By Kevin Healy
The sheer inhumanity, the sheer cold-heartedness of totalitarian communism was exposed once and for all this week with a report that people in the Soviet Union are — thank god we live in a caring capitalist society where this sort of thing could never happen — unemployed.
"Unemployment offices opened across the Russian republic today", the Spencer Street Foulfacts (Receivership) reported, "ending decades of official Kremlin insistence that joblessness existed only in capitalist countries". But Soviet unemployment should end before the week is out, because the very next sentence of the report pointed out, "The Soviet parliament passed a law allowing the state to sell most industry to private companies and individuals, including foreigners".
So remember: if things go well, it's because they've overthrown communism and adopted the freedom of the marketplace. If the economy goes bad, it's because they're communists. The same day, the Foulfacts also reported, "Hundreds of thousands of East Germans will join the dole queues today". This was analysed profoundly as another proof of communist failure.
Once capitalism is firmly established and the great benefits start to flow, there'll only be hundreds of thousands, or a million or two, in the dole queues — which could be eliminated altogether if we took the hard but fair decision, to paraphrase Victoria's dear Premier Joannie Learner, to abandon the dole and put everyone on an equal footing.
Showing how capitalism manages these things, the True Blue Big Aussie With the Big Red Heart, having announced a record profit, and acknowledging that "labour has helped our oil profits", celebrated by announcing it must sack — sorry, make redundant — 5000 workers in its steel division. Imagine how many they would have had to make redundant without a record profit. But that's how it works: develop government policies so they can make record profits, and employment automatically increases, and we're all better off in that famous trickle down effect.
Laurie Conwell, struggling now that he's lost everything, showed how to do it when it was revealed he'd learned who would get the Perth casino, went to the rival and accepted a mere $2 million fee for not participating in that offer, and then went and collected a fee from the highly regarded and ethical company that was going to get it. Keep it up, Laurie — inspirational stuff!
Another stroke of luck for that most blessed of people, the Palestinians. With Zion controlling southern Lebanon in order to bomb the proverbial out of the Palestinians because the Palestinians have the audacity to claim their land as their land, the Lebanese army decided to take steps to get Zion out of south Lebanon. How? By bombing the proverbial out of the Palestinians. "That'll show Zion we mean business", they said.
Finally, they've found the answer to smog. You thought it was cars and other pollution, didn't you? But this researcher says plants also emit organic chemicals. So there's the answer: eradicate all the plants in the urban environment so the human species can enjoy life to the full.