On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers jointly issued a statement explicitly charging for the first time ever another government of committing `a crime against humanity’.
The Allied Governments announce publicly that they will hold personally responsible all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in the Armenian massacres.
Article 230 of the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres required the defeated Ottoman Empire to
…hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Ottoman Empire on August 1, 1914.
Ottoman military and high-ranking politicians were transferred to the Crown Colony of Malta on board of the SS Princess Ena and the SS HMS Benbow by the British forces, starting in 1919. These war criminals were eventually returned to Constantinople in 1921 in exchange for 22 British hostages held by the government in Ankara.
But for victory at Gallipoli, the Anzacs would have been the first Sergeant at Arms of a war crimes trial. By marching into Constantinople, the Anzacs may have been able to prevent the purging of the Ottoman archives of evidence of complicity of specific individuals.
In praise of measurement error: good thing no one noticed the severe deflation in Australia and in New Zealand in the late 1990s for otherwise the do-gooders might have felt the need to do something about it. Good thing no one is panicking over the recent mild deflation in New Zealand as well.
Mass kidnappings is the only charitable explanation for their failure to be dancing in the streets by Eart Day activists over the greening of the planet courtesy of capitalism since Earth Day 1970?
As a soon-to-be parent, I find this fascinating and terrifying. The diminishing range of children visualized: http://t.co/7NiFN9Eaw0— Austen Allred (@AustenAllred) April 18, 2015
Success in the industry requires enforcing executory agreements that are beyond the reach of public courts, and Jewish diamond merchants enforce such contracts with a reputation mechanism supported by a distinctive set of industry, family, and community institutions. An industry arbitration system publicizes promises that are not kept. Intergenerational legacies induce merchants to deal honestly through their very last transaction, so that their children may inherit valuable livelihoods. And ultraorthodox Jews, for whom participation in their communities is paramount, provide important value-added services to the industry without posing the threat of theft and flight.
The British law society copped a lot of flak for issuing practice notes explaining how to write wills that were compliant with Islamic family law.
In any case, any will is always subject to laws about providing for the family and for dependent children and can be overridden on those grounds, no matter how they are written.
Peter Sellers left each of his adult children £750 because he wanted to disinherit them. Under the case law at that time, if you left your children nothing, the courts somehow persuaded themselves that you had forgotten to provide for them so they amended the will. By Sellers leaving them this small sum of money, he made it clear that he wanted the limit how much he gave his children.
In the UK, rulings handed down by the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal can be legally binding. This is because the Arbitration Act 1996 allows almost any body to act as a dispute resolution service if both parties agreed to be bound by its decision.
There is a bill before the House of Lords amending the Arbitration Act to ensure that the evidence of men and women are weighed equally and penalties to apply to any body purporting to have the powers of a court of law.
The UK parliament also passed a Forced Marriages Act a few years ago. This law included penalties for people who threaten self-harm if someone didn’t go through with an arranged marriage.
Cara McDaniel went to the mammoth task of constructing average tax rates for 15 OECD countries over the period 1950-2003 for consumption, investment, labour and capital:
Total tax revenue is divided into revenue generated from four different sources: consumption expenditures, investment expenditures, labour income and capital income.
To find the average tax rate, tax revenue from each source is then divided by the appropriate income or expenditure base.
She used that data to examine the role of taxes and productivity growth as forces influencing market hours. She used a calibrated growth model extended to include home production and subsistence consumption, both of which were key features influencing market hours. Her model was simulated for 15 OECD countries. She found the primary force driving changes in market hours is found to be changing labour income tax rates and productivity catch-up relative to the United States is found to be an important secondary force.
I thought I would summarise the tax rate data computed by Cara McDaniel for Australia and New Zealand.
McDaniel’s data on average tax rates on household incomes in Australia and New Zealand suggests that the average tax rate New Zealand household incomes fell by a third since 1986. No estimates were calculated for earlier years for New Zealand.
As for Australia, taxes steadily increased between 1959 and 1987 stabilised until 2005 and then fell a bit.
There is a big spike in the average tax rate on consumption expenditure in New Zealand in 1986 when a GST replaced the pre-existing sales taxes. The average tax rate on New Zealand consumption expenditures and tapered away until the end of2009 and started to increase again.
Not much happened in Australia regarding the average tax rate in consumption expenditures since about 1983 despite the introduction of a GST in 1998.
The average tax rate in capital income in Australia is much higher than in New Zealand. On the other hand, the average tax rate on investment expenditure is much higher New Zealand as compared to Australia.
Taxes on investment expenditures increased quite significantly at the same time that a GST was introduced in New Zealand.
All in all, New Zealand cut taxes on personal income but that tax cut seemed to be pretty much offset by higher taxes on personal consumption through the introduction of a 10% and then 12.5% GST.
The most interesting finding in this database is the sharp increase in the average tax on investment expenditures in the mid-1980s. This prolonged New Zealand’s lost decades – the two decades of next to no GDP growth per working age New Zealander.
Real GDP per New Zealander and Australian aged 15-64, converted to 2013 price level with updated 2005 EKS purchasing power parities, 1956-2013
A local doctor thinks we can abolish child poverty in New Zealand with $1 billion in increases to welfare benefits and family allowances.
During the 1987 Australian Federal election campaign, Labour Party Prime Minister Bob Hawke announced a Family Allowance Supplement that would ensure no Australian child need live in poverty by 1990.
Child poverty was to be no more in Australia by 1990. These changes in social welfare benefits and family allowance supplements would ensure that every family would be paid one per week dollar more than the poverty threshold applicable to their family situation. I know child poverty was to be done in this way because I worked in the Prime Minister’s Department at this time.
It was a silly shorthand thing,” Mr Hawke has told News Limited newspapers. “I should have just said what was in the distributed speech.” “We set ourselves this first goal: by 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty,” Mr Hawke said on June 23, 1987 at an election campaign launch. The comment entered Australian political folklore after it was supposed to improve the ALP’s major social welfare reform. The printed version had it as: “By 1990 no Australian child need live in poverty.” Mr Hawke’s words returned to haunt him as his pledge was impossible to keep.
About 580,000 Australian children lived in poverty in 1987. In 2007, at least 13 per cent of children, or 730,000 people, were poor. This was after social welfare benefits and family allowance supplements were increased to $1 above the child poverty threshold.
There is an infallible test of the practicality of Left over Left dreams such as the abolition of child poverty by writing bigger and bigger cheques to those currently poor.
If you could abolish child poverty simply by increasing welfare benefits and family allowances, the centre-right parties would be all over it like flies to the proverbial as a way of camping over the middle ground and winning the votes of socially conscious swinging voters for decades to come. Many people who would naturally vote for the centre-right parties on all other issues vote over to centre-left parties out of a concern for poverty and a belief that centre-left parties will give a better deal to the poor.
Countries all round the world have attempted to buy their way out of poverty by lifting welfare benefits and family allowance rates with no success. Simon Chapple is also quite clear that social welfare benefits reduce the incentive to work.
The payment of welfare benefits to families who do not work creates a number of potential issues. Firstly, as it guarantees an income to people not in paid employment, including those with children, it creates incentives not to work. While theoretically indisputable, much debate surrounds how large this effect is in practice, and how best to offset it.
There is child poverty in northern European and Scandinavia despite the most generous possible welfare states. Most of this child poverty is among single parent families in all industrialised countries.
Around 60 percent of New Zealand children in poverty are in social welfare beneficiary households, and most of these are sole-parent households.
Child poverty rates are lower in the Nordic states but the Nordic states expectation that mothers will return to the workforce rapidly – when their child is 1 to 3 years old. Employment is front and centre in the Nordic welfare state strategy to reduce child poverty.
The notion that poverty is simply the result of a lack of money and giving people more money will abolish child poverty has never worked. As the OECD (2009, p. 171) observed:
It would be naïve to promote increasing the family income for children through the tax-transfer system as a cure-all to problems of child well-being.
The only major success in reducing beneficiary numbers anywhere has been time limits in the USA in 1996. Time limits on welfare for single parents reduced caseloads by two thirds, 90% in some states.
After the 1996 US Federal welfare reforms, the subsequent declines in welfare participation rates and gains in employment were largest among the single mothers previously thought to be most disadvantaged: young (ages 18-29), mothers with children aged under seven, high school drop-outs, and black and Hispanic mothers. These low-skilled single mothers were thought to face the greatest barriers to employment. Blank (2002) found that:
…nobody of any political persuasion predicted or would have believed possible the magnitude of change that occurred in the behaviour of low-income single-parent families.
Employment are never married mothers increased by 50% after the US well for a reforms: employment a single mothers with less than a high school education increased by two thirds: employment on-going single mothers string ages of 18 in 24 approximately doubled. With the enactment of welfare reform in 1996, black child poverty fell by more than a quarter to 30% in 2001. Over a six-year period after welfare reform, 1.2 million black children were lifted out of poverty. In 2001, despite a recession, the poverty rate for black children was at the lowest point in national history.
This great success of US welfare reforms was after a quarter of six century of no progress, poverty among single mothers and among black children declined dramatically.
The best solution to child poverty is to move their parents into a job. Simon Chapple is also quite clear in his book last year with Jonathan Boston that a sole parent in full-time work, and a two parent family with one earner with one full-time and one part-time worker, even at low wages, will earn enough to lift their children above most poverty thresholds. Welfare benefits trap children in poverty.
Sustained full-time employment of sole parents and the fulltime and part-time employment of two parents, even at low wages, are sufficient to pull the majority of children above most poverty lines, given the various existing tax credits and family supports.
The best available analysis, the most credible analysis, the most independent analysis in New Zealand or anywhere else in the world that having a job and marrying the father of your child is the secret to the leaving poverty is recently by the Living Wage movement in New Zealand.
According to the calculations of the Living Wage movement, earning only $19.25 per hour with a second earner working only 20 hours affords their two children, including a teenager, Sky TV, pets, international travel, video games and 10 hours childcare. This analysis of the Living Wage movement shows that finishing school so your job pays something reasonable and marrying the father of your child affords a comfortable family life.
The housing spikes in Australia and New Zealand preceded the global financial crisis, starting in about 1999, and were largely unaffected by the GFC. Housing prices in the USA were pretty calm except in the lead up to the GFC, and took a dive with the onset of the global financial crisis and great recession.
Source: Dallas Fed; Housing prices deflated by personal consumption expenditure (PCE) deflator.
The latest counting in the New South Wales Legislative Council election shows the ease in which ordinary citizens can form a political party and be elected to Parliament when there is federalism and an upper house elected by proportional representation.
Five of the six Australian states have an upper house. In four of those states, the electoral system is proportional representation, with results in the election of many small parties.
In Tasmania, my home state, the Legislative Council as single member constituencies with two or three vacancies filled every year but is full of independents elected the six-year terms. The political parties having no chance of getting candidates elected in front of them. The Tasmanian voters simply don’t vote for party candidates in the Legislative Council elections. Out of 15 members, there is one Liberal Party member, and two members from the Labour Party
In the current New South Wales Legislative Council election, the favourite to win the last seat, and with it the balance of power in the upper house is a previously unheard of No Land Tax party. The Shooters and Fishers party is electing another member this year in New South Wales. The Christian Democrats also have two members.
In Victoria, the Australian Sex Party finally got a candidate elected to the upper house late last year through the courtesy of proportional representation.
Other small parties in the Victorian Legislative Council are the Shooters and Fishers Party with two members, the Democratic Labour Party with one member and a party of never heard of, Vote 1 Local Jobs, with the last seat. These small parties share the balance of power.
The South Australian Legislative Council includes two members from the No Pokies Party, two members from the Family First Party, and one from the Death with Dignity party. Again, this motley crew shares the balance of power.
Western Australian Legislative Council has a government majority, but there is one member from the Shooters and Fishers Party.
The crossbench in the Australian Senate is made up of eight independents and small parties. Several Australian senators on the crossbenchers are completely mad and ignorant; in one certain case, as thick as two short planks. This doesn’t harm, in the case of Jackie Lambie, her chances of being re-elected to the Senate for Tasmania for another six-year term in 2019. A number of Tasmanian voters, including members of my family, value her honesty, though they do admit she is not very bright and is rather rough around the edges.
The strength of democracy lies in the ability of small groups of concerned and thoughtful citizens to band together and change things by running for office and winning elections. That is how new Australian parties such as the ALP, the country party, DLP, Australian democrats and Greens changed Australia. One Nation even had its 15 minutes of fame. Most of these parties started in someone’s living room, full of concerned citizens aggrieved with the status quo.
In Australian elections in recent years, about a quarter of the electorate do not give their vote in upper house selections to the major parties: the Labour Party, the Liberal Party and the Australian Greens. That is fertile ground for small parties to flourish.
So fertile ground is the Australian Senate that the big parties want to change the election system to make it harder for the small parties to swap preferences to get elected through proportional representation and make it much harder to register a political party in the first place.
As would be expected, the far left parties get nowhere in the upper houses of the Australian State parliaments, despite the benefits of proportional representation and preferential voting. These upper houses are filled with small parties from both the left and the right, populist parties all, but the battle cry of socialism just doesn’t resonate with the Australian electorate.
Same thing happened in New Zealand in its recent parliamentary elections. New Zealand has no upper house, but does have proportional representation for the House of Representatives.
A pre-existing hard left party well-funded by a millionaire with an agenda to avoid extradition to the USA got 1.2% of the party vote, but it lost its electorate seat and so is out of Parliament since late last year’s general election.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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