Again mud is thrown at the left, not by informed people but those stuck in a well worn grove.
Fueled by refusal to understand, throw away insults as hollow as egg shells that have been pricked and blown out.
Some things we once had, think we still have, or will have after the right takes them away are left generated
Education health pensions, the list of things is long and mostly things we demand government give us.
Yes it failed us Capitalism is failing us a third way now please
But let it come because good people thought about it long and hard while leaving their biases in the bucket at the door

I know that you don't believe in freedom of speech, Belly, but opinions another than yours are not "insults". You are living proof of the fact that the people who know the least yap the most. What sort of "grove" are you referring to: an orange grove, an olive grove?

I am truly making an effort to avoid you ttbn but please keep your rants honest
I know it will be hard but we all need to learn new things
the forum, if not us, is worthy of much more respect than I think you are capable of.
Defending any thing left of our current government is my default position, insulting me for that reminds me some are unable to do any better

"Before the union movement employers could pay what they like. Employers could pay just enough to keep workers from starving, and the workers had to take it."

While that is strictly true, its also true to say that before democracy those things were true and before the rise of liberal capitalism, those things were true. What isn't true is the implication that the union movement was the cause of the change.

Redistribution of the new wealth of the industrial revolution occurred in countries that had strong unions and countries that had weak unionism.

The notion that the pre-union workers (say before 1850) were utterly powerless and exploited shows utter historical ignorance. The workers in the new industrial towns were there because life in these places, though immeasurably miserable by current standards, was very much better than life elsewhere. That is why there was a constant and growing movement off the land and into the towns beginning around 1750 and continuing to today. Looking at these things in isolation shows a lack of historic understanding.

The workers in these towns and cities were very much better off than their counterparts on the land. They were immeasurably better off than their grandparents.

What the left, in the main, fails to appreciate is that, to redistribute the wealth, a society has to first generate that wealth. The left has little understanding where the wealth comes from, thinking that it just happens and will continue to happen irrespective of what they do.

The left, or at least that part of it that is represented by the likes of those on these pages, doesn't understand how fragile the mechanisms behind wealth creation are. It was, for example, the great failing of the Whitlam government which, having seen unending growth post-WW2, didn't understand that they couldn't just rape the golden goose without consequence. In the end they created much more poverty than they alleviated.

/cont

/cont
(Its why I so admire Bob Hawke, who learned and implemented the lesson that its easier, and less dangerous, to ensure that the pie continues to grow even while you redistribute that growth. The ALP and most of the Libs have forgotten that lesson).

You can see the same phenomenon in places like Venezuela, once one of the richest countries on earth, and now a basket case after the left decided that redistribution of wealth could occur without regard to where the wealth came from. It was only just over a decade ago that the left's so-called intellectuals were saying we should emulate Venezuela in its socialism.

Around 1900, Argentina and Australia were the two wealthiest nations on earth. While Australia went down the path of income redistribution, it did so with caution and consent from all sides. And we remain relatively wealthy. Argentina caught the left disease and eventually threw it all away.

Part of the problem with the left is that it considers itself the home of the intellectual and knowledge. So when its shibboleths are shown to be wrong, it finds it very hard to backtrack. The area north of the Crimea was a net exporter of food for at least 2500yrs before 1917 when the left's theories were implemented there to try to 'improve' things. As they failed, utterly utterly failed, there was no avenue for the left to admit error. So they didn't and the area remains a net importer of food.

Likewise Venezuela continues to implement policies that have clearly failed and the left in the rest of the west continues to cheer those policies. The USA's leftists implemented policies in the 1960's to lift the blacks out of poverty. Those policies have clearly failed a portion of the black community, which is why many blacks are now looking to Trump for better solutions. In Australia, the notion that social policy could lift all aboriginals out of poverty is clearly wrong. But the left cannot bring itself to admit it and failed policies continue and aboriginal poverty continues.

/cont

/cont

Another problem we see with the left 'idealism' is that there is no notion of an end point. Yes there is relative poverty in Australia, with people below the poverty line. But there will always be relative povery. But what about absolute poverty? Today's poor having living standards that would be the envy of the richest classes from a century ago. But there is no acknowledgement or, perhaps even undrstanding, that absolute poverty has been long since solved in the capitalist west thanks to the wealth created by those the left hates.

Its all very well for the left to claim kudos for helping the poor. But that help is paid for by the productive classes. To the extent that the left fails to see this, it endangers the economy and therefore the nation. To be sure, we need those who point out inequality and work to alleviate it. But we also need those who keep a check on misplaced idealism and who keep a look out for the welfare of the wealth-making mechanisms.

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"The Left doesn’t respect authority. "

On the contrary the left adores authority... so long as they have it. They disrespect it in others hands, but defend it absolutely when they have it.