I took advantage of your offer, Mr Davies, and downloaded your "book" for free. I feel sorry for anyone who actually pays for it, though. It is breathtakingly shallow, and full of arrant nonsense.

Here's just one example, from the section "Pyramids and Ponzi Schemes"

"If the price of oranges goes up, this counts as contributing to inflation. If the price of housing goes up, it isn’t counted towards inflation."

Fact check:

"...the Housing group includes all expenditure on rents, utilities, purchase and maintenance of dwellings and other expenditure on shelter-related goods and services. The Housing group accounted for just over 22% of the CPI expenditure in the 16th series CPI weighting pattern, introduced in the June quarter 2011."

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/6461.0

If this was merely an opinion you were expressing, you might get away with it. After all, we all have our opinions. But you out yourself as a complete fabricator in the next sentence...

"I’ve had occasion to ask an economist if this is really true, and why. The response has gone something like “Oh yes well … technical reasons … international comparisons … mumble mumble … OECD … blah blah”. But , I say, isn’t it a major omission? After all, the rent or the mortgage payment is one of the biggest, often the biggest, expense for your average family. Buying the family home is the biggest investment most people make. More mumbling."

Sadly, this sort of baloney is a recurring theme throughout the pamphlet. As is the chutzpah with which lines such as this are delivered:

"Anyway, it seems I just explained the GFC in a couple of pages of fairly plain English. Certainly there were other factors involved, some more of which I’ll mention shortly, but I think we’ve covered the essence. Yet it seems this explanation has never occurred to the economists in charge of major economies."

You may think you "explained the GFC", Mr Davies but you did so with pretty much the same level of comprehension as an economist would bring to bear to "explain" mantle dynamics.

G'day Pericles,
thanks for the link. May I direct your attention to paragraph 1.10: "The cost of housing is measured as the price of a new home (excluding land). Mortgage interest payments are excluded.”
Also 2.1:
 “All expenditures by businesses, and expenditures by households for investment purposes, are out of scope of a consumer price index. In this regard, expenditure on housing presents particular difficulties as it can be considered as part investment and part purchase of shelter-related services.”

I imagine Mr Davies is suggesting, whether as an investment or not, the cost of land is integral to the purchase price of a home and has inflated somewhat over the last few decades.
Personally, I found comparisons such as this annoying:
“ From 1953 to 1974 unemployment in Australia averaged only 1.3%”
blithely ignoring the fact that back then a significant number of middle class wives and mothers stayed home and didn't register as unemployed. I think back then many of us were under the impression that -with technology- life would continue to get easier and we were all headed for a life of leisure.
Oh well.

Foyle
Can you see that it’s just garble-brained to reason like this:
“Government does certain things because they’re good and the reason we know they’re good is because government does them”?

That’s all you’re doing.

For example, we could preserve depletable resources for future generations by no-one using them. But then those future generations would be under the same prohibition for the sake of still further generations. Taking this extreme version of the “robbery-of-the-future” argument to its logical consequence, no-one could ever use them. As soon as we accept that any amount of use is to be permitted in this generation, we immediately raise the issue what the correct balance should be between present and future utility, and how to decide it. When I ask, how is the government to know what is the correct balance you merely assert without any explanation whatsoever that the government knows better. Can you see that’s just mental gibberish?

Can you see it’s just the same thing, to say we need government to ensure non-fraudulent market transactions are fair, and when asked by what rational criterion do you know the difference between the market price and the fair price, to answer, Because the government says so?

Same with saying the reason we know government is providing the optimum amount of any given good, is because government is doing it. Gibberish.

Your equivocation about the use of force is trivially disproved. Are you suggesting that government’s interventions should be voluntary? No? Then stop trying to pretend they are, and honestly answer the question instead of evading it with a question in reply, and a repeat of your religious liturgy.

Geoff:
can you see that all the same assumptions underlie all your theory, that it entails an open-ended irrational credulity in governmental economic superiority, and that’s why you can’t answer critical analysis of it?

All
Notice how both Foyle and Geoff think that economic knowledge consists of asking “economists” what their opinion is, and just blindly following it without at any stage inquiring what their reasons are or whether they make sense in their own terms?

Curmudgeon - I've been off line for a day. If you're still here, yes it's a bit shocking how the numbers don't match the received wisdom. The full references were removed from the article. Here they are:
1 Bell, S., Ungoverning the Economy. 1997, Melbourne: Oxford University Press. 324 pp.
2 Weisbrot, M., D. Baker, and D. Rosnick, The Scorecard on Development: 25 Years of Diminished Progress. 2005, Center for Economic and Policy Research, www.cepr.net/index.html: Washington D. C.

Funny though, that you know the right answer even though you don't have evidence to hand.

Grim, thanks for clarifying the role of housing in inflation measures. Yes, it's the land price that inflates in a bubble, but that isn't counted.

Not quite, Geoff Davies.

>>Grim, thanks for clarifying the role of housing in inflation measures. Yes, it's the land price that inflates in a bubble, but that isn't counted.<<

The reason land has been excluded is that it is not a commodity, and cannot in itself be consumed or exhausted, and is therefore equivalent to an investment, rather than consumption. Its inclusion can also be a distortion, as its contribution to the price of a unit in a twenty-storey apartment block will be substantially different to the price of a McMansion built on the same land footprint.

In any event, rental values are included, which are a close analogue to the impact of the price of housing.

So your glib assertion that it is "the land price that inflates in a bubble" simply serves to underline your tendency to invent your rationale as you go along.

Okay, let’s just recap what we’ve established so far about the original article and the anti-libertarian defences of it given in this thread:
• You DO want your policies enforced otherwise they’d be voluntary and the only thing you all agree on is that you want to “rein in” voluntary transactions
• You cannot identify any point up to and including shooting people dead when you renounce the use of aggressive violence to enforce the policies you advocate.
• If you do, at that point your policies would become voluntary which is exactly the one thing you are all agreed you don’t want so my above line of reasoning is correct, and you are too embarrassed to admit your nasty fascism.
• The fact that we don’t see government shooting people to enforce interventionist policies is not because policy do not entail and rely on aggressive force and threats, it’s because the subjects of it know that resistance is futile and their obedience does not entail consent.
• By contrast market transactions are consensual.
• There is no issue that aggressive force and fraud are and should be illegal in market transactions, so it’s drivel to allege that free markets entail oppression or exploitation
• On the contrary, it’s you guys who are arguing for the “law of the jungle”, “survival of the fittest” creed: the most aggressive and violent party in society – the State – taking whatever it wants from the weaker. You are trying, and failing, to establish any justification for it.
• Your denial that you stand for the use of aggression is either straight-out dishonesty or confusion/delusion.
• You cannot identify any rational principle whatsoever that identifies the voluntary transactions that you want to override: you stand for mere open-ended total government power.
• You cannot identify any principle by which government power would be limited: you are totalitarians.
• You cannot identify any rational criterion by which you distinguish the market price from the alleged fair price that you want to enforce: you stand for mere arbitrary power.