THE LONG AWAITED AMERICAN tariffs are announced. They promise to be as catastrophic for the largest economy in the world, whose currency is the global reserve, as anyone had predicted. 'The Markets' as at the time of writing are responding, also, predictably, but as though they could not quite have believed that a politician who made repeated statements that he would do a thing, is on record over decades supporting a thing, once in a position to do the thing, would do the thing. Who'd have thought?
There's been a decades-long conventional wisdom borne out in every opinion poll that the political Right are better 'economic managers' of Western developed economies, an assertion that goes along with all the mythology of the household budget model of public finance, and with Reagan-Thatcher era public morality. For Gen X and our peers, the international political Right enjoy an unquestioned lock on the claim to be Better For The Economy, while the political Left suffers, at least journalists' framings, an assumed requirement to live up to austerity principles it disbelieves in.1
Or do they? Liz Truss's hilariously catastrophic Prime Ministership of the UK seems to have left the UK conservatives' economic reputation genuinely damaged. The United States' experiment with Trumpism seems to be continuing in that desire for disaster, and indeed destroying the whole concept of Economic Management, in favour of breaking as many eggs as possible in the hope that a delicious omelette will thereby be created. The European conservatives have, in the face of the Russian Army, just dropped the Eurozone austerity that was imposed throughout the 2000s and 2010s, and decided rearmament is the go regardless of domestic impacts. (Understandably).
It leaves the Australian political Right in an odd situation. They've always followed international trends and imported the received wisdoms from the Northern Hemisphere. But when those received wisdoms are, instead, examples of absolute nihilism and disaster, our domestic Right has a choice---continue in sync, and into disaster, with the overseas conservative and reactionary parties, or surrender the assumed better-economic-manager mantle.
Left un-asked, generally, are the questions 'what is the Economy anyway?' and 'better for who?' But that's just ideology. ↩
I read a part of a book (I definitely could not stomach the whole book) of another famous economist that could have been written in 2000: the same clichés, the same authors, the same discussions interspersed with, for good measure, a mention of Trump here and there. Nonsense on stilts in today’s world.
It makes you realize that intellectual influences are so crucially dependent on time.
Kiran Pfitzner: 'A Modest Proposal For Restoring the Warrior Ethos'
Pete Hegeseth has pledged to restore the warrior ethos to America’s military. The warrior ethos traditionally demands self-destruction as compensation for failure. The Japanese example is the most well-known, but it was also expected for honorable Romans to fall upon their own swords rather than suffer disgrace. If Hegseth wants to preserve his own honor and adhere to the warrior ethos, then there is a clear course of action open to him.
AMERICA EXISTS AT MANY levels. It's a real nation of people with geographic territory and a federal State, it's the constantly self-referenced ideal of constitutional self-government, it's a historical tradition of progress and of dynamism, it's the religious-liberal experiment of shining lighthood and citizenship in the city on the hill, it's the artificially bright lights of Hollywood. It also exists of course as a culinary-industrial tradition admired and imitated around the world, for example by Khrushchev, who ate a hot dog and declared the sausage 'good, but not enough'.
Down the road from my office lies what will always to me be the America Burger shop. It has a name but that's irrelevant; it sells burgers with chips and soft drink, American-style, it plays Bon Jovi, it plants the Stars and Stripes on its food. So far as I can tell it has no American employees whatsoever. The food is bad for me and more expensive than it really has any claim to be, but I love it and return, and I return, and I return. A meat pattie, barbecue sauce, mayonnaise, tomato, lettuce, curly chips, soft drink, please.
Australians are inescapably culturally linked to the United States; how could we not be sharing the Pacific and the post-war alliance? Even earlier the two societies found a common settler-colonial self-belief, and it's no accident that Australians looked across the Pacific to set up a House of Representatives and a Senate in our federated country, then put it in a Capitol architecturally drafted by a pair of Yanks. Our self-regard is American, our provincialism is American.
So when our neighbours across the Pacific do... whatever the hell it is they're doing, it's a profound break not just in a relationship but in our own self-conception. Are they really going to do the little-green-men trick and annex Greenland? Withdraw thoroughly from the world? Everyone thinks through the practical questions of where it might leave Australia politically and internationally---nowhere good---but maybe of more salience is where would that level of isolationism leave us, culturally?
For the purposes of data monitoring, the city is divided into sections, called ‘grids’. Grid workers, employed at the lowest level of the civil service system, are required to know the households in the grids under their jurisdiction: they need to know which apartments have elderly people, which have tenants, which have pregnant women, which have family members overseas, which are in the middle of lawsuits, which have bad relationships between mother and daughter-in-law, which have frequent quarrels, which are rich, which are poor. Even an elderly woman who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and doesn’t watch TV is constantly feeding data into this network by turning lights on and off, using the toilet or turning on the stove. ‘With this eye of wisdom,’ Li gestured to the building around us, ‘everyone will be looked after.’
Howard W. French: 'Toffler in China'. New York Review of Books, 10 April 2025
How competent or thorough these emerging online means for surveillance and political control will prove to be is still an open question. What is certain is that the enlistment of citizens in the policing of the population has venerable roots in China, dating at least as far back as the Mao period. At that time even family members were notoriously encouraged to inform on one another, and neighborhoods had their own resident inspection committees that reported on every aspect of people’s behavior, including whether or not women were missing their menstrual periods, a possible sign of evasion of strict birth control measures.
The ambition of the current efforts, though, is beyond doubt. The embattled lawyers in Total Trust lay out its scope. “The system uses big data and human surveillance. It divides every community into grids and assigns an officer to each one,” one says. “Each grid officer is in charge of about four hundred households, or one thousand residents,” explains an officer. Equally clear is that the system under construction is not placing all its bets on technology.
A BEER AND A pie at the football was once the Australian norm and tradition, with sausage sizzle as the alternative and substitute for local matches. But now we, in both respect to multiculturalism and market service to gentrified crowds, do better. I went to see Sydney FC defeat Jeonbuk FC in the Asian Champions League (2) at Moore Park Stadium, and ate
salsipão with my craft beer on tap. My goodness what a world of glorious sport we live in. True to my dinner, Diego Costa scored.
