Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
Unseen Economics
That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen
by Frédéric Bastiat, edited by Gary Furnell
Connor Court, 2024, 120 pages, $29.95
Why bother with an obscure French economist and essayist who wrote in the first half of the nineteenth century? I’ll come to it. But first to my use of the word obscure. After all, there are dozens of Bastiat societies around the world under the auspices of the American Institute for Economic Research. Still, I doubt Frédéric Bastiat appears in any Australian university undergraduate economics course. He certainly didn’t appear in mine. And, as I pointed out in an article I wrote on Bastiat’s economic insights in the September 2020 issue of Quadrant, he doesn’t appear in Mark Blaug’s Economic Theory in Retrospect, which is something of a bible on the history of economic thought.
Robert Hébert wrote in the 1987 edition of The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics: “Generally, judgment on Bastiat has been that he made no original…
The history of the Jewish state, just like that of the Holocaust, is undoubtedly unknown to these deniers of Israel’s legitimacy. They are but the latest iteration of the five Arab states’ war in 1948-49, by which they expected to destroy the fledgling Jewish state. They lost, but have since used the motley collection of Circassian, Turkish, Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese Arabs, renamed Palestinians in 1967, to ceaselessly prosecute the original war of rejection.
Aug 29 2024
8 mins
Like the soul itself, the imaginal conversation both traverses the boundary of death and intimates enduring mortal realities. The omission of question marks in the interrogatives points towards one locus of pathos in the poem, our awareness of such interactions’ limitations.
Aug 29 2024
10 mins
Pascoe invents Aboriginal farmers; Harney looked at Darwin and knew individuals who were trying to enter a white world: “Let them grow a garden and they soon felt the full weight of kinship ties when, at harvest time, their hosts of relations came to help them—not to gather, but to eat the crop.”
Aug 29 2024
13 mins
