Gerard Jackson
19 December 2022

Before the Marxist Adam Bandt appeared on the green scene there was Bob Brown, the founder of this pernicious party. Brown was never for the workers any more than the Green Party he founded is today. What is overlooked is just how elitist and loony green economics really is. Brown revealed the Greens real attitude to Australian workers many years ago in a letter he had published in The Australian¹ expressing his views on what he sneering called “extraction industries”  basically said it all. This brilliant economist and defender of the Koal bear and Australia’s fictitious “first nations²” defined logging and mining as “resource robbery”.

He further declared that Tasmania is a “post-industrial” society, despite the fact that it has never been industrialised, because her economy has never been based on those stinking high-wage energy intensive “dinosaur industries like pulp mills, zinc mills and aluminium mills.” Is this why average wages in Tasmania are about $11,000 lower than in mainland states? Yet these sanctimonious Greens wallow in their sense of moral superiority.

Continue reading Adam Bandt’s Green Party policies will be hell for workers →

Gerard Jackson
19 December 2022

Led by Adam Bandt, a Marxist, Australia’s anti-capitalist Green  party²  wants to use the concept of economic rent to target profits. Even though the concept of economic rent is accepted by the great majority of economists as factual it is in reality an absolutely dreadful fallacy whose continued existence is not due to David Ricardo but  John Stuart Mill who resurrected it in his Principles of Political Economy³. Though found in every economics textbook it has been largely ignored as an instrument of taxation. Unfortunately, dealing with this fallacious theory is a tedious process which will require some forbearance from readers.

Continue reading Australia’s anti-growth anti-capitalist Green party is screaming for a fallacious rent resource tax part 1 →

Gerry Jackson
12/12/22

Adam’s Creighton’s reporting from Washington is appalling. It has to be otherwise his bosses at Murdoch’s Australian would sack him. The job of every so-called reporter that rag ships to the US is to whitewash Democrats and disparage Republicans. At the moment more Democrat scandals are exploding into public view but rather than report them,  thereby upsetting his bosses, he chose to write happy-clappy garbage on the wreck of an economy that Biden and his America-hating left-wing controllers are creating. In do so he shames himself.

Continue reading Adam Creighton’s paints a false picture of Joe Biden’s train wreck of an economy and ignores the impending recession →

Gerry Jackson
12/12/22

The present economic situation was brought to us by Keynes’ fallacious economic opinions. We now have a huge debt and politicians who are wedded to big-spending fallacies that will bring on another recession. These are ignoramuses who firmly believe the nonsense that any government spending is investment. It was Keynes who wrote that even

 ‘wasteful’ loan expenditure [credit expansion] may nevertheless enrich the community on balance. Pyramid-building,  earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth,…¹” (Italics added)

It should beggar belief that any reasonably intelligent person could swallow this oxymoronic statement. Demand deficiency lies at the heart of Keynes’ economics, so let us examine this fallacy.

Continue reading How Keynesian economics gave us the disaster of big spending governments →

Gerard Jackson
28 November 2022

Peter Smith¹, Steve Kates², John Quiggin³ are economists. Smith and Kates are on the right while Quiggin is on the left. Despite their political differences all three have serious doubts about the benefits of free trade. I’ll begin with Steve Kates who made this important observation on free trade:

But you know what was also current then [in the nineteenth century]? The gold standard. There are many ways this process of comparative advantage breaks down, but with the abandonment of the gold standard and fixed exchange rates, there are all kinds of ways to cheat in foreign trade relations that are not discussed as part of the basic theory⁴.

Unfortunately, this was too much for Professors Sinclair Davidson and Judith Sloan with Davidson making the absurd accusation that Kates believes the theory of comparative advantage is wrong because the world is not on gold. Sloan wasn’t much better, calling Kates’ point about gold a “dud”. The only duds here are Davidson and Sloan. At a later stage we shall see why classical economists considered gold crucial to maintaining free trade and why Kates’ view that comparative advantage broke down is misguided. Peter Smith, like nearly all economists, does not link the gold standard to the principle of free trade, even going so far as to emphatically state that there is no such thing as “free trade”⁵.

Professor Quiggin, who confesses to being something a “heretic on free trade”, takes a macroeconomic approach to nineteenth free trade, arguing  that it created the  “impossible trinity”, according to which governments

Continue reading The link between free trade, the nineteenth century business cycle and the gold standard →

Gerard Jackson
21 November 2022

The Black Death provides a particularly vivid picture of the effect on wage rates of a sudden and significant drop in the labour supply. By 1348 the Black Death had reached England. The effect on the labour supply was so swift and severe that Edward III issued the Statute of Labourers Acts of 1349 and 1351 which set maximum wage rates based on the average for the period 1325-1331. The statutes were a complete failure. From 1348 to 1377 successive waves of the Black Death slashed the population from 4.8 million to about 2.9 million¹. The result was an increase in the ratio of land and capital to labour resulting in real wages rising by about 50 per cent². Writing in 1375 John Gower, a country gentleman, lamented:

Labor is now at so high a price that he who will order his business aright, must pay five or six shillings now for what cost two in former times…the poor and small folk…demand to be better fed than their masters³

Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester, wrote in 1388 that

the elation of the inferior people in dress and accoutrements in these days, so that one person cannot be discerned from another in splendour of dress or belongings, neither poor from rich nor servant from master⁴.

In the same year canons in Normandy complained the demand for labour had increased to the point that they

who did not demand more than six servants would have been paid at the beginning of the century⁵.

In 1356 the managers of the Florentine mint reported that the workers

at the mint do not want to work except when it suits them. And if one remonstrates with them, they reply with vulgar and arrogant curse words say they only want to work when it is convenient to  them and provided there are increases in salary⁶.

This brief foray into medieval economic history was necessary to bring home the indisputable fact that the ratio of labour to capital is of vital importance, an importance that is generally ignored. Therefore, we find that large changes in the labour supply relative to the capital structure have significant effects on wage rates. It is also true, as stated previously, that productivity⁷ can for a time conceal the negative effects of a heavy immigration inflow.

Continue reading The globalists’ policy of open borders would be catastrophic for the workers 3 →

Gerard Jackson
31 October 2022

Before examining the economics of mass immigration, meaning open borders, we must take note of the fact that advocates of this destructive policy largely fall into two groups: There is the extremely wealthy self-appointed globalist elite of which the self-righteous Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and Lady de Rothschild are prominent members.

According to the super rich Sir Evelyn any person who has the temerity to oppose this gallant knight’s love of open borders is a racist, particularly if his name is Trump¹. Rest assured, however, that Sir Evelyn would not for a moment allow a mass of third-world ‘immigrants’ to invade his beautifully manicured 3,200 acre Buckinghamshire estate.  Instead he and his ilk would damn well make sure that these people would be herded into the crowded streets, schools and hospitals of the working class, thereby driving down their wages and rendering their lives miserable.

Continue reading The globalists’ policy of open borders would be catastrophic for the workers 1 →

Gerard Jackson
24/10/22

What proponents of central planning proposals (industrial polices as they like to call them) overlook is that no matter how productive a technology appears to be it will always need capital and entrepreneurship to convert it into a commercial success. Without these factors new technologies with commercial promise will always gravitate to foreign shores.  When a country appears to be lagging behind other countries the interventionists solution is always the same: more intervention. That government intervention, meaning political meddling. may have created the situation these same politicians and their academic advisors now lament never seems to occur to them.

They also appear unable to grasp the fundamental fact that it is savings (spending on future goods as opposed to present goods) that  fuel an economy and it is entrepreneurship that drives it. However, according to the eminent Professor John Quiggin:

Continue reading Technology, markets, investment, and Professor Quiggin’s flagrant errors →

Gerry Jackson
17/10/22

In my last post I explained the crucial role the gold standard played in the classical economists’ theory of free trade. This is of vital importance because the classical approach deals a damaging blow against the globalists so-called ‘free trade’ arguments.  The classical theory argued that for the flow of international goods to be determined by the purchasing power of each trading nation a stable exchange rate was essential which in turn required a self-regulating specie standard. Therefore, only a specie standard could ensure an international division of land, capital and labour would result in these factors being allocated to their most valued ends thereby raising the standard of living above what it would otherwise be.

But the classical economists were adamant that purchasing power parity¹ was based on the prices of internationally tradeable goods: domestic goods were excluded. This meant that price levels play no role in their thinking. Frank Taussig emphasised Ricardo’s important position on this issue when he pointed out that the

Continue reading Gold standard,  exchange rates  the Dutch disease →