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The Forum > Article Comments > Yes, a jobs crisis is building > Comments

Yes, a jobs crisis is building : Comments

By Syd Hickman, published 17/2/2014

Abbott believes it is all about individual firms, dud managers and greedy workers. Let them go broke and the economy magically creates new jobs.

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Yebiga

Has it ever occurred to you that if your starting assumptions are wrong, your conclusions will be wrong, and your process of reasoning will prevent you from identifying those facts?

Obviously you are in no position to determine what the "balance" should be if you
a) you have no rational criterion for distinguishing what government interventions are justified, even in your own terms, from what aren't;
b) confuse state ownership and control of the means of production with private, blaming "economic rationalism" for evils and disorders caused by government.

As I have demonstrated these defects in your argument, over and over again, and as you just keep making the same assumptions, it just means you're wrong. It's important to understand that the problem is not that you have a valid viewpoint, on which reasonable people can disagree. It's just simply an irrational belief system. It's in the same category as belief in Santa Claus, or throwing virgins into the volcano to increase crop fertility.

AT NO TIME have you justified or attempted to justify your assumption that the State can do what you assume it can do. Yes it can give industry handouts, we know that. What you have not demonstrated, is *how you know* that the resources foregone, and the values sacrificed, to achieve that end, would not have been better and fairer employed left in the hands of their owners and producers.

No, I'm not asking you to give me assumptions, an slogans, and ideology, and aggregative fallacies, which is all you keep offering. I'm asking you to show by what *rational criterion* you *know* what is in issue.

This is not a contest between "ideologies". I have demonstrated that what you are saying is flatly incorrect, self-contradictory, and unjustifiable even in your own terms.

What you have is a mere superstition, and none the less so for being the predominant and fashionable religion of the modern age: the blind unquestioning anti-rational, anti-human, anti-social adoration of state power.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Saturday, 22 February 2014 12:57:17 PM
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"The role of government is to enable anyone to open a business and contribute to wealth of a nation not to restrict entry and enable a culture of distortion to mask itself as legitimate."

That's an argument *against* government's economic intervention, not in favour, isn't it?

The interesting thing is that although you consistently appear running left-wing slogans, on challenge and examination, you equally consistently give away any socialist claims at the outset, and say you agree with libertarian principles.

Has it ever occurred to you to examine the extent to which the things you're blaming on economic rationalism, are the result of government interventions?

Are you sure you're not just deeply confused?
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Saturday, 22 February 2014 1:08:30 PM
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I have tried my best to step you thru my conceptual and simple understanding. But no matter how clear I make it, you revert back to the same core foundation that business creates wealth and is the best possible and only prove. Method of doing it,

I don't dispute this.

What I dispute is that this is all there is.
And here you find it difficult to get out of grade school.

I am assuming you accept there will be a governmen, schools, police, a defence system which will be funded outside the strict business world economy?

And it is just this where the hard work begins. How big should government be? What is its responsibility? Its limits?

Whenever I try to raise the conversation above the basic you insist on dragging it back to fundamentals.
Posted by YEBIGA, Saturday, 22 February 2014 11:43:15 PM
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"And it is just this where the hard work begins. How big should government be? What is its responsibility? Its limits?

Whenever I try to raise the conversation above the basic you insist on dragging it back to fundamentals."

No I don't. I keep asking what is the criterion by which those questions are to be answered, and you keep not answering.

In my opinion, they can only be answered by a principle, and that principle must have the following characteristics:
- it must be logically coherent, i.e. no fallacies, double standards or self-contradictions
- it must be ethical, for example it cannot entail an open-ended warrant for a privileged class to engage in fraud or aggression
- it must identify a sphere in which people have a right to be free from aggression initiated by others
- it must answer why, if governmental power is justified for one thing, the same reasoning would not apply to everything else.

I don't think you can do that by just plumping for a particular historical period, and saying you liked the "balance" as between private and public at that time, because
a) that's not a principle, it's an impression, and
b) the world keeps changing forever, e.g. compare China in the 70s, versus now,
c) that method doesn't distinguish the critical parts of the inquiry, such as what good things in that period were because of liberty and property, or despite them; and what things were because of government, or despite it. In other words, it has no theory of causation. So for example we often get the clearly false claim left-wing claim that evils of the Ponzi scheme of monetary policy - government intervention piled on government intervention - represent "unregulated capitalism".

Obviously if your theory doesn't distinguish private from state, it's useless.

Go ahead: what's the principle that distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate government power?
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Sunday, 23 February 2014 8:45:39 AM
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For example, what makes you think that the interventions in industry that you are in favour of, are *not* going to cause the destruction of industry?

And then the people who voted for policies to destroy industry, look in dismay at the loss of their jobs, and cry "Why doesn't the government [intervene to] fix it?"

For example the carbon tax wasn't even touted as being primarily about revenue-raising. No sir. It was specifically *intended* to to destroy industry.

Well? Are you Labor voters happy now?

Can you imagine how frustrating it is for the non-moron part of the population to see this kind of foolery take in a majority of the population?

And what was the high value for the sake of which industry was to be deliberately destroyed by policy?

Because otherwise all the DNA in the world will unzip and de-nature itself, from the boiling of "the planet" caused by global warming from people not being forced to use curly light-globes, so there won't be any nature left for "our grandchildren".

Don't laugh. This is literally the level of their mentality.

We're talking about people who are literally so dumb that they can't make the connection between voting for policies that destroy industry, and the following destruction of industry!

Now the question for you is - and this is the same as what you are asking: "How big should government be? What is its responsibility? Its limits?" -
by what rational criterion do you distinguish your theory of government from theirs?

Because it's *the same* isn't it?

But if it's not, then explain how you know that government interventions in industry aren't going to cause consequences worse than the problems they were intended to solve?

Even if you read only the first two chapters of "Economics in One Lesson", you will understand more about political economy than all the Labor party put together:
http://www.hacer.org/pdf/Hazlitt00.pdf

They are stuck in a belief in Santa Claus, crying for mummy's tittie, real infantile stuff.
Posted by Jardine K. Jardine, Sunday, 23 February 2014 1:48:32 PM
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Jardine
Please don't suppose that I am a fan of the ALP. Particularly, the current crop of nuts. Likewise, I am not a Howard or Abbott fan. And in case you are wondering, I am not a green either.

The carbon tax was always going to be a joke. Real things should be and can' be done to protect our environment and transition in a sensible way to renewable energy.

The Hawke/Keating government, for example, showed that it is possible for government to work with industry and implement coherent and sustainable plans. Remember, back in the early 1980s the automotive industry also threatened to leave en masse. By negotiating union concessions, tariff concessions, providing R & D grants the industry was retained and even grew of its own volition during the intervening years.

There are constructive interventions and large infrastructure projects only government can facilitate. I am firmly convinced that much of its failure is not that government is intrinsically stupid and incapable ,rather, it consistently sells out our national interest to short term prescriptions, down right corruption or mad ideology - as in the desalination plant in Victoria.

J Shumpeter, himself, warns in Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy, that as more and more large public companies predominate a disconnect occurs as ownership becomes abstracted into shares; Reducing the vitality of capitalism. In other words, the passion and energy common with private ownership becomes more bureaucratised in large public companies. He does not say it quite like this but in time there is little difference between a big public company and the efficiency of a government department.

Thus two options are available - break them up as the US did with AT&T and the baby bells or government has to become involved. The first will not happen because in truth the public companies are now the citizens in all but name. So the way forward is problematic.

Personally, I believe, the system as it stands is entirely screwed. The necessary changes are not as hard to figure out as they are impossible to implement absent a catastrophic economic melt down.
Posted by YEBIGA, Sunday, 23 February 2014 10:54:32 PM
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