On Politics
I just reread my “Read Me” (About) page, and noticed that I said I’d never vote Liberal. Well, on Queensland’s election on Saturday I did (as a second preference to Greens, of course), because I think for myself and my loyalty towards a party only lasts as long as they actually deserve it.
Labor lost me on two key issues: removing the children’s hospital from the Royal Brisbane, and persisting with the travesty of Traverston dam. Not to mention that they are prepared to keep running Queensland into debt (hey we need some savings for the yearly cyclones and floods that always seem to take the QLD Labor party by surprise and they react to them as a “disaster” instead of already having emergency money set aside) and their answer to when they think they will start paying back their billions of debt is “when we can” (how many banks would accept such a vague answer?). Essentially they are taking a dangerous childish approach (an approach that gets many young people into financial trouble in the first place before they learn to save and budget): spend, spend, spend even though our state is already in debt (What if those in our society already struggling under debt took that advice? They will be even worse off and have less of an emergency savings buffer). (I am so against their policies that I am not even going to tag Anna Bligh or Labor in this post.) Also, why doesn’t Anna smile in her posters?
Springborg had pages and pages of itemised budget showing exactly how and where he was going to cut costs to save Queensland a billion dollars each year and get us both out of debt, and with a savings buffer to survive recessions and disasters. Springborg talked to economists who told him that the predict the recession (and people unlike what Labor scare-mongered you into thinking, right now unemployment is at 5% whereas in the Great Depression unemployment was at 40% - so yes it’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but it’s not an absolute disaster) to last three years, and his plan is four years long.
On Economics
I am a fan of philosophy because it encourages questioning what you are told, rather than just blindly accepting what “everybody knows”. Galileo, Copernicus and Einstein would have all been labelled as crazies simply for having questioned “science” and come up with a different conclusion that has more evidence behind it than the current accepted answer. Over time the majority have accepted their conclusions as truth, and the next person who dares to question their premises and discovers overwhelmingly contradictory evidence will again be labelled as a lunatic until people are educated in a new way of thinking.
This irritates me no end. Rather than labelling anyone who dares to question something accepted as an idiot, particularly if they’ve bothered to do some research and are happy to provide their evidence and logical reasoning for their opinion, perhaps we should pay them enough respect to question our own beliefs along with theirs.
I love economics but I unfortunately can’t think rationally about whether or not any of these handouts are a good idea now that I’ve been told that I might be receiving $900. I think I’m scared to question this policy because I sense deep down that it might not be in line with my economic values of the past, when all I really want to do is be grateful and celebrate free money (compared to the amount of work I’d normally have to put up with to make $900). Before anyone jumps down my throat and declares that because the government came up with the idea it must be more right than my opinion because they’ve had more formal training in economics than I have (without even bothering to question the government’s idea), well I recently read Henry Hazlitt’s famous Economics in One Lesson and was relieved to discover that his opinion is what I’ve always suspected was the real truth: