Daves2017 wrote on May 31^st, 2024 at 12:51pm:


Correct. Don't tell FD....he will accuse you of "class warfare"......

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That's the evil consequence of the Thatcherite small government/privatization ideology.

freediver wrote on May 31^st, 2024 at 6:54pm:

 

(So show me ANOTHER person...)

So you can afford to pay the hefty prices  demanded by the privatized industry, and aren't interested  in the AGW issue.  Good for you, but the TEALS will ensure your ideology never sees the government benches again.   

Meanwhile Shell recently abandoned a wind farm project off Vic's coast because it can profit more from fossil fuels....stuff the CO2 emissions.  Shell too will become a dinosaur like you.

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All rooftop PV owners (except maybe the rich ones)  are complaining about it.

Do try to keep up. 

This is a painful thread to read, thank you both, not.

It is possible for the private sector to totally help deliver public services if , basically, contracts are water tight.

I have given the example of surgery connect in QLD. Which I believe is a good example.

Rather than read the continued arguments between both of you can we be a little more intelligent?

Privatised public service isn’t always good.

Particularly when it involves creating a monopoly and subsequently the corruption.

If done properly, and I believe that means short term contracts put forward for tenders. It can be a very valuable assistance to Government public service.
It can be targeted too fill services the government has simply been overwhelmed or failed to plan adequately for.

That should be the extent of it.

Once we have politicians who sell off each viable public service.

We need remove those politicians from the decision making process.

There is very much unexplored  middle ground in this argument?

I have worked in both sides .

There are many plus and minus.

It’s not as clear cut as many want!


You can’t have the best Olympics ever Sydney and not expect to pay for it.

Money comes from government selling profitable business to private companies.

You want stadiums and good time?

It has to be paid for

Daves2017 wrote on May 31^st, 2024 at 12:51pm:


This has always been my concern, but providing examples of the outcomes of that concern, you know, evidence, is a bad thing in the eyes of some.

freediver wrote on Jun 1^st, 2024 at 3:08pm:


Typical out of touch conservative: pensioners and people badly impacted by cost of living pressures can't afford heating or cooling, unlike the previous generation. 

And guess why electricity IS heavily subsized (hint:  market failure...requiring socialist intervention). 

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"Fairly cheap" to a blind comfortable conservative. But most working people need elecricity when they are home at night, necessitating a $12k battery. 

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..the perils of arguing with a rich, blind, free market ideologue : see above.  Why do you think the government is subsidizing electricity bills? 

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And WHY is the government "interfering in the industry?"   
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Mind-blowing cunfusion re economics.

1. If the govt. subsidizes rooftop solar, it will increase demand for rooftop solar (which the government wants to achieve in line with its Paris AGW commitments).

2. There can be NO "oversupply" of renewable energy, the world has to achieve zero CO2 emissions before 2050.

3.  "oversupply" in free markets results in  lower prices or zero price, not "negative prices" which is an absurdity brought about by private companies  operating an obsolete grid which can't deal with electricity flows in two directions.

One thing, and one thing only, keeps people trapped in the kind of poverty of mind where they don't feed their children properly even when they could, and shit in their own stairwells. It's a lack of ownership; a lack of self-reliance. It's a lack of the very concept of self-reliance. It's an idea that the mere thought that they should be self-reliant is immoral, evil, callous and cruel. And though this idea is gibbered out by halfwits like TGD, it actually derives from Polly Toynbee.

Not just Toynbee, of course, but she has made a particular fetish of "social exclusion". And she claims that

...growing inequality multiplies all these problems


No, it doesn't. What multiplies them is continued state intervention in and control over these people's lives. They shit in stairwells because they don't own the stairwells and they don't feel responsible for keeping them clean. The same people will complain that the council are slow to disinfect them, before they shit in them again.

I don't know this because I've held focus groups; I know it because I've lived there and seen it. I have seen someone whose father sent him to school from a tower block in Walworth with the carving knife to stab a boy who was bullying him (which he did) buy a house and take his kids on holidays through sheer hard work, and I've seen middle-class lefties spend decades on the dole.

Telling people who are institutionalised into dependency that it's all the fault of unequal income distribution, that they are victims and that their salvation lies in more government money is hideously cruel, for all the fatuous false moral posturing of Toynbee and her carpet-brained acolytes. The only things that achieves are a deepening of the sanctimonious self-satisfaction in which Toynbee and her entourage wallow, and a broadening of the base of the state on which they depend and through which they thrive.

The answer lies not in the redistribution of wealth, but in the creation of wealth, by the poorest, for the poorest - for themselves. For that to happen, the state needs to get out of the way, not just by intervening less with "help", but also by hindering less with regulations and taxes. Taking money from the poorest, then giving it back to them in housing subsidies, tax credits and income supplements is grotesque - it wastes their few precious resources (unless tax collectors start working for free) and it institutionalises the recipients who could have just been left alone in the first place.

Constant regulation and "quality improvements" simply mean cutting off the bottom rungs of the ladder; instead, the focus should be on removing barriers to work and self-employment.

But then there'd be nothing for Polly and her friends to do, and nothing to give them that glow of self-righteousness that comes from stooping down from on high to hold the little hands of the poor. And that's the really unforgivable aspect of this: the sense that the unconscionable cruelty of keeping these people trapped is motivated in part by the self-interest of the advocates of statism.

China has 814 billionaires, the most in the world, according to the Hurun Global Rich List 2024.