Idealism in Chaos ( A Greek Tragedy)
May 15, 2012
χάος
Another big fall in world markets, billions will be wiped off and Greece is tottering on the brink of total economic collapse. Good morning!
Some European countries which were supposed to be examples of how society ought to distribute wealth more equitable are now being lined up to fall like a row of dominoes set up on the dining table of good and well intentioned but un- equitable sharing of the rich Euro baked pork dish with crackling good social security till the grave.
What went wrong? Was it the apple sauce?
The answer might well come from the dining table itself. The excessive ladling out of all those goodies without balancing it to an equal generous increase in taxation revenue was always dodgy. The expenditure didn’t match the income. A classic case of economic delusion that one can live beyond means was always a premier lesson at the kindergarten of economics. If you keep scooping the sand out, the sandbox will finally be empty.
The lure of getting more with less income seemed to have overtaken the world of capitalism. Election after election the sound economic principles of setting expenditure to income was eroded away. The voters swallowed it like marsh-mellows on a stick held above the fire of greed and avarice. Right wing governments took over with the promise of more for less and we were all seduced by this ugly Judas kiss. And look at us now? Will there be blood on the streets once again?
With Portugal and Spain queuing up after Greece with youth unemployment at a staggering fifty percent it seems to be hovering on a similar precipice into economic collapse.
In Australia we keep rubbing hands together with glee in how we seemed to have escaped the GFC turmoil with our scooping up of mineral resources. In the process we seem to forget that this is due to luck much more than sound economics. Take out China, and we too would be lining up at soup-kitchens.
Are we too taken in by the lure of more for less? Notice the upheaval in the suggestion of raising taxation on our resource mining companies. Notice how the Three hot headed Musketeers of our resource companies have taken on Australia and its citizens daring to utter getting paid a fair share of the economic resource pie. Notice too, how the principal of taxing those that defile our environment is fought against tooth and nail. Millions are being spent in advertisement opposing this very sound and principled way of making the environment spoilers pay for it. We too are cruising for a bruising being taken in by the fairy floss of more for less.
At least in Europe there seems to be a return to the left with new governments willing to find a solution in bringing the rich back to the kitchen table of give and take. In France, the rich will have to pay much more tax and many are questioning how anyone should have more than they can possibly need. Capitalism has gone berserk and the masses are paying for the sins of the rich. The poor, for too long have been denied a share for which they have worked just as hard as the rich, which, in the majority of cases inherited the wealth enabling them, with the regimes of lower and lower taxation, to keep on exploiting handy taxation loopholes and fattening themselves on the pork crackling of lenient taxation laws.
It is not for nothing that the collapsing economic capitalist world is looking anew at Scandinavia. They were always looked at askance and with suspicion. How could a taxation regime of over fifty percent continue to thrive giving its citizens a world of social welfare that would sooner or later end in total collapse and disaster? Well, the Scandinavians did not and now seem to own the only beacon of light and insight in perhaps having a solution for those countries on the brink of economic disaster.
We should perhaps look anew at those prophets of lower taxation being the only way forward. Just look how, with the new budget, we have delayed Foreign Aid? We have the top three wealthiest in our society owning over 30 billion. Or is it 40 billion now?
How just is our society and how moral when we can’t support foreign aid anymore and at the same time support not raising taxation for the obscene wealthy?
Tags: Australia, China, France, Greece, χάος, Kaos, Portugal, Scandinavia, Spain
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
I remember that back in the seventies The Dutch had a system whereby no one could earn more than five times the average wage. The maximum wage was set by law.
I also still remember that Mexican CEO of Telstra a few years ago, was his name Solomon Trujillo or something being on 6 million and a bonus on top.
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Hollande is promising to tax the rich much more, why can’t we do the same here; I’m sure the factory workers can’t avoid paying their taxes why should the mining magnates be allowed to do it.
I’m also starting to doubt that having a common currency is a good thing, why can’t each and every European country sort their own finances…i can understand helping the poorest of African countries…
We are for ever telling ourselves this is the bloody best country in the world, yet I see more and more homeless sleeping rough, every time we go to Sydney
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Taking earnings from the rich, will mean that they won’t be rich. And no one else will want to be. Who will employ us then?
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Takings earnings from the rich will make them less rich and the money given to the poor will make them less poor.
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Then you’ll have only poor people – and no work.
Oh well do what you flipping well like. I’m past caring Our government is crazy. Couldn’t run a tea garden.
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How lucky am I ? FM just came in with the mail. It’s a letter from my bank inviting me to increase my credit card limit (by 50% !!!).
Here’s a knife – go cut your own throat. (Don’t try this at home).
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I’ve been resisting similar ‘irresistible’ offers from my own dreadit card company, Therese… ever since I was fool enough to get a dreadit card!
😉
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I just love it when they send you the letter for the overdraft of a certain amount at the knockdown rate of around 18% pa. Like as if!
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Gez, I’ve been working for myself for nearly 24 years. I’ve worked on probably more than 200 projects or assignments. This is my third recession. I have never, repeat, NEVER seen things so tough out there. Right here in Australia. Ask anyone who works in retail (if that lady still has a job), finance or many other service sectors like ours.
Lest people generally think that things here are tickety boo because some fucking economic indicators say that Australia is so well off compared with the obvious shit that’s going down overseas, let me disabuse everyone of the illusion.
Our economy is as tight as a fish’s arsehole. Nobody I know in our business sector is making decent money. Many are just scraping by covering costs and some of us are facing the wolf.
We have traditionally done a fair bit of work for state and federal governments, but there hasn’t been one single job in that area in over three years for us. We have colleagues who have thirty years experience in contracting to government who are falling into personal debt just to keep their businesses’ doors open. For the last two years we’ve been working in the not for profit community services sector – and now those jobs are starting to dry up with government funding tapering off with the reduction in tax receipts – and private donations going the same way. Our sector is struggling to make ends meet. People are working ridiculous hours and burning themselves out – just to keep their jobs.
When we see mass sackings at say Railcorp, for example, the businesses that used to sell goods and services to those 400 or so families suddenly take a hit. People lose their houses and cars get repossessed. Kids get taken out of expensive private schools and have to learn to do with not very much. Teachers in those schools get the chop. It goes on and on.
Our dentist is discounting his fees just to keep busy. He says that people who really need dental work are just not coming in like they used to. In my view, when a person would rather put up with pain or discomfort instead of going to their dentist, things are bloody terrible.
When the Gillard government turned a bead on what some call dole bludgers and single parents, we’ve got to take the hint that in our so called mining-protected economy, things are bleak and getting bleaker.
In my view this is a seriously bad situation with no prospect of improving soon.
Sooner or later it hits everyone whether people have been parsimonious or spendthrift. Better make room in the spare bedroom for a couple of long term guests.
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This is one reason we keep telling our kids to take it easy. In my almost sixty years doing all sorts of jobs, we went through tough times as well as better times.
Things are tough when you daren’t look inside shops and catch the look on the shopkeepers face.. Even community markets are not selling with onlookers rattling their coins in their pockets, looking, looking but not buying.
I was fortunate to be able to do both menial and office jobs and my lack of fear at great heights was a bonus during the sixties when swinging stage work was still rather primitive and dangerous but well paid.
I, like you have always managed to be self-employed, apart from a stint at a Chullorah railway shop, sandblasting structural steel frame at a huge rail workshop and a job at at a Dutch Bank in Amsterdam.
I hope that the worst might be over and that somehow China might come to the party in Europe like the US did in the fifties to Europe with their Marshall plan. It is in China’s interest for the world to keep buying their products. In the meantime, tighten the belt and stock up on lentils.
I wish I could say the words that would provide more cheer.
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For those of you who aren’t Melburnians Chapel Street, Prahran is one of the prime shopping streets of Melbourne. It has genuinely funky shops and over the top fashion shops, book shops and a supermarket-for those who have to! Tourists love it because it isn’t junk touristy, and the quality is good. Antique shops exist next to pawnbrokers, etc etc.
For ten marvellous years I lived around the corner from this street. On Friday I went back to get some jeans. Shop after shop was empty and trams rumbled loudly, magnified by
the sheer hollow sound of listless human enterprises.
This is the real face of our economy, rather than the vapid meaderings of over-weight mining titans. Clive Palmer and Gina the Rheinmaiden should arse off before the public wake up to the amount of tax they don’t pay.
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Yes, of course. Clive’s eaten all of the shop’s goodies.
Either that or the interest rates have been too high to encourage enterprise.
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All too true Emm, Talked with the elder Algernonia about all of this tonight. She finishes school this year and will need to look for some part time work, All we can do it tell her to keep trying and eventually something will come her way.
Half of Europe is in depression, Greece appears to have no hope. Spain has unemployment akin to that of the 1930’s.
This latest is why I’ve moved to taking a full time job instead of working for myself fulltime., When the GFC hit I suddenly found myself holding half my annual turnover in unpaid invoices. Fortunately with stimulus the invoices where eventually paid. The clients that I still do some part time work for are all doing it tough, they’re keeping their head above water just. I’m seeing very little work though recently.
This could be a lot worse that other recessions I’ve worked through, and as you say people are going to lose their houses, They did the last recession I worked, a lot of our work was repossession work of banks in possession. Quite sad it was. The cmpany I worked for was often paying on the overdraft and we were unable to hire even though we had the work available. So we ended up working 6 day weeks to just get it done. At least thy paid us the overtime. The previous recession I saw half the people I worked with lose their jobs and the rest of us work 4 day weeks.
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I worked in the money business for a short time and ever since analyse by imstinctive habit what punters on the money market might be doing from day to day. It’s a kind of a game, but now I have been doing it so long prices of groceries on shelves, house prices, the rental market, second hand goods fall into patterns and this is what I have seen…wildly swinging indicators in the microcosm and one late night I sprung an Alan Kohler presentation of a chart demonstrating consumer spending and available income, that came as no surprise, No consumer spending. The reason for that has been forwarded as saving, people want to preserve their income for fear of the consequences of spending now and finding themselves with nothing later. I don’t subscribe to that idea.
There is a phenomenal gap between the subtlies of why a spending pattern establishes itself, or disestablishes, and the clinical lines of a chart an economist is qualified to construct and describe with a tracer. I often think it is ironic that the personality of money is somehow disallowed. Money is, leastwise, promoted as if it doesn’t have power; it only has a proxy. The soft sell of money as opposed to the hard sell of its agents (personified by the money market forwarded as bullish or a bit of a bear) produces a tame analysis of the path of money, one that is stripped of its character despite it is that it is what is done every day, in every hour, every minute that drives the market; the general trend looking at it from the viewpoint of strategic analysis is useless as a mirror of what is going to happen postulated on what did happen (the history). It is on what you and I do that we can begin to think about what a dozen people in proximation will do given certain conditions at a specific time on a particular day, not a trend on a chart in an economist’s office overlooking Wall Street.
It is a measure of protest that people are not spending, not a measure of saving. Its an important distinction I make. It raises a different complexity of issues. They can be lead to the water by, exhortations, stimulus packages…but the world has changed and the people are speaking, educated, networking, cognisant of the importance of the colour and the personality of their money. It’s a type of Occupy. It’s the Outrage. It has a number of faces. It is the personality of money. Of course, that has terrible consequences.
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typo…referring to ‘tame analysis of the path of money, one that is stripped of character despite it is’ should further read ‘what is done every day’ etcet..
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‘Shoe, your take is, as ever a joy to read and an enlightenment. Many thanks.
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The comments we have each written above, Therese, constitue an interesting package of ideas don’t they and contrasts in viewpoint although not necessarily different; we are each dealing with the common thread. Thank you for your kind and interested comment.
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Interesting parallel Gerard: It was when Marie Antoinette could no longer afford her traditional regular donations to charity and her hubby Louis XVI still insisted on funding the American War of Independence (ironically!), that the French Revolution started.
You’re right though… there’s a lesson here that we ought to learn while we have the opportunity; if, after this GFC, we still think and act in the same manner which brought it about, we can blame no-one but ourselves.
What possible good can it do any country to have within its borders businesses which are far richer than the country’s government? Time to tax the big corporations, not only ’til it hurts, but ’til they’re no longer such monstrously powerful organizations that they can bully governments into submission any more!
🙂
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