Green follies

The success of the Greens is the most striking outcome of the Federal elections. The once solidly working class electorate of Melbourne has now voted for a Greens member, Adam Bandt, who was able to draw on the influx of trendy tertiary educated middle class voters. 

Former Labor senator John Black noted two outstanding characteristics of the Greens’ core demographic. It is well-off and has liberal arts degrees. “It doesn’t have degrees where you have to add up.” Moreover, a large proportion of Greens supporters work in the public sector and enjoy defined-benefit superannuation. "I don’t think they’ve got the slightest idea how a business works, I don’t think they’ve got the slightest idea how a budget works and they’re wedded to the public sector unions."

The following is a summary of the Greens’ taxation policies: 

1. An increase in the company tax rate to 33% 
2. A new personal income tax bracket of 50% 
3. The reintroduction of death duties 
4. A levy of a 100th of 1% on foreign currency transactions 
5. Family trusts taxed as companies 
6. The introduction of road congestion taxes 
7. The reduction or elimination of personal and business tax concessions 
8. A 10% tariff on imported four-wheel drive vehicles for non-primary producers 
9. Support for the original resource super-profits tax as the first step along the road to its policy for a 50% rent tax on mining profits. 

One might cynically argue that the Greens support for “hairshirt” policies are indulgences for good economic times. It seems that all too many Greens voters are parasitical beneficiaries of rising real estate values in inner city suburbs. 

The beneficiaries of the boom are biting the hand which feeds them. We may be astonished at the spectacle of voters supporting policies which are so contrary to their own interests. 

However the paradox of an affluent demographic support for a far left programme may be more apparent than real. After all, Joseph A. Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, said that Marxism is essentially a product of the bourgeois mind. Moreover, he saw intellectuals as the main enemy of capitalism. The very success of capitalism in spawning better education and a higher rate of literacy facilitated the spread of ideas hostile to free enterprise. 

It would seem that some of “the best and the brightest” have committed themselves to the recycling of failed ideas of the past under a new guise. Truly as Karl Marx expressed it, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. 

It is probably no accident that failed communists such as Mikhail Gorbachev have hopped onto the anthropogenic global warming bandwagon. Lee Rhiannon, Senate candidate for the Greens in New South Wales, was, alongside her parents Freda and Bill Brown, a loyal member of the Moscow line Communist Party right up to the end of the Soviet Union. Her reinvention as a heroine of the trendy middle class is a marvel to behold.