So the saviour of ACT is a man who argues for abolition of all labour laws and removal of all health and safety regulations?

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whyte
So the ‘saviour’ of ACT is a far right fringe academic who has argued to decriminalise P? Has argued for the abolition of all Labour laws and has argued for the removal of all health and safety regulations?

Jamie Whyte’s Ivory Tower is made out of real elephant ivory.

Whyte is so radical he makes Don Brash look positively communist. This lurch to the far, far, far right is out of desperation, ACT could make Jesus Chris, Frank Sinatra and Mahatma Gandh leaders of the party and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference.

ACT are a damaged brand so beyond redemption they are a contemptuous political joke. The fact that the last leader of the Party is in court requiring the testify of Sky City which he will vote for to escape prosecution is a pus filled wound that Whyte’s coronation as leader can’t and won’t cauterise.

If the rank and file of ACT honestly think NZers are yearning for more far right neoliberal experiments they are living in a bubble world well beyond the reach of mere mortals.

All the Left have to do is dredge up the more outrageous crazy right crap Whyte has passionately argued for in the past and line that up with John Key and Colin Craig and proclaim, ‘Welcome to your new Government’.

42 COMMENTS

  1. Their weird thing is that libertarianism would work just fine, if it lived by one mantra, “do what you want only don’t crap on the next guy”. In other words, “do unto others” you know how it goes.
    In in even more other words, the only true libertarianism is libertarian left, as I believe were many important historical figures whose charisma has lasted through the ages.
    It never ceases to amuse me that those who camp themselves up in the conservative quarter of the political compass tend, in significant numbers, worship one of the original libertarian lefties, their actual polar opposite

    • Are you able to give some examples of these “libertarian left” and what you mean by this term.
      How does “libertarian left” differ from “libertarian right” ?

      • Left libertarians are just like right libertarians, but they believe that the free market will magically solve all of the world’s problems once the big bad government stops getting in the wayby, you know… providing the poor with food and healthcare…

        • So the libertarian left believes in the collective – i.e Big Government, wealth redistribution and welfare, and at the same time believes in small government and individual responsibility

          EDIT – Brendan O’Neill (of Sliked) describes himself as a “libertarian Marxist” and of the left, but he sounds just like all the other libertarian commenters so I find it hard to see the subtleties

          • You could if you wanted to try. Think of it this way, a man goes out to work in his own small business where he operates in an individual way, he then returns home to his family where he acts in a collective way. The thing I would like people to do is to open their minds and see how in terms of left and right the two work side by side to some degree or other in almost every country in the world, almost nowhere has a totally free market and almost nowhere has a completely collective one. Do not use South Korea as example of a collective, it is not, it could possibly be if Kim Jong Un and his protectors and collaborators took no more from the system than the rest of the population, it is a dictatorship and they can come in any form right to Augusto Pinochet who enforced the free market at the end of a gun.
            All you have to do is think about it a bit. Again I say “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself” a philosophy where one puts the consideration of others to the forefront is quite naturally a more collective one than individual, even though a person may do things individually within it.
            Here’s something for you to consider, Bill Gates by nature is a leftie, betcha

            • I don’t really accept that “right” means being completely self-interested. Your example of someone supporting their family describes most with families

              I think where we draw the line is between State-driven collectivism and a self-organised form of society that doesn’t necessarily require the State

              I can think of several example in my local town – volunteer firefighters, an old people’s home that is self-funded from donations, etc. All these exist with little state intervention.

              Just because they support a collective need doesn’t make them “left-wing” constructs, in my view.

              • Absolutely they do, however, why do you keep on thinking that this is an argument of big and small government for crying out loud. You can bet that even the volunteer fire brigade has an organisation that keeps everything running smoothly, making sure the fundraising is organised, that practice is attended to, isn’t that a form of govt for the volunteer fire brigade. And you can bet in terms of the number of volunteer firemen there are the organizational side of it (govt) looks rather big.
                The real problem with libertarianism is that there are just enough people who will not do things in an honourable fashion and ruin it for everyone else.
                That is why you have to have rules and regulations, the magic trick is to get it right, which we probably never will, we just just keep going right on past it whichever direction we head.

                • Well, I work in IT. Currently, I work alone, the most efficient team size.

                  Every time I have worked on big government IT projects, there have been myriads of consultants, project managers, project managers assistants and their minions.

                  Everytime, we have wasted between $50 and $100 million of taxpayers money on systems that failed to deliver and would have never worked anyway

                  That’s kind of why I prefer small government and small team solutions.

  2. Whyte is the kind of faux scholar that made the segregated bathroom studies in The Help, or the current ‘studies’ that license Paula Bennett’s pogrom against the poor.

    ACT will totter on until their funder withdraws – but the kind of person who votes ACT is either uneducated, and so not persuaded by academically framed arguments, or well enough educated to notice the flaws in Whyte’s reasoning.

  3. “All the Left have to do is dredge up the more outrageous crazy right crap Whyte has passionately argued for in the past and line that up with John Key and Colin Craig and proclaim, ‘Welcome to your new Government’. ”

    That about sums it up nicely.

    • That is what libertarianism is, and it could be argued, perfectly logically, that the abolition of all labour laws could actually even extend to the point where one could sell one’s labour for your entire life – ie that is they essentially argue that you should be free to sell yourself into slavery, because of course the natural continuation of that is that such ownership can be transferred to another.
      The slavery argument is one that libertarianism constantly has with itself.
      Libertarianism has so many forms, from left where it is agreed that there is no land or natural resource ownership to right where private property rights are supreme and all points in between.
      Libertarian really should only apply to personal freedom and not whether or not society works fiscally as a collective entirely (socialist) or in an individual base (capitalist) or somewhere in between.
      ACT are probably really neo-liberal but picking and choosing bits of libertarianism that advantage the elite and powerful the most

      • Libertarian really should only apply to personal freedom and not whether or not society works fiscally as a collective entirely (socialist) or in an individual base (capitalist) or somewhere in between.

        Indeed, Raegun. The issue of decriminalising soliciting (prostitution) was one of the very few areas of common policy between The Alliance and the Libertarian Party. It was strange being side-by-side with Libertarian Party members on one protest outside Parliament…

        • Have you ever been to the site http://www.politicalcompass.org
          By understanding how the political spectrum is not a linear thing it is really easy to see why it is that both left and right and all points in between can have libertarian ideals.
          Do the test, see where you sit naturally, and get yourself a few aha moments.

          • That was an interesting read and exercise Raegun.

            I have always considered myself a right thinking lefty.

            According to the “test” I’m a lefty libertarian.

            • Funny that, I think most decent thinking people who have consideration for their fellow man will find themselves there

          • Interesting test. I also find myself DEEP in Libertarian Left territory. Economic Left/Right value of -6.38, and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian -5.23. I wonder what John Key would score.

            • I know on one level he would probably be in the libertarian quarter, but as far as economics go, I guess he would be on the right hand side. There are the questions about corporations in there, it would depend how he answered a lot of them. Try doing it, as honestly as you can, with what you know about him, for him.

  4. Hopefully our mainstream media types will closely analyse White and his ideas and its potential impact on any National led government to the same degree that they analysed Cunliffes policy announcements in the last week. Come on now any party leader advocating the legalising of P and the abolition of Health and Safety laws shouldn’t be anywhere near a treasury bench. And the media go on about the Greens – Come on now Whytes ideas are positively loopy

  5. Yes, he’s a nutjob, although no more so than most of the current Green Party MP’s.

    Remember Russell Norman claiming that tax wasn’t a ‘burden’, andnthat Quantitative Easing was good.

    • Come on INTRINSICVALUE, you can do much better than that. Try not to let your desperation be so obvious. Greens are mainstream these days

      • Yes Frank, exactly. The same QE that brought Europe almost to it’s knees, and the US with it. We are coming out of recession much earlier than most for many reasons, one of which is we didn’t print money!

    • Russell seems to have misunderstood the term “quantitive easing”.
      What he was suggesting was old fashioned Keynesianism financed by borrowing from the Reserve Bank.

  6. ACT is self destructing to the last minute, ensuring the last nails go into the coffin. This may make it easier for Labour and Greens to win the general election, provided they get their shit together and avoid further mistakes.

    And of course also, provided the MSM do not succeed in “undermining” and destroying the campaign efforts by Cunliffe, Labour and the Greens.

    • I don’t know about that. There is a place for them as much as there is Mana. I would not vote for them as I believe they are actually neo-lib as opposed to libertarian. But there is a place for the extremes

    • So it was “libertarianism” that caused all these problems?

      Perhaps if the UK had adopted a Soviet or Maoist model it would have all worked out a lot better
      At least, the population would be a lot smaller now

    • Why would he have fit into Germany in the 1930s?
      I thought the predominant political force at the time was National Socialism, which is about as far from libertarianism that you can get

      • Andy is right there, facism and libertarianism are opposites. Nazi Germany in terms of right and left economies goes was neither here nor there, in terms of authoritarianism, it was off the scale. Then of course toss in a heapin’ helpin’ of elitism/racism, stirred up by poverty and you have the perfect storm that was Nazi Germany.
        Adolf Hitler is an example of something far removed from any monetary system as is North Korea’s leadership and any other dictatorship you can name.

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