Like Kevin Rudd before him, Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers used the first summer after winning government to write an essay about how he is going to save capitalism. Chalmers begins by quoting Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus saying, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.’ Reading Chalmers one is more inclined to think of that great baseball philosopher Yogi Berra who said, ‘It’s like déjà vu all over again.’

Chalmers didn’t go to the World Economic Forum (WEF) jamboree in Davos but Rudd did and just as the phantom of Rudd hangs over Chalmers essay, there’s also more than a whiff of the WEF. Chalmers wants Klaus Schwab to know he’s a fan. He chides the previous federal Liberal government for giving no thought to ‘the potential of the fourth industrial revolution’, the title of Schwab’s 2016 book on the topic.

Chalmers tells us that we are in a ‘polycrisis’, a term cooked up by Simon Torkington for the WEF. A polycrisis, says Torkington, is a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects so that the impact is greater than the sum of its parts. He says the cost-of-living crisis is the most immediate but that climate-related risks are the biggest future threat facing the world. The WEF helpfully provides a list of the ten most serious risks over the next two and ten years.

But if that’s not scary enough, Chalmers quotes Nouriel Roubini, aka Dr Doom, who forecasts ten ‘megathreats’ in his latest book, talking about a nuclear bomb being dropped on New York, Florida under water, drought from Colorado to California, wildfires all over the American West, the military annexation of Canada, and job-stealing robots. ‘This won’t end well,’ writes Roubini. You don’t say.

Of course, nothing excites the imagination of WEF-fies more than a crisis. Unless it’s ten crises. As Rahm Emanuel, adviser to President Bill Clinton and chief-of-staff to Barack Obama said, ‘You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.’

Chalmers certainly isn’t going to let his crises go to waste. He claims, like Rudd, that the Global Financial Crisis ‘exposed the illegitimacy’ of neoliberalism, which Rudd was going to fix with his own summer essay, a task left undone when he was turfed out of office creating what Chalmers calls the ‘lost decade’ which ended with the pandemic crisis, the energy crisis and the cost-of-living crisis, driven by the climate crisis.

According to Chalmers the ‘common thread’ in these crises is ‘vulnerability’. In reality, the common thread is that each of these crises was caused by politicians in their most dangerous guise, that of grinning do-gooders cracking the whip.

The GFC was created by do-gooding US governments forcing banks to lend to people that couldn’t afford to service their loans when interest rates rose, and regulators who gave triple-A credit ratings to subprime mortgages so that their clients in investment banks could make mega-profits selling them for far more than they were worth. When the inevitable crash came, the Big Banks were bailed out by their mates in government, to whom they had generously donated, and taxpayers and consumers footed the bill.

The so-called climate crisis has taken place while global lower-tropospheric temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.1 degree per decade since 1979, even with the massive increase in CO2 emissions from China over the last 20 years. According to the 2021 IPCC report, Earth’s average temperature in the last decade was 1.09 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial baseline, which means that if warming increases at the current rate, the planet will still be below 1.5 degrees hotter in 2050, meant to be the safe upper threshold, Yet, oblivious to this, governments force consumers and taxpayers to subsidise the most inefficient and unreliable forms of energy production while turning green investors from millionaires into billionaires.

The escalating cost of energy has driven inflation and fuelled rising interest rates and the cost-of-living crisis. This has been amplified by the government’s response to the pandemic, shovelling billions of dollars out to keep people alive while it destroyed their jobs and businesses while coercing people to take a vaccine which has coincided with an unprecedented 16 per cent increase in excess deaths.

Each of these crises has been created by government, the product of bad policies and regulatory capture. This isn’t a polycrisis, it’s a polly crisis. Only the pollies don’t want a cracker. They are crackers.

Chalmers’ modest proposal is to ‘build a better capitalism’ by redesigning markets, saying, amazingly, the ‘clean energy sector is a perfect example’ of what he plans to do to the whole economy, showing how ‘greater levels of private investment are achieved when the government ensures the flow of first-class information’. What Chalmers means by the first-class flow of information is the first-class flow of propaganda and the censorship of any other points of view, using his government’s misinformation legislation that will give the media regulator the power to crack down on online ‘misinformation’ as defined by faceless bureaucrats.

In the clean energy sector, state and federal governments have used a combination of subsidies, taxes, regulations, price caps and outright bans to railroad investors into building the most expensive and unreliable sources of energy that will inevitably pauperise consumers and drive any activity that requires significant energy offshore.

Chalmers proposes to start with climate finance but expand into aged care, disability, education, ‘partnering with the private sector’ in these ‘shared goals’ because, as he admits, ‘the federal budget is deep in debt’.

What Chalmers is really proposing is not some new kinder version of ‘capitalism with values’, it’s corporatism, or just plain old-fashioned crony capitalism, in which power is exercised by the government in concert with the trade unions, industry superannuation funds and favoured businesses for their benefit at the expense of ordinary people. Chalmers claims the last decade was wasted. But there can be little doubt that it will look like a golden age compared to what’s ahead.