In Defence of Barnaby Joyce’s “Net Debt Gross, Public and Private” Concept

It’s easy for people who are - understandably - overwhelmed by the intricacies of politically contentious economic concepts to be as triumphalist as people such as the ABC’s Chris Yuleman in deriding non-mainstream economic ideas in his report on tonight’s 7:30 Report. Part of his report derided out of hand Senator Barnaby Joyce’s moronically titled “Net debt gross, public and private”. Joyce is no economic genius but Yuleman was a sheep in following the mainstream media’s universal condemnation of Joyce’s argument. The condemnation was largely due to the wording, in my opinion.

The fact is that foreign debt, incurred by both the public and private sectors, should be conflated. The only qualitative difference should be in the rate of interest paid on the debt. Just as if the government transfers, say major assets such as Telstra and Qantas, to the private sector, then privatisation means there is no change in the total level of assets in the Australian community, just a change in the distribution of wealth from the working class to those who can afford shares (minus the proportion of privatised wealth being sold to foreign interests).

So people shouldn’t dismiss ideas that are out of favour in the mainstream, especially if their derision is just a quick journalistic decision due to the wording of the exponent involved. The fields of economics and psychology are particularly susceptible to such treatment. Think for yourselves, people.

When Atheism Entails Suicide

I hold the following train of reasoning: if you have been the subject of unremitting pain for the past 30 years, and have no rational, probabilistic expectation of ever emerging from such pain, then you are irrational in your decision not to commit suicide if you are an atheist/materialist. Just as an atheist who is condemned to, say, a year of physical pain with certain death afterwards is irrational in not euthanising themselves.

Recently someone I know (an atheist/materialist) commented that this was a “sad” way of looking at life. (I’ll leave the philosophical issues with a materialist commenting on the word “sad” to another day). To me it is a sadder state of affairs to endure a lifetime of pain due to an inability to follow the chain of reasoning involved, or to endure it because your irrational brain precludes you from such action despite the dictates of your frontal lobes. Methinks in people whose intellects are capable of following the reasoning, or people whose emotional brains are strong enough to override their intellect, but who do not follow my reasoning, that there are unresolved childhood theistic immersion issues involved.

It’s just simple statistics, people. Not that hard.

This brings you to the vexed issue of “faith”. In my interpretation, you either have been graced with it or not, depending on the path the Universe has intended for you. It’s definitely not to say that people with faith are further along the journey to Nirvana than those without. For me personally, I was a hardcore atheist/materialist from 1990-2002, until, after a year’s worth of intense honours-year formal philosophical training, I had an experiential episode of such gravity that I haven’t gone back since. And that’s what faith comes down to: the experiential, not the theoretical.