economics

I have posted this thread on Twitter this morning: I criticised Labour, Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting for their comments on GPs and their financing
Read the full article...

A couple of days ago Wes Streeting, Labour’s shadow health secretary, attacked GPs, saying their finances are murky, in the process obviously seeking to blame
Read the full article...

One of the first budgets I covered as a journalist spelt the end of the career of the man who delivered it. John Dawkins, who had been finance minister in the formidable first Hawke cabinet of 1983, had finally achieved his ambition of taking the treasury portfolio after Paul Keating […]

When Bob Hawke died in 2019, two days before the federal election, many mainstream commentators took the opportunity to remind the prime ministerial hopefuls that in terms of charisma, persuasiveness and popularity they didn’t exactly measure up to the example of the Silver Bodgie.

In How to Rule Your Own Country, Harry Hobbs and George Williams consider the phenomenon of micronations, which is to say territorial entities whose members claim independence or sovereignty but which lack diplomatic recognition.

Towards the end of Dreamers and Schemers, his ‘political history of Australia’, Frank Bongiorno tells us that the term ‘democracy sausage’ first entered public discourse in 2012. The date, he suggests, is significant, for while the coinage seemed on one level to speak to the relaxedness and egalitarianism of the Australian electorate, and even to a sense of celebration and fun as regards the institutions of democracy, its introduction coincided with a sharp decline in public trust in politicians and the political process.

Capitalism is corrupt, but its defenders say it can be regulated to become less savage. History shows that the tendency of power and money to aggregate and be monopolized in fewer hands makes the dream of regulated capitalism impossible.

The post “Regulated Capitalism”: a Fairy Tale first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Despite the impression many seem to have of me, I live life in a generally optimistic mood, and enjoy much of it a great deal.
Read the full article...

Those of us who fought hard against the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 (and I did, most especially on Twitter) always knew the
Read the full article...