Well said Binoy.

Abbott and Hockey have clearly become inspired by the Austrian School, Libertarian, Ludwig von Mises school of economics which underpins the Tea Party movement. But even in the USA this has been rejected.

Anyone interested in what to expect from the Abbott government need only visit the Wikipedia page, search for Tea Party and the agenda is eerily spelled out. This is free market fundamentalism. All things government will become smaller to get out of the way of business. And once government is out of the way, an economic miracle is expected to occur. That at least is the theory.

What we can expect is a free hand to woolworths/Coles type cartels. Across industries small businesses will be bullied, purchased and concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Corporate profits will at all times trump public interest. Expect working conditions to be further diluted: over time rates, wrongful dismissal laws.

While governments around the world are feverishly working with their businesses to promote high technology business, Australia will now embark on a reversal of history and march back towards Agriculture and Quarrying.

Is it the end of entitlement or really the end of enlightenment. This economic theory belongs to another age - it is pure nostalgia. During colonial times this kind of pure dog eat dog economics worked because how else do you build an economy from scratch? The very name, Tea Party, betrays the nostalgia behind this movement. Welcome to the Wild West

I recently bought a car for my daughter. It was a Suzuki Alto 5 door automatic, and it cost $12k drive away with a 5yr 150 000 km warranty with guaranteed low service costs, and included A/C ABS stability control, electric windows, modern music system, and a 6 litre /100km fuel efficiency. The nearest equivalent Aus made vehicle was about $16k.

It is not hard to see why the market for Aussie made cars has evaporated over the past decade, and why with such a shrinking market, that there is nothing on earth that can justify propping up this dying industry when even with the government subsidy paying about $50 000 of each worker's wages. An analysis I saw showed that even if the government subsidy paid 100% of the wage bill, the industry was doomed.

I do however get irritated when the left whingers present distorted statistics showing that Australians pay per person a low subsidy, when if the subsidy per car was presented, it would be the highest in the world.

So thats a no to reexamining the fundamental cost structures to make it possible for business to succeed then.

Instead we will take money from the public to subsidise the jobs of a few union parasites who earn more than the ordinatry people who have to pay tax to support the unionists jobs, and the superstructure of crooks that move between union jopbs and Labor governments - or opposition while the grown-ups fix their mad expenditures.

Dear Chrisper
It is some decades now since Unions exercised real power. This is now for all practical purposes a rhetorical myth. What remains of any real power is in the large Construction industry - Abbott is well on the way to eradicating this now anachronistic relic.

It is entirely disingenuous or naïve to rabbit on about union excess at a time where it is illegal to even strike without a mediation process and court approval. We are all on contracts or contractors There is no security of tenure for employees virtually anywhere.

The only entitlements which remain are for politicians and CEOs.

On the other hand the malpractices and public waste of funds has not been reduced one sheckle since the 1970s. Having stripped the worker entitlements from workers, we have in its place institutionalized a hidden, but more perverse system of waste.

The now lean public sector everywhere hires through byzantine methods various consultancies, contractors. The owners of these entities gouge the public purse and their employees.

In the private sector, ever larger corporations are privileged by government and permitted to extort, harass and destroy smaller and legitimate competitors. The likes of Coles/Woolworths extort the public and their poorly paid employees. Their suppliers are more a kin to landed serfs paying in kind to their masters then businesses.

The idea of free enterprise has thus been so perverted as to be close to meaningless. The corruption at every layer of the economy stinks to high heaven. The only real businesses in this grotesque charade are cafes, hairdressers, and masseurs. The rest are cartels, oligopolies and of course the crony companies which survive by servicing them.

For example Telstra reduced its workforce by 30,000 or more and replaced them with just as many but more highly paid consultants. The same mask of efficiency is repeated everywhere: at every local council, every university, every bank. The system favors charlatans, favors to friends, kickbacks.

In the service industry: lawyers, accountants, financial advisers, wealth managers - none of this produces any value and can be efficiently run by relatively simple computer programs

This must be the most dishonest article I've read for a long time.

Come on Binoy, we all know the Productivity Commission, is a lefty feminist organisation doing just what you are doing, trying to justify charging the old road tax on the fuel used by mining, farming, & a few other industries. It is not, & never has been a subsidy.

Yes, we know they changed the name of the tax, but we also know it was to try to find some money to balance the budget Rudd/Gillard has so successfully destroyed, by charging it on off road work.

I don't know how much math Selwyn College, Cambridge teaches, but you must have missed it all. My 7 year old granddaughter could work out, in her head that we have been subsidizing cars at over $1000 each, where did you get your $18. Give her a calculator & she would get close to $1318, each, at least $1300 more than your $18. In fact on some it was #1800, perhaps you missed the couple of naughts.

You finish, "The future unemployed have every right to be indignant". What tripe, they have got exactly what their stupidity deserved. If anyone has any right to be indignant it is the long suffering tax payer who has been stumping up $40,000 in subsidies for each process worker employed. More than they were worth, before the fool car makers more than doubled that.

Hasbeen. Please pass on my best regards to your learned daughter, I knew the $18 subsidy was, to be polite 'shonky' to be not so polite.... Disingenuous, and dishonest.

Now Binoy, mate, you disapprove of government supporting 'big business multi nationals" ie mining companies, but you approve of government supporting 'big business multi nationals" ie. GMH, Ford, Toyota. Am I confused or are you?

The mining industries produce nothing, and their profits go overseas.
No manufacturing industry in Australia, means high unemployment and the loss of skilled workers.

YEBIGA

How do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate governmental activity?
How do you distinguish between the market price, and the fair price, in any given case?

PS You haven't read any Austrian school theory have you?

"The reasoning is scatter brained: on the one hand, globalisation is good yet terrible (there will be tens of thousands of people out of work as a result of the closure); industry protection is bad (yet countries with successful car manufacturing bases do it); and finally, Australian cars are fabulous, but don't sell in sufficient numbers.

Typical socialist rusted-on stupidity.

Binoy and YEBIGA, where do you think the government is geting the money from, to pay for handouts to industries?

Just think for a second. They're not getting it from some secret pocket hidden in the universe, somewhere, are they? No.

So?

Where do you think they're getting it from?

Actually turn your brain on, and *think* about what you're talking about for a second.

Now. What's the answer to the question?

Dearest Jardine,
I am happy to hear a counter argument but
"Where do you think they get the money from" " stupid socialist..."
"What is a fair price" "you have not read Austrian theory"

These are not rational arguments, or even rational assertions.

If you reread the article and my comments and find fault - fine extrapolate
offer an alternative but at the minute , I get the feeling a constructed rational thought may well be beyond you. I am however ready for you to prove me wrong.

Yebiga
" I am however ready for you to prove me wrong."

Well that's very good of you; and likewise I'm ready for you to prove me wrong.

Okay, my counter-arguments are:
1. If you can't say by what rational criterion you distinguish between the market price, and an alleged fair price, the achievement of which is the purpose of a government intervention advocated by you, then you have no rational basis for asserting that any government intervention can or does achieve your purpose. Therefore you can't justify it.

2. If you haven't read any Austrian theory, how do you know
a) it's wrong or you disagree with it?, or
b) the Tea Party movement agrees with it?

"These are not rational arguments, or even rational assertions."
They are questions. You left out the questions marks. The reason I'm asking them is to prove you wrong. I assert that you can't answer them without self-contradiction or fallacy.

For example, once you admit that the government gets the money for industry handouts from its subjects, then I'm going to ask how you know that the benefit, or public interest, or utility, or happiness, or whatever you want to call the ultimate human welfare criterion, is greater from the government intervention than would have obtained if the resources were left in the hands of its owners? How do you know more jobs or industry aren't destroyed than created, for example, in a given intervention intended to save or promote jobs or industry?

But you haven't yet been able to bring yourself to admit where the government gets the money from in the first place. I'm ready to prove you wrong in your criticism of Austrian theory but I need you to answer the question without evasion first.

Go ahead: try answering and see if *you* can come up with a rational argument, because I assert you haven't got one.
1. How do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate governmental activity?
2. How do you distinguish between the market price, and the fair price, in any given case?
3. You haven't read any Austrian school theory have you?
4. Where do you think the government gets the money from, to pay for handouts to industries?

Jardine
I had assumed your questions were simply rhetorical.

Money comes from government mints (haha) and the banks creation of debt. But, the value of money comes from the interaction between consumers and the fulfillment of their demand by producers, service providers and capital.

It is years since I got into Mises, Hayek et al. I confess the minutia of disputes escape me. But, I have no explicit problems with the foundational ideas purported by this school. Its description of how consumers behave and make decisions offer more robustness than the simplicity of the classical economic demand/supply curves.

As for Government, noone can honestly argue that Government is anything but a parasite on an economy, an overhead which contributes little and mostly misallocates; at every turn causing inefficiencies, waste and even down right destruction to industries, producers, and cumbersome red-tape.

Its no longer just government that is a burden and waste on the economy. We have pseudo industries proliferating everywhere. Over the last 20 years, Government and Big business, have ostensibly reduced their staff numbers by huge numbers. Only to replace them with almost an equal number but more expensive consultancy firms and Contracting companies.

The most successful big corporations from Coles/Woolworths, the Banks, the Miners have become oligopolies. Small businesses have been either swallowed up, marginalized or illegally bullied into a single contract with the oligopoly. All this too, is a distortion of the efficient running of an economy. Something entirely absent in the Austrian schools considerations.

There is no discernible difference between a big government department and a big corporation. Once a business has a certain market share within an industry which is either essential or in growth mode, than it is as protected as a Government Dept. A Shell, a Microsoft, a CBA or a BHP. These are oligopolies and cartels, only flagrant and fraudulent mismanagement is a threat to them. Competitors are purchased or destroyed. Government lobbying is as important as any marketing campaign.

The essential point is their are far more inefficient and useless practices in out economy than the heavily subsidized automative industry.

Yebiga
You're contradicting yourself over and over both in word and action.

For example obviously if you cannot identify any rational criterion by which you distinguish between the market price and the alleged fair price, then you are in no position to talk about what is a 'pseudo' industry, or what's wrong with alleged oligopolies, or what's 'inefficient' or a 'distortion'.

It's like that joke about the two economists:
First one: "How's your wife?"
Second one: "Relative to what?"

Unless you're going to specify *relative to what*, all you're doing is arbitrary moralising.

Of course the neo-classical school pretend to the conclusions you are making relative to the concept of equilibrium, which is complete nonsense.

However there's no need for me to prove it so because you haven't even begun to defend your argument. Most of what you're describing as wasteful, inefficient, and fraudulent etc. is because of the interventions of government, so to that extent you're agreeing with the Austrians. And the rest is demonstrably wrong.

Look, tell you what. Here's a copy of "Man, Economy and State" by Murray Rothbard.
http://mises.org/Books/mespm.PDF
Why don't you read the first chapter, and see if you can identify any proposition that you disagree with or can refute? Go ahead, it won't hurt. You might even learn something; after all, it shouldn't be so easy for an Austrian to completely demolish your entire argument as qucily and easily as I have done should it?. Unless you have some attachment to self-contradictory fallacious theory that is demonstrably untrue, why not have a look?

Notice how Binoy is completely unable to answer the question how he knows the resources going into industry handouts would not achieve more and better benefits left in the hands of their original owners?

Jardine
Simplicitus!
Why do you sound like some kind of Marxist passionately rabbiting on about the means of production? You appear to be so thoroughly immersed in this ideology that you are incapable of seeing the forest from the trees - as the saying goes.

At no point, am I questioning the raw power of free enterprise. Yes a thousand times yes, wealth, goods, services are best created thru the free interchange between individuals satisfying their needs and yes a thousand times yes a government any government distorts this.

But my simplistic ideologue, we are humans not economic robots. We need government, we need police, we need laws and unless you subscribe to some radical anarchist nirvana you will acknowledge this. That is the first thing that your precious Mises and friends fail to address.

The next thing is that because of technology and the acknowledged power of free entreprise the totality of goods and services we require is provided to us by a mere fraction of the number of individuals required merely 50 years earlier.

Once you acknowledge this self evident reality, you may then cast an eye at the landscape and actually be able to think. Until such time you are entrapped in some historical ideological disputation - interesting perhaps - but incapable of addressing the contemporary scene.

To help you along, what we now have is some perhaps 20% of the available workforce providing all the goods and services necessary to satisfy the needs of the 100%. The fundamental thing you must grasp is that rather than scarcity our age is defined by excess. Your brainwashed mind will endeavour to resist excepting such a statement but the sheer volume of the deliberate manufacture of disposable and non durable products which pervades the economy may just penetrate your skull with its ideologically shattering significance.

The question then arises, what the hell do you do with the redundant 80 % of the available workforce? And it is this question, which mocks Abbott and this ideological decision to no longer support an automotive industry. The war your conducting is over.

Ho hum, repeated passionate ad hom, question begging, collectivist fallacy of Yebiga’s assumed gods-eye view of how the entire world’s economy should run, and the old socialist fall-back whenever challenged of squarking “ideology” (undefined term that presumably doesn’t apply to you).

Of course the question is not whether something is ideology, it’s whether it’s true or false.

Notice how Yebiga says he’s ready to be proved wrong, but steadfastly refuses to answer the questions that prove him wrong, because he knows I’ll blow him out of the water with his own bullsh!t as soon as he does.

I’ll ask them again:
1. How do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate governmental activity?
2. How do you distinguish between the market price, and the fair price, in any given case?
3. You haven't read any Austrian school theory have you?
4. Where do you think the government gets the money from, to pay for handouts to industries?

“The question then arises, what the hell do you do with the redundant 80 % of the available workforce?”

This assumes that your economic theory is correct in the first place. It’s not, as you yourself are demonstrating by coming back from my total demolition with nothing but ad hominem and question-begging.

Sorry but it’s sheer stupidity to allege, without any factual or rational foundation whatsoever, that “80%” of the workforce is redundant based on … what? Where did you get that figure from? Your own posterior?

And even if it were true, the solution is what? Government handouts to industry? Are you serious?

You could only rationally make that argument if you were able to demonstrate how you know the resources going into industry handouts would not achieve more and better benefits left in the hands of their original owners?

Go ahead. Show us your workings.

The problem is not “ideology” it’s reality, and in particular, it’s the consequences of economically illiterate government policies in raping industries to death, and then trying to revive them by killing other industries. Complete foolery.

But perhaps another emotional tantie will satisfy your intellectual standards in reply?

We laugh at the complete stupidity of the Soviets who used to have "jobs" for people sitting in a museum in the dark, to turn the light on when a visitor walked in the room.

But how is that any different from what you guys are suggesting - for exactly the same reasons?

And then you get offended when I say it's stupid!

Jardine - stay with me - you have come a long way
Based on government stats year ending 2011
Australia's employed numbers are 11.5 million and .7 million unemployed and I would conservatively estimate a similar amount who because of government or circumstance have got themselves unto disability pensions or just given up trying to get a job.

Thus a total available workforce of let's say 13 million of our population of 22 million, or in percentage terms 56%
Now the figures provided by the ABS are % based on 11. 5million figure - so adjustments need to made.

15%idle
20% agriculture, forestry, fishing, manufacturing, mining and construction
11%utilities, transport warehousing wholesale, technical support
2% media entertainment, telco
5%hospitality tourism
5% health excluding social welfare
5% retail -reduced from 10%
10%finance, rent and professional services
20% government admin, policing, defence, social, arts, etc
7%education
Please note I have halved the retail figure and added the 5% reduction to the idle as the retail sector is so casualised, full of part timers and the official figures have them employed even if they only work an hour a week.

Now is my 20% of productive and 80% unproductive so outrageous? Our industry is effectively 20% the services to enable that industry 11%. But even with in these figures it does not take into account how much government red tape and regulation encumberes our core industry and core services. At any rate what we have is less then 4 million who provide every product and core service for 22 million.

Given these facts, the libertarian, Austrian or even classical and Keynesian argumentation misses the point. We need a whole new paradigm. And when your ready we can discuss the whole crazy debt system - by then you should be at least semi conscious.

What specifically are you proposing?

You still haven't established that your theory satisfies the minimal threshold criteria to qualify as logical thought, let alone justifying a presumption that you are qualified to re-design the whole world.

Notice how you keep trying to slime out of my questions? Do you think we can't see what you're doing?

Let's be honest. Absent your evasiveness, and the false pretence of economic knowledge in your statistical gizzard-lore, an intellectually honest dialogue would look like this:

I: How do you distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate governmental activity?

You: I don't. just yarble off whatever self-contradictory slogan comes to mind at any given point in time.

I: How do you distinguish between the market price, and the fair price, in any given case?

You: I don't, because I can't, and I've never actually turned my mind to that question ever in my life before, even though I see, now you've pointed it out, that the baseless assumption that I can underlies all my economic theory, or rather twaddle.

I. You haven't read any Austrian school theory have you?
You: No. Garbled third hand accounts from critics not interested in accuracy, yes.

I: Where do you think the government gets the money from, to pay for handouts to industries?
You: The taxpayers.

Okay, come on. What new paradigm and what action are you specifically proposing in relation to government protection of industry?

Well dearest Jardine,
A fair price for any product or service is established through the free negotiation between buyers and sellers. Individual decisions made by the members of an economy based on their goals and objectives. I think that may even pass muster with Mises.

Governments extract taxes from the wealth created by the economy via a tacit agreement of providing certain essential services, law and order, ladidah.

The money itself is largely created thru the extension of debt by banks to us and our government. The interest charged by these banks is an irresolvable inflationary burden rendering the entire system fundamentally flawed. - but its the best system we can think of.

Whilst the capacity of a country, its resources, its human capital is always present and available an economy will go thru all sorts of uncontrollable gyrations, booms and busts. the system has a mind and logic of its own and cannot be directed by governments , companies or any group of individuals - it is mysterious beast.

It is a 19th century system, or perhaps even older from mercantile times. One can accept its historical merit and necessity, but one must be entranced to fail to see that it is antiquated.

Consider the tax system, the electronic age enables us to tax ourselves instantly at point of transaction without the tedium of forms. The time, effort and intelligence consumed by business owners, workers, accountants, lawyers trying to find some loop hole, some deduction, some complex structure to minimise a tax - in what reality does this not condemn us all to imbecility?

Time does not permit for me to elucidate the endless stupidity entrenched in what is our economy but suffice to say, the above example is not the worst of it. This country because of its abundant natural wealth has been protected from the worst of the global financial crisis which still besets all of Europe and America. The economic rationalism which has now been the prescription for 30 years has failed miserably - everywhere

Honey
Notice how you didn't say what new paradigm or specific action you propose?

Notice how your definition of a fair price contradicts your views on oligoplies, cartels and "distortions"?

Notice how in criticising economic rationalism you did not distinguish the problems caused by government, which are common ground, from the problems caused otherwise?

Notice how, when your criticism of the Austrian school is challenged, you say a whole lot of stuff that agrees with them, and then can't justify any of what doesn't?

"The interest charged by these banks is an irresolvable inflationary burden rendering the entire system fundamentally flawed. - but its the best system we can think of."

Speak for yourself. Who's "we"? It's no wonder you can't think of anything better, if all you can do is recycle third-hand garbled neo-classical theory.

Let's cut to the chase. Are you in favour of government handouts to failing businesses or not?

Jardine
The better question is how you can continue to ask the same questions about the role of government when industry itself makes up no more that 20% of the entire workforce?

So in regards to the real economy, I think the Austrians have it. But when the real economy is a fraction, whether it is 20-30 or even 40 % of the whole economy then what? Exactly which part of the excess do we commence to address. The automotive industry has the unique distinction of actually producing something.

What do government departments produce? What do accountants, banks produce? What do council officers, financial planners, lawyers produce? See, I am all in favour of efficiencies, all in favour of removing theft. But lets get real, I would rather a country of subsidised engineers, than of subsidised bankers, accountants, advisers, insurance salesman, health safety experts, auditors....I would like to see more small businesses, more farmers, more manufacturers, more retailers but instead we see rapacious consolidation and more consultants to obscure and justify the illegality.

Economic rationalists have had control for 30 years and all they have done is bring the world to the brink of disaster. The Austrian / libertarian alternative currently promising salvation is essentially the same crap with only more obsession and some strand obsessed with a return to the gold standard. You know yourself the Austrians have nothing to say about restraining oligopolies. There is no consensus at all about size, the role or scope of government, other than it is bad.

So in other words you have no specific proposal, and no new paradigm, but just an open-ended cry for the teat, for no particular reason, and an allegation about oligopolies that contradicts your own theory?

Notice how you have not defined economic rationalism in any way to distinguish problems caused by government, and not distonguished problems caused by government in your critique of it?

What we've just established is that what your spouting is simply irrational. It's a belief in getting soemthing for nothing by destroying capital. This can only work on the predatory or parasitic principle. It does not and cannot work by creating net benefits for society, and the fact you think it can, doesn't mean everything's just "ideology". It just means you're wrong, which is established by your self-contradictions and logical fallacies.

Even if your idea about 20 percent of the workforce being "real" was true, it still wouldn't justify taxing them to pay other people to dig holes and fill them in again, would it?

The proposals become self evident once you look at what is in reality happening.
There is a part of the economy which is real and a bigger part which is an overhead, sometimes useful or essential like education, but just as often no more than a way to keep people busy.

So the first step, Should be to define the real economy of goods and services which are essential and create wealth - here minimise all government interference, red tape, etc and more over clear their path to ensure it can work optimally.

As for the rest, what do you think? Make it as lean as possible, apply as much technology as we can for things like taxes, banking, accounting, the law etc - simplify, automate, repeat.

Then lets have an honest to goodness debate about how debt, particularly government debt, is managed, created? And then lets see what happens.

They are just some ideas, but once you look at it correctly, their are numerous possibilities, and I am sure many better than what I came up with here. We may for example find that we are prepared to fund a semi permanent 20% pool of unemployed or invent whole new industries or ways to keep people engaged and still some how contributing to the economy and the common good.

For the minute though we all act as if the economy were a tarot reading, all mysterious and unfathomable except by those with visionary powers.

“So the first step, Should be to define the real economy of goods and services which are essential and create wealth.”

So after all this, you still haven’t got to square one in thinking what your new paradigm is. Go ahead: define the “real economy of goods and services which are essential and create wealth.”
(Hint: you will see this is the answer to the question you’ve been evading until now: how do you distinguish legitimate from illegitimate government activity. See unlike you, I don’t evade and ignore disproofs, I actively seek them out and change my theory accordingly.)

Wake us up when you’ve worked out what your new paradigm is do. (Hint: you’ll need a theory that’s logically coherent.) (Hint: handouts to industry is not a “new paradigm”.)

You start the thread by saying “Well said Binoy” and railing against “free market fundamentalism”. Binoy was arguing for government protection if industry; and you imply that opposition on free market grounds can only be religious i.e. irrational.

Then you say “As for Government, noone can honestly argue that Government is anything but a parasite on an economy, an overhead which contributes little and mostly misallocates; at every turn causing inefficiencies, waste and even down right destruction to industries, producers, and cumbersome red-tape.

So far, according to you, government intervention is parasitical, but on the other hand the legal monopoly it claims and exercises for itself is unquestionably necessary and “unless you subscribe to some radical anarchist nirvana you will acknowledge this”.

Self-contradiction.

Then, according to you, the fair price is defined as one that is “established through the free negotiation between buyers and sellers”. But then you say that “oligopolies” [no definition] need to be [iforcibly] “restrained [no reason given why].

Self contradiction. The neo-classical school pretend to find justification for such policy in all that stuff about perfect this, perfect that, perfect competition, and so on. But I think we are agreed that’s crap as a premise of policy?

You said you’re ready to be proved wrong.

Well? Consider it done.

By the way, a proposition isn't self-evident just because you happen to think it's a good idea. It's self-evident if you can't deny it without performing a self-contradiction.

The binary thinking has you in its grasp Jardine
Every now and then you appear to almost escape its clutches but down the rabbit hole you plunge once again.

the contradictions you think you see occur because of this binary yes/no simplicity which possesses you.

See if I can help, if the real economy is a small subset of the whole. Surely, Once this distinction is made it is possible to treat the real economy one way and the rest another. In fact, logic would surely lead in that direction. So the real economy needs to be unfettered and protected from red tape and government interference. Whilst the false economy is than a matter of strategy, options abound.

See no inconsistency what so ever.

I know you want to be consistent toward the whole economy but why? Government alone is 20% of the economy. It is not really important what it does is it? As long as it does not encumber the real economy which provides us with food, industry, essential services. Similar all does other redundant activities - I am all for scaling them down.

Is that the best you can do?

So basically it's just an open-ended plea for handouts. You don't know whether the handouts are going to do more harm than good, and are unable to define what activities should or should not qualify for them.

Well if you were trying to act as an advertisement and billboard for conceited meddling socialist stupidity, you couldn't have done a better job, could you?

But perhaps a few more supercilious remarks to the effect that you may be assumed to know how to re-structure the world's economy may vindicate your (non-)argument?