“So Australia would become a military dictatorship,…”
May 2nd, 2008 by Warwick HughesThis is the opinion of Bruce Haigh, writing an article about the future effects of climate change, Weather the Weather, at newmatilda.com Bruce Haigh is a retired Diplomat who now farms near Mudgee; he irrigates grapes and olives. Bruce writes and comments on domestic and international affairs; he regularly presents at conferences, seminars and training sessions in relation to water issues and strategic planning.
I am bringing some rainfall data to Bruce’s attention.
I am fascinated to hear what readers think of this idea about Australia becoming a military dictatorship.
Posted in News and Views | 4 Comments »
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:36 pm
So Bruce imagines that leaving resource extraction and distribution to the market will cause problems and the obvious solution is to let the government handle it all. Since he has such wide experience living in unfree countries, perhaps he can tell us which ones do a better job of running their economies (and creating wealth) than the free market countries.
Earth to Bruce: Centrally controlled economies, at their best, only distribute poverty. They can’t create (much less distribute) wealth. And the price for this “benefit” is loss of freedom, misery, and ultimately democide. A much better solution to the possibility of the poor being left behind, is for the government to subsidize them and leave the free market (and the economic and political freedoms that enable it) alone.
I hope he’s wrong about Australians not being willing to fight for their freedoms, though. If not, then he just may be predicting Australia’s future.
May 3rd, 2008 at 3:16 am
Mmm,
Retired diplomat, —- like our Prime Minister,—- hope they don’t think alike !
May 7th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
I wonder if Bruce ever saw Friedman on the “benefits” of government control:
May 8th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Uri’s old footage of Friedman still provides convincing arguments against Bruce’s pleas for government control, many of which could have been taken from one of Lenin’s old pamphlets, e.g.: “Ownership should be controlled by the state for equitable distribution and use by all on a sustainable basis”, and his scarecrows of greed, speculators, “cartels and monopolies”, “banks and irrigation conglomerates…cornering the market”, “creating winners and losers” etc.
Bruce says that “The head of Treasury, Ken Henry, is, in my opinion, wrong in claiming that the market will regulate and conserve water through price. It will not.” Full marks for a taking a clear position, Bruce, but what economic argument will sustain your position that price does not regulate and conserve whatever is being traded? A free market price, by definition, expresses the combined wisdom of buyers and sellers about the supply, future supply, and use-value of whatever they are trading. If a commodity with a high use-value is running out, the price will shoot up and consumption will fall. This is too obvious to require examples, though millions could be supplied.
Allocating commodities by regulation, by contrast, is a recipe for waste and mismanagement of natural resources. In particular, it caused the most spectacular misallocation of water resources of all time, big enough to be visible from space: www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=reclaiming-the-aral-sea&sc=rss.
That was a real military dictatorship in action, and the pictures of the Aral Sea more than justify the old description of the Soviet Union as “Burkina Faso with nuclear weapons.”