Is it at all possible for anyone to be more incompitent than the man of the moment, Captain Credit, our (best the world has to offer) treasurer.

Could anyone possibly get it so wrong, so often, for so long.

I actually feel sorry for the gullible supporters he dragged along for the ride.

But hey, come September, he won't care, cause the mess will ne left to the coalition to sought out, ONCE AGAIN.

What can you expect from this incompetent bunch of clowns, one prime example is the contracts signed that relate to the illegal welfare for lifers it was $8 BILLION dollars.

That does not include our Navy Taxi service or Federal police overtime etc.

The sooner the Government says NO to the economic invaders or just resigns the better for Australia.

more treachery than incompetence.

When Kev took over Labor had more money than sense.
Now they have no money and no sense.

Swan is a fiscal/economic imbecile. Nothing he has touched has worked in favour of our Commonwealth. I mentioned previously that I have a mate at the U.N. and he told me that Swan was an international laughing stock after his lecturing of the handful of delegates that stayed to listen to his fiscal rhetoric a few years back.

Swan the IMBECILE coupled with Gillard the LIAR delivers the LARGEST Commonwealth debt in our history. I have a mate who is intelligent, worldly, and on the face of it sound of judgment, but he will not vote for the Coalition because he hates Howard. He would rather see Australia fall than the Coalition gain power. I can’t understand this line of thought.

So far the comments on this issue are disappointing.

The budget balance of a currency issuing government should never be an aim. It is an outcome at the end of a defined period.

The aim of a currency issuing government should be to ensure that all the resources available in the country are employed for the benefit of the citizenry. If there are people capable of working one aim should be to see that work is available. There is plenty that could be done. About 12% of our citizenry are unemployed or underemployed.

If there are sections of the economy that are being parasitic on more worthwhile economic activities then the parasitic activities should be choked off.

Privatisation of efficient public owned enterprises such as the power industry, Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank converts those businesses to less efficient parasitic activities.

All economic activity should take into account long term aims such as what industries should always be available for the long term and what industries are likely to be temporary.

Only on QandA last night there was comment that the government was paying $20m per day in interest. That payment is upper class welfare agreed to by parliament. The government could simply owe its debt to the Reserve Bank which it owns on our behalf.

A currency issuing government can never not afford to pay for anything available for sale in exchange for the currency it issues.

Foyle, I could only agree with you re government owned business if some way was found to stop empire building, & inefficiency.

Remember the old Telecom. Every job requiring a man to do it, had 6 watching him. After privatisation Telstra was still overstaffed after it had reduced staff by 60&.

Now if perhaps we had a rule such as the pay rate for any public service manager, & any university administrative staff, was inversely proportional to the number of employees they supervised, we could actually have public enterprise.

Meanwhile it is much cheaper for the consumer to be ripped off by your rapacious industry, than so called public servants.

Hasbeen,
In some ways the old telecom was a dinosaur but the problem was mainly poor management.

Politicians need to be willing to set up competent supervision and to expect world best practice from government owned businesses. Having been a manager in a large heavy industry I am well aware of major poor performance in sections of some private industries. That, as with Telstra, was mainly in the maintenance areas.

Had Telstra not been privatised I believe we would have had fibre to the node years ago. Telstra delayed starting that project once privatisation was in the wind.

Ask yourself how much extra the general public are paying to the big four banks because Which Bank was privatised.

There is an excellent article on economics, published to-day, at the site New Economic Perspectives. It is long and the first of three on Modern Monetary Theory. It starts with an excellent history of how the USA and Europe arrived in the pickle they are in today.

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/04/modern-monetary-theory-overview-part-1.html#comments

Foyle perhaps you should think what a government is before you promote action based on what you think it should be.

The idea that a "currency issuing government" is immune from the need to economise, is the same as the idea that it creates real wealth out of thin air. Children might believe this pure fantasy, but when we grow up we need to put aside childish ways, even if they conflict with our fond wishes; we need to learn to identify parasitic behaviour when we see it, even if it is operating behind the august edifice of the state whose nature you have never examined.

Yes Foyle, big business can be as bad, Newcastle Steel works were like Telecom.

Small business, with out unions is very different. Here is a day of mine on a Tourist Island.

In a slack period, probably November, We had only 7 or 9 guests, & there were only 4 of us working that day. The cook did breakfast, my wife waitressed, I did my radio schedule with the one sail your self yacht we had out, then the barman & I did the 8.00 AM ferry run to the mainland.

Back at the island I got a call to say some frozen stores had turned up at Shute Harbour. I grabbed the sky boat & went off to get them. Meanwhile, my wife did the housemaid duties, the cook cleaned up after breakfast, & the barman opened the bar.

Back again, I went to sort a blocked toilet, discovered it was a full septic tank & pumped that out.

My wife was arranging guest activities, & they could not decide between visiting another resort or going fishing. We decided to do both. The cook organised lunch, then went off for a sleep. I had a shower. We left at 11,00 AM, & with all guests going, the barman came for the fishing, & my wife was hostess. Just the cook was on the resort.

We gave them an hour at South Molle, while the barman slept, then served lunch while heading to a fishing spot.

Back on the island at 3.30 PM, the cook started dinner, the barman opened the bar, & my wife did the afternoon ferry run as deck hand with me. I did my afternoon schedule with the yacht on the way.

Cook & my wife did dinner, & cleaned up after, I had a bite, then gave the barman a couple of hours off for dinner & a kip, before he came back for about 4 hours.

A pretty average day on a resort, but can you imagine how many staff a government department would have required to do the work we did that day?

Dear Hasbeen
Take your point. Sort of. I was a public school teacher converted into a HO type person in mid career. So there are two targets for you.
As a HO person, I recall one Friday when I discovered a problem with our contribution to a commitment with two other states on the following Monday. I stayed over in my office to sort it out. I worked through until Sunday afternoon without sleep (admittedly with decreasing efficiency as the hours dragged by) but managed to get everything ready and rescued for the Monday morning deadline. My boss never knew. No recognition, no O/T, just a feeling of immense satisfaction that I had turned around a potentially embarrassing situation for my state and my betters. Make that "superiors". On the way to work on Monday morning, I heard one of the radio shock jocks sounding off about lazy and incompetent public servants. There's a lot of it about. And yes, I worked with a few — a very few — on whom food would have been wasted. But I also knew the many who were just as determined to do the very best they could as I was, and for no better reason than it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It was certainly not in expectation of some reward in my workplace or some eternal reward in a future life that exists only in the imagination of the deluded.
But thanks, anyway, for setting everybody straight about the superiority of public over private employees

Dear Rechtub,

Wouldn't you do the same in their place?

If you were given a blank cheque to pay for whatever took your fancy, knowing that someone else (and not a family member, but someone you in fact despise) will foot the bill, would it be incompetence on your behalf to make full use of the opportunity?

.....Privatisation of efficient public owned enterprises such as the power industry, Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank converts those businesses to less efficient parasitic activities.

F, I think you have this back to front.

Yuyutsu, I think y may have the wrong thread.

Seriously, I can't believe how stupid this guy is, stating countless number of times that WE WILL ACHIVE Surplus AT ANY COST.

Meanwhile, blind Freddie knew that the wheels were wobbly, yet he still managed to convince so many people that we were in great shape.

All I can say to those loyal followers, is welcome to the real world, and as far as pain goes, as the saying goes, you ain't seen nothin yet!

Dear Rehctub,

<<Yuyutsu, I think y may have the wrong thread.>>

Doesn't Labor have a blank cheque to spend as much as they like on their favourite items during the next few months?

Don't they know that after September it will not be them, but the ones they despise that will have to foot their bill?

If you had such an opportunity to go on a wild shopping-spree, then have your enemies pay for it, would that make you 'incompetent'?

Glen I had great teachers, mostly.

A very good friend is a teacher, but is now teaching TAFE, where he has people who really want & need to learn. He reckons they are like sponges, just soak up everything offered, & he loves it.

These people are doing trades & need the math they were supposed to get at school, & didn't. Their fault or teachers, or a bit of both, it doesn't matter. Now they want it, & with a good teacher they are getting it.

I also had a Telecom district maintenance manager on special leave, after a marriage break up, work for me on that island. He was no kid, I worked his guts out, & he loved it. Union rules meant he had not been allowed to do anything but sit on his butt for some years.

When the time came, he had to go back, for financial, & family reasons, but would have loved to stay, but the tourist industry doesn't pay too well. In the late 70s most island staff earned about $125 & keep. I think his maintenance payments were higher than that.

Congratulations on saving the day. In private enterprise it would be noticed, & you would be in line for promotion, & probably more satisfaction. Unfortunately you would still be unlikely to earn as much as the public sector pays, & you would never get similar retirement benefits.

We desperately need politicians who are prepared to take the long-term view and care about the whole community, not just the immediate interests of themselves and the malefactors of great wealth (as FDR put it) who bankroll them. Swan wouldn't need to make irresponsible promises about a surplus if the "Labor" party hadn't destroyed so much trust with their lies and broken promises. If people believed that the Treasurer was acting in their long-term interests, they would mostly leave the question of a surplus up to him. Foyle for Prime Minister.

It's all very well to say how good it would be for governments to have a view to the long term, but the very nature of democracy militates against it. Politicians are elected for 3 year terms, simple as that. They do not own the property they are given control over. They have every interest in indulging short-term grat over long-term. At least a private property owner has an interest over his whole life and often his heirs as well. Politicians short-term interest generates a short-term purview and this of necessity filters down through the ranks of their lower delegates. Where people got the idea that government, of all things, should be the guardians of sustainability is a mystery. If your purpose is to favour long-term perspectives, then that is better served by not putting matters in the hands of governments to decide.

As for the unresponsiveness of big businesses, some activities intrinsically require a lot of capital. This acts as a restriction on competition, and to that extent these businesses can be less responsive to the consumer. However at least private businesses rely totally on the voluntary payments of the consumers for their continued existence. Government services, funded under coercion, in their very nature do not have the possibility of responsiveness to consumers whose direct input via the price mechanism has been severed at the root.

Jardine K Jardine
You should read more. The second item of the three I drew attention to earlier is now available. Some of J R Saul's work might also be of value.

I never advocate waste of money, or effort, by government or private enterprise but a sovereign government needs to take on major infrastructure work and pay those who do the work so that they can buy the products of private industry.

I have recently examined the cost of generating electric power. The generating cost in NSW by mainly government owned coal fired generators has increased at 1.5% compound annually over the last fifteen or so years, well below the rate of inflation. I doubt that private generators could have held their cost to that rate of increase. I suspect that privatisation of the marketing of power has been a main reason for the extortionate price increases faced by the power consumers.

Much of what government spends money on make our society better and worth living in. Justice, education, health services, clean water, research and similar for example.

David Hume wrote that money "..is none of the wheels of trade. It is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy."
Adam Smith said much the same. Once manipulation of money becomes an industry that industry is parasitic on real industry.

A condensation for New Economic Perspectives
"A principle of Keynesian theory is that free markets are far too important to be left free – as in, free-to-fail-and-fall-apart. Markets, and especially financial markets, have to be regulated and moderated by the central government and its central bank if we are to avoid bubbles, panics, crashes and depressions. The “neo-classical” revival came in several flavors and wore a variety of different guises over the years, but every version has turned this principle upside down. First as theory, and more recently, as all-too-real, and tragic, public policy the de-regulation of financial markets and the repeal of the depression-era controls have been successfully imposed. In America, these policies have been adopted by both sides of our political duopoly. Madness and macro-economic blindness are now a fully bi-partisan affair.

The economy we have now and the Economics profession we have now are twin causes and twin consequences of the thirty-years-and-counting devolution we have undergone since Keynesianism was decertified as the ruling conception of a managed, domesticated form of capitalism. We have now almost completely returned most of the world’s financial sector to the kind of opaque, dangerous, gangsters-and-gamblers capitalism that prevailed before 1930. As a result, we have suffered a huge, worldwide financial crash caused by corporate criminality, fraud and deliberate risk-concealment in the mortgage-bond market. The crash and the rapid deflation of the housing bubble combined to send the U.S. into a Grand Canyon class recession.

Economic austerity has devastated the Eurozone. Yet the economists who praised the housing bubble and the dot-com bubble before it as a “great moderation” are still in charge. The hegemony of “neo-classical” theory and “neo-liberal” policy is as absolute and almost as unquestioned as ever. And while there is by now a quite well-established intellectual trend within Economics to challenge the hegemony of the neo-classical orthodoxy, it has yet to be recognized or engaged by that orthodoxy. Insular and in possession of all the important levers of academic power, the old guard just soldiers on, oblivious. The pundit class is as clueless as it is corrupt."

The obvious answer to those who urge the beneficence and necessity of government providing this, that, and the other goods or services, is to ask “Well if that’s so, why shouldn’t government provide all goods and services, i.e. full socialism?”

“Oh no!” reply the government apologists, instantly resiling from their own logical conclusion, knowing full well it would mean the total collapse of the economy and society in enormous human rights abuses. “What we mean is we need a balance between private and state provision.”

Okay, then by what rational principle do you know whether government is providing too much, too little, or just enough of whatever services is in issue? By what rational principle do you distinguish “infrastructure” from capital goods in general?

It’s completely illegitimate, and anti-economical, to point to mere benefits of governmental action, as you have done. Anyone can produce benefits if we don’t count the costs! You have to account for the resources withdrawn from some other area of activity, and demonstrate that the benefits they would have produced would not be greater, else you’re back to the original problem of assuming *any* governmental action must intrinsically be better for society than the alternative of private property and individual freedom. But how can you account for those uses foregone? There is nothing in the process by which government gets the money that would enable you to conclude so.

I say you can’t answer my questions because you know they prove your theory wrong. What do you say?

It should not be so easy to disprove your entire argument. As for your defence of Keynesianism, please don’t make me laugh. It’s you who should do more reading: http://mises.org/Books/humanaction.pdf

Jardine K Jardine
So you would see no problem in privatising the armed forces, the police, the supply of water and sewerage, education, including the science curriculum and all the services supplied by councils.

You forget that water supply and sewerage became a public concern in the nineteenth century because private interests weren't interested in public health.

Democratic government came into existence because citizens had had enough of the tyranny of kings and feudal lords. If you had your way young children would still be employed to mine coal and slavery would still exist.

Government has a role where otherwise monopolies would exist. How can there be real and efficient competition where only one service is required to a home; one water service, one sewerage service, one power line, one phone or internet line, even one road or footpath.

Keynes theories were aimed at obtaining the best available performance from both private enterprise where it could be truly competitive and from government services wherever a monopoly was almost inevitable.

Have you not heard of Gresham's Law?

To quote from my copy of Adam Smith, "To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.
The Wealth Of Nations, Book I, Chapter XI, Conclusion of the Chapter, p.267, para. 10.

Jardine K Jardine (and others)
The article in the latest New Statesman makes a lot of sense.

http://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2013/04/where-would-you-rather-live-small-government-somalia-or-big-government-sweden

Foyle
Notice how you weren't able to answer any of my questions because they prove you wrong, and you know your whole argument would collapse if you tried?

This is significant, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it proves that, from the point at which you chose evasion, everything else you say is invalid because it includes all the same assumptions that I have just disproved. So the situation is, that I have completely proved your argument wrong and you've been unable to disprove my argument or prove your own except by circularity.

Secondly, I'm surprised that you found that the New Statesman article "makes sense", since it is full of self-contradictions, displays economic illiteracy, and I can disprove it as easily as I did your argument.

For example, only an ignoramus could think that the current financial crisis comes from unregulated capitalism, since the capitalism in which it has happened is very heavily regulated. In particular, governments have at all times claimed and exercised monopoly power over the supply of money and credit. Governmental manipulations of interest rates is clearly implicated in causing the crisis that have caused the crisis, even according to their own theory; and the interventionists must lose that argument any way you look at it.

But if the problem is not enough regulation, then you are back to the problem you have just tried to squirm out of – how do you know how much governmental counterfeiting, fraud, and looting is too much?

For another example, you obviously don't understand Gresham's law, which originated in observing the results of governmental attempts to rig the price of money in its own favour. It proves my case not yours.

Thirdly, because your intellectual technique is to start with the conclusion you want, and work backwards cherry-picking to confirm your bias, it never occurs to you that others aren't using the same technique. Unlike you, I actively seek disproofs of my own theory. I asked you questions which are capable of disproving me; you can't answer them.

Fourthly, you make a good advertisement for abolishing state education since it obviously indoctrinates educated people like you into thinking it’s okay, in adoring the state, to look on disproofs of your beliefs in its favour, and actively prefer slogans and what is false, instead of actual critical thinking about what is demonstrably false.

As for research, you’ve already lost that argument, remember?

So, how do you know how much of people’s savings the state should be stealing by inflating the currency so as steal billions from the ordinary people, and give it to billionaire banksters, which is what you’re arguing in favour of?