Dr Sam Wylie

How should they work?

Those kinds of things.

That's a neat insight, that there is this sort of key difference between free market economies where individuals make those choices and those choices add up to macro things,

and centrally planned economies where some central planner, the government, makes the choice and then basically tells people what they're going to do.

Now, every real economy is somewhere in between those two things.

You know, if you went back to sort of the Soviet Union, which for me, people talked about a lot when I was a young guy, but for you probably seems like about three or four centuries ago.

But actually, if you went back to the Soviet Union from the last century, then there really was centrally planned.

You know, they really did make up all these plans for how much wheat's going to be grown and how much steel is going to be and what the price of this is going to be and the price of that.

And they told everyone.

So that was one extreme.

And then also, if you went back a long way in history, there was no regulation.

There was no regulation of what choices people were allowed to make.

I mean, there was no minimum wage.

There was no regulation on how much pollution you could produce.

So you need to have the right balance between people having the freedom to make their own choices

and having some government control to make sure that those choices don't harm each other too much.

And every country and every economy needs to find that balance between the central planning and the freedom of individual choices.

And every country is at a different point on those spectrums.

Australia is quite a long way towards sort of free markets and individuals getting to make their own choices and do what they want.

Yeah, well, that's an insight as well, that that balance between government control and individual freedom, and every country needs to find that balance, that in Australia, that has an expression in financial advice, as you were just saying.