Archived publication for 2008
Recent publications
Can free markets be as interesting as regulated markets?
Sinclair Davidson reviews The Best Book on the Market: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Free Economyby Eamonn Butler (Capstone, 2008, 172 pages) Eamonn Butler has written a marvellous little book promoting the free market. The best book on...
Try to remember: when you're in opposition, it's not about you anymore
‘If you don't understand the GST, don't vote for it.' That was Paul Keating's message days out from the 1993 election. It helped turn the poll around. Like all successful political lines, it was both shorthand and subliminal. What Keating...
Building the Australian Nanny State
Free bibs Victorian Deputy Premier Rob Hulls has announced an additional $35,000 of funding for Auskick programs to provide bibs and waist bags to identify volunteers who had met working with children checks. V-chip for Australia The Senate...
Submission to the Green Paper on Australia's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme
Emissions Trading: Towards the biggest economic change in Australian history
‘Placing a limit and a price on emissions will change the things we produce, the way we produce them, and the things we buy', states the Federal Government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper, which compares the economic impact...
So now you have bought an emissions trading scheme
What is it? The emissions trading scheme, or ‘Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme', is a ‘cap and trade' system. This requires firms to obtain a government ‘permit' if they emit greenhouse gases. The government caps the level of...
Federal Government's ETS Green Paper is a Recipe for Radical Transformation of Economy
If implemented, the measures to curb Australia's carbon emissions foreshadowed in the federal government's Green Paper will bring about a radical transformation of the economy, according to the Institute of Public Affairs, Australia's leading free...
Submission to the Senate Inquiry into the National FuelWatch (Empowering Consumers) Bill
The rise of pop economics
The classical economists of the nineteenth century were largely concerned with wealth creation. David Ricardo developed theories of wages, rent and profit. Thomas Malthus wrote the consequences of population growth. Karl Marx looked at the moral...
How humanity outflanked starvation
Sinclair Davidson reviews A Farewell to Alms: A brief history of the world by Gregory Clark Sometime in the last 200 years there was a fundamental shift in the human condition. Our lives changed from being somewhat ‘nasty, brutish and short'...