Our Prime Minister hates liberty

The sad reality has dawned on me. Kevin Rudd is much worse than John Howard.

During his 10 year as Prime Minister, Howard actually made very little moves to enhance freedom, deregulate and lower taxes, and he was actually responsible for establishing new bureaucracies, new welfare payments and doubling the number of public servants.

Perhaps he deserved to be thrown out after so long because he was just playing with the existing system and not cutting taxes or deregulating seriously. I could safely suggest it was because of our alarmist and hysterical media and opposition who predicted an apocolypse at any move towards freedom and deregulation. Howard faced the fiercest opposition for some small moves like privatising Telstra and trying to de-regulate (re-regulate) industrial relations slightly with WorkChoices.

But at least he never went about expanding the regulatory powers of ACCC, introducing FuelWatch, FoodWatch and other price controls, introducing new environmental regulations and carbon taxes. And despite not getting rid of the income tax, he would at least make big budget day announcements about reducing it gradually.

Howard always spoke favorably of all moves towards free trade, deregulation, lower taxes.

Rudd has never done such a thing. He has grudgingly endorsed cutting the number of public servants and deregulation, but in effect, he hasn't outlined one single way he will acheive this.

Today, he has revealed his socialist stripes in full activist mode, and blasted capitalism as a "greed is good" ideology. This is one of the most offensive speeches to come from a world leader, and is worthy of a thug-in-chief like Castro or Chavez:

------------------------------------------------------

We’ve seen the triumph of greed over integrity; the triumph of speculation over value creation; the triumph of the short term over long-term sustainable growth,” Mr Rudd said.

“It is perhaps time now to admit that we did not learn thefull lessons of the greed-is-good ideology. And today we are still cleaning up the mess of the21st-century children of Gordon Gekko.”

Mr Rudd said such ideologues always argued that the market knew best except when there was a crash and then “the self-same ideologues argue, having privatised their profits, we should socialise their losses - and, by the way, having demanded lower and lower taxes all the way through”. [ !?!? just exactly which part of capitalism requests that private losses are socialised by the tax payer ?!?!]

“This culture was never challenged by a political and economic ideology of extreme capitalism,” he said. “And this crisis bears the fingerprints of the extreme free market ideologues who influence much of the neo-liberal economic elite. [ And of course government hasn't left its fingerprints on this mess and has made no mistakes at all ?!?!]

“Free market ideologues who have a naive belief that unrestrained markets are always self-correcting and that markets left to themselves will always achieve optimum outcomes.” [ Since when is the U.S Housing market, and the banking system unrestrained and regulated l ?!?!]