I smell some public service type bulldust, and an 'equality of outcomes' attitude from the posters. Look at the list...

To be socially included, all Australians must be given the *opportunity* to:

* secure a job;
Tick!
* access services;
Tick!
* connect with others in life through family, friends, work, personal interests and local community;
Tick!
* deal with personal crisis such as ill health, bereavement or the loss of a job;
Up to the individual's outlook and effort I suppose. Tick!

* have their voice heard.
By whom? Guvment? That's a laugh. That very statement is a sure indication of hippy left wing everyone just needs a hug crap.

So, with the exception of some of the mentally disabled, all of Australia is 'socially included'.

Now that's settled, the rest of the speel about employee 'inclusion' is socialist rubbish. To the risk takers go the spoils, and so it should be. Put up your own time, money and effort for risk, and if you do well you may become an employer. If you're happy being an employee, you're free to invest in the company you work for if you think that's a good idea

Beefyboy
What you say would be fine if politicians got the money for social inclusion policies from a moonbeam. But they don’t. They get it by forcibly taking it from other people who themselves are faced with the same problem of a scarcity of resources. This is the bit that the interventionists always ignore. They assume that there is an unlimited supply of capital out there that they can get to pay for their schemes. There isn’t. The people who end up paying are not the rich people they hope to milk, but the poor and disadvantaged. Thus the interventions make things worse.

The need to compete for resources is not because of capitalism. It is because both nature and society impose certain limitations on resource availability. For example there is a natural limit on time, because we all die. And there is a social limit on the amount of other people’s labour you can have spent for your benefit, because other people want to use their labour for their own benefit.

This problem cannot be made to go away by governmental confiscations. They can only be made more destructive *no matter what their adherents think*.

Fractelle
In case you haven’t noticed, neither Beefyboy nor the author gave a definition of social inclusion.

What is it? Not a description: a definition.

Pelican
You do not address the problems of exploitation, environmental damage, or corruption by simply assuming that they don’t apply to government.

Force and fraud are illegal under capitalism and no-one is arguing that they are justified. But both are legal under government, which relies on both for its continued existence.

No-one explains *how* government’s legal monopoly of force or fraud is supposed to produce the superior results that are claimed for it.

You just assume it, but the assumption is wrong.

All
There are two main problems:
1. Tax does not, on balance, take from the richer and give to the poorer. It takes from the poor and middle class, and gives to the middle class and the rich.
2. The interventions themselves generate social problems of disadvantage, for example, subsidising vast armies of comfortable middle-class university-educated bureaucrats to administer programs that keep poor people dependent and marginalised.

The dichotomy between individual freedom and private property on the one hand, and ‘social responsibility’ on the other, is a complete furphy. In fact human society arises out of, and is entirely an artefact of, freedom and property, in the absence of which society collapses amidst enormous human rights abuses and environmental destruction.

Property rights arise out of the principle of self-ownership. It’s not that they are “sacrosanct” – holy of holies – it’s that they are axiomatic. Anyone advocating the violation of property rights is involved in denying the principle of self-ownership. They are thus *necessarily* involved in a self-contradiction. Everyone agrees with the principle of self-ownership, either explicitly or implicitly, because if they deny it, by their speech-act they are asserting ownership of their body.

There is no intrinsic conflict between property and freedom on one hand, and social responsibility on the other, that is not adequately covered by the laws against force and fraud.

Violations of property rights, including all socialism, are anti-social, not extra-social.

The destructiveness of Marxian errors cannot be redeemed by name-changes, wishful thinking, or vain conceptions about how morally superior you are.

Houllebecq is right.

Wing Ah Ling
Of course governments are not beacons of light in regards to corruption or being responsible for environmental damage etc but at least we can vote them out at the next election. Although I must admit we suffer a bit from the tweedledee tweedledum syndrome under our current electoral system.

I am not suggesting that we go about taking people's houses or other property at will. In our system of democracy we are required to give of some of our property through our taxes - but for that we get services like health care. Even if we don't get to use all those services there is security in knowing there is a safety net should we need one.

Arguing for social equity is not socialist twaddle or in the category of 'everyone needs a hug' mentality. These are flippant statements that hide from the real issues.

Please define what you think would constitute a violation of property rights?

We get one twenty-millionth of a say once every three years on whether to sack the government, however the other party's policies are at least 90 percent the same. We have no remedy whatsoever if we elect politicians on the basis of their promises which they then fail to perform - in other words, fraud. We get no chance to withhold payment if we are dissatisfied. Hidden taxes are rife. The motivation to force others to pay is rife, if not dominant. Vested interests can and do specialise full-time in lobbying governments for special privileges paid for under compulsion by everyone else and called 'the public interest'.

With market transactions, every dollar is a vote. We don't have to participate in any transactions we don't want. It is illegal to lie to induce us to enter into the transaction. Single or in a class we have a remedy in federal law, state law, common law, equity, corporations law and criminal law. We can sack them, so far as concerns ourselves, in every single transaction. No need to persuade millions of others to agree. They cannot simply take money out of our bank account. There is no opportunity to force others to pay. They cannot threaten us with being physically seized or locked up in a cage in order to force us to pay, or to obey; but this anti-social method underlies all governmental revenue and action.

Violation of property right means taking or using someone else's property without their consent.

Please define social equity.

The people of the country have to pay for health services one way or the other. The idea that we can provide more, better or fairer health services by paying under compulsion through a huge monopoly of force and fraud, who in turn sponsor huge corporate vested interests, acting through huge centralised bureaucracies, is simply not reality-based.

Nothing you or the author have said justifies the use of force or fraud that needs to be justified in arguing for governmental interventions.

Jardine KJ.

What a crashingly boring and miserable post.

Everything is reducible to dollars and cents? There are no values other than economic? Ultimately there are no rights other than property rights?

I can't see why you are posting on an article about social inclusion, because you appear to believe neither in society nor inclusion - except perhaps to the extent that one might buy a place.

Your diatribe about the faults of democracy - wailing that you're only one of 21 million, etc - is cynical and bankrupt. I don't imagine you have any affinity for Mahatma Gandhi's saying "YOU must be the change that you wish to see in the world."

Just cop out and leave it all to money, right?

A surefire recipe for life to be "poor, nasty, brutish and short."