Will the students rise up here? Only is the pubs shut down.

The comfortable lefties are really letting their revolutionary fantasies run wild, aren't they?

WHY WE HAVE UNEMPLOYMENT

"Economic rent" is the free lunch resulting from protection from competition -- e.g. through possession of finite resources such as land and minerals.

Taxes on economic rent don't feed into prices, but merely cut into the free lunch. But the recipients of the free lunch have accumulated big PR budgets with which they punish any politicians that propose to tax the free lunch. So governments tax production -- via income taxes, payroll taxes and value-added taxes. Taxes on production, unlike taxes on free lunches, are costs of production, which feed into prices, creating inflationary pressure and raising the "natural" rate of unemployment, i.e. the minimum unemployment rate that puts enough downward pressure on wages to give stable inflation.

The Reserve Bank sets interest rates to maintain unemployment at the "natural" rate. This rate is called "natural" in order to pretend that it isn't a problem. Sometimes it's even called the "full employment" rate, where "full employment" means enough unemployment to inflict enough pain on workers and jobseekers to keep inflation under control without taxing the free lunch.

The beneficiaries of the resulting cheap labour are not employers per se. The less employers need to pay their workers, the more they can bid up the rents and prices of commercial land. Hence the real beneficiaries are owners of commercial land. Employers that own their premises benefit as landowners, not as employers.

The "capitalist" system doesn't look after capitalists or employers. It looks after the recipients of the free lunch.

Perhaps it really is time to shut the universities, if this is what's coming out of them

Just as government inflation of the money supply causes financial bubbles, government inflation of the education supply causes graduate bubbles - and every bit as useless and anti-social. Government funding of tertiary education subsidises precisely those students who would not be induced to do a degree either for the financial or any other reward, a veritable premium on uselessness. But as the humanities and social sciences are drenched in Marxism it all works out for the better - from the governments point of view. It gets more useless idiots brainwashed into thinking the the state is the way to approach social perfection, it gets more dependent recruits for the class of "intellectuals" to preach that government can do no wrong, and more human cattle for its animal farm.

We really should make Universities independent of public funding. That way you get better education with less waste. Universities should get the same deal a businesses. Put on apprentices i.e. students & teach them to become revenue makers rather than mass revenue takers.
I say make the old way of pulling your on weight the new way again.