The idea that governments couldn’t continue with aggressive Covid action had nothing to do with public…

The idea that governments couldn’t continue with aggressive Covid action had nothing to do with public health, but more importantly also nothing to do with economics. Let’s add some history to the spin. Government spending as % of GDP. /1 https://t.co/iXDLZvzobj

It looks a big spend, hey. But look at the comparison, only as far back as 1999. Government spending as a % of GDP hit almost 35%. But adding history here, for perspective. Just defence spending alone in WW2 hit 33% of GDP. /2 https://t.co/p9sD4Dy4IJ

You can see it in the public debt numbers. How for most of the 20th century, until the critical decade of the 1970s, government happily used debt to invest. I want to argue the 1970s is a watershed, because that’s when politics got its grubby hands involved. /3 https://t.co/Bs3GdilOoH

First, look at GDP growth/decline over that same century. How that big surge of government borrowing and expenditure in WW2 for example led to decades of booming economic times. That’s INVESTMENT. Not ‘spending’, as later politics would call it. /4 https://t.co/f4BQ9tAOKA

Amazingly, investing in the country made it boom. Who knew? This is where the 1970s poisons the well. The introduction of small-government, market politics. Where government borrowing and spending is re-defined as the worst evil. Just let individuals do it all, in markets. /5

Have a look at government expenditure as a % of GDP once that waffle became entrenched, compared to the earlier 20th century. Hovering well below 20% most of the time, settling now around that 23% mark. There’s no particular reason that amount is chosen. /6 https://t.co/BQURtwP5M5

Or rather there is. Political ideology. Small government, market politics. Ignoring 70 years of unprecedented prosperity, due to massive government investment in Australian life. I’ve Tweeted a lot of times about how this was actually a social shift, disguised as economics. /7

That the elites pre-wars clawed back control of societies by inventing a fictitious market economy, which defined all State intervention as an obstruction to the perfect operation of a market. Which achieved exactly what they wanted to achieve. /8

A massive flow of wealth and power back to them, with every attempt to regulate that wealth and power in the way we’d done for much of the 20th century described as anti-competitive, destructive of the market. A complete con. A hijacking of social status that they’d lost. /9

The wars and Spanish Flu pandemic destroyed previous social hierarchies, allowing a fundamental refocusing of collective life, on collective aims. 33% of *all* GDP devoted to defence alone, in WW2! Spending under 35% of GDP to fight Covid has to be seen in this context. /10

And let’s not call it spending, using the free marketers’ propaganda phrases. Let’s call it what we used to call it. Investment. In public life. The enormous investments from early to mid-20th century set Australia up for those unprecedented decades of prosperity. /11

We were fighting emergencies, but we not only ended the emergencies, by doing that we set our society up for a much higher quality of life for generations to come. Now compare that with the dreary free market narratives around Covid. A ‘spending’ narrative. /12

Where emergency payments had to be scaled back as quickly as possible, apparently. And the fundamental reason for that is again social. Those same free market hijackers knew their game was up. That their 50 years of dismantling public investment was at risk. /13

So that ‘the economy’ could return to some apparent normal, really just everybody trying to pay for everything themselves, bankrupting most. No public investment to address the causes of the pandemic, to create a new boom in prosperity and health that we saw after WW2. /14

I’ve also Tweeted how Industrial Revolutions more generally are misunderstood as technological and economic phenomena. They’re social phenomena. The revolutions address glaring social need, which is why addressing that need leads to an explosion of prosperity. /15

The free marketers are deliberately blocking the next Industrial Revolution, because they’re the people still living off the fat of the previous one, over 260 years ago. They’ll tell you economic and social problems are distinct. That they need to be ‘balanced’. /16

Rubbish. They’re obstructing economic activity as much as social activity, because they’re the same thing. Industrial revolutions address social need. They’re pirates, trying to suck the last gasps of the last Industrial Revolution into their own bank accounts. /17

So that’s how to see what’s happened with Covid. It should have been an ECONOMIC opportunity (like climate change) to create a new Industrial Revolution, creating vast new prosperity and health for all. They’re not protecting the economy, they’re destroying it. /18

In their own dreary propaganda language, all of these modern small government market ideology governments have ‘lazy balance sheets’. A total drought of investment. Gone is that essential truth, that you have to spend money to make money. Again they’re just pirates. /19

Looting collective wealth for personal gain, under cover of a ridiculous fantasy narrative about self-regulating markets. It’s feudalism, returned, history’s most stable social form. But without any of the historical sense of obligation of the privileged to those below them. /end