Frank:

1. "Life does not always amount to all that we are capable of or want"...sure, but I don't see how this invalidates or even qualifies my point.

2. Agreed - the "for its own sake" is to clarify that I reject any doctrine that suggests it's better for everyone to be equally poor than to have a mixture of those who are wealthy and those who are not.

3. Disagree that Australian workers getting sacked because Korean ones are cheaper is necessarily a bad outcome. Australia should be working on increasing the productivity of its employees, meaning we can work less and create more wealth.

4. "The more wealthy people there are, the more poor people there have to be, by definition". Huh? It's completely possible for the number of people earning twice the average income to increase, while the number of people earning half the average income to decrease. Indeed, that's even (theoretically) possible with a fixed amount of wealth, which is obviously not the case anyway.

9. Not sure how it's a false dichotomy. What I accept is that there are cases where allowing competition among private enterprises will, on balance, lead to increased inefficiency and better outcomes than government monopolies, but it's by no means a given, and depends considerably on the nature of the industry.

If the "Left-Right" divide was completely useless, it wouldn't still be used, to the point of large numbers of people happily categorising themselves as one or the other.

BOAZ, re moral issues - my position here is pretty simple: governments attempting to control the what informed, consensual adults do in their private lives is virtually never justified, and almost invariably leads to outcomes that the majority would agree were ultimately undesirable. Indeed, there are very few cases where it's desirable to have governments controlling what informed consensual adults do in public either. Of course there are grey areas, but remarkably few.

I will make a small concession that there is a dangerous in attempting to be "too" progressive and rush through social change at a pace faster than the majority can adjust comfortably too. But in many areas, Australia has gone from being one of the more progressive countries in the developed world (e.g. giving women the vote) to one of the most backwards - a situation I seriously hope to see rectified in the next decade or so.

Hear, hear! Wizofaus. Strngth to your bow!

BTW, one further point re the capacity of market forces for innovation/wealth-creation: it remains the case that publicly funded research and development has been critically responsible for some of our most revolutionary technological achievements: nuclear power, space travel, and the Internet to name just three. It seems pretty improbable to me that any of these would have ever been developed via private enterprise alone. It's also the case that much of our wealth and technological advancement is due to the tireless and often economically unrewarded work of great scientists, mathematicians, inventors and volunteers, including the free software that powers much of the Internet. In other words, selfishness and greed (at least for monetary reward) are not *necessary* motivators, though they are undeniably powerful ones. I'd like to think that the more materially wealthy we become, the less the desire for more material wealth will be an important motivator behind progress.

wizofaus,

1. Simply, individuals can't always take responsibility for their own actions e.g. Cornelia Rau.

3. Fine for economists, terrible for the Australian unemployed.

4. How else can you measure wealth or poverty but by their reflexive relationship?

9. The false dichotomy is between decisions (or efficiency) made by government and private enterprise. Neither has the monopoly on merit.

On the usefulness of the "Left-Right" divide, people believed the earth was flat well after it was demonstrated not to be. Large numbers of people believe they are Christians, but their actions betray them.

The left-right dichotomy has had its day. The Political Compass (http://www.politicalcompass.org/test) uses a quadrant taking account of a Libertarian/Authoritarian social scale and a Communist/Free marketeer economic scale.

This is necessary to help us see the difference between socialists like Gandhi and Mugabe - the first a pacifist, the second a brutal dictator. On the 'Right', Pinochet was prepared to condone mass killings in the interests of the free market while Thatcher was only prepared to condone mass sackings.

Examples from the four quadrants would include:

* Libertarian Left: Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and J.K. Galbraith

* Libertarian Right: F.A. Hayek, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman

* Authoritarian Left: Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il and Samir Amin

* Authoritarian Right: George W. Bush, Irving Kristol and William F. Buckley.

There's a useful but controversial discussion of the demise of left/right dichotomy also on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-right_politics)

The article concludes: "Many modern thinkers question whether the left-right distinction is even relevant in the 21st century. After all, in most countries left-right appears more a matter of historical contingency and local politics than any coherent statement of principle."

1. But those weren't "her own actions".
3. Temporarily yes, but the point is that there is now an opportunity for those workers to be trained/educated to a higher level of productivity, which will benefit them (and Australia as a whole).
4. Off the top of my head...someone whose entire paycheque goes on rent, food & other necessities is poor. Someone who never needs to look at the price of what they spend on necessities is wealthy.
9. That is a genuine dichotomy in the context - enterprises are either run by government or by private enterprise. But it doesn't seem like we actually disagree with each other here anyway.

Yes, I'm well aware of the quadrant, which is a slight improvement on the single-axis dichotomy. However I was deliberately focussing on the "economic" scale in this thread. FWIW, out of all the names you list there, I would most associate with Galbraith.