The main form of libertarianism in Australia is an utilitarian one in which the maximization of utility serves as an axiomatic first principle. These Libertarians believe that individuals and groups should be free to trade just about anything they wish with whomever they wish, with little to no governmental restriction. They hold that free markets and private property generate good utilitarian outcomes.
This variety of libertarianism holds its political principles to be grounded not in self-ownership or the natural rights of humanity, but in the beneficial consequences that libertarian freedom and institutions produce, relative to possible and realistic alternatives.To the extent that such theorists hold that consequences, and only consequences, are relevant in the justification of libertarianism, they can properly be labeled a form of consequentialism.
Libertarians hold that most, if not all, of the activities currently undertaken by states should be either abandoned or transferred into private hands--hence the idea of the minimal state --a critique of ‘governing too much.’ This critique is different from classical liberals. The latter tend to share libertarians' confidence in free markets and skepticism over government power, but they are more willing to allow greater room for coercive activity on the part of the state so as to allow, say, state provision of public goods or even limited tax-funded welfare transfers.
What we represented with is the liberal myth of the self-generating natural and organic body of free markets, which have “self-correcting tendencies”. The natural and organic is, more often than not, interpreted as a machine that needs a good motor and re-engineering to keep ticking over. The recent language of an order of economic growth, efficiency and productivity comes from neo-liberal mode of governance in Australian political culture. It is the logic of finance capitalism-- the finance markets will decide the trajectory of Australia--that emerged with Australia becoming a part of the internationalisation of the world economy in the 1980s.
Rather than being linked to substances and objects, in finance capitalism money relates abstractly to other monies, producing new forms of abstraction especially those derived from speculation on the volatility of inflation and deflation of money. Money takes flight from the ground on which it is generated, not to be re-invested into machinery or land, but rather to be invested in the deterritorialized cyberspace of financial markets viewed as numbers on computer screens.
Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey is an example of an academic going online and engaging with contemporary issues. This is in the context of Harvey, a Marxist geographer, deciding to post his class lectures on his own website.This is a text that he has been teaching for 40 years and it informs his political economy understanding of the current global financial and economic crisis.
He says that what we are witnessing in the US is a massive consolidation of financial power in that the US will end up with four or five major banking institutions in the United States and nothing else. Harvey argues that the term ‘national bail-out’ means bailing out the banks, since the money goes to the banks, but not to the homeowners who’ve been foreclosed on. And the banks are using the money not to lend to anybody but to buy other banks. They are consolidating their power.
The analysis in the Why the U.S. Stimulus Package is Bound To Fail is Marxist, and it is grounded within a consideration of geopolitical shifts of power in an attempt to both imagine and map the changing landscape and scale of capital in our moment. The discussion focuses specifically on China as an emerging hegemonic power. In the post Harvey says:
Much is to be gained by viewing the contemporary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since 1980 or so will almost certainly increase. The manner, form, spatiality and time of these surface disruptions are almost impossible to predict, but that they will occur with greater frequency and depth is almost certain. The events of 2008 have therefore to be situated in the context of a deeper pattern.
Harvey argument explores the way that the US is only able to implement a weak Keynesian program to deal with the recession whilst the Chinese are in a position to implement a fully fledged Keynesian programe. he adds:
The overall effect will be to accelerate the drift of wealth from West to East in the global economy and rapidly alter the balance of hegemonic economic power. The tectonic movement in the balance of global capitalist power will intensify with all manner of unpredictable political and economic ramifications in a world where the United States will no longer be in a dominant position even as it possesses significant power. The supreme irony, of course, is that the political and ideological barriers in the United States to any full-fledged Keynesian program will almost certainly hasten loss of US dominance in global affairs even as the elites of the world (including those in China) would wish to preserve that dominance for as long as possible.
Harvey argues here that his concern is about, the likely uneven geographical impacts and responses to the crisis conditions. The export oriented development model that has dominated in East Asia is in deep trouble:
If the Chinese and other East Asian powers find themselves forced to abandon the Export-Industrialization model (which is now failing catastrophically) and to go to something like an Import-Substitution strategy (which was by no means as unsuccessful as it is usually depicted when practiced in the 1960s in Latin America) and a development of their internal markets (almost certainly coupled with internal repression of dissidence), then they will not have the money to lend to the US.
Education policy in Australia since the 1990s has put short-term political management first and this has led to the neglect of longer term problems and issues. In recent years policy has oftenappeared to be rudderless and unable to address the big issues, such as the decline in basic research capacity; how to build a layer of top notch research universities; the emerging needs of industry in the knowledge economy; how to secure genuine diversity of educational mission; whether the orientation of the international program is appropriate; how to securethe renovation of training; what to do about the emerging shortage of academic staff when the baby boom cohort retires, and so on.
Consequently, there was little thinking about policy on Australia as a knowledge economy.
Michael Hudson in The Language of Looting says that the rhetoric of “free markets,” “nationalization” and even “socialism” (as in “socializing the losses”) has been turned into the language of deception to help the financial sector mobilize government power to support its own special privileges. He adds:
The [US]Treasury’s plan to “socialize” the banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions is simply to step in and take bad loans off their books, shifting the loss onto the public sector. This is the antithesis of true nationalization or “socialization” of the financial system. The banks and insurance companies quickly got over their initial knee-jerk fear that a government bailout would occur on terms that would wipe out their bad management, along with the stockholders and bondholders who backed this bad management. The Treasury has assured these mismanagers that “socialism” for them is a free gift. The primacy of finance over the rest of the economy will be affirmed, leaving management in place and giving stockholders a chance to recover by earning more from the economy at large, with yet more tax favoritism. (This means yet heavier taxes shifted onto consumers, raising their living costs accordingly.)