In my local cafe, the smile of the owner is gradually disappearing week by week as he dispenses coffee from behind a piquant little mask. That must have seemed cute a few weeks ago. Now, there is a worry in his eyes that was not there before.
When the first lockdown occurred, he negotiated a deal with the district landlords of his shop for a rent holiday that went for three months. Rent was reintroduced and then suspended again. He has reduced his staff to a single other person in order to give his retinue of staff at least some regular work.
But it’s all starting to come apart.
The Noosa absentee landlords are now wondering if he is ever going to be able to return to the levels of commerce that he has had hitherto — they’re wondering if he will simply put up the closed sign on the shop, head out the back door and keep going. They’re wondering if they should get what renders they still can from whatever reserves he has left, while there’s some steel to get it from.
This would appear to be repeating itself across Melbourne at the moment, and should lockdowns return to other states and to other countries, the same thing will start to happen there.
The lack of a second lockdown in other places has allowed them the benefit — or perhaps the illusion — that they could escape a reckoning through questions about the sort of economy we have, and how well suited it is to any sort of minor interruption.
Everything that is happening now is telling us that this sort of highly complex economy is not set up for even the most minor disturbance, which is really what COVID-19 should actually be.
The simple act of reopening will not be sufficient if a basic level of confidence is not there to inspire people to go out and spend in the manner they once did.
It is clear how easily things come apart. The border disruptions between states are now taking their predictable toll on a national and international food supply, one of the things which federation was specifically designed to guard against.
The grotesque imbalance between the sort of money we spend on luxuries and the amount we spend on what should be necessities is becoming starker by the day. Yet, a vast amount of energy is being expended by the powers that be on keeping social relations exactly as they are, despite whatever rational changes COVID-19 might prompt.
Thus there is now protest at the fact that private corporations are paying out dividends to shareholders, even though those companies have been recipients of JobKeeper.
The difficulty here for those who would seek to preserve the social relations at all costs is that, beyond a certain point, you simply cannot engineer the confidence required to spend or to restore levels of spending and circulation in the private sector.
And there is an absolute and total resistance to any idea that the state might step in — in a good, old-fashioned Keynesian manner — to restore, if not the levels of confidence, then the levels of spending which would fill the gap.
There is an extraordinary level of acceptance here, especially in Australia it would seem, of a whole series of shibboleths about the limited role of government in the economy.
Fran Kelly on Radio National breakfast this week interviewed Matt Comyn, CEO of Commonwealth Bank, in the manner in which one might interview an oncologist about cancer — as someone who can give an entirely disinterested and analytical view of the problem at hand, not one in which interests were at play.
Did Comyn think there was any problem with the fact that dividends were being paid out, even while employees were getting JobKeeper money which would eventually be paid by the taxpayer?
No, surprisingly, Comyn did not think that. Was the level of extra savings at $25 billion such that one might consider negative interest rates as a way of stimulating spending? Comyn thought negative interest rates were not such a great idea. They’ve been tried elsewhere, and hadn’t really been a success.
This is entirely spurious. But Kelly never followed up with the other question, which was whether the head of a bank was objecting to negative interest rates because they might impose an incentive to push money out the door into everyday investment.
The obvious point is that the Commonwealth Bank has no interest whatsoever in whether the economy functions well or poorly at the grassroots level.
Its only interest now is in the higher-flown world of finance, which can apparently tick on endlessly as the economy at street level gets poorer and poorer.
Meanwhile, no one has emerged in mainstream politics with the basic guts or audacity to say that the interruption granted by COVID-19 is an extraordinary opportunity to do some reconstruction of an economy that has become a sort of booby trap.
I don’t want my local cafe to go under. But it might be said that COVID-19 has simply exposed the degree to which we have a policy of having no policy on where spending goes.
The plight, in fact, is that the economy we have now is the result of a system of steadily lowered taxes, higher discretionary spending, high levels of family and public debt, all inevitably directed to the point of consumption in which ever-greater sectors of production have become import sectors — the very reverse of what we have been trying to do with the country for 50 years.
The neoliberal right will, of course, say that this is just a matter of freedom and personal choices. But the current distortions in the economy to deliver the things that we need effectively demonstrate that the very opposite is the case.
Neoliberalism is simply a different system of regulation which prioritises certain forms of expenditure and limits the possibility of others, and therefore systematically removes the option to choose other things which may be of greater importance and utility.
We can not all individually choose to have a better aged care system by an act of a million individual choices; such a thing has to be made as a collective choice.
A neoliberal regime also has a specific role with regard to time, and what one can only call human frailty. Though we know we should save and direct resources towards the things that sustain life — such as proper aged care — the rationality of a system of so-called free choices and individual wants will always win as we respond to the immediate stimuli. We can see this happening in the great superannuation withdrawal that has occurred.
The contradictions of this crisis can be seen nowhere more than in aged care. Simultaneous privatisation and deregulation of aged care means one important thing: that the efficacy of extra expenditure is removed. You don’t really know whether the gold-plated aged care home you have consigned your relative to is really delivering, or if it has dished out the same sort of shoddy care that would be had in a much cheaper home.
Only the very richest people can now afford to have the home-based, 24-hour care necessary in the situation of dementia or other conditions. Yet politicians who won’t be able to afford that have still put in place a system which people contemplate with horror and fear.
Dan Andrews saying he wouldn’t want his mother in a place like this illustrates this as clearly as possible. Where else does he think she is going to end up if she has dementia or other conditions which require constant nursing?
This is simply a retread of the fantasy that everybody has: that they will never put their parents or aged relatives in a home. But sooner or later everybody does, because as we live longer there are increasingly less options for the continued care of a person.
This illustrates not only the irrationality of the system, but its now autonomous character. The fact is, we have created the very opposite of the sort of economy we should have engineered out of prosperity.
And the coming of COVID-19 has made that starkly visible.
We have steered in exactly the opposite direction that the European social democracies did in the post-World War II years, as high-level economic growth occurred. They used higher personal and luxury taxes in order to steer money back into collective control, so it could be redirected towards social investment and the growth of a social plan.
We did what they sought to avoid, which was to allow levels of prosperity to generate personal spending that deprived society of the capacity for greater collective social investment.
Would it be possible that the occurrence of something like the COVID-19 pandemic would allow for an alternative proposal as to how we should organise the economy?
Yes, it would.
This is actually an extraordinary opportunity to reverse that foolish decision to rely on individual consumption and redirect money into social investment, aimed at soaking up the excess savings that some people are accumulating even as others go without a substantial wage.
Such a bond system would rely on the same principles that the war bonds did: first and foremost, of course, to pay for the extra production required to run a total war/social machine. But it was done entirely by borrowing from the public rather than from international money.
That decisively ended the Great Depression by persuading people to spend money on war bonds for patriotic reasons, as well as for their own future security. The governments of the West not only managed to draw back some of the wages that they would pay out through total world production, they also managed to reduce the levels of spending on gambling, alcohol and other diversions, and to prevent the inflation of costs in such diversions which would have been a response to the scarcity of their supply in a war environment.
They did so by making war bonds something other than a simple personal investment. War bonds were an investment in collective security, and in a world mission. They were an expression of mutual support. COVID-19 bonds could be issued to do the same thing as fixed-rate, high-yield bonds separate from the flows of the money market.
And with the stated purpose of redirecting the money towards the things that we now see are essential — such as a better aged care system and a renewed focus on research development, so that we could genuinely be in the race for a COVID-19 vaccine and not be left begging on the global market.
The money from COVID-19 bonds could be used for rapid re-training schemes for many people who will be nearly unemployed, a lot of them from the hospitality industry. Such a system would remove the blackmail of the consumer markets for the future of the wider economy. The money that goes to COVID-19 bonds from savings of those who still have full employment and are accumulating money — money they cannot or do not wish to spend — is redistributed in a manner that increases fairness.
That won’t happen in a political scene that has decisively renounced any sort of dangerous or original strategy which would allow them to present a genuine alternative to the situation we find ourselves in.
So I don’t want my local cafe to go out of business. But if cafes are to go out of business, if there is to be a shift in the basis of the economy, then would it not be better for that shift to be managed consciously, in pursuit of a better society which is close to within our grasp?
The alternative to such an audacious scheme — which is hardly audacious in the grand scheme of political initiatives — is that one morning in late spring of this year, or all at once, 10,000 businesses will suddenly, finally, give up the ghost, hand back the keys, shut the shop and turn the closed sign for the last time.
A time of great change is upon us. Those who close their eyes and pretend we can go back to what we were are fools.
And they’re irrelevant, too. As usual on economics GR has too many grand big ideas for his own good. (It’s the Information Worker’s curse.) We don’t have to do anything, much. We’re already issuing bonds with joyful abandon, spending like debt don’t matter (coz it don’t), employing ourselves to do nice things again, and chuckling, wondering how long before overpaid capitalist impostors like Comyn (and stupid tenured hacks like Kelly) are going to twitter in their bubble before they recognise that there’s a fortune begging to be made out thar, if only they could tear their hypnotised eyes away from neoliberalism’s Magic Money Tree at last.
Too, too funny.
“GR has too many grand big ideas”
Looks like one simple idea to me, Jack: Covid bonds.
What’s your prescription? Waiting for “overpaid capitalist impostors” to “recognise that there’s a fortune begging to be made”? I don’t get it.
When GR first mentioned the covid bond 2 months ago I thought it was an innovative and creative path forward. Fast forward to today and it’s probably the ONLY innovative and creative path forward..
His critics here on Cky bagged it because it did n’t fit their concept of utopian social reset from the ground up. Fortunately, GR does n’t suffer the political ideology syndrome that other too far leftish types do here on Cky.
And GR is right about the Australian patriotic support it would receive from institutional and mums and dads investors.
We are at war and we need to fight back. The covid bond is the military hardware for just such a purpose.
No ‘prescription’ is needed. Why do we need a Covid bond? There’s oodles of Oz bonds knocking about in private hands already. You can buy ‘em, you can sell ‘em, fill your boots if you want to ‘invest in Australia’. But we do already: we pay tax. Even that’s moot – more’s the point…we live here. THAT is our investment. What does everyone think is going to happen if we…what…run up a gazillion dollars of ‘debt’?? Explode? Run out of food? Sit helplessly in a puddle crying? Stop making coffee, even?
No. We’re not.
Skin in the game, Keith? We’re all skin in. Bonds? There’s more than enough already for the Fed to use as a temp/speed lever, which is really their primary role. (First thing the big private sector holders did when the balloon went up was cut and run. The Fed hoovered ‘em up.). We don’t ‘need’ to flog bonds to raise chook raffle money to pay for the kiddies’ new netball dunnies. Even GR seems stuck on the idea that our govs have to ‘raise’ money before they can spend it. It’s just not true.
You just watch, Keith. We might well go a trillion bucks ‘into debt’ in the next half decade. So what? Tell me what’s going to happen. I say: the economy will reshape itself more or less as GR says. We don’t need a ‘prescription’. The economy will be fine. So long as governments keep spending money into being, until we start to fatten out our long starved private sector to the point of capacity.
By…well….‘trickle down’ – wouldn’t you know it lol!! This is – tragedy aside – so delicious. The Great Inversion, they’ll call it. TINA (…but government spending). There’s no such thing as an ‘economy’. The scariest words ever heard ‘I’m from the private sector and I’m here to help…’ Etc.
Erk – ‘trickle up’ obv. Keith
“the economy will reshape itself more or less as GR says. We don’t need a ‘prescription’.”
I do admire your optimism, Jack. In your prognosis there is an apparently automatic process the dynamic of which I can’t quite follow. I hope you are right. I get that governments don’t “borrow”, but I think the bond idea is addressing other issues.
I can’t speak for GR, but being Eeyore-ish in temperament, I would say in the absence of some left “prescription” or other we will get change alright, but we won’t like it very much.
PS That voice from the private sector offering to help – I hear it every other day. It’s from Telstra’s technical department and my internet is about to be cut off. But I’ve found that as long as I do nothing my internet is fine! Maybe that’s a datum point supporting your optimism.
‘ Waiting for “overpaid capitalist impostors” to “recognise that there’s a fortune begging to be made”? I don’t get it…’
Soz, as for this…the financial sector is awash in idle capital, Keith. Oozing lazy cash. Bloated on it, after a couple of decades of sovereign governments everywhere bombarding then fat suited dopes with it, in an effort to get them to do capitalism: invest in real productive growth. Like Comyn, they’ve all become addicted to short term sugar hits, they’ve mistaken ticket clipping and ponzi musical chairs for capitalism. They simply will not trickle that cash down.
Fine. We’ll print some more, and channel it via society’s ‘visible hand’, and do trickle up capitalism.
There’s lots of nation rebuilding to be done with that cash, comrades.
Our fat cats will get the hang of it – capitalism – again, real quick. You watch Keith.
At last a way forward to cure the ills of the world, at least in our own backyard. The writing has been on the wall for years and now is the chance to make the change. Pity the neo-cons own most of our pollies…
Major events, such as 1348 to the English Civil War to WW2 etc. tend to create two distinct camps : optimists and pessimists. The optimists clamour for social an political change in the circumstances of the revealed opportunity and the pessimists know better on account of being significantly better read in history.
The social changes after the Plague and the English Civil war didn’t go anywhere; the Revolution of 1776 come to that either. Sure George (III) lost a colony but I am referring to the politics within the Colony that followed immediately after the war. Current prisoners (felons), during the War, who had opted for a blue coat and a musket got a reprieve but the social order didn’t change.
No elite, in the broadest sense, has NOT attempted to (as you put it) “preserve the social relations at all costs”. For the elites the consequences for the economy will be dealt with “later”
As to consumer confidence one only has to read some (perhaps half) of the posts on Crikey who genuinely, albeit irrationally (at 2% of infection), fear “the Reaper”. Warren’s article, of yesterday, regarding the press ought to suffice as a guide to illustrate how the electorate has been monkeyed about over the virus; the hoo-har over Iraq, of some years ago, come to that. Nice to see that your article is at least an attempt at recovering some sanity Guy.
However, as to “the limited role of government in the economy” the private jets that were lined up at Washington DC over 2008-9 changed that perspective. After 30 years of Journals of Management barking about no role for government in the economy, the handout to the major players was an order of magnitude greater than the NASA budget (but the minimum wage did not change – ha ha).
The war bonds were a factor, Guy, but they did NOT “decisively end[ed] the Great Depression”. Even in NZ, PM Savage, whom I’ll bet anything, had not heard of the General Theory but put the [its] principals into place in regard to establishing a forestry industry. Aggregate demand solved the problem Guy.
Turning the matter around, Guy, towards the end of WW1 in Germany people began saving for
dear life – which created some real problems. However, this money came to be injected into the economy as prices began to rise (significantly) from circa 1921-2. This injection of previously saved money into the economy made the feed-back loop (the government’s efforts notwithstanding)
much more severe.
I would like to see a Covid-19 bond introduced but it also has to be introduced with a complete revision of the Tax Code, particularly for companies and that will be the issue and of which you omitted to mention. What has been advocated by you needs to include differential taxation incidence for regional and city Australia (a change to the Constitution here) and some form of Capital Gains tax and likely some form of annual property tax that is directed to the Commonwealth (similar to Rates). THEN we’ll see how it looks Guy as a definitive and delineated policy!
I hope you get lots of informed response, Erasmus. This exchange with GR certainly has my attention, particularly, from you, the sharp focus of the last paragraph
Keith, my purpose here is to communicate with anyone who is inclined to an intelligent discussion that is based upon facts (and all facts are verifiable but not necessarily all theories extending from the facts). For that ‘privilege’ I’m happy to pay A$0.99 / week. I tend to learn more from a few of the subscribers than from the employees at Crikey and that aspect does not bother me at all.
As recently as yesterday three subscribers lost their blocks over perspectives that I had articulated with evidence but was not to their liking. Such is life. As an aside, no contrary rational argument was forthcoming from their side.
Uhh Grundle very clearly, explicitly, calls neoliberalism regulation of the economy, and that ideas about the government having a limited role in the economy are ‘shibboleths’.
Not sure why you are telling him about the dangers of hoarding wealth and the virtues of aggregate demand in the comments for this article either.
Did you skip down to here after reading the headline?
(1) The economic and political history, well prior to the English Civil War, is utterly as variance with your “support” for Rundel in your first paragraph (or did you miss that point?)
(2) I did NOT mention ‘dangers’ but I did refer to consumer behavour. There is a difference.
(3) Policies (or initiatives for the economy) are to be comprehensive. Do we agree or disagree?
(4) skip down to “where” exactly?
Down to the comments. Maybe it is a reading comprehension problem, don’t recall neoliberalism in the English Civil War. Deeply suspecting you are just ‘doing a thing’ and engagement was a bad idea.
Following the The English Civil War the political movement of the ‘Levellers’
became a major headache for Cromwell. Please read this history and the association with neo-lib will become clear if only by analogy.
Prominent members (typically youthful) of families who had served as officers on both sides went to the rope given their “inflammatory pamphlets” despite literacy being fractional as a percentage of the population. Cromwell, who argued that men intended to be governed differently in the 17th century (compared with previous centuries) crushed the movement out of existence – with assistance from the older members of established families.
I trust the forgoing has clarified and assisted your comprehension of the history and difficulty Rundle has in prosecuting his policy.
I still don’t know why you bring this up in an article about raising money from bonds for a fiscal policy that will save petty bourgeois small businesses? This is hardly the Communist Manifesto, mate.
Draco (I know you are responding to Erasmus, but here’s a comment from the front stalls)
I think GR’s piece is great.
What to do when people aren’t spending as now (i.e. are hoarding) – harness their savings for the common good. How?
Guy says Bonds ala War Bonds are needed.
Erasmus says Bonds plus 3 tax measures (1) differential regional/city tax (Constitution change needed), (2) Capital Gains tax, (3) commonwealth property tax.
(silent bit: to keep control of aggregate demand)
I hope I’ve got it right.
I’m interested.
I benefited from the context provided by Erasmus’s pre-amble, though I don’t know that GR would be always best pleased by the magisterial tone.
I’m not going to take issue with the calls for tax reform (does Grundle need to propose an entire blueprint of the future in a Crikey article, though?) but the rest had me thinking ‘Sir, this is the McDonald’s drive-through’. Fair enough if it were one of Grundle’s recent pieces on needing to change society in general to deal with this crisis, but this one? Only radical compared to less ambitious calls for stimulus.
Apologies for the late reply, had night shift.
Just as a matter of interest, what makes you think (if you do) that anyone has the slightest appetite for this sort of radical reshaping of Australian society? I happen to agree with you that it would be a good thing, but where is the politician who’s proposing it? Where are the voices who are calling for it?
One of the good things about Australia, and probably the main reason why the answer to both those questions is “Nowhere”, is that notwithstanding the sizeable segments of society who are the casualties of the current system here, the vast majority have been doing okay, and usually much more than okay, for the whole of their lives. They recognise and deplore (or say they deplore) the abovementioned casualties, but they don’t want a complete reshaping of the system. They like the system. They’d like it better with a few tweaks to help the deserving cases, but they’re not interested in making radical changes.
Grundle isn’t even proposing an end of capitalism here and people apparently can’t even imagine it!
Pathetic.
In like manner, Robin, one might enquire as to why the Conservative Party has been in government for most of the time since the Education Acts of the 1870s. Taking the long view, the time in government for a Labour Party (there or here) is typically short lived (and they tend to self-destruct).
Jacinda’s government could not be more National (read Oz Liberal). There isn’t a trace of the Labor orientated promises from the 2017 election.
“Where are the voices who are calling for it?”
Well, they are here, now. Always look on the bright side if life. How many Bolsheviks were there in 1917?
This is just the introduction of bonds as in WWII (people would have to see it as a similar crisis, true). Add in Erasmus’s tax measures. Society might just begin to transform itself.
That’s a dismal view of the ‘vast majority’, and you might be right. But you call it a ‘good thing’? When you say ‘deserving cases’ that immediately suggests to me a moral judgment, like that exercised with regard to welfare recipients, the homeless, refugees. In Howard’s time ‘the deserving poor’ was dropped in favour of the ‘battler’, leading to downward envy, the phenomenon of begrudging the poorest the welfare for which they did nothing but lay about idle, getting something for nothing. My observation is that downward envy is so widespread that the prism through which a ‘deserving case’ would be defined today is made incredibly narrow by many in that ‘vast majority’. The whole idea of ‘deserving cases’ is antithetical to the collective investment in the future that GR is proposing. It may seem there’s not much appetite for the change, but this is as propitious a time, with mass unemployment and failing businesses, as has ever been for giving it a go.
The act of selling war bonds to the public withdrew money from circulation. Thus avoiding rampant inflation as idle monies pursued a shrinking supply of frivolities in the face of wartime production. However we are in the opposite situation. Inflation is too low, as fear or unemployment reduces our inclination to buy. Instead of selling bonds, the government needs to be buying something from us. In Keynesian tradition, that happens when the government buys large infrastructure programs from the unemployed.
Roger Clifton
” Instead of selling bonds, the government needs to be buying something from us.”
In WWII they were doing both, weren’t they? Selling bonds while purchasing war service and the labor for manufacture of materiel, neither of which was a tangible investment in the future. Similarly, in times of covid “they also serve who only stand and wait”. We can’t do much right now about building infrastructure. Meanwhile why not sell bonds to those with cash, so that the current savings don’t create inflation and asset bubbles when the economy opens up. If Guy has to forgo his coffee, where does he spend his $4?
(These are genuine questions from a non-expert.)
Keith we were still pegged to the Sterling during WW2 so our capacity to manage inflation with the currency throttle was moot.
As for GR’s coffee…inflation is a function only of scarcity v. demand. Unless, as I said, the coffee machines actually explode, scarcity won’t be a problem. (It’s Melbourne – they’ll sacrifice the loo roll supply chain first. If our national borders are shut to freight no doubt the Atherton Tableland will boom…or Thornton hothouses!) A temporary (admin) shortage might occur – while his barista sorts out a new sustainable rent deal with his landlord, and while GR sorts out what Crikey’s sustainable rates might be post-Jobkeeper (UBI?), say.
But so long as there are enough baristas and enough customers, and beans and machines…the coffee economy will motor along without inflationary pressure.
Asset bubbles? Ah…we are already crippled by them. Is one of ‘the’ key structural killers this crisis will – I hope with nowhere near as much grief and heartbreak as I fear – sort out.
Bingo.
All that’s going to happen is the government is going to show the useless lazy private sector how to do capitalism. The fat cats will either step up and start sinking their lazy wads of capital into…energy transition, sustainability technology, infrastructure renewal, a housing and essential services innovation, advanced manufacturing (which might include just domestic self-sufficiency), agricultural renewal, space travel, quantum computing, education and care revolution, biomedical transformation, a new creative renaissance …geez I dunno I’m making this up, maybe even modular nukes for intergalactic space travel Roger…alien communication, animal translator gizmos…
Or they’ll just keep paying each other divvies and ludicrous salaries, and sinking their franking rebates into their relatively dwindling ‘nuts’ in the Caymans and buying more negative equity off-the-plan apartments that no one else wants.
What makes you think that the government has any idea about how to do capitalism? This government or the other option. The whole edifice of the ruling class has a learned helplessness trained into them by years of dogma and out-sourcing their thinking to the corrupt financial class.
That is the primary reason that Covid-19 bonds would fail as an idea too: why would you give money to this lot? You know that they’re just going to use it to build useless boondoggles like country train services or subsidise privately-owned gas pipelines or coal-fired power stations. Or whatever else their rich mates ask them to spend it on.
Your reply is a tad confused, Andrew, with all due respect , for the following reasons.
A government looking after their “rich mates” (as you put it) is ‘crony capitalism’ and Hawke (no less) was not above it. However, let’s consider capitalism (per se) for a moment.
Any enterprise that is able to sell a product at a greater price than the costs of production, which comprise the costs of labour to live and the costs of materials – which can also be converted into prior or previous costs of labour (all the way back to the first spear) – is termed ‘capitalistic’. In other words, the difference between the market price of the product and its costs of production is the “surplus” that the capitalist appropriates (via dividends or anything else).
The “system” is maintained in such manner that the majority of the inhabatents have no option but to sell (i.e. work for a wage or salary) their labour. That is the point of a capitalist society.
Secondly, do take a look at the company Tax Code when the opportunity presents itself Andrew and it will be apparent that the government (since Hawke and prior) is an expert at “doing capitalism” as you put it. From Abbott the government has actually “improved” in terms of its capacity in this matter.
As an aside, what is occurring in the USA is wafting into the Australian Tax Code but very much less so for Europe (but such is another story)!
Thirdly (too much coffee already and hit ‘reply’ prematurely), the matter of bonds *is* an opportunity to revise some major ills (indeed, as you see them). As to the matter being realised I have ‘extreme’ reservations based upon copious instances of history alone.
Being wrong on the internet is one of my chief strategies for learning things. So thank you for your reply, which I do not understand at all. I’ve never had occasion to consider the company tax code, so perhaps the answers are there, as you suggest. Doesn’t sound like light reading, but perhaps it’ll be worth the effort.
I still don’t see the government showing the capitalists how its done being any kind of likely outcome. Well, certainly not entrepreneurially or or in any constructive way. Their speed, as that of most Australian business, revolves around monopolistic rent-seeking.
Inasmuch as the landed gentry lived off feudalism to about 1500 (give or take) elites in modern society live off capitalism or, if one prefers, the work of others. Marx wrote vol. 1 for a capitalist economy that was VERY much less complex than what we have today.
Governments around the world and the 1st world in particular introduce legislation continuously to make it easier for the system (described previously) to remain afloat. The leglisators listen to the lobbyists but are NOT interested in entrepreneurial activity per se. Capitalism pays for their not insignificant parliamentary salaries (look them up).
As an aside this is precisely what all the hand-wringing over the virus thingee is about.
I can’t think of too many instances of ‘monopolistic rent-seeking’ in Australia outside of the mining industry which is an exception in itself. It is not a small (to 50 employees) business phenomenon which accounts for a fair wack of the country’s GDP.