Whatever Happened to The Fair Go
Saw this article on FB although in fact it it is from SMH. It is a long article so have just put a small part below. This article is is not just from Socialists but from the concern of world citizens from across the board of academic, political parties and IMF.
"What happened to the fair go?
Date
July 29, 2014
•
Record numbers of Australians are sleeping rough as concerns about global inequality rise. Michael Green reports on the growing gap between rich and poor.
“Piketty, the French economist and author of the best-selling tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is in great demand - and short supply. Translated from French this year, his 685-page book sold out all over the English-speaking world. It is already the all-time best-selling book for its publisher, Harvard University Press, which ran 24-hour shifts at its warehouse to keep up with orders.
In Melbourne, the independent bookstore chain Readings ordered just 10 copies at first; since then, it has been selling it hand over fist, reordering 100 at a time. For several weeks, incoming shipments sold out well before they arrived.
"There is an urgent need for a mature community debate about how inequality is impacting on our lives, our culture, our economy and our society. Photo: John Hewson
So, at the Trades Hall meeting to discuss the book - notwithstanding the absence of the author - the audience was particularly attentive. ''Every so often a book just catches interest,'' said Berry, a professor of public policy. ''It's broken out of the scrum, partly by sheer weight of evidence.
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''Piketty shows that capitalism inevitably and remorselessly leads to increasing inequality. In short, unless we do something about it, we're headed back to the 18th-century world of haves and have-nots.''
For his efforts, Piketty has joined the exclusive, counter-intuitive class known as ''rockstar economists''. In May The New Yorker described the backstage clamour of a group of Nobel laureates eager to meet him before a public lecture. But more importantly, inequality is now a global, mainstream concern.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/what-happened-to-the-fair-go-20140728-3cpmf.html#ixzz38vmbDhM3
One thing we can be justly proud of is that somewhere in our collective soul, whether by design or accident or habit, we have developed and cultivated this odd sense of the fair go, of a rough sort of equality and social justice, where the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to those with knowledge, but where tax and redistribution happen to them all.
The Abbott Government, and its supporters in business and the media, hold that Australia, egalitarian Australia, in contempt, and they see this term of government as their chance to feed it to the sharks.
Why would any of us, let alone the conservatives whom they have most betrayed, let them get away with that?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-31/dunlop-feeding-our-egalitarian-nation-to-the-sharks/5638304
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