at low levels. The pursuit of budget surpluses also narrowed the range of policy instruments used. It is now very difficult to raise income or other taxes to provide flexibility to the budget position. Accordingly, there has been an excessive reliance on monetary (interest rate) policy despite the bluntness of this instrument. But the underlying cause is that the free market ideology has convinced us, wrongly, that government involvement in the economy imposes costs on us -- now and into the future -- that we are better off without. There has been a constant cacophony of commentators wheeled out every day to make this point -- over and over again. As recession deepens, this chorus has almost gone beyond itself in its daily bleating. The cacophony though has been spectacularly successful. As a reaction we (the people) have supported governments who have significantly reduced their involvement in economic activity via spending and tax cuts and widespread deregulation and privatisation. We have allowed our governments to worsen the living standards of the most disadvantaged and then punish them for the plight they are in (via welfare-to-work measures). We have stood by as the top-end-of-town has pocketed millions of government welfare payments and rebates (superannuation, private health insurance and the rest of it). And then as this has started to fall apart ... as it had to ... the middle class has finally started to see its own wealth shrinking without realising that the governments they supported were the agency that did