2 thoughts on “Albanese government’s close embrace of Qantas may no longer fly with the times”

1. Some observations on one paragraph.

   “As the tide of public opinion turns against privatisation…”

   Maybe it has but the tide of elite oligarchic opinion is still all for maintaining it. Only elite oligarchic opinion is operational in our system. Public opinion is useless because people are still led by the nose by media manipulation. One only has to look at the Covid capitulation and the sacrifice of vulnerable people that that entailed.

   “It is possible that Qantas may one day be renationalised, as has happened to Air New Zealand.”

   We can only hope. I see no signs of it. Every public dollar sunk into Qantas should have bought a public stake in it. The government should already own part of Qantas again for the money it put in. Why do we give hundreds of millions and billions to businesses for free?

   “At that point, governments will have to decide how to manage an industry where competition has clearly failed.”

   Competition always fails. No true Scotsman also applies to competition. There is no true competition, only rigged competition. Nobody gets more public dollars, subsidies etc, than the rich and the corporations.

   “But in the meantime, this rapacious corporation should not be the recipient of political favours.”

   “Rapacious corporation” – The adjective “rapacious” is redundant when it precedes corporation.

2. Correction:

   I probably should have said there is no “true competition”, only rigged or regulated competition. Rigged competition is either not competition at all (e.g. a monopoly) or it implements unfair advantage and/or exploitation. Good regulated competition implements fair and equitable competition. I don’t think I need to define “fair and equitable”. On a blog “from a socialist and democratic viewpoint” we know what that means.

   I will indicate again my strong skepticism that markets can ever work in the interests of a fair and equitable society unless that society is first run on social equality and democratic principles as first principle precepts and axioms and thus as precursor inputs to the regulation of markets among other types of regulation. Excessive private property, the income-earning right from excessive private property, the power of conglomerations or large lumps of capital and the failure of market valuations in the nominal, non-scientifically dimension-ed numéraire to capture either ethical value or real objective value (a value in a scientific dimension for which refer to the SI (International System of Units)), all completely militate against the assigning of either ethical or scientific values in the unregulated or inadequately regulated market society.

   To keep, this post short I will just flag my strong suspicion that a better approach to socialist-democratic equality in the future can only be achieved by the radical abolition or transformation of property, markets and money. To me, clinging to the present system and its market theory is like clinging to divine right and feudalism. We have simply replaced the divine right of monarchy and secular lordship rights of aristocracy with the all but divine right of money and the secular lordship rights of property ownership. It’s philosophically, ethically and scientifically indefensible. It’s primitive stuff and if we can’t advance beyond it we are done for.