Good article.
Both neoclassical and Keynesian models require competition to keep efficiency up and profits down. Whether you approach things from the supply side or the demand side, waste is waste. Profit minimisation is important! It allows for "creative destruction" when a new technology overtakes the old, and allows efficient "upstart" companies to force old and out-of-touch companies to innovate.
(Witness the billions going into "clean coal" to "save jobs", yet all renewable jobs are just "uneconomical costs". In accounting spending can be "investment in assets" or "expense on costs" depending on time scale and whim. Industry spin talks "jobs" for them, and "costs" for the competition. Hence green power is "waste" yet clean coal is "investment". Real comparisons are lost in spin.)
It also stops wealth from accumulating in old money "dams" where it evaporates or stagnates instead of invigorating the economy. (Modern banking is supposed to facilitate this process.) Corporations have recently successfully lobbied and manipulated things to achieve record profits regardless of performance.
High profits means workers are being underpaid: Folks used to be able to pay for a house and kids with one working parent: Now two must work and childcare is yet another industry for profit (taxpayer subsidised of course!) There is more than enough wealth to go around, it is just being accumulated by a smaller elite then ever before.
By exporting manufacturing, corporatism of monopolies, and the obscene profits generated in parasitic financial "industry" we have witnessed societal theft: from common workers to the top 10%. this "regressive shift" is due to deliberate policy by the neo-cons.
It is not only the rural workers and producers who lost out. It is *all* workers and producers of wealth. The middle-men who lobby are the only winners.
The economic system is clearly corrupt, which is why many Australians would prefer the hung parliament with a bit of chaos to the "Tweedle brother show with moronic media" we have become used to.