Socialist Governments: Meddling Mediocrity

Over here in London I had a conversation with a Scottish business colleague yesterday, who was telling me how the British government has started discriminating against children who's parents went to university. The policy works such that a student's university entrance scores are adjusted based upon the education history of the student's parents - upward if they didn't go to uni, and down if they did. So in effect, one could be not particularly bright, work incredibly hard to get a score to go to university, and miss out because your parents had decided that a Uni campus was a cool place to hang out in the 60's.

To rub salt into the wound, this bizarre form of social engineering is made even more perplexing by the fact that back in the 60's the British government actually encouraged, through policy, kids going to university. Those that took up the encouragement have unbeknowingly disadvantaged their children.

Frankly, I hate these sorts of policies. I hate this interventionist 'engineering' of society outcomes. I hate this micro-level policy setting that systemically erodes the ability for citizens themselves, acting in a free market within common-sense regulation where self-regulation fails, to find the natural water level.

Take this case. How can any government justifiably penalise a citizen for working hard towards their goals? How can they plausibly justify this policy which pulls hard-working people, who achieve something, back to the pack. It's classic socialist policy that my father warned me of when I was a child. Trying to make sense of the difference between the Labor and Liberal Parties in Australia, he told me "its simple son. Labor wants to drag everyone back to a common denominator. Liberal wants to encourage every person to rise to the best they can be".

Seeing the British Labour party in action scares the crap out of me, because I see the Rudd Government slowly but surely chipping away in the same vein. Kevin Rudd, running his "I'm just like Costello and not like Howard" con job will have us all think he is a Labor moderniser, bringing his union-spawned party into the modern age of free market economics. But what has he done? He's re-introduced tough means testing, he's spent all of the surplus and a whole lot more (thank God Costello created the Future Fund as this could be gone too); and has cost millions of shareholders a fortune by deciding to break up Telstra and, wait for it...creating another government owned telecom company and telling us we can all by shares in that! It would be a bizarre joke if it wasn't true.

Australian voters are typically apathetic for a period of the political cycle. We will only throw out a well-run government if we get bored of a leader we perceive is getting to used to the power (Howard, Keating). Once we've done that, and things are still cruising along we don't really ask very hard questions of our government. We took for granted the ideology of the Coalition, and how that ideology has driven the market and societal reforms that have translated into great prosperity through massive productivity improvements in almost all sectors of the economy, put Australia on the foreign affairs and capital-markets map, nurtured a climate that allowed people to openly and comfortably discuss their religious beliefs, settled the debate once and for all that average people want to send their kids to private schools, improved the already-best-in-the- world healthcare funding system, and dramatically increased volunteerism. We've come to think that ideology is irrelevant, that our political parties are 'all the same mate'.

They are not the same. The ideology matters.