Thank you, Professor Quiggin, for your series on The Risk Society in Crikey. We now know how the new new class intends to make its living.

“‘Risk’ may be a central idea of the early 21st century,” the Prof writes, “just as ‘globalisation’ was the dominant idea of the 1990s.”

He helpfully adds: “The fact that individuals and families are vulnerable to a wide range of social, economic and other risks — and that collective action is needed to help reduce and manage these risks — has long been an important theme in social-democratic thinking.”

Put plainly, the Left reckon they can turn a bob by creating risk – or a perception of risk. Risk is essential to the rent-seeking business models of the modern Left. Climate change. GM food. You name it. The modern Left is all about beat-ups in exchange for cash.

They create the perception that they are pushing a worthy cause to get money from the public. They then use corporate social responsibility scams to get business to hand over their cash. Their “risk” creates a different kind of risk to the perception and therefore the profitability of private enterprises.

And the Left also creates risks for government, who respond by inviting them into the tent and throwing taxpayers’ money at them – an attempt to buy silence that instead acts to legitimise their scams.

It became clear a generation ago that all the Left’s economic policies produced were stagflation and sclerosis. In more recent times, their social and educational policies have given us yob culture and dumbing down.

All of these, of course, have led to more disadvantage for the disadvantaged, the very groups the Left have claimed to support.

The mafia, so folklore says, originally evolved as defenders of the poor and weak. Crime came later.

The intellectual Left, it appears, has followed a similar path. Having failed to deliver the masses a better tomorrow, it’s stopped worrying about them in favour of lining its pockets through upmarket protection rackets.