Down under, in Australia, it is often thought that we are a dry country. What if I was to tell you that we have more rainfall than the United States! As the legendary Aussie agriculture designer P.A. Yeomans said: "Australia is not short of water on any comparable per capita basis." However, "the incidence of rainfall is not very reliable."[1]

At present, Sydney’s water supply is in dire straits. Government has declared itself the monopolist of water. The water storage level is 45.8% of capacity. And there is a growing supply and demand imbalance. The solution to our water supply problems is to eliminate government interference. In Australia considering the erratic incidence of rainfall it is all the more important. Read more

Nev Kennard on the CIS and IPA, Mises reviewed in the SMH in 1944, the classic McGuinness essay, "Where Friedman is a pinko", Bert Kelly introducing his journalism, an essay by Albert Jay Nock that you haven't read yet.

These are just some of things you can read at www.Economics.org.au, a site that hopes to complement the work of Liberty Australia. Permalink

The Australian libertarian movement has just suffered its biggest setback since the birth of Nugget Coombs in 1906. Ronald Kitching, our greatest letters-to-the-editor writer, died yesterday, aged 81, after a long, brave and arduous fight against government and other cancers. He is survived by 7 children, 10(?) grandchildren, 1(?) great grandchild and millions of other taxpayers.

The taxpayers work in many different industries, especially in the private sector. Read more

At Economics.org.au I am trying to get a new scheme for libertarian activism running. Here is the draft press release: Read more

The principle that there is a perpetual tendency in the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is usually attributed to Malthus. But he was really just the popularizer of a belief that was (and is) fairly widespread. William Hazlitt, a mighty adversary of Malthus, does not think he was the first to write about it, either. In fact, plagiarism is hinted at. See Hazlitt's excellent essay on this topic here. The great Australian philosopher, David Stove, in the same vein as Hazlitt, thinks:

There are anticipations of his 'principle of population' in the writings of David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Townsend, and no doubt others beside; but not, or not to any extent worth mentioning, in any writings whatever before about 1750. And yet people could have made, at any time during thousands of years before that date, at least a rough comparison between the size of a batch of fertilized cod eggs, or viable pine seeds, and the number of this batch which survived to reproduce in turn.

But whatever may have been the reason for it, it was left to Malthus to teach naturalists the strength of the organic tendency to increase, and of the resulting pressure of their numbers on their food. And he happened to do so in a book which, for reasons quite unconnected with evolution, reached an unusually great number of readers.[1]

The Malthusian population principle is always incorrect, but its proximity to the truth varies. It is also an instance where we can appreciate one of Rothbard's empirical generalizations—of high predictive value, but not apodictically certain—that nonAustrian individuals tend to specialize in the area they are least competent. As Stove put it: Read more