One of my minor problems (which I do not think even counts as a first world problem) is that I do not own enough beer branded clothing (except for baseball caps – I have a lot of those).

Perhaps I could fix it by visiting the Victoria Market on a Sunday. They sell all kinds of bogan clothing items there on Sundays.

Anywho, I was in Cotton On at Highpoint West this morning, looking to buy some cargo shorts, and noticed that amongst the various t-shirts featuring Mickey Mouse and various prestigious US Universities, there were two t-shirt designs with Fosters Lager as the main theme.

I took a closer look at the price tag, and decided that $34.99 is a bit too dear for me to become a walking advertisement for a hard to find beer. The flip side of the price tag did catch my attention however – it had something like 18+ on it.

I am not about to encourage underage drinking, and I will have some very minor reservations about the appropriateness of teenagers wearing beer logo t-shirts (although I think it is very cute when parents bring their toddlers into a pub), but I think it is silly to expressly prohibit the sale of t-shirts with beer logos on them to minors.

After all, you can’t get drunk from wearing a beer logo t-shirt. Or can you?

This year, Good Friday does not happen til 15 April. However, given that the holiday calendar is geared around maximising retail sale volumes, Hot Cross Buns and other Easter related matters appeared in my local supermarket even before the New Year.

I am not sure whether they appeared on Boxing Day, but believe me, by New Year’s Eve, the Hot Cross Buns were already in store.

This does not really surprise me. Christmas decorations and carols started appearing in the local shopping mall (in my case, Highpoint West) just after Halloween, not too long into my 13 week staycation.

You might think, from the prolonged emphasis on Christian festivals, that we live in a society of heightened religious fervour.

The opposite however is the truth, and probably for the simple reason that we have mostly forgotten the significant of our religion, and whatever was our connection to it, but have retained the desire to celebrate it.

The cornucopia of plenty that we enjoy in our modern post-industrial civilisation means that we have, for the most part, the wealth and the leisure to celebrate for just about any occasion, and to prolong those celebrations. [I expect sociologist Max Weber, who wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, would have had much to say about our capacity and need to celebrate for prolonged periods, but as he has been dead for about a hundred years, I am just name dropping him to show how well read I am.]

After all, Santa Claus is some sort of modern distortion, developed mostly by Coca Cola’s marketing department a century or more ago, of Germanic medieval Christmas traditions. South Park are totally right when they ridicule modern Christmas traditions by having Jesus and Santa either confront or help each other.

And now we have the ultimate in marketing travesties around Easter. That is, the creation of Hot Cross Buns with Vegemite in them. Which were in the supermarkets immediately after Christmas.

For those who might read my blog and are not Australian, Vegemite is a very typical Australian savoury spread people put on their toast. It is made from a yeast extract, normally left over from beer production (we Australians do love our beer, so there is plenty of left over yeast byproducts which can be recycled into Vegemite). It is very much an acquired taste.

When you look at how insanely the meaning of Easter has been twisted in the name of commercialism, this is not surprising. What does an Easter Bunny and all that chocolate have to do with the voluntary death (in a literally excruciating manner) and subsequent resurrection of our Saviour? And what does entitlement does a Bilby (an endangered Australian marsupial) have to replace the Easter Bunny here in such observances? And now we have Vegemite on Hot Cross Buns?!?

Anyway, my brother says that they taste great, so I might try one tomorrow when I head over to sponge breakfast at my mother’s home.

I have never been into all that contemporary CE (Current Era) and BCE (Before Current Era). For me, counting the years with the Latin preface Anno Domini (In The Year Of Our Lord) suffices as much now as it did 20 or 200 or 1500 years ago, and does so for most people, except for woke academics. Mind you, the monk who decided to count the years from the birth of Christ (and got canonised for his efforts) did get the actual year of Christ’s birth wrong – He did first come to us about 7 or 8 years earlier than the year 1 (there is no year zero).

If that does not work for you, then as an alternative perhaps we should count the years from the actual creation of the world, which would make right now the year 6030 or so – given that the somewhat pedantic Bishop Usher calculated from his reading of the Bible that the world was created sometime in October of 4008 BC….

But this is all just me being a tad provocative as a segue into my reflections on New Year’s Day, AD 2022. I am not a creationist, and my practice of Roman Catholicism rarely goes much further than ticking that box on the religion question on the Census every 5 years.

Today was a stinking hot day – the third in a row, although thankfully it appears that a mild cool change arrived early and has caused the temperature to drop from 39 degrees Celsius to 29 degrees, ending a three day streak of days in the high 30s.

Despite being invited to two New Year Eve parties, I stayed home due to the heat, and was visited by a friend who brought a couple of bottles of chilled sparkling wine with her. That passed the time until a little while after dusk.

Another reason not to go out on New Year Eve is to do with the limited availability of transport home after midnight. Taxis and gig economy rides like Uber were in short supply last night, and the surge prices that Uber allows in high demand situations, whilst a practical demonstration of free market economics, make taking an Uber rather expensive, even for those of us who enjoy a relatively materially affluent bourgeois lifestyle.

The likelihood of big earnings in the wee hours of New Year’s Day for drivers, combined with the heat wave keeping many people indoors, has adversely affected the food delivery services that I am prone to use during heat waves. Drivers became scarce yesterday afternoon, because they presumably needed to rest up for their busiest and most profitable night of the year, and hence in my local area it was impossible to order through any of the three options I keep on my phone (ie Menulog, Deliveroo, and Uber Eats). Nor, with the heat wave, was I going to trek 20 minutes to the nearest Thai restaurant (the one closest to my home closed for good in early December).

Today, my cravings for comfort food continue to be unfulfilled – the driver shortage plus the holiday closures of a lot of restaurants means that there are few options on the delivery apps aside from Macca’s (which is definitely not worth getting delivered) or Domino’s (and even there, the two closest Domino’s stores are not showing up as available for delivery).

So what does AD 2022 hold for us?

I for one am really sick of the Covid Plague – of the self-serving rhetoric of various of our technocratic political leaders, masks, QR codes, and electronic vaccine certificates. Hopefully Omicron proves to be a very mild variant and gives the unvaccinated some ongoing immunity from the plague, whilst a booster shot might finally put the risk away for the rest of us.

A state election is due in November, and I do not see a change of government happening, despite the groundswell of danger by some people in the community against our ersatz Maoist Premier Chairman Dan. There is an utter lack of a credible opposition in Victoria at the moment, as evidenced by the second coming of Matthew Guy as opposition leader, a chap whose tenure as Planning Minister in the last coalition state government was underpinned by at least two highly questionable decisions on zoning. His previous tenure as opposition leader subsequent to that resulted in a heavy defeat, but not before the infamous ‘Lobsters with Mobsters’ lunch which reflected little credit on his judgement.

A federal election is due well before then, although I believe that technically, the House of Reps does not need to face election before October. Most recent federal elections have been held at odd times of year, based on the capricious quirks of the incumbent PM (eg Gillard going in August 2010 in order to seek a mandate immediately after she had pushed Rudd out, Turnbull doing something rather similar in July 2016, and ScoMo going in May 2019 because he thought that the timing was right).

Elections are usually held in either early to mid Autumn or in late Spring. Holding elections in the dead of Winter like Gillard chose just reflects contempt for the party faithful who will have to brave the elements. Summer, aside from the first half of December, is out because of the holiday season and then the reality that it is uncomfortable to campaign in the heat. Which leaves as realistic options late March, April, and most of Spring (except for when we have the AFL and NRL grand finals at the end of September and start of October, and the very start of November, when the Spring Racing Carnival distracts people).

My gut feeling is that an election will be called for April 2 or 9, although as I do not advise ScoMo (only Jesus and the leaders of Hillsong do that), it is beyond my ken to predict.

I think that there will be a change of government federally. In both 1993 and 2004, voters were tired of the federal government, but were scared off by the opposition. They changed their minds resoundingly at the following election.

Whilst the coalition in this term has performed competently, compared to the infighting of their first two terms, they have quite a few things going against them. One is the perception, through the performance and behaviour of various front benchers, that they are arguably amongst the dodgiest governments in Australian history. Another is that the opposition does not have a dislikable fake as its leader this time – they have Albo, who is as loveable as Humphrey B. Bear. And a third is that it is very rare for governments to win fourth terms (I can only think of three instances – the Menzies era run of 8 wins in a row, Hawke-Keating with 5, and Howard with 4).

Of more interest is what happens internationally. Communist China remains a menace to the Indo-Pacific region, although whether it is, as Mao might have said, a paper tiger remains to be seen. There are a lot of demographic and other issues ticking away within the PRC which could see its sudden decline. Putin’s Russia is probably more of a threat to its own citizens than to the Free World, but Putin is belligerent and showing signs of aggressive expansionism not seen since Leonid Brezhnev got drunk at Christmas and ordered the tanks into Afghanistan in 1979.

And the thing we worry about most is money, because we all need to eat and want to have reasonably comfortable lives. This is the time of year where stock brokers and economists make their predictions and give their tips for the coming year.

I will tell you this about those predictions. They will all be wrong. All the stock tipping newsletters I read are hit and miss – for every stock they suggest which suddenly takes off, there are four or five which either go nowhere or totally tank.

[As a personal example, one stock broker made a New Year’s tip in one of the newspapers about a decade ago about a gold explorer called Robust Resources. I punted (and punt is the accurate term) $1000 on it. The company no longer exists, and I think I got out $200 of what I had punted whilst the share price spiralled into terminal decline.]

The vogue for money printing through such pundits as the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory leads me to suspect that the share market is going to continue, despite regular blips, to move upwards.

But there are a lot of headwinds which could affect this. I don’t expect War, but there are other possibilities. The PRC is constantly providing false figures on GDP growth and other economic measures, as well as putting both its own companies and others who invest in China at a high degree of sovereign risk. At some point, whether it is a whale like Evergrande or conflagration across the entire Chinese financial system, there is going to be some sort of serious financial crisis in China.

And of course, we have Bitcoin and all those other cryptocurrencies. These have no intrinsic value and just rely on the great fool theory, a bit like a pyramid scheme or a bubble. People believe in Bitcoin for as long as they will believe in magic beans. When they stop believing that the beans are magic, Bitcoin will collapse.

So, what should you do? I have no answers. Do what you think is most comfortable for you. I think I will be constantly stocking up on toilet paper and canned foods for the zombie apocalypse. I might buy some gold or silver bullion. These are not strategies I am following to get rich – just to ensure that if things end up a lot less optimistically than what Modern Monetary Theorists predict, then I will not be too uncomfortable.

Have a happy new year, readers, and try not to abandon your New Year’s resolutions until next week.

The philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche in his writings frequently deplored the materially affluent and relatively safe bourgeois lives that most people of his era lived.  He found such lives mundane and unheroic.  He yearned for the coming of a Superman, an Ubermensch, who would, through his example, topple the existing moral order and usher in a new age of heroism and daring.

Sometimes, even though it is 30 years since I first read Nietzsche and I have long since settled into suburban mundacity with all its petty comforts, I still wonder whether there should be more to life than our trivial everyday existences.

There is little that is more archetypical of that mundane bourgeois existence than the currently vogue term ‘Karen’.

A ‘Karen’ is a woman from a relatively privileged middle class background who exhibits a strong sense of self-entitlement, particularly in relation to airing grievances and demands to people who are less empowered than she.  It is probably the case that the Karen does not consciously realise that she lives a life devoid of significant meaning and mostly disempowered, but instinctively lashes out at those around her to try and assert some semblance of power and meaning over her otherwise trivial existence.  In this, I suspect that she is trying to express herself as some sort of Uberfrau (if you pardon my coining of peculiar German concepts).

No one can better illustrate what an Uberfrau is like than the high profile and cliché driven marketing maven Roxy Jacenko.  The trivial headlines and incessant media coverage of the life of this lady does sometimes give me cause to wonder about whether some of the drama queens in our society should be better described as Roxies rather than Karens.

I like the idea of calling a high profile and materialistic person who is both annoying and success driven a Roxy.  A Karen is going to just lash out at the poor shop attendants and waiters she encounters.  A Roxy is going to swill champagne and preach from the gospel of success, whilst carefully curating her public image and that of her family on social media, all as part of a very calculated strategy.

Of course, it is all focused on material wellbeing, albeit of a much higher standing than that of the Karen who does not like someone walking a dog down their street or that the service in a café is too slow.  A Roxy will do things like buy a luxury car for her nine year old daughter (true story) and fly her wedding dress in from the USA in its own first class seat (again true story), and constantly set up new business ventures.  Her wants and desires (mostly fulfilled) include beach houses and Lamborginis.  

In the end, a Roxy will have more material success and a life of greater privilege than a Karen will, but it remains a shallow life.  And whilst Roxy’s husband is a rule breaker who is troubled by the existing moral order, he is no Ubermensch interested in overturning our values and mores, he is merely an insider trader who sought to enrich himself directly, rather than rely on his family’s extreme wealth.  Nor is Roxy an Ubermadchen.  She is just interested in the accumulation of wealth and fame and a higher degree of material comfort than that afforded to most members of our society, including every Karen.  That just makes her an Uberfrau.  

Nietzsche would not envy them their shallow lives with their yachts and luxury cars and palatial homes, and nor do I.  An obsession with pursuing such excesses of wealth and luxury becomes an end in itself, and is an all consuming way of passing one’s life.  I doubt that it would be a happy one.

But I do think that a term such as ‘Roxy’ is needed to describe those privileged women who live or aspire to live such lifestyles. 

Let this be my contribution to the English language. 

Historicism is one of these concepts which I first encountered during my readings for my long ago abandoned MA thesis on Nietzsche, Hegel and matters which were in vogue in the mid 1990s such as the End of History.

Historicism essentially holds to the idea that human nature changes over time, that as civilisation grows in sophistication, we change, hopefully for the better.

[Nietzsche argued something different – that the advent of Christianity saw us abandon our heroic nature, and adopt the morality of slaves.]

Whilst we are far less hairy than our distant ancestors, and probably cannot digest raw meat too readily, I am starting to think that probably Historicism is too optimistic about both human nature and our intellects.

Back in antiquity, long before we had electricity, people used to believe that plagues and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and other catastrophes were signs of the wrath of gods, needing to be assuaged by sacrifices. The exiled Athenian general and historian Thucydides was rather sardonic about such not so idle superstitions amongst his countrymen in his writings.

Early church doctor Saint Augustine, in his City of God, had to do a lot of intellectual fancy footwork to explain why the collapse of the Roman Empire around the ears of his fellow citizens was not the fault of the rise of Christianity. Earlier Christians, of course, are commonly believed to have been fed in large numbers to lions in Rome in order to offset the wrath of the gods.

Such views have continued to be held until more recent times. Look at the Spanish Inquisition and the witch burnings, including in Salem in early colonial America. These were the products of superstition and ignorance.

The Darkness was here yesterday, as Joseph Conrad wrote.

And perhaps it is here today.

The two years of this pandemic has been an object lesson in the susceptibility of large volumes of people to ignorance and modern superstition.

In previous times, where education of limited availability and there was a vested interest in keeping the people ignorant (for example, prior to the King James Version, the existence of any English translation of the Bible was banned in England so that the clergy could have a monopoly on access to and understanding of scripture), ignorance was a sad fact of life for the overwhelming majority of the populace.

Now, in the first world, where education is universal, ignorance is a choice, and therefore quite possibly unforgivable.

I read a lot of peculiar things on the internet. One of the most peculiar yet sophisticated is the theory (complete with elaborate graphics) about the various covid vaccines being actually graphene nanotubes holding the virus, programmed to release it into the bloodstream when triggered by a 5G signal.

Another intriguing one is that the various pandemics of the past century or so, going back to the influenza pandemic of 1918-20, have each been triggered by the sudden proliferation of a new type of electromagnetic radiation, with the introduction of radio, TV, then mobile phones and now 5G each more than just coinciding with a pandemic.

A supposedly leading astronomer is believed to have argued that the virus has come from Outer Space, and that the appearance and waves of disease are connected to various meteor showers at various times and parts of the world. [I am not sure how that theory can be consistent with the very terrestrial microbiology of the virus.]

What I am getting at is that whilst we are more literate than our ancestors, and we are more skeptical about the supernatural than we were, such that we do not really believe in the wrath of the Gods or witchcraft, we have not changed that much. Instead of angry gods or malevolent witches, we remain susceptible to beliefs that there are all knowing cabals which are trying to control us or enslave or destroy us. Or that there are aliens with such plans in action.

Such stuff is very easy to find on the internet, along with other topics designed to stultify rather than enlighten us.

We don’t cry ‘Witch!’ anymore, but we do something similar in relation to developers of vaccines, particularly in countries like the USA, where so many people have supposedly achieved university level educations.

That seems to be an enduring problem with human nature. Whilst we now have access at our fingertips to all the information that humanity has ever discovered, we choose so frequently either wilful ignorance or the contemporary equivalent of superstition.

Looking online at pictures of cats, whilst most unproductive, seems to be a much more harmless use of social media and the internet generally.

As a child in the 1970s, I avidly read much Enid Blyton. My favourite was the mischievous trickster Brer Rabbit, always getting the better of Brer Fox and Brer Wolf and Brer Bear with his quick wit.

It was only when I re-read a few of the stories about a decade ago that I realised, to my dismay, that Brer Rabbit is not exactly a laudable hero. He is a con-artist and a fraudster, forever taking advantage of the trust and good nature of those around him. He is what the English, of a later generation and lower social class than Mrs Blyton, would call a spiv.

From the 1980s onward, Enid Blyton has been regarded as a literary persona non grata in children’s literature by many who are too clever to believe in witches but who are still willing to burn them. She is regarded as misogynistic and racist, through her portrayal of women as weak characters in her books, and through the inclusion of golliwogs (sometimes even as the heroes, rather than as the villains).

Some even read a homo-erotic relationship into the friendship between Noddy of Toytown and his elderly neighbour Big Ears. (Whether this is seen as a thought crime in the same light as the issues raised in the previous paragraph, I leave to you, gentle reader.)

You can read what you like into Blyton. Some of her greatest critics in 1980s England were the sort of people who ruled the Greater London Council, who banned the use of the terms ‘black’ or ‘white’ coffee from the workplace, because such terms were racist (instead you had to ask for coffee with or without milk).

Getting back to Brer Rabbit. Perhaps his subliminal influence as a trickster inspired the corporate fraudsters who plagued the UK in the late 80s and early 90s, like Nick Leeson of Barings Bank fame. Maybe he read too much of Blyton’s Brer Rabbit trilogy as a child?

I never read any of her secret society stories, ie the Famous Five and Secret Six. You might argue that those inspired people, when grown to nominal adulthood (like a cretinous former friend of mine) to join real secret societies like the Freemasons (or perchance bondage dungeons?).

But I do have a passing acquaintance with Noddy of Toytown, the hero of a series of stories for younger readers, complete with colourful illustrations.

Noddy, relationship with Big Ears aside, is the most inappropriate of Blyton’s characters, when reviewed through the eyes of her modern day critics. But they have tried to save him, with some careful historical revisionism to make him socially acceptable to the 21st century reader.

Let’s compare, and then comment, on the two covers of the highly inappropriate ‘Noddy Goes To School’. First the original, and then the sanitised one.

I think you can see a subtle difference there. The Golliwog (whose name, by the way, is Gilbert), has been removed. Exiled from Toytown, if you will. He has been replaced by a monkey.

Another subtle difference is that the slipper on the wall in the original version has been removed. This is consistent with the removal of a passage from the original story, in which one of the naughty children is asked to ‘fetch the slipper’ by the teacher, so that she can give him a spanking. Corporal punishment is a no-no these days.

I think that a more savage assessment of Noddy’s modern revisionist editors could be offered. Poet and literary critic TS Eliot was scathing about the translators of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, whom he said were atheists without even realising it. In the revisionist Noddy, not only is Gilbert Golliwog exiled, but he is replaced as the principal antagonist of the story by a ‘cheeky monkey’.

You could say that not only are the characters of colour erased from Toytown completely by those revisionists, but they have chosen a ‘cheeky monkey’ as a replacement in a denial of their humanity. Those revisionists may be well meaning, in the same way that many ideological zealots are, including when they send people to the gulags, but a case could clearly be made that they are racist without even realising it, the very thought crime of which they accused Enid Blyton.

I am a bit of a wine buff (which is a kind way of describing someone who probably should drink a lot less fine red wine than I do). Back in 1999 when I lived in Canberra for most of the year, I started reading about wine appreciation in order to relieve the boredom of dwelling in Australia’s most boring city. I also started paying attention to wine brands and labels, which I had not done before.

By that, I mean that I started to drink a lot of Penfolds wine as my preference, and not Poet’s Corner (thankfully I don’t think they make that anymore).

I also started investing in a rather expensive wine collection. At one point, I had 2 bottles of the 1994 Penfolds Grange, one bottle of the 1995 Grange, one bottle of the 1985 Grange, and one bottle of the 1994 Henschke Hill Of Grace stashed away in an esky in the wardrobe in my spare room.

Anywho, wines are made to be drank, rather than stashed away forever like a pile of gold coins under a dragon, and over the intervening two decades I have gradually gotten rid of my premium wines the sensible way, ie down the hatch.

This past month, I have gotten rid of my last two bottles of the good stuff – the 1994 Grange and Hill Of Grace. I am glad that I did, and the friends I shared them with would definitely agree.

The wines were still very good. I think the Hill Of Grace, which I had yesterday over yum cha with some friends, seemed a little disappointing (the only other time I have had the Hill Of Grace was the 1977 vintage in August 1999 at the Tang Dynasty in Kingston, and it was a mighty fine drop), but still very tasty. The Grange, which I had last month with a wagyu steak, really did live up to its reputation, more so than I remember from the past.

The big problem of course is the sealant. In both cases, the cork turned to powder as we were opening the bottles. This is nothing that could not be solved with a decanter, which we had on standby, but it does serve to illustrate the perils of holding onto quality bottles for too long.

Having said all this, I have one more thing to say to you, dear reader, and I do this as a shareholder of Treasury Wine Estate (the owners of Penfolds). And that is, go out there and buy as many bottles of Grange and other fine Penfolds wines (eg St Henri, RWT, Bin 707, Bin 389 etc) as you can. Do not care about the price, or whether you can afford them. Just buy them. Max out your credit card if you have to. Skip mortgage or rent payments. I say this because I want you to push up the price of Penfolds wine and increase the share price of TWE and its profitability so as to enrich me.

Several weeks ago I wrote a post in which I expressed my concerns about recent changes to federal electoral laws to make it harder for minor parties to operate.

Since that time, two long established minor parties, who have enjoyed a small degree of electoral success over the years, have had their registrations challenged by the major parties, due to the similarities of their names. One is the Liberal Democrats, whose existence is being objected to by the Liberal Party. The other is the Democratic Labour Party, who is being objected to by the Australian Labor Party.

A High Court case looms:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/12/08/liberal-labor-minors-name-change/

It is disturbing when a major change to electoral laws occurs, with the support of both major parties, which radically alters the political ecosystem in which the minor parties have operated for many years. In the case of the DLP, who in the past 15 years have enjoyed a minor resurgence in Victoria (one Senator and two Legislative Councillors elected), they have operated under their existing name since the late 1950s, without any previous challenge to their existence.

It is a cosy stitch up, which shows how, whilst the major parties disagree on who should be in government, they agree on so much more when it comes to screwing over minor parties and alternatives.

Our political system is already very heavily loaded towards the two main political forces – the LNP coalition on one side and the ALP on the other. Compulsory voting makes campaigning a lot easier as it forces the apathetic out to make a choice on Election Day to avoid a fine. Taxpayer subsidies are given out to candidates and parties based on obtaining a certain threshold of votes.

These measures make it easier for established mainstream parties to operate and make it difficult for alternatives and protest movements to break into the system with any success.

I am not a big fan of proportional representation, except that I believe it is healthier for a cross bench to hold the balance of power in the upper house in order to prevent the government of the day from having its own unfettered way. But proportional representation does provide an opportunity for minor parties to make themselves somewhat more relevant, for as long as the electoral laws are not rewritten to impede their existence.

Why now has there been this change to the rules so that the major parties can put the screws to minor parties in an unprecedented way?

I think it has something to do with primary votes for the major parties collapsing. At the 2019 Federal Election, the primary vote for the Coalition was 41.44%, whilst for the ALP it was 33.34%. Compare that to 1980, where the primary votes were 46.40% and 45.15% respectively. Historically, for most of the second half of the 20th Century, both major parties could consistently count on a minimum primary vote of 45%.

The response from the major parties to the growing disenchantment in the electorate with their policies and personalities and general behaviour is not surprising. Instead of taking steps to try and re-engage with the voting public and recover their lost primary vote, the major parties are taking the lazy way out – trying to knobble the competition they fear from the minor parties.

None of this is healthy. Both of the major parties are locked in considerably vicious infighting at the moment. Branch stacking and purges have in recent years made front page news for both sides, revealing an inability to attract and retain genuine committed members.

Our democracy deserves much better than this.

For a few days there, after finishing reading Stephanie Kelton’s book on Modern Monetary Theory, The Deficit Myth, I was starting to doubt my sanity. She sounded really convincing.

This is the problem with not have studied economics formally, but just having read a few textbooks to teach myself economics. There are always going to be gaps in my knowledge such that I cannot easily pick holes in what intuitively seem like quite bizarre theories.

Economics all comes down to how you interpret the simple concept of Supply and Demand. That might be quite simple, but Economics is a social science, so there is a lot of room for error, especially when you factor in the need to try and predict the behaviour of billions of people.

Intuitively, I know that money printing is going to result in inflation, lots and lots of it, and that this could manifest itself in high bread prices, or in high house prices (most likely the latter rather than the former). But I am not going to be able to explain exactly why because I am not a trained economist.

And when clever academics like Professor Kelton or L. Randall Wray write their books and tell me that MMT is NOT money printing (it is all keystrokes on a computer) and that it is not going to cause rampant inflation, I end up scratching my head and wondering how to rebut these assertions.

Thankfully, the answer was sitting in another book on my coffee table (a giant pile of unread books I am slowing getting around to reading), financial guru Jim Rickard’s most recent book, Aftermath. Rickard is one of those people who writes about doom and gloom and how you should stock up on gold for when the Financial Zombie Apocalypse finally hits.

In his chapter ‘Free Money’, Rickard demolishes MMT. He asserts that there are two related factors which the MMT acolytes do not take into account when blithely arguing that the US or Australian governments can create as much money as they like (and they should). Those are confidence, and velocity. When confidence in a currency drops, the velocity of money increases, ie people are going to change their money into other goods (eg gold coins, shotgun shells, tinned food, toilet paper etc) and will be doing so at a faster and faster speed, forcing the price of those goods to go up as confidence in the currency goes down. Ergo inflation, and possibly hyper-inflation.

Thank you Mr Rickard for providing me a sensible rebuttal of Money Monetary Theory and restoring my trust in my own sanity. Now I will resume stock piling toilet paper and packs of dry pasta for when the tough times really hit.

I recently read a book about Modern Monetary Theory. I want to have an understanding as to what the current fashion is in financial policy, given that it does affect our wallets and our lives.

The author was at pains to emphasise that MMT is not money printing – it is creating money electronically by computer keystroke at a central bank (eg the Federal Reserve or the RBA).

Somehow, this does not reassure me.

What it did do was to leave me convinced that the post-Keynesian economic consensus since the mid 1970s is over. Those countries with a strong sovereign currency can issue, through their central banks, as much money as they like, until people no longer believe that the sovereign currency is all that strong anymore.

To a layperson like me, Economics appears to be part mathematics, part politics, and part psychology. It is a social science, and social sciences have never been particularly accurate at making predictions.

Last year I firmly believed that the share market recovery was founded on absurdities, and that there would be a long bear run. Today, I am not so sure.

What we have seen, despite the destruction of large parts of both the domestic and global economies through lockdowns and restrictions since the Covid started, is record share prices and housing prices. This makes me glad that FOMO made me pour my bank account back into my share portfolio over the past 13 months (mostly by last February).

My expectations now have changed. I believe that the financial policy makers, whether or not they actually are acolytes of MMT or other theories, will not allow a share market or housing market crash to occur on their watch. Policies will continue which will increase the money supply at least sufficiently to prevent such a crash from occurring. Such policies include the setting of low interest rates and putting more government bonds out into the market (which incidentally will result in more government spending).

Weeks like this one, where I have taken a 5% hit in my share portfolio, will be minor speed bumps. The access to the ability to borrow and spend more money will keep asset prices rising over the long term, rather than resulting in a crash.

Similarly, whilst I feel it absurd that my brick veneer dump in Avondale Heights is now valued at a million dollars (aka 11 or 12 times the average wage, as compared to the 5 or 6 times the average wage it was valued when I bought it 19 years ago), I do not see that house prices will be dropping to a more affordable level anytime soon.

For people making important life decisions like buying a family home, there is little room for error. If a median house is (optimistically) worth 9 or 10 times your annual salary, and you have a deposit saved of 20%, the risk to your financial security of a shift in interest rates could be severe. It is because of that risk that I get the feeling that interest rates are not going to be rising anytime soon.