I am reliably informed that the September edition of the IPA Review will be available in newagencies and mailboxes in the next few days, if it has not arrived yet.

This issue has a special focus on the emissions trading scheme (that’s Climate Change Minister Penny Wong on the cover), but, as I point out in my editorial, does not focus on the science behind global warming. The government has set a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - but is the ETS the right way to do so?

There are, as Alan Moran and I point out, huge issues with the ETS regardless of whether you share the desirability of pursuing that goal. This is by far the biggest economic change in Australian history - introducing a greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme is akin to imposing an entire economy on top of our existing economy.

I also have a piece on Alexander Solzhenitsyn (which isn’t online yet.) Visit the IPA Review website to read a number of other pieces available for perusal right now.

Unless they have been misreported - and assuming my googling skills haven’t let me down, I don’t think the submission is anywhere online yet - local councils are asking for a big shakeup of liquor licencing practices.

The reported proposals range from the self-interested to the absurd. Alcohol licence holders would be subject to unprecedented regulatory interference - including probation periods, annual licence renewals (which, if recent changes are anything to go by, would allow councils to alter conditions each year).

The proposal that private parties larger than 100 people would be required to obtain a liquor licence is bizarre and a bit depressing - even if it wasn’t obviously a grab for extra revenue, how on earth would they plan on monitoring it? Councils have already made street parties hard enough. If they have their way, private parties will head down the same track.

Without seeing the full submission, it isn’t hard to guess at the origin of the demand that licence conditions be ‘harmonised’ across the country. Jurisdications with high regulatory burdens do not particularly like seeing their revenue base disappear across the border to jurisdictions with lower regulations. When you have competing jurisdications setting their own standards, it makes it harder to implement high cost regulations - this applies just as much to pubs and bottle shops as it does to wealthy individuals fleeing their high tax home countries.

Nevertheless, no doubt that many of the council bureaucrats advocating for such policies believe that they have only the community’s best interests at heart - local councils have little power but lots ambition for social change. It just goes to remind us that the nanny state was not invented in Canberra.

There is a strand of liberalism or libertarianism that is skeptical of, and sometimes even hostile to immigration. This piece in The Australian by Gaurav Sodhi is a good example, which appears to be a follow up of a 2006 paper that raised some of the cultural and social objections to immigration that are typical of this view.

Sodhi doesn’t quite go so far as outright opposing the scheme - he conspicuously avoids passing judgement, except to raise a rather peculiar objection. Surely nobody has claimed that a tiny guest worker program could single handedly resolve Pacific development problems alone? The scheme will be wonderful for the guest workers, wonderful for their families who will benefit from their comparatively high salaries, wonderful for the farmers who need the labour, and pretty good for consumers who like to eat cheap fruit. The dire situation of some Pacific economies is not sufficient reason to oppose such an exciting opportunity for everybody involved. And the less said about the implication that the potential Pacific island workers are criminals, the better.

I admit to being very uncomfortable with those supposedly free market advocates who oppose immigration, for whatever reason. Too often the objections are so strained as to be suspicious. The idea that we should stop an individual from searching for work beyond the national borders of their birthplace simply because we believe that their culture is somehow incompatable with ours is a deeply illiberal position to hold. Our existing skilled migration scheme discriminates on the basis of education, and, by implication, wealth. That is, to my mind, already unconscionable; ‘liberals’ who propose further group discrimination on the basis of culture are even more worrying.

How does the free movement of people differ in any significant way from the free movement of goods or services? Surely we have enough faith in the strength of liberal democracy - and the persuasiveness of liberal civil society - to withstand potential ‘clashes’ of culture? The only concrete thing we ask of migrants is that they obey existing laws - and in this concern we already have an elaborate mechanism to monitor and assure compliance of all those on Australian shores regardless of their birthplace.

This is not merely apologetics. I suggest that not only is immigration practically beneficial, but we have a moral obligation to accept into our borders those who want to come. For individuals born in under-developed countries, simply crossing into the developed world can dramatically increase their potential salary, as well as allow them to experience the historically unprecedented living standards that we already enjoy.

The objections to expanded immigration seem nationalistic or economically illiterate at best, and immoral at worst.

I’m particularly proud that in my column in The Age today “Battling green noise“, I got to use the word ‘ka-trillion’.

What’s worse: too much irony, or not enough?

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

In a lengthy essay at Creative Economy, Margaret Simons takes on my criticism of the ABC trying to replicate the already existing commercial and civil society organisations - as well as individuals - that provide ‘town squares’ for public debate. (I spell out my argument here, here and here.)

Simons has two responses. The first is that the ABC could encourage direct conversation between media professionals and the public - unlike private blogs, which she implies lack the ‘professional’ voice. I’m not sure how she squares that view with the now highly influential mainstream commercial journalists who now have widely-read blogs, many of which are very participatory. The idea of collaboration between professionals and audience is one which most commercial organisations are groping towards. So it is hard to see what ‘public good’ that is being under-provided here.

The ABC could certainly offer its journalists the opportunity to blog under its brand, but to my mind, there doesn’t seem to be a good case to change the ABC’s charter or provide significant extra funding to produce participatory content. For somebody who is enthusiastic about the creative potential of the audience, Simons doesn’t seem have much faith in the town squares that the audience create themselves. Civil society is actually pretty resourceful.

The second response is much less convincing. The distaste the ABC supporters have for advertising has always struck me as a first and foremost an aesthetic argument, rather than a policy one. Introducing advertising would certainly favour the production of more popular programs over less popular ones, but surely striving for popularity would be one of the most ‘audience-responsive’ reforms the ABC could make. Anyway, it is hard to see why advertising is ruining the public square.

For this reason, I think Simons is overly cynical when she describes the commercial media as a “shopping mall” - if that’s all our commercial print, radio and television media really is, then there is a lot of good journalism sold in that shopping mall. Certainly, there is tension in the commercial media between the considerations of business and the considerations of journalism, but, all things considered, journalism is doing pretty well.

Simons ends with a call for the ABC’s charter to be revised to be made less prescriptive. The charter could certainly do with some revision, but I would argue it needs to be made stricter, not more open. There are few government funded bodies in Australia that are as undirected and open-ended as the ABC.

If the broadcaster feels that it is being constrained by its charter at the moment, that is certainly not obvious in its activities - I hate to keep harping on about the ABC’s Second Life adventure, but any charter that allows a government department to do something like that is hardly too shackled.

The federal government’s new GROCERYchoice is up and running, apparently to empower consumers and enhance competition.

But if there is an effective duopoly in the grocery market that requires government intervention, GROCERYchoice only makes that duopoly stronger.

Take the Inner Melbourne Central market, for example. GROCERYchoice provides a comparison based on four categories: Coles/BI-LO, Woolworths/Safeway, Independents, and ALDI. The Coles and Woolworths categories are competitive, although Coles tends to have an slight edge in most markets and most categories. ALDI is far cheaper than any of its competitors - GROCERYchoice is great publicity for ALDI. Arguably however, ALDI offers a different product to the other three categories - vastly fewer products and effectively no service.

But the real take home lesson of GROCERYchoice is that you should never visit independent supermarkets. Independents are consistently more expensive than Coles or Safeway, and by a non-trivial amount. So how does telling consumers to avoid independent supermarkets help increase competition?