4 THINGS NEED FIXING

4

(1) Elected politicians currently accommodate their party’s (or lobbyist) interests, instead of the interests of the people they are purported to represent. Using Proportional Representation to help elect people supporting other than binary party viewpoints will assist in fixing the current corruption of representative democracy.

(2) “Where is the money to come from?” The federal government is not like a household. It may spend on underfunded essential national requirements, or on a universal income, without borrowing money. Such government expenditure would assist demand, thereby, the socio-economic fabric, without inflation.

(3) “We need to set up a fund.”  No, we don’t. We don’t need the Australian Government Future Fund, nor superannuation funds out of which retired people may be paid. We simply pay them their pensions, without building up funds which tend to lose vast sums at each recession, after the bursting of each bank-inflated land bubble. Nor is taxation a fund, a pot of money, from which our elected representatives may spend, despite current political mythology. Rather, we use taxation to withdraw money from the system, in order to maintain the currency’s purchasing power.

(4) Finally, and most importantly, we don’t need to tax wages and profits. These taxes on productivity carry enormous deadweight losses and ought to be abolished. However, we do need to tax away ‘ground’ rents (including mining and electromagnetic spectra rents), as advised by Adam Smith, if we’re to abolish monopolies. Capturing these economic rents instead of taxes will free up the economy from cost-push inflation and allow wages and profits to grow consistently, instead of granting super-profits to banks and other extractive rent seekers, at the expense of all other Australians.

Although we do need these four surgeries to remedy the slough into which we’ve become entrapped, we’re entrapped in applying band-aids to our ever-increasing number of socio-economic wounds.

Let’s trust that changes!