Rudd’s essay railed at “market fundamentalism” and lack of regulation. But he never gets very specific. No mention of recognized mechanisms by which participants may cheat the level playing field. For example, undermining the competition is sometimes an easier road to success than producing a better product at a better price and market it more effectively.

That last is why we have a Trade Practices Act, and we seek to prohibit things like predatory pricing, cartels, monopolistic takeovers, and other anti-competitive practices that can unbalance a market if it’s not regulated properly.

Airlines that cut accreditation of travel agencies for not meeting minimum-quota bookings, banks that do the same to mortgage brokers, consumer brands that cut off supply to retail stores for discounting below a fixed price, supermarket chains boycotting the produce of independent farms in their pursuit of vertical integration and control of Australia’s food supply. Some of these are illegal, some should be, all are done with impunity because whatever the law says, regulators just don’t have the resources to enforce it.

What was Rudd’s response to his own analysis of the problem? Fuel-Watch and Grocery-Watch. Measures which seek to distil the free market into its purest form by adding visibility. If any measure smacks of “neo-liberalism” as Eva describes it above, where is Rudd’s strategy to reintroduce real regulation?

Eva also makes the point eloquently that money, and by extension economics, isn’t everything. But you have to have some sort of working measure of well-being, or else nobody woul ever agree on anything and parliament would become even more disfunctional than it is.

What about “wealth”, redefined to mean that which enables people the most freedom to get on with life and control their own destiny? (Freedom in the liberal sense, I mean.)

Define wealth in that way, and working your way backwards you soon find that although owning lots of shares and a house in Wooloomooloo makes you far from helpless, people still need to eat and society needs control and security of its own food supply. Which is an example of where GDP alone is inadequate. You can sell out your farming sector because it has too many bad years and isn’t competitive enough. Or you can recognize that it has value beyond that of its exports on the international grain markets, and act accordingly.

So far I can’t see any evidence of real thought or creativity from Kevin Rudd on any of these types of things. Just Fuel-Watch and Grocery-Watch, the closest things to “neo-liberal” initiatives that we’ve seen for some time.

I see no evidence that markets consider any benefit to communities or even particular nations, it is just about personal and entrenched wealth. Just coincidentally, this is also destroying the planet.

Vive Chavez and roll on 21st century socialism I say

A more profound point in favour of markets is that they require people to work out how to make themselves valuable to others and, with great deviations from the ideal, but always some tendency, at least in prospect, to come back towards the ideal, to encourage behaviour beneficial to others individually and collectively by rewarding people with more money (especially money) for being more useful to others.

Of course it is all as complicated as a climate model (with clouds who actively respond to provocations and invite alliances with volcanoes and tsunamis) and sometimes for some people the attractions of life in a monastery can be understood and, for all of us who crave simplicity and certainty, the beauties of Sharia law, or maybe the Sanhedrin or the Vatican…… Even in Red State America they do at least give scope for the exercise of human energy and ingenuity in the competitive market place and I suppose one would cope with Sharia by concentrating one’s secular energies on making Islamic finance work and sucking up to the Mullahs or Ayatollahs. One way or another the animal spirits will out and there is likely to be a lot less waste and grief it they are let loose in a neo-liberal democracy than any society where someone knows best.