It’s fairy-land economics out there. In a big economic advance, the Labor Party realized that they can solve world poverty: the secret is to take money from the big producers, and hand it to anyone and everyone — it will not only keep our national economy productive and efficient, but millions of people will be richer! Why we didn’t do it 50 years ago!*
Millions to be ‘better off’ under carbon tax
Think of the possibilities! If it works on a national scale, why not go international — how much richer would we all be if we buried our five cheapest sources of energy in a pit under Maralinga, forced everyone to use the sixth, seventh, and eight best sources of energy, AND we took the profits from the most efficient successful operations around the globe (known henceforth as “polluters” (sic)) and gave them to all the world’s poor and needy?
Where do Gillard and Combet think the “Big-Polluters” get their money from? Would it be from:
(a) giant Swiss-bank-accounts held by Nazi war criminals,
(b) ancient Saxon wishing wells, or
(c) pots at the end of the rainbow?
Do they think the big-polluters pull money out of thin air? (Excuse me sir, you need a banking license to do that.)
Money has to come from people
The mature age audience (people over fifteen) know that corporations get money from either people who choose to buy the goods or services they make, or from shareholders who give money (voluntarily) in order to help the company profit and to keep themselves off the street.
“Big polluters” are really law-abiding hard-working citizens
If you hung out in Labor-land too long, you’d think industry was full of Ogres, but the people that the carbon tax is attacking are already THE big contributors. “Big-Polluters” provide things to the community: like keeping houses warm (or cool), and helping move food to the table, and that’s just for starters; they provide money, yes buckets of cash, and lots of it, to the families of the people who help them make it all happen (known as employees); and as if that’s not enough, they pay more than a third of all they get after that to the people of the nation (its called tax).
So let’s figure out what happens when the government gets even more involved in this chain of transactions.
When companies pay the carbon tax, the money has to come from somewhere: i.e. the consumers, shareholders, and employees will all ultimately pay more or receive less. And of course so will the punters who have their superannuation tied up in company shares (though they may not realize it).
Meanwhile foreign investors flee to places where there is not so much sovereign risk, like Chad, Guam, and Venezuela,
Then through the magic roundabout of “government” (with a bit of leakage), some of the money that was directing resources to where they could be most effectively used, is shifted instead to employ green police who fine you if you put PET bottles into the glass recycling bin. Soon, shareholders realize that they need to move to nations with lower tax rates (almost anywhere outside the EU), and the last few consumers of Australian goods switch to buying Chinese things from factories powered by cheap coal. Meanwhile foreign investors flee to places where there is not so much sovereign risk, like Chad, Guam, and Venezuela, and the Australian sharemarket slowly deflates. Formerly successful companies employ fewer people, those sacked — poor sods — spend less, and even their friends with jobs spend less, because they know they could be next for the chop. Next, all the items those now-unemployed-consumers could have bought, stay on the shelves, to be discounted for a sale-with-no-end, and then to top it off, some more companies go bankrupt.
The cycle thus begun has been tested before many times across the world. By ham-stringing the most productive, promoting inefficiency (think-solar), and scaring the pants of everyone who thought they might invest in Australia, we too can increase unemployment, drive smart people from the country, and become the plaything of redistributing apparatchiks who never managed so much as a school canteen for profit. Argentina here we come.
Congratulations to the Labor Party. It’s the largest pork-barreling wealth-redistribution in the history of Australia, and the promises to “over-compensate” low and middle income earners might buy enough votes to allow them to take an axe to the national economy.
And all that just to make a meaningless difference to world temperature (even if the IPCC weren’t exaggerating). But plenty of jobs for bureaucrats and green police, eh?
Let’s put the “polluters” in jail, right?
It’s not just Bob Brown, now it’s also the Labor Party who refer to large law abiding corporations as “polluters”. If they are polluting why aren’t they in jail? It’s another not-so-subtle form of namecalling.
Why do the big businesses put up with the insults?
Science is still the camouflage
Greg Combet, the Australian Minister for Climate and so on, at the National Press Club said yesterday: “The foundation of any such policy is the climate science.”
“OK”, the taxpayers of Australia respond: so show us the one peer reviewed paper with empirical evidence that CO2 doubling causes more than 1.2 degrees of warming? Where’s that mystery paper hiding? And “No”, a paper from a computer simulation will not do.
“Argentina here we come.”
Combet again: “No Government acting in the national interest can ignore such advice.”
Of course not Mr Combet, but did you audit it, or get a second opinion? Or did you commit our nation to deliberate hardship simply because a bunch of self interested guys in lab coats and nice suits said you had to? If you took unaudited and unchecked advice like this in any financial arena you would quite properly be run out of Canberra as a fool — anyone remember Tirath Khemlani and the bypassing of the Loans Council?
It’s not as if there are any clouds of impropriety hanging over the advice you are getting … cough cough … C-l-i-m-a-t-e-G-a-t-e …. ahem … thermometers next to hot concrete, graphs made from bus timetables… charts that depend on a single tree in far north Russia… and global data sets that are missing…
God help us all, can someone teach the Labor Party about where money comes from, and how corporations are not actually monsters, but organized collections of … wait for it… people?
Will the public fall for the it’s-too-good-to-be-true-policy of money for nothing?
The bottom line is that the government can’t give them anything other than what it has already taken.
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* They did try it, and it was called the Soviet Union.