Julia Gillard has called an election for the 21st of August, uttering the usual Labor rhetoric of a strong, sustainable, forward-looking economy with a budget surplus while simultaneously promising to spend money we do not have on 'world class' health, education and welfare. Translated, she will move the country further towards centralisation and big government, something very much in line with her socialist upbringing.

That little jibe aside, an important question is will a Liberal government do any better? We have mentioned earlier that, no matter who is elected, the trend of big government, privacy infringements and the erosion of freedom and liberty will continue. The only real difference is how fast it will occur: if Labor win, the trend will accelerate. At what pace I am not sure, but I have a feeling that with Gillard pulling the strings, nationalisation of various industries will definitely be in her sights (education, health and so on) along with wasteful green jobs and ineffective carbon schemes and green energy 'investments'.

So what if the Liberals win? The encroachment of big government will be a more gradual one but it will still continue. With that said, the result regardless of the election outcome will be the same: a continuation and worsening of the welfare-warfare nanny state where, to (poorly) paraphrase Mencken, we know what we want and the government is more than happy to give it to us good and hard.

The Liberals

The people who run the Liberal party have abandoned their roots and are no longer defenders of freedom. Decades of Liberal rule, the self-proclaimed advocates of small government and liberty, left our country with a federal government larger than ever. But it gets worse. Not only did they establish countless federal institutions and bureaucracies along with mountains of regulatory red tape, but this burden is now accepted as a matter of course (people forget that we did just fine without the useless, bloated bureaucratic departments that now exist). It is far harder to remove government apparatus once it is in place than it is to just stop the bleeding. However, that will be quickly forgotten in the flurry of campaign rhetoric and Labor aren't going to criticise something they can use when in government. Speaking of rhetoric, over the next month we will once again hear the usual lies of lower taxes, smaller government, more personal freedoms, then if elected see nothing of the sort. To quote P.J. O'Rourke, "the Democrats [Labor] are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans [Liberals] are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

The fact of the matter is the Liberals will evade responsibility for their big government legacy. They believe that it is not freedom that serves as the pillar of a functioning society but that the state, through brute force, is the answer to all of our problems. Instead of providing Australians with the liberty that they never hesitate to mention when giving emotional speeches, they instead left us with big government, two offensive wars, put Australia on the terrorism map and generally squandered most of the once-in-a-lifetime resource-fuelled influx of revenue. Will this change with an Abbott-led conservative government? Not a chance.

The ALP

Do I really need to say much here? The Labor party operates with a socialist ideology: there is no economic activity that they will not regulate to the nth degree. They used to have some redeeming features, social ones such as anti-war, pro-privacy and civil rights, but if the latest Labor term is anything to go by, these have long since been abandoned. So with their socially-liberal traits tossed out the window, we instead look at their stance and record on commerce - and it does not look good.

Indeed, it would appear that all property is up for grabs to control and meld in the name of moving Australia 'forward'. They will speak of how they successfully managed the economy through the GFC but all they did was kick the can down the road; their stimulus spending will only sustain us for as long as they continue to spend or stimulate spending in particular ways and in particular directions (arbitrarily). When the spending is wound up, the demand and the structure of prices dependent on it, along with resource and labour employment derived from it, will decline. This is why by avoiding technical recession, the Labor party merely laid the foundations for a future, more painful bust as now another layer of adjustments and realignments, on top of the ones needed before fiscal 'stimulus,' are required to fix the economy.

This is hardly what I would call sound economic management.

The Alternative?

Neither the Liberals nor Labor are going to move this country 'forward' in a positive way. They are both part of the same collectivist creed, two heads of the same beast. The only way to progress and move forward is through a belief in freedom; as Hayek said, "...to free the process of spontaneous growth from the obstacles and encumbrances that human folly has erected." We need to move away from centralisation and the idea that 'federal knows best'. I will once again leave it to Hayek, citing John Locke's Second Treatise on Civil Government, to provide direction that I feel we need to move to in order to progress: 

While in his philosophical discussion Locke's concern is with the source which makes power legitimate and with the aim of government in general, the practical problem with which he is concerned is how power, whoever exercises it, can be prevented from becoming arbitrary: "freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power erected in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, where that rule prescribes not: and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man." It is against the "irregular and uncertain exercise of the power" that the argument is mainly directed: the important point is that "whoever has the legislative or supreme power of any commonwealth is bound to govern by established standing laws promulgated and known to the people, and not by extemporary decrees; by indifferent and upright judges, who are to decide controversies by those laws; and to employ the forces of the community at home only in the execution of such laws." Even the legislature has no "absolute arbitrary power," "cannot assume to itself a power to rule by extemporary arbitrary decrees, but is bound to dispense justice, and decide the rights of the subjects by promulgated standing laws, and known to authorized judges, while the "supreme executor of the law...has no will, no power, but that of the law." Locke is loath to recognize any sovereign power, and the Treatise has been described as an assault upon the very idea of sovereignty. The main practical safeguard against the abuse of authority proposed by him is the separation of powers...

Sadly, the chances of a move in this direction are virtually nil. All we can do in the meantime is to continue to expose the fallacies that "...the insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a statesman or politician, whose councils are directed by the momentary fluctuations of affairs (Adam Smith)," repeat on a daily basis - a time consuming task considering their misleading claims and statements take minutes to utter whilst debunking them takes considerably longer - and slowly influence public opinion in the hope that eventually people will come to realise that the current system is fatally flawed and must change.