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I’ve just caught up with Denis Lenihan’s excellent account of Ben Chifley’s bank nationalisation case. It was a more nuanced event than I had originally thought, with things transpiring in such a way as to only to leave Chifley “the nuclear option of nationalisation”.

Whatever the characters and events of banking and the Melbourne Establishment versus the Chifley government’s proposals, it nevertheless boils down to the same old story: the rent-grabbing elite indoctrinating people to the belief that any change to the economic status quo isn’t in their best interests – ‘because it amounts to socialism’.

If people understood the rapacious nature of rent-gouging from the national net income, they’d see the essential need to tax away publicly-generated economic rent if economics is to operate in their favour: that the taxing of labour and capital is a curse to which they’ve submitted themselves.

That many Australians consider we need more taxation in order to afford necessary government spending in health, education, infrastructure and welfare is testament to which side of the argument is winning.

Seems VIMMLBUTT has some catching up to do!