The noblesse oblige tradition is not only evil by nature, since it sees some groups of people as being naturally ‘better’ than other groups of people; it is the last thing that the poor need if they are to become free and independent, as they would certainly like to be. Representatives of the aristocratic noblesse oblige tradition are given as Malcolm Fraser and Robert Menzies. These two are described as ‘social liberals’ who would disapprove of John Howard’s appreciation of the liberating potential of the free economy.

The problem is that the Left and the Labor Party didn’t say this at the times that Menzies or Fraser were prime ministers. To a Kevin Rudd of the 1950s and 1960s, Menzies was the exact opposite of a social liberal: he was the intolerant and ossified head of an ultra-conservative gerontocracy, a slavish lap-dog of the British Empire and the United States, an oppressor of the workers, and a high-hat snob who treated those below him like dirt.

Fraser was even worse. He was a literal Nazi: during his time as prime minister every city in Australia was decorated with graffiti in which the ‘s’ in Fraser was replaced by a swastika. Like Menzies he was a privileged bastard who wanted to remove all the social security structures on which the poor depended (this was called ‘Fraser’s razor’) thereby leaving the poor destitute on the streets, shivering and starving to death. Can Kevin Rudd explain why there has been such a change of heart regarding these two former prime ministers? I would genuinely like to know.

There are no more corrosive agents at work today, on the so-called conservative institutions of family, community, church and country than the unforgiving forces of neo-liberalism, materialism and consumerism, which lay waste to anything in their way.

The institution of family was shattered by Gough Whitlam’s ‘no fault’ divorce laws and by generous welfare payments for single mothers, also introduced under Whitlam. In the nineteenth century, when laissez-faire capitalism was at its height, family life was very stable, and churches were strong. The institution of community is part of the extended order, the central idea at the very heart of economic liberalism. It is under a socialist order that the benign community spirit is destroyed, and is replaced by mutual suspicion, distrust, and envy.

Religion survives under capitalism not because capitalism encourages religion, but because capitalism is an economic and social system of broad tolerance. It is a system under which each individual can ‘cultivate his garden’, to quote Voltaire. People living in a free society have choices, precisely what is denied to them under Labor Party collectivism. I have known people of the Left for nearly fifty years, and I have never met any whose attitude towards religion was anything but unremitting hostility. Perhaps Kevin Rudd should read the scribblings of his Labor Party chum, Phillip Adams.

The reference to ‘country’ implies that people who believe in the benefits of a free economy are unpatriotic, while people who believe in collectivism, by implication, are patriots. Well, I am sure that all readers remember what Samuel Johnson said.

Capitalism does not ‘lay waste to anything in its way’. It is a dynamically selective process, and is always chasing the most productive use of a particular resource. That is why, in countries in which capitalism has been allowed to exist, living standards have improved so much, to everybody’s benefit. But the changes under capitalism occur gradually. There are no lamp lighters left in Melbourne, but their numbers decreased in stages, and they had time to find other work. It is collectivism, and only collectivism, that can destroy thousands of jobs at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.

A definitive example of Kevin Rudd’s outrageous lie is the field of education — surely a vital part of the community structure that Rudd wishes to preserve. Until the Left gained control of schooling, changes to the syllabus were gradual and rational, and involved no corruption of academic standards. However, once the Left gained power the cultural continuity of schooling was bashed to death in a couple of years, and has never been allowed to revive. The same has happened to tertiary education of course.

Nowhere amid the triumphalism of Howard’s recent address on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Quadrant was there any attempt at a philosophical framework for the reconciliation of the Right’s competing neo-liberal and conservative tendencies.

Is Rudd trying to say that there should have been? At the fiftieth anniversary dinner of Quadrant? Why? John Howard was happy that Quadrant had lasted fifty years, despite being comparatively ignored by government funding bodies, and being excoriated by the Left (I assume that this survival against the odds is the ‘triumphalism’ to which Rudd refers). The content of Howard’s speech was as follows:

Quadrant has offered an alternative to the mind-deadening conformity of the Left. It has been consistently committed to intellectual freedom, liberal democracy, and a pluralist society;

Quadrant has played a small but definite role in the final collapse of communism. The left-wing weasel argument that this collapse was ‘inevitable’ is totally at odds with what the Left said when communism still ruled in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe;

Howard offered a few reminders of the degree to which Australian fellow-travellers were made fools of by communism, such as Manning Clark comparing Vladimir Lenin with Jesus Christ;

He praised the moral clarity of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II;

Given that Australia has an admirable historical record in comparison with other countries, Howard praised Quadrant for confronting the leftist presentation of Australian history as a narrative of harsh cruelty and evil –- apart from the trade unions and the Communist Party, of course;

He warned that Islamic terrorism was the defining global struggle of the twenty-first century, so the work of Quadrant must continue. All of this seems appropriate for such a celebration. Why should John Howard be ruled by Kevin Rudd’s nonsensical obsessions?

Howard has never accepted that labour is different from any other commodity …

Now Rudd wants reality to be replaced by wishful thinking. What Howard does or does not think about labour is of no significance at all, anymore than what he thinks about the moral rightness of the second law of thermodynamics is of any significance. The point is that labour is subject to the same laws of supply and demand as any other good, and if the price of labour is raised above its market level then unemployment will surely follow. All that Howard demonstrates here is that he is a man of science, while Rudd is a man of witchcraft and magic.

Modern Labor, following Smith, argues that human beings are both “self-regarding” and “other-regarding”. By contrast, modern Liberals, influenced by Hayek, argue that humans are almost exclusively self-regarding.

Members of the parliamentary Liberal Party have read Hayek? Who, precisely? I have never heard of one. I would love to know who they are. And if Kevin Rudd can prove to me that the Liberals deny the charitable impulse in humans then I will donate $1000 to any body that he names, including the Socialist Left faction of the A.L.P. In fact charity reached its greatest levels during periods of laissez-faire.

It might be argued that there is comparatively less charity today because the government has created a welfare state, but this does not mean that things are any better for the needy. I have spoken to government beneficiaries, and there is no body in Australia which is more heartlessly cruel than Centrelink. You are made to feel like garbage from the moment you enter, and when some piddling Centrelink bureaucrat tells you to jump, you bloody well jump, or you can starve to death on the office doorstep for all they care. And Centrelink was exactly the same when Labor was in government. The coldest religious charity in Victorian London was more respectful and welcoming.

Neo-liberals speak of the self-regarding values of security, liberty and property. To these, social democrats would add the other-regarding values of equity, solidarity and sustainability. For social democrats, these additional values are seen as mutually reinforcing because the allocation of resources in pursuit of equity (particularly through education), solidarity and sustainability assist in creating the human, social and environmental capital necessary to make a market economy function effectively.

‘Equity through education’ means that schools and universities will be dumbed down even more, at dreadful cost to the people in general, and to the most intellectually eager and creative students in particular.

‘Solidarity’ belongs to the rhetoric of totalitarian collectivism, so Rudd really lets the mask slip here.

‘Sustainability’ means an authoritarian state, and that, apart from the looting classes, we will all be poorer than we would have been under economic liberty.

This concept of the state had its origins in the view that markets are designed for human beings, not vice versa, and this remains the fundamental premise that separates social democrats from neo-liberals.

It is now clear that Rudd has never read Hayek, and consequently he doesn’t know what he is talking about. A point that Hayek makes in all his books and interviews is that the free economy is not something to be pursued as an end in itself. It only has significance as a liberator of the human mind; as a humane and beneficent system which enables people to help other people in the best way possible: by creating the wealth that will make them independent.

Rudd also makes the cardinal error of talking about markets and people as different things. This is a particularly extreme example of a false dichotomy. The liberal economy is just people freely trading goods and values. It is idiotic to talk about whether one is designed for the other or vice-versa — they are the same thing. Kevin Rudd is seen by many on the Right as somebody to admire. Andrew Bolt, usually a rational person, sees Rudd as the best leader for the Labor Party, with Lindsay Tanner as his deputy.

I have known Lindsay Tanner for thirty years, ever since he was an undergraduate radical. I still see him occasionally. I have spent hundreds of hours on late night political arguments with him. After the collapse of communism Lindsay was still quite happy to call himself a communist, and to say that the Socialist Left faction (to which he belongs) consists of Marxists. His views have supposedly become more rational, but I don’t think there has been any fundamental change.

Kevin Rudd, in the Australian article, demonstrates that he has no grasp of the extended order, the concept of conserving but evolving institutions that lies at the very heart of free market liberalism. If he did understand the extended order he would realise that there is no contradiction between conservatism and economic liberalism. This too is a false dichotomy.

Lastly, I repeat that it is collectivism, the political philosophy in which ‘social democrats’ believe, that is the smasher and destroyer of everything which we should be preserving in Western civilisation. History shows that to be true beyond doubt. As Karl Marx said, “Our task is not to understand the world, but to change it.”

Postcript: Kevin Rudd’s article was discussed by Noel Pearson (The Australian, 4 November). Noel Pearson did not defend freedom, but merely suggested that Kevin Rudd’s attack on freedom may have been a tactical error.