Mark, you have the ability to unmuddify the mess we are in. I read the following over and over:

"Furthermore, any resulting inept commercial behaviour and sinfulness is countered with increasingly onerous and strict requirements. Nothing really improves, of course, while the cost of extensive controls slowly eats away earlier gains.

This slippery slope seems inescapable even when the irrational premise upon which it is based is exposed. To stamp out corporate evil, one must assume it exists, even if this leads us to institutionalising it in the process."

* * *

This goes to the heart of everything; IR laws, transport policy, free trade agreements. It inevitably describes the very structure of a government that prides itself on it's "economic cleverness".

We once made a very good Prime Minister from a train driver. Maybe the criteria in future should be, "Will this Prime Minister make a good train driver?" See what I mean?

I am not sure the mess is any less muddy.
Religion surely for such allows contradictory behaviour even cognitive dissonance, recent examples are Iraq war, children overboard, AWB and on ever on. Is economics a religion as your seem to imply?
I remember a former minister in the early days of the Telstra debacle taking part in an ABC programme on what should be done. His contribution was to squeak ’competition. Competition all the way home‘.
Can’t the Telstra infrastructure carry others after all the capital originally was tax payers. Agreed as a commercial coy it cannot. Does the bush not get fast communications then or even any?

Bad faith I think. But maybe I have missed the point or is it cognitive dissonance to see regulatory strictures on business competition, that religious icon, thus making business not a business?
Anyway it is really all about making the government debt free and voicing this as yet another Icon to persuade the voters

What a poorly argued article – full of sneers and prejudicial language, but with no substantive case at all. “Wealth of Nations” (still less “Road to Serfdom”) as “sacred scriptures?” A “market deity”? Businesses “presumed” to “gouge” their customers? Regulatory “Holy mandates” decreed, and “infallibility” enshrined?

In contrast, of course, to a “corporate life” that originally aspired to “meaningfulness”.

The only ideological prejudices illuminated by these cheap rhetorical tricks are Mark’s own.