Great article, Ian! Wish you had written it six weeks ago.

I have taken advantage of the "Creative Commons License" in order to reproduce it on my own web site at http://candobetter.org/node/266 linked to from http://candobetter.org/ThrowHowardOut

I trust you will approve.

My earlier article "Living standards and our material prosperity" at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6326 may also be of interest.

Many may also be surprised to learn that the Howard Government is just as grossly incompetent in its management of our national defence forces (which is not normally a weakness one would expect to find in such a militarily aggressive and avowedly patriotic government). Only some of the damning evidence is presented in my article "The myth of the Howard Government's defence competence" at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6665.

Well said.

All governments today collect too much money, over spend and claim to be great managers. Regardless of results as any bad result is covered up or "Spun" to reflect anything but the facts.

I don't want money managers as our leaders.

Government exists for one reason. To provide for society. Yet money is everything. The value of saving one life is measured and decisions are made that allow some to die as it is uneconomical to help them.

Sounds good until it is you that is no longer "value". And that happens to everyone as we grow older, become unemployable, develop addictions and so on.

Instead people falling into those categories are demonised by people who hold the purse strings. Currently fatter and drinkers are people targetted in a society where we have laws against discrimination. What next? People with red hair? People who are sick?

Examples? Smokers. Old people, young people, the unemployed, drinkers, drug users of any description including prescribed medicines. QLD is about to start roadside drug testing for prescribed medications (as well as grog, marijuana and any other illicit drug)which implies if you are ill then stay home as you may be arrested for taking the medicine prescribed.

When a legal drug does the most damage young people can make no sense of this approach as our freedoms and choices are whittled away for one purpose. To show what good money managers governments are.

Even if you accept that line of money being the decider of all things it is more than insanity for one man to claim to have "fixed" the economy". That one man, either Party, has a team of people behind them that do all the actual work but get no credit for it as politics is about the egos of individuals and has nothing to do with us other than as people to tax.

Look at how humans behave and compare it with how apes act. It's clear they care for each other more than we do. But we are supposedly intelligent and civilised. Really? I don't agree any longer.

"All governments collect too much money?" Nonnsense. Putting all out taxes (Federal, State and local government) together, we are still taxed too little for proper management of infrastructure and services. We are way down the OECD list in expenditure on tertiary education, for example, and ludicrously overcorwded classes and exhausted acadmics are the result.

For you who know, is is true that in order to grow the government has to create more dollars ie run a slight deficit long term in order for enough money to be available? I take it that bank credit is actually a zero sum in this case. Is the the view that we are funding our government surplus with our credit card as I have seen written true?

Steve Keen's "Always look at the bright sise of credit" is interesting in this context. Makes one a pessimist