This piece by ALP minister for small business in the OZ is so deeply founded in bullshit that it is in danger of drowning.
The article asserts that ALP understands competition and Smithian economics more than conservatives. I am always sceptical, rather, dismissive of this claim. Every time it is made there is a perverse anti-competition motive for it.
The perverse aim of this piece is to somehow say that means-testing the baby bonus (one of the unpopular parts of the budget that needs spinning out of existence) is natural conclusion of following free-market competition-encouraging ideas, when it is precisely the opposite. This is just another exercise in Labor spin, or more correctly, misrepresentation; still more correctly, lying.
Rudd said to the author "We need to spin this shameless vote-buying anti-competition class-war redistribution as good for competition because we are "economic conservatives" now. Can you write it up for us?"
"But that's bullshit" came the reply, i'm sure.
"Yeah, but that's what we are good at around here. Hop to it, son" commanded Rudd, testily.
And so the author waded in up to his neck and let rip a real stinker...
The bit of BS of the piece is that conservative Governent regulate more than Labor governments.
Wrong. Howard deregulated the labour market. Rudd is re-regulating it.
The second chunk of BS is how conservative governments increase the welfare state, and ALP is about winding it back.
Wrong again. Howard introduced work-for-the-dole, increased employment, intervened in the NT and waged war on welfare wherever he went. The so-called 'middle-class welfare' of the baby tax break is nothing of the sort as i have explained ad neaseum, but I will explain again.
Welfare is taking money off one person through tax, and giving it to another.
Taking less money off someone to begin with, say via a baby-based tax break, is ... a tax break, not welfare at all. The country needs more kids. The baby bonus is sensible social policy that tried to bring this about through the means at the govt's disposal: rewards through less tax. What's more - and since the ALP now claim to be good little economists too they will understand the power of incentives - it encourages people to have kids, regardless of their income.
Means-testing the baby bonus rewards low to middle income people for having kids but not better-off people, although it's arguable that households above the 150K cut-off are better off. Sooo, going back to incentives, means-testing the bonus discourages people who are better off from having kids. Maybe not alltogether, but they wont be able to afford as many. If they do have a third child, it makes sure that he or she wont be able to send them to an independent school. One less middle-class well-educated free-thinking kid is one less person who will vote Liberal. "Job done", says Rudd.
Means testing the baby-bonus takes a policy that did not discriminate against winners, and makes it discriminate. This is the definition of an anti-competitive policy.
To the victor, the spoils. This is the essence of competition.
To penalize winners for winning goes against the very nature of competition. And it IS the very nature of the resentment-fueled envious grasping class-warring ALP. The ALP thinks that its ok to discriminate against winners. Since they believe humans only win by being cruel and currupt. Their cyncism is killing this country and every other country they hold sway.
How can the ALP claim to favour competition when they not only support policies the penalize winners, but try and hide them behind political spin so the policies can work their poisonous effect unnoticed and unacknowledged, and all the more effectively. Their false overtures to competition use economic language to uneconomical ends. They are at bottom an attempt to find a more intellectual and thereby more socially acceptable way of indulging their hatred of the good and the great. The spin is as dangerous as the resentment that drives it.
The biggest lump of BS in the piece asserts, in the typical pseudo-intellectual fashion of sound-biting communist, that the Liberals favour "private-enterprise, not free-enterprise". Is the Author suggesting that government-owned enterprise is somehow more free? I dare him to state openly the logical consequence of the bland bollocks he propounds.
One of the central pillars, sorry THE central pillar, of the Free Market is the idea of Private Property (my capitals, for these ideas should be elevated to the status of deities). The people own their own stuff. The people earned the money themselves. The money belongs to the people, individually, and not to the government. If the government takes the money they need a damn good reason. And they are not doing us a favour if they let us keep OUR money.
Welfare means taking our money and moving it around. A tax break is by defn NOT taking our money. The two are clean different things. They only seem the same in the eye of the government official who thinks the money was theirs to start with, and they decide who gets it.
If the ALP would stop claiming to have more rights to our own property that we do ourselves, they might see the huge contradiction at the bottom of their perverse assertions. They would realize that their attempts to represent themselves as more appreciative of competition than conservatives are an insult to the most noble human notions of truth and reason.
Hopefully then they would then lose the will to live. Nah, who am I kidding they would have to care about the truth for that to happen.
