Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, January 28th, 2009 - 76 comments
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National’s two main internal factions consist of the Conservatives, and the Neo-Liberals. Overall the Conservatives want to keep things pretty much as they are, and with such an inspiring reason for being it’s hardly surprising their star has waned over the last couple of decades.
The Neo-Liberal camp has a different agenda. Like the Conservatives they too champion individual liberty, private property and a reduced State. But what Neo-Liberals seek isn’t remotely conservative. Rather it’s quite a radical doctrine. Whereas Conservatives still see value in maintaining a State for at least its regulatory function, and some might even secretly admit that the State can and should intervene in an economy to properly harness its benefits for greater society, the Neo-Liberals see any State ‘interference’ in the economy as evil. For them Nirvana is when businesses (that’s big business corporates, not corner dairy owners) have free rein to do as they wish. That position isn’t remotely conservative because no democracy has ever traditionally been so. Even Conservatives know that leaving it all to powerful private interests doesn’t make for very healthy economies or democracies. The Global Credit crisis also demonstrates that when governments get too hands-off some pretty serious and undesirable consequences can arise – invariably requiring expensive clean-ups at public expense.
Right now the Neo-Liberals are in retreat because anyone to the left of Roger Douglas can see that total laissez-faire non-regulation of markets not only doesn’t work, it’s downright negligent. Let’s hope National’s Conservative wing can shrug off its grey cardy and rise to the occasion because they’re definitely the lesser of the two evils.
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*Love* it when a leftie tries to pull together a POLS 101 essay on what they think the “neo” liberal school of thought really thinks. As a proud member of this so called “clique” I am surprised that I subscribe to all that silliness.
Greg, Douglas ia revered in many countries and people I have met are surprised that he is not as respected by the left as he is overseas. Estonia is one of many countries that include Canada, Slovakia and Czech Republic to name a few who have bestowed an honor upon him. The latter 2 countries have flat tax and a wealthier society than we do as a result of following good fiscal practice.
With all due respect your good comments will fall on deaf ears over here
[lprent: *Love* it when a rightie gives others advice and then doesn't follow it themselves. Have you read your own posts recently? I was hoping you meant it about not sending people here. I was really hoping that included you.... But it looks like you don't take your own advice.
Anyway the Douglas economic prescription typically falls over when times get difficult. Effectively it destroys the social cushions built up in good times that break the fall of hard times. Instead it is powered into short-term consumption. I'd expect any country that has used his prescription to start dropping it about now. It fails in recessions.]
The left overseas actually respects Roger Douglas?!
Stephen: Bearing in mind that when Clint, Baiter, et. al. talk about `The Left’ they tend to mean `anyone who’s not a fundamentalist neoliberal’.
L
I read Basset’s book about the Lange government over Christmas. Absolutely facsinating.
What I do not think I appreciated at the time was that Douglas’ package post the 1987 election (which was effectively a referendum on Rogernomics) had been passed through cabinet and caucus and countermanded by a Lange press-conference without reference to any other member of the government.
“I read Basset’s book… over Christmas.”
Jeez Billy. That’s supposed to be Lent thing.
PB,
In those circumstances, what would I be giving up, exactly?
Your rationality.
Time.
IB,
I do not recall you ever conceding before that I had rationality to begin with. I have a warm feeling deep inside of me.
But seriously, the PM countermanding cabinet and caucus who were pursuing an agenda for which the government had recevied a mandate two months earlier. That’s pretty scary, isn’t it?
The Killing Fields, huh. Collectively called that by whom? You? Have you been there? Do you know what it smells like? Because I have, and I do,
As a matter of fact I have and I’m guessing that in fact you have not because there’s nothing unusual about the smell. I suggest that you go there, it might very well help you to understand the ideology of the Labour party.
But if you’re just comparing a group of people willingly getting on planes to seek their fortune elsewhere, mostly to return and settle down, to the forced labour, starvation and mass execution of millions of men, women and children – then you’re beyond ridicule.
The similarity stands. The Killing Fields were to the Khmer Rouge what Australia and Britain were to Labour -a convenient place for intellectuals, the productive or anyone else that the regime considered ideologically unsound to (be sent/go.)
Helen Clark took a special interest in ensuring that the two-year UK working holiday remained available to young Kiwis. Why? Because law abiding, educated and productive Kiwis are not Labour’s type of people and Labour did everything they could to encourage them to leave and ensure they had somewhere to go to.
Communists? Where? Let me get my rifle! Oh, wait, do you mean `anyone who doesn’t immediately agree with me?’ Sorry, that’s called `open society’.
No, I mean Communists. We’ve just had a decade of it. Did you miss it?
So `white flight’ means `productive, educated and law-abiding kiwis leaving the country’?
As a matter of fact it does. The overwhelming number of emigrants fleeing the Labour regime over the last decade were Caucasian. This is simply a fact but feel free to argue it -God knows that pointing out facts that don’t meet the Left’s general definition of acceptable PC discussion is a hate crime..
That these emigrants were largely educated and affluent has been the subject of much discussion under the general heading “brain drain” -perhaps you missed that too?
Do you think you could brush up a little bit on your html skills so I can see what their kind of people look like? I really want to know, because that’ll tell me what kind of fucked-up bigot you are.
I’ll paste it as text this time;
http://www.winz.govt.nz/about-work-and-income/contact-us/language-lines/index.html
Take a good long look at that link, it summarises the social engineering agenda of the Communists over the last decade beautifully. It shows us the calibre of people that the Labour regime enticed to NZ, where they came from and the rewards that Labour offered them in welfare when they got here.
To decent, law-abiding Kiwis over-burdened with punitive taxation for the last decade, replacing our best and brightest with HIV-positive, unskilled, illiterate welfare recipients from the 3rd world is does not materially benefit our society.
What it does do of course, is assist the Labour regime in it’s pursuit of engineering a worker/peasant collective to impose upon NZ.
Presuming for a moment that these people of which you speak are more existent than the communists, of which NZ has few to none.
Labour is a Communist party, or at least the front for one. We’ll have three more years of listening to them position themselves as merely environmentally-conscious centre-Left but after a decade, we know who they are. You do too.
Are they brown ones? Slanty-eyed ones? Do they wear funny things on their heads and perform odd rituals like bowing and drinking their tea from tiny cups? Really, having spent a bit of time in a variety of communist and post-communist countries, and gratefully returned here, I want to know what you think they look like.
I have no problem with any immigrant who contributes to our society and assimilates our language and culture. Welfare recipients, the illiterate and the diseased are attractive immigrants don’t qualify, except of course, to Labour. And you.
[lprent: You are calling me a communist tool as I've been involved there for decades. Guess what - I'm going to exercise my freedom of private property and ban you permanently. I think you have a wasted brain one way or another. You may address your complaints to the 7th ring of hell (aka the anti-spam bot).]
The electorate voted in national because they promised to halt the reforms of rogernomics
Actually, if you read their slogans of the time it’s hard to say if they promised to stop them or not. It is fairly obvious though that Labour were voted out, not that National was voted in, because people didn’t like the reforms that Roger Douglass had initiated. Once it became obvious that National were continuing what Labour started in the 1980s people rapidly stopped supporting them. It is only because of the short comings of FPP that National were returned in 1993.
Oh yeah, the “Conservatives’ want NZ to remain a stagnating socialist quagmire. What utter rot.
No, they want to keep themselves at the top of the pile because they have it good – they don’t care that everyone else is suffering.
But seriously, the PM countermanding cabinet and caucus who were pursuing an agenda for which the government had recevied a mandate two months earlier. That’s pretty scary, isn’t it?
They didn’t have a mandate. Labour got voted in because people still weren’t voting for National after Muldoon. They hoped that Labour wouldn’t continue on it’s neo-liberal binge. People, quite simply, didn’t have a choice – it was Labour or National (another of the vagaries of FPP – you end up with a two horse race).
Of course, now that people do have a choice about who to vote for some people, mostly from the right, are complaining about it.
Simon, can I ask – do you genuinely believe what you wrote there, or do you just hate the left so much you invent these little fairy-tales as an outlet? I hope it’s an outlet, because it’s better than nailing kittens to trees or whatever you’d be doing if not for this. So much anger – so little thought.
Simon, have you got a single statistic to support any thing you’ve said today?
[lprent: Simon will be silent. He annoyed me too much & got a permanent ban for being a idiot that I cannot be bothered reading. Besides I'm tired of banning him.]
Billy said: But seriously, the PM countermanding cabinet and caucus who were pursuing an agenda for which the government had recevied(sic) a mandate two months earlier.
Seriously then what did DL know that RD didn’t..? Something big enough to make a big call..
We might also in the name of transparency try figure what RD did not know.. and/or subsequently not/never reveal.
Back then why should he. Heck he could rely on party members and they (to mics left on and recording for later broadcast) declare how they didna understand him.. his explanations, economic prescriptions.. but that’s “because he’s a genius, right!”
And he could publish bad largely incomprehensible books and likewise evade questioning.. reliant as he was upon existing and prior business benefactors.
Boil it down—to what end? Yes, certain corporates. Best to medium term, but then failing because the core deceit of the economic pup he bought and then advocated had the missing link of misapplied accounting. And no, command of the language could not make up for it. No way.
So.. go talk to the guy, ask him explain his EBCT – yeah he and the few who put it into his head know what it means. And they, now, know why it doesna work—they don’t want to admit this, of course, not when they’ve spent a lifetime cultivating a no mistakes admission platform whilst declaring unto themselves belief in the freedom to make mistakes, we couldn’t expect them to.
Though party members, those loyal and oft-lasting supporters in many more ways than blogging innocent prejudices are different. Hypocrisy is of less concern to them than the truth. The whole truth and nothing but the truth.
At least.
ps: someone mentioned Canadians hot on RD. Like who? How many? Cult or solo-cultivated..?
Phil Sage: thanks for Emerson’s input. Given the forgoing, however, I suspect another likely hijack to veil the error mentioned above. Words like ‘liberal’ are highly flexible and much sought after by both faux and flux-makers.
Lew – The genocide may not have been, but the war was. What I’m saying is what has the Khmer Rouge got to do with Marxism (see communism) or the british communist party? What have the socio-economic ends (you can fit almost anything under that) of the Khmer Rouge got to do with communism as espoused by the british communist party Marx hardly even mentioned agricultural workers, he opposed militarism, saw it as a waste of human energy and was horrified at the slaughter of the communards. Capitalists like you use disgusting episodes like pol pot’s for perverse arguments against ideas that have nothing do with it and that which you know little about.
PhilSage:
Market Democracy – hahahahahahaha – that would have to be an oxymoron to rival Military Intelligence – hahahahaha . . . and as for “market demncrats are the champions of competition and compassion . . . hahahaha . . . . reminds me of that other great oxymon the “compassionate conservative”. Those Aussies need a good dose of Aunty Helen, our Greatest Living New Zealander, to set them right.
Thanks very much; given the horrific combination of a recession and a National government in power, I needed a good laugh for a moment’s cheer.
Simon: As a matter of fact I have and I’m guessing that in fact you have not because there’s nothing unusual about the smell.
Guess: a hypothesis based on nothing. I went there after the rains and there was a distinctly rank smell about the place, not aided by the collection of murky slimy water in some of the pits.
I suggest that you go there, it might very well help you to understand the ideology of the Labour party.
So … where do Labour advocate hiding the millions of bodies, then? Having witnessed the results of an actual genocide, your comparison is even more despicable and unjustified. You don’t have the excuse most hyperbolic morons do.
The similarity stands. The Killing Fields were to the Khmer Rouge what Australia and Britain were to Labour -a convenient place for intellectuals, the productive or anyone else that the regime considered ideologically unsound to (be sent/go.)
Oh, I see. You think that going away is the same as being executed. That makes a degree of sense if you’re afflicted with separation anxiety; that is, the developmental stage during which a child believes that if someone or something isn’t right there then they no longer exist. You have my condolences – this normally passes by age about 18 months; your ability to type indicates that you’re a bit older than that.
Helen Clark took a special interest in ensuring that the two-year UK working holiday remained available to young Kiwis. Why?
So that young New Zealanders can continue the old tradition of visiting what is for many their ancestors’ homeland, earn a bit of foreign currency, acquire different skills and generally broaden their horizons, so that when they come back (and most of them do), they’re able to do better than if they were chained to their homeland (as the Khmer Rouge, among others, required of their people)? No, too obvious. Must be a more ridiculous explanation. Oh, I know – what if it was a voluntary (but not really) sort of exile which is never enforced but yet works anyhow? Yeah, that makes much more sense.
No, I mean Communists. We’ve just had a decade of it. Did you miss it?
Apparently I did. So did the rest of the country, who have just elected a party whose agenda was largely derived from the previous governent’s. What’s that you say? They’re communists too? I suppose that means Australia and Canada and the UK and the USA are all run by communists, too – after all, they’ve more politically and ideologically in common with NZ than they have with – say – China.
As a matter of fact it does. The overwhelming number of emigrants fleeing the Labour regime over the last decade were Caucasian.
Funny, when it suits people on this topic, they talk about all the MÄori folk going to Australia. But perhaps that’s partly to do with the fact that the overwhelming number of people in NZ are caucasian? In any case, the point wasn’t about who might be leaving, but who you chose to emphasise. By your choice of terminology you indicate you care more about the colour of a person’s skin than the content of their character.
Take a good long look at that link, it summarises the social engineering agenda of the Communists over the last decade beautifully. It shows us the calibre of people that the Labour regime enticed to NZ, where they came from and the rewards that Labour offered them in welfare when they got here.
I see! You object to people who don’t speak English, no matter where they’re from! How even-handed you are.
Labour is a Communist party, or at least the front for one. We’ll have three more years of listening to them position themselves as merely environmentally-conscious centre-Left but after a decade, we know who they are. You do too.
Apparently, you’re close to alone in knowing that. The `we’ of whom you speak must be fairly cheap to shout a round for.
I have no problem with any immigrant who contributes to our society and assimilates our language and culture. Welfare recipients, the illiterate and the diseased are attractive immigrants don’t qualify, except of course, to Labour. And you.
If this is true, why don’t you discriminate on the basis of ability to contribute to society (through, say, a skilled migrant scheme? Or on the basis of literacy? Or on the basis of health?
Answer: because you spend so much of your time being sorry for yourself about how tough things are for privileged white educated healthy men that you figure someone, anyone must be to blame for it. Or everyone.
Mencken said it best: “The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. He ascribes all his failure to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of infamy.”
But you probably think he was a commie, too.
Not only beyond ridicule and beneath contempt, but apparently impervious to sense, as well.
L
QtR: The genocide may not have been, but the war was.
No. The war was nominally about `Lebensraum’, that is, the re-establishment of the German national homeland which briefly existed between 1871 and 1918, plus the necessary strategic territories and resources required to ensure its integrity.
what has the Khmer Rouge got to do with Marxism (see communism)
Are you asking because you don’t know, or because you want me to explain it? Come on, you seem to know your history.
The Khmer Rouge was a very strict and selective reading of post-1917 communists (notably Stalin and Mao) with a view to return Khmer society to a mythical state of utopian agrarian egalitarianism. The socio-economic ends were explicitly to remove the covetousness and excess and external material dependence of Khmer society by returning everyone to subsistence. It’s only a loose implementation of Marxist theory, but it’s a quite extreme implementation of Stalinist-Maoist communism (though without the industrialisation imperative). That’s the problem – communism is fine in theory, but has never worked in practice. So I thought someone who was a member of a political party wanting to implement it ought to go and see and smell its worst possible effects. Turns out he agreed with me after the fact (though he remains a communist in principle, he’s got a nice IT job and a house in the ‘burbs now).
Capitalists like you use disgusting episodes like pol pot’s for perverse arguments against ideas that have nothing do with it and that which you know little about.
Like the Khmer Rouge genocide? And the Cultural Revolution? And Stalin’s famines and purges? It isn’t coincidence that these all took place under proto-communist systems. Specifically, it’s due to the power transfer problem required in Marx’s formulation – once a subset of the nominal proletariat (in reality, an elite subset) are dictating, there is no reason for them to give up their authority, and by virtue of that authority they are able to make themselves immune to the effects of their decisions. Solve that problem, and perhaps the world will revisit Marx.
L
Lynn, the cookie system is fucked again. I guess it’s our client-side cache (over which we have no control).
L
[lprent: I'll have a look at what I can do from this side. Possibly I can make the cookie name different. Try logging in? I seem to remember from the code that gives a different cookie name. ]
Now your just taking Billy and Robinsods game from the other day way too far!
PB,
Mencken said it best: “The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
Gold!
Specifically, it’s due to the power transfer problem required in Marx’s formulation – once a subset of the nominal proletariat (in reality, an elite subset) are dictating, there is no reason for them to give up their authority, and by virtue of that authority they are able to make themselves immune to the effects of their decisions. Solve that problem, and perhaps the world will revisit Marx.
Lew – I have criticised just those very aspects of Marx here on this site and if you’d follow the links in my first comment (try the last one) you’ll see I’m no communist. Here’s one of my comments on this old thread:
First of all I’ll say that I’m not a commun1st that much should be clear from my previous comment. That fact that you think bolshevism was communism in practise evidences you as an ignorant fool. The bolshiviks exploited the revolution in Russia to their own ends. The bolsheviks did not enact marxism (by which I mean communism) they merely exploited revolutionary sentiment and enacted their imminently despisable government. Many marxists criticised them at the time and many of Marx’s contemporaries on the left criticised Marx in his time. Your argument to the bolsheviks or some other despicable regime in the last century is a perverse argument made to stultify discussion much like comparisons to nazism. It is often heard from those on the right and would be as idiotic as me pointing to the nazis everytime you made a point in favour of your political views. Furthermore, what has been the great success of modern capitalism? Massive inequality, poverty, unemployment, mass apathy, environmental degradation, cultural monism what? I think there are many comparisons to draw between bolshevism and corporatism today, the mangerial nature, technocrats, and despotic tendencies. Lenin said that the workers must “unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the process’ which sounds exacly like today’s corporatism to me.
I wasn’t defending communism I was criticising your misrepresentation of matters.
That’s the problem – communism is fine in theory, but has never worked in practice.
No its never been tryed in practice and it isn’t fine in theory. Stalinism is not Marxism and I’m sure the british communists don’t advocate Stalinism or going back to some mythical agrarian utopian egalitarian state. So I still don’t get where your coming from using the Khmer Rouge to criticise communism. I personally think your just being perverse.
On the war yes nominally about Lebensraum. You can’t seriously be denying the economic ends of the war, can you? I’m not saying it was solely economic (no one would say that) neither was the Khmer Rouge’s genocide (it was ethnic as well) but of all the stuff I’ve read about the war Ã’ve never heard anyone deny an in part economic motive.
As an aside here’s an interesting artlcle: Nazi privatisation.
And watch Adam Curtis’ BBC documentary “The Trap” (on Google Video) if you want to know what’s wrong with this. Really, everyone should watch this three part complete skewering of neoliberalism and its insane pretensions.
NuLabour have tried this in Britain, and it has led to an increasingly authoritarian and absurd state.
Captcha: aboriginals ought (ought what?)
I’m sorry Northpaw, that thing of yours made my head hurt, and not just because of the Scottish dialect.
Are you saying that it’s OK for a party leader to ignore his or her cabinet, caucus and the people who elected his or her government two months previously?
Billy,
To be honest I can see why your head hurts if you can only ask the following when it is/was clearly unnecessary:—
Though I could add – helpfully you understand – how the Bush/Cheney gang could oblige a satisfactory answer to your conundrum.
Northpaw: That post is me, not PB. He and I share an IP address behind a fairly aggressive proxy and the Standard always gets me mixed up for him (though not him for me, for some reason). But yeah, it’s a cracking quote : )
L
Stop talking in riddles, man.
I suggested that the PM countermanding cabinet and caucus who were pursuing an agenda for which the government had recevied a mandate two months earlier was scary.
In response to which, you said: Seriously then what did DL know that RD didn’t..? Something big enough to make a big call..
I asked if you thought this was acceptable behaviour and you said: the Bush/Cheney gang could oblige a satisfactory answer to your conundrum.
My mother is a fish.
Quoting Faulkner won’t help you, Billy.
I don’t expect it to help me understand what northpaw’s point is. But it seemed kind of apt.
IB, I know you are really Margaret Pope and all, but what do you reckon about a PM ruling by press conference and, in so doing, ignoring cabinet, caucus and a recent mandate from the people?
And I love you too Lprent
But you may be wrong about countries dropping the Douglas prescription during tough times. If you got to the end of Unfinished Business – you’d see that Douglas wasn’t the big scary boogieman you all make him out to be. Central Europe are cutting their flat taxes downwards this year – but still maintain a fair society for those who need it.
It is sad to think that when discussing a comparitve taxation/social system when I was in Borohradek (a small town in the Czech Rep) that they felt they were better off than NZ. And to think a decade ago (or actually longer) it would have been the other way round.
captcha – devine Sumo? Maybe in Japan
The problem is neo-liberalism has never been fully realised. Look at the US situation. Neo-liberals would say that those companies that failed financially should not be rescued and that a market solution would fix the problem. Typically resulting in bankruptcy or to be brought and asset stripped. One can debate whether that’s a good thing or not, depends on your point of view. Neo-liberals also have much in common with mere liberals in that they don’t favour borrowing. One of the problems neo-liberals have with most government policies during this crisis. Is they involve heavy borrowing for insignificant gains. Look at what passed in the House today. A 600 billion+ bailout where lots of it has little short-term gain. Most of it to me doesn’t point to added jobs yet Obama is saying they’ll get two million+ in employment. All the US is doing is further burdening itself with even more debt that is likely to result in further problems sometime in the future.
In fact one has to concerned whatever your ideology over how much countries are borrowing to get themselves out of a crisis that was a factor because of debt. And that all the bailouts and crisis plans countries have today still do not address the issue of debt. Something that must be looked at, because if we don’t solve current debt problems now they’re only going to be a problem later.
ginger – You don’t need to be a neo-liberal to think these companies should have been let to fail. People say these companies are “too big to fail” well how did they get so big. They got their through preferential regulations and privileges from the state. In a free market these companies would be allowed to fail but in a free market these companies would never get so big in the first place. The bailouts are a glaring example of how government and big business are like two peas in pod and not enemies as some ridiculously naive capitalists and leftists alike believe. These big businesses externalise their diseconomies of scale onto the taxpayer and consumer through the state. Anyone from whatever political creed should be disgusted by these private gains and socialised losses, however crony capitalists like the National party would obviously applaud any government intervention into the market on behalf of big business.
That is true QtR. But neo-liberals would also argue that government intervention in terms of Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae were part of the problem. In that one of the requirements those two companies had to make to the government was to provide loans to families and people that could never afford those loans in the first place. I know its popular right now to blame big-business and certainly much of what has happened is a result of big-business. But government was also a big player in this current financial crisis.
Also any application made towards National should equally be applied for Labour surely?
Again I agree with gingercrush. I think there is something we may all agree on there, as all the socialists I know say there has not been a proper example of a communist/socialist state practising “pure” socialism or communism.
I think the same is true about “neo” liberalism. It hasn’t been fully realised at all either. This will piss off the politics lecturers who have been for years preaching that NZ’s “neo liberal” TINA, Ruthenasia type garbage to gullible first years. I think that an even handed approach rather than these scary bed time stories are for more productive.
Quoth the Raven – I would take you more seriously if you didn’t refer to “Auswitch” as “state-capitalism”
That is so wrong on so many levels bro.