Annoyances
Here are a few things that get my goat. They really annoy me. Start with the strange coalition between open borders Left-wing progressives and chamber of commerce types (some, but fewer these days, nominally conservative) about how ‘there are jobs locals won’t do’. A mere moment’s thought tells you that’s wrong. Such claims aren’t that far off the ante-bellum, pre-US Civil War queries from some in the south about ‘who will pick the cotton if we end slavery?’ It’s simple. In market economies all jobs will be filled if you offer to pay enough. All of them without exception. It’s just supply and demand. This past Christmas my wife and I were in northern Norway. All the hotels were cleaned by locals. All the hard, tough, unattractive jobs were too. Everyone, and most definitely tourists, just had to pay more. You can’t help thinking that what some big-end-of-town types on huge pay packets don’t like is the higher wages. Mass immigration keeps down wages. It also brings with it all sorts of costs, very few of which (at least in the short term) have to be borne by rich, white, inner-city types who seem to think emoting is the highest form of virtue.
It’s no coincidence, and not unrelated to what I just said, that after just 150 days of President Trump’s second term real wages (as announced last week by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent) are up almost 2% so far this year. That’s the strongest per annum growth in 60 years. Under President Biden hourly wages were down nearly 2%. In fact, no other US President has seen a real-terms rise in hourly wages since Richard Nixon. Well, no other President save for Trump in his first term (when they were up 1.3%). And this is not a coincidence because blue collar wages are undoubtedly related to mass illegal and legal immigration. Biden (I’d say intentionally, you can disagree) let in between 12 and 18 million illegals in four years. Trump has now completely closed the border. No one is coming in. Upwards of one million have self-deported or been deported with the Trump administration all-in on going after every person who came in illegally. It’s an astounding achievement that many ‘moderate’, ‘wet’, ‘Rockefeller’ Republicans (and virtually every breathing Democrat) promised was not possible. Ha! It just required bravery and will and is, by itself, good reason to be delighted that Orange Man Bad won last November. It’s also why Trump has remade the Republican Party – the Mitt Romney/George W. wing is nearly extinct – and scored record high results at the last election with black men, Hispanics and whites who did not attend college. If you have time watch the podcast Treasury Secretary Bessent did with Miranda Devine.
Here’s another thing that annoys me. I refer to all the many anti-Israel blatherers in the media, government and universities. I’ll be blunt. I really, really admire Israel. It’s the only Middle East democracy and is surrounded by a sea of authoritarian Arab countries that wish it did not exist. There are more civil liberties (more human rights if you insist on that flabby, inflated language) – more by far – in Israel than in any surrounding country and myriad more than in the West Bank or Gaza. Sometimes incredulity, not annoyance, is the proper response to groups such as ‘Gays for Gaza’ or ‘Feminists for Iran’. That and a desire to have such people spend a few months in these places. I also admire the fact that Israel seems to have an intelligence service fit for purpose (unlike the CIA or MI6 or anything in Australia). The audacity and cleverness and ability to keep secrets that allowed them to set up drone bases in Iran or create an actual pager company nearly beggars belief. But, of course, Israel is fighting for its survival. Its military is more careful of civilian lives, orders of magnitude more careful, than the Allies were in the Second World War when we (rightly) bombed Dresden or dropped an atomic bomb on Japan to end the war. Yet you get these pettifogging pro-Palestinian rich inner-city types in the West who pretend Israel can turn the other cheek. Repeatedly. Even after October 7th. Of course Israel has to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Were Australia in Israel’s position we’d have the same sort of bipartisan consensus here that they have in Israel.
It goes without saying that I was not just annoyed but infuriated by the way in which Australia’s university Vice-Chancellor caste allowed Palestinian encampments on campuses under the patently wrong guise that it was a free speech issue. One, we all know any conservative cause that took over a campus would be moved on immediately. Secondly, even the US First Amendment does not allow anyone to trespass and park themselves on your porch with a loudspeaker shouting their views. These things should have been removed within days. It was annoying on steroids that they weren’t.
Let’s finish with this third source of Jimbo crankiness. Why does anyone take the core, underlying positions of the transgender movement seriously? You have to be 18 to get a tattoo but you can be younger, sometimes way younger, to have your genitals chopped off, made sterile and pumped full of drugs. (You also have to be 18 to vote, join the army or be conscripted, and drink alcohol.) And as I’ve said before, how plausible is it to believe claims that ‘I feel I’ve been born into the wrong body’ should trump facts imposed on all of us by the external, causal world – facts such as the trillions of cells in your body being all XX or XY, facts about males statistically being bigger, faster and stronger than females and facts about the effects of testosterone on strength and muscle twitch speed and aggressiveness. And why do feelings and one’s subjective druthers win out for so many when it comes to ‘self-identifying your gender’ but near on no one allows it when it comes to race (sorry, you don’t become a Cherokee Elizabeth Warren just because you want to be one, for affirmative action benefits reasons or any others) or age (so 28 year-olds can’t compete, and win, against 12 year-olds, however they ‘self-identify’).
Thirty, even 20 years ago people across the political spectrum would have laughed at you if you’d suggested half of society would lose its mind in this way – partly, no doubt, in the service of being as caring as possible. But live-and-let-live, which I support for those over 18, is different by far from the ‘what’s your pronouns’ implicit demand that others celebrate all choices made and ignore imposed facts about the world, pretending that a few drugs and some surgery are creating the real thing, not a poor facsimile copy.
As I said above, we are at a stage in the West where bravery is the most important virtue – certainly for politicians but also for all of us citizens too. And if the Covid craziness and lockdowns showed us anything, it is that far, far too few regular Australians were prepared to be brave. Time to fix that pusillanimity.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.
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Good rant.
The ‘jobs the locals won’t do’ is easily resolved by cutting welfarism and the faux sick note addiction.
The idea of the author was wage increases by cutting mass immigration and not The lazy fuckers will work once they face only starvation if they don’t!
It’s both. Too many feel better off on welfare even at a higher wage.
As Adam Smith pointed out, all.wages are in effect the same.
So (numbers indicative) you get £50pw on the dole but if you worked you’d get £80pw.
That £80 is £50 + the time cost of working. Some might consider they would rather get £30 less and spend their time as they want, rather than sell their time to an employer.
Its called Human nature and not everybody thinking, wanting, being the same.
Pay then has to go up sufficiently to tempt people off the dole, but since all pay is a cost to consumers, a better balance would be to abolish dole, as well as slinging out all the cheap labour.
The statement that all pay is a cost to the consumer is wrong. Pay is the part of the value created by someone’s work that someone gets himself. It’s necessarily only a part because otherwise, businesses couldn’t make any profits and there are plenty of profitable businesses. In fact, pay is the only part of consumer prices which isn’t a cost to the consumer because it’s the only expense which was really necessary (I’m intentionally ignoring the cost of other resources for simplicity) do produce or provide something the consumer wanted. Had the consumer had an arrangement with the worker himself, he could have paid him less than what he had to pay to the business employing him because the consumer cost business profit hadn’t been included in the price.
Businesses are not charities and they don’t employ people out to kindness of their hearts but because the work these people do is worth more to the business than what they get paid.
Pay – that is the money that an employer gives to employees, plus other payroll expenses such as pension for example, and like ALL costs incurred in bringing a good to market – such as rent, or mortgage, rates, utilities, inventory, taxes, etc – is included in the selling price of goods. Consumers pays all costs
If that were not so there would be no profit.
Labour does not create value. Nothing has intrinsic value. Value is subjective as perceived by an individual and varies between individuals. See: auctions.
Pay is what a worker gets for selling his labour to an employer.
On holiday in Vietnam we met two young native British doctors. Both out of work and both finding it difficult to get work. Another family member is a nurse and she is training foreign nurses to work here. She is not training native British nurses.
I have worked at 4 large corporations over the last 10 or so years and all have big teams of Indians. In one company my job was to mentor a team in India to do what I did. Once that was completed my contract ended and those Indians were brought to the UK and housed. I have nothing against those Indians as I would do the same. I am against our representatives that feel, once voted in by the British constituents, that they must represent every one else except their native constituents. The open borders, no native industry, gig economy is cultural sabotage not far removed from what Daesh did at Palmira. The difference is the damage to Palmira was against historic artefacts while the damage our self appointed ‘elites’ are doing is against a living culture, so therefore worse.
To clarify the young native British doctors were trying to find work in the UK, not Vietnam.
Sorry, for a moment I thought that was a photo of Ed Milliband when he realises Net Zero is just a load of hot air, metaphorically speaking of course.
Indeed.
How did we get to the point where a statement like “a woman is an adult female“ can be considered hate speech?
I don’t think we, as a society, can be considered sane any more.
And why is it necessary to have to state it?
It’s highly unethical and atrocious, what’s happening to children, really. Very reminiscent of a cult. The problem is when the parents are cult members, what chance do these young kids have?
”Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber sacrificed their sons gender to their illuminati cult…”
https://x.com/ReturnOfKappy/status/1938667646678949954
https://x.com/JebraFaushay/status/1938939494205669796
https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1938617761296728131
When the Labour Government nationalised just about everything post-war, it found that the only source of capital for all these industries plus public services, army, etc was a single source – The Treasury fed by taxation and borrowing. The wage bill for the nationalised industries was enormous. (Socialists don’t understand economics.) Since the formerly profitable industries quickly became non-profitable as happens to anything the Stats runs, the assumed net inflow of “profit” from these industries soon turned into a net outflow. The payroll is the biggest, controllable expense of any enterprise, so in order to lower it the Government (Labour & Tory) started importing cheap labour, largely from, but not just from former Empire, also from poorer Countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece. This cheap labour was a threat to existing workers. State-run industries and NHS were heavily unionised and operated closed shop agreements – only members of the appropriate, recognised union would be employed. To counter the influx of cheap labour – which pulls down all wage levels and displaces workers – unions refused to give union cards to non-white or other immigrants. And that’s why race relations legislation was introduced, not because there was any problem throughout the… Read more »
in South Korea there is no Dole, if you dont have a job, the state will find you a job and if you dont take it, then you are on your own.
During the Wuhan Flu madness we closed schools and teachers refused to teach? Back in 2020 there was an interview with a Korean COVID-19 ‘expert’ (supposedly) and as well as the assertions that China controlled this well with strong restrictions there is this answer about education. Stephen Park (Interviewer): “In Korea the start of the school is being postponed, people are practicing social distancing, and the government even sends regular updates via texts. How well do you think this is all being handled?” Professor Kim Woo-joo “On March 20th, a couple days ago, the prime minister made a special announcement that he strongly recommends social distancing. So religious facilities, places people hang out, like bars, and indoor gyms… From march 20 for 2 weeks, these 3 types of places were strongly recommended to shut down. But this is not mandatory. People who are over 50 or 60 are following these protocols well. But teens and those in their 20s are not, because for teens in Korea, their education is very important. Even if they are sick and have a fever, they have to go to school and academy. The school year was postponed for elementary, middle, and high school because of… Read more »
I have no objections to your rants except for the one on Israel, whereby congratulating Trump on closing US borders is fine but why should that have been difficult? Every country in the world had border controls until Merkel opened Germany’s borders in 2015 and set things going around the world. As far as Israel is concerned, the same story applies to every colonial force in the world’s history, where generally people with superior weaponry or knowledge, raised a flag somewhere, set up a country mirroring their own, and subordinated anyone (generally by force) who happened to occupy the place beforehand. Native Americans, Aborigines, Maoris, practically every African national, they have all been subject to colonization and part-extinction. And so it is with Israel. A whole lot of Jews from Russia, Ukraine, USA and Europe were encouraged at the beginning of the 20th century to build a new country in the Middle East, whereby that country was already occupied by Palestinian Arabs. It was encouraged primarily by the British administration at the time – for what reason is unclear. But the result has been conflict, as was always the case in past occupations. I am afraid your claim that Israel’s… Read more »
“A whole lot of Jews from Russia, Ukraine, USA and Europe were encouraged at the beginning of the 20th century to build a new country in the Middle East, whereby that country was already occupied by Palestinian Arabs”
That is factually incorrect and as it is the basis of the point you are trying to make I suggest that you read some history (rather than anti-semitic propaganda).
a) Jewish people have been a distinct nation in the region in question for thousands of years – check out the archeological remains. Their historic claim to the land is indisputable.
b) ‘Palestinian Arabs’ were simply nomadic tribes (gypsies in the eyes of the Arab states – hence why none of them want them in their own countries) who roamed the region and didn’t own the land – they didn’t even ‘occupy’ it as you phrase it. The land was owned (and sold) to Israel by the Arab landowners of the region.
c) By ‘encouraged’ you mean murdered in the Holocaust, to the point of virtual extinction in Europe – a true example of the word, ‘genocide’.
If you want history, allow me to quote (largely) from the book, A History of the World in 500 Maps. The ‘Fertile Crescent’ refers to the strip of fertile land running in a crescent shape around the Syrian desert. This area [the western part of which includes the area now known as Israel] receives over 200mm of rainfall per year … and saw the domestication of the forerunners of wheat, barley, rye and flax; peas and lentils; and cows, pigs, goats, sheep, donkeys and cats. Earlier, it had been the site of one of the oldest sedentary cultures, the Natufians, and it later became the birthplace of the first written languages. The Fertile Crescent also gave rise to the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. From the 4th to the 1st millennia BC, what is now Israel was part of Mesopotamia. From the 23rd to the 6th century BC, enormous empires alternated with periods of geopolitical fragmentation. The first period was that of Akkad … Amourrou … Egyptians and the Hittites. By the start of the 1st millennium BC, the Assyrian Empire was in place … In 612 BC, the newly independent Babylonians seized the Assyrian capital, Nineveh. Nebuchadnezzar II… Read more »
Zionist troll
So with you on all of that 🎯
“I refer to all the many anti-Israel blatherers in the media, government and universities. I’ll be blunt. I really, really admire Israel” So genocide is OK with you then ?