Why does the BS continue?

Yeah, Chomsky's a big part of the answer, but it's actually a few compounding mechanisms working together.

The Chomsky / Herman piece — Manufacturing Consent

The propaganda model they laid out in '88 is basically: media ownership concentration means the people who own the narrative are the same people who benefit from property tax concessions. It's not a conspiracy — it's just structural incentive alignment. You don't need to call your editor and say "kill the negative gearing story." The editor already owns investment properties.

But there are other forces layered on top:

Loss aversion (Kahneman)

People who have something fight 10x harder to keep it than people who might gain something will fight to get it. Property investors are a loud, organised, motivated constituency. The diffuse beneficiaries of better health outcomes are… everyone, eventually, quietly.

Concentrated benefits, dispersed costs

Classic public choice theory (Olson, Buchanan). The gain from negative gearing is concentrated and visible to a specific group. The cost — foregone health/education investment — is invisible, spread across millions, and counterfactual. You can't point to the MRI machine that wasn't built.

Temporal mismatch

Education multipliers compound over decades. Political cycles are 3 years. No treasurer gets re-elected on "I invested in kindergartens that will pay off in 2047."

The Overton Window gets policed

Any serious attempt to reframe gets labelled "class warfare" or "sovereign risk." The language itself is weaponised to shut down marginal analysis before it starts.

The frustrating part? The economics has been settled for a while. This is entirely a political economy problem. The question of what works is answered. The question of who has power to resist change is what actually runs the show.

Chomsky got the structural bit right. But honestly Kahneman explains the emotional physics of why rational actors can't dislodge it even when the evidence is overwhelming.

Manufacturing Consent (Herman & Chomsky, 1988) · Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman) · The Logic of Collective Action (Olson) · public choice (Buchanan)