We know price gouging drives inflation, so does Albo

 

The emerging reality is that the Albanese Labor Party is no friend of ordinary Australians, and prefers to pretend it doesn’t directly punish us all in order to stay onside with corporate gangsters running amok.

The ABC’s The Drum/David Taylor offer yet another explanation showing that completely unprincipled corporate price gouging is driving inflation, and that the government, through the Reserve Bank Board, is punishing ordinary consumers for it with interest rate rises.

A complete disconnect in policy and rationality.  Let the corporates (big business, not the corner shop) rip our very last dollar from us to pad out their profits, and executive bonuses for doing so.

Should we really believe the government’s only tool to counteract the ensuing inflation is to beat ordinary Australians with the stick of interest rate rises until we run away, hide, and stop spending?  A strategy so dumb you have to wonder why government doesn’t just bring on the recession it’s aiming at by stopping its own spending?

It’s a universally accepted given that government in a liberal democracy can and should step up market regulation exactly when market failures occur.  Unprincipled price gouging is market manipulation, and therefore a massive market failure, permitted to go unchallenged by way of corruption or just amoral lack of care for citizens not wired into that cycle of corruption.

So, why does the Albanese government not step in to do what really could address price gouging?  And that would be superprofit taxes on corporations, and a higher individual tax rates on individuals profiting parasitically from price gouging?

The answer is that the Labor Party is not a champion of working class people, nor even of the middle class.  It is a common or garden conservative party as much in bed with big business as anything to the right of it.

The ALP doesn’t really give a shit about the pain that ordinary Australians suffer because of its maintenance of a mismatched set of economic indicators and policy tools.  And perhaps rightly so, because we don’t really have much choice but to vote them out for even worse gangsters.

One thing both the ALP and the lunar right may have overlooked, though, is the possibility that they will never again be entrusted with the absolute majorities they need to pursue their plutocrat agenda.  A term here or there as indication we want the other side out more than anything else for three years, but not as endorsement of the parties that win that way.  You might say this is exactly true for Albanese’s election win in 2022.

The only rational response from ordinary Australians to be so much abused by government in order to allow corporates to profit is to vote independents and minor parties.  Every time.  Not because they can necessarily fix things, or even want to, but because it denies absolute power to the major parties, and therefore also stability and comfort to their sponsors-the corporates laughing at Australians while they rob us. 

A black eye for the biggest and most persistent, unprincipled gangsters in Australia.

PS, 13 February 2023: Alan Kohler's column this morning makes for a less combative take on  getting the many to help further concentrate wealth in the hands of the few by punishing them with interest rate hikes in rapid succession.