GUEST POST: Stateless Standards

Regular readers will have noticed that I’ve been a bit distracted recently, the reason for which is mostly that I’ve been moving into a new office in Dominion Road (about which more in due course), and partly because local politics is presently so lack-lustre it’s barely worth commenting on. 

But rather than disappoint both of you regulars by having just spartan offerings scattered across the blog, I’ve decided instead to seize the opportunity to post a few of the more provocative pieces from the earlier pages of Not PC and The Free Radical magazine. So here, from the 1996 pages of what was then Lindsay Perigo’s Free Radical, is a classic by the curmudgeonly Bob Jones.

Stateless Standards

The debate following publication of my book Prosperity Denied* has exposed the real beliefs of those who support the Reserve Bank Act while purporting to be market adherents.  What in fact they believe in is nothing more than private ownership. But ownership is meaningless if subject to controls and taxation.

As I explained in my book, true market believers recognise that all economic laws impede the market’s functioning** and ultimately result in the opposite outcome of that intended.

For example, let us imagine there were no health and hygiene laws applying to restaurants or no building standards***, and consider the possible outcome.

The socialist, with his inherent contempt for individuals capability of making their own judgements, would claim the outcome would be mass poisoning.  Indeed, it goes without saying by inference, that anyone who supports the current regime of restaurant health standards has that view, otherwise he would not see the need for such regulations.  But is he correct?

If there were no standards regime, undoubtedly and inevitably some customers would be poisoned and some even die.

But mindful of that possibility, people would simply not eat out—at least in theory.

Yet, as is evident, people do want to eat out—and it’s here the market would swing into play, filling the void of people’s desires.

What would eventuate would be Moody’s or Standard & Poors type rating organisations establishing their own hygiene codes****, which would probably be similar to the existing ones currently monitored by local government inspectors.

So why bother, you ask?

Well, the answer is the same as always when it comes to comparing the relative performance of private and public ownership.

A private standards setting and policing organisation, unlike the current public one, would be more efficient and therefore cheaper, and more effective.

The public health inspector will always be more lenient on offenders for a variety of reasons.  Currently a non-compliant kitchen owner is issued a notice allowing him a period of time to correct the problem, but still allowing him to carry on business.  A private entity could not afford that risk.  Non-compliance would mean the immediate withdrawal of the rating certificate, perhaps in the form of a colourful sign displayed in the door just like credit card signs.  If it wasn’t there then customers would shy away.

The net result: higher standards and lower policing costs, and also a fairer user-pay cost burden.  The cost of the current inspector system falls on all rate payers.  This way, the cost would be incurred by restaurant owners and be borne, albeit indirectly, by restaurant patrons.

A lax inspectorate would risk their entire business and additionally, given a poisoning occurrence, could open up the ratings entity to a damages action.

And what of restaurants not participating?  I doubt if any would survive but should they, well, the customers accepted the risk with open eyes and any consequence would be their problem alone.  The market economy is all about individuals making their own uninterfered-with decisions, weighing risks, and bearing the consequences of their judgements.

Frankly, I doubt any restaurants would survive if they didn’t buy a rating company’s services.

Exactly the same thing can be said about building standards, like restaurants, administered at great cost***** and generally inefficiently with only a marginal (and therefore unfair) user-pay aspect.

Who would buy a high-rise apartment, or even an ordinary bungalow, if it didn’t comply with an established ratings organisation’s standards?

Who would rent a factory, apartment or office if it didn’t have a compliance certificate?

The answer is: nobody.

Yet building controls and the permit and inspection system unnecessarily remain in public control, are notoriously inefficient and, in not being user-pays, are inequitable.

There’s a general belief that New Zealand enjoys a market economy, yet nothing could be further from the truth.  On a scale of one to ten, we’re probably only on the second rung at best.

Currently, all that can be said about the New Zealand economy is that it’s a private ownership, private enterprise system, but a market economy it ain’t.  Basically, it’s fascist, with its private ownership structure subject to a mass of directions, licensing and other control factors vested in central and local government.

* * * * *

* The book was a full-blooded attack on what was then Don Brash’s Reserve Bank, and the Reserve Bank Act that set it up (partly, it must be said, because as a developer-as-was Bob fancied a bit of inflation). A decade-and-a-half after publication, sitting midst the wreckage that the Reserve Bank’s meddling with the money supply created, you’d have to say Bob is at least partially vindicated.

** Especially those that set up a Banking Czar to dictate market rates!

*** A situation contemplated by at least a few intelligent types in the Department of Building and Housing. (And it’s not often I’ll use words like “intelligent” and “Department of Building and Housing” in the same sentence.)

**** That is to say, Moody’s or Standard & Poors type rating organisations without the sort of govt monopoly that  Moody’s and Standard & Poors enjoy, and without which their incompetence in the financial crisis would have been duly punished by the market—if indeed they had not already been punished for manifest prior incompetence.

***** And, as the leaky homes fiasco proved, at great (and unnecessary) financial risk to ratepayers.

FREE RADICAL 81: The Stimulus Edition [with a competition update]

Here’s what we have for you in the very latest Free Radical magazine, going to press as we speak . . .  and you won’t believe the calibre of the writers in this line up!

Come Now, Let’s Do the Stimulus?

The Free Radical’s Bumper Stimulus Edition gives you all the stimulation you need to say you’re not dancing.   Everything you need to understand why throwing fiscal fuel on a financial fire will only fan the flames; from economics for the intelligent layman, to the only comparison I’ve seen that cogently compares what major western countries actually did during the Great Depression – and which of them actually worked out.  Everybody you need to read to understand what happened this time, what needs to happen now, and why it mostly isn’t – by people who really do know what they’re talking about, from academics (yes, we’ve tracked down the good ones!) to New York Times best selling authors.

But that’s not all.

We’ve got the original Riff Raff, Richard O’Brien, creator of the ever popular Rocky Horror Show and one of the few men to be immortalised in bronze in Hamilton’s main street.  He tells our man Graham about a life lived well.

It’s been two hundred years since Charles Darwin was born, and one-hundred and fifty since his most famous book was published – and in every year of those one-hundred and fifty it’s been causing controversy. Vincent Gray adds to the controversy with a piece that should rile religionists and Objectivists alike.

It’s only been a few years since the film Amélie knocked everyone’s socks off. Daniel Wahl explains why it did.

It’s been only a matter of weeks since the disastrous Victorian bushfires. Ben O’Neill puts the blame squarely where it belongs.

And as I write this, National’s Select Committee Inquiry into Climate Change has begun to work out how, at one and the same time, the Key Government can both tax us and impose carbon rationing. Christopher Monckton’s Open Letter to John Key concludes in this issue with a comprehensive demolition of whichever scheme they care to throw at us.

Send it to your MP now, while you still have the chance.

All this and much, much more – including Lindsay Perigo on the renaissance of Atlas Shrugged, Peter Cresswell (that’s me) on the power of architecture,  puts man in the possession of this earth -- in the most stimulating Stimulus edition ever!

Get ready to get your copy now. Head to the Free Radical Store now to subscribe (or resubscribe) now --and make sure you’re included in the first mailout -- or to order up your own full-colour digital copy..

Stimuliciously Yours,
Peter Cresswell

Now take note that this is a mail-order only issue. To get your copy, head straight to the Free Radical Store and click subscribe now to be included in the latest mail-out, or to have a full-colour digital copy emailed to you.  Or, if you just want a hard copy or six of this issue, then deposit $9(inc. p+p) for each issue to ASB account 12 3016 0561084 00 (add your name in the ‘From’ field of your online banking form), and then email undergroundpress@xtra.co.nz or fax (09)638 9445 with your details, and Shirley will have your copies winging their way to you before you can say ‘Stimulation!’

UPDATE 1:   To celebrate the new issue, I’m going to give away a full-colour digital copy of the magazine to the first four NOT PC readers who can email me with the answer to the following question: “What four word question runs through the first half of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged like a refrain?” HINT: It starts with the word “Who.”
    Email your answers to me at organon@ihug.co.nz, with FREE RAD COMPETITION in the subject line.

UPDATE 2: Congratulations to the competition winners: we’ve found our four champions.  :-)

Christopher Monckton's OPEN LETTER to John Key: “Global Warming” Is Not A Global Crisis.” PART TWO: The Policy Responses

As the government’s Select Committee inquiry kicks off with all manner of fabricated non-science presented to it, The Free Radical is thrilled to be publishing an Open Letter letter from one of the world’s leading climate ‘skeptics’ to the world’s newest Prime Minister on the very subjects the Select Committee says it is considering.

The last Free Radical magazine, issue #80, featured this world exclusive: Part One of ‘Christopher Monckton's Open Letter to John Key’ on the science of so called Climate Change: a thorough debunking by Christopher Monckton of the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.

The so called science, says Monckton in that Letter, is “a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, but is now scientifically discredited. “

Since featuring Part One Monckton’s letter in The Free Radical, the Open Letter on the science of so called Climate Change has gone far and wide -- thanks to Free Radical and NOT PC reader, who asked for electronic copies to pass on to “opinion makers.”

In the forthcoming issue, out Monday, Monckton completes his Open Letter, this time covering the political responses to so called Climate Change. 

Below are just some of the many highlights in what is a thorough debunking of any of the political prescriptions chosen for what is a thoroughly politicised pseudo-scientific phenomena.

(And, by the way, if you want to make sure your letterbox will be in the first mailout of this latest Free Radical, now is the time to subscribe, or resubscribe.)

From: The ViscountMonckton of Brenchley
To: John Key, Esq.,
Prime Minister of New Zealand and Leader of the National Party.

OPEN LETTER TO JOHN KEY:
“Global Warming” Is Not A Global Crisis
PART TWO: The Policy Responses

Dear Sir,

• We have in Part One thoroughly examined the scientific propositions that you and your colleagues have advanced in support of global warming – the basis of what your Climate Change Inquiry calls “the central/benchmark projections which are being used as the motivation for international agreements to combat climate change.” We have examined them, and found them wanting…
  We now turn to your policy prescriptions and the basis for them. . .

Your proposed remedy for "market failure"

• By now I hope I have established in your mind the possibility, at the very least, that there is no need whatsoever for any controls on the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that has previously and harmlessly contained 20 times today's concentration.
• By citing the need for such “tools” as “a well-designed, carefully balanced emissions trading scheme” (should such a thing even be possible) . . . you are saying, in effect, that the free market on its own is incapable of acting fast enough to prevent worldwide damage caused by anthropogenic "global warming," and that your approach to your domestic economy will be to institute government action to limit private action.
• The free market can scarcely be blamed for having failed to address an imagined "problem" that has not long been widely talked of; now that the free market has been made aware of the imagined "problem," it will be able to deal with the "problem" (to the extent that the "problem" is real) far more quickly and effectively than the State.
• Even if the fancifully-exaggerated estimates of climate sensitivity generated by the UN's climate panel were correct (and they are not), the world will have largely run out of the fossil fuels that are the alleged cause of the alleged "problem" long before any significant environmental damage can occur. And long before the fossil fuels become exhausted, their price will rise (thanks to the free-market law of supply and demand), so that the market will ration them by price long before any State-imposed system of rationing, whether by "cap-and-trade" or otherwise, could possibly have gained sufficient public acceptance to make any difference.
• Russia, India, and above all China have made it abundantly plain that they do not propose to reduce their "carbon emissions". . . Even if the West were to close down all of its industries and transport systems and factories and hospitals and schools and power stations, and even if we were all of us to revert to the Stone Age but without the ability even to light carbon-emitting fires, the growth in China's and India's emissions would entirely replace all of the West’s emissions within little more than a decade.
• It is a scandal that your farmers are included at all in the Emissions Trading Scheme. Farm animals do not eat fossil fuels; they eat grass, and they sink most of the carbon into meat, milk, wool, and blood and bone fertilizer. They should receive carbon credits for doing so.
• In sum, all that you will achieve, if you inflict upon yourselves a severe enough system of rationing actually to reduce your emissions by the one-half you have suggested, would be to transfer your industries, your workers' jobs, your emissions, and your well-controlled environmental pollution to China, which is opening one or two new coal-fired power stations every week, and whose record of pollution is currently the worst on the planet.

Some defects of your proposed "cap-and-trade" policy

• No matter how well “balanced” you think you can make your “cap-and-trade” system of emissions trading, any such proposal would require a vast, complex, costly, bureaucratic nightmare of controls, regulations, intrusions, and interferences that would swiftly and forever destroy the economic vigor of New Zealand.
• The facts are that "cap-and-trade" is simply a market in hot air – a “cap in hand” concept invented by the Environmental Defense Fund - no friends of either human freedom or prosperity. . .
• It is, first and foremost, a complex regime of State-inflicted rationing, by which government officials interfere in the free market by arbitrarily deciding which industries shall or shall not be permitted to emit, and how much each of them shall have the right to emit.
• You cannot escape the central flaw of the Environmental Defense Fund's "cap-and-trade" system. If carbon trading is to work, it will not be cheap; and, if it is cheap, it will not work.
• If you introduce cap-and-trade, you will destroy thousands, and probably tens of thousands, of jobs throughout New Zealand and in all sectors of the economy – with perhaps a large number of those being your own supporters from the agriculture and forestry sectors.
• Those jobs - the livelihoods of working people and their families throughout the country - will have been sacrificed for no environmental benefit whatsoever: for whatever you cease to make, China will make in your place; whatever you cease to emit, China will emit in your place, and will emit in greater quantities because her systems of power generation are far less efficient than our own. You will not only destroy the livelihoods of tens of thousands: you will also increase the planet's total emissions of carbon dioxide.
• If you actually believe (per impossibile) what you have said in your speeches about the imagined dangers of increased emissions of carbon dioxide, then you had better abandon "cap-and-trade" at once: for the policy you propose would be calculated to increase the world's carbon footprint, not to reduce it.

The chimera of "market rewards for alternative energy"

• The greatest market incentive is price. Yet, since governments are in no position to make the prices of the things they wish to promote any cheaper in a global sense (and as we know, governments’ ability to dispense subsidies and “pick winners” has never been a successful strategy) then there is only one possible mechanism whereby they can change existing market incentives: by making things dearer. This is not so much to offer a price incentive, as it is to offer a price disincentive.
• If you persist in attempting to “pick winners” by subsidizing that which you wish to encourage at the cost of that which you wish to discourage, you are certain to encounter the same problems that every system of subsidies ever imposed upon your country has encountered.
      May I remind you of the effects, for example, of your Prime Minister Muldoon’s marginal-lands subsidies, which had the effect of bringing huge environmental damage to eroding land that was never productive enough for genuine agricultural production? The folly of “picking winners” continues today in a new form, encouraging, for example, vast acreages of agricultural land to be taken out of food production to grow biofuels, even though biofuel production emits more carbon dioxide than oil production. These are the results of what can be more accurately called “price distortions.”
• The greatest barrier to your country’s economic recovery in this time of depression will be to impose needless costs on the creation of new sources of energy, or the unnecessary expense of subsidizing that which should never be encouraged.
• Even if there were a scientific case for cutting carbon emissions (which there is not), there is now not the slightest economic case for doubling the damage already caused by global recession by imposing "cap-and-trade" on top. If you were to impose "cap-and-trade" – or carbon taxes -- on top of the already harmful costs of world economic and financial collapse, you would merely drive the economy from recession to destruction.

Capital in the service of freedom: Smith's "invisible hand"

• It is precisely because entrepreneurs only prosper by giving people what they want that capital and liberty go everywhere hand in hand. Directly contrary to what you suggest, it is not in the least hard to picture venture capitalists, corporate planners, and small businesses working together to the same good purpose – should the purpose to which they are called be a worthwhile one. The extent to which the big stick is needed is, I submit, the extent to which the purpose is one based on hot air and little more.
• As I’m sure you are aware, however, environmentalists are not always working to a good purpose. They are a narrow, special-interest group just like any other. It would be foolish to ignore the fact that, after the Berlin Wall fell, many on the Left found a new home in the environmental movement, seeing it as the new hope for the destruction of the Western, capitalist hegemony that they so detest.
• The environmental movement in general, and the "global warming" alarmists in particular, may have an agenda that is political rather than environmental - an agenda that is a serious, strategic threat to the peace, security, prosperity, and liberty of the West, and an immediate and pressing threat to the very survival of the poorest peoples of the world.
• At the very least, there is an obvious coincidence of interest between those who persistently exaggerate the supposed adverse consequences of "global warming" . . . and those who have long planned and intended to dismantle and destroy the economies and liberties of the free and prosperous West from within.
• In our schools, the slick, relentless propaganda of the alarmists - based not on fact but on fear - infects the minds of innocent children.  Gripping children in a self-serving, manipulative state of fear robs them of their childhood.
• Among our classe politique, "global warming" is seen not as a crusade to "Save The Planet", but rather as a priceless opportunity to extend the empires of the new and growing aristocracy of overpaid, over-privileged bureaucrats and the politicians who cravenly serve them, and to increase the taxes and imposts inflicted on the people, and to intrude into every aspect of our lives, from the light-bulbs we use to the automobiles we drive.

The heavy cost of the economic destruction you propose

• Whatever may have been true about the “targets” being talked by other countries when you announced your ‘50 by 50’ target – which even at its announcement was more about politics than it was about either science or economics – there is no way that pipe dream of last year matches the present-day reality.
  Both Europe and Australia have sensibly backtracked on their targets in the face of overwhelming economic reality.
• Said Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian, “Kevin Rudd's announcement of a carbon emissions reduction target of 5 per cent by 2020 demonstrated that his pre-election claim that climate change was the great moral issue of our time, and demanding that Australia lead the way, was what Winston Churchill would call a terminological inexactitude: a whopper, a piece of bare-faced duplicity of epic proportions. But thank goodness Rudd and his colleagues deceived us.”
• Reporting on the outcome of the Poznan conference on climate change, which history will probably record as the conference that sounded the death knell or climate alarmism, the Wall Street Journal recorded that “Instead of standing by plans to cut CO2 emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020, [Europe’s] actual reductions might be as trivial as 4% if all exemptions are factored in…
• And in the US, while addressing global warming is certainly said to be a “top priority” of the Obama administration, a recent Pew poll shows it ranks low among the concerns of the American public. Among the 20 policy issues people were asked to rate, global warming ranked last. . . “People are sick of the hype,” said Patrick Michaels, a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. “If they really believed global warming was a threat, it would be higher on the list.”
  No politician as astute as Mr Obama can afford to ignore a signal like that. Frankly, sir, nor can you.
• Let us translate what ’50 by 50’ means into plain English. This means that within 41 years - the working lifetime of a high-school graduate today - the policies which you propose to introduce will have shut down, deliberately, consciously, and to no environmental benefit whatsoever, more than one-half of the entire New Zealand economy.
• You have repeatedly stated your support for a target for so called renewable energy of fully 90% of your country’s needs. Let us briefly examine the credibility of this assumption. At present, fossil fuels and nuclear power, between them, provide more than 98% of the energy used in the developed world. So-called "renewable energy" accounts for less than 2%. Even the UN's climate panel no longer believes that you can close down 98% of a nation's power supplies and retain anything more active than a Stone Age economy.

The “carbon footprint” of the economic interferences you propose

• By any definition, emissions trading is not really trade – it’s rationing. The government puts a limit on the amount of carbon dioxide industry is allowed to emit (a “cap”), and then unused quotas can be sold. It is certainly not a market operation because the key feature is not the buying and selling but the government limit.
• Remember Friedman's multiple. The State consumes twice as much resources as the private sector in performing any given function. Therefore, if you truly believe that the planet is menaced by an insignificant and harmless increase in the atmospheric concentration of a trace gas that is essential to life, then your first duty as Prime Minister will be to do the reverse of what you propose: in short, to shut down all unnecessary functions of the government altogether, and to transfer as many as possible of the remainder to the private sector, which has already done a better job of disincentivizing the consumption of fossil fuels in just two years than your proposed "cap-and-trade" system is expected to do in almost a third of a century.
• We can no longer afford the luxury of over-extended, over-ambitious, centralized government. Yet the call for “action” in the face of climate change is overwhelmingly for government action to place limits on private action.
  Since this will of necessity concentrate vast additional powers in the hands of government it is not merely doomed to ignominious failure; it is not merely guaranteed to increase your nation's "carbon footprint" under the guise of taking steps to reduce it; it is an explicit and abject abandonment of the individual freedom for which the National party is supposed to stand.

Conclusion

• The "serious dangers" threatening the planet are not dangers arising from the very slightly warmer weather that the world may enjoy as a result of enrichment of the atmosphere by fractional increases in the proportion of the air we breathe in that is occupied by carbon dioxide such as that which we breathe out. The climate scare is, as you will now realize, a mere bugaboo - a horror story for children, that only children and those with a mental age on a par with children can be expected to swallow. The real, pressing, "serious dangers" to the peace, prosperity, and freedom of the world are the dangers that spring from the very measures you propose to drive away the fearsome-sounding but harmless climate bugaboo.
• The citizens of New Zealand need their country to continue as an engine-house of prosperity, and the people of the world need New Zealand to continue as one its few ongoing and successful “food baskets”. . . Exercise your good sense, I urge you; use the opportunity of this review to mend your ways.
  You have changed your own mind on this issue once. Let me implore you to change it once more.

Like I say, these are just some of the highlights of Monckton’s thoroughly delightful debunking – and the Open Letter is just one of the highlights of a thoroughly entertaining and informative magazine!

So if you do want to make sure your letterbox will be in the first mailout of this latest Free Radical, now is the time to subscribe, or resubscribe.

Copyright PC.BlogSpot.Com © Please contact author for permission to republish.

THE FREE RADICAL ‘Summer Reader’: The Crisis Edition

Hi to you all, and welcome to a ‘Summer Reader’ of the Free Radical.  This is the Crisis Edition, and it’s packed with great reading on the economic crisis; who caused it and how, and what politicians and their servants are doing now that will only make it all worse.

George Reisman, David McGregor, Gene Callahan, Stephen Hicks, Sean Gabb and Jeff Perren make sense out of nonsense, and order out of economic chaos.

On it’s own that’s the price of your copy back right there.  But that’s not all!

We have a world exclusive!  Right in time for the forthcoming parliamentary inquiry into climate change, Christopher Monckton –- that’s Viscount Monkton of Brenchley to you and I  -- writes an Open Letter to John Key on the politics and science of climate change, taking him to task for his stated plan to drive NZ’s economy even further into penury to pay for an environmental delusion.  This thorough debunking of “the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change” is really one to sit and savour. (You can read some leading excerpts here.)

This is the article you need to send your warmist friends and enemies, and to quote from when you write you letters to the editor, and your submissions to the parliamentary inquiry in the New Year.

But that’s still not all.

• We have the late Larry Sechrest’s tremendous call to take on the enemies of civilisation, which is to say the enemies of capitalism.  Taking them on begins with understanding them. Says Larry in one of his last public talks before his death, "if one couples the repugnant urge toward envy with a broad misperception of reality," it results inexorably in the headlines and press releases and what passes for analysis around the commentariat.
• We have Lindsay Perigo’s and Peter Cresswell’s differing views and expectations of the new Key Government – and Lindsay’s spirited attack on the headbangers and the caterwaulers: those musical morons who don’t ‘get’ good music, or why it’s objectively superior.
• We have the Christchurch man who just wants to save weka, in the face of councils and government departments who wish he wouldn’t.
• We have Stephen Hicks’ attack on teachers who teach fear-mongering instead of science.

All this and much more, including all our regular columnists and reviews, and all the usual ribaldry, irreverence and wit.

This is almost all your summer reading right here.  A copy of The Free Radical and a copy of Atlas Shrugged, and that’s all the thinking man and woman needs these holidays.

* * Now take note that this is a mail-order only issue. To get your copy, head straight to the Free Radical Store and click subscribe now to be included in the latest mail-out, or pay online to receive a digital copy (which should be online very soon).  Or, if you just want a hard copy or six (or more)of this issue, then deposit $9(inc. p+p) for each issue to ASB account 12 3016 0561084 00 (add your name in the ‘From’ field of your online banking form), and then email undergroundpress@xtra.co.nz or fax (09)638 9445 with your details, and Shirley will have your copies winging their way to you before you can say ‘Apocalypse Not.’ * *

You need ‘The Free Radical.’  Your friends need ‘The Free Radical.’  Even your local MP needs ‘The Free Radical’ -- your politicians sure as hell need ‘The Free Radical,’ which is why it’s so urgent that you either take what you read and pass it on to them, or buy a copy just for them.

There has never been a better time to make good ideas heard.

This Christmas, give the gift of ‘The Free Radical’ to a friend or to yourself.   And enjoy.

If you like NOT PC, then you’re gonna luuurve ‘The Free Radical.’  Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss out!

Cheers,
Peter Cresswell
EDITOR, THE FREE RADICAL

‘FREE RADICAL’ EXCLUSIVE: Christopher Monckton’s Open Letter to John Key on Climate Change’

I’m delighted to be able to give you two very exciting pieces of news.

First, a much-delayed bumper summer issue of  ‘The Free Radical' magazine is just days away from hitting the inside of subscribers’ letterboxes – in fact, the finishing touches are being put to this issue as we speak!  Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss out on your Christmas treat: all the reading you need to make sense of today’s current events.

Second, in anticipation of National/ACT’s select committee inquiry into climate change, we have a world exclusive Open Letter to John Key on Climate Change sent by the world’s leading climate ‘skeptic,’ Christopher Monckton – or Viscount Monckton of Brenchley as he’s known to his friends.

This is pure gold; the world’s leading climate ‘skeptic’ explains to NZ’s new Prime Minister that the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, and is now thoroughly and scientifically discredited.

To give you just a taste, here’s some leading excerpts.  As you can see, it’s a thorough exposition:

• I applaud the stated intention of both Act and National to re-examine both the fatally flawed emissions-trading plans of the previous government and the fundamentals of the science of “global warming”, but I remain concerned at your continuing policy goal – pointlessly to halve your country’s economic output.
• Is climate change literally a “hot” topic? As you ponder that question, Sir, consider that the recorded temperature in the Christchurch of 2008 is no warmer than the Christchurch of 1910 – as you can establish for yourself by checking the record. Clearly, there are more facts to bring to bear than either your colleagues or your advisers have told you hitherto.
• The facts which I shall give you in this letter are taken not from my own imagination, nor from the obscurantist reports of the UN’s climate panel, nor from any lobby group, but from the real-world, observed data and the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
• Today’s temperature, in the perspective of the long recent history of our planet, is unusually low…
• At both Poles, it was warmer only half a century ago than it is today.
• A symposium of the International Astronomical Union [2004] concluded that it is the Sun that was chiefly responsible for the warming of the late 20th century; that the “global warming” that had been observed over the previous 300 years had ended; that global cooling would soon become the norm; and that anthropogenic effects on the climate were negligible.
•     From 1700-1998, temperature rose at a near-uniform rate of about 1 °F per century. In 1998, “global warming” stopped, and it has not resumed since. Indeed, in the past seven years, temperature has been falling at a rate equivalent to as much as 0.7 °F per decade. Very few news media have given any prominence to this long and pronounced downturn in the temperature trend.
      The January-January fall in global mean surface temperatures between 2007 and 2008 was the steepest since global-temperature records were first compiled in 1880.
• Since the world is not warming at the rate projected by the UN’s climate panel (the IPCC), it follows that the urgency relentlessly suggested by that panel is by no means as great as the UN’s reports would have us believe. Some 20 years ago, the IPCC told us we had ten years to avert climate disaster. Today, the IPCC’s chairman says exactly the same.
• Despite rapidly-rising carbon dioxide concentrations, there has been no new record year for global temperature in the ten years since 1998; and, in the United States, there has been no new record year for national temperature since 1934.
• Greenhouse gases keep the world warm enough for plant and animal life to thrive. Without them, the Earth would be an ice-planet all of the time rather than some of the time… Two-thirds of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is naturally present, and carbon dioxide occupies just one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did 250 years ago: for the atmosphere is large and we are small.
• Sir, you have proposed a “target of cutting New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by the year 2050.” Yet your party is supposedly committed to free enterprise, and you have said you are “ambitious for New Zealand”. Do you not think that a far greater degree of scientific certainty as to the effects of minuscule increases in carbon dioxide concentration on temperature would be advisable before you inflict strategic damage on any such scale upon your own country’s economy from within?
• A recent survey of 539 peer-reviewed scientific papers published since January 2004 and selected at random using the search term “global climate change” reveals that not a single paper provides any evidence whatsoever that “human induced climate change is real” or that “it’s threatening the planet.” The fictitious notion of imminent, catastrophic climate change is almost wholly absent in the scientific literature… Since the UN’s estimates are indeed exaggerations, and are known to be so, the only potentially-“credible” basis for alarmism falls away.
•     Using computer models to predict the climate cannot ever be effective or accurate: for the climate, in the formal, mathematical sense, is chaotic… Long-run climate prediction is impossible unless we can know the initial state of the millions of variables that define the climate object, and know that state to a degree of precision that is and will always be in practice unattainable.
      It is the common characteristic of any chaotic object, such as the climate, that the slightest perturbation, however minuscule, in the initial value of even one of that object’s variables can induce substantial and unpredictable “phase transitions” – sudden changes of state – in the future evolution of the object. The climate is defined not by one or two variables but by millions.
• The UN [IPCC, 2001], accepts that the climate is “a complex, non-linear, chaotic object”, and, consequently, that “long-term prediction of climate states is impossible.” Yet it then attempts the impossible by making predictions of climate sensitivity that are already being proven exaggerated by the failure of temperatures to rise as the computer models had predicted (or, recently, at all).
•     All of the climate models relied upon by the UN predict that the distinguishing characteristic or “fingerprint” of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing is that in the tropical mid-troposphere, about 6 miles up, temperature over the decades should rise at two or even three times the rate of increase observed at the tropical surface.
      However (and it is crucial that you should understand this), the computer-predicted “hot-spot” over the tropics that is the supposed fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse warming, entirely distinct from that of any other source of warming, has not been observed in any of the tropospheric temperature datasets. Thirty years of satellite data do not show the “hot-spot” either. It is not there.
• You also need to know that the values for climate sensitivity in the computer models – in short, the central estimates of how much the world’s temperature will increase in response to a given rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – are not outputs from the models, but inputs to them. The computers are being told to assume high climate sensitivity, so a high climate sensitivity is what they find.
• Let me summarize the irremediably shaky basis for the UN’s alarmist case. It is not based on physical theory. In several fundamental respects, it is at odds with theory… Nor is the UN’s case based on real-world observation: and, as we have seen, its principal predictions and conclusions are grievously at odds with real-world observation… The UN’s entire case is based on computer modeling, in which – astonishingly – the models are told at the outset the values for the very quantity (temperature response to increased carbon dioxide concentration) that we are told they are going to calculate.
• From late 2001 on, the oceans and the atmosphere simultaneously cooled. The UN dealt with the problem by ignoring it, as did many of the news media, who simply failed to report that the world has been cooling for seven years.
• Sea level has been rising since the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. It is 400 feet higher now than it was then. The rate of increase has averaged 4 feet per century. Yet in the 20th century .. sea level rose by little more than 7 inches… There is no scientific basis, therefore, for saying that any anthropogenic warming that may have occurred over the past 50 years has had any appreciable effect on sea level.
• The UN imagines that most sea-level rise will come not from the melting glaciers about which the media so frequently fantasize, but from thermosteric expansion – sea water swelling as it warms. However, thermosteric expansion can only occur if the body of water in question is getting warmer. The oceans are not getting warmer (except in certain regions, such as the Antarctic Peninsula, where there is evidence of undersea volcanic activity).
•     There is no reason to suppose that sea level will rise any faster in the 21st century than it did in the 20th – i.e., by about 8 inches…
      There is not and has never been any scientific basis for the exaggerated projections by a certain politician that sea level might imminently rise by as much as 20 feet. That politician, in the year in which he circulated a movie containing that projection, bought a $4 million condominium just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco…
     In a recent case in the High Court in London the judge said of this politician that “the Armageddon scenario that he predicts is not based on any scientific view.”
•     Given that glacial recession began long before humankind could have had any appreciable effect on global temperature, and given that the rate of recession has remained uniform, on what basis can it be said that it is anthropogenic “global warming” that is causing the glaciers to recede?
•     Finally, only a tiny proportion of the future sea-level rise imagined by the UN’s climate panel is attributed by it to melting glaciers.
• You will recall that in the 1940s the Arctic was warmer than it is today.
• Both the summer and the winter extent of the sea ice surrounding Antarctica was greater in 2007/8 than at any time since the satellite record began 30 years ago.
• But the most telling evidence of all is that the mean thickness of the Greenland ice sheet increased by 2 inches per year – a total of 1 ft 8 in – during the decade 1993-2003. Once again, there is no cause for alarm.
• Tim Flannery, an environmentalist campaigner, “predicted” last June that Sydney’s dams would run dry. He said this was “the most extreme and the most dangerous situation arising from climate change facing any country in the world right now." He made his prediction just days before a deluge that made that month the wettest June since 1964.
• Over a sufficient timescale of decades, then, a warmer climate will entail not a drier atmosphere but a moister one. Sure enough, some of the world’s driest regions – such as the southern Sahara – have experienced more, not less, precipitation over the period of the satellite record.
• As to suggestions that the world is likely to see reduced water supplies, you are yet again seeing “global warming” blamed for a problem that has nothing to do with warmer weather. As the human population expands, its demands on water supplies increase. That, and not “global warming”, is why many parts of the world do not have regular supplies of drinking water.
• There is no longer any credible, scientific basis for the implicit conclusion that “a higher incidence of extreme-weather events” has occurred because of anthropogenic “global warming.”
•     A certain Tennessean tobacco-planter and politician, in his notoriously-inaccurate sci-fi comedy horror movie about the imagined “climate crisis”, cited a scientific paper that, he said, revealed that “global warming” was already killing polar bears.
      However, the paper concerned, had actually said that just four polar bears had died in the Beaufort Sea, not because “global warming” had made sea-ice scarce, but because of unusually strong winds and high sea states in a severe Arctic storm. The politician had simply chosen to misstate the principal conclusion of the paper on the cause of the polar bears’ death, because the truth did not fit the great lie.
•     Intrigued by this evidence that there is more ice, not less, in the Beaufort Sea, I decided additionally to check the total extent of sea ice in the Arctic on 30 November 1979 and on 30 November 2008. I found that there was almost as much sea ice on St. Andrew’s day this year as there was in the first year of the satellite record…
      I also decided to check whether the global sea-ice extent had declined in response to the supposed “global warming” of the past 30 years. It had not. There has been no trend – no trend at all – throughout the period of satellite observations.
• The key characteristic of a species at risk is, of course, declining population. However, the population of polar bears is not plummeting. Instead, there are five times as many polar bears in the Arctic today than there were in the 1940s. As you may think, Sir, that is hardly the profile of a species facing imminent extinction as its habitat shrinks away.
• I have presented evidence, drawn directly from the raw data and from the peer-reviewed, scientific literature, to establish that, at the very least, there is reasonable doubt about whether destroying the Western economies on the scale now proposed ... would make any difference whatever to the climate, even if there were a “climate crisis” ...

And finally,

• Sir, every one of the reasons advanced by the IPCC and its faithful adherents for alarm and consequent panic action has been demonstrated to be hollow and without any scientific foundation or merit. Yet, if your proposal to close down half of the economy of New Zealand is to be justifiable, then the false scientific and policy propositions that you apparently support must be shown to be true.

I did say it was thorough – and this is just the excerpts!

Don’t miss out if you want this, and much more, in your mailbox before Christmas. Subscribe now!

Help, help, we're being oppressed!

Californian columnist for 'The Free Radical' Michael Vardoulis sent me a reflection from afar on why Maori activists need to learn about independence and self-reliance from the likes of the late-career Malcolm X (right) ...

Yes, Maori individuals have a lot fewer historical claim to bitterness than Afro Americans, or especially Native Americans and Hawaiians!  Whatever their legitimate complaints, at least New Zealanders never suffered the stain of slavery while proclaiming the protection of individuals' rights.  These are individuals whose ancestors were never enslaved -- not at least in New Zealand after the British arrived.

Maori individuals need to shake off the great state fixation too many seem obsessed with.  There is a kind of philosophical 'judo' that Malcolm X represents, insofar as the pride of self-reliance he talked about is essential to survival as an individual, and it would apply to Maori as well.  His message of "why look to your former 'masters' and  the government which supported them, for anything?  The only thing a (insert arbitrary racial identity here) individual should seek from the government which supported their former master is to be left the hell alone!"

   The lesson that needs to be tattooed on the soul was expressed perfectly by Isabel Paterson: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got" -- including, if you let them, your pride in your self-reliance.  Self-reliance does not come from sucking nanny's tit, or from the marshmallow embrace of collectivism -- it comes from standing on one's own feet and beginning to take responsibility for one's own future as an individual.

And then we have the conclusions one can draw universally on the issue of 'race' from what Rand wrote so perfectly: the only genuine solution to racism is a color-blind government supporting the same rights for all individuals as individuals; anything *other* than that merely perpetuates the evil of racism, and (not incidentally) the careers of political figures who benefit from the perpetuation of the problem rather than achieving solutions. 

Liberty HAS been stolen from many different arbitrary groups (though compared to what others have suffered over history, including many Europeans it's much harder to find in the case of post-1840 Maori) and in any case it's ultimately irrelevant to the much more important issue of regaining that liberty, which can only be achieved in a society where only the rights of the individual are upheld regardless of any arbitrary 'group' status either placed upon them or with which they choose to identify. 

   Hell, the Brits stomped all over my mother's ancestors in Ireland, and the Turks all over my father's ancestors in Greece.  I don't go looking for handouts from Downing Street or Istanbul!  I just pursue a society in which the individual is protected from being interfered with, knowing as a result that no arbitrary group can be singled out either for persecution, or for restitution.  The people who stomped all over my ancestors are long dead and buried -- those alive now bear no guilt for what their great-great-great grandparents did to mine.

But, I fear I preach to the choir.  It's individuals of Maori, Afro-American or Native American backgrounds which need to 'get it'... as my mentor Richard Boddie (right), a former student of Malcolm X, is fond of saying, "People are deluded en masse and enlightened one at a time." 

The lesson of Malcolm's own growth and change over his life helps to show that lesson is true -- and dangerous to those who would hope the lesson is never learned.

The interested reader might appreciate PC's review of Spike Lee's film 'Malcolm X' that appeared in The Free Radical at the time of the film's release.  [NB: Some light editing of Michael's post has been done for sense and context.]

Free Radical #79: 'Brown-Nosing Te Qaeda'

                                      

Yes, that's the cover of the latest Free Radical, which will be going out to shops and subscribers from the end of this week.  Subscribe now to make sure your letterbox is included in the first mailout, and you get the earliest possible briefing on the issues that matter:

• What happened to One Law for All?  Why is John Boy cravenly brown-nosing a man who wanted to assassinate him?  What does that say about him? And what do a dead Italian Communist and a live Mexican gunman have to do with it all?  LINDSAY PERIGO, TREVOR LOUDON, PETER CRESSWELL, PHIL HOWISON & TIM WIKIRIWHI between them examine Waitangi collectivism, the objective threat and ideological links of Te Qaeda, and why this matters to you.  DON'T MISS OUT!  You'll be keeping this issue as a reference for a long time to come.
• And who wrote the strategy for the left's long march through the culture?  LINDSAY PERIGO has the answer, and a solution.
• How do you keep yourself afloat in the world's most recent financial crisis? The simple answer is understanding.  Recent articles in The Free Radical have warned about the economic downturn, explained how the counterfeit capital of the world's central banks are culpable, and pointed to real solutions. In this issue we have  all the literature that's fit to read to understand the mess, and keep yourself afloat.
• And what about those dark greens, and their claims that the environment is endangered - that we're "running out of resources"?   "Rubbish," say our writers.  It's not climate that's endangered, says Czech president VACLAV KLAUS, it's freedom!  Progress is good, not destructive, says GEORGE REISMAN -- economic freedom is the solution, not the problem, he proves.  Reisman utterly demolishes environmentalists' claims that we're running out of resources and shows that as long as we pursue wealth we never will, and OWEN McSHANE &  VINCENT GRAY dissect the background of those who insist we must.  The historical links will surprise you, and the weight of argument will floor you!

All this and much, much more, including the Belgian who gave fuel to the Nanny State, the Canadian who became a hero of free speech, the architect who combines art and business, the educationalists who have a lot to say sorry for, and the American who's been proclaimed as a hero of conservatism and who is shown to be anything but  -- all this plus film reviews, book reviews and all our usual and controversial columnists.

The world is in a mess, the long march through the culture by anti-reason, anti-life state worshippers is the root cause – and like every ‘Free Radical’ since issue number one, this one has the solution: in a nutshell, it’s reason and the freedom to use it.

DON"T MISS OUT!  Subscribe now to get your copy in your mailbox ... and give the gift of Free Radicals to a friend or three who need the rocket-fuelled intellectual ammunition within. 

del.icio.us Tags: Libertarianism,Objectivism,Politics

Submissions for next 'Free Radical'

It's nearly time to start pulling together contributions for the next Free Radical magazine.  If you have something you're already working on, or something you'd like to be working on -- something that simply has to be in the next magazine -- then let me know now, and start working towards the Feb 6 deadline.

You can email me at organon at ihug.co.nz.

Helengrad is here

Since a talkback caller first used the word 'Helengrad' in a call to Lindsay Perigo's radio show just weeks after Helen Clark's ascension to power in 1999, after which Perigo picked it up and ran with it far and wide,  the term has entered popular parlance as a means of describing Clark's Wellington "in an attempt to mirror cities in the former Soviet Union named after rulers - Leningrad and Stalingrad."  Its usage is so widespread it has now been added as an entry in the Macquarie Dictionary.  Dom Post story here [hat tip DPF]. 

Little wonder it's had such penetration, since in combining Leaderene's name with the Soviet-style suffix meaning 'town' the word so accurately describes the Clark regime set up in NZ's capital city.

I wrote about the word's origins back in 2005, and as far as I'm aware it was my own cover story in the May/June 2000 edition of the Free Radical describing Clark's and Margaret Wilson's parliamentary hui on constitutional reform that first used the term in print.  (That's the story in its original habitat above right -- click to enlarge.)

On the day that particular Free Radical arrived in parliament with the words 'Helengrad Hui' and a condom-clad Statue of Liberty on parliament's steps pictured on the cover (above), Headmistress Shipley rose in Parliament accusing Clark of being "an interfering Minister of Everything and running a 'Helengrad' regime." The chamber fell about, and the name stuck - as unfortunately has the regime.

I believe the Herald's Fran O'Sullivan and then the rest of the world took it up about then -- it hit Australian shores later the same year in an article in The Australian called 'The Siege of Helengrad' -- and now Google boasts some 12,500 hits for 'Helengrad.' As Mrs Marsh used to say, "It does get in."

Digital 'Free Radical' open for business

I'm very happy to announce that the injury-delayed digital edition of the new Free Radical is now available for download here at the Free Radical store.

(My very warm thanks to webmaestro William Green for climbing out of what fortunately wasn't his death bed to do the necessaries.)

del.icio.us Tags: Free_Radical

TFR78: The Democracy Rationing edition (updated)

"Don’t Vote For Any MP, Any Party Or Any Candidate Who Supports The Electoral Finance Bill!"

Democracy is now rationed. Political speech is being muzzled. Has New Zealand really come to this? The latest Free Radical magazine hits the streets, just in time for Christmas, and just in time to dissect the greatest assault on New Zealand's democracy and free speech since .. well, for ever.

How did it come to this, that saying what's quoted above could have just become illegal? Bernard Darnton and Peter Cresswell explain why, how, and why it’s so wrong – why and how what our soldiers fought to defend is being taken away -- why thousands have taken to the streets to protest it, and where that leaves us now. And that's just the cover story of this bumper summer issue of 'The Free Radical.'

• NANNY's BIG BABIES: The Rise and Rise of an Infantilised Culture
  We now have virtually cradle to cradle nannying -- we’re never allowed out of our cribs, and there's nothing any of New Zealand's childlike, apathetic would-be whiners care to do about it. Marcus Bachler and Peter Osborne take the culture of infantilisation to task. How did we become such crybabies, they ask?
• FEEL-GOOD ENVIRONMENTALISM: Spinning the Climate
  How is it that the forces of global nonsense can fly to Bali in their thousands to force us to make any sacrifice hey consider necessary towards their goal of “saving the planet”? Talking about ways to force us to reduce carbon emissions, emitting 100,000 tonnes of the stuff themselves to fly there to talk about it – that’s how ‘seriously’ they take their own warnings. Vincent Gray, Callum McPetrie, Joel Schwartz, Steve Hayward and Ken Green explain how spinning the climate requires politics to pose as science, and emotions to replace thought.
• BANNING BZP: Prohibition Still Doesn't Work
  How is it that despite abundant evidence that prohibition doesn’t, can’t and hasn’t ever worked, the forces of darkness are doing it again: banning a peaceful party pill, and inviting the social destruction of prohibition all over again. Rodney Hide, Nandor Tanczos and Richard Goode point out the how, as Richard Goode says, the party pills ban but the 'P' into BZP.

All this plus the usual treats, including reviews, interviews, all your regular columnists, and a celebration of the 40th anniversary of your editor’s favourite TV show, all in this 78th Free Radical. 78 blows for freedom, and still going strong!

Head to the Free Radical store to subscribe or to buy your digital Free Radical. Or head to one of these top shops around the country to pick up your hard copy (they should be arriving in shops this afternoon).

Cheers,
Peter Cresswell
EDITOR, THE FREE RADICAL
**POLITICS, ECONOMICS & LIFE AS IF FREEDOM MATTERED**

NB: We're having a few teething problems getting the new digital issue for TFR78 succesfully uploaded at the Free Radical store. Keep checking back: I've been assured it will happen soon.

In the meantime, here's a link for an A3 poster of the cover you can download. Enjoy.

UPDATE: As astute readers might by now have realised, our webmaster appears to have taken an early holiday -- for which I can only offer prospective purchasers of the digital edition my profound apologies, and a recommendation that they purchase a hard copy edition from one of these top shops. And to say that volunteers for the job of Free Rad webmaster will be gratefully received in the New Year.

UPDATE 2: Mystery solved. Just heard that webmaster presently responsible for uploading digital Free Radicals was hospitalised after a car accident. News such as it is so far here. Naturally, our thoughts are with the young man as we wish him a speedy recovery ...

POSTER: Nanny State has gone berserk

Sick of Nanny getting on your back, in your face, and hip deep into your life? Then this free poster courtesy of The Free Radical magazine is for you.

Click on the pic to enlarge, or here for an A3 PDF file [1MB] -- and tell Nanny to go to hell.

"There's only so much democracy to go around"

It's said by supporters of the Electoral Finance Bill that to protect demoracy it's necessary to ration political speech in election year -- all of election year -- thus effectively destroying democracy, which heretofore has been seen as a system whereby citizens get to have their say.

Not so, say EFB supporters. There's only so much democracy to go around. Free speech is so important in a democracy, says the Electoral Finance Bill and its supporters, that only politicians and those registering with a government censor should be allowed it.

Thus are free speech and democracy destroyed in the name of protecting free speech and democracy! What could be more ingenious?!

Its also argued that private money should be banned from public debate because -- too much private money slants debate, it is said, and laws are need to level the playing field. This of course is bullshit.

People who have money are just as entitled to have their views expressed in public as those who don't -- if democracy has any meaning it is that anyone of whatever race, creed, colour or means is entitled to express their views, and should not be encumbered from doing so.

Taking money from those with one view of politics (while banning their own use of it in expressing those views) and giving it to those with opposing political views who wouldn't otherwise attract such support -- which is what state financing of political parties amounts to -- is wrong. It means that I, in my role as citizen and ripe suck, am required to pay for views that I vehemently oppose. And it means that I, in my role as subject and slave, must pay attention when my political betters tell me I may not freely express my own views.

That is just obscene. Voltaire's dictum is to defend the right of others to express views with which you disagree, not to provide them with a microphone, an advertising budget and a censor's office to bar views with which they disagree.

It's wrong to ban or limit free speech in election year, which in NZ is one-third of our lives. And it's wrong to ban private money from public debate. After all, if it were so easy for money to buy elections, why is the ACT Party the only party in the MMP era that has never been in government?

Bernard Darnton encapsulates the argument in a recent issue of The Free Radical:

Labour seems to have concluded that political speech is so important that no one else should be allowed to have any... The Clark Government is not just nibbling at the edges of free speech, they are engaged in both direct frontal assaul and deliberate flanking attacks on free speech [and democracy].

... Political speech must be especially protected because it is in the political arena that all other freedoms must be protected. The Clark Government's assaults on free political expression must be resisted because if we fail to withstand this latest round of assaults, it may be illegal to resist the next.

I salute every single one of the two-thousand or so good honest and angry people who got off their arse in Auckland on Saturday to protest this obscenity, and I look forward to seeing that anger land on Parliament's steps on Wednesday with a loud and resounding bang.

Let us hear the outrage echo from one end of this beautiful country to another, and let's Kill This Bill.

UPDATE: Submitters to the Electoral Finance Bill, who were overwhelmingly against the Bill, were told effectively, "Don't worry. It'll be all right on the night. Changes in Select Committee will address your concerns."

Today those changes have been announced and the Bill as it is about to be rammed through can now be seen in detail. It can't have been easy to achieve but the Select Committee hasn't made it better -- as David Farrar summarises they’ve actually made it worse!

Not content with regulating written political advocacy, they’ve extended the definitions to also include verbal political advocacy!

The Electoral Finance Bill now even regulates someone who gets up on a soap box and starts communicating to the public.

And while they have scrapped the ludicrous system of statutory declarations, they still treat a placard in a protest march as an election advertisement (if it targets a political party) and that placard will need your name and residential address on it.

Remember all those protesters outside the Labour Party Conference? They would all have been breaking the law if they didn’t have their name and address on their placards. The ones with the megaphones – they would be breaking the law if they didn’t announce over the megaphone their name and residential address each time they chanted.

And this is no drafting error. The select committee report makes it clear they have intentionally widened the scope to capture “the use of loudspeakers and megaphones”. Yes Labour, NZ First, United Future and the Greens have deliberately moved to regulate verbal political advocacy. What sort of parties and Governments are threatened by megaphones?

Read on here to see more details about the form in which the death of democracy is proposed.

Last chance for articles, reviews, columns and words of praise

It's not only 'Atlas Month,' it's also nearly time for me to hunker down and start putting together the next issue of The Free Radical. Last call then for anyone wanting to submit articles, reviews or columns for the November issue -- and in particular for any Atlas fans who'd like to join in the Atlas Month celebrations with a few hundred carefully chosen words of praise.

Send contributions to me at pc@freeradical.co.nz. Thanks.

A curriculum without content delivers students without knowledge.

How bad is the state's new education curriculum, soon to be enforced in all schools public and private right across the country? When even the teacher unions know that things "have gone too far" with the state-enforced education curriculum, then it might just be possible that things really have gone too far.

It is quite literally the curriculum you have when you don't have a curriculum: it is explicitly a curriculum without content. The new curriculum "will teach pupils how to hold a conversation or ask for help rather than remember facts, historic dates or periodic tables."

The new curriculum, to be released in November and introduced in 2009, focuses on the process of learning, rather than content.

For example, social science students will be marked for taking action to make their community a better place to live, rather than remembering facts about a society on the other side of the world. Science students might be tested on whether they know how to design an experiment, rather than whether they remember what the result should be.

Mary Chamberlain, overseeing the project for the Education Ministry, says that although people are "rattled" by the changes, "there's no use (students) being little knowledge banks walking around on legs. We've got computers, we don't need people walking around with them in their heads... People just have to get used to that."

Mary Chamberlain is an example of the educational model she proposes: someone who has nothing at all in her head. Miseducating a whole new generation in her image is not the answer; removing her and her ilk from the miseducation of NZ children is clearly urgent.

Even the teachers union, the PPTA, called this "a paradigm shift that has gone too far." Roger Moses, principal of Wellington College, explains why: with its focus on "skills" rather than knowledge, this will he says see New Zealand children growing up ignorant.

But none of this is new: the process has been going on for years -- this latest promise of miseducation simply continues a process that has been under way for years. Writing in 'Free Radical #76,' George Reisman summed up the Chamberlain view: "With little exaggeration, the whole of contemporary education can be described as a process of encumbering the student’s mind with as little knowledge as possible."

Nonsense like Chamberlain's does not emerge fully grown. In the following excerpts from his article, Reisman explains where this nonsense comes from, and what has already been the result. Settle back and read his incisive dissection of modern miseducation. It's good:

It is sometimes observed that most of today’s high school and college graduates have very little education in science and mathematics and thus do not understand and cannot properly appreciate modern technology. There is considerable merit in these observations, but the problem goes much deeper. Namely, from the earliest grades, the prevailing methodology of contemporary education systematically encourages irrational skepticism ...

To explain how this is the case, I must briefly digress into the history of philosophy.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant foisted on the intellectual world a distorted version of what reason is, namely, a faculty divorced from knowledge of the real world and limited to awareness of a world of mere appearances created by the human mind itself. ...

For many years now it has been Kant's distorted 'Romantic' version of reason that has been foisted upon students worldwide. Ms Chamberlain and her comrades now wish to make that explicit. Reisman explains how the undercutting of education is explicitly based upon the undercutting of knowledge espoused by 'Romantic' era philosophers.

Romanticism ... follows on the direct foundation of Kantianism... In its essentials, the philosophy of Romanticism is the guiding principle of contemporary education. Exactly like Romanticism, contemporary education holds that the valuable portion of our mental life has no essential connection with our ability to reason and with the deliberate, controlled use of our conscious mind—that we possess this portion of our mental life if not in our sleep, then nevertheless as small children. This doctrine is clearly present in the avowed conviction of contemporary education that creativity is a phenomenon that is separate from and independent of such conscious mental processes as memorization and the use of logic...

Now, properly, education is a process by means of which students internalize knowledge: they mentally absorb it through observation and proof, and repeated application. Memorization, deduction, and problem solving must constantly be involved. The purpose is to develop the student’s mind—to provide him with an instantaneously available storehouse of knowledge and thus an increasingly powerful mental apparatus that he will be able to use and further expand throughout his life. Such education, of course, requires hard work from the student. Seen from a physiological perspective, it may be that what the process of education requires of the student through his exercises is an actual imprinting of his brain.

Yet, under the influence of the philosophy of Romanticism, contemporary education is fundamentally opposed to these essentials of education. It draws a distinction between “problem solving,” which it views as “creative” and claims to favor, and “memorization,” which it appears to regard as an imposition on the students, whose valuable, executive-level time, it claims, can be better spent in “problem solving.” Contemporary education thus proceeds on the assumption that the ability to solve problems is innate, or at least fully developed before the child begins school. It perceives its job as allowing the student to exercise his native problem-solving abilities, while imposing on him as little as possible of the allegedly unnecessary and distracting task of memorization.

In the elementary grades, this approach is expressed in such attitudes as that it is not really necessary for students to go to the trouble of memorizing the multiplication tables if the availability of pocket calculators can be taken for granted which they know how to use; or go to the trouble of memorizing facts of history and geography, if the ready availability of books and atlases containing the facts can be taken for granted, which facts the students know how to look up when the need arises. In college and graduate courses, this approach is expressed in the phenomenon of the “open-book examination,” in which satisfactory performance is supposedly demonstrated by the ability to use a book as a source of information, proving once again that the student knows how to find the information when he needs it.

With little exaggeration, the whole of contemporary education can be described as a process of encumbering the student’s mind with as little knowledge as possible. The place for knowledge, it seems to believe, is in external sources—books and libraries—which the student knows how to use when necessary. Its job, its proponents believe, is not to teach the students knowledge but “how to acquire knowledge”—not to teach them facts and principles, which it holds quickly become “obsolete,” but to teach them “how to learn.” Its job, its proponents openly declare, is not to teach geography, history, mathematics, science, or any other subject, including reading and writing, but to teach “Johnny”—to teach Johnny how he can allegedly go about learning the facts and principles it declares are not important enough to teach and which it thus gives no incentive to learn and provides the student with no means of learning.

The results of this type of education are visible in the hordes of students who, despite years of schooling, have learned virtually nothing, and who are least of all capable of thinking critically and solving problems. When such students read a newspaper, for example, they cannot read it in the light of a knowledge of history or economics— they do not know history or economics; history and economics are out there in the history and economics books, which, they were taught, they can “look up, if they need to.” They cannot even read it in the light of elementary arithmetic, for they have little or no internally automated habits of doing arithmetic. Having little or no knowledge of the elementary facts of history and geography, they have no way even of relating one event to another in terms of time and place.

Such students, and, of course, the adults such students become, are chronically in the position in which to be able to use the knowledge they need to use, they would first have to go out and acquire it. Not only would they have to look up relevant facts, which they already should know, and now may have no way even of knowing they need to know, but they would first have to read and understand books dealing with abstract principles, and to understand those books, they would first have to read other such books, and so on. In short, they would first have to acquire the education they already should have had.

Properly, by the time a student has completed a college education, his brain should hold the essential content of well over a hundred major books on mathematics, science, history, literature, and philosophy, and do so in a form that is well organized and integrated, so that he can apply this internalized body of knowledge to his perception of everything in the world around him. He should be in a position to enlarge his knowledge of any subject and to express his thoughts on any subject clearly and logically, both verbally and in writing. Yet, as the result of the miseducation provided today, it is now much more often the case that college graduates fulfill the Romantic ideal of being “simple, uneducated men.”

Such a process of miseducation is so far advanced that few now really see it, particularly not those already miseducated. Ms Chamberlain and the other writers of this proposed 'curriculum without content' are banking on the miseducation of earlier generations to blind everyone to what's happening right in front of their nose. Continues Reisman:

Contemporary education is responsible for the growing prevalence of irrational skepticism. The students subjected to it do not acquire actual knowledge. They have no firm foundation in a base of memorized facts and they have not acquired any solid knowledge of principles because their education has avoided as far as possible the painstaking processes of logical proof and repeated application of principles, which latter constitutes a vital and totally legitimate form of memorization. Such students go through school “by the seat of their pants.” They are forever “winging it.” And that is how they go through life as adults. It is impossible for them to have genuine understanding of anything that is beyond the realm of their daily experience, and even of that, only on a superficial level. To such people, almost everything must appear as an arbitrary assertion, taken on faith. For their education has made them unfit to understand how things are actually known. Their failure to memorize such things as the multiplication tables in their childhood, makes it impossible for them to understand whatever directly depends on such knowledge, which, in turn, makes it impossible for them to acquire the further knowledge that depends on that knowledge, and soon. With each passing year of their education, they fall further behind.

Ironically, their failure to memorize what it is appropriate to memorize ends up putting them in a position in which to pass examinations, they have no other means than out-of-context memorization—that is, memorization lacking any foundation in logical connection and proof. Because they have never memorized fundamental facts, and thus have no basis for developing genuine understanding of all that depends on those facts, they are placed in the position in which to pass examinations they must attempt to memorize out-of-context conclusions. It is because of this that a growing proportion of what they learn as the years pass has the status in their minds of arbitrary assertions. They are chronically in the mental state of having no good reason for most or almost all of what they believe. Thus, in their context of actual ignorance masked by pretended knowledge, they are prime targets for irrational skepticism. To them, in their mental state, doubt of everything can only seem perfectly natural.

Such students, such adults, are easy targets for a doctrine such as “environmentalism.” They are totally unprepared intellectually to resist any irrational trend and more than willing to leap on the bandwagon of one that caters to their uncertainties and fears. Environmentalism does this by blaming the stresses of their life on the existence of an industrial society and holding out the prospect of an intellectually undemanding and thus seemingly stress-free pastoral existence, one which is allegedly “in harmony with nature.”

The destructive work of contemporary education carried on against the development of students’ conceptual abilities from the earliest grades on is compounded, as their education advances to the higher grades, by the teaching of a whole collection of irrationalist doctrines that constitute the philosophical substance of contemporary liberal arts education... These doctrines constitute a systematic attack on reason and its role in human life...

If one wishes to use the expression “intellectual main stream,” and borrow for a moment the environmentalists’ alleged concern with the cleanliness of streams and such, these doctrines may justifiably be viewed as intellectual raw sewage comparable to what can be seen bobbing up and down in a dirty river. They and the methodology of contemporary education have totally fouled the “intellectual mainstream.” The kind of education I have described—-if it can still be called education, consisting as it does of an unremitting assault on the rational faculty and every rational value—-is responsible for the hordes of graduates turned out over the last decades who have had no conception of the meaning and value of the Constitution and history of the United States, of the meaning and value of Western civilization itself, or indeed of the meaning and value of membership in the human race. It has been responsible for the decline in the quality of government in the United States, as, unavoidably, many such mis-educated graduates have found their way into the halls of Congress and the state legislatures, and into major offices in all the other branches of government, and, of course, into all the various branches of the news media and publishing...

Thus, in what may prove to be the greatest tragedy in all of human existence, we see at the end of more than two centuries of man’s most dazzling success, the proliferation of heirs who as adults possess less than the mentalities of children. We see a culture of reason and science being transformed before our eyes into one which more and more resembles a culture of primitive men.

Such a transformation is not inevitable, but as long as the fundamental tenets of the miseducators remain largely unchallenged, it will continue.