Why Progressive Taxation Is Essential In A Modern Economy

A “flat” income tax system cannot work in a mature, stable economy. A progressive income tax system ie. increasing tax rates with increasing income is a necessity.

If people on higher incomes have materially higher proportions of those incomes available for discretionary spending and investment, they will increase their wealth at a faster rate. Thus, wealth disparity will gradually increase, which due to human nature will lead to animosity and the loss of social cohesion, eventually destroying the amenity of the wealthy. Thus, the wealthy have as much vested interest in a progressive tax rate as the poor, albeit for different reasons.

Every so often, we hear people calling for a flat income tax rate. In its purest form, all income from your first dollar earned is taxed at the same rate. Most proponents modify the proposal so that all “earned“ income above a certain threshold (usually dependent upon household structure) is taxed at the single rate. Earned income is defined as wages. Inheritances, capital gains and interest on savings are tax exempt.

Former US presidential candidate Steve Forbes proposed a 17% flat tax on all company profits and earned personal income greater than a threshold equal to $13,200 for each adult, plus $4,000 for each dependent child. Others have proposed variations. More recently, there was the Taxpayer Choice Act in 2007, which was never passed. Last year, we had another Republican presidential candidate, Hermann Cain proposing his / Sim City’s 9-9-9 plan.

Somewhat strangely, “earned” income ie. money you suffered for, is taxed, whereas income earned by someone else on your behalf, such as interest or dividends is not. I’m being a little facetious here, since the tax break for interest and investment income is intended to promote savings and make capital available for businesses.

Still, a reduction in the tax rate for low risk savings and the ability to smooth capital gains over a number of years, rather than no tax at all would recognise that society in part made that money for you, whereas the wages you were paid for digging that ditch really were earned by you.

It seems like all these flat tax proposals come from fringe US Republicans and moreover, never get up. Actually, many eastern European countries have introduced flat income tax rates since the fall of communism.

An increase in investment, productivity and economic growth in these countries since the introduction of the flat tax system does not imply cause and effect. Even if it is found to be a contributing factor to these desirable outcomes, it does not follow that such a taxation structure will continue to have a beneficial effect as these economies mature.

How much of the total economic growth is due to local innovation and how much is due to inflows of foreign capital as a result of economic liberalisation requires deeper analysis than the scope of this article, but I’d hypothesise that the latter is a greater factor. This means that although the flat tax may have spurred economic growth in the short term, this was in economies in transition out of a failed system, where private wealth was being created largely from scratch (for all but a few party apparatchiks). It does not follow that the flat income tax system will continue to have positive economic effects.

The economies of Eastern Europe which introduced the flat income tax regimes were stagnant after decades of oppression by communism. There were few genuine markets and little private ownership. The result was a lack of investment, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Suppose that all of a sudden, the rules of economic interactions are greatly changed, so that those who do take risks, work hard and can attract capital get to keep most of their profits. The result will likely be an upsurge in economic growth. Even if most of the wealth increase is concentrated in a minority of the population, most people achieve a higher standard of living relative to their previous situation.

In the initial phase of the economic changes, the profits earned by the newly wealthy minority are largely reinvested in order to make more wealth, because that is the new avenue to power, influence and self preservation. It is only later that more of the wealthy’s incomes are spent on imported consumer goods, or funnelled out of the country.

This subsequent stage of economic development is when a progressive taxation system needs to kick in, now that there are sufficiently many high income earners and a significant proportion of their income is not being reinvested locally. Even if some of it is, there are now far more investment opportunities for the newly wealthy than most citizens, generating on average significantly greater returns.

That brings me to my main point. In any economy with a sufficient amount of economic freedom, wealthy citizens and profitable, well capitalised corporations will have surplus capital to invest. Individual citizens on or below the average wage will be spending almost all of their incomes on necessities. They will not have a significant amount of surplus capital to risk in a variety of investments. Even when they do invest, they will be constrained by both logical risk aversion and lack of access to many types of higher risk, higher return investments, due to comparatively less financial education and professional and social connections.

Thus, high income earners will have proportionately higher disposable incomes ie. for discretionary spending and investment, as well as usually a better understanding of financial markets and more beneficial professional and social connections to provide investment advice. Additionally, those with a higher proportion of their wealth available for investment can afford to take greater risks, not only due to diversification, but due to the consequences of financial loss being lower in absolute terms.

It follows that those on higher incomes have the opportunity to increase their wealth at a faster rate than those on average or lower incomes. This may be desirable in an economy which is transitioning out of a situation of wholesale stagnation and average poverty (relative to other societies), as it may promote economic growth in the short to medium term. However, in a mature economy with free economic interaction, it will lead to concentrations of wealth and social instability.

As wealthy people and corporations earn on average higher returns and increase their capital at a faster rate than everyone else, a greater share of the total wealth is concentrated in fewer hands, even if the total amount of wealth is increasing through real economic growth.

People may not see a problem with this in a rational economic sense, but that is not how human beings interpret the world.

At very low economic levels, people value things in close to absolute terms: Have I enough to eat? To wear? Do I have shelter?

With more economic complexity ie. with increased levels of absolute wealth, people start to value things in relative terms. There is a famous experiment in which each member of the control group is given $10. Each member of the subject group is given $20 or $50, by a random process, with each knowing what everyone else received. The people who received $20 were significantly unhappier with the outcome, as determined by responses to a questionnaire, than those who received the $10.¹

If a society has a small number of individuals with a large proportion of the wealth, the above phenomenon will dominate, even if there is strong economic growth as a whole ie. on average. This will very likely lead to social instability, due to that other prevalent human characteristic: the urge to punish, even to one’s own detriment.

Eventually, a sufficient number of people will derive more emotional satisfaction from destruction of others’ wealth as some perceived “punishment” than working to create their own. Sufficiently many people will begin to see the wealth of the few as undeserved. We are already seeing it now with the loss of social respect of bank CEOs and the pirating of movies and music. Without remediation, the likelihood of violence on both sides increases dramatically.

It is possible to sustain significant income disparity over shorter horizons eg. a couple of decades, as in the United States in the late 1800’s, Eastern Europe 1995 – 2007 and as we are currently seeing in China. This is because a sufficient proportion of the population experiences such a growth in living standards that the absolute outweighs the relative.

In the long term, increasing concentrations of wealth lead to feelings of injustice in the majority of citizens. It does not matter if the wealthy class does not see this as reasonable, perhaps due to a high rate of overall economic growth. In this case the majority opinion will hold sway over the longer term. Social cohesion will break down, harming the amenity of the wealthy.

One of the simplest methods of remediation is via the income tax system. People earning higher incomes need to pay tax at higher rates because of humans’ evolutionarily derived emotional makeup, which significantly determines their sense of social right and wrong.

In a mature economy, it is thus also in the interests of the wealthy to institute a progressive income tax system. The only debate should be tax brackets and rates, which are to an extent derivable, with respect to the requirement of keeping the income distribution in a stationary state.

¹ There are plenty of similar examples in Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely.

Some Economics Of Solar Power

Suppose we wanted to generate a significant proportion of Australia’s electricity from solar power. What would it take and how much would it cost?

We could replace a significant proportion of our coal fired generation for roughly the cost of the NBN, create an entire export industry, profit from carbon trading instead of losing out from the current tax and keep the coal for much more valuable uses like adding to iron for steel exports, or eventually, making carbon nanofibres.

I don’t intend here to compare the current cost of solar power with that of coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, wind etc., because with proper investment, the costs of solar will greatly reduce. What I want to do is work out how much it would cost to substitute a large percentage of our current coal fired electricity generation, both in terms of dollars and land area.

Firstly, how much electricity do we actually produce in Australia?

In 2009, it was 261 TWh (terawatt hours). Of this, 19 TWh was used by the power stations themselves, 17 TWh was lost in transmission and distribution and 11 TWh was consumed by the energy sector itself. This leaves 214 TWh available for all commercial, industrial, government and private consumption ie. only 82% of electricity produced ends up being available for end user consumption.

That’s in 2009. In recent times, electricity production has been increasing at around 3% p.a., which implies that 2012 production will be approximately 285 TWh, of which 233 TWh will available for non energy sector consumption, rounding to the nearest integer and assuming no material increases in the efficiency of production and distribution.

Electricity consumption should increase at a bit less than the increase in real GDP, which is about 3 - 5% (about 1.5 - 2% from population growth and the rest from productivity gains due to better technology etc.).

Our total electricity generation capacity in 2009 was 56 GW (gigawatts). This doesn’t mean we actually use that full capacity. In fact, we rarely do. On average we use about 70% of our electricity capacity ie. an average output of 39 GW.

Of the 56 GW of power generating capacity in 2009, 30.3 GW came from coal fired power stations. These are at nearly full capacity pretty much all the time, so in 2009, we actually got 78% of our total power produced from burning coal, despite coal fired power stations providing only 54% of total generating capacity.

As far as renewables go, in 2009, we had 7.1 GW of hydroelectric generation capacity and 2.5 GW from solar, wind and biomass. The rest is gas and similar. The gas and hydro power can be on almost all of the time, but solar and wind cannot.

Suppose we decided to replace coal with solar and wind, in equal measures. Recall that 78% of our actually generated power (as distinct from theoretical capacity) comes from coal, so we would need (in 2012) 91 TWh per year from each of solar and wind available for end users.

A significant percentage of solar power is consumed at the place of generation. There would be a significant reduction in the 52 TWh or 18% of total production lost to inefficiencies. Let’s say we could reduce losses by two thirds in the case of solar ie. to 6%. That means we would need to generate 97 TWh from solar in 2012, increasing at approximately 3 TWh each subsequent year.

For the sake of definiteness, I’ll work with the 2013 target of 100 TWh. Being slightly more than one third of the total electrical energy requirement, this is about the upper limit of what can be generated from solar, since even spreading the grid across the country and using batteries (chemical and thermal), it's very difficult to get more than 8 effective hours per day of solar generation.

Let’s start with photovoltaic cells. I’ll discuss solar thermal power later. How much electricity do solar cells generate?

At 100% efficiency, about 1 KW / m². The most efficient, commercially available solar panels are the Sunpower E20, with an efficiency of approximately 20%. Let’s suppose that with improvements in technology, we could get to 25% in a few years. That’s 250 W / m².

Solar cells don’t generate electricity at full capacity all day. The best ones produce about 5 hours worth each day. That’s 1.25 KW / m² / day, or 456 KW / m² / year, a significant percentage of which would need to be stored in batteries for later use.

So, if we could store all the electricity produced by solar cells, or if we just fed the power not used at source into the grid and generated our nocturnal power from hydro and gas, we would need 220 km² of solar cells to hit our target.

Could we even do this?

The advantage of solar electricity generation is that it is easily distributed. The idea would be to make residential, government, recreational and commercial buildings generate as much power as possible from their rooftops, then add in banks of medium and large solar photovoltaic or solar thermal arrays in rural locations.

Large, industrial users such as aluminium smelters (which account for more than 10% of Australia’s entire electricity demand) could draw some of their daytime power from solar fed back into the grid, but realistically, they would continue to derive their electricity from large, gas fired stations.

There are approximately 9 million residential dwellings in Australia, of which approximately 7 million are free standing houses and 800,000 are semis or townhouses¹. Most free standing houses can fit 10 normal size solar panels on the roof. That’s 16m² per house, with semis and town houses about half that. Suppose you achieved a 50% take up rate for houses and 25% for semis and townhouses.

That’s 57.6 km² of solar panels, just on residential housing. Increase the take up rate to 75% for houses and 32% for semis and townhouses and we get to 86 km².

Now add in all the rooftops at schools, office buildings, local shops, factories, sporting pavilions etc. I don’t have figures on the number of each, however it should take us to halfway: 110 km².

The remaining 110 km² would need to be generated by large solar cell arrays, or their solar thermal equivalents. Most likely, this would be split between say, 60 x 1 km² large arrays and 5,000 x 0.01 km² smaller arrays. Allowing for spacing between the panels, the larger arrays would each need about 2 km² = 200 ha = 500 acres of dedicated land and the smaller ones 2 ha = 5 acres each. 5,000 might seem like a large number of 5 acre plots to find, but when you realise there are 15,000 suburbs and country towns in Australia, it puts the number into perspective. There would be plenty of 5 acre plots not suited to farmland not far from many country towns. Alongside irrigation channels would be sensible as it would lower the evaporation rate.

Even if we were only able to meet 20% of the 220 km² target from rooftop arrays, we would need 12,000 medium size (5 acre) arrays instead of 5,000. It is only feasible to substitute solar thermal generators for the large photovoltaic arrays.

Logistically, the placement of the solar generation capacity is feasible … and that’s replacing half of our current coal fired electricity generation with solar. Even finding the extra 13 km² of land each year for the extra 3% capacity will be fairly easy for a few generations, by which time we should have finally cracked the fusion puzzle.

What about the cost?

The Sunpower E20 panels cost around $1,000 / m². Add at least 50% for frames, wiring, batteries, DC à AC inverters and installation. Without economies of scale, the cost would be $330 billion. Totally infeasible.

But there would be huge economies of scale. We would need to produce something like 140 million solar panels just for domestic consumption, plus another 4 million per year, plus exports.

The panels could easily come down to $100 / m². Labour costs would not scale much, apart from efficiencies gained by installing all the cells in the one place in the large arrays. A Spanish paper comparing solar photovoltaic and thermal generation shows the current cost of thermal power is significantly lower than photovoltaic at Australian latitudes. Conversely, photovoltaic production costs are more responsive to economies of scale. Still, we might be able to reduce the all up installation cost to something like $250 / m², including the costs of hooking all arrays into the existing grid.

That’s $55 billion … over many years … to replace half our current coal fired electricity generation. About the same cost as the NBN and probably more valuable.

Who would pay for all this?

Firstly, the government would need to venture capitalise multiple solar cell manufacturing plants. If the entire project took 20 years, Australia would need to quickly develop a manufacturing capacity of 11 million solar panels per year (remember that we need 4 million per year just to meet the 3% increase in demand). Any exports would require extra capacity again.

The only way to raise the capital for such large manufacturing plants is with the federal government at least as a partner. It could use part of the future fund, or issue government bonds.

There is nothing wrong with the government acting as a venture capitalist. It happens all the time: Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank, CSL. The real debate should be about when the government should sell its shares to free up the capital for future investment and return profits to the taxpayers in the form of better services and / or reduced taxes.

By legislation, the government could guarantee the success of the industry. The government would build and operate the large arrays. It could sell them later if the public agreed. All new buildings would be required to have solar generating capacity. Existing buildings wishing to install solar panels could qualify for government loans at the government bond rate.

It is not wrong for the government to pick winners in terms of future industries and technologies, provided there are strong, independent arguments implying their benefits: the export and tax revenue, the employment creation, the use of non-arable land, the shielding of irrigation channels, the profit from carbon trading. Free movement of private capital does not always make the correct decisions and often cannot respond to the demands of the scale of both investment size and horizon.

Additionally, if you want to give Aboriginal communities real benefits, independence and land rights, install some of the arrays on their land, funnel part of the royalties into providing services and let them do what they want with the rest.

Afterword: Germany is producing a solar power output of 22 GW right now. They probably get closer to 4 effective hours per day, but if we installed the same capacity in Australia, at 5 effective hours per day, that's 40 TWh per year. The Germans are already at 40% of the very high solar target discussed above, even with the current high cost of solar energy.

¹ Source: RP Data

How Much Heritage Is Enough?

How many heritage listed items do we actually need to maintain a living cultural history? When is a building of such historical value that it must be maintained in its present form, even if privately owned, so that the community can physically experience it, as opposed to maintaining the historical record through video and still images?

There are 56 houses in Sydney which are listed on the National or State Heritage Register. If you look at the list, there are some properties from the early colony, such as Elizabeth Farm and Old Government House. These are of great cultural and historical significance. They need to be maintained in situ, which they are.

The above two examples are government owned. Having in effect been turned into museums, they are now more than they were. School students visit on excursions.

Not all of the 56 properties are government owned. Boomerang, for example is owned by Lindsay Fox. Private ownership is not unreasonable. The owner must maintain the property according to the standards of the heritage listing. They are well aware of the requirements when making the purchase. In fact, having wealthy owners living in and maintaining some of these historically significant properties benefits the nation as a whole, since they are likely to spend more doing so than a budget cutting government.

56 properties of cultural and historical significance can easily be maintained by a combination of the taxpayers and a few wealthy individuals seeking social elevation.

But what about all the local heritage listings? There are 20,000 listed “items” in NSW. Not all of them are houses of course, but the listed houses number in the thousands. Almost all are privately owned.

One such house is Camden Lodge at 102 Burlington Rd, Homebush. It’s on 2770m² and is currently owned by the Mayor of Auburn, Ronney Oueik. It also burnt down in “suspicious circumstances” after Ronney Oueik’s development application was refused by Strathfield Council.

I have no sympathy for Ronney Oueik. He knew, or should have known at the time he bought the property what the implications of the local heritage listing are. His DA clearly didn’t comply, since it proposed demolishing the house. Then the house mysteriously burned down one night. The Sydney Morning Herald said it: “does not suggest that Cr Oueik or members of his family are suspected of any involvement in the fire”. Not officially suspected, that is. Based on the (albeit circumstantial) evidence, you can form your own opinion. I know what mine is.

Now Cr Oueik has threatened to turn the house into a Muslim prayer hall if his post fire DA is refused. He’s saying: I know you don’t like us. I’ll put the most confronting Muslims I can find next door to you, and as many as possible. See how you like that, you Anglo, heritage society fuckwits.

Great ethical principles there, Ronney: casting your fellow Muslims as the punishment to be visited upon people who oppose you. And this bloke is the mayor of Auburn.

The threat has the street’s residents all riled up, but it’s unlikely he could see it through. Strathfield may be close to Auburn, but it isn’t like Auburn. Apart from a still sizeable proportion of residents from an Anglo-Saxon background, the demographics are heavily Italian Catholic, with many people of Chinese and Korean descent, as well as an increasing number of Indians. None are great supporters of Muslims, who comprise less than 5% of the population. So good luck getting your rezoning application through Strathfield Council.

Hopefully Strathfield Council will call Ronney Oueik’s bluff. Sufficient would be a simple statement that a Muslim prayer hall on the site would not be allowed because of zoning rules, which will not change due to the heritage listing. Even at a conservative cost of capital of 6% p.a., Ronney Oueik is losing $150,000 per year on the purchase price of $2.5M. Hopefully, he’ll either have to remediate the site or sell it at a large loss, although it will probably be an expensive lesson unlearnt.

In this country, the way to settle differences of opinion over heritage listings and development applications is by providing evidence to the Land and Environment Court, not by arson¹ and threatening to dump a great, steaming bucket of Islam on your neighbours’ doorsteps. If you think the Liberal Party is a vehicle for buccaneering property developers, you’re in for a shock, Ronney. It has plenty of conservative members who like their heritage listings.

In general, there are too many private residences with local heritage listings. All it takes to get one is a sympathetic assessor and a small, but active local heritage society. These are often people with too much time on their hands who want the area to remain as it was 50 years ago when they moved in. Unfortunately, that requires a very large number of privately held properties to be maintained to externally mandated standards, coupled with significant restrictions on the owner’s right to develop their property in ways similar to most of their neighbours, not to mention a reversal of the past 50 years of immigration.

In one way, it is good to maintain as much as possible a few “heritage” properties in each local government area to show the new arrivals what the area was like and that the community values this cultural heritage. They act as subtle cues in favour of assimilation. They are saying: It does not matter whether you do not grasp the historical significance of this property to the dominant culture of this country. This is for us. It can be for you too, when you have understood and valued the societal structures which made this into the country to which you asked to come.

I don’t mind some of my taxes being used for this purpose via tax deductions for extraordinary maintenance of the properties, but there is a limit and it is not large. A few, key properties, not several dozen in each LGA. The more properties we add to local heritage registers, the less “unique” most of the additions will be. That is an excessive impost on both taxpayers and the property owners for diminishing cultural returns. The Land and Environment Court needs to take a more sympathetic disposition toward the imposts on owners of local heritage properties and their arguments in favour of overturning local heritage listings in some cases.

¹ I’m not implying any arson in the Camden House matter, however there have previously been “suspicious fires” in other, completely unrelated development applications by unrelated individuals.

Sometimes The Police Are Right To Shoot

If you pull out a gun and point it at the coppers, you can hardly expect them not to shoot you, particularly if you are a known criminal and the police are executing a search warrant on your house.

There have been multiple, recent cases of unjustifiable deaths at the hands of police, but the above is not one of them.

Nor is the shooting of Darren Neill at Westfield Parramatta or the shooting of Ryan Pringle at Tenterfield by police after he pointed a crossbow at them and other people. They even did the right thing in the latter instance and tasered Pringle first, but apparently it didn’t work.

The men in the three cases above were shot dead rather than police shooting to merely disable eg. by aiming for the thigh. Society can’t expect police to endanger their own lives by taking low percentage shots when confronted by someone wielding a gun or a crossbow. It is even unreasonable to expect police to take low percentage shots if they are cornered by someone with a knife. If they can back off, then take a shot, then more measured action is appropriate, but not when a split second decision is required and the consequences of failure are quite possibly death.

Update: The Police Were Right To Shoot These Fuckwits As Well:

Police in King's Cross shot the driver and front seat passenger of a stolen car which had deliberately mounted the kerb to escape pursuit and driven along a pavement packed with pedestrians. The police opened fire to stop the car after it hit a woman, who fell under the front of the vehicle and was dragged along.

What's the problem then? She was an innocent bystander who could easily have been killed. There was a choice between shooting the driver to stop the car and save the woman's life or being more concerned for the welfare of a bunch of scummy cunts who couldn't care less about other people's safety and right to walk on a footpath without being run over. The police made the right one. 
Were I one of the woman's family or friends, I'd be thanking the police. Conversely, I'd have been raising hell had they made the opposite choice.

The question was asked whether police should have opened fire in a crowded street. 
To save a woman's life? Of course they should. One would expect them to be able to hit their target, given that it was about six feet wide.

There was predictable hand wringing and accusations from the usual suspects over the fact the shot driver was a 14 year old boy and moreover, that the occupants of the stolen car were Aboriginals.
How would the police have known his age prior to shooting? What does it matter that they were Aboriginals? Why should it have changed the police's decision? Would the woman under the car have been any less dead?

More should be made of the obvious question: "What is a 14 year old boy doing driving a stolen car through Kings Cross at 4am?"

Have a look at the family of the driver about 2.00 min into the ABC TV coverage. It explains a lot. The police may want to ask them how they arrived on the scene so quickly.

All society's fault, of course.

Actually, it is partly: the lefty, identity politics hand wringers and pseudo intellectual onanists who bend over backwards to give this so called "community" equal rights, without the commensurate expectation of equal standards of behaviour.

Islam May Not Be So Bad After All

With most religions, it’s the culture which interprets them that is the real problem.

An interpretation of religion which encourages a man to have sex with all of his wives at the same time seems fairly sensible to me, particularly if it also suggests his wives indulge in a bit of lesbianism to further please their husband. The same pamphleteers also encourage wives to be “obedient”, presumably with some strictly applied spanking able to be meted out if they are not.

Suicide bombers? Cutting off hands? Banning alcohol? What the fuck are you Muslims doing? Get this pamphlet out there as widely as you can. We can all stop fighting right now. You can keep the driving ban on women though, particularly now we might get a flying car.

With modern, Western countries legalizing gay marriage, there is no reason why we should not also legalize polygamy. Then someone could convert to Islam, interpret it through the lens of our open, libertarian culture and have 2 husbands and 2 wives. Or they could convert to Mormonism and have 11 husbands and 14 wives.

Christ only knows what will go on inside the White House if Mitt Romney gets elected.

Debating Atheism

Last night’s Q&A program on the ABC, featured a debate between evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins and Catholic Cardinal George Pell. Predictably, the debate quickly lost its way in the Q&A format as it largely descended into sniping and peripheral point scoring. Even worthwhile questions open to the development of a clearly reasoned argument in response rarely elicited one.
For example,

·         In what way are moral values dependent on the existence of a god?

·         Without religion, where is the basis of our values?

·         Clarify the Roman Catholic church's position on evolution, and comment on whether the dichotomy between science and religion is in fact real.

All good, open ended questions. Each gave one of the protagonists a chance to state a position and justify it with a brief argument, then allow the other a reply. If you watch the show, this didn’t happen in any serious way.

We even had a nice segue into exploring the high correlation between religious conservatism and climate change skepticism in

·         As a climate change skeptic, you a demand a high standard of evidence to support the hypothesis that global warming has an anthropogenic cause. Why then do you not demand the same standard of evidence for the existence of God?

George Pell of course fluffed about in response, but Richard Dawkins missed the chance to absolutely cream him.

A major problem with the debate was that it did not begin by establishing exactly what is meant by atheism, agnosticism, spirituality and religious faith. Richard Dawkins touched on the first two and the spectrum of disbelief or agnosticism about a quarter of an hour into the program, but any chance of a meaningful, epistemological discussion quickly fizzled out.

From this, it could have led into what science and rational inquiry in general has to say about religion and what religion believes it provides that the former not only does not, but cannot.

The statements

1.      I believe that god does / gods do not exist

2.      I do not believe that god exists / gods exist

have different meanings.

From an epistemological perspective, there are three possibilities:

1.      That god exists / gods exist and there is sufficient information available to allow the question to be decided.

2.      That god does / gods do not exist and there is sufficient information available to allow the question to be decided.

3.      That one does not know whether or not god exists / gods exist, either because there is currently insufficient information available to decide the question or because the proposition is logically undecidable.

The first statement takes an active position in favour of possibility 2 and thus necessarily against both possibilities 1 and 3. The second statement takes a position which may, but does not necessarily include the first because it is compatible with either possibility 2 or 3, though obviously not both, since they are mutually exclusive.

The first statement is stronger than the second. It is saying that the proposition that god exists and the proposition that the question is undecidable are BOTH false. It is also saying that the person making the statement has access to the information required to decide that god does not exist and moreover, that the information has been analysed correctly.

The second statement may include people who actually mean the first, but whose language is imprecise. It also includes people who believe possibility 3 and who dispute both possibilities 1 and 2 based on the decidability of the question.

Even if one affirms statement 2 but not statement 1, one can elaborate in several ways:

·         I do not believe that god exists / gods exist and I believe it is more likely than not that god does / gods do not exist.

·         I believe that god(s) cannot have the following properties …

This second statement would have made for an interesting panel discussion, since although metaphysical, it is amenable to logical analysis. For example, the possibility that God might exist but not be omnipotent or omniscient could have been discussed, or even the possibility that God may have evolved after a certain level of complexity had been reached, in the same way as self awareness has evolved in (some) humans.

The program was weakened by a panel of two almost diametrically opposing views and a moderator (Tony Jones) who was clearly well out of his intellectual depth. What it needed was a philosopher of science and perhaps a more modern thinking, Protestant theologian as counterpoint to George Pell’s Catholic superstition and dogma on the other side. Of the former, A.C. Grayling is on Q&A this coming week and physicist Laurence Krauss is in town. Either would have considerably broadened and deepened the discussion.

The problem with Richard Dawkins’ public debating on religion is his approach to his opposition. His method is to essentially lay out a summary of an undergraduate course in evolutionary biology, then say words to the effect of: “Well, after all that, if you still don’t believe in evolution, you must be a delusional idiot”.

He is correct, but the effect is that his opposition becomes even more intransigent as they respond to the threat by looking for safety in numbers. Logical argument is pointless, because that’s not how such beliefs are formed and maintained.

If you deal with enough idiots in settings where you don’t have power over their behaviour, you figure this out or suffer. Richard Dawkins is a strange sort of person, though. He has almost no sense of humour or ability to understand the thought processes and motivations of the profoundly illogical (most of the population). It’s almost as if he’s a tiny bit autistic. It’s a great shame, because he’s an excellent lecturer and scientific writer, but only effective as a preacher to the converted.

He has also spent almost all his adult life in academia, where idiots are dealt with in a completely different way. Whether you’re writing a paper, delivering it at a seminar or lecturing students, you’re essentially telling people how things are and responding authoritatively to questions. If people don’t believe you, they can either provide a coherent counter argument, fuck off or fail their course. You don’t need to care if an idiot refuses to believe you based on some absurdly incoherent world view.

In business, politics and most general social interactions, you do need to care, because such idiots can make decisions which affect you. You either need to find some common ground and use it to bring them along socially with you ie. to make them feel you and they in some way belong to some common group, or if this cannot be done, treat them as the enemy, form your own social coalition and exclude them as much as possible from positions of power and influence.

To successfully prosecute either of these strategies against the menace to freedom of organized religion, Liberalism needs public proponents just as intelligent and knowledgeable as Richard Dawkins, but vastly more urbane. I suspect A.C. Grayling or Laurence Krauss, or particularly the late Jacob Bronowski would have gently painted George Pell into a corner and shown him up as the meagre intellect and hypocrite he is.

Instead, the highlight of the evening was a (possibly Freudian) slip where George Pell was recounting his earlier days in Rome:

“We were preparing a group of boys …”

Perhaps they were preparing them for an older, Frank Thring style cardinal:

“Bring me another boy … this one’s full.”

Victorian Parks Staff Who Closed Gates Should Be Sacked

The solution here is very simple.

Parks Victoria employees have taken it upon themselves to lock the public out of Victorian parks this Easter as part of a Community and Public Sector Union industrial campaign.

When non-union workers were employed to open the gates, CPSU members returned and locked them.

Who the fuck do you pieces of shit think you are? The parks are public land ie. they belong to all of us, not you. You have no legal right to refuse anyone access to them unless specifically directed to do so by the Victorian government. Do you turds think you can try to ruin people’s Easter as an industrial blackmail tactic without a public backlash?

The Victorian government has been extremely weak in handling this issue. Once the union decided it would try to hold the public to ransom and ruin people’s Easter holiday plans, the gloves should have come off.

The government should have issued an order that all park gates were to be left open on Thursday evening. Entry to all parks would be free for the holiday period. Any employee ignoring this and closing the gates would be sacked. Any employee who turned up to work, but instead of actually working, closed and locked the gates should be sacked and charged with trespass and public nuisance. If the police refused to lay charges, the DPP should have been instructed by the attorney general to do so. After the smoke had cleared, the government could have agreed to reinstate the sacked workers in return for a 2.5% pay rise, contingent each year on no go slow campaigns.

During normal opening hours, there should have been employees (contract or otherwise) manning the gates with instructions to prevent anyone closing the gates, physically if necessary. A few big, nightclub bouncers would have done the trick.

If some union members had been really stupid and tried to block access with a picket line, they may have found themselves removed by angry members of the public. If not, the police should have been called in to do it. They have just received a 4.5% p.a. pay rise for the next 4 years, in return for productivity gains. Well, here’s your chance to demonstrate some productivity, boys: arrest these CPSU dickheads.

The combination of keeping the parks open and free entry would have ensured majority public support. The Coalition only holds government in Victoria by a slim majority (45 - 43), but it does control both houses. I doubt being tough with unions trying to ruin Easter for people in pursuit of a 6% pay rise would have lost them many swinging votes, particularly given the results in NSW and Qld and with the federal government so on the nose.

Slimy wanker, Julian Kennelly, a spokesman for the CPSU tried to pretend the industrial tactic had some public support:

"The public have been extremely supportive today when they have turned up to find themselves turned away".

… and then admitted it didn’t:

"There will be some people who will be angry."

No shit, Sherlock! I’m surprised none of your dickhead members were bashed. If you make enough people angry, simple statistics argues some of them will snap.

When the rangers were refusing to participate in controlled, hazard reduction burns and other dangerous activities as part of their campaign, they had some public support. When Parks employees decided to refuse to clean toilets and collect rubbish ie. do the normal part of their jobs, some people rightly asked: “Why are you being paid if you’re not working?” Now they have actively tried to sabotage people’s holiday plans, any moral position they might have had completely disappeared and many people have turned against them.

The lack of credibility in the CPSU campaign is revealed by its contradictory claims. On one hand, they complain about being short staffed, since the land area under management has increased by 20%, but staff numbers have not. This is fair enough. I think most people would support what appears to be a logical argument for staff increases.

However, the main sticking point of the industrial campaign is that the Victorian government has offered pay rises of 2.5% and the union wants 6%.

6%? With inflation at half that and interest rates at near record lows? Get fucked! It’s not as if you’re highly skilled labour, opening gates, cleaning toilets and telling people where they can’t park. You just don’t deserve 6%. The pay claim is clearly a bargaining device.

Where has the push for more staff gone? What about the proposed change in policy whereby Parks Victoria can transfer employees to any park in the state? Is that even true? Where have the valid arguments regarding employment conditions disappeared to? If you got the 6%, would you hypocrites accept staffing levels and the new transfer system (if that is even true and not union propaganda)?

This is where unions hurt themselves. They have a couple of valid points and have been offered a pay rise. The police got more than 2.5% because maybe they were underpaid for the danger of their jobs (the quid pro quo should be less corruption and a MUCH better attitude toward the law abiding majority of the public).

But instead of keeping the public onside, the CPSU have decided to take a confrontational stance with us. You will lose as a result.

Some people might wonder how my above position is in keeping with Liberalism. You will only be confused if you think “liberal” means what it has come to mean in the United States: a hand wringing, wet, lefty. But that’s not what it really means. It’s been hijacked: by the conservative right as pejorative and by the left as a badge. Both groups are fuckwits who would destroy a great political tradition.

People should have the right to organised representation in the workplace. In fact, they probably need it if they are employed by government or a large corporation. What their representation should not have the right to do in a modern, open society is facilitate an organised campaign to destroy other people’s amenity or harm their prosperity in support of industrial action. Where physical action is taken to interfere with other people’s right to enjoy their free time (as with closing parks) or their right to conduct business, it should be met with physical action.

Australian society is not so rife with oppression that Victorian park rangers must physically disrupt it in order to argue a wage offer up from 2.5% p.a. to somewhere below 6%. This is a case which should be settled by a workplace arbitration commissioner.

Afterword: The only contact details I can find for Julian Kennelly are the CPSU head office number (03) 9639 1822 and his email: jkennelly@spsfv.com.au.

Arts Prizes Should Be Privately Funded

What involvement should governments have in funding arts prizes?

Very little, according to the new government of Queensland. Writers have of course complained bitterly. There have been critical responses, many such as this example from Kate Middleton (I believe a different one from our possible future queen), a melange of self interest and non sequiturs.

The argument by analogy with tourism funding is particularly absurd:

“Given the millions spent on boosting tourism, surely some money can be laid aside for the arts.”

So, because tourism receives money from the government, the arts should also get a slice of the pie? The argument epitomises the leftists’ handout mentality: money is being collected and distributed, so why can’t we / they have some?

How about collecting and distributing less of it in the first place?

Firstly, funding tourism is an investment. The intention is that the funding will be repaid many times over in job creation and tax revenue. It is sound economic practice for governments to perform a venture capital role. Tourism is one of the best export industries because its earnings come from the provision of services and the enhancement of the environment, as opposed to mining which degrades it. In fact, valuable environments such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu must be preserved in order to facilitate tourism.

One could suggest that funding of writers via prizes is an investment, since some will later become successful and provide the community with tax revenue. However, Kate Middleton's article argues against this claim by admitting that this is often not the case. Conversely, most financially successful writers have never received a government grant or prize.

Secondly, governments do fund the arts to a significant degree. All large Australian universities have English, Music and Fine Arts departments. Opera and theatre companies are subsidized. Film finance corporations offer incentives and investment. Rebates are available through the tax system. NIDA is part of the University of New South Wales. There are also annual arts festivals, although these are partly aimed at stimulating tourism.

“Arts cuts will reward only the unthinking”, says Kate Middleton. How? Is the government diverting the prize funding to support rugby league? In fact, the cuts will reduce the public debt, which rewards everyone.

Kate Middleton is a previous winner of the West Australian Premier's Award For Poetry and the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. The latter is funded by an endowment from the poet Bruce Dawe. Her poem Rainbow's End won it in 2006. It can be found in her book Fire Season.

It’s a good enough piece of work. I like the way the complexity of the themes marries with the cadence. Sure, give it a prize. But why should taxpayers fund it per se?

If Kate Middleton was on a university English faculty, she could get paid to write stuff like this all the time, as long as she contributed some wider literary criticism and taught it as well. Not an unreasonable trade off for a professional poet.

In fact, no-one is being rewarded by arts cuts. Taxpayers’ money is being saved, because this government believes it is preferable not to take money from citizens in the form of taxes and redistribute it to a select handful of writers and poets. Their rationale is that the funding of arts prizes is a matter for the private sphere.

Lefties would say governments at all levels should fund prizes in art, literature and music. The federal government should fund a few major, annual prizes in several categories, state governments should fund prizes for younger or lesser known artists and even local councils should offer arts prizes to schoolchildren. That’s the way lefties think: “What can government do?” As soon as they gain any control over public office or funds, they immediately set about exploring this question, assuming without doubt a moral imperative.

True libertarians don’t want any funding for arts prizes by governments or large corporations. It is more than a philosophical belief that this is not a legitimate role of government; funding from such sources is dangerous because it has the potential to compromise artistic integrity.

The compromise from funding by large corporate entities is pretty clear and certainly the left would agree. However, the assumption that governments would not also be likely to seek to influence awards by threatening to withhold future funding and / or stacking the prize committees is naïve.

Often, a less actively conspiratorial mechanism delivers similar results. When arts prizes are instituted by governments, the types of people who seek membership of the awards committees, or whose membership is sought, tend to be left of centre politically. Not all them, but the overall balance tends to tilt to the left.

Eventually, they just can’t help themselves and award a prize to an overtly (left) political work, whose didacticism greatly exceeds its artistic quality. This sets a precedent and more such awards follow. If there is not currently a conservative government in power, there eventually will be. Their reaction is to reconstitute the board of trustees of the prize or even to shut the prize down. Left wingers then evoke Nazis and their attempts to control culture. I have read one citing the Germanic Art versus Degenerate Art exhibitions, conveniently overlooking the fact that socialist realism was virtually mandatory in the Soviet Union. Apparently, conservative governments should just fund the arts and not criticise what is produced. It’s perfectly acceptable for left leaning governments to involve themselves in arts debates, of course.

You can’t keep politics out of art, or art prizes. Political fighting ruins it for everyone. That’s why democratic governments should not be involved. Arts prizes should be privately funded. The biggest ones are.

The Archibald Prize came about as a result of a bequest in J.F.Archibald’s will. The Archibald, Sulman and Wynne Prizes are all funded by a combination of donations and entry fees to the exhibitions of the finalists. They are administered by the NSW Art Gallery via a board of trustees.

Prizes for literature and music are logistically more complicated to administer because there is nothing equivalent to a national or state art gallery, in that theatres are too small and diverse and libraries do not charge entry fees. It does not follow however that prizes in these fields cannot be privately funded and administered.

It requires some effort to raise funds, however given that many of these prizes are in the range $5,000 - 20,000 p.a., it shouldn’t be that difficult. Making the effort to get off the public teat will very quickly pay large dividends in terms of independence.

There are many Australian actors and writers who have done very well for themselves. I’m sure they could fund a few literature prizes. This would be vastly preferable to government involvement.

Aboriginal prizes are the ones with most to gain from independence from government. The David Unaipon Award could easily be funded by any Aboriginal land council (or group of them) which receives mining royalties. Why doesn’t a group of prominent Aboriginals propose to take over the trusteeship of the prize? There are certainly people competent to run it: Noel Pearson, Ken Wyatt, Warren Mundine. Approach some successful Aboriginal sportsmen for a funding contribution: Adam Goodes, Anthony Mundine. I’m sure they would be good for a few grand a year each. In the end, the Australian taxpayer will be funding 46.5% of the prize anyway.

Let The Victims Name Paedophiles

Derryn Hinch is in the news again for naming another convicted paedophile. The linked article ran with the stupid headline: “Derryn Hinch Has Done It Again”.

Maybe he should be doing it “again” because it’s the right thing to do.

In this case, the offences occurred around 20 years ago. It was the victim herself who wants her father named, as the transcript shows.

On sentencing, the offender’s barrister made the standard attempt to have publication of his client’s name suppressed. Trying this on is expected. It’s also expected that the defence will come up with ludicrous reasons for the suppression. In this case, it was to “protect the man’s reputation” and “not to destroy his ability to earn an income after his release from prison”.

What should not be expected is that the judge will agree to the suppression order for any other reason than to protect the privacy of the victim and siblings.

According to Derryn Hinch on his broadcast, the victim wanted her father named at the time of sentencing. The timing of the court case is nearly 20 years after the dates of the offences. The victim brought the complaints as an adult.

It does not follow that because a victim wants the perpetrator named, that this should necessarily happen. If the victim is still a child, they may not grasp the full consequences for themselves of doing this. I don’t care about the offender, however the child may not understand the results of everyone knowing and may subsequently be unable to cope with the emotional effects.

There are also siblings to consider. Even if the victim is now an adult, there may be younger siblings who may be damaged by the publicity.

One possibility is that once all siblings are adults, the suppression order can be lifted, only if the victims agree. If some siblings were victims and others were not, only the wishes of the victims should be taken into account.

One element remaining is what to do if some victims, who are now adults want the suppression order to continue and some do not. In a sense, it is a denial of free speech to prevent adults from naming someone convicted of molesting them when no children of the family will be at risk of emotional harm by doing so. The law should not extend the coverage more widely, for example to protect children of now adult victims if for example, their aunt wishes to expose their grandfather.

The only other reasons for granting a suppression order should be if the defendant intends to appeal the verdict. In this case, despite the victim’s mother and siblings supporting the father, he does appear to have been correctly convicted – wouldn’t you appeal if you had wrongly been convicted of molesting children?

So, in this case, I can’t see any reasonable impediment to naming the convicted offender. Self serving arguments as to damage to his reputation and earning capacity should be treated with the contempt they deserve. If a court accepts them, it too should be treated with “contempt”.

What if someone were convicted of stealing from clients? Surely that would damage reputation and future earning capacity. Yet publication of their name is highly unlikely to be suppressed.

How about the victim naming her father?

Let's see if a judge is "brave" enough to jail HER for contempt of court and show us all how stupid this law really is.