GUEST BLOG: Bryan Bruce – What is the purpose of an economy?
Last week RNZ reported on two stories that should give us all pause to think about who we are , what we stand for and the ACTUAL rather than the pretend economic policy by which our country is run .
The first was on the queues of people lining up at the Manurewa MSD office on Thursday to get emergency assistance .Some had been there, in the cold and rain since 2 am.
The Minister Carmel Sepuloni put the blame on the Auckland Action Against Poverty group because that’s the day they have their advocates there to advise people about their rights and they won’t spread out their advocacy over the week, through pre appointments and at other offices
Putting aside all other issues (such as trust in the MSD and the need for volunteer advocates at all) the fact that so many people are so desperate for assistance the government itself has had to increase the amount it has allocated for hardship grants to $128.5 million, tells you there is something very wrong with the way we are running our economy.
The second item was about the proposed sale of Westland Milk to a subsidiary of the Chinese milk giant Yili.
The Cooperative has been struggling to be profitable and pay a competitive pay out to its farmer suppliers.
Last year when Prime Minister Ardern visited the Westland Milk Products factory she announced it would receive a $10m loan from the Provincial Development Fund but this was taken off the table in March of this year when Westland Milk signed their provisional agreement with Yili to sell to the oversdeas buyer at $588 million.
What this story tells you is that the government’s continued neoliberal policy of allowing vast sums of foreign investment to wash across our borders means that it is powerless to support our agriculture and dairying industries from being bought up by overseas investors.
The same problem occurred in our housing market when unrestricted foreign money was allowed to buy and sell in our residential housing market . When overseas buyers can pay more for a property than the locals , then the locals miss out. (It is still happening by the way but in a less overt manner).
Who can blame a Westland famer who has struggled to make ends meet for taking a more attractive deal from an offshore buyer when the local deal isn’t as good?
Well of course that’s neoliberal capitalism. Everything is for sale because, to the neoliberal mind, money is the measure of value.
The trouble is that if we keep going down this road there will come a day when New Zealand is entirely operated by people who do not live in our country. What then? Who will be? What happens to our identity as a nation – our democracy?
Again the problem lies in the way we run our economy . The government, for all it’s recent PR about wellbeing is still running to the neoliberal agenda which promotes selfishness and competition over cooperation and the common good .
It still has ‘ a hands off’ attitude to the market place. Indeed it is actively waving foreign investors ashore to buy up our freshwater , milk factories and farms so that it won’t have to raise taxes from our own wealthiest people to pay for our own infrastructure, promote our own businesses and ensure that workers receive a fairer share of the nation’s wealth.
While the government may point excitedly to fact that there are officially less unemployed people in our country as evidence of their economic success , they can only do so by turning a blind eye to the fact that neoliberal economics has turned us into a low wage economy – a Gig economy – where many people have to work 2 and 3 jobs just to make ends meet.
It is still running an austerity budget with $3.5 Billion surplus when food parcel distribution at the Auckland City Mission is up 50% on last year.
It is also to ignore the fact that our richest two citizens now own as much wealth as the bottom 1.5 million of us- and yet our government refuses to instigate any significant form of wealth tax.
Over the last 3 weekends I have posed hypothetical questions on my page which have invited readers to think about their ultimate values . This week let me finish by posing you the real question I asked at the end of my 2012 documentary Mind The Gap…
What is the purpose of an economy?
Is it so a few people can get rich at the expense of the many? (Neoliberal economics)
Or to deliver the greatest good for the largest number of our citizens over the longest time? (Progressive economics)
I’m for the progress ‘greatest good’ approach to running our economy.
How about you?
Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.
If the economy is the production and logistical distribution of resources facilitating a given society, then you are really asking what the proper role of a society is. That is a relative concept that varies with each individual and their personal ideals.
The concept of the greatest good for the greatest many, or the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, may cause undifferentiated common mediocrity and a tyranny of homogenised mediocrity.
You cannot achieve a single moment of independent free thought by that avenue. You risk being bogged down by irredeemable masses. Sadly, idealistic visions of utopian greater goods are simplistic, oppressive, illusory, relative, temporary, tending towards dogmatic and ultimately useless.
So I return to the start, reducing the word to meaning only the productive and distributive logistics that produce the given society. It contains no ideological guidance beyond that. Hope this helps you liberate yourself from that illusion. All the best, DH
think you messed up on the definition their Doc. Defined as the greatest good for the many. You may have little to no imagination that makes greatest good equal to mediocrity but I for one and I guess BB for another can see a little further than that. Likely we would say that mediocrity is what we now have and that the competitive model that is neoliberalism can only produce mediocrity because it is in its nature to cut down and destroy or colonise and own anything that challenges the hegemony of the elite. Most truly great human enterprises were the result of collaboration and cooperation not individual greatness. Survival of the fittest doesnt mean the fittest individual but the fittest species since no individual can survive on their own. there is no such thing as individual free thought. thinking implies language implies society and others just as your definition of the economy doesnt exist. The production and logistical distribution of resources is an act of people cooperating together. Your disdain for the masses only exposes either your lust for the position of elitism or your accomplisment of the same. Either way I suppose it is to your advantage to portray them as a mediocrity to be despised
https://www.thegwpf.com/scientists-find-evidence-cosmic-rays-influence-earths-climate/
It’s interesting how the old blame the victim mentality rears its head from time to time. This time it’s like how Jenny Shipley said in in the early 1990s said that people who use food banks are alcoholics and that food banks create their own demand. FFS. It’s as if people like being poor and enjoy begging for food.
I thought a few quotes might describe what I believe our economy should be and do.
Today’s economy should go for:
We have the capacity to create a remarkably different economy: one that can restore ecosystems and protect the environment while bringing forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security.
Paul Hawken
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/paul_hawken_637129?src=t_economy
An objective look at the reality of the financial world behind the Wizard of Oz’s green smoke:
“You know what’s truly weird about any financial crisis? We made it up. Currency, money, finance, they’re all social inventions. When the sun comes up in the morning it’s shining on the same physical landscape, all the atoms are in place.” ― Bruce Sterling
Not the economy started by this man – the start of the western world’s downfall:
Ronald Reagan – an actor pretending to be a sage. (Sports announcer, then actor, was President of Screen Actors Guild where he was active in routing Communists, went on television, became a motivational speaker, was a Democrat, changed to Republican, became Governor of California, raised taxes, changed a deficit into a surplus.) In 1969 he ordered in the troops against protesting students with one killed, 128 hospitalised; (probably all commies!). In 1980 he became President and began the supply-side economic regime with tax reductions. Radio commenter to raconteur. Wikipedia and Rolling Stone
Quote: “You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.” ― Ronald Reagan
(A protean character illustrating that having humble beginnings doesn’t engender a generous community spirit towards your fellow citizen.)
Quote from Goodreads
Try Confucius’ way:
To rule a country of a thousand chariots, there must be reverent attention to business, and sincerity; economy in expenditure, and love for men; and the employment of the people at the proper seasons. Confucius
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/confucius_717854?src=t_economy
Michael Moore’s memories are what I would wish for people in a good economy, feeling the wellbeing and not just being consumer animals:
“It was the American middle class. No one’s house cost more than two or three year’s salary, and I doubt the spread in annual wages (except for the osteopath) exceeded more than five thousand dollars. And other than the doctor (who made house calls), the store managers, the minister, the salesman, and the banker, everyone belonged to a union. That meant they worked a forty-hour week, had the entire weekend off (plus two to four weeks’ paid vacation in the summer), comprehensive medical benefits, and job security. In return for all that, the country became the most productive in the world and in our little neighborhood it meant your furnace was always working, your kids could be dropped off at the neighbors without notice, you could run next door anytime to borrow a half-dozen eggs, and the doors to all the homes were never locked — because who would need to steal anything if they already had all that they needed?”
― Michael Francis Moore, Here Comes Trouble
Not a good example to use Mrs beneficiary soup(shipley) cause she tried to make all beneficiaries eat soup when she was in power yet she was over weight herself and was preaching. And she used the public health system to have her angina sorted she was rushed in urgently when our Maori people are dying not getting scans or diagnosed properly
Funny you should say that Michelle. I had the misfortune to see a picture of Paula Bennett online yesterday and sat mulling over – wasting valuable time- whether she was more detestable than Shipley, whom I had hitherto regarded as the most obnoxious woman ever squeezed onto a parliamentary seat.
The similarities are skin-crawling: two fat women who were only able to control their obesity by having expensive gastric bypass operations. What a waste of surgeons, considering.
Not everyone has the dietary knowledge or the money to eat wisely, but these two should have, so maybe they’re just a couple of greedies, in which case their preaching to the poor was singularly obscene.
Did Dame S really tell,people to eat soup ? What a nerve. MP John Banks said that beneficiaries should grow their own vegetables – perhaps to make Jenny Shipley soup.
Parts of NZ have unpredictable growing seasons – where I am is – but these two should have known that life at the bottom is not always that simple, or they could have been playing to the gallery,
or maybe they believed their own words, which is also not good enough.
I now think that Bennett is worse than Shipley, and my hairdresser says that she looks terrible – she’s aged 10 years since her op, but I think of her with a smidgen of empathy whenever I tuck into fish and chips or pork bones. ( That’s actually a lie. I’m practising.)
Yes shipley did we called it beneficiary soup yet she wasn’t eating it herself and she got prompt service in the public hospital for her angina attack in the meantime she was bene bashing
pull the benefit is the most hated and her own people hate her the most why she is one nasty piece of work
Changed my mind, Michelle, and decided that the Dame was worse as she has such a profoundly irritating unctuous manner and patronised everything in sight.I think she was the one who gave a whole new meaning to cost effective medicine, and it’s just as well that she seems to be now helping to bugger up banks rather than human beings.
Bennett I prefer not to elaborate on, but I do think her more deluded than many in her perception of herself. The pair of them give lie to platitudes about woman being caring and sharing, and they drag all women down with them, and they shame us.
A lot of their negativity towards others quite likely derives from – consciously or not – feeling negative towards themselves – and deservedly so I must say.
Well if youre going to have at them why not Lange as well or is it only fat women that you detest?
The base rate of income tax in the UK is roughly 45%. That government will claim it’s 20% but that is a bare faced lie because employees pay 3 income taxes out of the money set aside to pay them. Then they also pay 20% sales tax on top.
Be careful what you wish for. Governments are more than happy to tax people and redirect it to the rich and unaccountable. Tax is only part of the answer, we need transparent and representative government and our own sovereignty.
The chinese have a philosophy of making a quick buck. If a businessman can make $20k today and forego $100k worth of business in the future he will.
My bet is after they have raped and pillaged all the value out of the businesses, farms and houses they’ve bought up here they’ll walk away and leave them.
The idea of Westland farmers opting to take this ‘better deal’ is shortsighted and naieve. These people have no idea what they have let themselves into by allowing such a buyout.
This is china attempting to take over the country by stealth because we have industry, food, supplies and natural resources here (water etc) that they badly need back home.
I must question as well, what caused Westland Milk Products to go from a profitable operation to one that needed a life-line.