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."