Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
95 thoughts on “Weekend reflections”
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John Quiggin 
Reflections…
1) Thanks for link.
2) This lefty, for one, hopes that Sharon gets better. That has to be the most ill-fated peace process….
3) Try the Wine Society’s McLaren Vale Shiraz, $11 a bottle, worth 3 times that.
Well, how about getting readers’ views (and even JQ’s) on this piece by Michael Costello?
If as seems likely ,Sharon,the man who was in a major way rfesponsible for the terrible massacres in Beirut in 1982,dies in the next few days I hope we are spared the sort of tearful performance from the media,that we saw after Packer died. I say good ridance to a butcher and war criminal. …though I would warn the Devil,if such a being exists,to take great care of Hell ,or Sharon will have settlements over half the West Bank of Hell,before the Devil knows he’s there !
I think we largely agree that a Carbon Tax is one the best ways to tackle greenhouse gas emissions but there are problems. The Left worry it will be inequitable and the Right object to taxes and bigger government on principle.
I am proposing what I call a Direct Transfer Carbon Tax as a solution.
Basically it is a normal Carbon Tax with the revenue directed differently. The revenue collected by the Carbon Tax would bypass government altogether and go directly into the bank account of each person in the country with each person getting an equal share. The Carbon Tax revenue would go around in a circle, avoiding ending up in government hands altogether. The heavy carbon consumers would end up paying a more in Carbon Taxes than they get back from the system while the efficient carbon users would get a bit more than they put in. On an overall basis, the Australian taxpayper would not have an increase in the rate of taxation at all.
This is seperate to Kyoto and would operate entirely within one country. Its aim would simply be to reduce greenhouse gas production by actualising the costs of dumping carbon into the atmosphere with the minimum of disruption and distortion to the economy.
The advantages are numerous. Politically it would be far easier to convince the Australian public to accept. It would also be much easier to raise the Carbon Tax rate if necessary and make it high enough to actually reduce emissions.
From an macro-economic viewpoint it is stimulus neutral as it is guaranteed to not increase or decrease the percent of GDP collected in tax, so it can be introduced without regard to the buisiness cycle. Adjustments to the rate will be macro-economically neutral as well.
For the left, it is a tax that automatically limits its impact on the poor without the need for costly and awkward redistributions. For the right, it is a market based solution to GW with no increase in the size of government or real rate of taxation.
It is philosophically attractive too. If you think of the atmosphere as belonging equally to everybody, then an argument can be made that dumping carbon into the atmosphere is a violation of everyone’s property rights. It is only fair that we be compensated for this. I am pretty sure that even a (reasonable) libertarian (who had accepted GW) could be convinced of the logic of this.
Apologies for the long post and bringing up GW again after the last thread, and if this not a new idea. I googled around but could not find anything on it already so hopefully it is something original and perhaps useful.
Still Working It Out,
This is the way to go. In principle your suggestion is consistent with theoretical models of ‘non-dictatorial resource allocation systems’. These models take as the basic unit of analysis the individual. I believe this aspect of ‘libertarianism’ should not be given up.
The open question is the pricing. But there are several approaches in existence and one can always try to develop a better method.
Regards
Ernestine
Thank you Enestine
I had thought about the pricing. I think there is a good solution to that by using something similar to the way the Reserve Bank controls inflation. Here’s how it might work.
1) The Carbon Tax Rate should be variable and reviewed every quarter or so, like interest rates.
2) The rate of the Carbon Tax should be set by a “Carbon Board” similar to the Reserve Bank Board. Since changes to the rate should not have a great impact to anything besides carbon consumption there is no reason for it to be set by the government and it would avoid the rate becoming politicised.
3) The rate should be set with only one determining factor. Keeping Australia’s Carbon output at a publicly agreed target. If we are producing too much Carbon, the rate can be raised. If we are easily making our Carbon targets, the rate can be lowered. This is analogous to Central Bank inflation targeting, but it should be a lot simpler as there are only two factors to balance. The Carbon Tax Rate and the Total Carbon Output.
4) This target level should be deduced through public debate and then set down in legislation for many years in advance and not changed unless the system is clearly not working. This will give everyone a lot of time to learn how Carbon Production responds to changes in the Carbon Tax Rate and get the system working smoothly. This would be difficult with a moving target.
Sorry sorry sorry. That should be
“Thank you Ernestine”
Macklins comments about the dependence of universities on foreign students is half right.
Right in that dependence on this revenue stream is not limitless (endless). Wrong in that she seems to suggest that by default it is a bad thing!
If interested we wrote a little more on uor blog
>I think we largely agree that a Carbon Tax is one the best ways to tackle greenhouse gas emissions but there are problems.
Actually we aren’t.
I believe emission permits are a preferable solution.
I just listened to an interesting article from Dutch public radio a local police authority there is seeking permission to take DNA samples from all suicides.
By doing so, they’ve already solved at least one murder.
Sampling the dead obviously removes many of the standard human rights issues and this approach has the potential to solve many unsolved crimes and could also release many people unjustly imprisoned.
(More problematically, a partial DNA match from a dead individual might indicate that another (living) member of that person’s family was guilty.)
On balance I think the idea has merit – and I’m even inclined to question whether it should be restricted to suicides – why not routinely sample all people after death?
P.M.Lawrence Says:
“Well, how about getting readers’ views (and even JQ’s) on this piece by Michael Costello?”
and article:
” Michael Costello: Done like a dinner on free trade deal
January 06, 2006
TO laugh or to cry? That is the question. Do you laugh at the increasingly ludicrous attempts by defenders of the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement to explain away the results of the FTA’s operation since it came into effect on January 1 last year? They demonstrate that, as forecast, the FTA is a winner for the US and a dud for Australia. Or do you cry for fear that those same defenders will fail the most basic test of human intelligence by refusing to learn from mistakes irrespective of the empirical evidence?”
So what were our Masters of the Economy Howard and Costello ” doing spruiking the deal in the 1st place ?
If I was a conspiracy theorist…..
I doubt that anybody would describe Noel Pearson as a libertarian. However when I read the following article I shudder physically with admiration for the man.
http://www.leadershipvictoria.org/speeches/speech_pearson2003.htm
His articulate description of the problems with the welfare state are truely superb.
I shudder physically with mirth whenever I hear someone introduce themselves as “a functional member of society”.
SWIO
Your carbon tax idea is fascinating.
Before I get carried away rubbing my hands together, have you any estimate of the amount of money involved?
Would the Carbon Board try to maximise its income or would it minimise carbon emissions? Or are they (somehow, Laffer-like) the same thing?
It reminds me a bit of a suggestion for guaranteed minimum income I read once. The idea was that the country had a certain worth so every citizen would inherit one share in Australia upon coming of age. The share would have a known dollar value (don’t recall how since there was to be no market in them) and investments (in private enterprises) were administered by an independent board which would pay dividends.
I’m not having a go but Noel Pearson seems to me to be the diametrical opposite of a libertarian. Every policy position he advocates goes beyond current orthodxy in circumscribing freedom for those on welfare.
Mark,
I agree with Noel Pearson in so far as he describes welfare and welfare services as displacing personal responsibility and solutions steming from the family and community. I have no experience with aboriginal communities but it rings true with my own encounters with the effects of welfare and welfare services.
I have no problem with circumscribing freedom for those on welfare in so far as welfare may include mutual obligation. However I do object to government policies (eg minimum wage) that make welfare necessary and welfare dependence unavoidable for some.
I have no in principle problem with welfare being paid direct to the landlord for rent and the rest issued in food and or travel coupons. I don’t think anybody has a fundamental human right that entitles them to spend taxpayers money on booze.
Regards,
Terje.
Well, Terje, I tend to regard the welfare system as ineffective and often counter-productive in practice as well, but in large part because it’s driven by almost pointless sticks rather than carrots (and the carrots offered are often past their use by date). If we’re talking incentives to work, then serious attention to the welfare/tax nexus would be a good start. And the pointless and overly bureaucratic surveillance of job seekers and the many compulsory things that employment services providers make people do which have no relationship to skills formation but rather to some subjective “job readiness” are a huge waste of taxpayers’ money. The presumption that welfare recipients spend all their money on booze and ciggies is part of the same sort of mindset that insists that they account for their time minutely to government authorities.
Most people who are on the dole get jobs within 3 months. They could reasonably be left alone to get on with it. But instead we get massively intrusive and expensive and practically pointless stuff – turning up for multiple interviews with Centrelink and employment service providers, filling out dole diaries, etc.
People who are less employable are often so for good reason, but a largely threat based regime is probably not the way to get them into work.
I’m mostly talking about the general non-Indigenous community here, and I recognise that Pearson is right in saying that Indigenous communities have particular issues to confront.
I agree that reform of the welfare/tax nexus would be a good start. I think it is the most pressing economic reform at the moment.
I was not presuming that welfare recipients spend all much of their welfare money on booze. I just don’t think that their freedom to do so is sacred in the way that libertarians might regard property rights or free speech as being sacred. I think it would in general be a waste of time to police whether welfare money is being spent on booze, however I don’t think that there is a general right to have welfare money for booze.
It is tragic that some people who want a job need to wait three months. If that is because they are being overly selective then they should not be on welfare but rather they should be living on savings.
I know people who state that they hated being on welfare due to the pain associated with the Centrelink and the rest of the system. That pain seems to be a significant motivator to avoid the welfare option in future. I don’t have a problem with that as such except in so far as unemployment is a product of government in the first instance. Governments usually uses pain to implement there policies. I find taxation painful but I still have to deal with it.
I must also admit that I am more tolerant of anti-libertarian type policies (eg alcohol prohibition) when they are implemented at the level of local government rather than central government.
Terje, you’re still emphasising the stick and ignoring the (lackof) carrot. That’s a pragmatic criticism, not a criticism of what you are after – it just won’t get there by squeezing the pips.
The obsolescence of the carrot comes in things like refusing to offer IT training in new areas but only in proven ones (which are precisely the niches that have already been filled, and/or are about to become obsolete in their turn). In a world economy that needs constant re-invention, offering only things that worked earlier is betting on the last race, not the next one – even though it is 100% accurate that they can’t pick the winner among the new stuff that’s out there. (Of course, this is one reason why government mediated training is futile anyway, but leave that aside – we see that the carrots are stale.)
As for denying people the flexibility of spending what they get, on the one hand that reduces their personal initiative and self responsibility, and on the other there’s George Orwell’s much more libertarian-spirited objection, when he shot down people who complained that dole money got spent on fish and chips and tobacco etc. rather than on approved healthy foods – he pointed out that they (he had been one) had little enough common dignity left and that it was churlish to seek to deprive them even of that.
Mike Pepperday,
I am afraid I do not have any numbers, but I will try and figure out some basics. Its just an idea at this point.
The goal of the Carbon Board would be to match the Carbon Tax Rate with the Total Carbon Emissions Target. Carbon Emissions would have some sort elasticty to the tax rate, so its all about finding the right point on the curve. I presume a fair bit of research would have to go into working out the exact shape of this curve. The curve would also shift over time as we are able to produce the same amount of energy while producing less carbon.
Another way you could do it is to get rid of formal Carbon Targets altogether and instead have the Carbon Board’s goal be to generate a constant amount of Total Carbon Tax Revenue. As the amount of Carbon produced went down due to technology improvements the Carbon Board would have to keep raising the Carbon Tax Rate to keep Total Carbon Tax Revenue constant. The tax rate and thus the incentives to switch over to less carbon intensive methods would keep going up over time but the total burden would remain constant. This would be a system with ever increasing incentives to reduce carbon emissions.
re: Carbon Tax, so what then of the NZ experience of dumping their own Carbon Tax policy – see: http://weekbyweek7.blogspot.com/2005/12/nz-dumping-carbon-tax-overboard.html
PML,
I agree that the carrot is important. The tax system plus welfare withdrawal rules mean that the carrot is eaten up mostly by these distortions and as such its not much of a carrot. I agree that this problem is the most important barrier and needs to be addressed ASAP.
I am not trying to emphasis the stick. I am just stating that the stick is a legitament part of the process. Welfare should not be regarded as a right.
Given that the government has notional senate control and a budget large enough to allow an easy kick at tax/welfare reform they should be dealing with these issues now.
Family tax benefits ensure that my own EMTR is 80%. Which is obscene. I have a personal appreciation regarding the lack of carrot.
Regards,
Terje.
Three months is not an excessive amount of time in which to find a job, Terje, for many people. And not everyone has savings to live on – in any case if you do, you can’t get the dole – if you have more than $3000 in liquid assets you don’t qualify immediately. It’s eminently possible for people to get casual or part time work during those three works while still doing a proper job search and this reduces the benefits paid (which also acts as a disincintive of course). And the $220 a week people get has to be set alongside the $4000 that job network providers get from the Gov’t even when (as in the majority of cases for people who find work quickly) they don’t lift a finger to help the person.
More discussion of it here.
Also, what PML said.
A public servant could spend most of his/her discretionary income on booze and ciggies and fatty food. This would no doubt mean that they would have more sickies, be more likely to suffer stress, and be a less productive employee. As a taxpayer, am I entitled to complain that they’re doing this with “my” money? Of course not! It’s a free society, and you have to let people make their own choices and their own mistakes.
Welfare:
After the HIH fiasco, which followed a string of other corporate fiascos, I find the discussion about what the unemployed are allowed or not allowed to do by ‘tax payers’ exceedingly pitiful.
If the proportion of unemployment benefit that is spent on acohol and cigarettes is considered ‘unreasonable’ then the obvious solution is to reduce the tax on the these items.
Have the learned moralists on the subject considered that many of the unemployment benefit recipients have contributed to the welfare funds in the form of income tax payments, GST payments and very high taxes on cigarettes?
May I suggest that a welfare system is nothing but a form of an insurance system – spreading risk among a large pool is efficient (the exact argument is too long to present here. The interested reader is referred to Duffie, 1998 or later editions).
It is of course particularly embarrassing if private insurance is advocated by some even though any thinking person realises that private insurance is not very reliable since private insurance companies can go bust in a big way.
May I suggest that not having to draw on the unemployment insurance facility may bestow the same benefits to an individual as those bestowed to an individual who does not have to draw on fire insurance for a house.
Of course you can complain.
I don’t grudge people their smokes and beer. However if the government decides to provide welfare in the form of food vouchers instead of cash then they are not violating some fundamental human right.
A zero sum game in terms of welfare receipients as you are no doubt aware. Although I have no specific concern if they want to lower the tax on beer.
There are similarities but also important differences. For instance insurance schemes are typically a voluntary affair.
A good case could be made in my view for allowing people to draw unemployment benefits from their superannuation fund. Although that is also not the same as insurance.
Insurance against unemployment is a necessity in a system where ‘full employment’ is a theoretical and practical impossibility. The social resentment exhibited by those like Terje is a problem not just for those forced to seek unemployment benefit, but is fast becoming a threat to democracy itself. The constant demonising of that part of the citizenry who require support/assistance, as though they somehow stretch the bounds of civilisation by asking to be kept alive, is a major reason in my opinion for moving to establish a general insurance fund (similar to superannuation) from which people may draw in the event they are unemployed. Constant schemes devised to circumscribe the personal freedoms and dignity of those who are supported on a princly $240 per week, of the kind advocated by Terje will eventually rebound on the rest of the population, and are fast becoming a recipe for intervention into people’s lives unimaginable outside stalinist russia or facist germany. What is it about being unemployed and requiring support that makes people like Terje and his ilk believe they are entitled to interfere in, and order about, every aspect of that person’s life and existence? It is personal fascism of a major kind, which ever way you cut it. Personal dignity and rights do not, in a democracy, depend on whether you are unemployed or not-they are supposed to inhere in the nature of being a human being. You Terje, are a threat to my rights as much as you are a threat to the rights and dignity of the unemployed-and no, before you ask, I have never been unemployed in my life.
Still Working It Out,
I agree with you that a lot more research is required. Are you familiar with the literature on ‘state contingent valuation’? There is also an emerging literature on ‘internalisation of externalities’.
What about imported goods?
I get welfare myself. Its called family tax benefit. I used to get Austudy when I was a student. Once in my life I even got unemployment benefits, however the lady at the department of social security had told me how to lie on the form and it was basically faudulent so I felt bad and cancelled it after the first payment. I have relatives that live on welfare and have done for many years. I also volunteered once to help out at a soup kitchen (its a real eye opener).
I have not expressed any resentment towards welfare receipients. However I do have a view about the welfare system and my view is not that different to Noel Pearsons.
Which is what I said. I said we could restructure superannuation so that it is a more general safety net. That would be an improvement.
All I said was that in areas where there is a major substance abuse crisis (eg Cape York) it is hardly unreasonable for government to attach strings to welfare. To extrapolate that to facism seems a little extreme.
I know somebody that ligitamently makes about $40,000 per annum in welfare and lives in a house provided by the government. That is tax free income. They also earn cash income on the side (which is illegal if undeclared). I love them dearly but I think the system is very sick.
What right does somebody have to make me pay taxes, regulate which trees in my garden I can cut down, what substances I can smoke in my home, or the way in which I choose to die.
I am all for reducing interference in peoples lives. However when somebody gives you a handout they have a basic right to set conditions. If you violate the conditions then they can withdraw the handout. If you go to a soup kitchen and you are drunk and abusive and spit at everybody then they will place conditions on you. The conditional nature of charity is nothing new.
On the whole I think that Noel Pearson is working to increase dignity in the Cape York. There is little dignity in sniffing petrol all day.
You stoptherubbish should stop the rubbish. You off the planet with your wild accusations. I am one voter with an opinion. Which rights to you imagine I threaten?
Regards,
Terje.
Terje,
Maybe true. But is welfare really a handout? I see it more as compensation for the institution of property having removed our natural right to seek food and shelter by our own hand. I am not permitted to try my ability to defeat my neighbour in open competition for land and food resources, as the State has overwheming power over both of us. So the State has a duty to give me basic necessities, without condition.
Perhaps. Or maybe I’m just having a politically whacky day.
I have used welfare (though not in Australia), and wouldn’t feel the slightest compunction in doing so again in the future. I haven’t yet met a human being I didn’t think entitled to food and housing, regardless of their willingness or ability to ‘work’.
Perhaps government has the duty to give me basic necessities. However alcohol and cigarettes are not basic necessities. So if they give me food and shelter they are not neglecting any duty to provide basic necessities. They actively prevent me from using other drugs.
Aboriginal Australians do still have the right to seek food and shelter by their own hand. They can legally hunt and camp in areas where the rest of us are prohibited from doing so.
Terje,
Your point about basic necessities is a fair one. That is, yes, I don’t think there’s a ‘duty’ for governments to supply alcohol etc. However that’s a far cry from admitting or accepting that provision of basic necessities can be made conditional on a recipient abiding by alcohol consumption rules.
Is it the case that Aboriginal Australians generally have rights to hunt and camp in restricted areas? Does it depend on which aboriginal nation they come from? What about those born in cities?
Welfare benefits are taxable.
“Before I get carried away rubbing my hands together, have you any estimate of the amount of money involved?”
According to the AGO, total Australian greenhouse gas emissions are aroudn 850 million tonnes per annum.
A question – does anyone know what the Aboriginal wokforce participation rate is?
I can see several reasons why it’d be higher than the Australian average – i.e. fewer Aborigines in higher education, fewer Aboriginal households earning enough income that one of the adults can be a full-time homemaker, fewer peopel in a position to retire early.
I can also see reasons why it’d be lower – higher incarceration rates and higher levels of serious chronic illness for starters.
It’d be ironic if the higher Aboriginal unemployment was attributable to a higher proportion of Aborigines seeking work.
My understanding is that under the Native Title Act 1993 fishing and hunting rights were protected from government regulation so long as activities were limited to “personal, domestic or non-commercial communal needs”. Which seems to mean that aboriginies can’t form market economies within their communities. Anyway I am no expert on the subject.
A fair point. However it is not really contrary to what I have been saying all along.
Has Terje read George Orwell on ‘Cheap Luxuries’ (eg cigs and beer)? The point Orwell makes, eloquently, is that it’s the cheap luxuries that keep a human being able to function with some dignity. There have always been those, like Terje, who would have welfare recipients live in spartan workhouses and eat nutritious porridge. The fact that the humiliation kills them just as surely as starvation is neither here nor there to the self-righteous who believe their own prosperity is the result of genius and hard work, inferring that the poor are stupid and lazy. Time was, this line of thinking had its progressive side – as in when Andrew Carnegie gave away virtually all his vast wealth and left his family with modest assets, believing they would be corrupted by inheritance. These days the comfortably upholstered seem to think virtue transfers along with wealth.
Crispin Bennett wrote : I see it more as compensation for the institution of property having removed our natural right to seek food and shelter by our own hand.
Absolutely spot on!
And let’s not forget that a large component of welfare payments are, in fact, handouts to landlords and property speculators, who have been the recipients, at our expense, of unearned windfall increases in the value of their investments thanks to this Federal Government’s policies.
Back in 1996, the new Coalition Government Social Welfare minister (can’t remember her name) announced that they would divert funds from public housing programs into subsidies for private rental accommodation. In an interview on ABC Radio National’s “Life Matters” program in that year, she justified this on the grounds that it was supposedly going to be more cost effective. In fact, it only served to help fuel housing hyper-inflation and put more taxpayer’s money into the pockets of landlords.
Tragically, it has also added grist to the mill of those such as Peter Saunders of the Centre for Independent Studies, who has been seeking to demonise social welfare recipients. In his book, “Austalia’s Social Welfare Habit”, Saunders takes care to include the cost of rental subisidies when he calculates the overall cost to taxpayers of our social welfare system.
If, instead, they had simply continued spending the money on public housing, they would have achieved a great deal more with, perhaps, with a lot less money. Indeed, the Housing Trust of South Australia, as an example, which provided good quality housing to all levels of South Australian society for many decades, never cost taxpayers a cent.
In case it may be of interest, many of these issues have also been raised in earlier Online Forum discussions in response to Peter Saunders’ articles.
Native Title has an extremely circumscribed application, and those rights you cite (which were circumscribed further both by the High Court and in Howard’s 1996 amendments) are rights which co-exist with property rights on leasehold crown land (in practice usually grazing and mining leases). Title to land in indigenous communities is usually collectively vested in the community as a result of state land law – and is a residue of the system of Aboriginal “reserves”.
There’s been a recent example of what lurks behind the agenda to make this title alienable, or alienable by lease – the suggestion of Peter Lindsay MP to kick the entire community of Palm Island off. Palm Island is prime waterfront (obviously), largely unspoiled and a place of natural beauty. The same stories noted that developers were lining up to get their hands on it. Development companies are not usually Indigenous corporations!
By contrast, many remote communities would gain little advantage from alienable property rights as the land is effectively worthless. The furphy that lies at the heart of Pearsonism is that there are simply no viable economic opportunities for Indigenous people in remote areas except where they’re blessed by minerals or scenery. Hence the introduction of schemes like CDEP (aka “sit down money”) in the first place. It’s all very well to talk about welfare dependency, but it seems to me that Pearson – by virtue of wanting to maintain the currently economically non-viable settlements and at the same time subject its residents to outrageous degrees of social control, is really about turning back the clock to Missions and Reserves rather than being the harbinger of a bold new social policy that he’s claimed to be.
Some concrete examples of money being poured into training and agreements with mining companies to take on Indigenous employees (which makes sense given labour shortages anyway – I’ve worked as a consultant for a regionally based corporation which saw the virtue in attracting Indigenous employees precisely because they’re more likely to want to live in such areas than either metropolitan or locally raised white people) have had a much better practical track record than Pearson’s approach. But they’re unglamorous, and don’t fit in so well with the usual anti-welfare rhetoric that suffuses public debate, so the debate is very one sided.
What’s on the government’s agenda for 2006?…
How about good public policy?
Politics must have returned after the holiday slumber, because Crikey’s back. 2005 was of course the year that Howard achieved some long sought after goals. Or so goes the consensus of the commentariat, right and left(ish…
There’s a fundamental confusion in “However when somebody gives you a handout they have a basic right to set conditions”.
When someone gives you something for something, of course they have a basic right to set conditions. But it is logically impossible to do that with a true handout – because that is of its nature a charitable gift with no strings attached, beyond what the recipient’s own conscience applies.
It’s not that you can’t attach conditions, it’s just that that isn’t a handout any more. In case you don’t feel that’s a problem, remember that this is all being done because of the effect it has on people (including but not only the recipients). Start handling it as a different sort of thing and you start getting all sorts of different behaviour than you originally wanted. Like, no more social insurance attitudes…
When I was on the dole, I considered it my compensation for having a government I don’t agree with forced upon me – if the masses want to impose their system on me, they can damn well pay for me to live in it.
haha
>I have no problem with circumscribing freedom for those on welfare in so far as welfare may include mutual obligation.
Hear, hear! Let’s breing back the stocks and the branding irons for “able-bodied vagrants”.
Tell me does your admiration for Pearson extend to his description of John Howard as “racist scum”?
How about to this:
“I want to take the opportunity to reiterate the importance of the opportunity of the Mabo decision on 3 June 1992. In recent years I have been attacking the social, economic and cultural problems we face as a people, but in that rethinking about our policies in relation to Aboriginal disadvantage and suffering I have never repudiated the importance of Land Rights as a cornerstone for reconciliation.”
>I get welfare myself. Its called family tax benefit. I used to get Austudy when I was a student.
Has it destroyed your moral fibre and will to work yet?
“my view is not that different to Noel Pearsons.”
Which I believe he has said explictly should only apply to remote indigenous communties.
>My understanding is that under the Native Title Act 1993 fishing and hunting rights were protected from government regulation so long as activities were limited to “personal, domestic or non-commercial communal needs�. Which seems to mean that aboriginies can’t form market economies within their communities.
Why should the right to take fish or animals for personal consumption deprive you of the capacity to form amrket economies?
Ever stop to think that maybe extreme poverty, abysmal education standards and sky-high crime rates have something to do with it?
Terje
If you have a couple of hours to spare, please read the following (online, free):
The Road to Wigan Pier
Down and Out in Paris and London
These are Orwell’s first-hand accounts of what the world you advocate is like.
Those who think welfare is not a “right’ are wrong. It is a right if you fulfil the conditions set down for it. And if you do fulfil the very stringent and often onerous conditions then why is it a ‘bad thing’ to receive it, and why do you have to be subject to endless sneering abuse from the self-righteous likes of Peter Saunders? I’d like to see his sort deal with the kind of brutal real-life circumstances that force people onto welfare. Nobody goes onto welfare by choice, and certainly not for long.
The real question for those hostile to individual welfare is what is the alternative? Do you honestly think that simply eliminating welfare support will cause the problem of poverty to magically disappear and make society a better place? (How does that help dependent children in particular?) An individual’s need for shelter and food and basic human acceptance vastly outweighs any else’s ‘right’ to own a Ferrari or a McMansion.
And what about the vast de facto welfare payments to business, especially big business, via various forms of trade barrier, tax breaks, cheap land, insufficient minimum wage, state granted virtual monopolies such as TV licences, guaranteed minimium returns on some allegedly private investments such as freeways and tunnels, extraordinarily accomodating regulatory environments, ability to transfer business failure costs to the state via the individual welfare system while company directors often walk away with obscenely generous payouts for total failure, etc? The one thing big business is consistently good at is privatising the gains and socialising the losses, via the taxpayer and the broader society. In other words, gross hypocrisy.
The tax/welfare nexus (very high marginal tax rate) alone for those on welfare is so problematic that nothing is going to even begin changing until that is fixed. Even then there are always going to be those who through no fault of their own cannot earn sufficient or even any income. The best form of welfare is NOT always a job. That is callous, unrealistic, self-serving ideological drivel.
Don’t forget that virtually every cent of individual welfare payments goes straight back into the local economy, and very quickly. I’ll bet the same is not true for the proceeds from big business welfare, much of which ends up being moved out of the country.
Clearly Hal9000 thinks that all welfare recipients should be gassed to death and their bones turned into fertiliser. What a horrible view for him/her to have. Then again there have always been evil people like Hal9000.
I don’t agree with the government that the masses impossed upon me. Which is why I am relunctant to pay taxes. As I see it you were part of the offensive system imposed on me for as long as you viewed welfare as an entitlement rather than as a gift.
Unemployment benefits has always been conditional. Conditional on your state of employment. Get a job and they take the handout away. The pension is dependent on age. There have always been strings.
Obviously Ian is an evil froot loop like Hal9000 who has no regard for basic human dignity.
I have no admiration for personal insults. However its not uncommon in the political arena. Given the crap hurled at me during this discussion (with totally baseless assertions that I want the stocks brought back or that I want to put people in spartan workhouses) then I can understand the temptation. You evil bastard.
Actually I would say that the bulk of both go back to the local community where it all came from via taxes. However the current process destroys efficiency (ie productivity) and reduces incentives.
Regards,
Terje.
anyone got a position on CIS latest paper – increasing self reliance? Lowering income tax and putting savings away yourself for health, retirement, etc instead of relying on the govt?
The paper is here: http://www.cis.org.au/IssueAnalysis/ia66/IA66.pdf
I have only skimmed it, but so far it seems pretty spot on.
Self funded welfare makes loads of sence. However I would be more inclined to incorporate it into existing superannuation funds rather than create a new set of funds. Also I am not sure if I would integrate medicare/medical insurance into the same scheme.
I am glad that the CIS has continued to produce innovative and useful ideas in the area of welfare reform. The left-wing think tanks have been next to useless in this area. It makes little sence to even admit them into the debate given their dogmatic stance.