The observation was made some time ago that to gauge the relative fairness of two societies one need only consider how one would choose if prior to birth you could choose which society… but not your parent’s financial status.

On such a test we don’t do that well.

Nor do we do all that well at preventing the rorts.

respectfully
BJ

I think you get into a problem when you try and discern between the “deserving” poor and the “undeserving” poor. Firstly, who defines what is deserving or undeserving? Secondly, even if a parent is undeserving, does this also make the children undeserving?

My personal opinion is that if there is going to be a welfare system, society has to accept that some “undeserving” people will benefit from the system. Obviously efforts need to be made to minimise the number of “undeserving” people benefitting from the system, but beyond that, this just has to be accepted as an unavoidable cost. The alternative is to let people starve.

I blame my spell checker! greengeek is being vicious.

Maybe I am out of step with others, but I believe that any mother has a responsibility to choose a mate who will stay around for the benefit of the offspring. It’s not hard.

Not hard? How old is greengeek? How many character judgements has greengeek had to make? (a) Predicting the future is hard (b) The male may die (c) the male, surly, deserves some credit for creating a solo mother (and I know of a lot of solo fathers).

If she chooses poorly, and the father runs away,

I expect greengeek is sixteen years old. That is such a naive thing to say. “chooses poorly”… Who is responsibility is a failed relationship?

are happy to make bad choices of mates, and then kick the blokes out and go on the DPB.

What evidence do you have of this? This stinks of prejudice.

Can you not see how a good quality society is harmed by funding poor decisions??

And can you not see how society benifits from ensuring all children have access to their material and emotional needs? And can you not see how hard that is to do? The DPB system is not perfect but it is of huge benifit to society? Freeing families from abusive fathers (or, often abusive mothers) by giving the non-abusive parent the financial options to get out.

I believe the average stay on the DPB is three years.

…the lazy and stupid (solo mums)…

I have had enough of your opinions on this. Go stand in the corner until you are willing to stop being a mean vicious little toad.

peace
W

bliss Says: “greengeek is just viscous.

today, the bullies are the tax dependents like solo mothers.”

Golly. Plummeting to new depths. How icky!

What exactly do you mean by viscous??

Maybe I am out of step with others, but I believe that any mother has a responsibility to choose a mate who will stay around for the benefit of the offspring. It’s not hard.

If she chooses poorly, and the father runs away, the children are left without a father and she becomes a solo mother. This is a detestable situation because the children (and the whole of society) suffer in many ways.

Obviously my criticism does not apply to those who have lost their husband through death (a very small percentage of solo mothers), or mental illness.

My criticism applies to the solo mothers who now make up a huge percentage of our welfare spending, those mothers who are happy to make bad choices of mates, and then kick the blokes out and go on the DPB.

Sometimes (ie, often) such women then proceed to have even more offspring with other (unsuitable) males.

Explain to me why taxpayers should fund poor decisions by bad mothers??

Can you not see how a good quality society is harmed by funding poor decisions??

Can you not see that there are many “good” taxpayers who are not greedy capitalists??

People who are tax dependents (eg: solo mothers) are bullies because they take from decent people those things that the decent people would not willingly relinquish if they had a choice.

I know many decent people who scrimp and save to afford the basics for their kids, and I know a significant number of beneficiaries who have far more than the basics. All paid for by the efforts of the decent people who make good, safe, conservative decisions.

That is why I labeled beneficiaries (particularly solo mums) as bullies.

Sadly our government has become locked into a “Robin Hood” kind of mentality.

This blog is about good and bad monetary policies. Financial bullies should be stopped in their tracks. That applies to the wealthy (eg the World Bank) but also applies to the lazy and stupid (solo mums) who actively seek to profit from those whose efforts swell the public purse, through good decisions and hard work.

“Of particular interest to economists is the “New Zealand Experiment”, which began in 1984 when Roger Douglas became Minister of Finance and began radically restructuring the country’s economy to fit the libertarian model[4]. Over the next 15 years, New Zealand’s economy and social capital faced a steady decline: ???

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_libertarianism

Mouldwarp said some things that are a little bit out of date.

But of course, as has repeatedly been shown, tax cuts for the “wealthy� actually tend to result in them paying far *more* tax than they were under the old regime

What studies? I think you will find that “voodoo” economics has been discredited.

Some things that are just wrong

I don’t think you understand what the term “market failure� actually means. The prices that emerge from free markets are axiomatically the “correct� ones. They literally cannot be “improved� upon by any central planner, only distorted.

When people’s welfare is not maximised for the resources spent, when markets degenerate into oligopolies (like our grocery market), when polluting the environment is more economic than not, when valuable hardwood timber is pulped for paper… These are all expected outcomes from “free markets”.

We must remember that the choice is not “command and control” like Stalinist USSR or “free market” madness that no country has ever implemented, being such a transparently stupid policy. The question is: “To what degree should the state interfere with the operations of markets?”.

And sometimes mouldwarp is being naughty…

Because politically appointed central planners ,spending other people’s money, magically possess the perfect information which eludes everyone else, right?

Wrong. The professional central planners have less distorted incentives. An obvious example is energy. Central planners can implement policies to increase efficiency, carefully husband non-renewable resources and shift to renewables. Market players OTOH aim to increase usage and profits and do not care at all about efficiency.

Some time mouldwarp is just playing stupid. Sad, but true.

- “Which is interesting because we have our own burgeoning overseas debt and current account deficit problems. And the housing market is a key part of the problem. �

I’d ask you to explain and justify any of that nonsense, but I know I’d be wasting my time.

Growing debt and deficit is definitely some sort of a problem. Whether or not it is a crises is debatable, but it is not debatable that it is a problem. There is evidence that about 40-% (from my memory) of OS debt was borrowed to buy houses. Borrowing for non-productive investments is a problem.

And we know that mouldwarp does not like Keynesian economics…

You mean the over-tax that this government has extorted from the workers?

In simple terms what governments do in booms is tax and save, in recessions they borrow and spend. There has not been, since Maynard Keynes thought of it, a better way of managing a countries economy found. There have been several attempts but they have all ended in failure.

greengeek is just viscous.

today, the bullies are the tax dependents like solo mothers.

Golly. Plummeting to new depths. How icky!

mouldwarp again displaying the glorious naivety of economic fundamentalists (right or left the fundys are indistinguishable).

Private companies that are so wasteful and useless run out of money and have to close,

Not so! In new industries patents protect them, Xerox and Poloroid (sp?) are examples, and in mature industries market power usually boils the industry down to just a few players whit enormous barriers to entry (car manufacturing, fast food restaurants). Hmmm…. I believe that pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than research now.

But it is possible for mouldwarp and I to agree, almost, on some things!

I do not care one iota about inequality,

Inequality if it gets too rampant becomes a destabilising force. But that is not the main point. I have a little saying I made up that I use a lot. “It is not a sin to be rich. It is a sin to be poor. Being poor is a sin of the rich”. That underlies my whole economic philosophy, so perhaps mouldwarp and I do not really agree.

But mouldwarp does not understand history.

the efficiency of free market economies with that of state controlled ones you will see there is, well, no comparison.

Can mouldwarp, or anyone, produce an example of a society that developed economically from peasant agriculture to being industrialised using free market economics? (I know of two, but I wonder if others can spot them, and they both had something in common that made them special cases) The two startling economic miracles of the 20th. century were USSR up to 1960 and China up to now. (China does not and never has had a free market in anything) Both were command and control economies during the development phase. Free markets have their place, but it is not everywhere. And there is no point having a wonderfully efficient free market and have the people mired in poverty.

How can one person be so consistently wrong about everything they say? Mouldwarp again…

Soviet economic activity actually *destroyed* value along the way,

That is complete nonsense.

A working free-market economy is the most powerful anti-poverty tool known to man

By what measure? Mostly nonsense!

Sometimes mopuldwarp just misses the point by so much it has to be that mouldwarp is taking the piss (and good ol’ Bliss is taking the bait)

Our concern should be to maximise individual liberty, not maximise economic output.

Clearly mouldwarp has never been in the position of choosing to feed his children properly, shoe them properly or take them to the doctor. Freedom, with out material sufficiency, is useless.

That said:

Individual liberties are a good thing.

So are collective liberties.

So is economic sufficiency.

So is sustainability.

Economic fundamentalism of any sort is not going to get us there. Which is why I am a member of the Green party and not the Act party.

Sometimes it is clear mouldwarp was out the back sparking up when he should have been in economics 101 taking notes.

free-market economy *is* the most efficient way of generating wealth for everyone;

No. All free-markets do is find prices at which markets clear. That is all they can do. Starvation is not a market failure!

From the “ignorance is bliss” department mouldwarp says:

In global terms there is no poverty in New Zealand

There are two accepted ways of measuring poverty. One is absolute poverty. From memory it is living on less than US$2 per day in 1990 PPP terms, and the other is relative poverty where people are too poor to access material resources that are generally considered the norm in the society they live in. In ours that includes shoes, warm house, good food and (bizarrely) a TV. Plenty of people in this country in that boat. SFA in that boat pre-1990.

I get a perverse pleasure from agreeing with mouldwarp.

In a market economy you can only gain wealth by providing goods and services to others who wish to freely trade with you for their own benefit. It’s win-win.

I would rephrase it by dropping the only as there are other ways. But the wonderful thing about a free market is you can make a widget, or grow a carrot, put up a sign (widget/carrot for sale) and sell it to some one who wants it and can pay for it. Great. Not a sound way to organise the provision of essential services that tend to be natural monopolies though.

From the “My head aches” department.

Who is confused over at lewrockwell.com when A classic, newly discovered article from Murray N. Rothbard. is touted? Newly discovered…classic… Please could some sensible people change sides so there can be some good debate with the right wingers?

peace
W

You really post too often and too incoherently for a proper response. But anyway…

- “Libertarians seem to want to be free to have as much as they want, however it is the contract of civil society that we are concerned about the welfare of everyone.”

What contract is that? I never saw it. And who, precisely, is this “everyone” that we have to be concerned about? Since you are defending the status quo I presume by “everyone” you actually mean “those (and only those) who happen to live in New Zealand.” I can’t imagine any moral argument that could defend such selective compassion. In global terms there is no poverty in New Zealand, so if you are going to justify the state taking our money by force in the name of helping the poor, shouldn’t you actually insist that it goes to the genuinely poor, who all live overseas? If you are going to argue that I should only be concerned about fellow nationals, rather than about everyone equally, then I’ll tell you now that I deplore such ugly sentiments.

The reality of course is that the state has granted itself the power to take the workers’ money by force in the *name* of helping the poor, yet the entire system has inevitably been captured and controlled by special interest groups to enrich themselves, and by unscrupulous politicians who use the money purely as pork and domestic election bribes. So even if there were any moral merit to your argument, the reality is that it will inevitably become utterly corrupted.

- “If one group have everything (acquired not earned) and the other nothing, the two groups are nothing but lions and hyenas fighting for survival and the law of the jungle applies.”

Remember that wealth is created, so we’re not talking about people fighting over a fixed amount. In a market economy you can only gain wealth by providing goods and services to others who wish to freely trade with you for their own benefit. It’s win-win. The system is notable for its complete absence of coercion or violence.

Sleepytreehugger

- ‘“Companies can’t just tax people at the point of a gun like the government does; they have to earn their income though voluntary, peaceful trade.â€? Not anymore they can’t thank God, but thats just what willl happen if vulgar libertarians like Murray Rothboard have their way and in the US its already happening. Not to mention they are able to use the the State’s force when they need to.’

You seem *very* confused about what Rothbard stood for. Here’s a link:-
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard-lib.html