It's business that has the greatest sense of entitlement

How the worm – and the world – turns. When the Abbott government came to power just four years ago, it claimed its arrival signalled the "end of the age of entitlement". Don't laugh, it's happening – but in the opposite way to what treasurer Joe Hockey had in mind.

As Hockey saw it, the sense of entitlement we'd acquired, but which could no long be afforded, applied to the social needs of individuals and families.

We saw the results of this attitude in Tony Abbott and Hockey's first budget of 2014, which got an enormous thumbs-down from the public and the Senate, so that pretty much all that remains of the attack on unwarranted entitlement is the unending crusade by the government's Don Quixote, Christian Porter, and his loyal Sancho, Alan Tudge, to root out the last welfare cheat.

Not content with the grand stuff-up that was the "robodebt" use of unguided computers to collect amounts that may or may not have been overpaid, the pair are now hot on the trail of drug-taking welfare recipients.

Drug testing isn't cheap, so it's likely the exercise will cost the taxpayer more than it saves. And drug care experts – who weren't consulted - say addicts can't be successfully coerced into treatment.

Trouble is, successive governments have been cracking down on the crackdown on welfare cheats every year for decades, so there can't be all that many of 'em left.

Why do I get the feeling that cracking down on welfare cheating is, at best, what governments do when they want to be seen to be cutting their spending but aren't game to.

Or, at worst, when they want to exploit the popular delusion that we could all be paying less tax if it weren't for the massive sums being siphoned off by dole bludgers and the like.

Sorry, the people doing by far the most to keep welfare spending high and rising are known as age pensioners. And no one has a stronger sense of entitlement than an oldie fighting for the pension. "I've paid taxes all my life . . ."

But though one of Aussies' less attractive traits has been our proneness to "downwards envy" – the delusion that people worse-off than us are doing it easy – polling by the Essential organisation suggests it may be wearing off, replaced by disapproval of wealthier tax dodgers.

Essential finds only 12 per cent of respondents (including 14 per cent of Coalition voters) are "bothered a lot" by "the feeling that some poor people don't pay their fair share", whereas 53 per cent (40 per cent of Coalition voters) are bothered a lot by "the feeling that some wealthy people don't pay their fair share".

Ask whether they're bothered a lot by the feeling that "some corporations" don't pay their fair share, and disapproval shoots up to 60 per cent, including 51 per cent of Coalition voters.

It's a sign of the times. It has finally dawned on us that the people with the overweening sense of entitlement are our business people.

They used not to be so arrogant, but more than three decades of neoliberal ideology – under which governments should do as little as possible to burden the private sector or restrict its freedom – have left business people convinced they're demi-gods, the source of all goodness and justly entitled to our approbation and genuflection.

They're the source of all jobs, and thus entitled to have their every demand satisfied.

Why should chief executives earn up to 300 times what their workers earn? Isn't it obvious?

Why should the chief executive's package rise by 8 per cent while his workers' wage rise is held down to 2 per cent because times are tough? Because I've just realised that Joe Blow over at XYZ Corp is getting more than me, and I'm better than him.

Why should companies doing legal contortions to minimise the tax they pay, hesitate to demand a cut in the rate of company tax in the name of creating jobs?

The developed world is still recovering from the carnage of the global financial crisis, caused by letting American banks do hugely risky things in the pursuit of higher profits and bonuses, confident in the knowledge that, should things come unstuck, the government would bail them out.

We weren't so silly as to let our own banks behave like that, but the years since then have seen a litany of banks mistreating their customers, as their managers put bonuses ahead of service and the four big banks compete single-mindedly for the highest rate of profit.

Meanwhile, journalists are uncovering a remarkable degree of lawlessness by other businesses: young people paid less than their legal entitlement, exploitation of foreign workers on visas, employers failing to pay in their workers' super contributions.

It's as though business people see themselves as so economically virtuous as to be above the law. Just a bit of red tape those gutless pollies have yet to clear away.

What's changed with the end of the era of neoliberalism, however, is the willingness of politicians on both sides to toughen up on the banks and other businesses.

They'll be paying more rather than less tax in future, and governments are already far less hesitant to regulate them more closely.

I see a lot more coming. Why? Because voters have got jack of arrogant business people.

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Econocrats’ job to minimise damage from lurch to populism

With the collapse of the "neoliberal consensus" between both sides of politics, which is reversing politicians' attitudes to intervention in markets, we're in danger of lurching from one extreme to the other.

My Financial Review colleague Alan Mitchell likes to say that one of the econocrats' primary contributions to good government is to "keep the crazy decisions to a minimum". Never was that truer.

The challenge for Treasury, the Productivity Commission and the rest is to be less doctrinal – less true to the one true economic rationalist faith - and more practical in giving advice that satisfies the pollies' ever-present need to "do something" without the something they do causing a lot of harm, maybe even some good.

To put that into econospeak: econocrats should stop proposing first-best solutions and propose more politically palatable second- or even third-best solutions than have been properly thought through.

Why should they compromise? Because if they go on strike, get the sulks or just let themselves be dealt out of the policy decision process, we'll all be lumbered with a lot of decisions that make things worse rather than better.

That's particularly so now ministers' offices are loaded with pushy young punks at the start of their lifetime careers in politics, who think they know a lot about what's good for the minister and the government but, unfortunately, haven't had the time or inclination to learn much about policy: what works and what doesn't.

Leave a policy vacuum and these chancers will happily fill it. They'll fill it with whatever will get a cheer from the all-indignation-and-no-responsibility radio shock jocks and tabloid loudmouths.

Those reptiles will cheer for what's showy and prejudice-satisfying, not for less spectacular policies the experts know are more likely actually to improve things.

The point is that with the populist reaction against what it's now fashionable for the often-uncomprehending left to call "neoliberalism", we're moving from 30 years of presumption against intervention in markets to a new era of presumption in favour of intervention.

That presumption against intervention came from the 1980s shift to a more fundamentalist approach to neo-classical economics, with its confidence that markets are essentially self-correcting, so intervening in them is more likely to derail this process than assist it.

This involved playing down the significance of "market failure" – factors that stop real-world markets from acting in the perfect way economics textbooks predict they will – or arguing that government interventions to correct market failure usually result in "government failure" – they make the problem worse rather than better.

The rationalists were wrong to play down market failure – it's ubiquitous – and wrong to denigrate government rule-setting for markets as "intervention", as though it's some kind of unnatural act. But they were on to far more than they realised in worrying about government failure.

What ended up discrediting their program of "micro-economic reform" was the way so many privatisations and attempts to make the provision of government services "contestable" were utterly stuffed up by governments that didn't know what they were doing, or were swinging one for their business mates.

Though it's true people have traded with each other since primitive times, it's historical ignorance to imagine that markets in the modern economy are anything other than the creation of governments, regulated and policed under laws of private property, contract, bankruptcy, limited liability, accounting standards and a host of other "interventions" and "regulations".

So there isn't and never has been such an animal as a "free market". What's in question is the degree of regulation and the specifics of what's regulated and how. Presuming against regulation (further or existing) was always an arbitrary and extreme position that would end in tears.

The era of deregulation has discredited itself, with inadequately regulated American and European banks causing the pain and destruction of the global financial crisis, declining standards of business behaviour much in evidence among our own banks, and mounting evidence of business lawlessness.

But for politicians to react to all this with a massive increase in ill-considered regulation would hardly be an improvement.

The real point is regulation is neither intrinsically good nor bad. What it is is very, very tricky. Very hard to get right; easy to get wrong. Bedevilled by "unintended consequences".

Why? Because of the terrible power of "market forces" – actually, profit-seeking firms and self-interested consumers.

There are two mistakes you can make when it comes to regulation: one is to believe market forces are infallible, the other is to believe they're of little consequence and incapable of utterly frustrating the regulators' good intentions.

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