Competency Now

It appears to me that Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan are collectively of the opinion that they somehow make the news and thus are excused from reading it.

I think this year has been the most illustrative of the destructive potential of democracy. One could be forgiven watching the 'talking head' news for grossly misunderstanding the financial crisis. One could be forgiven for getting angry at the huge question nobody seems to be asking yet smacks of so much fundamental common sense it is infuriating.

Will the bail-out work?

Well if on the other hand Wayne Swan or Kevin Rudd read the papers they might stumble across articles like this or logging on out of curiosity to online journals to find articles like this.

Opinions from most actual economists are fairly unanimous - the bail-out won't work.

Whilst this then indicates that the government is getting its information from people who are not economists and/or not who we get our information from the list gets shorter and shorter till one is left with - industry lobbyists and political analysts.

And this is what we deserve, complete ineptitude because we have created a "pass/fail" system of government.

This concerns me because it is in effect a demerit system of government. That is pass/fail or in lay terms 'don't do anything wrong'.

Now sensibly I must concede we don't like our government to make mistakes so on the surface 'don't do anything wrong' sounds fine. It sounds great! It sounds like one of those ideals you strive for. Until you point out that the easiest way to do nothing wrong is to do nothing at all.

Hence this year has been a rich treasure trove of doing nothing.

The Carbon Trading Scheme has gone from being a hot topic to progressively take on the shape of policy that does nothing.

This happened because there was massive public sentiment that something had to be done about climate change.

Then the government got a call from some people that no doubt lent it money earlier in order to get elected and pointed out that if they had to pay for their damage this would cost them some money and they might even have to shut down.

Hence a backpedal.

SImilarly the housing affordability crisis was a problem, there wasn't even talk of what the government was actually going to do about it before it started going backwards.

Houses were suddenly becoming more affordable and this was a disaster. Voters were pissed off that their demands for affordable housing were resulting quite 'naturally' in houses becoming more affordable.

This was a problem because housing being affordable inevitably means a decrease in price, yet this is what was making people feel really wealthy.

So now the government puts out $4bn of taxpayer money to try and stop this from happening.

And this is the tyranny of democracy, something that has the ability to wipe our civilization off the face of the earth.

Because unlike having a big fat tyrant sitting in his palace that doesn't want to admit to his starving peons that he made some mistakes and is going to have to pay for them, we have big fat people sitting at home in the millions that don't want to admite that they made some mistakes and are going to have to pay for it.