No Easy Answers To Complex Things
There are no easy answers to complex things. Stupid people are suckers for populist promises re-smaller government and privatising stuff. What you end up with is less transparency and less accountability. What we actually need is better and stronger governments and their agencies. Slashing government spending just means more money going to the private sector. Private interests are governed by one thing – their own interests. Blaming everything on the government is just another dumb, easy out for those who cannot be stuffed finding out how things actually function. See Trump 2.0 for an illustration of this right now.
Market Forces Have Not Met The Challenges Of The Housing Crisis
If you look around now and observe the housing crisis this is a failure of government. The abdication of state government responsibilities re-social housing in favour of letting the market take care of business. Well, the market doesn’t give a rat’s for the working poor. Neoliberal economic policies via the privatisation of government assets have not delivered wealth and prosperity for all Australians. No, only a select few have grown exorbitantly wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. Private interests look after private interests, hence the name. They do not look after the vulnerable and the poor, as these more challenging parts of our society are what governments are supposed to look out for. If we sell off government assets and transfer operations to the private sector these folk get shafted.
Promising More For Those Who Already Have More
The LNP Coalition is campaigning on more for those who have already got more. The Neocon strategy has been to endower victim status upon the dominant white cohort. It is disgusting really that these well off folk are lining up in the welfare for the middle class queue. Downward envy is the name of the game. Take from the poor because the rich are too tough to deal with. It is weak shit from lousy people encouraged by right wing strategists. Blaming those from disadvantaged backgrounds and demanding more for themselves. This is the nub of the LNP Coalition strategy for attracting voters. Australia is a wealthy nation but certain economic policies are driving up prices and making it unaffordable for many. Corporate greed and profiteering is par for the course these days.
“Now, after nearly half a century, the verdict is in. Virtually every one of these policies has failed, even on their own terms. Enterprise has been richly rewarded, taxes have been cut, and regulation reduced or privatized. The economy is vastly more unequal, yet economic growth is slower and more chaotic than during the era of managed capitalism. Deregulation has produced not salutary competition, but market concentration. Economic power has resulted in feedback loops of political power, in which elites make rules that bolster further concentration.
The culprit isn’t just “markets”—some impersonal force that somehow got loose again. This is a story of power using theory. The mixed economy was undone by economic elites, who revised rules for their own benefit. They invested heavily in friendly theorists to bless this shift as sound and necessary economics, and friendly politicians to put those theories into practice.”
There are no easy answers to complex things. Those who promise that slashing government spending and privatising everything will make things better are not governing for all Australians. Rather they are looking out for the pigs closest to the feeding trough. Their insider mates will join the oligarchy by benefiting from the transfer of public wealth to the private sector. Have electricity prices come down thanks to privatisation? No. Are domestic airfares cheaper thanks to privatisation? No. Is the Commonwealth Bank looking out for us via better deals? No. What we have is an overly concentrated market with monopolies and duopolies ruining consumer power and thus distorting free market capitalism. Privatising things ends up creating giant corporations with too much power. It is not socialism plaguing the West but totalitarian oligarchies. Billionaires with too much wealth and power everywhere we look. Right wing parties are in the pockets of these oligarchs. People power has been decimated by laws brought in by right wing governments. Unions have been decimated. This is the world we live in. It is an unfair society, which favours the wealthy at the expense of the working poor. The investor is hardly taxed whilst the worker is heavily taxed – how is that fair?
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
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