These are my links for September 3rd:

• Croc Dundee star loses fight with Oz taxman - Accountancy Age - Thank goodness - tax cooperation is in action. It's what we need
• Why Obama Can't Close the Sale - WSJ.com - The expected undiluted neo-liberal drivel from the WSJ
• Simon Caulkin: Now we see it: the free market isn't always right | Business | The Observer - Simon Caulkin on the ball, as ever:

  "Of course there's no hiding that much public service is depressingly bad, but again this has nothing to do with public or private; customer service in the private sector is equally poor. This is not surprising because, ironically, the badness in both cases could be said to be another market externality - the purchase of identical IT-based mass-production service systems geared to meeting the internal incentives of the management consultancies that sell them rather than the needs of the end customer. Intrinsically, there is no reason why public-sector organisations cannot provide service at least as good as the best private sector outfits - and a growing number of them do.

  It's not the market that will provide the answer to poor public (or indeed private) service: it is, as it always was, the hard work of establishing what the customer wants and organising the work to meet it with minimum fuss, and therefore least cost. "