Two things have come to my attention in the last 24 hours. First, in Australia, both Labor and the Coalition are introducing/plan to introduce a form of paid parental leave to replace the baby bonus. Labor’s policy is set at the minimum wage and is therefore cheaper to the taxpayer and less onerous on the [...]
Posted in Australia, Economics, Law, Taxation, Welfare
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Tagged income splitting, income tax, paid parental leave, PAYE, personal allowance, Tax policy, tax-free threshold
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It has long been my view that Gerard Henderson and Michael Danby and Colin Rubinstein do not actually accept the logic behind having freedom of speech. Instead, they have jumped on the fashionable bandwagon that seeks to control how one’s ‘group’ is portrayed, hence their support for legislative piffle like s 18 (c) of the [...]
Posted in Free Speech, Law
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Tagged Catallaxy, Chris Berg, gerard henderson, group rights, individual rights, Institute for Public Affairs, IPA, John Roskam, Racial Discrimination Act, RDA, Section 18 (c), sinclair davidson, war on terror
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April 22, 2013 – 10:46 pm
Chrissie Amphlett and the Divinyls provided a decent chunk of the soundtrack to my young life; reports of her early death (aged 53) hit me in the childhood memories, hard, much like the arrest of Rolf Harris, or pictures of Berliners crawling over the remains of the Wall. I have, by saying those things, disclosed [...]
Posted in Books, Fark!, Literature, Popular culture, science fiction
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Tagged Ayn Rand, Bleak House, Chrissie Amphlett, cultural capital, DC Comics, Dr Who, Ender's Game, geekiness, geeks, high culture, Jane Austen, Jarndyce v Jarndyce, literary criticism, National Organisation for Marriage, Orson Scott Card, Reason Foundation, Star Trek, Star Wars, Superman, the Divinyls, Tolstoy, Ursula Le Guin
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[SL: I have long been of the view--while I have great sympathy for my libertarian and leftist friends who want calamity in the developing world taken as seriously as calamity in the developed world--that the lesson that Jacques teaches below is important, and needs to be taken seriously. There is a reason why 'if it [...]
April 15, 2013 – 11:18 pm
Over the weekend, I was a guest at this really rather splendid skeptical convention (responsible for the terrific animation above). I and my fellow panellists (three lawyers, one science writer) got to talk about libel and defamation law, and how it relates to social media. This is, I think it’s fair to say, controversial right now. [...]
When I wrote my Reason Foundation brief on equal marriage, I focussed (understandably) on the empirical arguments both for and against same-sex marriage, leaving rights arguments to one side (what do you expect? I’m a positivist). However, in one section, I addressed (albeit briefly) the common libertarian argument that we should ‘get the state out [...]
Posted in Feminism, Law, Personal liberty, Politics
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Tagged 'palm-tree justice', common law, default rules, defaults, discretion, Hayek, Lord Denning, privatised marriage, Professor Richard Epstein, Reason Foundation, Reason.com. Scott Shackford, Roman law, Scots law, spontaneous order
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April 10, 2013 – 12:32 am
In order to understand this post, you need to be familiar with this cartoon. Familiar? Good, now onto the ‘fun’ part. As a general rule, I try to avoid the situation in which the cartoon’s protagonist finds himself. That is, getting into lengthy online disputes where – it would seem – very few people are [...]
I have written about cunning plans gone terribly, terribly awry before. That post concerned Karen Matthews. I have also written about the welfare state gone terribly, terribly wrong, too: this time, the post concerned Australian subject matter: Snowtown. Both topics intersect and reinforce each other today, in a story so ghastly it is difficult to describe. [...]
Look, the whole kids sitting on Santa’s lap at Christmas to have their picture taken is creepy enough, but it would appear that various retailers (and others) around the place are trying to replicate the elcreepo factor with the Easter Bunny. This. Is. Wrong. Wrongetty. Wrong. Wrong. I know the whole torture porn aspect of [...]
…And not people for the laws. First, an apology for my lengthy absence. I have discovered that working and studying at the same time is difficult, so much so that I have resolved never to combine the two again. However, the study has now finished, and even better, I have a month to prepare for [...]
Posted in Law, Marriage, Personal liberty, Public Policy, Religion, Skeptics
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Tagged #equalmarriage, Cato Institute, Foundation for Economic Education, Hollingsworth, James Peron, Liberty Fund, Moorfield Storey Institute, Proposition 8, Reason Foundation, Sarah Skwire, SCOTUSblog, Steven Horwitz, Tom G. Palmer, Windsor
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