Friday, August 10th, 2007...12:37 pm
The Howard Myth
[There is] more than enough time for Krudd and his inexperienced team to slip up a dozen times. Wayne Swan will make a joke of himself at budget time he is the biggest dunce the Labor Party has ever seen and he thinks he can run a trillion dollar economy!!
I think this pretty much sums up a broad view of the Liberal/National coalition and their supporters. It also indicative of major weaknesses on that side of politics: inconsistency and intellectual cowardice. Howard, Costello and co. are not the masterful economic managers they they’ve fooled themselves and their electorate into believing.
Firstly, the fact that they’d even refer to it as “running an economy” and “managing an economy” (as Joe Hockey did on Lateline) shows just how illiberal they truly are. Demand management is a mainstay of Keynesian economics. The great dries of the party would rather take it up the bum from crazy-haired hippies than have anything to do with Keynes. It is simply not kosher. The truth is, even in an economy as padded as Australia’s, it has a tendency to run itself. That is as it should be. The government is on auto-pilot, and makes a few changes at the margin every now and then.
Instead, they’ve painted an image of Howard/Costello uniformed up, guiding it, directing it, in a way only the the all-knowing fathers of the nation would. Presumably, Labor, if given the treasury benches would deliberately fuck up the economy out of spite.
Beyond their fallacious grasp of the role of the federal government, Howard/Costello have committed some grave sins in the name of liberalism, most notably, their commitment to taxing and spending (something much to the chagrin of Costello, as revealed in July). The current government is the highest taxing, highest spending government in history. The size of the federal government, as a proportion of GDP has been higher under this administration than any that preceded it. Yes even Whitlam’s! How have they done it? Not through the socialisation of the means of production. Mr Chifley tried that, but our constitution doesn’t allow it. Nope. What Howard/Costello have done is become the great re-distributors
of income. They, tax, levy, charge, fee, big businesses, small businesses, single-income earners, the poor, the elderly, the self-reliant, and plentiful supply it to the one group that be bought more easily than a crackwhore: Suburban families with children (and their doppelgangers, the couple thinkingabout-notreally-maybe wanting to have kids).
Howard is undoubtedly aware of all these weaknesses. And he knows the attacks on Labor’s economic ability are groundless inasmuch as he acknowledged Hawke/Keating’s role in opening up Australia’s economy in The Longest Decade :
He again acknowledged structural changes to the economy made by the Hawke and Keating governments, saying the present strength of the economy owed much to the reforms made in the past 25 years.
The level of economic debate and education in Australia over the past decade has taken a battering — a deliberate ploy by the government to enable the trivialisation of economics as nothing more than the price of petrol and the level of interest rates.The Big Lebowski ipod
5 Comments
August 11th, 2007 at 10:43 am
I, for one, sincerely hope all those who switched to Howard at the last election because of interest rates are regretting it now. But then, if one gets fooled by that rhetoric, one will probably get fooled by the “let’s blame the States for original sin” argument too.
August 11th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Where in the constitution is the socialisation of production prohibited? Or is it another one of those implied restrictions?
Everything seems ripe for a Labor victory, but there’s always the possibility that things will sour: some union representatives doing/saying stupid things, a terrorism attack, etc.
August 11th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Post of the day, mate!
August 11th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
It is not strictly prohibited, but if the government goes about it the wrong way it would be struck down as in the Bank nationalisation case.
September 1st, 2007 at 2:09 pm
[…] trivialised people’s economic literacy, the “can’t manage the economy” argument […]
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