I agree with Barry Cole that Keith Rankin is incoherent socialist about Keith Rankin's incoherent socialist ranting:
I emailed Mr Rankin ten days ago after another of his socialist articles and asked him if he had read "Rusty Firth's book "Are You a Charlatan?" Mr Firth says in his book that the problems in New Zealand are caused by the Politicians, Economists and Editors. I asked Mr Rankin that these people should get together and sort out the damage they have caused.
Would you please put the following article I wrote onto the Scoop site.
Sally
McIntyre
Wendon Valley
RD 3
GORE
Censorship, taxation, regulation……….who needs
it?
Over the last hundred years or so, political thinking has given us the “welfare state”, high taxation, massive government intervention and regulation.
A side effect of this is that government agencies have become a victim of their own success. The “welfare services” have for the large part created their own customer-base, and now have a much vested interest in never actually defeating poverty or unemployment, since to do so would lead inevitably to the closure of those very Government agencies.
Instead, they seek to expand their base, by continually redefining their own definitions of the ‘problem’ they have to address. In my view, these Government agencies are the main reason, as to why the reforms initiated by the Lange Labour Government back in the late 1980’s did not have a fair chance to succeed.
The shocking impasse of the education and health sectors, are just two of the many indictments of incompetent New Zealand Government agencies. Over the years billions of dollars of taxpayer money has been thrown at these two sectors and each year the notion that one more experiment or a bit more taxpayer spending could be the elusive silver bullet.
Rather than finding solutions, the self-perpetuating elites of this country are more anxious to improve their salaries and superannuation schemes.
The DPB introduced in 1973 has been the biggest single creator of poverty in this country, with a series of deplorable down-stream social consequences that are still with us, and are multiplying.
The role of government should be to provide an enabling legislative framework and leave implementation and enforcement to individuals. Let people make for themselves the decisions that influence their lives and the lives of their families, and let them live by the outcomes of these decisions. After a while, they may realise they don’t really need to be governed at all.
The desire for increased monetary rewards has increasingly been supplemented by increased demands for increased autonomy at work, and freedom of working styles, coupled with a growing awareness that Governmental interference in the lifestyles of individuals is both oppressive and unnecessary. Freedom today is more and more the ability to determine our own lives.
It is a tragedy for New Zealand to see so many citizens now prepared to further erode their freedom, by voting for “more government” in their lives when they should be demanding “minimal government”.