Australians: Is It Time To Eat The Rich?
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The leaders of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) are calling for unemployment to rise. Yes, the RBA want more Aussies out of work so they can slay the dragon they call inflation. You may not have been aware that for the last 50 years the economists at the RBA have adjudged full employment as an unemployment rate of 4.5%. That equates to around 500, 000 ordinary Australians being out of work. These are the sacrificial bodies and souls, apparently, necessary for the economy to work without high inflation. I have an alternative suggestion. Australians: Is it time to eat the rich?
“The Reserve Bank should be praised for speaking frankly.
Last week, deputy governor Michele Bullock said the RBA’s goal was to get the unemployment rate up to 4.5 per cent by the end of next year.
It’s currently 3.6 per cent.
She said there’s too much employment for the economy to handle right now, and if there were more unemployed people it would help to bring inflation under control.
She was castigated on social media for her comments, but I think she should be applauded.”
Hey Australia, Why Don’t We Sacrifice The Wealthy Instead?
Why should it be half a million of the poor to suffer lives debilitated by poverty and lost opportunity? Could it be because the central bank managed capitalist economy was devised by wealthy bankers in the first place. Yes, folks if you haven’t cottoned onto it by now the system is designed to wildly favour the wealthy over everyone else. Australians are famously apathetic and conservative by nature, which may explain their docile acceptance of such things. The working poor everywhere are similarly at a disadvantage by birth and upbringing, when it comes to questioning their fate. Yet, it boggles the mind how long supposedly intelligent human beings are going to put up with such endemic and institutional injustice. High inflation and the monetary policy designed to combat it, raising interest rates, both make the wealthy much more wealthy. Meanwhile, you and I slide further down the pole into abject poverty. Governments wring their hands, saying, ‘Oh isn’t it terrible how poor Australians are suffering but there is very little we can do.’ Have you ever noticed that whenever we get a Labor federal government the economy is already in a dire state? The conservative LNP government has left things in a pickle and Labor is left to pick up the pieces. The 2008 Global Financial Crisis saw economies everywhere destroyed by the rampant greed of the merchant banking sector (these chaps do not vote Labor). 2022/23 post-pandemic supply side inflation crisis meets housing crisis in Australia. The RBA decides to make things much worse by embarking on the steepest and most severe, series of interest rate hikes in Australian history. This follows Philip Lowe’s assurance that rates wouldn’t rise until 2024.
The RBA has a track record of being too slow to act and then sustaining action for far too long once the horse has already bolted.
Why Don’t We Eat The Rich Instead?
Why should the many suffer instead of the few? How about we devise a new economic regime during times of trouble. We all know that Australia has become a nation of haves and have nots, where the very wealthy are now getting around 90% of the benefits of economic growth whilst the rest of us are having to make do with the scraps, the 10%. I suggest that we bring in an extreme wealth cap, where those who tip over this amount (including family and blind trusts and all the other tax evading schemes devised by unscrupulous accountants and lawyers) go into a pool that returns capital. Taking large amounts of money out of the economy is a deflationary measure. Inflation is most often caused by too much money chasing limited supply. Think of the property market in Australia, where inflation over the last 30 years is at around 382%. Paying down debt removes liquidity from the system.
Yes, it takes billions to make this measure effective and luckily these billionaires have them.
Is It Fair That The Rich Get Richer At Our Expense?
We are a community, a nation, and some of us seem to forget that. Some of us have grown rich via the capitalist system, where by chance of birth or financial skill (most likely a combination of both) they have prospered. The consolidation within the corporate world has seen market concentrations at levels never seen before. All this talk of the free market is a furphy, because companies always seek to remove competition from their markets. The banking sector in Australia is a prime example with the big 4 gobbling up their competitors over the journey. The media landscape has seen Murdoch eat up competing newspapers and networks over the years. Australia has the most concentrated commercial media sector in the world, which means you do not see a diversity of stories or hear a diversity of voices. News Corp and Nine Fairfax control most of the media landscape. Airlines, well Qantas got a bail out by the Morrison government during the pandemic and now has increased airfares on every route and is making record profits. No pay back from them for the billions provided by Australian tax payers. The ACCC has failed to protect competition in so many sectors across the Australian economy, but how could they be expected to succeed when they don’t have the resources or the funding.
Governments, predominantly conservative governments, have overseen the corporate consolidation in Australia to the detriment of Australian consumers.
Neoliberalism has been the economic currency of the last few decades. Mates benefiting from great deals on previously state owned assets. Big companies with little competition can set the prices, as they have done in Australia. In this rent seeking economy these businesses charge their customers fees everywhere you do and don’t look. Multinational mining companies extract our resources without paying adequate amounts of tax. Why is this so? Why are Norwegians able to get super profit taxes out of the same companies on their territory? It is a failure of our politicians or possibly something worse and more criminal. Politicians around the world feather their own nests at the expense of those they are supposed to be representing. Time at the top is tough and these gallant leaders feel justified in creaming off serious wealth when the camera is switched off.
Accountants and lawyers, it is these professions who enable individuals and corporations to maximise their wealth and avoid taxes wherever possible. PwC that veritable partnership between greedy accountants and their clients has been caught out in a rare look into this professional world. Trusts and other such devices are set up by these enablers without adequate scrutiny in many instances, as to where the wealth was derived in the first place. Australia has become home to many investments, which are quite rightly seen as money laundering via real estate acquisitions. The massive amounts of inflation in the Australian property markets have made our homes targets for this offshore money. This has pushed prices up even further, especially at the top end of the market.
Government bodies supposedly monitoring this flow of money are most often underfunded and lacking the resources to do their job properly, quite apart from the corruption always prevalent where ill-gotten gains and extreme wealth exist.
Australia has a problem with an attitude of ‘take the money and maybe ask question later, but not too strongly.’ Real estate agents want the sale, as do their clients, and governments in Australia have always wanted investment. We saw an expose on the ABC’s 4 Corners programme the other night about a big tax fraud scheme worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A bunch of unsavoury blokes hanging out in strip clubs cooked up a payroll tax fraud involving layers of companies with dummy directors. Liquidators (more crooked accountants) were highly likely complicit in the scheme but still have not been prosecuted, as of this date. White collar crime in Australia is rampant and rarely criminally prosecuted. What struck me about these corporate fraudsters were how unimaginative and morally worthless they were. They had all this money and what did they spend it on, houses, cars, escorts, expensive booze and drugs.
The challenge for really wealthy individuals is what they do with their wealth. The minds of these guys never got out of the gutter, which is why they were preyed upon by scumbag bikies.
Australia lacks inspiring role models, as the bar is set way too low by the current crop of leaders. Successive governments pander to low hanging fruit in terms of community standards. The materialism in Australia, like in America, produces uninspiring results. Massive amounts of state taxed and sanctioned gambling pervades the community and its love of sport. An anti-intellectual and anti-elite mentality has been fostered by conservative governments. This makes it more difficult to smarten up the nation. Corporate greed is seen as a good thing, which is why filth like the son and daughter of a tax commissioner can get away with their behaviour for years. The standards in corporate Australia are pretty low, as the sex workers around the country could attest to. There are Australians with hundreds of millions of dollars squirreled away in their self-managed superannuation accounts. Superannuation was designed to take the pressure off the age pension not as a tax avoidance scheme for the rich. Comfortable Australians don’t care about this, they think it is their right to be rich even if it is at the expense of others.
Australians: Is it time to eat the rich? Is it, finally, time to instigate a fairer, more equitable system that removes excessive wealth? Are we a community or a nation of individuals and family groupings intent on looking out for themselves? The ancient Romans, during the time of the Republic, were ambivalent and often dismissive of individuals bearing extreme wealth. They did not put billionaires up on pedestals. We know that most fans of the very wealthy are so because they hope to become so themselves. Aspirational ambitions motivate many with their nose to the grindstone. Plenty of those flint-hearted Aussies are that way inclined toward the poor on this basis. Dog eat dog is their pit-bull mantra.
Ask yourself what will you do if and when you achieve your extreme wealth? Will it be mansions, fast cars, and escorts? Like our Gentlemen’s Gallery clientele? Will bikie muscle be knocking on your door for a home invasion soon?
What is wealth for? Why are our homes not primarily places of shelter and basic comfort and security? Who decided to base the domestic wealth of the nation on inflated property prices? Thus, making them unaffordable for vast swathes of our citizenry. Money laundering via offshore property investments, negative gearing no matter how many properties you own, and a 1 000 new immigrants arriving every day are all contributing to a property market out of the reach of ordinary Australians. Now, the third of us who rent are being assailed by rental increases of 20 to 30% and sometimes much more.
Australians: Is it time to eat the rich?
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt & Financial Freedom
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