Catallaxy, Lift your game

Catallaxy is one of the blogs which inhabit the blogosphere which is Australian based.

It used to have a libertarian base when it was run by Jason Soon but now it would be more accurately said to be right wing.

It needs to be said Australia (desperately) needs a quality right wing blog. A right wing version of John Quiggin so to speak.

Unfortunately Catallaxy has, to be euphemistic, poor quality controls.

If you excuse the intemperate language it is now  a blog for idiots, Articles are written for idiots with comments made principally by idiots. It seems the only reason for any article is to enlarge the ignorance of its readership.
This is what we talked about in a previous article on Obama, Austrians etc.

It seems the US system has infected this blog. Faux-facts are paraded, ignorance of readers is enhanced.

Why is this so?
Let us take Henry Ergas. He started out as a right wing spear thrower in the US tradition which was very strange given the company he headed at the time. I have already given an example of how misleading he is.

Judith Sloan, who like to slag other women, finds budget statistics too hard to get right. She also has no idea of what Bernie Fraser has done. She blasted him for being soft on both fiscal and monetary policy and heavily biased towards the ALP. She obviously doesn't know who the Treasury secretary was who helped Paul Keating and Peter Wash transform a budget deficit into a fair dinkum budget surplus ( even got a structural surplus as well). She doesn't know who was the RBA governor who put cash rates to 18%.
nor does she know who was the governor who could have reduced cash rates in 1995 thus assisting (?) the ALP but waited until after the 1996 election to do it!

We have had fun with  Samuel J and his lack of understanding of what affects budgets.

Poor old Rafe rabbits on about poor productivity in Australia when it clearly isn't the case and then asks where he can find evidence for his assertions!

Finally we have Sinclair Davidson.
On some topics such a fiscal policy he has no idea. Only he and Samuel J said the present budget is expansionary when it is clearly contractionary.
 He claimed Australia was about to enter an era of stagflation just when disinflation occurred. He thought the CPI showed Treasury had under-estimated the impact of the ETS when it was clearly the opposite as we have seen in the past. He confuses a rise in the current price of electricity with a Treasury forecast in constant prices.
With a record like that he should go away and hide!


Australia deserves a quality right wing blog for intelligent readers. It doesn't have one at present.

The solution seems obvious. Get rid of everyone there and bring back Jason Soon. Make it the beacon for intelligent libertarians not right wing ignorami. Leave that to Tim Blair.

The evidence of whether it succeeds or not is whether people such as Derrida derider, Labour Outsider, Peter Whiteford come back and regularly comment.

update

I have been asked to provide some examples of the 'best of catallaxy.
Of course it must involve Katesy. notice the quality of the comments.
I have highlighted this before because to quote John Quiggin it involves "bogus statistical claims from fools too ignorant to estimate a trend line and too lazy to learn how, silly IPCC and BOM conspiracy theories, absurd economic alarmism about the allegedly catastrophic effects of the carbon price, CO2 as plant food, and so on."

Further update
I have been asked if I would recommend articles on Catallaxy.I would love nothing more but to recommend an article on my Friday Around the Traps. I doubt if it will happen though. If you write to an unintelligent audience ,as I have outlined above, then it is very hard to write to an intelligent audience. You have to do research on a topic which is hard if you have adopted lazy habits. You need to address any questions rather than simply ignoring them ( See the Katesy link above).
By the way use the comments section please not my personal e-mails.