Andrew Bolt: Beware Jim Chalmers’ socialism in a green mask

Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ tells us Labor wants to “build a better capitalism”, but we’ve seen this government-knows-best arrogance before, and it didn’t end well.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers. Picture: Gary Ramage

The best thing about Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ new essay is that it’s shorter than Kevin Rudd’s.

The bad news is it’s still 6000 words telling us what could be said in 10: Labor wants to spend even more because it knows best.

And so, Chalmers humbly announces, he’ll “build a better capitalism”, the clever little monkey. Hold on to your wallet.

Chalmers, just 44, clearly wants to be seen as the thinker of the Albanese government and next to succeed the 59-year-old Prime Minister, so has explained in The Monthly how he’s going to make capitalism “more aligned with our values” and “forward-thinking”.

He notes Rudd, as Labor Opposition Leader, also wrote an essay about fixing capitalism in the same magazine just before he (hint, hint) became prime minister.

But Chalmers only manages to remind us of Rudd’s arrogance and his failure, which Chalmers will surely share.

Rudd wrote 7000 words on how he, too, would reform capitalism, by giving us “social democracy” instead of the “unrestrained market capitalism” of the Howard Government that had allegedly encouraged “individual greed”.

We saw how that ended. Rudd launched a tsunami of spending that wiped out the surplus and buried us in debt.

His government-knows-best conceit also had Rudd wasting billions on dud schemes like installing free home-insulation, then taking it out before your house caught fire.

I predict something similar from Chalmers, who waffles that his better capitalism will give us “an orderly energy and climate transition”, a “more resilient” economy and “growth that puts equality and equal opportunity at the centre”, by “redesigning markets”, “defining targets”, helping “flows of capital into priority areas” and “co-investing”.

Uh oh. Socialism in a green mask.

All that “redesigning” and “defining” and “co-investing” by government has already hurt us by helping to shut a third of our coal-fired power stations, leaving us with electricity that costs too much.

Now it’s got Labor capping the wholesale price of local gas and coal, leading to a strike from gas suppliers and a potential crippling of investment.

The problem with Chalmers’ plan is that politics has different rules to markets. Markets tell you what’s popular and what’s not, what works and what doesn’t.

A government, in contrast, can insist on dumb things that don’t.

For instance, your power bills shows green power costs more, but this government says it doesn’t.

So beware Chalmers’ “better capitalism”. There’s a reason the old one made us so rich.