Re: Want Doctors? End Government Health Care Monopoly (The NEWS, Nov 7).
Anthonie den Boef’s letter sounds like the old Mulroney/Thatcher call to “get government off our backs,” introduced in a futile attempt to repair an economy being drained out by the $60 billion annual interest charges in our governments’ budgets.
This is not a partisan comment; from the change to total privatization of government funding in 1975, all government budgets of any stripe fell into serial, totally unproductive and therefore inflationary deficits, under interest rates which leapt from a fifty-year average of 5.5 per cent to 10 per cent in 1979, and then to 22 per cent in 1981. The fix was in.
Check it out; rates did not fall below 5 per cent again until 1994, by which time federal debt alone had mushroomed from $20 billion to just short of $500 billion under these enormous imposts. One may also Google the 1993 Auditor General’s ‘Report to Parliament on Interest and the Debt’ (still available) which stated that 92 per cent of our debt was due to decades of borrowed interest. The system remains, unexplained and undefended, as does that other unquestioned corruption— massive private funding of parties.
One cannot obtain any defence from any party of that 1975 un-publicized privatization of the nation’s monetary system, while the Chinese, funding themselves interest-free, and growing at 7-10 per cent a year, must be laughing their heads off to see our programs perpetually underfunded while our debts grow.
Certain functions of government must never come under private control, least of all that of the national monetary system. Our budgetary crises are purely self-inflicted, and our political parties are scared witless, purchased as they are.
Russ Vinden
Errington
