Only the naive can doubt, and hired guns pretend, that monopolists (including oligopolists) will, if allowed, engage in price gouging.

There is no need for an inquiry to establish that. Like the scorpion in the fable about the frog, price gouging is in their nature.

My principal recollection of high school, and indeed university economics, is in how price is determined by the market when competition prevails. But in its absence, price is determined by the monopolists.

The other conclusion, I recall, is that the last thing oligopolists will compete on is price. They prefer such things as advertising.

The job of the politicians is therefore to force monopolists to go against their nature, as the Americans did so well, over a century ago, in the celebrated Sherman and Clayton Acts.

But in Australia, politicians typically go soft on monopolists.

Especially, these days, where monopolists play politics and campaign for far-left,  even neo-communist, policies.

Was anyone surprised when potential competition against Qantas was blocked by the government just as Qantas was vigorously campaigning for the Yes vote in the government’s referendum?

Years before, politicians handed over  the insurance industry holus-bolus to the monopolists by getting rid of two restraints.

First, the usual carpetbaggers were allowed to sell off the mutual companies owned by the policy-holders such as the NRMA.

Then they sold off the the GIO and other taxpayer-owned insurance companies.

Today the highly political supermarkets are left free to gouge both farmers and customers to a level not tolerated in comparable countries.

Of course, there’ll be the cosmetics of inquiry after inquiry, but none will result in any effective legislation being rushed through the Senate before the election.

I will have more to say on this at a later date.

 

While absorbing news about the  King’s illness, the mental impairment of the US president, and the NSW police producing a defence for violent antisemites so weak even a desperate defence lawyer would never use it, bottomless bikinis, also known as G-strings, are making summer tabloid headlines.

This is not about the grotesque mankini, but about an emerging practice limited to the ‘fair sex’ where increasingly, bare buttocks are exposed. As with so many things, there is a time and a place. Worn on public transport, supermarkets or restaurants, a bottomless bikini will raise at least an eyebrow.

But kept to the beach, one interesting trend has not been so far mentioned.

This is the descent, if I may put it that way, from the formerly topless fashion to the current bottomless style.

This has much to do with the West’s current female body ideal, vastly different from  Renaissance Europe and, although women must hide their bodies there, the Muslim world.

Today’s Western ideal of the slimmer, almost boyish look with tightly rounded breasts is sometimes said to be related to an assumption that the great designers of women’s clothes are often gay.

Whether or not that is true, it seems clear that young ladies have come to the conclusion that while their breasts are not as  disciplined as the ubiquitous Australian cartoonist, Brodie Mac, so long depicted them,  their bottoms are.

As to Brodie Mack, I found a cartoon of a typical long-legged, firm-breasted Brodie girl sitting with her bookish admirer in a romantic setting.

She slaps his face while the following limerick explains the reason:

 

There was a young lady of Beecher

Used to roam with a nice schoolhouse teacher

But he asked one night late

‘Do you conjugate?’

She cried, ‘nevermore will I meetcher!’

 

By way of contrast to today’s young ladies, the trend over recent decades has been for many young men to cover up their no doubt well-shaped thighs with shapeless long boardshorts. However useful they are on boards, they do make swimming in the surf more difficult.

Why has this curious latter-day puritanism struck young men while young women are so liberated?

Always on the lookout for a conspiracy, I wonder whether this is an unintended consequence of the never-ending campaign by a cranky and no-doubt jealous commentariat condemning Tony Abbott for wearing speedos, notwithstanding that this is a normal and indeed prudent uniform for lifesavers.

My wise mother used an apt saying on such occasions, probably from one of the old countries from which she came or was intimately related:

‘When you want to hit someone you can always find a stick.’

As to the current preference for bottomless swimming costumes, those who are offended might perhaps consider the fact that the greatest art which human civilisation has produced is very often centred on the beauty of the human body.

It was therefore particularly appropriate, indeed inspiring, that the central feature of the quadrangle at my old high school was a copy of that magnificent statue, Apollo Belvedere, probably the most admired sculpture in the world.

Sir Kenneth Clark wrote that this is an ideal of perfection – reason, justice, physical beauty, with all of them in equilibrium.

The Ancient Greeks and then  the Romans were never afraid to admit the high place of physical beauty in civilisation nor did they hide from the exposure of the body.

Greek civilisation is at the foundation of Western civilisation, an influence fortunately tempering the at-times clerical obsession with sex which can so detract from the fundamental teachings of Jesus.

I am not of course suggesting that the bottomless bikini is an expression of high civilisation, just that at its beginning, Western civilisation in no way denied or shrank from either physical beauty of the body or its exposure.

And given that Genesis says God created the human body in His image, who are we to say the human body should be hidden?

Fortunately, when Christianity fulfilled the Jewish religion, as Christians believe, the commandments were interpreted so as not to limit the artistic interpretation and therefore the showing and indeed celebration of God’s special creation, the human body.

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