The pandemic’s been pretty terrible, but no matter what it’s been doing to us we’ve got to get on with life and enjoy it to the extent we are able with family and friends .

Before Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and neoliberalism there was something we used to care about almost as much as family and friends but that’s gone now namely, society, as represented by the public capture of publicly-generated economic rent, the glue that literally bound us together in a pact of common interest.

Neoliberalism had deemed public capture of publicly-generated economic rent to be forbidden territory. It was the ‘socialist’ expropropriation of ‘private property’. Therefore, society’s natural dividend owed equally to everybody became more greatly enshrined as the natural income of the already-wealthy.

Margaret Thatcher went so far as to deem the Poll Tax to be preferable to a decent municipal rating system. It’s a pity about that having caused rioting in London on 31 March 1990 and Margaret’s subsequent dismissal from the Prime Ministership.

And hasn’t the world done wonderfully ever since neoliberalism took control of our politics?

The middleclass has become debt-ridden from the greater privatisation of land rent and financialisation of escalating land prices, governments have managed to prop up the misbegotten edifice with assistance from their central banks, and no longer extant society has bifurcated into two feuding camps: “You’re wrong!” “We’re right!”

Community no longer exists. Our neoliberal leaders considered it sounded a bit too much like communism – so it’s ‘out’.

Thankfully, we now have AUKUS, or, as a person more appropriately suggests in THE AGE today, “USUKA” – so things should be alright now.