Our current financial crisis of rising interest rates and overall cost of living increase demonstrates the way capitalism is out of control. Many statistics are revealing the rich are getting richer (and the super-rich are ruling the world) and large corporations, especially in mining, banking and food supply are making record profits.
How does the capitalist system try to rein-in inflation? Well, in Australia the Reserve Bank raises interest rates; that particularly affects the average person, be it through mortgages, rent, or living costs.
Wages, which have been stagnant for nine (Coalition government) years, no longer meet the workers’ needs.
If the Reserve Bank’s only hammer is to belt the general population with rate rises, why doesn’t our democratically elected government step in to charge the price gouging corporations who are taking advantage of the situation, and apply a ‘super profit’ tax?
Surely if we look at previous years’ profits of companies and can see a trend that indicates record profits year-on-year, then some equity should apply; so that not only shareholders, but the general community, either gets a share or at least aren’t ripped off.
Fuel at the bowser is a classic example. From December 2014 to April 2021 the barrel price was below $62, from January 2022 to December 2022 it sharply rose to $116 then quickly fell back to below the ten-year average of $78. The bowser price during those ten years has gone up and up, not at all indicative of the barrel market price. What a ripoff!
Central banks and the fiat currency that comes along with it, are anti-free market capitalism. ‘Introduction of central banking’ is the 5th plank of the communist manifesto.
Before the RBA and its predecessor the Commonwealth Bank, people could use anything they liked as money in Australia. Businesses minted their own coins as money. If someone would accept it, it was money. If someone over printed, people would declare it to be crap and stop using it. That’s how free markets work. The govt generally wanted gold or British coins, but we, the people, could use whatever proved to be trust worthy. They have passed many different laws over the last 112 years to stop us creating private currencies.
The current inflation problem in Australia was admitted to in the Senate a week ago. The RBA ran up the money printer at the beginning of covid, they didn’t issue govt bonds like usual, they just printed as supply of goods and services dropped and handed it out, mostly to the big banks. Now they have a problem, particularly since we are also coupled to the failing petro-dollar, but that’s a far more complex story. Hot take, it’s not a free market outcome, it’s a ‘government controlling the means of currency production’ Marxism problem. Buy a bitcoin or a gold sovereign.