and you’d find that in the two two supreme moments of crisis, WWs 1 & 2, all the democracies, the second & third reichs, the tsarists and obviously the soviets turned to central planning as the only efficient way to marshal each countries resources. that during those years there were phenomenal peaks in economic growth and technological advancement, far greater than in ordinary peacetime conditions. in tsarist russia there was more capital investment over 1914-17 than in the entire preceding century of crude proto-capitalist investment

that in WW2, the centrally planned soviet economy comprehensively and utterly crushed the less centralised, more capitalistically oriented third reich, possibly by itself. a staggering achievement for a country that had itself dissolved into dysfunctional anarchy under the impact of total war only 20 years previous.

you’d find that the postwar boom, the longest single period of sustained growth in western history, was buouyed by the development of the social democratic / social market / consociationalist / social contract (etc) – that still enjoys public confidence everywhere

its amazing what people can do when they believe in the collective enterprise.

you would find that even thatcher couldn’t get rid of the NHS, that howard learned to love Medicare, that albrechtsen and coulter can scream abuse at the left only because courageous leftwing feminists in the 20thC won them the right to be unchained from the kitchen sink (clearly a mistake in these cases, but hey its the price you pay)

that to cling to power the supposedly laissez faire right must pour money into socialised childcare, UB, disability, housing subsidies, educational subsidies, social-agrarian subsidies of all sorts, socialised health and medicines, the list goes on and on – just read the budget. a 1930s conservative would faint from shock, or hopefully, die from apoplexy.

yeah, polish up on your 20thC history. and check out the satanic mills of the 19thC too. the laissez faire right showed its true colours then – the whole course of history since has been to make sure they never get the chance again.

I do think the labour movement has already hit rock-bottom and is now rising …. but it’s much changed; it’s no longer a labour movement dependent on the current unions. That’s my guess, anyway.

The Democrats still have some residue left over from their small l liberal origins – for instance Lyn Allison’s recent support for AWAs.

the labour movement is a movement (at least ostensibly) in decline now, while it was a rising interest in the British politics of the late nineteenth century.

On the contrary, Bush, Thatcher II and Howard have unadventently arrested the decline of the labour movement and – being slightly closer to the action – the Aust. Labor Party are probably better prepared to take advantage of this change in the tide.

Australian political analysis tends to assume that parties, and their ideologies and practices, are fairly stable if not immutable. It’s questionable how true this is.

Immutable? What a joke! We’ll all see just how immutable the parties are when the A.L.P. brings out its own compulsory defence duty program. [Not "National Service" but a better, fairer training program so we can all defend ourselves against terrrorism .... and the word "conscription" nowhere in sight].

H&R:
Sadly. the Democrats, since the loss of Janine Haynes, have become narrow …. although they still have outstanding individuals, like Queensland Senator Andrew Bartlett, who strive to keep it relevant, up-to-date and a long way ahead of the pack.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5941

That counter argument alone is enough to make Mark’s case that private systems are not inherently (ie inevitably) more efficient, although of course there is plenty of evidence they are in many circumstances.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5941

But I just don’t think there is a case that private enterprise is inherently more efficient than government.

You are kidding, right!!!???? Dude, get ye to a “History of the 20th century century” course toute de suite. Then for the love of god, take Micro 101 and put us out of our misery.

What possible argument or evidence could you use to justify such a bone-headed statement?

What next? “Hamas! The Face of 21st Century Feminism?”

Well worth a look.

http://www.soundings.org.uk/

No, I didn’t read it as a call not to use “reasoned debate”. I read it as pointing out that we can’t expect the British Labour Party (or by inference, the ALP) to stand for social democratic policy and thus to imagine that the election of a Labour/Labor government is sufficient to ensure a turn to social democratic policy. Probably you could have with the Whitlam Labor party. On the whole. Therefore we need to explicitly fight for those objectives. How you do that is surely a matter for reasoned debate and I can’t imagine the methods wouldn’t include reasoned debate.

In that case, I’m a bit confused. Maybe you don’t interpret the injunction in the same way I do….

Here’s how I read it: Let’s stop acting as though our parliamentary representatives, and especially our executive branch, operate on the basis of dispassionate reason and general, non-partisan goodwill. Accordingly, let’s stop acting as though we could convince those who are in power (or who have power) by speaking to them via ostensibly reasonable, objective and civil forms of discourse. Instead of trying to convince others through reasoned debate, etc., let’s admit that we will have to fight for the policies we want via other means.

What those other means might be remains, of course, unspecified, but I read the injunction as one to suspend, not speaking or arguing as such, but rather our investment in the model of debate implied by the view that “policies like full funded, fully-socialised, health-care, decently-funded universities and civilized provision for the aged [are] still reasonable, moderate objectives, implementable by decent clever people of good intent from Whitehall and Westminster”. Consequently, the injunction calls for us to fight via forms of discourse (among other means and other forms of action, obviously) that do not necessarily seem reasonable, objective and civil.

My reading of the injunction, however, seems (as I said earlier) to be at odds (if only in certain respects) with what, on other occasions, you’ve argued. So I’m surprised that the passage from Gilbert struck you so — which leaves me wondering how you read the injunction…

About the fourth year on welfare payments, I heard friends – who worked in Newcastle Council admin – discussing someone they knew who had received ‘the golden handshake’ – he’d been on welfare for so long that Centrelink had just given up on trying to find him work. It horrified me that I could be on the track to be just like that; and it horrified me that Centrelink could just give up on a person like that, as a routine bureaucratic decision. And it horrified me that something like this could be so normal and routine as to be a joke amongst administration.

So I admit, I am prejudiced, but I’d say some of those prejudices at least arise out of direct experience!

But I just don’t think there is a case that private enterprise is inherently more efficient than government.

There is no case that capitalism is more efficient than statism in all circumstances. Or vice-versa. Its horses for evolutionary courses.

Efficiency is typically a function of the degree of voice and choice principals exert over agents in a given institutional forum. This is the foundation of an Open Society’s responsible accountability, making due process conducive to good progress.

Social democracy simply combines the economics of the firm on the productive side with welfare economics on the distributive side. In competitive markets it is obvious that catallactic firms have the edge over the dead hand of bureaucratic agencies. Conversely, in monopolistic arenas democratic states have it all over wastefully competitive firms.

Likewise soc-dem in principle supports progressive taxation. But regressive changes to the tax scale could in principle be justified if they improved overall productivity, along the lines of Rawls mini-max theorum.

There is no final answer on the right balance between private and public economy. It depends on the shape of functions which are always curving in unpredictable ways. That “unscrupuous opportunism” is what gives soc-dem its scientific edge.

However, the practice of Howardian politics has been a highly sectional government, even if All of Us are a different mob than the sectional interests Keating was flayed for being supine to. Howard’s big government conservatism and his constitutional centralism should not be underestimated as key innovations in the Liberal tradition. Their legacy will continue to shape the political contest, even after he is gone. Similarly, there’s definitely a whiff of Gladstonian sound finance around Rudd Labor.

Correct. But perhaps an historical antecedent for Howardian political practices can be found not within British Liberal politics of the last part ofthe Long Nineteenth Century, but in British Tory politics.

Randolph Churchill’s Tory democracy pandered to clients in sections of the British working class (Howard’s “Battlers”) and beat the sectarian drum loudly against Irish influences and the threat of Home Rule (Howard’s dogwhistles.)

Churchill is rumoured to have died of syphilis. Howard my catch myxo from his Akubra.

Its between the majority of us, whether worker or boss, who struggle along in the free market, and the well connected ‘insiders’ ; government backed businesses, overpaid consultants and law firms, media monopolists, property developers etc etc etc

In other words, the real driver of income inequality these days, IMO, is the rise of market failure. Fund managers and investment bankers creaming off millions from managed funds, company directors getting huge rises, consultants doing work at $400 per hour for their mates in government – from both parties.

Both major parties are in favor of big government, just for different sectional interests.

If we want to attack income inequality, we’ve got to attack its cause – market failure and the moral hazard of when people aren’t spending their own money. Its the only way.

Qantas and ComBank are better enterprises for not having to go cap-in-hand to the taxpayer. There is no call for a people’s airline – and if there is, you should be able to turn a buck from it (I Still Call Australia Home, anyone?). Telstra will be too – they suffer from poor leadership and having the framework for their privatisation stunted by successive (and equally clueless) governments.

Secondly, where there’s greater penalty to society as a whole for not having a service than having it, the service will be provided by government. This is why government runs rape crisis centres, and public transport (yeah, so they don’t in Melbourne – and aren’t Connex shareholders taking an absolute bath copping the sort of shit that politicians seem only to happy to wade into public life especially to cop).

Sydney Water would be no better as a private entity than a public one. Many other entities on the private-public cusp are in a similar position, requiring massive injections of capital before you can even think about innovation. Pacific National is another example.

The lesson from Telstra is not some stale bullshit from Gramsci or whatever – it showed the market that if government is selling something, it must be a dog of an investment. Where is the public entity sitting on massively unrealised gains? That carnival is over. Never mind calling on government not to sell something, the real trick would be encouraging Teh People not to buy. Remember mobilising the masses? Gorn, if you were real socialists rather than risk-averse coffee-shop heroes, you’d give it a go or die trying.

When you have vast wealth going to the private sector, you occasionally get a Medici but more than a few Borgias. When you have the economy controlled by politicians you get the occasional FDR or Nugget Coombs, but more than a few Francos or Stalins. You are, as the old philosopher once said, fucked either way.