The world is going neither "right" nor "left", it's going more authoritarian on an orthogonal axis.

Rubbish. We've had thirty years of tax reductions, deregulation and shrinking public services.

The world is most assuredly moving "right"wards.

We have been watching these sorts of things come out of Australia for years. The labor government was at least as bad about it with their black lists and various censorship schemes. In the article also notice that the bill has the support of both the conservative government and the labor establishment. So blaming this on the conservatives seems questionable.

New Labor have been just another conservative party for over a decade now.

As for as I can see there is no party, other than the greens, who are really against this stuff in Australia.

That is because the Greens are the only left-wing party of any size.

We have the same problem in the US.

In fact, the whole Anglosphere has the same problem. The steady march of selfish, greedy, narcissistic right-wing politics that has been taking over since Thatcher and Reagan kicked it off, has all but eliminated left-wing politics and brought with it the destru

Yes, well the devil's in the details. My definition of 'fair' is not the same as the left's. Mine is keep what you earn (or at least 90% of it or so), and allow the meritocracy to operate more naturally.

Right. So you favour increasingly concentrated wealth, the power it wields, and the inevitable corruption it breeds.

Theirs boils down to insistence on equal outcome, everywhere, even at the cost of liberty and bonafide justice.

Completely false.

The "insistence" is on equal opportunities.

The comical fantasy promulgated by the Right, however, is that everyone born into a western democracy inherently has equal opportunities. That the black child born to a drug addicted single mother has the same opportunities in life as the white child born to two high-earning professionals, because both were born in America. Undoubtedly, they will be able to trot out a couple of cherry-picked examples of such disadvantaged children who have, against all odds, escaped their demographic destiny. They might even produce some similar cherry-picked examples of rich white kids whose parents abandoned them after one too many low-level drug charges or car crashes and have sunk into desperate poverty.

But it's just ideological bullshit. Statistics, data and history show the truth. Wealth breeds increasingly more wealth and poverty more poverty, in feedback loops. The best society springs from both of those ends of the scale being curtailed to build a strong middle class. The period of human history with the greatest increase in wealth, productivity and living standards were the few decades post-WW2 - with its high taxes, strong regulations and comprehensive welfare systems - before Thatcher, Reagan and their acolytes' neoliberal cancer started destroying western democracies from within in the name of greed, selfishness, and free-market fundamentalism.

Historically, leftists (of any flavor) want to centralize power in the state under the guise of doing 'The Peoples'' bidding, and rightists prefer smaller governments and traditional values.

You sound like the people who say "historically, marriage was one man and one woman".

Ie: You're cherry-picking a very specific point in time to call "historically".

In reality, "historically" - that is to say, where the terms originated - the Right is the side of concentrated, inherited power - monarchies and serfs - and the Left is the side of democracy, individual rights, equality, freedom of speech, and the like.

Every "freedom" you cherish today, you need to thank progressive politics for.

Let's assume God does not exist. Therefore heaven does not exist. Therefore things like morals don't matter because you don't go to heaven or hell or are not judged regardless of what acts you commit.

For those who have ever wondered what a non-sequitur is, this is a prime example.

Again, how does that justify limiting the number of cabs? That's what licensing does.

No, it doesn't.

As implemented, thanks to crony capitalism and lobbying, the number of taxis is limited. However, this artificial limitation is in no way an inherent feature of an accreditation system.

No higher authority should be able to make it illegal for consenting adults to interact with one another.

Indeed. That's why laws dealing with fraud, workplace safety and food standards are just Government oppression.

It takes a special license in order to inspect your vehicle?

No.

You are required to have your vehicle inspected to hold the special license.

Are there really taxi unions? Around here taxi drivers are lucky to make minimum wage.

Taxi *owner* "unions". Though I doubt they're "unions" in the traditional sense. More likely "associations" like doctors or lawyers.

What moral authority does the state have to stop consenting adults from forming their own contracts and doing business with each other?

Should people be able to sell themselves into slavery ?

What does "... for profit" mean? If you consume $6 in gas and you friend gives you $5, paying $2 more than their share, is that "for profit"?

If you have someone over for dinner and they pay more than their share or the groceries that go into the meal, are you running a restaurant for profit?

No.

Next question ?

But I think you will have a hard time convincing most reasonable people that pornographic films of actual children should be legal.

He didn't say the films should be legal, he said looking at them shouldn't be illegal.

Not necessarily (think about it!), but in any event, it is far from clear that minimum wage actually gives more people more money.

Counter examples (actual, real-life, counter-examples supported by data) would be interesting to read.

You can, of course, add the money received by those people who benefit from the minimum wage laws to the total money available to spend. However, businesses pass increased costs on to consumers, or go out of business.

Or they could, shock, horror, take less in profit.

In effect, people's net purchasing power goes down. Instead of helping the people you want to help, you end up hurting them.

Purchasing power isn't going down because labour is getting more expensive, it's going down because labour is steadily getting paid less and less because capital is taking more and more.

The only place the continual downward pressure on wages ends is a tiny proportion of wealthy people who own everything and a huge proportion of people of subsistence incomes. When hardly anyone has any disposable income, where do you think economic activity is going to happen ?

Thus, merely "increasing" economic activity is not a valid goal: to be beneficial to society the economic activity has to be healthy activity, not the production of shoddy products. This can only be the case if we don't cause a net reduction in people's buying power (which is what minimum wage laws tend to do).

Again, evidence to support this claim would be useful.

In reality, countries with higher incomes at the lower-end, rather than the rock-bottom incomes you are advocating, are the countries that have the higher quality goods you are insisting they will not.

No this is done by welfare laws (of which there are a plethora).

No, welfare is there as a safety net for people who are unable to work. Since neoliberalism took over the western world and maintaining a certain level of unemployment became a policy goal (to reduce worker bargaining power and suppress their wages), it has become a necessity for millions of people ready, able and willing to work but who cannot find anyone to work for.

What you are talking about is a universal basic income, which would need to be set at a similar level to minimum wage to meet that objective.

I never gave my opinion on the matter.

Yes, you did. Your opinion was:

"So lets pass a law that says every person should be paid $50,000 per hour. Economic activity ought to be AMAZING then!"

Which, while obvious hyperbole, is meant to somehow refute the original point by taking it to an extreme never suggested or implied.

Your ignorant political stereotypes led you to make assumptions about what things I never even commented on.

I didn't make an assumption about anything. Your following comment called people who couldn't find work "parasites".

just because you are economically illiterate doesn't make something "a lie".

You argue the service "can no longer be provided".

That is a lie. It *can* be provided. It's just that customers clearly don't value it enough to make providing it worth the cost.

if it could and it were economically advantageous for companies to provide it, they would have done it.

Yes. I believe that was my point. It's not sufficiently "economically advantageous" to cover its cost.

Nobody had to force the gas stations in the past to provide the service, it was in their best interest to do it because it attracted more customers and there was a competitive pressure to do it.

I'm not quite sure what your point is with this straw man. No-one said anything about anyone being forced to provide full service in the past.

that's the propaganda line, sure. The reality is of-course completely different. The wages of the workers have been destroyed by inflation, not by 'corporate profits'.

Ratio of labour to capital share of GDP says otherwise. Nearly all the benefits of productivity increases over the last few decades have been siphoned to the top 10%, and especially the top 1%. Workers have been getting shafted as their bargaining power has been progressively destroyed by removal of their legal protections and the sadistic philosophy of NAIRU (to say nothing of the ever-increasing "rights" of corporate entities). Meanwhile, the taxes that are supposed to discourage the inevitable greed, selfishness and hoarding of the wealthy and recover some of their waste into productive endeavour, have been completely gutted.

That's before even talking about the mind-boggling explosion in private debt that has been taken up by households in an effort to maintain increasing living standards in the face of stagnant or declining incomes. Encouraged by banks and the wealthy, of course, because people madly paddling the canoe rarely have time to rock it.

It is a pattern that has repeated across the entire Anglo world for decades, it is the aftermath of Thatcherism, Reaganism, and whoever-your-local-neoliberal-psychopath-copying-them-was-ism. Every country has had one, and the outcomes have been the same in all of them - reduced unionism, reduced workers rights, increasing unemployment (because of the previous two events), dramatically decreasing taxes (primarily for the wealth), privatisation of public assets, decaying public infrastructure, decreasing public services, decreasing welfare, decreasing social mobility, increasing income inequality, etc, etc.

What's astounding (well, not really) is that after 30 years of this disaster, most politicians and a sizeable chunk of economists argue the problem is we're not doing it enough !

The world is heading towards a new fuedalism, where the serfs are kept in their place not by threat of arms, but by barely adequate incomes and oppressive debt. It's a Libertarian wet dream - all the slave labour they want to make the rich richer, while maintaining a facade of voluntary participation from the victims since no (overt) physical coercion is involved.

The inflation is created by the Federal reserve bank of America buying up bad USA debt from the Treasury (and the rest of the market) for decades following Nixon's default on the US dollar in 1971.

The core problem in the money supply isn't inflation, it's usury.