The Victorian ALP is full of commie thieves

Economic illiterate John Brumby holds the post of Victorian Treasurer. His latest Marxist vision is reported by the Herald-Sun:

Treasurer urges more cash for ideas

THE Federal Government needed to spend an extra $860 million each year on scientific research and development if Australia was to compete in the world, Victorian Treasurer John Brumby said today
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"Private sector R and D funding in Australia is very, very low by international standards and one of the reasons for that is the lack of encouragement within the tax system."

I can't believe its 2006 and we still have such incompetent morons running the show. The sheer idiocy of suggesting that government (e.g bureaucrats, politicians and lobby groups) is super-intelligent and able to run an economy and allocate resources to a better outcome than millions of citizens who would otherwise make many millions of decisions each day, is naive.

Only true entrepreneurship and innovation in a free and unregulated market, not reckless spending, can result in progress. I'm sure that these socialist politicians will tell you that there isnt enough R&D spending and produce some statistics to compare us to other countries to justify the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes.

Fools such as Brumby rarely consider the fact that useful, i.e productive gains from technology, are measureable in terms of profits to firms. Who honestly cares if we spent billions to have some high-tech fancy breakthrough if the benefits can't be measured in terms of dollars? If it doesn't improve our productivity, reduce resources and/or save time, well then people wouldn't spend on it. Any R&D, whether it be electronics or pharmaceuticals, is undertaken by the free market in the expectation that it will produce something new that the market is willing to pay for.

Government expenditure on R&D is a misallocation of resources, as is all government spending.