Posts by giovanni tiso
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Tax is just the symptom.
That's a fine metaphor if you think that society is a disease.
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Gio, did you mean to write "Mouldoon?" Because if you did, bravo. I usually hate the nicknames we give politicians (like "Hyde" for Rodney Hide) but the "mould" in Mouldoon is brilliant.
I could claim to be witty rather than ignorant, and you would probably all believe me because you are such nice people. But you deserve better.
I despise Douglas for his contempt for democracy. But I don't doubt that when Labour took office in 1984, to discover that Muldoon had been hiding a currency crisis, action had to be taken very quickly.
Quite aside from the actual nature and gravity of the crisis, which is still a topic of debate, the problem is, what action? Faced with very similar crises, other countries (including mine) simply devalued their currency. It wasn't painless, but it was nowhere near as painful.
(And yeah, NZ had high inflation. So did the rest of world. It's nice that we no longer have it, but it's disproportionately nicer for the wealthy. And in the meantime the purchasing power of workers' salaries in the Western countries that put this fight at the centre of their platforms has crumbled.)
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Even when the bulk of the money goes to large corporations? And poor countries are denied the ability to compete by rich countries? It's just mad.
I'm not saying they are implemented well, or not disproportionately in favour of corporations (what isn't?), I'm saying that they're not wrong in principle. And that I wouldn't want my country to just abolish them altogether. Implemented equitably, they're simply a form of redistribution. I'm okay with that.
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The resulting over-production is eventually dumped with developing economies, badly damaging their own small producers.
You could certainly argue with that side of the equation, but the idea that we should subsidise primary producers is not wrong per se. It's what keeps a lot of cultures going that would have disappeared. And there is nothing demonic in a country acting to keep the cost of primary products for domestic consumption down.
(Disclaimer: some of my best family members are farmers, etc.)
Denis Welch is always good value on this one. Money quote right at the end:
And don’t tell me that New Zealand is subsidy-free: the
entire economy is predicated on capital being subsidized at
the expense of labour. -
what he says is that socialism just doesn't work to achieve the [noble] aims it sets out to achieve.
Whereas his policies do, making him the only true socialist.
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asking her for a copy of Roger's book.
Believe it or not, I have read No Second Class Citizens. (It's the one that comes with Boscawen's inaugural speech at the end, right?) And as I recall in the first speech Douglas starts, as he always does, by claiming he's the only true socialist.
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Should we return to:
- A subsidized farming sector producing mountains of product no one wanted?Europe has that. In fact every other country in the world has that, pretty much. Are they all stupid?
- Tarriff barriers to ensure we can all pay more for goods?
And so that we keep people in work. Again, most countries still have those. What they appear to lack is enough sad-arses who think that paying five dollars less for a skivvy at the Warehouse is worth somebody else's job.
- Taking cars apart in Japan so we can reassemble them in NZ for make-work jobs?
- Tax rates at 66%
- the list goes on....Yeah, why not. I'll take any and all of those things. Mix them up as you wish. It's true that we didn't reverse a lot of those measures - some of them were simply too destructive, how do you even begin rebuilding a manufacturing sector via the reintroduction of tariffs? - others were successfully bedded in from an ideological standpoint, but it's also true that the world hasn't followed us down that particular path. And Douglas and his acolytes can't have it both ways. The reforms had terrible results, by all measurable economic standards, and opened up a huge gap between us and, amongst others, Australia, as well as making NZ a far less equitable society with marked internal disparities. The standard defense against that argument is that the reforms didn't go far enough. That's bollocks, they should have worked at least partways. Where's our productivity? Where's our innovation? We're still an agricultural producer, as we were under Mouldoon. We employ a reasonably high number of people by Western standards, but in low-wages, low-producivity jobs. It's all that neoliberalism can offer.
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Wish me luck.
Why? I for one like the ACT party broken the way it is.
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For saying that ,if I wanted to do this, I would not open with fireworks. I suspect it will alienate some potential clients.
Doesn't Pam want to attach the brothel to a reality TV series?
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Also. Men paying women for sex = degrading to women. However, women paying men for sex = degrading to women. Wuh?
Because a key traditional role of women in most societies is to wash away men's sins?