On Bernie Sanders
Paul Kennelly writes: “Rundle: sticky questions for the Dems in a hot and humid Philadelphia” (yesterday). Sanders joined the Democrats after he announced he would run. His whole point was to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming President. It seems to escaped people’s attention that he is an old white man. There are no prizes for guessing who was behind the leaking of the emails.
On populism
Ian Hunt writes: Re. “Morrison doubles down on dumbness in the face of populist attack” (yesterday). The “achievements” of the last thirty years include a growing gap between the top few and most Australians in terms of wealth and income. These “achievements” include a loony attempt to pretend that economies work better when they get closer to an imaginary economic world in which there is a market for every good and service that can possible be brought to market, there is competition that forces everyone to be price takers and there is perfect knowledge of the future for both buyers and sellers.
True, this ideological rubbish has gone along with some worthwhile reforms over the last thirty years. These worthwhile moves pale in comparison with the ideologically justified policy contraptions that have been inflicted on Australians and their children, like the phoney national electricity market, with privatisations to create imaginary competitors, phoney competition policy between hospitals and doctors, and phoney creation of education markets in which universities, who should aim at cutting edge research and practice and passing these on to new generations of researchers and professionals, are told to aim at imitating businesses bringing products and services to market.
If you ask why there is all this “populism” Bernard, it is because people are becoming disillusioned with the rubbish peddled as part of neo-liberal economics, which Bernard clearly refers to as “liberal economics,” which would be another fish if it ever managed to replace neo-liberal ideology. Let us look forward to a new era in which fake competition is recognised for what it is and people stop pretending that anything is improved by getting nearer to an imaginary world in which equal players all bring their products to market, leaving only security and social order to government.
Yes, Sanders used his old white man powers on the democrats mainframe, utterly hax0ring it. Now the great progressive Killary won’t be president, instead we’ll get Trump, who will match Obama’s deportation record and not build a wall because it has already been built. The US cops will start shooting their own citizens in the streets. It is all Sanders fault, shame Sanders, shame!
Nope, the Russians hacked the DNC and handed the emails to Wikileaks. Either way this election will be historic – the first female president of the USA, or the first Russian president of the USA.
Ian Hunt – you have (as have most thinking people) hit the nail on the head identifying “neo-liberal economics” as the ultimate cause of much of what is currently wrong with the planet.
Despite the prevailing word-wank, our unfortunate situation is really very simple to understand; our leaders and media look busy engaging a variety of complex, but largely inconsequential, proximate factors while spouting the fictions they learnt along with that C+ in ECONS200 (which I tend to believe they believe).
Solutions to this impasse will include repairing economics and the way it’s taught. If some science or philosophy were injected into the mix the current pathology of mistaking the map for the terrain could be overcome.
As an aside, my neighbor’s daughter completed honors in economics at a Go8 a few years ago. One day when driving her to uni I asked her a question concerning Adam Smith. “Adam who” was her response. She’s currently making truckloads of dough as a stockbroker.
Thanks Ian…you invariably make sense to me even though I know little about economics!
The one thing I have noticed about this “neo-liberal economics”…it doesn’t seem to include what happens to ordinary people who are supposed to be better off with all this ‘competition’. Yet many of them don’t have a safe job, can’t buy a house and have trouble existing from pay day to pay day.
Don’t think it is working too well!!