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Down this rhetorical road lies Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Let's pray the voters and legislative branch of New Zealand are able to temper PM Ardern's flights of fan
by Cyberdog 9y ago
Down this rhetorical road lies Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Let's pray the voters and legislative branch of New Zealand are able to temper PM Ardern's flights of fancy.
- jgamman 9y agoNZ runs a proportional representation election system and since we had our election 2 months ago it would seem that 52% of NZers have chosen to temper the neoliberal flights of fancy. Good? Bad? I dunno but you're in 'culture' territory here so be careful with your comments - NZers live on a giant farm and we have hungry kids underperforming in schools/employment and our beautiful rivers chock full of literal crap. Lot's of Kiwis are very unhappy about _any_ system that thinks this is an acceptable tradeoff for unevenly distributed $$.
- surfmike 9y agoThe point is blaming “capitalism” is throwing out the baby with the bath water. Look at Scandinavia for capitalist societies with a high level of social support and environmental protections. And on the other hand look at true socialist societies like Cuba and Venezuela where hunger and pollution still exists.
- mattdw 9y agoLet's maybe also consider the role of e.g. US interference and sanctions in your two examples, before we decide capitalism good, socialism bad.
- surfmike 9y agoThe problem is there are too few socialist societies left because they’ve all failed. My parents lived through one (Poland) which had all the same shortages and pollutions. It’s the same story anywhere socialism has been tried in practice.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago"Let's maybe also consider the role of e.g. US interference and sanctions in your two examples" Or let's maybe not. Cuba could, and did, trade with essentially every other nation on the planet, so blaming "U.S. sanctions" is not a realistic excuse for their failure.
- ionised 9y agoThe problem is that free-market fundamentalists look at even the Scandinavian countries and see nothing but COMMUNISM because in their minds, much like Thatcher, There Is No Alternative to neoliberalism.
- libertyEQ 9y agoI'm a 'free-market' type that believes in prioritizing liberty, and I do not see Scandinavian countries as communist. I just see them as small to medium sized states (wrt a given state within the USA), where implementing such policies is more viable. Only Sweden has double-digit millions, while the USA has ~310M. Scale is an important consideration, and the variety of view points/ lifestyles is greater among such a large population.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago> since we had our election 2 months ago it would seem that 52% of NZers have chosen to temper the neoliberal flights of fancy. And? 56% of Venezuelans voted for Hugo Chavez. The only "flight of fancy" here is that Marxism can somehow ever be made to work. One would think that a hundred million dead bodies piled up over the last century would be enough to constitute persuasive evidence, but True Believers gonna believe, I guess.
- EdwardDiego 9y agoWho's going Marxist? New Zealand is recovering from neoliberalism, and Ardern is signalling a shift back towards our social democracy that has existed since the 1930s. Settle down with the extremes.
- Turing_Machine 9y ago"Neoliberal" is a meaningless term of abuse. In practice, it just means "not a communist".
- c0nducktr 9y agoRegarding the "hundred million" thing... http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm
- Turing_Machine 9y agoI'm old enough to remember when Chomsky was still defending Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe, so no. Try this instead. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/
- PostOnce 9y agoHow about all the bodies that piled up in defense of capital and capitalism? It seems worthwhile to tell both sides of the story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nationalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company#Nati... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Banana_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company#Banana_ma... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War There's a lot more where that came from.
- randomsearch 9y agoWhy do so many people think the alternative to our current system is to be Venezuela? Economic policies form a spectrum of trade-offs, balancing needs and priorities of different socioeconomic groups and legal entities. It seems to me that people are either (a) brainwashed into thinking that way so that they accept massive inequality as the inevitable cost of avoiding economic collapse and misery, or (b) using such an argument disingenuously to support their own advantage or emotional attachment to a particular worldview. Whatever the reason, it makes the speaker look silly and stifles serious debate. The real question is “how do we make things better?” The free market policies of the last few decades have made plenty of things worse. Let’s try to improve the state of some of those things.
- surfmike 9y agoTo flip the question: Why do people blame capitalism as if it’s not possible to have another system but maintain capitalism? Capitalism doesn’t imply lack of a social safety net or regulations. Even its most classic proponent Adam Smith saw a role for the state in providing public goods and regulating industry.
- mistermann 9y ago> Why do so many people think the alternative to our current system is to be Venezuela? Of course that's not the inevitable alternative, but if you have no understanding of what capitalism is and is not, as seems to be the case with Ms. Arden (and 95% of the rest of the people on this planet), that's where you can end up before you know it.
- ionised 9y agoHow are those countries at all comparable to New Zealand?