Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
It is not about "money in every pocket" Germany had that after WW1 and it turned only good for lighting the fire but it was a big fire
To be fair, Germany was having the living shit squeezed out of it under the harsh Versailles settlement terms. The system quite literally forbade their country from economic recovery. Sez Wiki:
The total cost of these reparations was assessed at 132 billion Marks (then $31.4 billion, £6.6 billion) in 1921 which is roughly equivalent to US $442 billion and UK £217 billion in 2011, a sum that many economists at the time, notably John Maynard Keynes, deemed to be excessive and counterproductive and would have taken Germany until 1988 to pay.
I'm not surprised that hyperinflation occurred under those circumstances. Fortunately NZ is not in the situation of owing all of our coal, oil and steel to an aggressive superpower for the next ten years, although it seems likely that we may end up owing quite a lot of our electricity to foreign investors pretty soon. Which, in the relentless drive for more jobs, more cash, more blow, more hoez, could mean that we owe foreign investors to dig up our coal to fire the generators to make them more money from our need to heat ourselves.
A couple of weeks ago a poster here (might have been Ben) said that he felt he and most of his cohort were poorer than his parents
I did say that. There are exceptions, the odd baby boomer who never got in on the property gold-rush, but the overall trend is that we're better trained, and considerably poorer than our parents.
I think we need some firm indications of what the terms "poverty and rich" really are
Is it a state of mind (ability to pay that unexpected bill), reality (can't feed, care or house ) or even more complexityIt's a discussion worth having.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Sacha,
Labour (as others have noted) are broadly committed to current capitalist economics.
Kind of. Compulsory savings, CGT, tax-free thresholds, and funded apprenticeships were all quite progressive ideas. A couple more additions and they're actually socialists proposing a New Deal to NZ. I know what my favourite additions would be.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Jeremy Eade,
We need money into the pockets of every working person.
We need money in the pockets of every human being, right down to the newborns. Or society just stops working. That is the inevitable outcome of the jobs, jobs, jobs push - to put work itself as the highest good, rather than the outcome of work, prosperity. As we continually improve how much work each person can do in job, any kind of logic would tell you this should either make society wealthier, or give people more leisure. But if jobs is the focus, improvement is evil, because it takes jobs away. Child-rearing is the same. Artistic creation is valueless. Leisure is for losers. Misery, poverty, depression, war. That's what jobs, jobs, jobs means.
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Hard News: The Public Address Word of…, in reply to Jolisa,
I feel sure we can tweak that and use it as a car-pooling slogan somehow...
Make a whole business around that slogan and you'll be the first green job in the new regime.
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Hard News: The Public Address Word of…, in reply to Jolisa,
Thinking of trading tiny car + bus budget for a family set of jetpacks. Or possibly kayaks.
On the Shore, huh?
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Hard News: The Public Address Word of…, in reply to Jolisa,
after a shell-shocked first week navigating Thunderdome, uh, I mean Auckland.
Two men enter, one man leave. But that's NZ, generally.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Jeremy Eade,
6000, I suddenly feel inadequate. Damn you Ben.
I feel inadequate from having little to show for such time spent. But that's capitalist thinking. The new, unemployed me admits that it was a labour of love and that a profit motive would have me writing the worst kind of hack, if I could survive as a writer at all. Most of the writers I'm meeting these days have the dream of the big novel or screenplay endlessly just beyond reach, and a life spent writing fluff pieces for pennies. This is common across most of the creative arts. It's pervaded journalism, and other businesses where artisanry was highly valued.
The most extreme example I meet every week is my sister, a dancer/choreographer, who constantly knocks the socks off the audiences that see her, but can't get 10g of funding to do a show that would employ many other dancers, while millions of dollars are swung towards a dance school specifically geared towards profiting from the labours of dancers. The new owner of this school proudly announced to an entire generation of fresh and (in my sister's highly expert opinion) amazingly talented kids coming out of the Unitec school that she got to teach at for peanuts, that they were at the high point at graduation that their dance careers would ever reach, and they must join her or die. It was quite literally incredible to the audience to hear this, that the Unitec would allow someone to come and tell them that they had learned nothing of any value whatsoever, except how to become slaves to an old hack, long bereft of any artistic vision, when a young and amazingly energetic teacher straight back from dancing all over Europe thought they were awesome, and had motivated them to really put into their art form. The most common word spoken by all the students about that speech was "evil". They sat in silent contemplation of what their student loans had bought them, and were last seen dancing like hip-hop angels as my sister sadly left them, turning her mind to where her own next crumbs would come from.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Paul Williams,
Interesting. I think economics is all too complicated myself, needlessly so. The basic functioning of money is beyond most people to understand, and that in itself is incredibly pernicious. How can people really plan their lives when such things are complex beyond even the greatest minds?
I think mostly this is because of debt. It is incredibly hard to get away from the fact that debt distorts everything about money. It creates amazingly complex scenarios out of things that are really simple. And it rewards an activity that produces nothing at all, beyond an extremely short term facilitation of economic activity, to an extraordinary degree. It is an idea that only humans could possibly fall prey to, and only our animalistic talent of falling upon one another in war once it gets stupid enough can clear it.*
*ETA: Or we could do what we're trying to do here, work this shit out using our top 2 inches.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Jeremy Eade,
It fucking better be.
Or what?
do you really think the unemployed homosapiens dig their lives, they either rot or get employed in activities that don't get taxed.
That's how it works now, yes. Could it work differently?
1000 posts.
Nearing a milestone myself.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Bart Janssen,
He's got some time now to show us his mettle, and it will take some time. I hope he's a quick study. I'm going to turn my attention away from the Labour leadership, towards what I think should really be done to fix this country. Labour can listen or not, we're right here on the 'net.
Currently the key problem I see is rising inequality and declining productivity. Mostly, I'm coming to the conclusion that this is a worldwide problem. Debt fueled capitalism's end game is that the banks own everything, and we are all debt slaves.
Is there any policy that a nation can sensibly run in face of this crisis, that dwarfs our little country? Is it possible that we could actually reverse our own impoverishment? Is it possible for us to step on the capitalist accelerator and outcompete the rest of the world, without driving our middle class back to the barest essentials, the whip wielders to keep the working classes working, and perhaps the police to round up everyone else? Or will stepping on that accelerator accelerate our bankruptcy, as it has been doing for practically the whole time I've been walking this earth? I think that far more likely.
Half of the problem is very basic to our way of seeing the purpose of work and production. When it's about providing for ourselves the things we need, then it's very obviously a good idea. But somehow we're in a situation that as an incredibly productive food producing nation we have some of the highest retail costs for food in the whole world. That's because mostly we make food to sell it, to get foreign currency. In fact, we've been going through a lengthy round of trying to work out how to do this for practically every kind of business we do. The end result is that we live in a very expensive country, and have to compete incredibly hard with far more established economies to get anything. Property can be purchased by any foreigner that cares to, so the cost of our property is such that it's utterly beyond most of the country to own. Anyone at all can stake up for a piece of the productive industry of this country, and in doing so, will eventually own it, and in the meantime will get a fantastic stream of overproduction from it, while the people actually producing the stuff can't afford it at all. Something's really buggered about this approach.
I don't think full employment would fix anything. It's not just the unemployed feeling this bite. Everyone is getting poorer, except the rich. So jobs, jobs, jobs, might not actually be the answer we're looking for at all, even if it has been Labour's message since they represented even people doing the dirty jobs. It might be that we need an entirely gestalt switch away from seesawing socialist/capitalist thinking.
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