Someone Else's Country

Lange govt destroyed New Zealand as a country.

The problem is not privatization of production but the concentrated ownership of production and thus markets. Labor workers MUST acquire ownership in corporate wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital assets, and not support the concentration of ownership. The problem is New Zealand and all other economies operate based on one-factor (i.e., laboristic) assumptions that justify artificially and coercively inflated wage rates, which inflate market prices. Such also lead to mercantilist capitalist and protectionist labor interferences with free and open markets in labor rates, based on the counter-productive goal of “protecting jobs” at the expense of consumers, all in the name of national “full employment” rather than two-factor “full ownership” policies. The real-world reality is that the relative productiveness of labor has been diminishing in the labor-capital mix as creative individuals redesign our technologies. Conventional economists have based their notions of distributive justice on their outmoded one-factor paradigm by ignoring this trend that has been accelerating at an exponential rate since the industrial revolution took off about the time of the American Revolution. In the case of America, if the nation had adopted a Capital Homestead Act instead of the Employment Act of 1946, the minimum wage could have remained at 25 cents an hour but workers would have been receiving more adequate and secure incomes today from dividend checks and American industrial jobs would never have been lost under what best-selling author calls “wage arbitrage” to low-wage workers in China, India and elsewhere in the emerging global economy.

Serious Fun: The Life & Times of Alan Gibbs
Author: Paul Goldsmith
In this biography we are told how Alan made a $200 million dollar profit
from selling shares in Telecom (financed by a cheap Telecom loan) when he was a director. (There is a NZ Herald article on this).

I think this shows utter contempt for democracy and the tax payers of New Zealand.

And in 2012 here we go again. Key Government Mk1 refused to have Douglas in the Cabinet. Key Government Mk2 looks set to repeat Rogernomics ( as far as it can get away with it). We keep making the mistake of pointing the lens at the public spokespeople and forgetting to dig down to the puppet-masters, who must exist and who must straddle multiple elections and political structures. Did Don Brash wake up one morning and decide to roll his old mate Rodney? Where do the ideas come from? And are the NZ puppet-masters themselves merely puppets to some higher authority? That'd be the real story and it would be fascinating.

I'd like to think you're right that our values haven't changed, but actually I disagree: NZers may not consciously regard extremes of poverty and wealth as "normal and necessary", but in general they now ACCEPT them as "how it is"... and to a larger extent ignore the ramifications of the increasing rich/poor divide, and especially their part in contributing to it. in short, they're well on the way to a state of mind that does see this as "normal" - if not necessarily "necessary". Thank you Roger et al.

And the societal process of forgetting what changed and how it came about is part of the deliberate dumbing-down and disenfranchising of the ordinary citizen that is at the heart of the social engineering toolbox of the New Right: make people feel vaguely ashamed they were suckered into something they disagreed with and they will gladly ignore that it happened - that it is still happening.

It's like deja-vu - this is exactly what Australia went through under the Hawke/Keating government in the same time period.

What are the chances the same things happen to two completely different countries? It just goes to show you there are other people running things behind the scenes in probably most countries.