wow! you got the market failure bit right but not the context.
The government's primary function is not to intervene in markets, and it
is not a market force created by the people.
The government is basically a contracting arrangement and does alot of
stuff in the area of managing freeloading (eg Police, Health, Defence,
etc)
by people who would not by themselves pay or where transaction costs
would
be too high (or something like that, if you want to use economic terms).
Secondly, or at least in Australia, governments tend to be elected
through
pseudo-democratic forces (eg the Labor or Liberal parties are not in and
of
themselves very democratic institutions the way they do this preselction
business - maybe we should separate legislative from executive powers in
a
new constitution, but that is another story).
> {snip} Reagan caused the biggest foreign debt in US
> history & threw millions on the scrap heap (the US Govt doesn't even
> attempt to count their homeless unemployed) & similar things happened in
> the UK, the Oz Govt is now, slavishly following the Economic Rationalist
> agenda. I really wonder why. There's a total lack of empiricism in this
> approach.
i lived very close to the homeless in Santa Monica CA so i can vouch for
this,
but at the same time, there has been no end to people and governments
happy
to lend the US government money, and the US is the most vibrant economy
in
the world today and one of the few embracing free trade totally. I
would have
thought that the Oz Government, with its continued protection of the FTC
industry and the car industry (thank god they didnt get pressured on
CDs) has
shown a massive disregard for economic rationalism as well as the
welfare and
wealth of its own citizens.
But to give only a small example of how Australian Govt is not following
Thatcher:
take Telstra vs British Airways. BA was given a fixed time to pull its
act together
before privatisation and the managers rewarded for the extra wealth they
created.
Telstra on the other hand, gets to destroy a bunch of wealth through
dubious
investments and all managers there still get rewarded. Please, lets not
compare
the two.
> If I was a conspiracy theorist I would speculate that this is all a
> sinister plot by the mega-multinationals to curtail or eliminate the
> power of government.
I would have thought that any conspiracy theories would actually have
the
multinationals dealing with strong governments who were not interested
in the
welfare of their people (or economic rationalism = same thing).
-- ramin marzbani [my own opinions etc etc] www.consult pty limited http://www.consultco.com.auTHE 4'TH WWW.CONSULT AUSTRALIAN ONLINE SURVEY IS HERE! SHORTER THAN BEFORE!! Have Your Say - if you live in Oz http://survey.hotlink.com.au
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