Long may they reign! Let's hope our own government has enough balls to run this country along the same lines:
If a conservative doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.
If a conservative is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a liberal is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.
If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.
If a conservative doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Liberals demand that those they don't like be shut down.
If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A liberal non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. (Unless it's a foreign religion, of course!)
If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A liberal demands that the rest of us pay for his.
I had never heard of Professor Harry Gelber of the Tasmanian University before but I liked what he wrote in The Bulletin of November 22:
"Trying to reconcile popular or sectional demands for increasingly detailed regulation of some areas of public life with equally powerful demands for a leaner and more accountable public sector may be one of the central problems of government in modern, advanced societies. Another set of difficulties has to do with the absurdities of a system of public finance created by competitive tinkering over several decades.
If one insists on having a sufficiently idiotic fiscal system, with tax structures full of disincentives, with a network of variously privileged monopoly groups, with penalties for success and subsidies for failure, then, however much individual and privileged groups may prosper, the economy cannot work.
For some decades now, more and more people have been shielded from the consequences of their own actions — for example trade unions, the public service, members of the New Class such as teachers — and government has accepted commitments, most obviously in the area of pensions, which it is politically impossible to cancel and economically impossible to honour."
We spend far too much time pleading for government help for almost everything. “Round and about and underneath us are the government’s everlasting arms and, if they aren’t, they jolly well ought to be”, should be the motto on our coat of arms.
