Comments on: The Australian welfare state

By: Michael White

Michael White — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 01:15:27 +0000

The article is heading in the right direction. It is far too easy to recieve welfare and once people are on it, they have no incentive to get off it. Just look at all the different types of government assistance schemes there are. All funded by the taxpayer. People need to learn to provide for themselves. There are only two types of people who should recieve welfare.

1. The elderly and retired. They have worked and paid taxes for most of their life so in their declining years the government owe them something.
2. The handicapped.

If you are an able-bodied man or women and you need money, you get up and go to work in the morning. All of this rent assistance, single parents assistance is just crap. You live with the choices you make in life so don’t expect anyone else to pay for them.

By: Damian

Damian — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:58:41 +0000

Also, charismatic entertaining speakers like Peter Schiff, Thomas Woods or Alex Jones are valuable tools to immediately cut through the idiocy, intellectual and moral depravity of statist ideology to wake people up.

By: Damian

Damian — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:26:22 +0000

“So we need to direct more students to our blogs, and have their minds expanded without drugs. Hard, but not impossible!”

I think piggy backing of and promoting of major publishing sites that publish news and articles daily like InfoWars (useful first step to shock people into questioning the smiley face, velvet gloved nanny state) or mises.org, is a good shortcut since they, and some others are already pretty popular and impressive with their articles and podcasts.
This also totaly bypasses the dog and pony show quagmire of local politics. Maybe young newbies can be more objective and actually get the message if they don’t immediately suspect your just out to promote the liberals or whatever.

By: Nick Gray

Nick Gray — Wed, 06 May 2009 07:26:47 +0000

So we need to direct more students to our blogs, and have their minds expanded without drugs. Hard, but not impossible!

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 06 May 2009 07:08:51 +0000

OK, Steve, what’s the catch? Did you attend Uni regularly, or did you only go intermitently? Or were you an economics student who studied the subject, and realised that Adam Smith and Hayek were right?
How can we bring other Uni Students to the same state as you?
Attend uni regularly, so I’m forced to put up with the socialist crap being peddled everywhere Luckily, computer science remains largely unpoliticized, so I was lucky that I don’t hear it as often as the social studies or arts students. I think I mainly arrived at my conclusions because I left a long winded left-wing rant on the LDP blog at some stage, only to have it refuted pretty completely by whoever it was

By: Fleeced

Fleeced — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:26:22 +0000

Colin Powell: "Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less."

By: Mitch

Mitch — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:16:46 +0000

Here’s a good example of what sets us aside politically from the rest of Australia.
If the federal budget were in a position where it did need to axe some of these programs, and the public were surveyed on which they’d prefer be axed, I’d put money on single people choosing family payments; city and suburbian people choosing those specifically for rural Australia; young people thinking seniors get too much with seniors returning the favour, and so on.
For me, my political beliefs came into shape when I realised the only ‘fair’ way to fix such a problem is to not treat any group specially at the expense of each other.
And I don’t think I would have cared enough to look into it except I’ve grown up with adult figures virtually all dogmatically labor supporters without any concern for actual policy except where it directly benefits or punishes them. That and English teachers explaining to me such concepts as ‘dogma’.

By: Tim R

Tim R — Wed, 06 May 2009 05:15:42 +0000

I think Damian has a point about the lack of comprehensive defense of capitalism in our society generally, especially in government monopolized education. (Although on a technical note I don’t think the core problem of seen/unseen is psychological but rather epistemological).

I do have what I consider an interesting psychological theory though, where I think the more welfare a society has, the more you ostrasize people and force them into the game of gun backed rationing of other’s property.
Because instead of the trader principle of mutual benefit and the good will this develops, we have the I win at your expense principle.
You get pensioners vs uni students for example, or single mums vs families. As the government expands welfare people must compete for the rationing of other people’s money like old dogs fighting over the last scrap of meat in a drought.

I should say that I don’t think analysing psychological effects or causes is the only or best way to approach welfare or other political issues.
However I think it’s ironic that welfare (which is supposed to be a sign of a compassionate society) actually results in ill feeling and distrust for others – the total opposite of the sense of community that welfare advocates desire (or at least I hope they desire this).

We not only see these type of negative consequences all the time, we see total failures of government programs constantly – as I’m sure you guys all know. In fact, failure is expected because people do not know any better. Apparently in Soviet Russia people became so accustomed to food rationing, they could not understand there was another way. They couldn’t fathom the idea that food shortages were not a way of life. Just like our society can’t understand that ridiculous traffic jams are not a necessity.
Politicians and intellectuals assume political action will have a positive effect when the opposite is true.
We are told more public funding for health/education/welfare will have a host of benefits when the opposite is true. These assumptions continue to go on unchallenged over and over.
The bad theory persists like a creationist subbornly insisting the earth is 6000 years old.

By: TerjeP (say tay-a)

TerjeP (say tay-a) — Wed, 06 May 2009 03:39:06 +0000

I never encountered such handy labels when I was at uni. I often subscribed to the label “economic rationalist” although it was usually considered a negative term. Mostly I just knew what I wasn’t. However being always against this or that cause is never as much fun as being for something.

Do think tanks such as the CIS and IPA deliberately market their material within universities or is it left to luck?

By: John Humphreys

John Humphreys — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:51:25 +0000

I also became a libertarian while at university. True, it was while I was studying economics. But the lecturer who started me on that path was himself a social democrat, who just happened to have “free to choose” on his reading list.