Subscribe to BrookesNews’ Bulletin
Now that Liberal Party politicians have defected maybe they should go all the way and exit the Party
Gerard Jackson
Liberal Party MPs Petro Georgiou and Judith Troeth and Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce were among several Coalition members who crossed the floor to vote against the government on immigration laws and to support the use of human embryos for stem cell research. According to the integrity-challenged Mike Steketee this lot belong to the “moderate wing” of the Liberal Party, meaning that in his fetid leftwing imagination their critics are nothing but a bunch of unrepentant rednecks (The Australian, Principles overboard, 22 June 2006).
What we have here is a bunch of self-serving ignoramuses seeking the approbation of the country’s despicable latte set. That ordinary Australians are concerned that loosening laws regarding alleged refugees could lead to an uncontrollable flow of illegal immigrants never once occurred to this cretinous mob anymore than it occurred to the self-righteous and cowardly Steketee.
And whatever gave these geniuses the idea they are qualified to give a scientific opinion on embryonic stem cell research beats me. If they were not so damn lazy and determined to win the support of lefty journalists they would know that adult stem cell research has been the real success while embryonics has gone nowhere with respect to human testing.
What an ineffable mob. We have Petro Georgiou who must rank as one of the laziest and ineffectual MPs to ever sit in parliament. Barnaby Joyce is another who is an intellectual disgrace. His asinine blathering against loosening our merger laws and his dim-witted support for ethanol subsidies clearly reveal a mind of staggering ignorance.
Then there is Judith ‘Pork Barrel’ Troeth who seems to believe that subsidies pave the way toward national prosperity. In fact, Troeth is an excellent example of the intellectual shortcomings of most of our politicians. So allow me to focus my attention on this particular blockhead.
When ever I hear politicians mouth phrases like “country towns . . . provide a continuing focus for the district they serve,” they are “supportive communities which satisfy the basic human need for human beings to be connected to others in a social framework,” that they are not mere “economic units” and so forth, I know they are well and truly priming the pork barrel. And you guessed right. This particular politician was the intellectually sparkling Judith Troeth, a Liberal Senator for Victoria (No time for beating around the bush, The Australian Financial Review, 19 September 2000).
Troeth paid homage to the efficiency of Australian farming, correctly noting that, unlike its foreign counterparts, it does not receive subsidies. From this she jumped to the absurd conclusion that farmers should therefore have subsidised “access to nearby facilities”. (This woman would not recognise a non sequitur even if it sat on her lap).
Let me apply a little dreaded economic reasoning to her pork-barrelling proposal. In a free market it’s the success of the farming area that gives rise to the facilities, not the reverse, though there are times when this reasoning seems contradicted by facts. A critic could, for instance, point out that there are historical cases where railways have stimulated, and even created, farming communities. But this is a superficial way of viewing these events.
Where private infrastructure advanced ahead of agriculture it was because entrepreneurs either foresaw agricultural demand expanding to pay for their investments or agriculture was incidental in that the infrastructure was intended to serve other needs. The obvious point is that Troeth’s “facilities” have to be justified by the value of the economic activities they serve.
To do otherwise is to waste scarce capital goods by directing them into politically determined lines of production when consumers have obviously placed a higher value on an alternative use. Put another way, this means overproduction in one area at the expense of underproduction in other areas. Carry this kind of policy out on a large enough scale and you end up like Cuba.
Once any politician assumes that factors of production should be allocated by political decree and not by market processes the next step is central planning, which is exactly what Troeth called for. She argued that careful planning is needed to “ensure an equitable provision of infrastructure . . . .” Now factors should be allocated in a way to maximise the value of their output and thus living standards. They should not be used to buy votes, which is what this idiot really means by ‘equitable’.
Troeth lives in a small town located in the south-west of Victoria. This is certainly not something I begrudge her or anyone else. But to suggest that telecommunication facilities should be subsidised so that people who enjoy living in these small and delightful towns can continue to do so is nothing less than rural welfare.
By the same token, poor people who find their rents rising because they are being outbid by better-paid people moving into their neighbourhoods should also receive a subsidy so they can afford to stay put. (St Kilda springs to mind, which, incidentally, is where Troeth has her office.) Though I wouldn’t be anymore respectful to her argument if she was out crusading for low-paid tenants facing rising rents I would certainly show it more sympathy.*
According to Troeth’s penetrating economic analysis subsidies would attract professionals to country towns while also encouraging “the best and the brightest” of the towns’ students to remain. Don’t count on it. In any case, could it be that companies won’t invest in these towns because our wage-fixing arrangements make it unprofitable for them to do so? This, unfortunately, is a question that is never raised by politicians, including conservative ones, American unions, however, are well aware of it.
That is why they try to prevent labour intensive firms in the Northern states moving their operations to the South in an attempt to escape union imposed labour costs. In addition, America’s mid-west is a highly successful example of industrial development taking place in a comparatively short time without subsidies or political edicts, directed only by market processes.
“Small country towns need not die” says Troeth. Not so, unfortunately. However, that some country towns need not die is no justification for putting the terminal ones on a permanent taxpayer-funded life-support system. Her pathetic argument in support of rural subsidies is just another example of the our politicians’ lousy intellectual standards.
Now that she has crossed the floor the best thing she and her fellow defectors can do is pass through parliament’s front door on to the lawn — never to return.
*Though people trapped between rising rents and low incomes are deserving of sympathy, ever increasing subsidies are not the solution. The main problem in St Kilda and similar areas is that well-off residents have been able to use the law to prevent further development of low-rent accommodation; they reduced the supply of land by imposing height restrictions, even though more people were moving in to the area. The result has been rising rents that have hit the poor particularly hard. But you won’t find any politicians lamenting this sickening abuse of the electoral system.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 26 June 2006