To depoliticise is itself a political act. But to politicise central banking is not to change anything, really. It is merely to reveal what has always been there, and acknowledge that all policy, whether fought out in public or cloaked in technocracy, creates winners and losers.

Perhaps we consume each other’s speculations, trading in the flimsy security of a community based in nothing but the hope of financial gain. The risk is not that we lose something—that is almost guaranteed. It is that we lose more than money: autonomy, accountability, equality and democracy. Ideals of justice have very little purchase in the world of crypto, which is what makes it a bleak vision for the future.

Australia’s case of Dutch disease has real political dimensions. The Australian state has represents what we might call in vulgar Marxist terms an executive committee for the mining industry.

In September, the Labor Party officially decided to cave in on the Trans Pacific Partnership deal, leading to the deal passing in the Senate. Since then, there’s barely been so much as a muffled scream about it in the mainstream media. But this is an agreement designed to completely reshape and redesign global trade. Will the TPP bring any benefit to Australia’s trade relations? The short answer is: absolutely not.

Because everyone would be assured a basic standard of living, a UBI would reduce incentives to undertake paid work. That is a feature of such a policy, not a bug. Most people would choose to allocate less time to income-producing activities (thereby reducing demand for a smaller pool of paid positions), and devote more time to other pursuits: charity and community work, leisure, caring, domestic work, education – and art.

Today’s awfully successful boomers continue to eulogise themselves in awful ways, often claiming to speak with authority for their entire cohort. Think the Clintons insisting that their peers recall the balmy nostalgia of the 1990s and its (ill-distributed) prosperity, or Turnbull framing inaction on housing as a gesture of solidarity to ‘mum and dad investors’ who have worked hard all their lives. This is a generation’s history (and its policy whims) as written by its victors, and it erases the losers.

Once upon a time, perhaps as far back as the mid 1980s, a computer or a phone was a carefully thought out, big ticket item to purchase for families, like a car, a refrigerator, a kitchen range, or a washer and a dryer. We still expect our cars to run for more than six months. We would be upset if our refrigerators, washers and dryers did not work beyond six months. But it is not so clear-cut with personal computers and phones. We tolerate half-baked products from these manufacturers, because psychologically we have bought into a compromise called upgrades.

Come 2030 – or 2040, or 2050 – when the region’s geopolitical environment will look very different than it does today, what will the submarines actually be used for? Who will be in our sights? The Chinese? Terrorists? Nobody asks; nobody says; in truth, nobody knows. This is the basis on which billions of dollars of federal money is shovelled into the raging furnace of the military-industrial machine. Conversely, our painters, writers, editors, and directors must endlessly, and minutely, articulate everything they do in the increasingly forlorn hope of securing even a small amount of funding from an ever diminishing pool.

Buy Me Once (BMO) is a form of green or ethical consumerism which believes that ‘with every dollar you spend you have an impact on the planet and its people’. The benefits aren’t just individual: as more consumers move towards an ethically or environmentally positive product (or away from a negative one), the theory is that businesses will take notice and change their practices on a larger scale. We want ‘to challenge manufacturers to build products that don’t break so easily. (We know they can!),’ says the BMO website. Yes, they can, but will they?

It is neither partisan nor controversial to suggest that political donations have a dangerous effect on democracy. A couple of months back, Fairfax revealed that the Liberal Party had received the first of two major donations from the gambling industry in August 2013, the same month the Labor government introduced new reforms to tackle problem gambling. While the Liberal Party and the gambling industry both denied the money had any effect on collation policy, the donations were intended to assist government frontbencher Kevin Andrews in his re-election campaign.

It’s been odd in recent days to witness so much political manoeuvring around a document that no-one outside the upper echelons of the world’s power elite has seen. When the rest of us are finally allowed to read the final text of the Trans Pacific Partnership, we’ll be able to make better sense of the contortions of politicians on all sides of the ocean. Right now, it’s like watching a succession of clumsy people, all of a certain age, fencing with a ghost.

Like heads of business, Australian vice-chancellors are raking in pretty big salary packages, making the notion of asking for handouts a bit odd. They earn an average of $800,000 a year – twice what the prime minister does, at least ten times more than academic staff, and, we can assume, a hell of a lot more than administration staff (and yet, an acquaintance I spoke to recalls being regularly hit up for donations when working in university admin).

In its current form, far from helping the unemployed remove themselves from welfare, Work for the Dole and related programs actually cause participants to spend a longer time collecting benefits, owing to a combination of a reduction in the hours available to search for paying work, and what Jeff Borland of the University of Melbourne calls the ‘scarring effect’ created by the program.

The idea that formed the cornerstone for much of the West’s analysis of China for the past two decades was that as China opened up its economy the political system would inevitably follow. But Beijing has never had any interest in implementing US-style neoliberalism.

The result of the Greek referendum surprised many: elections fought in the shadow of financial crises are usually won by the champions of ‘sound finance’. The first great example was 1896 in the United States when voters rallied to the gold standard and the Republicans, who stood against the Democrats’ populist advocacy of free silver and price inflation.

It’s been reported that the largest 900 Australian companies save $25 billion a year through a range of tax exemptions and write-offs for research and development. As Fairfax pointed out, this ‘sum would wipe out two thirds of the current deficit at a stroke’. So why are our politicians and bureaucrats so easily outwitted by the multi-nationals? If the corporations are taking advantage of loopholes in the law, why haven’t those loopholes be closed by our lawmakers, the Australian government?