Where does the SMH get these clowns?

The SMH dug up a professor from Deakin University's school of law this morning, and asked him to write an incredibly stupid article. That, at least, is the only reason why I can think this pile of putrid garbage was published today.

Having read it twice, I have come to the conclusion that either the dumbing down of our universities has gone so far, even the professors have an IQ of fish shit, or our havens of tranquility are returning to the drug culture of the 1960's.

Apart from being even more badly written than one of my thrown together rants, get a load of this stupidity:

It is also why developing countries are entitled to refuse to adopt greenhouse targets. Global warning has been caused solely by Western nations, whose use of cheap energy increased their prosperity, while at the same time refusing to share the largesse with the largely hungry Third World. People in developing nations are no less entitled to improve their lot.

Western countries are the sole cause of global warming? Has this guy never heard of China and India?

Then there is the crack about "cheap energy". If you want cheap energy, the places to look at are Iran, Venezuala and most of the middle east - hardly "western countries". Petrol is so cheap in Iran, smugglers are smuggling it out of the country to sell it at higher prices elsewhere, leading to chronic shortages in a country sitting on an oil lake. India also heavily subsidises energy costs for farmers - the government pretty much gives electricity away over there. The same holds true in a lot of South America. Sure, the supply can be pretty rough and ready, but it's cheap.

He then has to say that we are refusing to share our largesse with the "largely hungry" world. I guess he is referring to third world shit holes like the Congo, Sudan, Zimbabwe and Somalia, which do contain a lot of hunger. But how would "sharing our largesse" help these countries? If we give aid to Zimbabwe, Bob Mugabe and his mates just steal the lot. If we give aid to the Sudan, the government steals it, sells it and then uses the cash to buy weapons in order to kill more of its citizens. We tried to help out Somalia, and ended up with Black Hawk Down. A stack of aid was even sent into Gaza last week - Hamas looted 100 trucks worth of aid and then sold it on the street.

The west has been sharing its largesse with the poorer parts of the world for centuries. We have developed most of the technology that shapes the modern world, and we have been sharing it and transferring it to other countries without regard for race, religion, creed or political persuasion. Think of Japan prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1868 - today we would see it as a backward, third world dump (with nice artwork and good baths). The west transferred all the new technologies of the day to Japan in a short period of time - the railways, telegraph, electricity, ship building, modern armaments and so on.

Pearl Harbour was not pulled off by a bunch of backward, starving, third world spear chuckers.

The British exported one of the most revolutionary technologies to every continent in the 19th century - the railways. They built railways in India, China, all over South America, Asia and Africa. With the railways came the telegraph, and then electric lights, dams, sewers, modern health practices (vaccinations etc) and on the list goes. Radio, radar, television, the modern printing press, the motor vehicle, bridge construction techniques, computers, power stations, fridges blah blah blah.

Some countries, which were utterly bombed out wastelands 50 years ago (Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan) siezed on the opportunities that the west gave them, which also included transfers of capital and injections of modern management techniques (the Japanese lapped up Quality Management from Demming, an American) and quickly turned themselves into modern industrial or trading powerhouses. Other countries, such as Zimbabwe and Burma, started from a better position than say South Korea - bombed flat by 1953 - and turned themselves into economic wastelands.

Is that our fault? Did they fail because we didn't share enough largesse?

No. They failed because they fucked it up. And they will continue to fail until they reform the way they do things. Us giving them more money won't fix things. I've never been attracted to the idea that giving a junkie more heroin will entice them to give up taking drugs. The same goes with pouring money into fucked up, kleptocratic, murderous regimes.

This moron though can't help himself.

No Australian living below the poverty line should pay tax. It is mindless, especially as they are then subsidised by the welfare system. It is bureaucratic, unjustifiable nonsense. About 10 per cent of Australians are living below the poverty line (about $700 a week for a family of four).

I think everyone should pay income tax, even if those on low incomes only pay a very small amount. The reason for that is I don't want to see a society created where you have one group paying all the tax, and getting little in return (the well off) and another group paying no tax, but getting all the benefits. The danger is that if the latter group grows large enough, they will simply ratchet up the taxes and benefits until it becomes unsustainable. People who pay no tax will always be happy to vote to increase the taxes on those that subsidise their lifestyles. Everyone should have some skin in the game, no matter how minor it is.

Yes, it is bureaucratic nonsense at one level, but it helps to glue society together - everyone contributes. Those on low incomes, no matter how little they are earning, should feel the pain of paying income tax. That way, they might think twice before wanting to "soak the rich".

When morons like this suggest ideas like this, I have a simple proposition. If you don't want a low income family to pay income tax, that's fine. You pay their tax bill for them. You feel their pain. I'm not interested.

I will now drift off on a tangent.

When the social welfare safety net was setup decades ago, it was supposed to be a temporary net for working people that had fallen on hard times. Let's say I can't get work this year, and we run down our savings to the point where there is nothing left, and I have to feed a family of five. At that point, I can understand Centrelink kicking in with welfare payments to keep us alive until the economy picks up and I get a job. But it is a temporary thing - to tide one over when times are bad. I have worked since I got my first job at 12, and even if I end up out of a job, it will be temporary - I intend to work again.

Thanks to social justice jerks like this professor of stupidity, that has morphed into the idea where it is no longer "employment insurance" - it is now a lifelong support system for those that don't want to work. The "intent to work" has gone. The "temporary" nature of welfare was gone by the wayside.

I don't particularly want to work either. I'd love it if my parents were loaded, and left me with a trust fund to live off. I'd spend six months of the year skiing, and the rest surfing or loafing on the beach. But what I want to do and what I have to do are two different things, so I work.

That's just tough shit.

But we now have an entire class of people for whom the idea of "tough shit" does not apply. They can fail their way through school without consequences, for it does not matter if they graduate as utterly unemployable goons - the state will provide. It does not matter if they are feckless, reckless and useless - the state will provide. The idea of work has gone right out the window. A temporary palliative has become a lifelong crutch.

Which is why I laugh when I read people moaning about the poverty line. What Professor Stupid should be asking is, "Why are these people below the poverty line?"

If the answer is, "they jerked around at school and made life a misery for their fellow students and all the teachers", then I say, "tough shit then - suffer in your jocks."

Actions have consequences. You screw up at school, you potentially screw up your life.

If the answer is, "they are addicted to ice/heroin/speed/dope", then I say, "tough shit - how does that make you deserving of paying less tax?" (One might in fact ask why all welfare payments are not dependent on passing a fortnightly drug test).

If the answer is, "I have two kids, and the fathers of both shot through when I got pregnant", then I really start to feel a good belly laugh coming on. In the dim, dark past, women usually checked a man out before rooting him - in order to see if he could provide for a family. Only suitable breadwinners had a hope of getting a root. Women were not so liberal with their favours, because no one wanted to get up the duff to a complete duffer, who'd shoot through and leave you barefoot, pregnant, broke and hungry.

Now, the state will provide. You can get knocked up, and the state will hand over the moolah. A baby bonus for starters, and a fortnightly deposit after that for the next 18 years.

But the downside is that if your "man" does a runner, you might find it tough to find work as a single mum. The consequence of that is you will be poor - the state will feed, clothe and house you, but it is not obliged to turn on the gravy tap. People who work hard get to live in a McMansion with hot and cold running champagne and nine Mercedes in the garage. If you choose to fuck completely useless dickheads, then you'll soon find that actions have consequences, and they are generally unpleasant.

The current economic circumstances aside, this is a land of opportunity. You don't have to be a swot at school to pull down a six figure income - if you are prepared to work in the middle of nowhere, driving a truck on a mine can deliver $100,000 per year to people who might be anything but rocket scientists. And yes, times are tough and mines and closing and those jobs are rare these days, but we've just had a boom like no other, with jobs like that 10-a-penny, and useless sacks of shit on the poverty line could not be arsed to put in a hard days yakka in order to triple or quadruple their income.

What is mindless is the idea of trapping people in the underclass through a raft of do-gooder ideas that have spectacularly backfired.

Instead of finding new ways to betray the constituency that gave him power, Rudd could contemplate one good reason for not increasing the tax-free threshold to the poverty line.

Because the idea was suggested by a moron, who has no place teaching impressionable minds at one of our universities. You wonder why the courts are choked with lawyers arguing that their criminal clients are "victims"? Look no further than this twat.