Tell me. Does
this sound like an economic conservative speaking?
Rudd is the Reddest PM we've ever had, and a total lightweight.
He has written a column against Gordon Gekko, a fictional character created by Hollywood to parody Capitalism. No real person ever said "greed is good". Us capitalists dont say it. We dont think it. We know greed is overstepping the mark and will get you in the shit.
Rudd has his little knickers in a twist so bad about evil capiltalism he doesn't even bother to look up the facts about the current crisis before shooting off his gob.
He's so petulant and lazy. Like a spoiled teenager. "Whhhhaaaaaahhhhh. Those capitalists want me to do my homework. It's not faaaiiiir."
The fact is that, Capitalism is not at fault here. Socialism is.
Left to their own devices, the capitalists at the big US banks would never have lent to money to people who they knew could never pay it back. That's not greed. That's just common sense.
Rudd could read on this blog
here and
here the way the Left in America, specifically ACORN, forced banks to lend to people from minorities without jobs, assets, income or any form of security in the full knowledge that one day this would all come crashing down, so they could then turn around and say the Capitalist system has failed.
Sure the debt was packaged off in supposedly non-transparent instruments and that's how the risk was spread around the globe, but the problem was the government agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (big Democrat donors) gave the impression that the debt was government-backed and secure, when they had no intension of going guarantor for millions of home-owners and couldn't if they wanted to. The BS originated in the Socialist desire to make the the market "fairer", which distorted it's proper working.
You wont find a single capitalist arguing for less transparency.
We want to know what we are buying. Once again that's not greed. Just sensible rational self-interest. The reforms needed to avoid this crisis were put forward by real economic conservatives like Bush in 2003 and McCain in 2005 (yes, even McCain is economically conservative compared to Rudd). The Socialists Democrats in congress blocked them.
Costello on
insiders yesterday was very level headed and sober in his discussion of this, as has been Turnbull in recent interviews. Rudd's panic attack about Capitalism has shown him up to be anything other than an economic conservative. He's a died in the wool Socialist and unfit to run this country.
If Rudd keeps this BS up he wont be around for long.
Rudd's kind of not-quite-high-brow commie-talk has only ever appealed to a small minority of the Aussie public. Aussies dont like being ripped off, that's why they make good
cautious un-greedy capitalists, and they know Socialism is the biggest rip off of all.
UPDATE: Expert Hypocrisy-spotter
Tim Blair hits the nail squarely on the head:
Kevin Rudd is complaining about “greed" and “extreme capitalism”. The challenge is to measure these things. Does capitalism become “extreme” when one amasses $20 million? Should a person who blows $10,000 per week renting a beachside apartment be considered “greedy”?
