You have to hand it to Rodders. Stepping out from the deathly shadow of the ACT leadership has really given him a new spring in his step hasn’t it?
A very unjustified spring.
Seeing as during his leadership he promoted a hard on crime criminal, hypocritically took perks he himself had railed against and then there was that whole sexist bullying thing with one of his MPs, you would think Hide would show a certain level of contrition.
Amazingly he doesn’t.
Rodney Hide’s column is far right hate merchantry at its best – half-baked lies seeded with the spite of self interest masquerading as truth. His latest offering in the Herald over the weekend is truly Machiavellian in its myth building.
Each point he raises is duplicitous in its twist of reality and his attempt to blame the State for locking people into poverty is an insult to our collective intelligence. His small government propaganda is just that – small government propaganda.
Rodney Hide is the wolf crying boy…
Here is just a small sample of how government stomps on the poor and blocks upward mobility.
1. The Government funds the very best schools for rich kids’ education. The price of entry is the cost of a house that’s “in-zone”. Poor families can’t afford it. They are locked out of decent schools and their kids are consigned to third-rate institutions.
The Government fund these rich schools by giving public money to private schools, the very same private schools that churn out ACT Party acolytes and supporters. Hide’s claim that statist zoning has locked the poor into remaining in their poverty ridden neighborhoods is simply an argument for funding our public schools better than they currently are. One way that could be achieved is taking that bloody public money back off the private schools and putting it back into the needy areas of our society.
Hide’s ridiculous insinuation that the free market should allow schools to take students from anywhere will see those very same schools in poor neighborhoods that Hide is currently shedding crocodile tears for gutted even further.
2. Rich girls are subsidised to attend university and become teachers, accountants and lawyers. Poor girls are subsidised to drop out of school and have babies.
LMAO – ask any ‘rich’ girl leaving University with $30 000 in debt on their back and a lesser chance of paying it off before a man if they feel ‘subsidized’ shall we? Seeing as these ‘rich’ girls are considered dependent on their families until they are 24, isn’t it their families who are bearing a far broader cost of the subsidy than the State Hide wants to blame?
As for Hide’s assertion that poor girls are ‘subsidized to drop out of school and have babies’, it’s this type of hate mongering stereotyping that Hide has built a political career out of and really should be shown the contempt it deserves. His language here betrays his real feelings on the poor he is trying to use to justify his small Government narrative.
3. The rich teach their kids to work hard and be smart to succeed. The Government teaches poor kids their land was stolen and that to prosper they must work on Treaty claims in hope of winning it back.
Um. No. Learning about the theft of Maori land is called history Rodney. Trying to warp basic NZ History into a propaganda lesson to radicalize the poor is flakey bullshit.
4. Rich boys start work on graduate wages. Poor boys are shut out of the job market by the minimum wage.
This is hilarious. Hide blaming the State on a low minimum wage has a really easy solution, rather than abolish the State which seems to be Hide’s preference, simply have the State raise the minimum wage to a living wage. Problem solved.
5. Solo mums face the highest effective marginal tax rates in the country. The rich have tax planners and offshore accounts.
Again, Government policy can simply be altered if it wasn’t for Political Parties like ACT that demonize solo mothers while championing free market tax avoidance.
6. Metropolitan Urban Limits restrict the supply of land and inflate the value of existing homes. That’s great for families who already own a house or two. It’s bad for the poor. The Urban Limits shut them out of ever owning a house. The poor are never able to accumulate capital and establish the sense of pride and belonging that home ownership brings. They are tenants for life.
Lolz. Oh Rodney, you cad. The Urban limits force intensification of public services like public transport and housing which make getting around the city far easier than suburban sprawl clogged motorways. The free market extremes of allowing foreign investors to buy up residential land doesn’t help much either. Being allowed to start the southern part of Auckland in Hamilton won’t help at all.
7. The Government subsidises the winnings of rich horse owners. The gambling of poor people is taxed through the TAB and pokie machines.
This is an odd argument and has ‘I’m running out of things to make up a list of 10’ written all over it. Government can choose to deal harshly with Gambling, Key’s pokie-deal-for-convention-center shows it isn’t. Rather than abolish the State, the State could just harden up.
8. The ballet and the orchestra are subsidised. Smoking and drinking are taxed.
I’m sorry, what? Drinking and smoking are cultural past times are they? I thought they were negative habits from addictive substances. I don’t think I’ve ever tried to freebase the NZ Symphony Orchestra ever once in my life.
9. Poor neighbourhoods are crime-ridden. The rich live behind locked gates and security patrols and say tougher sentencing and increased policing don’t work. The poor struggle to protect their meagre possessions and to keep their children from the clutches of gangs and drug dealers.
Seeing as Hide whipped that middle class fear of crime up more than anyone else, watching him try to use that as one of his points is hypocrisy that is beyond hubris.
10. The Resource Management Act, occupational safety and health, and our labour laws protect established business from upstarts who can’t afford lawyers, human resources consultants and three tiers of management devoted to compliance.
Yawn – ahhh, the old ‘red tape argument’. It’s almost as if Rodney never heard of Pike River Mine.
Hide tries to use the poor to justify a myth building of the big bad State bogeyman. It would be laughable if so many didn’t buy into the talk hate radio stereotyping.
Aaaand comments are closed on the Herald site.
Watching Rodney Hide pretend to care about poor people would be amusing if it wasn’t so odious and self serving.
It’s politicians like Hide that make me wish that we could subject aspirants for public office to an empathy test and publish the scores on the ballot papers.
Since wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty, you might think that the left would be as obsessed with the creation of wealth as they are with the redistribution of wealth. But you would be wrong.
When it comes to lifting people out of poverty, redistribution of income and wealth has a much poorer and more spotty track record than the creation of wealth. In some places, such as Zimbabwe today, attempts at a redistribution of wealth have turned out to be a redistribution of poverty.
While the creation of wealth may be more effective for enabling millions of people to rise out of poverty, it provides no special role for the political left, no puffed up importance, no moral superiority, no power for them to wield over others. Redistribution is clearly better for the left.
Leftist emphasis on “the poor” proceeds as if the poor were some separate group. But, in most Western countries, at least, millions of people who are “poor” at one period of their lives are “rich” at another period of their lives — as these terms are conventionally defined.
How can that be? People tend to become more productive — create more wealth — over time, with more experience and an accumulation of skills and training.
That is reflected in incomes that are two or three times higher in later years than at the beginning of a career. But that too is of little or no interest to the political left.
Things that work for millions of people offer little to the left, and ultimately the left is about the left, not about the people they claim to want to lift out of poverty.
Ah, the myth of social mobility.
Harriet. Perhaps you should try writing your own stuff instead of copying someone elses’ material,
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/com-1_10_06_TS.html
Not an empathy test but a test for sociopathy/psychopathy.
That article sets a new gold standard in concern trolling. He’s never really been concerned for the poor to begin with.
Awesome gutsy reply there Bomber….i was soooo tempted to write a similar point by point refute about that article. Ka pai u, from the whanau.
Is there anybody out in newspaper land that takes him seriously?
I recall the repetitive meme used by Bill Birch and other National ministers when they were pushing the Employment Contracts Bill through Parliament in 1991.
The ECA, they said, would “free employers to pay their workers more”.
That was utter rubbish. A lie.
It entitled employers to smash Union awards and wages dropped.
In effect, Hide’s comment that “Poor boys are shut out of the job market by the minimum wage” is a rehash of Birch’s Bullshit.
If Hide was truly honest, he would’ve said, “Poor boys are shut out of the job market by not being paid $1 an hour”.
The middle classes would never stomach that. (And god help them if they did. The “class war” would become a “hot war” overnight.)
LOL
Rodney apparently so torn up about politics after hearing Bolger and Winston both saying “man, I really screwed that other guy over” RE his first time near the reigns of Government. Get with the program, your neoliberal project you pushed the whole time created these problems.
Why does he remind me of this guy… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hood_%28Thunderbirds%29
And this guy… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blofeld
And this guy… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Luthor
The only question remaining to be answered; does Rodders have a secret underground Volcano lair somewhere in the mid-Atlantic?
Thomas Sowell has said all of that and more – and he’s an African American!
I’d even bet that it is mostly Sowell’s findings that Rodney has simply ‘cut and pasted’.
Yes, I know. You plagiarised his writing above without acknowledgement.
Comments are closed.