"Australia is already
completely over-invested in housing. It’s ruining the economy and destroying
the quality of life for millions of people. It’s creating a ‘rentier’
economy where the only way to get ahead is collect the rent on a property.
Nobody produces anything. But more importantly, a whole country can’t get rich
and stay rich by selling houses to each other."
And more, from a make believe address to US college grads from the same source-
"Memorial Day and higher education
have a lot in common: You have to ignore the particulars to appreciate them.
Take out the inconvenient details. Remove the embarrassing facts. Often what is
left is sterile nonsense.
Every Memorial Day editorial tells us
our veterans fought for ‘freedom’. Yet in not a single one of America's wars
was an enemy preparing to reduce our freedom.
The huns wanted Alsace, not
Pennsylvania. The Philippines intended no subjugation of Indiana. And what
about the Nicaraguans? Nobody even remembers the shackles they were meant to
clamp onto American wrists. But after every victory, we know what happened
next: The doughboys and grunts came home to higher taxes and more prohibitions.
What you learn in college is the way
things are ‘supposed’ to work. But few things in real life are as simple as
they're ‘supposed’ to be. Our government is not run by the people for the
people. Government is merely a way one group of people — the insiders — take
advantage of other people — the outsiders.
You can call it democracy or
dictatorship; it hardly matters. It can be gentle and broadly tolerable...or
brutal and widely detested. What makes it a government is it has a monopoly on
the use of violence; ultimately, the insiders use it to get what they want.
As for the economy, you have learned
about our capitalist system. You have been told that it needs regulation by the
SEC, the Fed, the Department of Justice, the FDA, the FTC and other agencies to
keep the capitalists honest. You have been lied to.
It's not a capitalist system; the
feds took the capital out 40 years ago. Now, it depends on cronies and credit.
It's a corrupt system — the product of collusion between industry and the
agencies meant to regulate them. Its real purpose is to transfer more wealth
and power to the insiders.
Economist William Baumol understood.
He noticed that goods-producing
businesses — such as an automaker or a maker of a widget — could achieve high
productivity growth, thanks to labor-saving automation and supply-chain
efficiencies. He also noticed that productivity stayed more or less static in
service-sector jobs, such as nursing and teaching. (Basically, a nurse needed
to spend just as much time with a sick patient...and a teacher needed to spend
as much time with a student.)
Despite this, wage increases in
service-sector industries — education, healthcare and government — tended to
keep pace with wage increases in industries where rising wage growth was
justified by growing productivity.
That's part of the reason your TVs
are cheap...but your healthcare has become so expensive. Not only is healthcare
largely protected from competition and distorted by third parties who pay the
bills, including the government and insurance companies, but also wages for
healthcare workers rise, even though productivity stays more or less static.
This also helps explain why a
university education is eight times more costly than it was in 1978...even though
you're still getting more or less the same education. Also, as I explained on
Friday, college was optional to a decent income in the 1970s. Now, it's almost
obligatory.
When everything is rigged, the
riggers have the money and the power. Lobbyists, lawyers, accountants,
administrators: Whether you want to take a business public...or just build a
house...you come face to face with someone who can stop you, with paperwork,
legal razzmatazz and nauseating administration. You need to play the game, too."
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