What’s so bad about inequity?

These intellectuals are proposing that there is a known fair amount to which each is due and that until that amount has been reached the taxpayer has to keep paying. The letter also contained the new canard, "inequality harms growth".

The Australia Institute acolytes should read The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality by Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel prizewinner in economics.

Deaton's book is the story of progress, cast as "the endless dance between progress and inequality, about how progress creates inequality, and how inequality can sometimes be helpful - showing others the way, or providing incentives for catching up - and sometimes unhelpful - when those who have escaped protect their positions by destroying escape routes behind them". Only in the latter sense can inequality be said to be harmful.

The rich in Australia have not set out to destroy escape routes by, for example, destroying public schools and hospitals. Note to the Grattan Institute: designs on the rich are pure envy.

As Deaton and Mancur Olson before him argue: "rent-seeking of an ever-growing number of focused interest groups pursuing their own self-interest at the expense of an uncoordinated majority" may harm economic growth. What leftist acolytes fail to understand is that their supporters are also pursuing self-interest.

Equity is an industry designed to take your money.

It starts with the proposition that money belongs to government and, after deducting for the industry's professional expenses, and the achievement of its great designs, the remainder is yours.

Bill knows a preponderance of public sector workers and beneficiaries butter his bread. I say preponderance because I know many who are aghast at Labor's propensity to invent a need and spend money fixing it.

No one in the government is suggesting denying access to schools and health services. These services are well funded. However, if public debts climb too high, there may come a time when these services fall into disrepair.

As I said to a priest in recent years who argued the need for more money for the poor, if you raise money among parishioners willing to give, good luck to you, but if you want government to confiscate other people's money, you have to appreciate that governments have to ask permission.

Perhaps you could hold an inquiry into the Rudd-Gillard governments' rank disregard for the taxpayers of Australia.

Now that would be interesting, Bill.