A friend writes with a brilliant summary of the NIMBY attitude on display "at an earthy non-political club" whose only goal is to build enjoyable low-cost mountain huts for those who love the outdoors. Their huts -- called 'Mountain Turks' -- cost only around 10% of the average DOC hut, and are more comfortable.
The hut’s design is based around the unusual but highly effective use of a large plastic water tank. Using this structure avoids many of the problems associated with standard construction techniques in the alpine environment such as snow and moisture ingress caused by high winds. The design has proved to be strong, light enough for easy movement by helicopter and rugged enough to withstand the rigours of an alpine environment.
Good idea that.
What's not to like?
Everything, apparently, with around ten percent of the members at a recent meeting rising up in opposition. The "older, grey-haired people." The NIMBYs. Their reaction? Horror.
It brings to mind the old quip, that the environmentalist is one who already has his bush cabin.
"Before you give the government new powers, try the 'Munger Test': cross out 'government' and insert the name of the politician you trust least. Then see if you still like the idea..."
I did know that the Greens are economically illiterate. I hadn't realised just how innumerate until I saw the so-called Taxpayers' Union's Bribe-O-Meter -- prepared for the election so you can see how much each party promises to bribe you with your own money.
As irresponsible as the ACT Party is, their bribes only amount to three-quarters of a billion. More than they should be, but less than they might be.
As profligate as Team National is, they're still just promising bribes amounting to two billion dollars.
And then there's a big jump. Barbara Edmonds is still barely to quote a number of her own this year, but the Taxpayers Union reckon her Labour Party will be bribing you with over fifty billion -- about the same as Winston First.
If you think that was a big jump, then settle back: Chloe Swarbrick's Greens -- the party who reckon she should be the Finance Minister in the next government -- are bribing you with a total of $236.72 billion over the next parliamentary term. Almost a quarter of a trillion dollars! That equates to $114, 245 per household!
You can read the detailed breakdown here. Here's a summary:
Social spending is costed at $178.7 billion over four years, or $86,234 per household, by far the largest single category.
Extending ACC to cover all injuries, disability and illness regardless of origin accounts for $96 billion of that alone
Lifting benefits to "liveable rates" adds a further $27.6 billion
On education, a universal student allowance to cover basic needs is costed at $14.4 billion, and free tertiary education up to a first degree at $8 billion
The party's proposed student loan write-off carries a $16.2 billion balance sheet impact
Free early childhood education for all is costed at $5.4 billion
Free school lunches for all kids in all schools at $2.2 billion
Expanding free apprenticeship programmes at $200 million
That's an awful lot of "free" stuff to be paid by someone else: That's you, the voter.
But we haven't even finished the promised bribes. Their next biggest bribe is on something they call "economic development" ....
Economic development spending is costed at $40.8 billion over four years
The largest confirmed commitment is a nationwide rapid rail network, costed at $17.2 billion
Comprehensive bus lanes in all cities are costed at $1.2 billion
EV subsidies at $337 million, based on reintroducing the Clean Car Discount scheme.
A further $9.4 billion is costed for tens of thousands of new public homes, based on forecast 2026/27 house-building spend and the maximum build rate achieved in 2023/24,
This is alongside $21 million for a Certified Rental Warrant of Fitness.
Regional support commitments add $2.4 billion for the Te Rangatiratanga Trust, $2 billion for a new intergenerational fund, and $400 million for a Te Rākau restoration fund.
Energy policies add a further $3.05 billion, made up of Kiwipower ($980.6 million), expanding Warmer Homes ($969.8 million), solar on all public housing stock ($460 million), zero-interest solar loans ($428.7 million), community-owned energy ($200 million), and increased EECA funding ($12.4 million).
The Greens' plans to purchase 120 supermarkets to form a state-run supermarket chain is costed at $4.7 billion, or $2,259 per household.
Creating a tribunal for dealing with disputes arising from auctioning off commercial leases on unoccupied lots has been costed at $7.2 million.
I don't know about you, but I don't see a lot of economic development coming therefrom.
Next biggest item is on developing bigger government. This doesn't come cheap.
The Greens' policy to lift core public service pay by 10 percent is costed at $15.5 billion over four years
Over fifteen billion to employ more bureaucrats.
And finally, on to their bribes in Environment and Arts -- only a comparatively minor item, considering they were once an environmental party ...
Environment and conservation commitments total $1.5 billion over four years
This includes $1.2 billion to expand Jobs for Nature, $200 million to introduce a price on agricultural emissions, $90 million to restore the Ministry for the Environment, and $13.5 million to increase funding for the EPA and community environment groups.
$200 million has also been promised for the promotion of te reo Māori.
=> And that's how we get the figure, for all of the promised bribes, of $236.72 billion over the next parliamentary term (equating to $114, 245 per household).
And just how does this all get paid for?
I'm glad you asked, because it hasn't apparently occurred to the innumerate Auckland Central MP to reconcile bribes with revenue. As of today's date ...
The Greens' tax plan, released in June, promises more than $32 billion of new revenue over four years. It relies on a "super-rich tax" (their renamed wealth tax) and an inheritance and gifts tax. (The current Wealth Tax has already been revised down by fifty percent since last year's "alternative budget." Expect any return, if implemented to continue that trend.) They would also lifts the corporate tax rate for some firms and reverses the coalition's changes to interest deductibility.
Consistent with their something for nothing promises, that's all the revenue they promise to extract from you. So how would the rest of those bribes be paid? Answer: borrowing.
The Taxpayers' Union describes a $60 billion infrastructure borrowing programme as part of the Greens' pledges, with interest of about $12 billion.
But even with that aspirational fantasy of a $32 billion Wealth Tax and saddling the few remaining taxpayers with $60 billion of borrowing (and another $12 billion interest bill), that still leaves a massive hole.
A hole of nearly one-hundred and fifty billion dollars!
How would that be paid? Somehow. That's how.
UPDATE: Of course Greens supporters will object that there is. no fiscal hole, that governments can spend as much as they like -- that money does grow on trees just as long as it's government that grows them.
In its latest guise, called MMT by its supporters (aka Magical Monetary Theory) -- the populist idea (already promoted by the UK Greens) that governments can spend spend spend and do not need to raise tax to finance it. Professor John Hearn explains that it's not just wrong, but dangerously wrong...
The Blue Team is crowing again about a budget surplus. In three years time. They seem to have forgotten their promise three years ago was that we'd be in operating surplus by now.
It's a bit like the old Soviet Five-Year Plans, isn't it. At the Plan's announcement, in those old Soviet days, forecasts were delivered and cast-iron promises made; and then, after five years, the same failures appeared, along with excuses for the failure -- saboteurs/wreckers/bad harvests -- at which point a new Five-Year Plan was announced promising that this time it will be different.
Nicola Willis is in the "this time it will be different" phase.
Because Treasury's crystal-ball waving three years ago forecast that net debt would peak at 22.8% of GDP in 2024/25, then fall. It didn't. It was make-believe, a fantasy: what economist Michael Reddell calls "vapourware."
Because today, net core Crown debt is forecast to peak at 46.1% of GDP in 2027/28. "So the important context is that NZ is now carrying roughly twice as much net debt relative to the size of the economy as the peak Treasury forecast in the 2023 PREFU [i.e., Treasury’s Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update]."
at the 2023 election National promised that the govt would be in budget surplus (& not on a make-believe measure) and that debt would have been falling by now. (Both Labour and National numbers rested on make-believe assumptions. Likely to be true this time too).
The promises, like the forecasts, are worth nothing. Why? Because Treasury is required to report on the basis that the Ministry of Finance told them that a re-elected govt would suddenly 'get religion'" -- would suddenly become fiscally responsible; would suddenly lose the spending bug.
Yeah right. Like that's ever going to happen.
Willis is still spending more than Grant Robertson’s 2019 pre-COVID "Wellbeing Budget," and she has no plans to unwind the post-COVID government bloat.
There is no likelihood of Willis getting the responsibility religion any time soon.
From Rousseau to Marx, philosophers of a certain bent argued pre-modern societies possessed an inherent nobility that is destroyed by civilisation. By colonialism. By modernity.
'Students for Liberty' explains the puncturing of the noble savage myth:
In 1964, a young University of Michigan anthropologist went to live with a tribe untouched by modernity.
What he found destroyed the noble savage myth.
Then his own discipline spent the next four decades trying to destroy him for publishing it.
The field was long dominated by a myth.
Postwar anthropology, inspired by Rousseau and Marx, held that "savages" were peaceful and cooperative. Violence, hierarchy, and inequality were supposed to be diseases of civilisation, invented by property, colonisation, and markets. Abolish those, and the natural harmony of man would supposedly return.
Then a kid from rural Michigan went to check.
In 1964, Napoleon Chagnon, one of twelve children from a poor family in Port Austin, traveled to the Venezuela–Brazil border. He went to live with the Yanomamö, roughly 20,000 people scattered across the Amazon rainforest, largely untouched by the state, by markets, or by modernity.
He would return nearly thirty times over the next three decades. His 1968 book, Yanomamö: The Fierce People, sold nearly a million copies and was translated into fifteen languages.
But this is what he actually found: Raids between villages were routine. Infanticide was common. Women were regularly abducted and traded after violent conflict. Headmen, as a rule, were killers. Chagnon mapped Yanomamö genealogies using early computer methods, learned the language, and lived inside the villages for months at a stretch. The data was not hearsay.
A particular finding broke the field. In a 1988 paper in Science, Chagnon documented that the unokais, men who had killed in raids, had on average more wives and more surviving offspring than non-violent men of the same age. In a state of nature, violence was being reproductively selected for. The Rousseauian premise ran backwards.
If violence, hierarchy, and inequality were what civilisation produces, they should be rare where civilisation is absent. Chagnon found the opposite. Where the state, the market, and modern institutions had never arrived, up to 30% of adult male deaths were violent. The men who killed were the men whose lineages survived. In the modern United States that figure is under 1%. [In today's New Zealand, the figure is 0.3%.]
The reaction was immediate. Marshall Sahlins, one of Chagnon's former graduate teachers at Michigan, turned on him. Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel circulated a warning to the American Anthropological Association (AAA) describing "an anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Joseph Conrad, though not, perhaps, a Joseph Mengele." Salesian missionaries in the region joined the coalition. What Chagnon had found could not be answered on its merits, so the man who found it became the target instead.
Then came the book that ended him. In 2000, journalist Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado. He accused Chagnon of triggering a measles epidemic through vaccine experimentation, arming rival factions to stage conflicts on film, cooking his data, and behaving as "a war criminal or even a genocidaire." The New Yorker ran Tierney's companion article the same month. Chagnon's career effectively ended before any serious investigation reached a verdict.
But every serious charge eventually collapsed. The vaccine complied with WHO protocols. The measles epidemic predated Chagnon's arrival. Venezuelan physicians, the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Michigan, the American Society of Human Genetics, and the U.S. Department of Health each investigated. Each reached the same verdict: no crime, no cover-up, no fraud. Jane Hill, who chaired the AAA's own inquiry, wrote privately that Tierney's book was "a piece of sleaze, that's all there is to it." [Alice Dreger, a historian of medicine and science, concluded after a year's research that Tierney's claims were false and the Association was complicit and irresponsible in helping spread these falsehoods and not protecting "scholars from baseless and sensationalistic charges." The controversy is covered in the 2005 book Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn from It by anthropologist Robert Borofsky, and Dreger's 2015 book, Galileo's Middle Finger. Chagnon himself revisited the topic in his later book, 2013 Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes: the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists.]
The AAA task force issued its own report in 2002 anyway, condemning Chagnon for prioritising his research over the Yanomamö. Raymond Hames had already resigned from the panel mid-inquiry, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a National Academy of Sciences member, quit the AAA in protest. Three years later, the AAA membership voted to rescind the report. In 2012, Chagnon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The following year, Sahlins resigned from the Academy over it.
The noble savage myth itself outlived the twentieth century's political movements. Today it powers the decolonial framework that dominates the humanities and much of political discourse. The claim is unchanged: violence, hierarchy, and inequality are artefacts of property, civilisation, and colonisation, and would vanish once those were abolished. Three decades of Chagnon's evidence showed the claim was wrong. The re-tribalisers ignored the evidence.
In the absence of the institutions the utopians wanted to destroy, human beings behaved more violently than within them. The discipline that could not answer his data answered his character instead. That is what an intellectual monoculture does when evidence contradicts its premises. It goes after whoever brought the evidence.
"A really good example of how people today have been conned," says Elizabeth Rata in this interview above, "is this post-2022 idea that the Māori and English versions of the treaty are quite different." She makes the case that a sound knowledge of history is a defence against being misled, giving a succinct overview of NZ's history including how not knowing history lets us be conned; what history is, and why primary sources matter; parliamentary sovereignty and the 1852 Constitution Act; why the chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi; and NZ, from world-leading to decline ...
The 45-minute interview, with Dane Giraud of the so-called Free Speech Union, is to launch her series of 40 short (ten-minute) videos on the history of of NZ education -- where there are plenty of myths to explode!
Above is her promo. As you'll here, she's something of a nationalist with little time for private education, unfortunately, but there's much in her series from which to learn. Here's Episode One, 'Introduction to the History':
"It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to [America's] Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbours or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both. This was the great American achievement — and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders’ motive, this is what [they] should have been teaching the world."
"The UN has become a useless organisation that serves only to feed a caste of fatally arrogant parasites disguised as well-intentioned bureaucrats.
"As Mises used to say, good people do not think about controlling the lives of their fellow human beings.
"Those who were supposed to guarantee collective security and human rights failed at that task and, instead, allowed chaos, violence and international terrorism to flourish."
“Another 'advanced' educational method does not mark examination papers for their accuracy; instead, grades are given indicating that the child has done well in relation to his capacities. That is, the teacher assumes divine omniscience, and pretends to know the child’s innate capacities absolutely, by some supernal means, instead of judging the specific result of a specific examination.”
— Isabel Paterson from the chapter 'The Educational Octopus' in her 1943 book The God of the Machine
So this week the Bills to replace the Resource Management Act passed their third reading in Parliament, marking what boosters call "the most significant overhaul of New Zealand’s planning system in more than three decades."
I'd call it something else. To be polite, after thirty years of RMA 1.0 we haven't seen abolition. We haven't even seen "overhaul." Instead these boastful grifting bastards have delivered nothing more than a new iteration of the same old regime..
I've been told it's "an improvement." Fuck that. Bishop's diagnosis is that “a core failure of the RMA was the absence of clear direction from central government.” Fuck Bishop. No. The core failure of the RMA is the complete absence of private property rights. Simon Court says these bills deliver that. Fuck Simon Court.
Property rights are mentioned by these bastards only to ignore them. These Bills's starting position is still: "You need our permission!" It is not abolition of planning; it is not a return to eight centuries of common law protections; the state still decides large categories of what you may do or not do on your own land.
It's not abolition, it's just reform. Another one of the regular "reforms" of the last three fucking decades. This "reform" changes the name, and that's about it. And while this time it promises property rights, it simply delivers more planning documents while all the planners get to keep their jobs. And Bishop will get his "increased direction from central government" -- as long as his time there lasts.
Philosopher Stephen Hicks reckons we should strive to elevate our locutionary acts. So ...
Never say "fucking idiot." Say this instead.
Polite English
"I'm afraid you're not thinking very clearly."
Formal English
"You're being profoundly incompetent."
Witty English
"Ignorance has never looked so confident."
Gentlemanly English
"I fear the matter has slipped entirely past your comprehension."
Victorian English
"I speak now not in malice but in earnest despair, for the conclusion you have drawn is of such astonishing simplicity that it grieves me more than I can readily convey; and yet I'm moved less to anger than to sorrow, so profoundly indeed that I find myself unable to discern whether your words arose from haste, from a species of naivety, or from a mind altogether too content with its first and poorest notion."
So by way of example, instead of calling Nicky Hager a fucking idiot, you might instead describe the rat-faced Wellington gnome as "a self-described ‘journalist’ who has made a career off the back of illegal and politically motivated hacking and break-ins."
“All people, entrepreneurs as well as non-entrepreneurs, look askance upon any profits earned by other people. Envy is a common weakness of men. People are loath to acknowledge the fact that they themselves could have earned profits if they had displayed the same foresight and judgment the successful businessman did. Their resentment is the more violent, the more they are subconsciously aware of this fact. ...
"It is profit and loss that force the capitalists to employ their capital for the best possible service to the consumers. It is profit and loss that make those people supreme in the conduct of business who are best fit to satisfy the public. If profit is abolished, chaos results. ...
“It is precisely the necessity of making profits and avoiding losses that gives to the consumers a firm hold over the entrepreneurs and forces them to comply with the wishes of the people.”
“Huge profits are the proof of good service rendered in supplying the consumers. Losses are the proof of blunders committed, of failure to perform satisfactorily the tasks incumbent upon an entrepreneur. The riches of successful entrepreneurs are not the cause of anybody’s poverty; it is the consequence of the fact that the consumers are better supplied than they would have been in the absence of the entrepreneur’s effort. ...
"The standard of living of the common man is highest in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs. It is to the foremost material interest of everybody that control of the factors of production should be concentrated in the hands of those who know how to utilise them in the most efficient way. ...
"There is no reason why capitalists and entrepreneurs should be ashamed of earning profits. It is silly that some people try to defend American capitalism by declaring: ‘The record of American business is good; profits are not too high.’ The function of entrepreneurs is to make profits; high profits are the proof that they have well performed their task of removing maladjustments of production. ...
“Of course, as a rule capitalists and entrepreneurs are not saints excelling in the virtue of self-denial. But neither are their critics saintly. And with all the regard due to the sublime self-effacement of saints, we cannot help stating the fact that the world would be in a rather desolate condition if it were peopled exclusively by men not interested in the pursuit of material well-being. ...
"The elimination of profit, whatever methods may be resorted to for its execution, must transform society into a senseless jumble. It would create poverty for all. ...
“Every step toward the elimination of profit is progress on the way toward social disintegration.”
"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions. Almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.
“Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.
"It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its ‘content supply chain. ...
"[There is a] real risk [that generative AI could] significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained ... LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain."
"A right is the sanction of independent action. A right is that which can be exercised without anyone's permission.
"If you exist only because society permits you to exist--you have no right to your own life.
"A permission can be revoked at any time. If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society--you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.
"Do not make the mistake, at this point, of thinking that a worker is a slave and that he holds his job by his employer's permission. He does not hold it by permission--but by contract, that is, by a voluntary mutual agreement. A worker can quit his job. A slave cannot."
~ Ayn Rand from her 'Textbook of Americanism,' collected in The Ayn Rand Column
"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this."
~ Henry David Thoreau from his Journal entry, April 24, 1859
People keep saying Trump term II is the most corrupt administration ever, so I built a model to find out if it was true.
I took the UN's definition of corruption [a definition of corruption that 190 countries have signed], turned it into eight criteria and 100 points ... Then I put every president since Eisenhower on the same scale, both parties, with every exoneration counted right alongside the convictions.
Nixon scored 41 and no other American President scored over a 25.
Trump's second term scored a 91...
It's even worse than that. When she put every president since Eisenhower on the same scale as the world-famous kleptocrats -- men who looted their countries -- Marcos, Suharto, Mobutu, Abacha, Obiang, Putin -- Trump II still comes out comfortably ahead of the kleptocrats' average of 83.
So he is not only the most corrupt president in American history. At this pace he finishes his term level with the most corrupt rulers of the last hundred years.
And this doesn't even cover this week's revelation that a corrupt Russian mobster linked to Putin paid for the spawn's wedding in the Bahamas.
Anybody here still deluded about the Corrupter-in-Chief like to defend any of this?
BUT FIRST, CAN WE REALLY measure corruption? What sort of standard might we use?
The most defensible starting point is the definition that 190 countries are party to, so that is where we will start. The United Nations Convention against Corruption, ratified by the United States in 2006 lists the offenses that constitute corruption: bribery, embezzlement of public property, laundering the proceeds, obstruction of justice, trading in influence, abuse of function, and illicit enrichment, which the convention defines as a significant increase in an official’s assets that cannot reasonably be explained by lawful income. That last offense would apply to nearly every kleptocrat in history, and nearly none of them were ever convicted of it, because the countries they ran had no such law on the books. ... Corruption is the conversion of public power into private benefit through whatever channel is available, together with the disabling of the mechanisms that would detect it. It does not require that a law be broken, because every kleptocracy in the calibration set made its theft lawful first. It does not require a traceable transaction, because dependence, access and regulatory forbearance are documented forms of benefit. And it treats the dismantling of inspectors, prosecutors and election regulators as corruption in itself rather than as an aggravating factor, because in every case studied the detectors were switched off before the extraction began.
Here are just a few examples during Trump II:
There is a unit inside the Justice Department whose only job is to prosecute corrupt public officials. It is called the Public Integrity Section. In January 2025 it had about thirty-six lawyers, and today it has two. ... What the game looks like without [these] referees is now a matter of public record. ... On June 30 the president signed a sworn financial disclosure showing more than $2 billion in personal income for 2025, most of it from crypto companies with his name on them. A foreign government’s investment fund settled a $2 billion deal in his family’s stablecoin. About 1,600 pardons have gone out, ten of them through the pardon office, and $1.7 billion in court-ordered restitution went away with them. The Justice Department settled the family’s own lawsuit against the IRS for $1.776 billion and a promise to stop auditing them, until a federal judge threw the deal out as collusive. The acting attorney general who defended that deal to Congress was Trump’s personal attorney and is now the Attorney General.
"The greatest stimulus package imaginable might simply be telling 99% of politicians: No. Fuck off.
"Stop treating every problem as an invitation for political management and every politician promising a solution as a saviour.
"They accumulate power by promising to fix problems, often worsen them through intervention, then point to the resulting damage as proof they need still more power.
"Maybe civilisation needs less faith in political promises and a lot more willingness to say no."
"Nice supermarket chain you have here. Shame if something were to happen to it ... "
When the Greens suggested a policy calling for a government supermarket, National called it "communist." "Soviet." Now, Nicola Willis wants to forcibly "break up" private supermarkets in a bid to lift its flagging electoral fortunes.
It's of a piece with David Cunliffe's 2006 dismemberment of Telecom, a private company, and the First Labour Government's nationalisation of the BNZ.
I was (initially) impressed with Business NZ's response, which came out swinging. "BusinessNZ is alarmed at National's proposal to pursue the separation of supermarket chain Foodstuffs," said BusinessNZ's Catherine Beard.
New Zealand has long benefited from a reputation for regulatory stability, respect for property rights and predictable policy settings. Measures of this nature risk undermining that reputation at a time when New Zealand needs investment, productivity growth and economic confidence ...
This is a very concerning move by the National Party and sends a chilling signal to businesses across New Zealand ... We consider this to be in the same league as Labour's ban on oil and gas exploration and New Zealand First's promise to split up the gentailers.
Exactly right.
If National really gave a damn about regulatory stability, respect for property rights and predictable policy settings, it would be ashamed of itself. But this of course is the same party which had a Prime Minister who used to make up "mini-budget" on the hoof (so much for predictable policy settings), and went on to introduce the RMA (so much for private property rights).
And of course the hypocrisy is baked in: when Labour's Michael Cullen introduced his Welfare for Working Families, in order to get over the line in another narrow election, National leader John Key described it then as "communism by stealth" -- only to embrace it three years later. (As it happens, Willis was then a senior advisor to Key during this capitulation.)
So National has form.
But if only Business NZ's Catherine Beard had left it at that. Instead. she heads swiftly from the broad uplands of principled opposition to Willis's pledge to strong-arm a private business, and straight into the undergrowth of compromise.
Ms Beard said any proposal to structurally separate Foodstuffs would require rigorous scrutiny of its unintended consequences.
"Scrutiny."
Increasing competition in New Zealand's grocery sector is a worthwhile goal, but structural intervention of this scale raises significant questions about whether it would actually deliver lower prices for consumers.
A "worthwhile goal." Raises "significant questions."
Guess which responses will be read by Willis and her scumbag team.
At least Jordan Williams and Michael Reddell were more forthright.
National, a party founded to protect private enterprise from the predations of state intervention, will campaign on "pursuing" the breakup of Foodstuffs into two competing
National came into government promising a resource management regime based on property rights. It's going into the next election promising a property rights regime based on a hopeful Cost-Benefit Analysis and vibes.
“To sit home, read one's favourite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men's doing.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt, from his 1895 article “The Higher Life of American Cities,” published in The Outlook [hat tip Stephen Hicks]
"The moral argument against a wealth tax is simple: Your wealth is not a public resource simply because other people are envious of it. If it was earned voluntarily and without violating anyone's rights, others have no moral claim to it."
"The wealth tax is not about economics at all. It’s about envy, destroying billionaires. And it’s about grabbing their power for the government. They want to get rid of billionaires even if it impoverishes the rest of us."
"Wealth is not a fixed pile that existed before human beings arrived. A field is not food. Iron ore is not a railway. Silicon is not a computer. Human intelligence transforms the material world into values. Production comes before distribution."
~ Michael Novak from his 1982 book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
"Any man with a serious central ambition is more of an outsider in his youth than in later years. It is particularly in his youth that he will be misunderstood and resented by others."
~ Ayn Rand, from her 1958 series of private, extemporaneous lectures on literature collected in the book The Art of Fiction
"I'd like to quote the founder and proprietor of Our World in Data, who said that the papers could have had the headline: '187,000 people escaped from extreme poverty yesterday,' every day for the last 30 years! But you never see that headline, and as a result, a billion people escaped from extreme poverty -- one of the most significant events in human history -- and no one knows about it."
"The new American foreign policy: Negotiations not for peace, not to build alliances, not to promote democracy or the rule of law but to benefit companies linked to the administration."
