Janet Albrechtsen, capitalist snake oil vending on the evils of social justice and social democracy, and please, drink any brew in moderation

(Above: just a couple of entrepreneurs going about their business, in much the same way as Janet Albrechtsen does her snake oil pitches).

Rise up comrades, there's an alarming, even terrifying call to arms in this morning's newspaper:

Those on the Right have a new spring in their step. Right across the spectrum of right-wing politics, from Janet Albrechtsen to Gerard Henderson, they are determined to build momentum for a new free market project. On these pages others have spent the past week bouncing around their ideas about conservative economics and the need to resuscitate the moral impulse behind free market ideology. Determined not to waste a crisis, the language of the Right is, as always, clever, tapping our emotions with talk of rebuilding a better marketplace. Yet, under new disguises, the same old frauds are being peddled. What is being sold as conservative is regressive if genuine progress is our aim. As the global Right rises up to claim its ideology will prevail, there has never been a more critical time to be reminded that social democracy sits at the heart of liberty and human advancement.

Oh okay, here's how it read in Janet Albrechtsen's Beware socialist snake-oil vendors:

Those on the Left have a new spring in their step. Right across the spectrum of left-wing politics, from Michael Moore to Kevin Rudd, they are determined to build momentum for a new social democratic project. On these pages others have spent the past week bouncing around their ideas about progressive economics and the need to resuscitate the moral impulse behind social democracy. Determined not to waste a crisis, the language of the Left is, as always, clever, tapping our emotions with talk of rebuilding a better society. Yet, under new disguises, the same old frauds are being peddled. What is being sold as progressive is regressive if genuine progress is our aim. As the global Left rises up to claim its ideology will prevail, there has never been a more critical time to be reminded that economic freedom sits at the heart of liberty and human advancement.

Yep, it's one of those rousing clarion calls to arms which in reality is just meaningless gibberish at the heart of the left-right divide, this time inspired in Albrecthsen by Michael Moore's laest film Capitalism: A Love Story, preaching to the converted in much the same way as Albrecthsen loves to preach to her converted acolytes.

Well, good luck to her. She's paid handsomely to peddle her mythology, and there's no doubt that preaching from a nice sinecure is a much more comfortable life style than actually doing manual labor in the trenches for the man.

So how's she doing? Well spreading furphies in the usual style:

The glaring omission from these grand-sounding statements is an acknowledgment that government action played a large part in fuelling the boom in the US housing market that became a bubble in the wider mortgage market and finally burst across the globe. Successive US administrations mandated taxpayer-funded home loans to those who, in more prudent times, would be regarded as clear credit risks. There is a great deal of irony, and even more dishonesty, when social democrats such as Barack Obama and Rudd exploit the crisis to demonise free markets.

This is such awesome claptrap that it certainly fills the chuckle a day requirement demanded of commentariat columnists for outrageous distortions and hilarious deceptiveness. Fortunately there are healthy correctives out there in the world of the free press. I'd particularly recommend James B. Stewart's Eight Days The battle to save the American financial system, published in The New Yorker, a gripping read surrounding the events of the downfall of Lehman Brothers (unfortunately requiring a subscription, only an abstract available here).

It is of course the latest double flip and pike by commentariat columnists of the Albrechtsen kind to blame government action for the GFC, when in reality the real failure was the lack of action taken by government to address regulatory problems in the banking and financial-services industry.

The next best step is to call opponents dealers in snake oil, keep chanting preferred mantras (preferably with ears blocked), note that black is white, or vice versa, ignore all shades of grey, and insist anyone who is agin you is wrong, simply because they're agin your simplistic analysis and refusal to allow in shades of grey.

Albrechtsen doesn't miss a beat:

As Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull noted in his speech to the Policy Exchange in London last week, US governments effectively underwrote two-thirds of the US mortgage market using government creations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The GFC was triggered, in large part, by governments in the US assuming a place at the centre of the economy to pursue well-meaning social goals that delivered disastrous unintended consequences. Without an honest appraisal of the causes of the global meltdown, the case for social democracy is a fraud.

Well, we might just as well say that without an honest appraisal of the causes of the global meltdown, the case for unregulated free markets is a fraud. And since we don't like to play the man, we'll just pass over in silence the sundry roles that Malcolm Turnbull played in various capitalist extravaganzas which no doubt these days he'd like to attribute to government intervention (if you're in the mood, why not read The life and adventures of Malcolm Turnbull).

But let's not brood about HIH and FAI (here), let's just consider that those adventures were all good, robust business - no pity for the shareholders, likely as not just rich idle speculators anyway - and focus on the dangers of the left, with their intuitively appealing notion of social justice:

While the Left’s catchcry of social justice is intuitively appealing, there is a reason no philosopher has been able to articulate the principles of social democracy. The closer one looks, the clearer it is that the Left’s language of a new social democratic project is deliberately couched in emotional, ambiguous terms as camouflage for an old project of centralising power in the hands of a few elites who presume to know what the rest of society wants.

Which would I presume be a different set of elites opposed to the few elites - represented by Albechtsen - who presume to know what the rest of society wants. Which is to allow her pet elites to continue running the show.

Because when Albrechtsen tosses around loaded words like elites (why ever did she leave out chardonnay swilling latte sipping to describe and evoke her elites) we know we're in the safe company of an ideologue, a snake oil salesperson, a charlatan, not actually interested in the concept of social justice or social democracy, but rather interested in the notion of wresting power away from anyone she's agin. Because as used by Albrechtsen, the term elite is objectively meaningless. Unless you happen to be referring to the elite who get to scribble out their nostrums for The Australian, and get paid handsomely for the pain inflicted on readers.

Which is why once you've dispensed with the notion that social democracy or social justice is capable of being articulated, you can have the pleasure of boxing such suffering naive idealist utopians around the ears. Never mind the logic, just work on the right jab and the uppercut:

Refugees from the Left - men such as Irving Kristol - have a knack for nailing the illiberal tendencies of left-liberal “reforms”. Kristol, who died last week, likened them to amateur poetry, “more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer rather than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves”. Their elephantiasis of moral sentiment means that they are overwhelmingly concerned with “revealing, in the public realm, one’s intense feelings: we must ‘care’, we must ‘be concerned’, we must be ‘committed’. Unsurprisingly, this goes along with an immense indifference to consequences, to positive results or the lack thereof.”

Well you don't have to look far to discover the notion that Irving Kristol managed to confuse the idealized little guy and the small man, and never understood the difference between "the people" and those who practiced populist manipulation of them (a nostalgic Christopher Hitchens, Farewell to the Godfather).

But we digress, when surely there's time and room for a little union bashing:

These are not arcane arguments for political philosophers. They go to the heart of human progress and how we live. For example, as Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout pointed out last week, the union movement’s hardline push against flexibility clauses in new workplace agreements harks back to an era when “if a mother wanted to collect her kids from school early, they would have to ask everyone on the shop floor whether it was possible and get a collective vote on it”. Those who advocate social justice by centralising power necessarily diminish our individual freedom.

Which of course is resolutely different to the way some employers oppose an employee going to take a toilet break and have a piss if it interferes with the smooth functioning of the floor. Don't ask me how, but it's different.

So then you might ask, what exactly is the point of Albrechtsen's tirade?

Gibberish. Of the one sided kind. But then let's take another turn, towards another great exemplar of democracy in action, the team working for that great pioneer of truth and enlightenment, Richard M. Nixon:

With remarkable relevance to today’s debates, William Simon, US treasury secretary under Richard Nixon, wrote in 1978 of the searing experience of the last great recession caused by the “promise-borrow-spend” programs of social engineers on both sides of politics. In A Time for Truth, Simon tracks a recession that deepened on the back of growing government intervention and stimulus spending. The conclusion was clear: “the country ... taught the social engineers a lesson.”

The only remarkable thing? Albrechtsen's failure to note how social democrats caused the great depression, which was compounded and worsened by the fiendish Franklin D. Roosevelt with his promise borrow spend routines. Social engineering? Why hell, let's have a war. Oops, you mean we have to social engineer an army, an air force and a navy to conduct it? Gibberish.

Ah well, what's left? Well naturally a clarion call to arms, to fight the fiends, who've created so much havoc with their absurd demands for social justice, when we all know we'd be much better off with the industrial system of the United States of the eighteen nineties, where employers were allowed the freedom to use goons and baseball bats. By golly, that kept those bloody marxist radicals in line:

More than 30 years later, history may repeat itself if we allow ourselves to be duped by those preaching a new order of social democracy little different from its forebears. The danger of replicating neo-Keynesian spending policies of the early 70s is we may end up with the disastrous stagflation - economic stagnation, high unemployment and inflation - that defined the middle to late 70s. With that in mind, it is worth repeating what Milton Friedman wrote in the preface to Simon’s book. Critical analysis of social democracy is needed so that “socialist snake oil no longer sells so readily”.

Oh yes, and I forgot the need to spread a little alarmist FUD and panic, as the world will likely come to an end this Friday as a result of the work of the current elites, as opposed to its untimely demise a year ago in the shape of a GFC. That beast stagflation is on the prowl, and watch them all shout about a small rise in interest rates as if it's the end of the world. Coming shortly to a commentariat columnist near you.

Maybe - just maybe - right at this moment, perhaps the snake oil that Janet Albrechtsen is selling isn't moving off the shelf so readily. Especially if you have to pretend that Chairman Rudd is a socialist when he's actually a centrist politician who just wants to be John Howard in drag, especially if that keeps him in power for a few more years.

My suggestion? Whatever brand of snake oil you like to consume, drink in moderation.

(Below: in keeping with a tradition established by The Punch, this site now includes an item of interest to discreet gentlemen readers on a regular basis, together with a snake oil advertisement where the copy provides a more subtle, nuanced approach to the redeeming power of snake oil than Janet Albrechtsen's panegyric to the joys of the free market, and the evils of socialism, social democracy and social justice, never mind that conflating all three is a bit like a spruiker offering to cure deafness with rattlesnake oil).