependency’ of the U.S. on foreign oil, drives up prices, and sets back social advance in every way – all in the name of some random attempt for one guy to appear ‘strong’ and ‘act’ in the face of an accident. It’s rarely been more obvious, day to day, that the machinery of the state, while pretending to be the caretaker of mother earth, only destroys hope for real human beings.
  Mises Economics Blog Playing Fast and Loose with Civilization – JEFFREY TUCKER

      A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a
glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two
beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses
between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social
systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration
of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is
an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings."
Ludwig Von Mises- Human Action

• The Roadkill Diaries calls “bullshit” on bleating about Gaza’s much-touted supply problems.
  Gaza Strip: Not Dry Enough! – SMALL DEAD ANIMALS
• Bet ya didn’t know that for all the bigotry and banging on the Australian “Liberal” Party and their fellow travellers have been doing about those nasty boat people taking over Australia, there’s been just 60 boats arriving this year.  Break through all the casual bigoty that even infests your basic  Australian newspaper report, and that’s the basic fact. It’s not like the place isn’t big enough to fit them in … or that the Australian economy doesn’t need them.
  Boat 60 arrives at Ashmore – WEST AUSTRALIAN
  Former PM takes stand against bigotry, shrugs off party – NOT PC
• You now how you’re always hearing that those nasty illegal immigrants are all criminals?  No, that’s something else that’s not true.
  New Crime Stats Contradict Anti-Immigration Hype- CATO AT LIBERTY
• How’s the Aussie dollar doing since the K.Rudd announced his Rape-The-Mining-Companies Tax? Um…
  
  
  How’s the Aussie doing? - CATALLAXY
• “ I often hear from extremely intelligent engineers that they have read all sorts of patents in the last decade that should not have been issued.  Despite their brilliance, I am usually pretty sure that they have no idea what they are talking about.”
  Patent Ignorance – STATE OF INNOVATION
• And while we’re on patents, let’s talk about the bane of “patent pools”: Antitrust.
  Patent and Antitrust Law   - STATE OF INNOVATION
  Does Cyberspace Need Antitrust? – ERIC CRAMPTON & DON BOUDREAUX
• All the presentations from the Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change are here, including presentations from Christopher Monckton, Richard Lindzen, Anthony Watts, Willy Soon , Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre; NZers Chris de Freitas, Bob Carter and Bryan Leyland, and ARI writer Keith Lockitch and Ayn Rand enthusiast Andrei Ilaryanov.
  4th International Conference on Climate Change – ENVIRONMENT & CLIMATE NEWS
• Lindsay Perigo summarises the entire Christian mythology in eight paragraphs.
  There’s more laughs than the Bible. And infinitely more erudition.
  The Story of the Lonely Goblin – LINDSAY PERIGO
• Something to think about: “why forbidding organ sales creates unnecessary dilemmas.”
  A sale would be cleaner  - REASON-PHARM
• Some history on the death penalty. “By the mid-fifteenth century crimes subject to the death penalty … included the following: rebellion, fraud, bigamy, incest, arson, theft, adultery, carrying off a woman against her will, blasphemy, moving signs of property boundaries, attacking someone, high treason, child murder, using dishonest weights and measures, murder, counterfeiting, rape, attempted suicide, striking someone to death, converting to Judaism, treason, having sex with animals, and sorcery.”  That’s quite a list, says Stephen Hicks.  “There has been a steady decline in the infliction of this punishment in every decade since the 1930’s … which seems a healthy development — except for that part about letting sorcerers off the hook.”
  The death penalty in fifteenth-century Europe – STEPHEN HICKS
• I bet you never really “got” commas at school either; yet they make life and reading so much easier. (Just ask the victims of the Panda who eats, shoots and leaves.) 
  Lisa Van Damme from the Van Damme Academy gives you the lesson you should have got in your school.
  



• Here’s some top-rate educational satire.  [Hat tip Montessori Ed]
  If you’ve been round this blog any time at all you’ll know by now I’m a keen advocate of Montessori schools, and an enthusiastic denouncer of Montessomething schools, i.e., schools with Montessori on their fancy signboards and hefty invoices, but nowhere inside their school.
  So here’s a website hilariously satirising the schools who foist fraud upon parents, and their children, by selling something they’re not delivering. It’s brilliantly done, right down to the school’s newsletter.
  Start with the page on teacher quality, which would be hilarious if it didn’t describe 95% of schools in New Zealand with the Montessori name on their letterhead.
  PS: Don’t worry if you don’t get the jokes.  Just click on the “Help” menu.
  Visit the Montessomething School! 
• "Magic, Objectivism, and Peikoff -- what more could you ask for?" Well, maybe Penn.  Or Teller…
  Leonard Peikoff Interview With Magician Steve Cohen - NOODLE FOOD
• A new DVD release of 1942's 'We the Living' introduces audiences to Rand's brilliant but obscure first novel. Fantastic! [Warning: There are spoilers]
  Love, Politics And Ayn Rand – FORBES MAGAZINE
• It’s time to stop building those stoopid goddamn social media websites.  Haven’t we got enough already!!!
  8 Websites You Need to Stop Building – THE OATMEAL
• You see it all the time but, well, “Why would someone advocate an idea that he knows to be false?"
  Putting the Cause Before the Truth – SHEA LEVY
• Just in case you were wondering what a city without billboards looks like…it’s not pretty.
  Publi-City or No Publi-City – ARKINET BLOG
• Here’s Django Reinhardt’s song ‘Minor Swing’ updated in Chocalat.
  

• And for those who are wondering where the “Ramble” title comes from…here’s Robert Johnson from 1936.
  

I think that’s me for now.
Have a great weekend!
PC

A story of two morons

Here's a story of two morons, only one of whom is called John.

John Key says, "Nanny State is storming through your front door," yet he plans to do nothing about it.  Notes Martin Bradbury at Tumeke:

[TV3's Sunrise co-host Oliver Driver] ran through a list of the Nanny State hit list and asked if John Key would change any of them. A slightly perturbed John Key had to stand unblinking as Oliver went through them…
    Driver: “Prostitution Reform Law”
    Key: “No”
    Driver: “Civil Union Act”
    Key: “No”
    Driver: “Repeal of Section 59”
    Key gulps: “We’ve always said that we wouldn’t do anything if the law is working”
    Driver: “Power saving light bulbs”
    Key: “No”

John Key is just dishonest, but the first moron really is you.  That is, if you think voting for John Key will alter any damn thing at all of what you dislike about the present government -- if you think that your wishes about what he might do will have any effect at all on what he will actually will do -- then you really haven't been listening, and you sure as hell haven't been thinking.  You're a moron.  You're ballast. You're a useful  idiot for your own damn destruction.

The second moron is Martin Bradbury himself.  "The point is made," says the moron. "Nanny State is a myth."  What a fuckwit. He's a fuckwit several times over, but he's really deeply idiotic if he thinks John Key is an advocate of ending the Nanny State, or has any idea even what it is (FFS, getting the government out of our bedrooms was not more Nanny State, but less).  And he's either blind or braindead if he really thinks Nanny State is a myth.  I know that he's in lust with big government and he's never seen a dictator he didn't like, but how could he possibly ignore all this?

The moron.

Nasty, brutish - and as stupid as a political journalist [update 3]

Whatever qualifications the Herald's John Armstrong has either as a journalist, or as a student of politics, he knows less than zero about economics -- and since he's paid to write about it (or since he's taken on the task unquestioned) -- he should learn a few basics, particularly before he starts peddling advice on the front page of the country's largest daily.

"Never mind inflation," says the numb nut right across this morning's front page, "recession needs big promises." And by "big promises" he really does mean a multi-billion dollar "spending splurge."  "infrastructure spending," says the ignoramus, "is ... the responsible thing  to do right now."

Sheesh, where on earth do you start with something as dumb as that, when all your reason tells you to respond by running screaming into the street yelling "No it fucking isn't, dumbarse!" ?

Do you point to Arnstrong's abject failure (along with most of his colleagues, unfortunately) to understand inflation?

Or do you start with the frankly destructive New York Times article by "Nobel-Prize winning economist" Paul Krugman that Armstrong points to and on which he relies, which maintains (correctly) that "All signs point to an economic slump that will be nasty, brutish — and long," and then demands as a solution that "increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered." 

Now, a prescription like this is sure to get the attention of big-spending interventionist governments and their supporters everywhere -- and of course it has ever since Krugman's hero John Maynard Keynes first opened his mouth with it seventy years ago -- and it has here too:  Helen Clark is now talking it up, and feeling her big-spending interventionist muscles. And John Key, too, is getting set to fill the same neo-Keynesian prescription that will attempt to cure the disease by giving us more of what caused it.

It's a National-Labour coalition, folks, both taking their cure from the same doctor.  Pity that the doctor is a quack whose prescription amounts to blood-letting as a cure for haemophilia.

You want to see nasty, brutish and long?  Then just look at what Krugman's neo-Keynesian prescription did in the thirties, as described by Dominic Lawson in last week's UK Independent:

    John Maynard Keynes, rather than Ludwig von Mises, is the economist whose name is currently being invoked on the airwaves in Britain. in his own day, too, Keynes obliterated Mises: it became fashionable to believe that Roosevelt's New Deal was a kind of successful rudimentary application of Keynesianism.
    Yet Roosevelt's policy of massive intervention by the state to prop up wage rates and inflate credit gets a much better press than it ever deserved. Consider this: in September 1931 the US unemployment rate was 17.4 per cent and the Dow Jones industrial Average stood at 140. By January 1938, unemployment was still at 17.4 per cent, and the Dow Average had dropped to 121...

So, no support there for Krugman's snake oil, unless your eyes can't see past the words "massive intervention" without heading off into excited hallucinations of Michael Cullen or Bill English wielding an open cheque book .

We've been over this before when the doctor quack got his prize.  Getting a Nobel for work on "analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity," doesn't mean you know jack shit about what to do in times of recession. And he doesn't.

I won't repeat at too great a length what I said the other day, quoting Ludwig von Mises, about this phoney failed prescription for recovery

• -- that interventionists would be right if their antidepression plans were to aim at a radical abandonment of credit expansion policies
• -- that the problem is not to elaborate infrastructure projects, but to provide the material means for their execution
• -- that the fundamental error of these projects consists in the fact that they ignore the shortage of capital goods 
• -- that while the only real problem is to produce more and to consume less in order to increase the stock of capital goods available, the interventionists want to increase (somehow) both consumption and investment
• -- that  the interventionists want the government to embark upon projects which are unprofitable precisely because they are unprofitable
• -- that the factors of production needed for their execution must be withdrawn from other lines of profitable employment that consumers consider more urgent, and the production of which would otherwise provide the means of formenting a genuine recovery
• -- and that the interventionists don't realise that such public works must considerably intensify the real evil, the shortage of capital goods, while destroying the very basis on which this shortage is to be remedied.

Okay, I will repeat myself (and Mises) just a little, but in the face of such destructive crap as is peddled on the front pages of our newspapers this really needs to be pointed out repeatedly: if you take away the capital resources that producers need in order to recover (which is what deficit spending does); and if by extra spending you continue to inflate costs, when it is the very correction of lower costs that is needed in order for producers to recover, then you are destroying the very means by which recovery is going to happen.  Understand, no?

You see, unlike Krugman's hero Keynes, whom history should record as the theorist who managed to extend the Great Depression of the thirties for more than a decade, Mises really did know what he was talking about.  As Lawson outlines,

   In his 1912 work, The Theory of Money and Credit, Mises declared that the corruption and distortion of money by the state and bankers ... was the principal cause both of inflation and – to coin a phrase – boom and bust...
    As the chief economic advisor to the Austrian government in the 1920s, Mises put his theories into practice and slowed down inflation in his native country (which, as a Jew, he later fled). He used his "cycle" theory to forecast that the "New Era" of apparently permanent prosperity in the 1920s was illusory, and that it would end in runs on banks and depression: The Wall Street crash of 1929 was exactly what Mises had predicted.

And today's Misesians predicted the present crash as well -- as you can see by checking the 'Who Predicted This?' section of the Mises Institute's Bailout Reader.

I won't labour the point that Krugman didn't get his Nobel for his grasp of what to do in a recession, but do you notice in the bullet-pointed summary above the repeated references to capital goods, part of an economy's capital structure?  What Krugman is fundamentally ignorant of, as Robert Murphy so carefully explains here, is capital theory -- of the existence and make-up of the economy's capital structure, which in the final analysis is what an economy really is,and which has been all but destroyed by the commodities bubble, the housing bubble and by the whole misallocation of resources brought about by the huge inflation of the money supply in recent years -- and which would be all but destroyed by the capital consumption implicit in Krugman's shiny short-term bottles of snake oil.

That, the economy's capital structure, is what fundamentally needs to be fixed -- but Krugman and Clark and Key and co don't even know it exists!

To be one up on all of them, and I promise you it won't take long, take a look at Murphy's entertainingly simple model of what a capital structure looks like, and how easy it is to screw it up, using a "hypothetical island economy composed of 100 people, where the only consumption good is rolls of sushi."

See how easily a man of Krugman's talents can screw up even a functioning capital structure (which is after all what the central bankers did with all that counterfeit capital they were creating at such volumes), let alone what they'll do to the economy now it's on life  support, and they want to take away the very oxygen it needs to survive.

Remember: nasty, brutish and long will be the result of following Krugman's exhortations to the interventionists to spend more.  But they'll still insist on you taking their medicine.  Why?  The answer's obvious: Have you ever seen a politician turn away an argument that says they can spend more?  Never happened. 

But it's the job of political journalists to know enough to tell them when they're wrong.  Sadly however, most of them -- like Armstrong -- don't appear even to know enough to tie their own shoes.

Like him they're mostly just bone from the neck up.

UPDATE  1:  Fortunately, one party at least understands that politicians spending money we don't have is not the answer, and nor is impeding the very people whom we need to be more productive.  I speak of course of Libertarianz two-part economic plan: their Don't-Spend-So-Goddamned-Much Plan  and their Get-The-Hell-Out-Of-The-Way Plan. 

Looks like on the evidence of his last paragraph here-- if not his earlier pledge to keep growing the state, -- Roger Douglas, at least, has been listening.  There's hope for him yet.

UPDATE 2: Austrian economist and senior lecturer at the Mises University Robert Murphy is interviewed on the boom, the bust -- and Krugman and Tyler Cowen and even "rational expectations" theorists -- and why Mises' Austrian Business Cycle Theory explained and predicted the bust, and the others didn't.  Listen here.  Good topical stuff.

UPDATE 3: Dumbarse.  After all that, I didn't even give you the link to Robert Murphy's superb article on the 'sushi economy.'  It's here.  And it's worth it.

"Me too" and mendacity on Nats' Maori policy

Despite talk that National has formed an understanding with the Maori Party that will allow them to do a deal after the election should both have the votes (a deal putting National into government and Pita Sharples into the Maori Affairs ministry), National has just released a Maori Affairs policy suggesting either a few problems for the talked-about deal -- or a few problems with the honesty of National's policy commitments.

As Liberty Scott accurately characterises it, it is "me-too" all over again:

• "Me too" on continuing to support (read - use your taxes to spend money on) Maori broadcasting, Kohanga Reo, racially-based housing, racially-based "professional development," racially-based health provision and the like," despite this "support" having led to what Scott describes as "appalling violence, abuse and intergenerational criminal underachievement of the underclass of predominantly Maori families, failing again and again, and worst of all breeding children in a climate of fear, abuse and neglect." National is for more of the same.
• "Me too" on "recognising the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document of New Zealand," despite it being too hastily written and lacking too much to bear the weight of such an accolade.
• "Me too" on "more support" i.e., taxpayers money, for the kangaroo court that is the Waitangi Tribunal. (National's David Farrar says "I especially like the commitment to speeding up the Treaty settlements by shifting the office to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, having independent facilitators and greater resourcing for the Waitangi Tribunal."
• "Me too" on their backsliding on the deadline by which the Waitangi Gravy Train will be brought to a halt, and nothing at all about the fullness or finality of settlements. Scott has more on both these points.
• "Me too" on establishing "post-settlement governance entities that best meet [Maori's] multi-dimensional roles and responsibilities," which presumably includes even more veto powers for iwi under the Resource Management Act.
• "Me too" on the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

Yes, they do promise to "reform the Resource Management Act to facilitate growth and development in the aquaculture industry" -- and the prospect of giving some weight to property rights to achieve this is dangled -- and they do promise to abolish the Maori seats, but it's this last and their position on the Foreshore and Seabed Act that will, at least on paper, pose the greatest problem for any coalition with Hone and Pita and Tariana.

And a deal with National is on the cards. Since the notion of reducing state spending on racially based policies is alien to National's policy document, one has to wonder if, like the Treaty Settlement policy, it's primarily about keeping the Maori Party happy?

But what about the policies on the Maori Seats and the Foreshore & Seabed Act? Opposition to Labour's Foreshore and Seabed Act, which removed from Maori the right to go to court and prove in common law their ownership rights over foreshore and seabed, led directly to the formation of the Maori Party. As Hone Harawira said recently, why would they give support to the party that introduced what is the worst violation of Maori rights for one-hundred and fifty years? (On which he's correct, incidentally.)

Pita Sharples said after National's policy release that abolition of the Maori seats is for Maori to determine (not as long as it represents a racial gerrymander it isn't) and National's stated policy on foreshore and seabed is "problematic" for any coalition deal ... "but they expect to see changes."

Now, John Key refuses to either confirm or deny whether or not those specific, high-profile marquee policies, either of them, are negotiable, but yesterday morning on National Radio he explicitly refused to rule it out -- and we all know what that means in politics, don't we.

So this looks like talking out of both sides of the mouth, doesn't it. Promising something in public to the electorate that the electorate wants to hear, while in private promising the Maori Party precisely the opposite in order to keep them on side.

Which all suggests that National intends either to break their promise to the electorate by backtracking on one or both of these big ticket policy commitments, or to break an understanding with the Maori Party -- that they will go easy on abolishing the Maori seats, and work towards abolishing the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

Which do you think is most likely? And what does this say about National's honesty?

UPDATE:  Pita Sharples confirms the analysis in an interview to air tonight on Alt TV.

Red and Blue Teams are both driving people away

Record number of Kiwis head to Aust ... the highest in nineteen years.

Statistics New Zealand said there was a net outflow of 33,300 people to Australia in the year to August. That's the highest figure since the February 1989 year. Some 2900 people packed their bags in August itself, up from 1900 a year ago.

And the Blue Team are still using the departure of some of NZ's best people to damn the present government ... oblivious even now that emigration is a long-term decision, and since National has looked for months like the likely winner come the election, the record number of departures is as  much an indictment of them and of the low expectations of a Key-led administration as it is of the present Clark regime.

Good people are leaving in their droves, and they see nothing from either side of the aisle to keep them here.

That's a real tragedy.

Experience? In what?

I love Ed Cline's piece on 'Demagogues and Circuses,' which includes a pithy observation on the latest American issue du jour: political experience, As you'll see, it has a local resonance, perhaps even to John Key's claim in this interview to be like Obama.

    Much has been made during the presidential campaign of the candidates' experience or lack of it, in both domestic and foreign affairs. This is a straw man...  not a single candidate lacks experience in corruption, venality, malfeasance, concession, logrolling, compromise, theft, and a multitude of other misdemeanors.
    Obama is not the stainless prophet ready to lead the country in a "new direction." He is as guilty as any of the rest of them.
    John McCain is an enemy of freedom of speech. His campaign finance law has made it more difficult for any one to oppose the collectivist policies that his alleged opponents "across the aisle" regularly propose...
    What all the candidates seem to have lacked are any commitment to freedom, and the integrity to proclaim it and act on it. But, it would be an error to think that. Neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party is a friend of those things. In point of fact, both parties are committed enemies of freedom. Whether McCain or Obama wins the White House in November, there would be no "change" and no "new direction," but more of the same movement in the same direction, which is statism. The only difference between the candidates is the preferred rate of acceleration in that direction.

Et tu John Boy?

Let the bullshit begin

The National Party's billboard campaign, now started, is singularly weak.  Not because the issue is not an important one -- NZ's loss of some of its most talented people to the convicts on the western island is a slowly unwinding disaster for this country -- and not just because the the billboard's style lacks clarity or force. See:

              

It's singularly weak because National itself must shoulder a fair share of the blame for the continuing exodus of some of our best and brightest, and not just because they were responsible in the past for the likes of the Resource Management Act and the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, but for what people think they'll do in the future -- which in just two words, is very little.

You see, if the Labour Government's campaign against prosperity is what is pushing New Zealanders in their droves to leave in search of something better -- a poll back in May suggested as many as 1 in 10 adult New Zealanders is "fed up with high interest rates, worried about the housing market, and want better wages," and is thinking about leaving the country to get them -- then the National Party's promises and their campaign against their own party's principles is doing nothing to make anyone consider changing their plans -- and I'd suggest National's cheerleaders and their strategists (if such a species exists) reflect on that point. 

If the Labour-led Government is driving them away, then the prospect of a National-led government is doing nothing to arrest the flood.  Ask yourself why?

Emigration isn't a spur-of-the-moment decision -- it's a life-changing decision most people make based on long-term expectations.  For most of the last year those expectations would include the quite reasonable assumption that National will win the November election,  yet that assumption is doing nothing to stem the flow.  

They're not just showing a lack of confidence in what Labour is already doing to the country, they've already factored in their expectations of how little a John Key administration will do to change the country, and they're expressing almost equal lack of confidence in what National will do -- which as we know is to do nothing and change nothing. 

In short, they've realised that Labour-Lite will be just is as bad for their future as Labour was.  And that's singularly tragic.

I'll say no more now, since I said much more back in May.  I'll conclude instead with a line from an excellent piece by one John Gardner, a North Shore voter who's only leaving the country temporarily, but who articulates well the wary plague-on-all-your-houses departing NZers must feel about the politicians who make their lives a misery:

    But come election time and the truth is nakedly revealed. In their heart of hearts they think we are backward infants rather than thinking adults.
    I'm glad to be freed from being treated with such disdain for a while.

Gardner is returning.  1 in 10 won't.  And National has nothing up their sleeve to stop that besides a billboard.

Bring on the artistic dead rats

Labour's arts, culture and heritage policy is to make the poorest taxpayers pay for the 'art,' 'culture' and 'heritage' favoured by the middle classes. It's a form of middle class welfare that pays off in establishing an establishment that feels duty bound (mostly) to blow timely air kisses towards their paymasters.

So that's Labour's policy -- to make people pay for TV programmes they don't watch, artists they don't rate, symphony orchestras they don't listen to, and operas they don't attend (Lord knows I love going to the opera and the NZSO, but that's no reason to make other people pay for it). Now National has released their own arts, culture and heritage policy for Election '08, and like every other National policy for '08 it can be summarised in just two words:

"ME TOO."

Making nanny state bigger one dead rat at a time

When one points out to would-be National voters all the dead rats John Key is making them swallow, they suck it up, wipe off their chin, and talk with glazed-over enthusiasm about the new age that Flip Flop Boy is going to usher in once the present dishonest corrupt government is replaced with another one of different hue, but similar policy outlook.

The dead rats are worth it, say the strategists. If we don't frighten the horses, then we'll come stampeding home come November. The dead rats are worth it, agree the poll respondents -- just as long as the dishonest corrupt government is our dishonest corrupt government.

As a strategy it's barmy, and just crying out to be sucker punched.

You see, it's not just the dead rats of the past that you and John Boy are going to swallow -- and here I'm talking to those of you dopey enough to swallow this 'appeasement as election strategy' strategy -- you need to think about all the dead rats to come.

Yes, you've sucked up all the dead rats served up so far when you thought you had to, and you've even swallowed on occasions. You've said to yourself, "I can accept this," while holding your nose and swallowing ... but smart Labour Labour strategists will already be drawing up lists to try and see if you'll also swallow this, once John Boy plants his 'me too' kiss upon it.

If you were a smart Labour strategist (and in this context 'smart' only means 'smarter than Murray McCully, so we're not talking rocket scientists here), you wouldn't be complaining that Key's "innoculation" of National's "scarier" policy positions makes it hard to paint them in the privatising, Roundtable-hugging way you'd like to be able to, instead you'd be observing the me-tooing with glee, and looking for a chance to use it.

How? By making nanny state bigger one dead rat at a time.

The smart Labour strategist would already be drawing up a list of election bribes so rat-like in their cunning, so obviously socialist in their aim, that John Boy and his supporters will be left with splinters on both cheeks as they try to perch on both sides of an irreconcilable fence in response.

Labour can't lose here, if they do it right: if John Boy and the Flip Flop Team do keep signing up to the dead rats -- and the latest student election bribe may be just a trial balloon in this respect -- then the election agenda for the next three months and the policy agenda for the next three years will both be set by Labour strategists, with all the growth in nanny government that will ensue, and all the election bribes that implies -- and all the drop in support for the Flip Flop Boys that can be predicted as even the blindest blue-tinged supporter realises that the effect of his party's strategy is that his party's leaders are in reality batting for the other team.

Socialism to the left of me, socialism from the right -- how could a Laborite really lose?

The job of the smart Labour strategist will be to find that 'equilibrium' point at which the dead rats being swallowed by the Blue Team start to choke their blue-tinged support, and then just go a little bit more. 'More,' in this case, meaning more bribes, more nannying, more socialism.

The job of the smart National strategist -- if such a person actually exists in their 'zero from three' strategy team -- should be to realise this now, several weeks before the election, while there's still time to promote a vision in which National actually represents a significant policy alternative.

And the smart National voter? That's another oxymoron. If more bribes, more nannying and more socialism is what you want, then keep right on supporting the Blue Team's 'me too' strategy. As long as you do, they'll keep right on offering it, as indigestible as that will eventually prove to be.

UPDATE:  Another dead rat has just washed up on the electoral beach: Liberty Scott reports "Labour has now pledged over $400 million of your taxes (not petrol tax but general tax) to pay for the frightfully expensive Transmission Gully motorway. This doesn't even cover half the cost."

And John Boy's response?  "Me too."

ECE: Me too.

National has just released its policy on early childhood education for the election, specifically on Labour's forced retraining, which has single-handedly led to severe teachers shortages, and its ill-named 'twenty hours free' policy that's led to the diminution of quality in early childhood centres.

Here's the short summary of National's policy response: Me too.

Kiwisaver? Me too.

Whatever the questions about the precise details of National's position on Kiwisaver, and Kate Wilkinson and Shane Ardern appear to have different views to their leader over what precisely those details should be, there are three things about National's position on Kiwisaver that are abundantly clear:

• they're going to keep it.
• there will be "no radical changes" to it;
• they could have killed it.

How could they have killed it when they're in opposition? Simple. They could have killed it at birth if they'd wanted too with one sentence delivered as unambiguously as they know how: "If elected, we will kill this bureaucratic mare's nest and return your money to you." Since signing up to Kiwisaver was a decision made by taxpayers based almost wholly on their expectation of the scheme's political support over its lifetime, the success or otherwise of the mare's nest was wholly dependent right from its inception on the degree to which people assumed it had cross-party support.

By announcing that they would deal to it as forthrightly as Muldoon once did to the last compulsory savings scheme Labour dreamed up, at a stroke it would have rendered Cullen's successor stillborn -- as I pointed out at the time. Instead, we're now encumbered with it, with all the impositions on small business employers that are now being more widely understood, all the implications for ongoing state control of capital markets that will become only too clear over time -- and the ongoing annual $2 billion cost of the Kiwisaver subsidy bill that John Key and Michael Cullen are forcing down taxpayers' throats.

Once again, we pay the price for John Key's 'me too.'

How many dead rats will John Key make *you* swallow?

Near enough everyone by now is aware that John Key has been swallowing dead rats to make himself look the way he thinks an electable politician should look.  He's swallowed enough dead rats already to make a bishop sick.

Interest-free student loans to bribe university-age voters? Me too. KiwiSaver? Me too. Foreign policy? Me too. Welfare for Working families?  Me too. Waffling on about climate change and emissions trading? Me too. Privatisation?  Cap on GP's fees? Bulk funding for schools?  There's the faintest whiff of controversy? Oh, go on then, me too.

There is nothing National will not do for power, including abandoning whatever principles it ever had, and fooling every supporter it ever had about what it stands for and where it's really going. 

But I'm not really here this morning to remind of the dead rats that Flip Flop Boy has already swallowed, I'd like to point out, or remind you, about just a few of the dead rats he's going to insist that you swallow.  As Steve Pierson says at The Standard (yes, Virginia,The Standard), "It strikes me there is a disconnect between what prospective National voters expect it to do in government and what it has actually promised it would do." 

"Disconnect" is the kindest way to describe the gap between what most Blue Team voters expect, and what National will deliver -- the size of that gap is the measure of cynicism of National's campaigners. 

Think power prices are too high and National will know how to lower them? Think again -- it was them who signed up to Kyoto, and who introduced the RMA.

Think petrol prices are too high and expect National to slash the fuel tax? Hell, no - Maurice Wimpianson has already ruled that out. 

How about reversing the anti-smacking law?  Not a chance -- Flip Flop Boy has already ruled that out. 

'Fixing' law and order?  They've got no more clue than the Red Team what to do. 

'Fixing' the RMA?  Nick Smith couldn't even fix a good going-away dinner - and he should.

'Fixing' the economy?  Who are you kidding.

Or 'fixing' the Electoral Finance Act?  Have you any idea what they will actually introduce as a replacement, or how -- because they sure don't have a clue. 

Reversing Labour's Emissions Trading Scheme? The bastards have got their own anti-industrial wet dream they want to introduce.  

Think they'll fix the die-while-you-wait health system, or the state's factories of illiteracy laughingly called schools? Are you kidding -- the health and school systems are the ones they introduced.

Or make serious tax cuts -- the sort of tax cut that would leave a Treasurer crying?  Hell no. Not in a million fiscal quarters.

So why would you even considering voting for the bastards?  They still don't even know from one day to the next whether they're a party of compulsion or not. No wonder NZers are leaving in their droves, even with the expectation of a National Government come November.

As a commenter says at The Standard, watching National voters after the election will be like watching a friend who starts dating 'HotChickHot4U' off the internet, and she turns out to be a scam artist who ends up with half your house...  Self-delusion is not compulsory, it’s a choice. And if people can’t be bothered to try and find out what they’re getting, they get what they deserve."

How many dead rats can you swallow?  And why on earth would you want to?

Here's Monty Python.

UPDATE: "You vill play schport!" says Nanny Key.  Jawohl, Herr Neville!

Sunday School: Blasphemy

More blasphemy this Sabbath, but this time with humour.

                                   

Don't worry if you don't get the joke -- I had to have it explained to me too.  I don't think you'll have any problem understanding this one: Rowan Atkinson welcoming you to Hell:

                           

It's not just Labour who shoulders the blame for 'brain drain'

It's just tragic watching New Zealanders with get-up-and-go who are getting up and going to Australia.  These people were New Zealand's backbone -- skilled tradespeople, middle managers, nurses, teachers, young doctors.

With numbers leaving already in their thousands (and the graph at right from Bernard Hickey's site suggests the number is if anything accelerating), a recent poll suggests as many as 1 in 10 adult New Zealanders is "fed up with high interest rates, worried about the housing market, and want better wages," and is thinking about leaving the country to get them.

    Kiwis say New Zealand is no longer the safe and happy country they grew up in and many are fed up with being told how to run their lives, and not enough attention going on law and order and controlling crime.

Since these are all problems either manufactured or made worse by government, it's only natural the 'brain drain' has already become an election issue -- and the National Party DVD in which John Key stands in the middle of an empty football stadium to show the numbers that leave annually for Australia strongly suggests his party intends to make the transtasman exodus a major election issue. But as the Herald points out,

    National's right to point to the increase in the figures is not unqualified: Key may like to remind himself that when National took office in 1990 it inherited an almost-unheard-of transtasman net migration gain of 1200 which it managed to turn into a loss of almost 25,000 by the time it lost the Treasury benches to Labour at the end of the decade. The worst year ever was to March 2001, arguably as attributable to National as to Labour. And he might like to specify what precisely a National-led Government would do to turn the tide...

Precisely.  It's all very well playing "me too" to win an election, but it's no good when it's those very policies they're "me too-ing" that are driving people away.

And here's something that should really concentrate the minds of those in the National Party who want to use the trans-Tasman exodus as an election issue: since most people emigrate based on long-term expectations (and included in those expectation would be the quite reasonable assumption that National will win the November election), they're not just showing a lack of confidence in what Labour is already doing to the country, they're expressing almost equal lack of confidence in what National will do.  They've already factored in their expectations of how little a John Key administration will do to change the country, and they've realised Labour-Lite is as bad for their future as Labour.

In other words, the reason for that empty stadium John Key's using for electioneering is as much him and his party as it is Helen Clark. 

Think about that one.

BERNARD DARNTON: "What was the question again?"

Here's the core of Libertarianz leader Bernard Darnton's speech at the Libz conference over the weekend.

2008 looks good for all of us who have struggled to dislodge Helen Clark from the Premiership.  The Labour government no longer looks invincible.  Its ministers look more and more foolish every day.

We have a finance minister who hates money; a foreign minister who hates foreigners, and a police minister who blames a month of rising crime on a full moon -- suggesting that, under this government, crime will only fall when we start having months without full moons. Lunacy indeed.

There are many reasons for wanting rid of Labour.  Labour has continued the destruction of New
Zealanders' property rights: vandalising Telecom (our largest listed company); denying forest owners their newly minted carbon credits; and confiscating the foreshore and seabed from its rightful owners -- not to mention the myriad abuses of the Resource Management Act.

Labour has squandered a decade of economic golden weather -- extorting wealth from the creative and spending the gains like  a drunken sailor on an engorged, vampiric bureaucracy.

Most ominously, Labour has taken every opportunity to silence dissent: threatening charities
with the loss of their charitable tax status if they criticise the government; banning the use of
parliamentary images for satire or ridicule; and, with the Electoral Finance Act, attempting to muzzle
everyone during election year.

With this list of crimes against freedom, who can't welcome Labour's two-year slide in the polls and
National's complementary rise?  I for one will be damn glad to see the back of Helen Clark, come November. But I'm not so sure I'll be pleased to see the front of John Key.

National Party acolytes will tell you that National is “a broad church.”  What that means is that National is a brand name.  It doesn't stand for anything.  To National, politics is a sport -- they'd quite like the blue team to beat the red team, for all the reasons we all like our teams to win out over the other teams, but like all sports teams there's no fundamental difference between them and the other team.  In this respect, John Key is the perfect captain.

Witness National's “me too” politics. Interest-free student loans to bribe university-age voters? Me too.  National orginally said it would oppose interest free student loans "with every bone in its body." Now, not only will National keep interest free loans but will also introduce a ten percent voluntary repayment bonus, meaning that I can borrow $10,000 on Monday, pay back $9,100 on Tuesday and pocket the discount.

Where are the bones in National's body now -- in particular the 33 vertebrae?

This is only one example of how we're going to see a "me too" election from the Blue Team.  We've seen it already.  KiwiSaver? Me too. Foreign policy? Me too. Waffling on about climate change? Me too. Cap on GP's fees? There's the faintest whiff of controversy? Oh, go on then, me too.

Even National's greatest recent challenge, the Electoral Finance Act wasn't met with outrage. It was
simply taken as an opportunity for point-scoring against the red team. They didn't ask for freedom, they asked for "consensus."

If the question at the next election was simply how to get rid of Labour then the answer itself would be simple: vote National. However, the question at the next election is not how to get rid of Labour. It is how to end Labour's assault on our freedom.   John Key's National Party shows no signs of being willing, ready or able to end that assault. And that means that voting National is not the answer.

A vote for National sends the message to all parties that it's business as usual. And business as usual is exactly what we don't want. Only a vote for Libertarianz says that the game is up. We'd like our freedom back please.

NB: Keep an eye out on the Libz TV site for the video of Bernard's speech to appear soon.
Inside this Issue:
1. What was the question again? – Bernard Darnton
2. Three Simple Remedies for Housing affordability – Peter
Cresswell
3. Libertarianz Conference 2008 – Craig Milmine
4. Compulsory Third Party Insurance Nonsense – Liberty
Scott
Libertarianz on Campus – Daniel Aguilar
5. Letters to the editor
6. Libertarianz Press Releases
7. Deadline Approaching for Candidates – Craig Milmine
8-9. Candidate Nomination Forms
10-11. Support Libertarianz
12. Contact Details

Yet another reason not to vote National ... (updated)

Every week brings another reason to realise that if you want any real change at the next election, then Labour-Lite are not the answer.

This weekend Flip Flop Boy has confirmed that his party will not be running on even the relatively timid freeing up of factory schools that is bulk funding -- which three years ago the Nats said was "the first step towards providing the flexible education system that parents wanted."  Apparently they now think that the Ministry knows much better than schools and parents how to provide "flexibility" in the state's factory schools.

And he's also confirmed that getting the government's $30 billion worth of dinosaurs off the taxpayers' hands is also off the agenda, by announcing that selling assets will be no part of a National Government's work under his spineless leadership -- not even the "pretty timid" partial asset sales floated by Bill English "as a way of raising capital for new infrastructure."  Reports The Press, "Key overturned years of National Party policy by making the U-turn on asset sales, saying preparing state-owned enterprises for sale would 'not be a good use of our time'." One wonders what a better use of their time could be, since at this stage there's nothing on National's horizon?

Their time won't be spent overturning the anti-smacking law, which Key personally insisted his MPs vote into law.

They won't be spending it overturning Michael Cullen's "No Bloody Foreigners" legislation, as they all but confirmed during the Auckland airport negotiations.

It won't be spent getting the ogre of the Resource Management Act off property owners' backs -- this is, after all, law that National itself introduced, and from which it has never resiled.

They won't be spending it gutting the NZQA -- they introduced that one too.

They won't be spending it getting rid of the Maori seats -- that's another one they've rolled over on.  Or slowing down the Waitangi gravy train that they themselves helped to kick off.  One law for all'?  Not with this mob.  Too busy bending over and saying "me too."

They won't be spending it reinstating a credible defence force -- "we've lost that argument too," they've effectively said.

They won't be overturning the interest-free student loans that Don Brash called "an irresponsible election bribe" -- a policy National once promised to oppose with "every bone in our bodies."  If they had any.

They won't be doing anything to overturn Labour's Welfare for Working Families programme that has made beneficiaries of so many of the country's middle classes.

On every point that Labour stands for, National just says "me too" -- which means they won't be doing a damned thing to work towards their party's purported goal of minimising the government and keeping them out of our lives -- which means there is no reason that National is seeking power, beyond the reason that National would quite like power -- which means there is simply no reason, no reason at all, for any freedom lover to vote National, and no way in hell that anyone who does vote National can pose as a freedom lover. 

If you want any genuine alternative, then National are not the answer.  They have no answer. Every week just reconfirms that.