The People’s Republic of the World
July 7, 2011
Bob Brown’s global ‘people’s assembly‘ continues to intrigue me. There’s soon to be 7 billion people in the world.
Brown says it should be ‘one person, one vote, one value’. So if 10 million people each got a representative in a 700 member world parliament the votes would look like this:
On Monday night on the ABC TV’s The Drum I asked the new Greens senator for Victoria whether Brown was serious – apparently so.
President Obama’s ‘stimulus package’ cost $278,000 for each job added or saved in the wake of the GFC. This week’s Weekly Standard explains.
And you saw how the President blamed ATM’s for unemployment? Here’s the video. ATMs have put bank tellers out of a job, just as calculators destroyed the abacus-making sector. Here’s what The Economist said and here’s what The Wall Street Journal said about it.
The video of the IPA’s Genius of Western Civilisation symposium will be up on the web soon. I’ve been asked by lots of people about the details of the books that were talked about at the symposium – here’s three of them:
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The Storm of War: A new history of the Second World War by our guest speaker at the symposium, Andrew Roberts. It was praised in this review in The New York Times a few weeks ago.
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Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. The incomparable Roger Kimball has this wonderful overview of MacIntyre in The New Criterion in 1988.
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Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson – reviewed here in The New York Times when it first came out in 2001.
We have some great events coming up. Tickets are available for the Vaclav Klaus tour in Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne between 22 July and 1 August. And the IPA is delighted to sponsor the Spectator Australia debate between Lord Nigel Lawson, Ian Pilmer and Gary Johns, against John Hewson, Mark Latham and Benjamin McNeil on climate change – details here. And the IPA’s Chris Berg will be speaking at the IQ2 debate in Sydney on the Nanny State in August.
Here’s more of what the IPA said this week:
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Chris Berg, Giving up on national classification - The Drum
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Chris Berg, Opening door to an outlaw - The Age
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Tim Wilson, Failure is an orphan – The Spectator Australia
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Asher Judah, No shortage of land or food…or hot air - The Drum
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Bob Carter, The science is not settled - Herald Sun
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John Roskam, The uncertainty problem – The Australian Financial Review
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