Australia's major political parties have "an unavoidable obligation" to hold the middle ground."??
Hold the middle ground indeed. The elites of this country specialise in distortion. There is no middle ground and there no is middle way. Here in this country we have a dictatorship - the only difference between the two major parties is style - and one of them is a decidely better manager of the public purse - and thats about it despite the Labor party hanging on to its socialist status - see preamble to Labor party constitution - yes it still says the Labor party is socialist. Well maybe it kind of is but then so are the Liberals.
The middle ground is a misnomer. The two major parties are soft leftist yes and socialist. Somewhere we got conned into thinking that is the middle ground. lt isnt. They like to say it is because 1 they think the middle ground is the place to be and can easily convince us that thats where they are and they think we like that and 2 its a good way to cover up the fact that they arent sitting there in the middle ground. Since when was the middle ground socialist?
For some reason we have been convinced that government has the right to take half our income - and reassign it or mismanage it or both. Governments are useless with money. They should not be allowed to divest us of any more than twenty per cent of our income irrespective of how much we earn and if that applied across the board the wealthy wouldnt need to spend 20 per cent of their income on accountants to protect the other eighty per cent - and then the system really would seem fair because right now the very rich pay nothing.
But l digress. We have been fooled into thinking the middle ground is a good thing and the major parties are sitting right there - in the middle ground. The middle ground isnt a good thing and they dont occupy the middle ground.

I couldn't agree more merv09.

The old right v left debate is boorish, inane, hypocritical, condescending and myopic.

The continued pedantry between them is excruciating to the point of alienation. Bogans barracking for their footy team.

Our political system has been refined to the point of "gaminess" which produces politicians who can best exploit the political game rules at the expense of providing vision and leadership.

The right likes to crap on about the decreasing number of union members who traditionally support labor while their own party membership numbers are not only shrinking but getting older.

Both sides only relevancy is that the political system offers no other real choice yet. The hung parliament says it all.

Hawke and Keating took Labor to the right where the Libs ran out of room and fell over the edge until Howard moved toward the cynical right. So the funny thing is Labor is no more left than Liberal. And what's even funnier is why Liberal call themselves liberal.

Ideology for the sake of it has no idea.

We get the politicians we deserve.

After all, we're the ones that vote for them. They don’t get a guernsey if we don’t give them a run in the first place.

If its really true, (and I’m arguing that it isn’t) that we don’t get the politicians we deserve, whats the excuse? Who’s making us choose elected officials we don’t want? Who’s standing in the polling booth on election day with you leading you astray?

Some will complain about lack of choice. But surely if there was a consensus on what we wanted, one of the political parties with their massive machines would have picked up on this and prosecuted a successful campaign. They haven’t. There is no consensus, except upon who is to blame. And its false.

To go on pretending it’s the politicians who are the problem is like telling the alcoholic that its the publican’s fault. But the publican's just selling what people want to buy. If he doesn't, he'll go broke. And the drinker will just walk on to the next bar. This analogy to public life is especially apt these days as all politicians manouevere for short term gain, afraid that any serious policy will send people down the road to the next guy. And they are RIGHT TO WORRY. IT ALMOST INEVITABLY DOES.

WHOSE FAULT IS THAT?

There's little doubt that the 24hour news cycle, combined with non-stop polling has, in part, led us here. Nevertheless, it is our consumption of such news that drives this whole cycle in the first place. This is the ongoing problem of a society lacking the patience to deal with complex issues and hell bent upon divesting any responsibility for it at every turn,. The simple and undeniable fact is that politicians do what they need to do to get elected. And who elects them? The people. It is OUR collective failure to hold the short/term populists (ie the non-conviction politicians) to account which is behind the politics we see today.

cont'

cont'

Politicians merely hold up a mirror to our society. And if people don't like what they see, they should do somethng about it. Not claim the mirror is cracked.To blame politicians and political parties for our own inadequacies is shortsighted and self defeating.

Merv, Glomley and others complain about the path the major political parties have taken. Yet they cannot escape the obvious fact that 50% of the people voted for the ruling parties.(even allowing for Gillards minority governement). By what other means do these people suggest we choose our representatives?

It is incumbent upon the citizen to take an active role in political life if they feel they are not being well represented. It is this failure to do so, along with endemic apathy among the voting public, which has led us here today.

Politicians introducing new policies today, face the uphill task of informing, educating and leading complex changes in public policy, in the face of a public with little engagmenent in the process and very little patience either. Sadly these conviction politicians will find that it is not the entrenched interests of the party system holding them back. There is plenty of ill feeling towards the short term, say anything, populist polticians out there. But coverting that into support for fundamental reform, from a public with ADD, is the 64million dollar challenge. Up till now, the public has almost universally rewarded the proponents of long term policy reforms, with consignment to the political dustbin. Not much of an incentive to go out on a limb, is it ...

Dear PaulL,

I am unable to even begin answering your questions without resorting to matters of spirit and religion, but that would imply that whatever I write here will be deemed irrelevant by most readers, who are brought up on a humanistic approach.

Ultimately, there is no good but God.

There is therefore no "common good" but doing God's will (which will, paradoxically, be done anyway!)

So if one who is fully attuned to God and acts on His behalf devoid of selfish motives, kills another for the common good, then in fact, such an act should not even count as violence. Obviously, however, we get into a deep mire here about how to tell whether or not someone is in fact in tune with God: there is no objective test or certainty about it, for only God sees to the heart!

Killing is not automatically an expression of violence, though most often it is, in which case it is termed "murder". While murder can sometimes be justified or excused (as on the grounds of self-defense), I cannot find a situation where it is actually good.

I would say that if one kills ONLY because of deep conviction that it is their personal duty, or even better, their calling from God, to do so; AND is able to retain their compassion and love towards the one(s) they kill even while they commit that act; AND is seeking no personal gain from doing so, then it likely is good.

Note that the exact same act, if done by someone else who does not fulfill all the above 3 conditions, would not be good.

mac
“My statement that economics is 'not a science' …[is] based on my acquaintance with economics at business school ….”

That’s fair enough but it only justifies the conclusion that the economics you were acquainted with is not science. It doesn’t justify the conclusion that economic science is impossible or non-existent. Please see my recent post in OLO Forum.

Accepting your cited definition of neo-liberal, it describes the neo-classical schools of economic descended from Adam Smith, and I agree with your and the left-wing criticism of them. They start with blatantly unrealistic assumptions, smuggle in value judgments under guise of “science” without justifying them, and make invalid use of mathematical, statistical and aggregative methods.

But that does not
1. prove that economic science is impossible or non-existent, nor that economic theory is nothing but ideology
2. establish a case against voluntary transactions
3. establish a case in favour of state interventions.

In particular, it does not dispose of the Austrian school of theory, which radically criticises state interventionism, at the same time as it rejects the methodology of science which the neo-classical school, the Marxists, and Steve Keen share in common, namely empirical positivism. The argument is that the empirical and positivist methods are invalid for studies of human action, which is subjectively motivated. *At best* they can only prove propositions of economic *history*, not *theory*.

However, sound and irrefutable scientific method is still capable of disproving the arguments of the socialists and statists in their own terms, proving that state interventions must produce results that are worse even from the standpoint of the interventionists.

The only refuge of its critics, such as Chris Lewis, Squeers and Tristan, is flight into the abnegation of reason itself.

As opposed to theory, all policy, as it is based on value judgments, can be called “ideology” if we want. But if one denies the possibility of economic science, then there is no objective way of knowing cause and effect, and therefore no reason for any particular ideology to be entrenched in policy, which supports the Austrian school conclusion anyway.

www.mises.org