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Ideally Australia would have no billionaire mining magnates. The bulk of the mining industry should be nationalised and the profits used to fund social services.

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Looking at the Guardian article, I detect a bit more coherence than our host does. Rinehart seems to think that an enormous amount of government spending goes in handouts to Those People, mostly of the dusky persuasion. This kind of belief is common enough in USA, at least, although Rinehart seems more willing to spend money on the Deserving than her USA counterparts. So maybe Ms. Rinehart's sense of arithmetic is fine, and she is just dealing with imaginary numbers.

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I preferred inherited wealth when the Brits went in for it. At least that way our culture got enlivened by Lord Peter Wimsey and Bertie Wooster.

Plus, nobody could fault British upper-class males in 1914-1918 for either lack of patriotism or lack of self-sacrifice. On the contrary, they were killed in numbers disproportionate to their percentage of the general population. And the ones who weren't killed, such as Harold Macmillan, never forgot how many friends and relatives they'd lost on the Western Front.

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