by Kennedy Graham
How do the three main political parties understand sustainability? That’s the question for the final panel of the day-long economics conference the Green Party’s organising this Friday, in Parliament.
After a full day exploring the issues of global and national sustainability, neo-classical and ecological economic theories, and how New Zealand can practically pursue sustainability in business, agriculture, trade, energy, and through fiscal and monetary policy, it’ll then be the turn of the MPs.
Up on the panel are Dr Nick Smith, National’s Minister for the Environment, Labour’s finance spokesperson David Cunliffe, and myself. The hope is that each of us can offer our insights into what sustainability means and how it can be achieved through informed economic policy.
It is not totally clear what the present Government makes of sustainability. John Key describes his Government’s policies thus:
The driving goal of the new Government will be to grow the NZ economy in order to deliver greater prosperity, security and opportunities to all New Zealanders. It will be going for growth because it believes in the power of economic growth to deliver higher incomes, better living conditions and ultimately, a stronger society for New Zealanders. My Government views economic growth as the platform upon which a stronger NZ will be built. It views political leadership from this Parliament as essential to achieving that goal.
It will be interesting to learn from Dr Smith what the Government thinks about the relationship between growth and sustainability in 2010.
Helen Clark’s Government addressed sustainability thus:
My government sees its most important task as building the conditions for increasing New Zealand’s long-term sustainable rate of economic growth… the appropriate mix of policies can, over time, return NZ to the top half of the developed world… Economic growth is a means to an end, not the end itself. It is about creating real opportunities for us all – a richer, more inclusive, more diverse and dynamic nation, and about creating the resources to enable governments to provide better social services.
Russel Norman has described the Green view as follows:
We believe that a sustainable society, one which lives within its resource limits and leaves some space for the natural world, is a society best placed to avoid ruthless competition for ever diminishing resources …The next economic wave is the green economic wave and, if New Zealand wants to prosper, we must prioritise research, science, and technology spending in areas such as renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, green tech manufacturing, green design, and energy efficiency.
Clearly there are subtle, and not-so-subtle, differences between the three parties on this question. It’s our hope that Friday’s conference will give us all a chance to dialogue on this critical issue and see how much common ground we can find among us.
Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare | Environment & Resource Management by Kennedy Graham on Tue, November 9th, 2010
Tags: economic sustainability
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All of these words, and others, are now commonly regarded as constraints to economic growth. And yet, internationally, these words are the very basis of our competitive advantage.
There’s a failure in NZ to acknowledge that maintaining a clean natural environment is a requirement for sustainable economic growth.
NACT, Fed Farmers, Fonterra et al keep presenting these greenwashed environmental gestures to hide the fact that they are making no genuine effort to protect the environment that our country’s business model rests upon.
Where was I? Perceptions… yeah, to get change we must work hard to restore the apolitical nature of these words.
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maybe restricting the economy from incentivising unhealthy growth is a valid strategy for assuring that economic growth occurs in ways that are sustainable.
we want more FROM the economy so we need to ensure that the economy develops in a healthy way. growth at all costs will deliver nothing but an import-addicted, highly indebted, highly unequal society (as it has done thus far).
if the economy is managed well – with unsustainable behaviours highly disincentivised – we will have a society which lives within it’s means, in which any child born in any family can expect to be nurtured and supported to fulfil their potential.
It sounds aspirational, I know, but politics in this country seems to be all about aspiring, all of a sudden…
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rimu – the point is, you’ll never get even a fraction of the extra spending you want on everything if the economy isn’t substantially bigger than it is now.
There sometime seems to be a disconnect with (some) Green thinking in that businesses making good profits are regularly and strongly criticised – yet high spending on all the issues Greens wants is highly dependent on companies making good profits.
High wages and high tax take are reliant on companies making good profits.
And thriving companies are far more likely to invest in new more efficient technology than those who are struggling just to keep their heads above water.
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depends on what you define as ‘good’ profits. if those profits are coming at the expense of society through good old-fashioned externalities then they are not good profits.
“And thriving companies are far more likely to invest in new more efficient technology than those who are struggling just to keep their heads above water”
Great, so all we need to do is manage the economy in a way that allows those companies that are prepared to adopt sustainable practices to thrive while those that profit at the expense of the environment and our society in general struggle.
Or do you think all profits are good profits, photonz?
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As long as our major export is a low value commodity we are consigned to remain in the global class of poor, and we simply wont have the money to do the right things.
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dbuckley says “As long as our major export is a low value commodity….
Many of our products – dairy, meat, fish, fruit, wine – are not so low value.
However it seems insane that other products like timber are exported as logs and chips, when there could be a whole industry in making them into higher valued products (with much more efficient shipping – even with saw timber)
The problem is that because of trade tarrifs, NZ companies would make LESS money with higher valued timber products or even sawn timber, than they do with logs and chips.
nommopilot asks “Or do you think all profits are good profits, photonz?”
Not necessarily. However there seems to be some people who think all profits are bad profits.
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That metric is a problem, and the reason why it is the metric needs to be considered carefully.
In spite of trying harder, the government is accomplishing little in terms of GDP Growth.
Wealth distribution is another metric of the health of a society, the GINI index is a useful tool here, we aren’t doing too well there EITHER.
One of our major trading partners is going to be borrowing 4.2 trillion dollars next year. Going off on a QE2 cruise. Using other people’s money.
Using our KID’S money. Consuming the environment ever faster. What nonsense to expect this process to actually continue to grow forever.
If we cannot do that (and we cannot while restricted to this planet), then at some point we have to work out what the economy looks like if we are NOT growing…
How does that work? Clearly no nation or entity on the planet has any idea, none know how to accomplish it, nor even have any inclination to try….
….why?
BJ
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“Economic growth” is the key to the legitimacy of every democratic government, especially among the wealthy nations. The promise of consistent growth is the historic compromise of the post war era – citizens get increasing incomes and increasing consumption, and capitalism gets an easy ride. So if growth continues, all is well with the world. When growth fails, citizens get very agitated.
The growth imperative that drives our society was a fine idea in the 1950s, but very quickly it was apparent that, once a society reached a certain standard of living, further growth came at the considerable expense of quality of life, whether that considered in environmental terms or in social terms. This is the fundamental insight of the green movement from Ivan Illich and Herman Daly onwards. (And it is why greens concern themselves with social justice as much as environmental justice.)
Yet the core of this insight which is so often ignored is that capitalism is the problem. If you have capitalism you get growth; if you get growth you inevitably get environmental and social degradation.
Realising this, some people – including some greens – try very hard to work another compromise called “sustainable growth” into the debate. Well Herman Daly and Kenneth Townsend nailed that fable years ago: “The term ‘sustainable growth’ when applied to the economy is a bad oxymoron—self-contradictory as prose, and unevocative as poetry.”
So let me rephrase my opening words: You can have capitalism or you can have sustainability, but you can’t have both.
Time to choose.
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bj says “….then at some point we have to work out what the economy looks like if we are NOT growing……”
Easy – economically, it would look like no extra money for benefits, no extra money for wages, no extra money for ACC claims, no extra money for early childhood learning, no extra money for teachers, no extra money for student loans, no extra money for health, no extra money for conservation etc.
Of course if we want to be better off growth is just part of the equation. Being more efficient and productive also leads to improved profitability.
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NZ’s (main) advantage in the dairy world was that we were a ‘low input- low output’ system. I.e. cows harvets grass which grows cheaply.
Now it is ecconomical to buy Palm kernel on the international market. Thus our main ecconomic advantage is gone. Chile and Uruguay will overtake us as cheap producers of milk powder.
We should be expoting organic, grass fed, free-range, GE free infant formula.
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NO Photonz, you are taking the simplistic and easy way out. Consider that no country on the planet has ever gone to zero growth without experiencing it as a severe economic depression/recession. It is economically “a bad thing” that has nothing to do with benefits. Think harder about the nature of the question I asked.
After all, if things cost the same then I don’t NEED more money each year to keep up, DO I ? So how come this is the way things are? … and don’t tell me you don’t know where I am going with this
, you’ve watched enough of my posts to have a pretty good idea …. to the extent that I am not entirely convinced you aren’t simply yanking my chain here 
BJ
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BJ
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“Easy – ”
by easy, I think you’re meaning simple, but your simple economic analysis there assumes that our economic system would be fundamentally the same under a no-growth paradigm.
making a no-growth economy work would involve some crucial, fundamental changes including a recognition of the primacy of the laws of physics over the rules of economics (sadly currently lacking).
A no growth economy would certainly not be easy, but it will certainly prove necessary if we carry on along our current path of borrowing from our children.
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Zero growth is a bad thing because growth, inflation, energy, and interest are all words that desribe the operation of the same system. The “debt is money” trick (which is what the finance systems of the planet are based on) can only work whilst there is growth.
And the root of this evil is that money is valueless.
I see no way to get off this treadmill. Until the global energy supply falters…
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One of the thorns that must be grasped is that to become sustainable, we must perform a paradigm shift, as BJ has intimated; no longer using the metric of GDP growth to measure our annual ‘success’, but looking to indicators of economic wellness.
Are we aiming for a society with dependence issues, or can we become self-maintaining by, for example, making more of what we need, importing less (and becoming more conscious consumers by rejecting the 1st-world consumerist habits indoctrinated in us by Madison Avenue’s marketing guru’s) and being more aware of the basics of life that we have been taking for granted?
Simple economic changes like encouraging middle-class suburban residents to use the land in their backyard to grow food; taking up initiatives like ‘clothes-swaps’, carpooling, and supporting the growth of public transport in our suburbs can go a long way towards reducing our dependency on constant spending on ‘feelgood’ consumer items. (Which we have been brainwashed to believe will induce feelings of well-being; I can’t recall ever feeling god about my credit card bill, back when I had one!)
Most of what I’ve suggested above is about cutting wastage in our day-to-day lives, which not only improves household budgets, but improves the national debt ratio, and for those who can handle thinking about how they live, might improve the national psyche.
I’ve always gained a lot more satisfaction from making something myself than from merely buying a mass-manufactured item (I’ll admit that I’m typing this on a computer I couldn’t possibly manufacture, but I’m speaking within the bounds of reasonable expectations of successful object creation!) and I’ve always found it appealing to discuss a newly acquired skill with a friend who is glowing with the joy of recent accomplishment, perhaps proudly showing off a new garment, or a household improvement.
We used to be a nation of avid ‘do-it-yourself-ers’; somewhere along the line many of us gave that away to become ‘weekend warriors’ at the local Mall, vying with each other to ‘spend our way to happiness’.
As the credit crunch and subsequent recession in the USA has shown us, that isn’t a viable option any more, with banks there at the height of the lending boom allowing 125% household debt.
I’m looking forwards to hearing some of the speakers at the conference tackle ways of attacking both the paradigm shift that needs to happen, and some practical, achievable sustainability goals for New Zealand, and New Zealnders
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bj says “We should be exporting finished products of all descriptions”
What about if companies earn LESS from finished products than from raw commodities because of trade barriers, like timber to many Asian countries?
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bj says “We should be exporting finished products of all descriptions,”
Further to the above question, if we export more finished products, we need more globalisation and less protectionism by reducing trade tarriffs.
But the Green Party often promotes protectionism, and doesn’t seem to keen on globalisation – so doesn’t exporting more finished products go against Green Party ideals?
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They want to ensure employment of their woodworkers. We want to ensure employment of ours. So there is a trade mis-match.
if we export more finished products, we need more globalisation
I did not mean that we needed to export more in absolute terms… I was speaking relatively. A ratio of finished to unfinished goods.
This is why you reach the conclusion that this is inconsistent. It has nothing to do with exporting more. It has to do with importing less. Which is I think, consistent with Green and sustainable economics.
This comment does however, make me think in the global sense.
Overall the woodworkers in East Bunga-Bunga who turn our wood into tables and chairs which THEY export, cause benefit to East Bunga-Bunga. If we arrange our terms of trade so that we are producing tables and chairs at similar prices the change will negatively impact East Bunga-Bunga as it brings advantage to us.
Is this good and fair? Are their tariff barriers that high? Is THEIR market so large or are they selling to some third customer? Getting right down to it this stuff becomes complicated. However, as a New Zealander, I am inclined to see the current situation as “not” fair.
BJ
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Do you always start a sentence with so and so says photonz? You really should try and formulate some of your own opinions instead of just slamming everyone else.
I think the do it yourself methodology of the average New Zealander is something we need to retain. There is a great benefit in fixing or making an item, although purchasing a throw away is easier. The principle must not be lost because of cheap imported items currently swamping our country. These things often have a very short life span, clearly an economic and environmentally unsustainable system.
The trick is to make things that we can and otherwise purchase well-made items. Having access to parts and knowledge of how to repair items is another factor. I was disappointed to see that a lot of what was taught in schools in my day is no longer available to our young people. That would be where the do it yourself (sustainable future) attitude originates. Our politicians have in general lost touch with the New Zealand way of life making policies that subvert and discourage the do it yourself Kiwi attitude.
Katie hints at what Transition Towns has been talking about for a while now: Much of this template will apply to economic sustainability: http://www.transitiontowns.org.nz/
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bj – my point was that Green ideals seem to be against globalisation and for more tarrifs – which would make it even harder to export finished products.
Personally I think globalisation is a great equalizer. Production of goods shifts to countries who need the income more. Then they improve their living standards hugely, then production shifts again i.e. production of electronic goods that shifted from Europe and USA to Japan, then Korea and Taiwan, then China. Now Thailand and Mexico are building new factories.
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…and now europe, usa and japan are going down the toilet…
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rimu says “…and now europe, usa and japan are going down the toilet…”
Ah – better to keep them rich with their foot on the throat of poor countries ??????
I think places like USA, Japan and Europe who are in your words “going down the toilet” still have a considerably higher standard of living than avirtually every other country in the world.
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The key to growth has always been energy, first coal, then oil and now solar electric is emerging as the likely cornerstone of our energy needs. The returns are already a good investment. Solar power can provide power locally, reliably and in abundance although it is a technology still in its infancy. When we can run our vehicles on this energy our oil imports will reduce and our balance of payments will improve. When we have free energy in our homes and for our transport we will all be better off and many things will become possible. Humanity is at its best when it has to re-invent itself and now is such a time.
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This of course is not true. He can simply do what the US did and print money. Instead the NZ govt is borrowing $260 mill a week of this fictitious credit which we have to pay back in container loads of beef (plus interest) or the land upon which we grew said beef (an option enthusiastically recommended by the dummies at the reserve bank). This is a perfect recipe for enslavement.
Apparently the truly terrifying side effect of this would be inflation which would shrink our mortgages, raise our wages, underpin house prices while at the same time making homes more affordable, a spectre too ghastly to contemplate.
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I can see that asking leading questions doesn’t get this discussion to its destinations. There is an inertia of thinking here.
Bookchin You can have capitalism or you can have sustainability, but you can’t have both.
I think not true. You can have fractional-reserve banking or you can have sustainability, but you can’t have both.
That is the place where the “we have to grow to succeed” comes from… because as long as money is backed by debt, the interest payments require growth which is geometric and impossible. Which is why we periodically get complete collapses of the system.
We have the “other” problem as well, that the population keeps growing too, and that is a different and potent driver for growth, but it is not actually an economic issue and I regard it as orthogonal to this thread. One problem at a time here.
First we have to correctly answer the question what IS money. Then we can have a shot at correctly arranging the economy around it. Right now every country in the world and every economic school I have ever heard of, is imprecise, to politely rephrase the more accurate description which is… “completely fncking wrong”.
I’ve pointed this out before. Money is “Work DONE” not work promised, not obligations accepted, not a “store-of-value”…. it represents work done and thus it CANNOT be backed by debt. Something that serves similar purposes but is backed by debt is not precisely “money”, though you may choose to exchange money for it. Making this difference clear through correct definition forces a whole different method of thinking about what things are worth and how money is handled.
It sure SEEMS simple, but the monetary system of the planet is basically a violation of the laws of thermodynamics, and as those actually cannot break, the breakage occurs in the society we built around our misconception.
Better Photonz, for the foot to have never been placed there… but THAT is a function of the way we’ve fostered growth at any cost. Capitalism can work if it is not based on a monetary system that is a lie.
Now the piper is demanding his coins and rejecting the false ones. Which has investors around the world in a panic stricken search for something safe. Not something that makes money, something that preserves wealth. Which means that stimulus packages are sucked up into various forms of savings, bonds and the like, NOT invested.
Which is why we saw a recent auction with negative yield on TIPS.
Those troubles haven’t ended at all.
BJ
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In the 1930s here the govt printed money and employed people planting huge forests and building infrastructure. The money stayed within the NZ economy. The govt ran up a debt against itself. The forests generated public profit which generated local industry.
Now we borrow foreign money to buy manufactured goods which we cant afford. This is like employing a housekeeper when you are broke.
Nations are forced to play this game of global monopoly in which entire nations go broke, such as Iceland and Greece. In monopoly the little guy always loses – its inevitable.
Currently they are trying to talk us out of our land, our very nationhood. This is the ultimate betrayal. Under the current system we will obviously ultimately lose the lot, bit by bit, one debt after another. A few farms here, houses there, office blocks, shops, Marylebone St Station, Old Kent Rd. . .
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Phil Toms, I think you need to take a look at the history books and actually see what happens to people when you let the printing presses go wild. People who have savings suddenly lose them all because the currency in which they are denominated in becomes worthless. You end up with situations where people enter a restaurant, order a meal and by the time they come to pay, the price has gone up again. You end up with situations where money becomes so worthless that people use it to light their fires, wallpaper their walls and make bricks for their children to play with.
In the 1970s, one of the few Western countries that did not go through a period of severe inflation was West Germany because the people there remembered what had happened in 1922 and 1923 when the printing presses went wild.
I would not worry about the Americans printing money; ultimately, the price of everything denominated in US Dollars will rise to compensate, and that means that our exporters will carry on competing.
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Letting the printing presses go wild?
We have a global credit industry and money HERE is affected by the actions of the Federal Reserve in Washington which will be borrowing 4.2 TRILLION dollars next year and which is currently embarked an a TRILLION dollar QE2 cruise. You don’t think maybe Alan Bollard is smart enough to reject those sorts of answers?
The fact is that we do not control our own currency and Globalization is a big reason for that. Which is why the banks like it and the rest of us suffer.
The only difference now is that, it being a global currency, the “reserve” currency, all that pain is exported for the entire planet to enjoy. Which means, if it means anything at all, that the worst thing for a nation in these times is to have a debt based currency that is not issued by its own hand.
BJ
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The rot sets in when instead of the shoemaker having to pay back the costs of his materials only. he has to pay back the costs of materials, a fee to the bank and interest. The interest is not set on what profit he can make, but on what the bank has been getting for gambling in derivatives overseas. When they lose the gamble he has to cover their losses also. He not only has to make a profit for himself, but also for the gamblers. He has to keep growing his business to pay ever increasing compound interest. Multiply this by a whole country it is easy to see why growth is required.
If money was simply a medium of exchange and not a commodity. He would only have to pay back what the merchandise was worth. Many small businesses have this arrangement now with their suppliers. E.G. Payment by 20th of the month following. Maybe extra to cover the loss of value with time if there is inflation. Though with a sustainable steady state economy the value of money should not change with time.
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John Ston
This is absurd. You reassure us that the US or Britain or Europe printing money is absolutely fine, but if we were to do it you would have restaurant prices going up while you have dinner, and wild printing presses gallivanting across the countryside.
No, you would have us borrow this “worthless” paper and hand on an insurmountable debt to our grandchildren.
In fact the time of high inflation in the 1960s and 70s in the West was probably the most prosperous period in the history of the world. In NZ we had NO national debt, full employment, relatively high incomes and considerably higher home ownership levels than we do now.
Now with this fictitious credit/debt they are robbing us of our very nation.
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This debate about capitalism and/or sustainability is absolutely central to green politics.
I’d like to address two of the earlier posts that implicitly argue we can have both capitalism and sustainability.
Firstly, bjchip’s arguments about fractional reserve banking – very similar to the social credit critique – suggest that fixing the debt finance system will “fix” capitalism. This is wishful thinking I’m afraid: see Gabriel Martinez at http://www.theuniversityconcourse.com/VIII,2,1-13-2003/Martinez.htm for several reasons why. Critiques of debt finance do have validity; they are just not the whole story of what is wrong with capitalism.
Secondly, Kerry Thomas tells a story about a shoemaker which I believe fails as an argument for capitalism because it does not adequately represent capitalism. The scenario represents something more akin to a medieval pre-capitalist system when usury was largely unacceptable, the guilds controlled the market place and no-one had thought of the joint-stock company. While we might bemoan the loss of simpler times, if this story is to be in any way useful it must include, at the very least, the shareholders in Shoecorp and the competitors across town.
Competition is the central concept in capitalism. Free market advocates argue that competition in the marketplace is important as it delivers maximum economic efficiency.
Competitive markets are also seen to drive innovation. Innovation arises through the desire to enhance profitability (to maximise the returns on investment demanded by shareholders) by improving productivity.
Economist William Baumol sees innovation as “mandatory, a life-and-death matter for the firm” owing to the intense pressure of competitors with exactly the same objectives who will seize Shoecorp’s market share if they get half a chance.
Enhanced productivity can be achieved by inventions and improvements that reduce production costs, enhance product quality, or generate new products. The resulting pace of the development and spread of new technology is, according to Baumol, the “explanation of the incredible growth of the free-market economies.”
And that is why growth in inherent in capitalism. It is also why a critique of growth, whether we like it or not, must be a critique of capitalism.
So I must conclude again that we can have capitalism or we can have sustainability but we cannot have both.
Sorry, greens, but that is just the way it is.
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phil – NZ has low inflation in the 60s.
And when we came out of the 70s we were nearly bankrupt (we had several currency crisis in the 70s leading to devalueing our currency a number of times).
Zaire (Congo) and Zimbabwe are good examples of what happens when you simply print money to pay your bills.
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As usual Phot your comments are wildly inaccurate. We did have high inflation in the 1960s. In the period when you falsely claim we were almost bankrupt our national debt was $3 billion. Now it is 170 billion, fifty times as much and our government is borrowing $1billion a month ,or $35 thousand a minute thanks to the genius of rogernomics. We are way past bankrupcy. We are halfway through the liquidation sale. Its been going on for 25 years.
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Inflation in the 1960s in NZ was between 3-6% due to our dollar being fixed at US$1.40. It was the seventies which saw high inflation (up to 18%?) which payed off all our mortgages.
It appears Phot that you are saying the US and Britain and Europe, who have all printed truckloads of dosh will go the way of Zimbabwe, while by the same logic we will prosper.
Of course prosperity comes form earning more than you spend, exporting more than you import. This is entirely what wealth comes from, a fact conveniently ignored by free market evangelists.
We were not bankrupt at the end of the 70s. We were considerably more affluent than we are now. 5th in the OECD before the right wing carnage set in.
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What is Quantitative Easing but letting the printing presses go wild?
Phil, in case you haven’t read my comments in other threads, I have commented that the Americans are going the way of Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Hungary and Yugoslavia – so long as we do not follow the trend of starting up the printing presses, then we will be fine.
If any country starts up the printing presses, then the natural result is that you will end up prices going up while you eat and money becoming worthless except as kindling, wallpaper or children’s toys.
Phil, borrowing is the smart thing to do during hyperinflation – when you have a debt of $1 billion during a hyperinflationary period, it shrinks in value to the point that repayment of that $1 billion is perhaps like paying $1.
We did not have high inflation until the 1970s – it was not possible prior to 1971 because the world was linked to the Gold Standard through the Bretton Woods system. Also, I am pretty sure that the 1970s was not all that prosperous as unemployment started climbing in most Western countries as we went through a pretty harsh recession.
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“Secondly, Kerry Thomas tells a story about a shoemaker which I believe fails as an argument for capitalism because it does not adequately represent capitalism. The scenario represents something more akin to a medieval pre-capitalist system when usury was largely unacceptable,”
I do not agree with your statement. Some form of market works best for allocating resources.
I am looking at how a steady state economy can be possible. Competition works and the market works for allocating resources on the micro economic scale.. The guy down the road may take over the shoemakers business if he can make better shoes,but he cannot expand the market for shoes. he simply replaces the first one.
You cannot have fractional reserve banking or shareholders who put in money only because then you need a growing economy to pay back the extra work/money they demand.
I gave the example as a thought experiment on how a sustainable economy may work. I do not think it is going to happen before the present setup totally collapses. People on the whole have to really see the need for change before it can happen.
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Inflation is bad for savers and those who have accumulated lots of money. But for the productive sector it is good provided wages and prices match inflation.
It is a transfer of wealth from owners of capital top borrowers. A natural re balancing which offsets excessive charges on the economy by lender’s.
At present we have had inflation in double digits for prices of necessities while wages and benefits for most people have remained static. At the same time interest rates have been kept artificially high and wage inflation low by the RBA and deliberate policy to decrease wage earners share of income. . The worst of both worlds for the majority.
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No John, quantative easing is not “letting the printing presses run wild”. It is creating a small limited percentage of extra money.
Apparently you feel it is fine for us to borrow this supposedly worthless money and pay it back forever with real commodities or assets.
Money is actually all just printed paper and the amount available is not tied to anything whatsoever any more, so who is to say how much there should be in the world?
I do not suggest we should “let the printing presses run wild”, in other words print unlimited amounts. My question was, if our reserve bank feels our dollar is too high because the Western economies are printing money, why not match them to bring down our dollar?
Inflation is the enemy of the banks. It shrinks the value of their assets which are forever growing. A certain amount of it may be good.
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John-ston
What is Quantitative Easing but letting the printing presses go wild?
Sorry, you can’t be allowed to switch sides that easily. QE is what the current mob of banksters thinks is needed to save their sorry butts.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with a government controlled currency which is what we’ve been describing and discussing.
You are effectively advocating for the continued private control of our money supply here. Maybe you didn’t recognize this as what the argument was about but it was clearly and exactly what the argument was about for the rest of us.
You first asserted that our policies would turn loose the printing presses. What I pointed out in return was that the crooks were already doing that with QE … and Bollard is smarter than that.
So I think this part of the argument is more of wires-crossed than anything else. Nobody is disagreeing that the current monetary policies of the US are bad, or that there is a risk inherent in simply “printing” money willy-nilly.
What we are arguing about is who is in control of that.
respectfully
BJ
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My main point is that the so called free market is a huge joke. It always was, but now that they need to print trillions of dollars, and now that NZ must borrow $35,000 a minute to prop up this “hands off, let the market find its level” system it looks increasingly ridiculous and hypocritical, And its proponents look more like traitors and idiots, totally unable to suggest any other way to escape this stupid mess the world financial system is in.
Speculation on food has forced many into starvation, making those who do it murderers but, oh, this is absolutely fine, free market economics. But when there is a war for oil of course it is the impoverished tax payer who must pay.
This system of greed has bankrupted our nation, and even though it has very clearly collapsed and is on life support (impoverished taxpayers bailing out bankers) its devotees say foul smelling things such as “the financial system is in good shape”. Crap!
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So when the Fed prints half a trillion dollars this allows the banks to rent out $5 trillion because of the fractional reserve system. People borrow this money and then set about trying to pay it back but this is not possible because this 5 trillion does not exist. It never existed. So these people are enslaved unless they can extract this money from some other poor sucker, but basically there is not enough money to go round. They (we) just keep paying interest (rent) to the banks for something which does not exist.
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Phil says :It appears Phot that you are saying the US and Britain and Europe, who have all printed truckloads of dosh will go the way of Zimbabwe, ”
Zimbabwe and Congo are extreme examples of what happens when you print lots of money. They had little wealth in the first place, and did it on a huge scale, but the consequences are the same on a smaller scale. It all depends how much you print, compared to the initial value of your country.
Essentially the total value, work output, exports etc of a country doesn’t change if you print money. So you can throw twice as much money into the system, all you do is halve the value of your currency.
Except you cause enormous problems, and create huge loses for some people. For example anybody who doesn’t get pay increases on a very regular basis that keeps up with the inflation.
As most people are on annual pay reveiws, if inflation was say 20 or 40%, then they end up at the end of each year earning 20-40% less in real terms. And IF they get a full rise, it will probably only match current inflation, so from day one for the next year they start losing again.
Ditto for anyone on a benefit.
Anyone with cash investments, savings, bank deposits or money of any kind continually sees the value of their assets diminish.
In Zim, if you got paid, you had to spend the whole amount within one or two days. Prices were going up 50% per week. People had nothing stashed away for a rainy day, because it’s value diminished so quickly.
Tough if you needed medical help, were trying to save for a car, fridge, house, or any large items, needed car repairs etc.
So printing money doesn’t change the value of houses, land, production etc. All it does is cause problems, and makes most people losers.
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There was a guy in England recently bought the entire world supply of cocoa, and stands to make a lot of money. he did this a few years ago and made $400 million. They do this with food which is why world food prices recently doubled, forcing millions into starvation. They do the same with oil, which is why when the “free market” had a coronary, and was rescued by the public health service the price of a barrel of oil miraculously halved, even though the world was still using nearly as much fuel.
This corrupt globalised “free” market system is designed for the very rich to feed on the poor, pigs with their snouts in the trough. It is corrupt and it is over. “Laisez Faire” has failed and must be thrown in the rubbish bin of history just as it was after the last time it collapsed on top of everybody.
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Bookchin
You make a serious mistake.
I am NOT arguing Social-Credit.
Martinez criticized Social-Credit, but not what we are discussing and you need to know for absolute certain that calling what we are describing another form of social-credit is completely wrong.
His first argument : “Smith takes his $100 to a bank. The bank lends $90 of it out to Jones. Jones takes the $90 and with it he opens a new bank account. Result: you have a total of $190. And so on.”
Where did the initial $100 come from. THAT money is ALSO backed by debt. Also is somewhere, subject to interest payments.
His second argument is worse, as it actually goes ahead and willfully rubbishes the principles of thermodynamics.
Bookchin, I am not arguing social-credit.
Go back to first principles and tell me WHAT IS MONEY. That was the question I asked at the first. It is dead simple that first step. What is money. What does it represent?
It represents “work done”.
Consider a barter transaction between two strangers. They exchange for reasons of their own, a painting for a loaf of bread. There is no trust involved, there is no promissory note, there is nothing there but the work on the one hand to make the painting and the work on the other to make the bread.
Work.already.done.
That is money.
You can use any debt instrument you like in place of it if others accept that, and you can swap money for debt-instruments if you are inclined to trust the issuer. However, at no point is a debt able to be or become money.
One of the reasons this is important is because of what follows from that definition.
Fractional-Reserve banking is fraud.
If money is work, then money must also behave in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. TANSTAAFL
If money is work, then it should be backed by work, and notionally here I have proposed 10 KwH to the dollar, deliverable at a standard outlet in any of our major government centers. Any number is fine, as long as it is fixed. Some will make the transitions smoother than others.
Moreover, if money is work, it has a use-by date. It degrades over time, can’t be easily stored and has a few other inconvenient aspects to it… but at the same time anyone can put in a wind-turbine and create more.
Another difference being that work has ACTUAL value to our civilization, and 10 KwH always does exactly 10 KwH of work, no matter how many of them you create. Which poses a real problem if you want to rely on inflation to pay your debts for you, and makes it pretty easy for anyone to recognize when you are printing more than you can produce.
BJ
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Yes Photo, and clearly no one was suggesting we print so much money that we have 40% inflation. However, having a higher levels of inflation is one way to ease out of a recession for all the reasons Kerry pointed out which you ignore as you are unable to counter them.
You are quite wrong to suggest inflation, which as you say is the result of printing money, does not affect house prices. Of course it does. This is basic.
And obviously wages do rise under inflation. This is what fuels the “wage price spiral”, the basic characteristic of inflation. And yes, the value of your money in the bank will go down.
We have been in the situation where wages for most have not kept pace with inflation for 20 years, which is why we have slipped to almost the bottom of the OECD. This is caused by constantly selling profit making assets to foreign economies and losing jobs to slave wage economies, borrowing to buy stuff from overseas which we can’t afford. i.e. globalisation.
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Borrowing further is totally the wrong thing to do. Selling our assets to service debt and have them run down by the private sector just to have to buy them back for more than we sold them for and then invest millions more just to keep them running is completely stupid as well. There is the very real possibility of us loosing it all if we keep increasing our borrowing or continue with Rogernomics, which has been proven a failure.
We cannot assume that future generations will be able to pay this debt back and we are simply setting them up to be the next slaves. Especially considering they have to navigate education, inflation and less employment etc in a user pays economy. Less home ownership is also a negative factor. This will simply mean future generations are less able to service the countries debt especially as it appears to be getting out of control. This type of scenario is how wars start by the way.
Globalisation has simply meant that the people who will work for the least pay will get employed. In some instances this has meant an increase in slavery. And remember the Nazis re-established slavery in 1936 after being elected in. That scenario appears to me to be happening again on a global scale. The poor or slaves will work in let’s say Mauritania (which banned slavery in 1981) until they have made workers in other countries redundant. After the environment is destroyed the multinational corporation will simply move to a new location where the incentives are greater because of their underhanded manipulations. Well that’s what I think is happening.
The National governments right wing agenda seems to be counterproductive to the good of the nation. There is no natural rebalancing to our current economy. Inflation is artificially set to maximise profits. Well I say we should have a Cheese Revolution. Damn Fonterrorist!
Globalisation allows entire businesses to shift to other countries where the workers are cheap or free and taxation is limited. The conditions in China or Mexico spring to mind. It is not a rebalancing of wealth; it is simply paying less for the product to be made. The products are still being sold at high prices to maximise profits. The implications to countries that do not have unionisation or competent taxation are also environmental, as they often have limited measures to safeguard the earth and water. Globalisation is a disaster for the working class and the world in general.
This is a serious matter, after all the future is all we have.
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Spot on Todd.
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Martinez criticized Social-Credit, but not what we are discussing and you need to know for absolute certain that calling what we are describing another form of social-credit is completely wrong.
bj, it would be great if you would post a succinct list of the differences between what you propose and Social Credit. Thanks.
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The big difference:
I reach my conclusions by examining the definition of money and applying the laws of thermodynamics. I make no attempt to alter the social system, the welfare system or to correct the distribution problem I detect. I just address the monetary system itself.
Douglas looked at the money flows of production, consumption and capital and determined that there was an inherent imbalance, the (A+B) problem. His philosophy caused him to try to correct the imbalance through the “national-dividend” giving people extra money (a compensated price) when they purchase/consume, (which would indeed compensate for the imbalance but which is obviously inflationary by my methods).
That’s the big difference.
The reason we are being confused is that we basically find the same PROBLEM. A problem that Keynes acknowledges himself, though he never approached understanding of the cause.
The economic result of the definition we use, allowing debt to be confused with money, requires ever increasing production, consumption and money supplies.
The imbalance identified by Douglas is a direct expression of the problems of that ever increasing production, consumption and money supply.
In Keynes words:
“Each time we secure to-day’s equilibrium by increased investment we are aggravating the difficulty of securing equilibrium to-morrow.”
…and the widely accepted notion of “Creative Destruction” is the answer that modern economics brings to bear on this difficulty, and the emphasis on GDP rather than more sensible measures of economic health are a symptom of this emphatic rejection of sustainability.
++++++
Social Democrats give money to consumers to equalize things.
I don’t try to equalize things, but insist that the government is the treasury and defines how much money there is to be printed, what it is worth in terms of redeemability and serves as a repository in which money may be stored without loss. I try to fix the tool, the money, so that IT behaves like the work it represents (not simple).
This takes a rather large amount of money and power away from the banks and places it in the hands of the people (representatives of the people). It doesn’t fix, or attempt to fix, any of the other issues.
The Social-Credit parties did not (unless I misread this) address the nature of the currency, whether it was fiat or redeemable, or what definitions applied.
For me the definitions are the most important single thing, as once armed with the definition that money is work done any half competent engineer can work out the rest of the story. Economics students will of course, need re-education to include and accept the laws of thermodynamics.
Which is unfortunately far from succinct, but I lack the time to make it shorter.
BJ
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Kerry Thomas wrote that “you can have capitalism” and, as the subsequent clarification indicates, then describes a “thought experiment” which is a steady state economy. I fully agree that the idea of a steady state economy is very appealing for its intrinsic (ecological) sustainability.
But it has to be accepted that a steady state economy is not capitalism.
As my second post argued, if you have capitalism you get growth, and competition is the mechanism that triggers it. Under capitalism, the mantra of business is “grow or die”.
Under a steady state economy, some significant economic controls would have to operate on the market (to maintain zero growth), which requires some economic planning and management structures external to the market.
Check out Michael Albert’s “Participatory economics” (http://www.zcommunications.org/zparecon/parecon.htm) for a democratic approach to doing this.
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While I haven’t explored this point in great depth, I would agree with bjchip’s point that money eventually has to obey the laws of thermodynamics – at some point money must make contact with the real world.
However, my own concern in posting on this thread is to argue that a critique of growth is a critique of capitalism. I have not seen anyone adequately argue here that it is otherwise. In fact some voices seem to strain a little too desperately to keep capitalism in the picture while ditching growth.
This just will not do. Greens have to get used to the idea that capitalism is the problem underlying all green concerns, because only then is it possible to start to think realistically about the solution.
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I was always a fan of the system we used to have, called a mixed economy, under which we had no national debt, full employment and a considerably higher standard of living.
This is where you have a measure of socialism, with essential services such as electricity, transport, health, and essential industry owned by the people, while enterprising individuals are free to grow businesses and innovate.
The opposite of capitalism, communism, is not very appealing either, as it involves propping up people who are lazy and unproductive. Initiative must be rewarded, but not to the point of annihilation of the less fortunate or educated as under the current system.
The mixed economy delivered the most prosperous period in history, from after ww2 until it was destroyed by reaganomics, thatcherism, and rogernomics here.
Now they tell us calmly that China is to be the new dominant force on the planet. Presumably this means we are to be the new 3rd world. Not because it is inevitable, but because they want us to be.
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Under capitalism, the mantra of business is “grow or die”.
This is in fact a condition of life itself. A fact with which all living things eventually cope with by… dying.
I suspect that there is another issue of definitions here. Free-market economic principles are not the same thing as “Capitalism”. I am not going to explore this now. I need sleep, the conference is tomorrow.
I would like to consider whether in a steady-state economy, where growth is not demanded to pay interest on debt, Capitalism is left unchanged? I haven’t examined this, I just doubt that it can be so.
respectfully
BJ
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phil toms, you seem to be saying we should borrow less (and presumably save more), which I would agree with.
The problems is if we get some of the inflation you seem quite happy to have, it has the effect of penalising everyone who has saved, and rewarding those who are most in debt.
It does the exact opposite of what you want to happen.
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My thesis is that the nature of our money defines the requirement for growth that appears to be built into Capitalism.
I don’t think it is built into Capitalism. I think it is built into the money definition itself and that by changing that, the beast can be brought under our control.
Maybe.
Y’all think about it.
BJ
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PHIL TOMS SAYS “…full employment and a considerably higher standard of living.”
Ah – the good old days. Where full employment really meant 50% unemployment (few mothers worked).
And our higher standard of living meant we could not afford overseas travel, two cars, three tvs, a miocrowave cost two months pay, eating out was a once a year treat, wine was a rare luxury, phones were shared on a party line with someone down the road, many worked in dirty stinking unsafe factory jobs that eventuially killed them, healthcare was much worse so we died much younger, we were far less educated……
and….
you think that was a “considerably higher standard of living”.
Ah – the good old days.
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I must modify bjchip’s comment that “grow or die” is a condition of life itself …
Yes we grow rapidly to begin with and yes we die at the end. However, at the macroscopic level most organisms reach a maturity when macroscopic growth largely ceases (though of course cellular regenereration continues). Living organisms are designed to achieve what we might call a steady state.
Unlimited growth at a cellular level is still problematic of course, which is why John McMurtry took the metaphor for the title of his book “The cancer stage of capitalism” (see summary article at http://www.islandnet.com/plethora/mai/cancer.html ).
Exploring the workings of a steady state economy is certainly worthwhile, and I appreciate the encouragement I have gained here to do that more fully. By the way, are people aware of the CASSE website at http://steadystate.org/ ?
In fact I appreciate the respectful debate and desire to explore ideas I have found here so thank you all. I might be back again.
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Once again you are essentially dishonest in your statements photo. Mothers were employed 9 to 3 making clothes, shoes and all the things we now go further and further into debt to buy from the worlds new boss, China. The rest did not need to work because it was easy to live on one income because wages were much higher in relation to the cost of living. Mothers could be mothers.
Perhaps you were still in nappies.
I think you would be much happier on an Act party page where you can all repeat your lies such as “inflation does not cause house prices to rise” and “there was 50% unemployment in the 1970s” and “we are much better off now that we are bankrupt” and you can all agree with each other’s bullshit.
As a youngster in the 70′s I found it easy to walk out of one job at 10am and have another by 11am. I could live, pay the rent, buy food and support my girlfriend on 2 days work a week. You could capitalise on the family benefit and buy a house!
Your free market capitalism is a sham. It always was. Now it has dramatically collapsed for all to see. This is undeniable. Greedy pigs with their snouts in the trough.
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phils toms says “you can all repeat your lies such as “inflation does not cause house prices to rise””
And where was that quote?
Or did you make up a completely false quote, and then wrongly attribute it to me?
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Photo said
“printing money doesn’t change the value of houses”
He did not say “inflation does not cause house prices to rise”
Obviously printing money causes inflation, and inflation causes the monetary value of houses to rise.
Clearly if money becomes worth less and one must pay more for the same item, its value has essentially not changed, unless you measure that item in terms of money. This is a tedious and misleading way of stating the definition of inflation.
This typically ambiguous statement by photo and does nothing except score points. One point to photo. Everybody clap.
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This, however is all crap.
“Ah – the good old days. Where full employment really meant 50% unemployment (few mothers worked).
And our higher standard of living meant we could not afford overseas travel, two cars, three tvs, a miocrowave cost two months pay, eating out was a once a year treat, wine was a rare luxury, phones were shared on a party line with someone down the road, many worked in dirty stinking unsafe factory jobs that eventuially killed them, healthcare was much worse so we died much younger, we were far less educated……”
In fact many working class families owned a bach at the beach and a boat. Wine was freely available,healthcare was free. TVs and microwaves were new technology which is always expensive but electricity was extremely cheap. Mothers did not need to work although many did, all those who wanted to.
I do remember party lines, which disappeared in the early 60s as technology inevitably marched on. Phones were also extremely cheap, the lines, still in use were built by the state.
Not only all this but we had no national debt and it was easy to raise a family on one income. Clearly much of what we have today we can no longer afford or we would not have a $170 billion national debt and would not be borrowing at $35,000 a minute. $35,000 a minute $35,000 a minute
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phil toms – If I have a house, and it’s price is $200,000 and inflation rockets to 100% and the price becomes $400,000 it’s obvious even to my eight year old that the price has gone up – but the value of the house is the same.
If you don’t even know the most basic of differences between price and value, then there’s no point in debating with you.
And as for making up fake quotes, and ascribing them to people…..that’s completely dishonest so I have no interest, and place no value, in what anything say.
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Bookchin
You must be a YOUNG whippersnapper.
Trust me, once you stop growing you start dying. It may look like “steady state” but it hurts a lot more every year
My Mom.. who recently went sailboarding on her 80th birthday tells me “Growing old is not for sissies”.
She always was pretty smart
respectfully
BJ
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I must say BJ, the more I learn about economics and the way the world economic system works, the more I feel like yelling WTF!!!
I am not feeling optimistic for the future and not quite sure what to do about it.
Are we just doomed to behave like a virus? are we even capable of acting any differently? Or will we just keep trucking on until our host is consumed?.
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Photo
I just said I misquoted you. I must have just skimmed over what you wrote because I’m not very interested in what you say.
I guess if you have an eight year old you probably were in nappies in the 70′s. Or maybe the 80′s.
I agree there’s no point you debating me. I’ll try to ignore your comments from now on.
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The conference – David Suzuki was great, but that’s one of those expectable things and the man was STILL able to exceed expectations. He challenged the conference and did an absolutely wonderful job of focusing it.
It went through many details… answers weren’t requested. Some of us provided them anyway
Then we had an eye-opening… perhaps eye-popping is the best description, presentation by Lori Wallach of the Global Trade Watch, describing the “Trans Pacific Partnership” which is favored by Government here but which contains enough fishhooks to deplete the entire southern ocean.
http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=3129
That’s the general site, I am still sifting through it. Basically the NAFTA type language and binding provisions related to the GAT Uruguay round are the problem.
http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=781
Which means basically, that while we could have environmental, safety or other regulations that apply to OUR citizens and corporations, one of those corporations with a branch in the US or Japan or Korea would NOT be subject to our regulations and would be elevated to the same position as a sovereign state when it took us to court with the WTO.
With no right of appeal, no public scrutiny … and the regulations were written in there by the corporations and they all say the same damnable thing…
The TPP brings this negation of national rights (as seen in NAFTA cases) in favor of the corporations, into New Zealand. We might have a regulation that restricts mining somewhere, but a corporation in a signatory country is not bound by this, and the result is that the multinational is subject to no law in any country.
That’s what happens when corporations write the laws. Lori Wallach presented this and it was absolutely eye-popping.
http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=4212
I don’t think the government will support it much longer once the actual Terms and Conditions are exposed to public scrutiny. Which I expect from us and from Labour over the next week or so. Nick Smith was blindsided by a question about it because he had not heard the presentation, and so was supporting it but it violates so many principles that I think are important to all New Zealanders that the likelihood is strong that it will be in trouble within the next week.
I note that the recent apples to Australians case was one of those national sovereignty issues. Nothing against our apples, but didn’t it strike you as a little odd that Australia is not to be permitted to control its own borders? What happens when someone selling diseased palm-kernel wants to sell it here?
respectfully
BJ
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This was a great job by Kennedy Graham and his Exec Richard Slade. I can only be proud to have ‘em.
respectfully
BJ
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From BJ’s post:
“These so-called “investor-to-state” cases are litigated in the special international arbitration bodies of the World Bank and the United Nations, which are closed to public participation, observation and input. A three-person panel composed of professional arbitrators listens to arguments in the case, with powers to award an unlimited amount of taxpayer dollars to corporations whose NAFTA investor privileges and rights they judge to have been impacted.”
This is truly chilling BJ and thank you for doing some real work here. Looks like the end of democracy.
“I note that the recent apples to Australians case was one of those national sovereignty issues. Nothing against our apples, but didn’t it strike you as a little odd that Australia is not to be permitted to control its own borders?”
I agree. Perhaps you remember the banana dispute, where Britain and Europe were forced to buy American apples from central America, while they preferred to pay slightly more for apples from their former colonies, where naturally they have relatives. Why should they not buy from their friends if they want to? Isn’t it supposed to be a free market?
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I heard Dr Suzuki interviewed by Kim Hill. Afterwards he commented “I have to say, this has been an extremely negative interview. You blocked or took issue with everything I said.”
Kim Hill poses as as intelligent and left leaning but actually is hard right.
She put the boot into John Pilger in a big way on TV a few years ago, threw his book across the table. Her opening question, about the Iraq war, was “surely if there was ever a just war, this is it?”
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Actually I sort of like Kim Hill, and her job as an interviewer is to draw the guest into arguing his/her points. I heard part of the interview and reckoned she was doing her job, but that it isn’t the way Dr Suzuki is used to discussing things.
Maybe….
…and maybe (since I heard only a smattering of it) you are correct. I don’t really know… just like them both.
BJ
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The fact that sick people in rural areas didn’t have to travel for prolonged distances to get to a hospital makes the good old days something we should all lament the loss of. And that is just one example of the endemic dysfunction in this country.
How on earth did we get to such a failure of a system in such a short time? It can’t just be Rogernomics alone. You can’t blame it on the people although they will ultimately pay. The failed economy can only be solved by the powers that be, after all that’s who caused the problems.
We now have a situation where nearly every social ill is on the increase. Young people have very little chance of attaining what was readily available to the baby boomers. Despite the politicking, the country can afford to invest in young peoples futures. The gap between the haves and the have nots is growing making living in NZ harder. All this in a time when mechanisation, the free market and globalization should have made everything abundantly free. I wonder how long we will be conned for.
It should be like the good old days when if a murder occurred, the whole country would be shocked and astounded. Nowadays murder is pretty commonplace so I can fully understand a yearning for a time when the people prospered and money wasn’t the be all and end all of everything.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a plan to remedy the situation. Sort of like letting the country die slowly from a cancer because you are too tired to travel for six hours to get the treatment you need at a hospital. Even if you had the petrol money to fill the car. But don’t forget to save. Not exactly a sustainable situation.
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I am sure Dr Suzuki has done hundreds if not thousands of interviews around the world and is familiar with all sorts of interviewing styles.
I feel he is in a better position to evaluate her attitude than she is. Her inquisition often appears derogatory. In the case of Dr Suzuki it had the effect of blunting his statements, cancelling out his message. Those who identify with her identify with her negative reaction.
Her loyalty to the establishment comes to the fore when required, such as when there is a war for oil, or criticism of the jewish theft of Palestine. Pilger told her she should read more.
I did however like her article on Ayn Rand, guru of the terminally mean spirited.
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Just watched TV3s brazenly one eyed piece on the Mana By election. It was about 12 minutes with the green party delegate getting about 30 seconds. The only 2 interviews other than with politicians were with a polynesian pastor who was pro national, and a polynesian social worker who was totally pro national. Same old same old.
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I’m with Todd.
Rogernomics alone? Well, we had the much vilified Muldoon standing in the way of the world bank/imf/reaganomics global agenda, describing the treasury boffins as “wet behind the ears”.
We had young nats who joined the labour party in order to subvert it who later joined Act. you had Bob Jones who sucked in the right wing vote to split the vote and install the extreme right wing (subverted)labour party, and then dissolved his “NZ party” after the election.
We had phoney left journalists such as Bill Ralston and Perigo, who’s true colours emerged after guesting on talkback radio. We had 2 channels of relentless right wing talkback propaganda. . .(still have)
The treasury would tell whichever incoming prime minister “well the situation is worse than we thought, you will have to cut this and sell that foerthwith.
We were sold down the river through fraud and propaganda, lies and subterfuge. We changed to MMP and were conned by Winston First, who returned the party they campaigned against (the only party that can get rid of National).
Now the Maori party are telling people to vote National in the by election.
Not entirely rogernomics – but mostly a coup by the global elite (who control treasury, who now want us to sell our farms), and a measure of local ignorance stupidity apathy and treachery.
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Phil Toms,
There wasn’t really a conspiracy by the right to subvert the Labour party. The Labour party had been gradually changing for decades. Even if you go back to the 1930s, you find that Michael Joseph Savage never whole heartedly supported the policies that the majority of Labour party members wanted … read up about John A. Lee if you are interested in this period of Labour’s history.
Over the following decades Labour gradually moved to the centre, by the early 1980s it was “ripe” for the sorts of policies that Douglas et al. wanted to implement. All it took was an economic crisis to let Douglas have free rein in the implementation of policies previously only tried in places like Chile (read “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein if you are interested in the sorts of events that can act as a catylist for implementing the neo-liberal ideology).
There has always been an alternative path which New Zealand could have followed (probably several paths), but things obviously haven’t hurt enough people badly enough to try something different.
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phil toms Posted November 13, 2010 at 10:39 AM: “I heard Dr Suzuki interviewed by Kim Hill.”
Do you happen to know if the interview is online? I couldn’t seem to find it.
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I found the Suzuki interview for those that want to listen to it:
http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/sat/sat-20101030-1105-David_Suzuki_a_sustainable_future-048.mp3
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Just finished listening to the above interview. I’m very surprised Suzuki finished by saying it was a negative interview. I thought it was, for want of a better word, an intelligent interview. I thought Kim Hill was good, asked a lot of very interesting questions, they weren’t attacks, they were the kind of opposing view questions that the likes of Suzuki must have strong answers for.
Very strange way of summing up the interview, I hadn’t considered it negative until he mentioned it, left a sour taste.
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News from APEC. NZ is 3rd most “free trade” ahead of Singapore and Hong Kong, which are both primarily trading centres through which everyone else’s goods pass. 4th equal were the US and Australia. Australia is okay because of its huge uranium reserves while America, like us are stuck in bankruptcy because they have given away their jobs, therefore their income. (derr!)
So Singapore and Hong Kong, being giant warehouses have reason to want free trade, which makes us officially most gullible on the planet.
Today they are actually raising the fact that China’s currency is falsely low, therefore they are cheating, and that they sell but are not buying anything.
Even though this is destroying us nothing will change as it suits the multinationals who are making a killing.
Japan wants to join the “free trade” block while keeping its 500% tariff on our butter. Its a total farce as always.
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Samiuela
I think the row with John A Lee was between the left and far left. Labour may have become less socialist but after Lange came in they revealed themselves to be extreme right wing – much more right wing than the National party. This redefined the centre as just to the left of the ditch on the right hand side of the road. After scraping in for the second term they flogged off everything we owned after having given no hint of this plan in their election campaign or their previous “efficiency drive” for state assets. National got in on a landslide after promising to “repeal the harsh policies of rogernomics”, and promptly turned the screws tighter.
The labour party was never “ripe” for becoming the Act party, but that us what happened, aided by Sir Bob Jones and a phoney crisis where we were told we were bankrupt even though now our debt is 50 times as big.
Meanwhile back at Apec, a trader spotted on Al Jazeera complaining that “If China has to revalue its currency there will be no point buying goods from China” Aha! Problem solved!
Ireland is said to be on the verge of bankruptcy after being the flagship of the right wing free marketeers, proof of the genius of trade liberalisation, the darling of Mike Moore and Richard Prebble. These right wingers are such morons!
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Bob Jones and the rest of the business round table poured money into Labour’s election campaign. David Lange’s speech, written by Margaret Pope, to the strains of Joe Cocker singing “Love Lift us up Where we belong” was truly inspirational. We were all sucked in.
Lange was not a bad man. He was just stupid enough to open the door for Roger Douglas, Richard prebble, Mike Moore & co. When he later realised his disastrous mistake he sacked Douglas, who was voted back in by Lange’s cabinet. Lange resigned and ran off with Margaret pope.
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Phil Toms,
The question I have is how did the policies of Douglas et al. manage to flourish within the Labour party? It wasn’t just a handful of Labour politicians who supported them; but a significant fraction. I don’t buy the argument that these sorts of things “mysteriously” happen overnight as the result of traitorous actions by a few people, combined with a “fortuitous” crisis. Such a weakening must have taken place over many years. If the Labour party was not rotten to the core, then the opposition to Rogernomics from within the party would have been much more effective than it was.
In the end only Anderton broke away from the party (and look at what a disappointment he turned out to be). The whole sorry story just highlights that Labour had already strayed far from its origins as a socialist party by the time the fourth Labour government was elected. Its also why I’ve personally lost any faith in parliamentary politics; I have a suspicion that by and large people trying to make changes from within the system either find their efforts are futile, or worse, they become corrupted by the system.
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Samiuela
That’s a fair question which I can’t answer. There was a bunch of young nats who joined labour and argued forcefully, and brought money from big business. Jones did split the “right wing” vote. The financial crisis was clearly a fraud because we are in a far bigger hole now, so we obviously were not bankrupt then. It was orchestrated from abroad, Imf, World bank and those bastards. Nevertheless you may be correct about the state of the labour party.
Anderton to my mind was not a disappointment. He was rubbished and vilified by the right wing media but was a positive influence later on. He was very good but received little support. His party the Alliance destroyed itself but Jim carried on. This is the trouble with the left. they put the boot into each other.
You can’t give up on parliamentary politics. There isn’t anything else. Possibly there could be a revolution once NZers are starving. Possibly the revolutionary council would not be murderous fanatics. Maybe they would last longer than the Alliance.
Perhaps this is just the human condition.
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Damn… sounds like the makings of one of those Soap-Operas on TV.
BJ
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What about a technology based voting system on every issue, we could then do away with most politicians. Instead we could have public debates giving an equal viewpoint of relevant issues. Decisions would be made because of the clear will of the people and not subverted by Governments with their own interests the driving force for decision making. We wouldn’t have the flip flop politics like now that cost the country millions and the system would be considerably more stable. Changing everything every three years or so is a negative aspect of our political system. For people without computers and cellphones, we could utilize ATMs. The country would have true representation and more emphasis would be put on creating well rounded and educated individuals instead of lemmings. The data base of registration for technology is already in place. We would need some sort of revolution to get the Politicians to implement such a system though.
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There was a very good movie made about exactly this. It was called “Someone Else’s Country”. The Alliance paid to have it shown on Max TV. Soon after that Max TV went off air. Everyone should see it.
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How about real democracy instead of re-electing a new dictatorship every 3 years. http://direct-democracy.geschichte-schweiz.ch/
That way we do not have to elect National because Labour has forgotten what they stand for as we had to do in the 80’s.
Take back control of our country from both politicians and bankers with real democracy and credit controlled by us.
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So ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY, the subject of this thread, means living within one’s means.
The Keynesian theory is that when your economy collapses you pump in money to stop everything falling over which would make everything worse.
With a globalised private banking system this does not work.
The USA is trying to do this by printing money but of course it just flows out of their economy in the form of imports and doesn’t go round and round as it used to.
So borrowing $35,000 every minute as the NZ govt is doing is not the same thing at all. China’s falsely low currency further rips us off and gives them an unfair competitive advantage, as does the US printing money for mugs like us to borrow.
We must stop borrowing from our competitors to buy stuff from them which we cannot afford. NZs politicians must focus on this issue. They are ALL ignoring this catastrophic situation. The right because they don’t care about our future, the left because they do not realise this is a perversion of Keynesianism and will ruin us, and is steadily resulting in the loss of all our money making assets.
I find it horrifying that everyone ignores the $35,000 a minute and we just keep rocketing into oblivion. This is irresponsible to the point of total insanity. Somebody tell me why this is not true.
Economic sustainability means living within one’s means. If everyone lived within one’s means globalisation would cease. It relies on ever increasing debt. It is the new form of war.
All our green ideals will be useless when we are reduced to mere serfs. The global elite will run our (their) country like an open cast mine. In the time it took you to read this we just got $100,000 poorer. Please. . .
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Worried Passenger: “Captain, this plane is dropping at 35 metres a second!”
Captain: “yes, but the seats are really comfortable and the TV is high definition. Soon we will be going as fast as Oshtralia.”
Act passenger: “We need to jettison some excess baggage – those who haven’t paid, and the pensioners”
Middle row passengers: “Shut up! We’re trying to watch the movie.”
Green Passenger “This food is not organic”
Co pilot: “We need more elevation. We should unbolt the engines.”
Worried passenger: “Beam me up Scotty”
Scotty: “I cannie do that Sir, Your credit request has bin denied”
Worried passenger: “Captain, we are going to crash into the sea.”
Captain: “Its all right. I have an ejector seat and a house in Geneva”
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Todd
As little as I like it, the representative democracy we have and use is I think, more appropriate to our citizenry than the direct democracy model. I don’t know how to discuss the potential problems with what you describe, but just one will suffice for now.
Who controls the machinery?
We have to retain the people in the process. If the numbers are all that matter, it is impossible to be certain where the numbers really come from.
…and I reckoned yours would be the better method of doing things two decades ago, when I had similar notions. I think now it might be possible… at least I can work out a means of feeding independent counting machinery so as to make direct corruption difficult.
respectfully
BJ
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Have people here explored the possibilities available in deliberative democracy?
Political scientist Doug Torgerson has written that the green public sphere must move well beyond the bureaucratic decision-making machinery of liberal democracy because “concrete decisions – and, indeed, the very question of what constitutes a ‘green’ initiative – cannot be reduced to matters of knowledge and calculation, but emphatically remain matters of opinion.”
Torgerson suggests deliberative democracy is the way forward, since it deposes the technocratic “expert” and restores citizen sovereignty over such “matters of opinion”.
It is a democratic decision making process in which citizen-decision makers do more than simply register preferences, but … shock horror … extensively inform themselves, discuss and think about the issue before them.
The Australian Citizens’ Parliament project in 2009 used this process, as detailed at http://citizensparliament.org.au/ and it is well worth a look.
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Phil Toms,
There is a very simple solution to issues such as China having too low a currency; it’s import restrictions. I apply this principle to my family … do not purchase more then is earned. The kids might want a Wii, but they’re not getting one because buying food is higher priority. It works for my family; it works for countries as well.
If New Zealand can make shoes and boots using its own resources (which it can, and once did), why import them from overseas? If it means they cost more because New Zealand workers are paid more than those in China, then spend less on imported luxuries such as TVs. This may seem like a drop in the “standard of living”, but is it really? We’d be employing more New Zealanders and reducing our dependence on overseas imports. I don’t know if anyone else noticed this, but when shoes and clothes were made locally, they seemed to be better quality and last longer than the things you buy now.
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Phil Toms,
Re: Jim Anderton. I was a member of the NLP. Anderton seemed (to me) to be quite conservative and not really wanting progressive left wing policies. Having said that, I have a lot more respect for the guy than any of the other Labour MPs of the time.
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I have no doubt that it is technically achievable in a secure way BJ. You raise the main issue for why I believe a “direct democracy model” is required. That our elected representatives are not actually representing the people. We have seen this to disastrous effects in many New Zealand Governments, whereby the governing body is elected in on certain promises and terms and then changes its tune once in power without any justifiable reasons.
Certainly something needs to change. Implementing a system that does not allow politicians to subvert the will of the people would effectively keep corruption at bay. I believe we have a lot of intelligent, informed and open minded people in New Zealand which I think would lead to good decision making for the country. Better than what’s going on now anyways!
Politicians would still be required for the debating process etc, but the decision making would be in the hands of everybody. Bills would be presented in a similar manour, but the ultimate decision to if they get implemented will not be up to a bunch of corrupt politicians who have proven time and again that they cannot be trusted.
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Samiuela
I agree with all that. Imports should equal exports. That the whole problem. Its so flaming obvious.
bookchin & co
Trouble is you would end up with perpetual election campaigns, only rich powerful lobby groups could afford the constant propaganda/promotional campaigns. Maybe one day . . .
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Todd
I believe we have a lot of intelligent, informed and open minded people in New Zealand
I was just out door-knocking in Mana for the by-election, and I would not be so optimistic. Not even close to so optimistic and here is at least 3 times as good as it is in the USA where I came from. Yet overall, not good at all and not good enough to do the necessary homework for the sort of direct democracy that is entailed in an electronic direct vote.
The Swiss model that Kerry points out has a far better chance of working.
I have no concern about “security” from the outside Todd. I work in that space after all, but I am not at all sanguine about the methods of securing it from insider manipulation.
Once the people are submitting their votes in a manner that admits of no external hard-copy verification, no “paper trail” and I know of no such innovation that would follow from the individual access methods available, the potential for someone to subvert the system subtly from the inside becomes far more ominous. It is bad enough WITH a paper trail… without one it becomes a fatal flaw.
respectfully
BJ
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Bookchin
My comments to Todd above also apply to any sort of deliberative democracy. That sort of thing can work if the electorate is restricted to people who actually are willing to do the homework needed to know enough to “deliberate”.
This electorate is not prepared for anything like that. Not in Whitby, no more there than in Ascot Park or Cannons Creek. We are way ahead of the equivalent places in the USA, and still far below what is required for a direct democracy of this sort to work.
respectfully
BJ
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So what you are saying BJ, is that people are too stupid for direct voting on current issues to occur, even in an informed way. I do agree that this is where the main issue with the hypothetical system would be. Many people have little interest in politics, as shown in a lot of low turnout at voting. Complacency as always would be the killer. Probably because people feel disempowered. However most people formulate an opinion to current affairs that they are informed about through the media, albeit that mostly biased information is being presented.
I’m just talking about a mechanism for the people to make their voices heard and something that makes politicians subject to listen to those voices by law. The retrospective “I didn’t like what Labour did in the last three years (selling us all to the Chinese) so I’m voting National” crap has got to change or we will all go down the plughole. Three years is a long time to do a lot of damage.
The trick would be in rectifying channels of information so that they are not subverted for political or business-gain, like what is happening now. Mr Toms correctly points out that a considerable amount of funds would probably be spent on campaigning issues as they arise, unless there was proper legislation and fines as a deterrent. However the direct representation system would make decision making almost instantaneous, and far superior in that it could react efficiently to pressing matters.
Elections could carry on as normal. But you would be voting for somebody to represent and speak for your interests and beliefs and the majority would win, not the whim of a drunkard idiot in the backbenches like Roger Douglas or some such reprobate. Lets put a vote to the people right now to see if they want to sell State owned assets? A no brainer if you ask me. Politicians would need to work together to present issues for the public to vote on. None of this schoolyard rubbish like the debating chamber. If you don’t have faith in the people, what are you in politics for?
There should be no issue with internal security as long as the system is set up correctly in the first instance and follows normal protocols and verification in the second. An electronic system would in fact make it easier to find voting cheats so to speak. A verification system could maintain a paper trail if you like. If you think that a secure system cannot be maintained, you are saying that security of institutes like banks etc is also not achievable. It is in fact very robust and easily implemented in NZ. All the technology is already in place.
The direct representation method would be a sustainable solution to our countries economic future. Removing those that have proven themselves to be untrustworthy from ultimate places of power where they can do a lot of damage to our Kiwi way of life is in my mind a good thing.
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Todd
Who would formulate the questions? How would you word the laws? This is where the direct system needs the touch of the professions. Which is why the Swiss have the process they do.
That might work here. I do think we are close to having that level of ability. However, the referenda are “tweaked” by the professionals. They’d have to be.
As for the people being “too stupid” I don’t think that’s the real issue. I think it is the complacency and the fact that most are limited in time and access to the information that needs to be understood. Not that they are stupid. Most are well aware of the fact that there is a lot they don’t know and haven’t studied going in. I’d say about half apologized to me on that score… but it doesn’t bode well for instant democracy.
The information channels… you correctly identify a very difficult problem. I already went at this with the notion of a 60 day clamp on advertisements in the run-up to elections, and a randomization of election dates, but it remains difficult if you wish to maintain free speech, and having more frequent votes on all manner of issues will make it harder to work out what to restrict when and where.
Instantaneous decision making is dangerous. Second thoughts are often required and I am more comfortable with decisions that are considered rather than knee-jerk reactions.
If you think that a secure system cannot be maintained, you are saying that security of institutes like banks etc is also not achievable
I am saying that I trust the bank because:
1. I keep track of my own money.
2. There are laws and recourse if I think they have stolen money of mine.
3. There is consumer backlash if they steal.
This doesn’t apply to an election result. If someone inside the election “bank” messes with the ballot result, only someone with access to the entire input stream of ballots will be able to detect that there is an error.
You need to look at the “inside job” aspect of this. I am very much aware of what can be done with what we have… not certain of the ease of reprogramming an ATM, but the difficulty of not having a paper-trail is very very real, and you need to think harder about how that gets generated maintained and checked. It has to be something official and not easily forged.
Public-Private key signatures can work, but how do you plan to check them and how do you guarantee that the private key remains the secret it absolutely must be, to keep the audit system from being corrupted and the whole thing captured by one party or another?
BJ
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I think that the Swiss system would work well here. Of course there would be teething problems. I suspect there will be masses of the ignorant voting initially, for example, because of the novelty. It would settle down like the Swiss system eventually as only those who are politically interested tend to vote.
Anyway as no right turn said. “Even if we make the wrong decision, it is our decision to make”. It would be hard to imagine worse decisions from the public than we have had from the 120 incompetents we presently employ.
I also think democracy will only happen over the bodies of politicians.
Examples of a powerful elite giving up any power without force are very few.
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I note with some asperity, the abject failure of the Dom Post to even notice that there was a conference.
Nor do I yet see something from the Herald, though I know Brian Fallow was there.
What part of this is our fault? Is/was there a press release or was one simply ignored.
?
respectfully
BJ
[frog: Every major media outlet knew of the conference. It was covered as news only on RNZ and we didn't expect more. Still expecting analysis pieces from Fallow, James and others, though. Given the media focus on the Trans Pacific Partnership, I'll be very disapointed if this doesn't occur sometime soon.]
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I know what you mean BJ. Not much info anywhere. Not only your conference but also things like the protest in Raglan about the drilling rig that the oil companies snuck in there. Not exactly democratic reporting huh!
Well I guess direct representation would go something a bit like this:
The Ministers would formulate the questions. There would not need to be as many representatives because the ultimate decision-making would be by the people. MP’s roles would change dramatically. Questions could also be formulated by petition.
The process of law making would continue in much the same way it is now. Presentation to the public would be made in a succinct and well-rounded way although in-depth programs would give deeper background to the issues. Ministers would need to give due consideration to various Acts and laws that are already in place.
I think you would see a slight lift in participation because a direct representation system would empower people.
Most political understanding can be relayed in a timely fashion. You are correct though in that some expert knowledge and in-depth investigation is required. I’m not talking about getting rid of all the politicians in favour of pressing a button (although I’m not ruling it out either). But there would be some savings to the taxpayer to be made.
Some wording of recent referendum has been terrible. MP’s would need to agree on how questions and concurrent laws were worded for the public.
What this country really needs is a plan. Decision-making would need to be set out in a formulated and open way. Although this type of system could react quickly in times of crises, I don’t think such “urgency” would be employed very often. Parties that abused the process would start to look bad in the public eye.
I am saying that I would trust a direct representation method because:
1, I could keep track of my voting.
2, There would be laws and recourse in the event of vote stealing.
3, There is public backlash if parties steal votes.
But hopefully our ballot system is already safe and secure. In general I think it probably is. No doubt there’s a few crazy people travelling around creating fictional voters but in general the current system in my view is cohesive. That cohesiveness should be able to be moved into a direct representation model.
ATM’s can be reprogrammed to incorporate voting on specific issues. And although I don’t like the card format, being that ATM’s could be utilised, a voting card is the obvious solution. However I am unsure about trusting the banking institutes or whether the Government as such owns the ATM’s. But again, this issue can be rectified.
Various checks could be in place so that only citizens were issued with voting cards. There would be no cost to the public. You might need to activate your card at a local post shop or such with another form of ID. You could then utilize the Internet or cell phone to make votes. Mechanisms to ensure current cheaters, cannot adopt to the new system are easily achievable in this technological age.
The real issue is with proper reporting of issues so that the public can make informed decisions, not security of voting infrastructure.
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We could always take the feudal system to its ultimate ideal… the loosing minister could be put to death. In essence you would be voting for who lived or died. I’m sure we would see a lot less badly formatted and thought out bills getting presented then and it would save taxpayer money. Would make for good television as well. Ha!
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Frog
I have to suggest that we feed them news like pablum to children. They aren’t competent to know what is happening without us writing it for them. Since they had no “reporter” present they simply do not know anything. Fallow may do us better service, but this is where the rubber meets the road. It isn’t enough to be right, other people have to find out about it.
Which is pretty much the same thing that Dr Suzuki was on about with the petition from 1992.
BJ
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But hopefully our ballot system is already safe and secure.
To the extend that it can be audited, our current system is. Recounts are a fact of life, but the original ballot papers are all available. Going to the on-line system there are no such papers available. Imagine our current system WITHOUT the ability to call for a recount? With one shot at tabulating the results?
If you go to the encrypted signatures the anonymity of the ballot is difficult to maintain, if you do not the audit is (I am struggling to think of a way at all) extremely difficult, unless there is a paper trail. The ATM has the advantage of being able to print out a receipt, and the printer is already built into the device.
Noting that for a lot of people, doing without ATMs for a day or two for each election is going to be more than a little annoying.
I am not saying this is an impossible dream Todd, I am saying there are real problems with its implementation that you still have to cope with.
I’d suggest that there be at least 3 duplicate vote tabulation systems with supervisors in each system being from different and known political persuasions. They might well disagree, but all 3 would be able to say where their data comes from and subverting all 3 at once would be more difficult than one at a time.
respectfully
BJ
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Let them eat pablum bj!
http://robertguyton.blogspot.com/2010/11/pablum-hat-tip-bjchip.html
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Whatever system is adopted it is only as good as the people involved. As illustrated above, the media is corrupt. The media rules and is controlled by evil. We have to be our own media. We must use it to attack the corrupt media. It was the media who told us we were sick of Labour and Key is wonderful. No one knew this until we were informed of this by the media. This morning our RNZ news devoted several minutes to the National candidate in Mana. No one else got a mention.
You can change the system – nothing changes.
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I’m unsure why ATM’s could not be utilised in their current form as well as having the dual purpose of a voting mechanism BJ. My friend used to program the touch screen ones and to my knowledge they can all be programmed for simple functions such as recording a yes or no vote, which is then collated to a database.
For this proposed system, which at times would require weekly or monthly voting, ease of use would be paramount. The MMP system could still work in conjunction, but politicians would not be able to go against the peoples vote.
Utilizing a voting card (with a personal pin number), which has been sent to a registered voters address and then has been activated by verification of formal id at an appropriate outlet should rectify any issue of voter cheating. With a comprehensively secure process, the following collation of votes being an electronic process would be easily achievable.
The difficulties of a direct representation system:
1. Designing a secure and easy to use voting system
2. Ensuring that the media undertakes to convey even sides of the issues
3. Getting Politicians to correctly implement the process.
4. Convincing banks of a dual purpose use for their ATM’s
It interests me that technology that is predominately designed by businesses to sell us things we don’t need, feed us propaganda and generally subjugate our existence can just as effectively be used to free us.
Now I’m off to get some McDonalds because the television told me it’s healthy.
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Todd,
While a direct democracy sounds great on paper, it is perhaps the worst form of government that could ever be adopted given the present state of the human species. Humans are self-interested, bigoted, and really stinking stupid. The advantage of a representative system is that those elected few can be smarter than the fools which elect them and are able to muster great resources, should they desire, to derive the better approaches.
The average citizen has an IQ of 100, the average university graduate has an IQ of 115, the average postgraduate has an average IQ of 130. Frankly, I wouldn’t even trust the country in the hands of many of the post-grads I know and I certainly wouldn’t want the average graduate to get their their mitts anywhere near the running of the country. There is simply no way that you can expect the vast majority of the population to vote in an informed manner, even with near perfect information, as it is, quite simply, in excess of their ability or inclination. If you want a country ruled by idiots, you might as well go the full hog and vote DSC or Libz.
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“Humans are self-interested, bigoted, and really stinking stupid.”
All the more reason not to give them positions of power over others.
“The advantage of a representative system is that those elected few can be smarter than the fools which elect them and are able to muster great resources, should they desire, to derive the better approaches.”
Any evidence that those elected are smarter than average? I wouldn’t have given Goff, Key or Brownlee any credit for smarts, but maybe they are just pretending to be thick to attract votes?
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A condition of using any sort of electronic voting (including ATM machines) is that the software must be open source and freely available for inspection by all concerned.
ATM’s will never be open sourced (for good security reasons) thus are not suitable.
Reason for open sourced is that the counting method must be transparent and open.
In a closed software coded counting system it would be dead easy to expand one vote for one party and allocate it two votes while a single vote for two other parties only gets allocated one vote to one party.
The final vote count talleys with the number of voters in the electorate but the allocation of those votes is totally “fixed”.
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Todd “2. Ensuring that the media undertakes to convey even sides of the issues”
If you could make the media tell us the whole unbiased truth you would not need the other measures. If you got rid of 1ZB National would be history.
I believe the majority are essentially good but misinformed.
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Argument against direct representation:
1. The people are too stupid to rule themselves
2. The technology will not be secure enough
3. The media is evil and will warp the minds of the voting public.
The old masters serfs philosophy again sapient. We really do need to get rid of the outdated feudal system with class distinction. It is so 16th century. Mechanisation and technology has made it pretty much redundant. I would probably put voters who are too stupid to understand the information presented or the implications of their decision at around 10%. That same 10% voted in 2008 to elect the current government. It is much preferable to have a 10% incorrect vote because people are not intelligent enough to comprehend their decision, which could swing either way, than voting in a politician that has three years of free reign to do whatever the hell they want to. Often acting without any mandate and against the majority of the public. The current system is utilized to the detriment of this country. My idea is that it would be the political process presenting decisions to the public so politicians would still have a say in what direction the country went in. It’s just if they want it to go down the tubes for their own gain, the people would stop them.
I’m unsure exactly why it needs to be open source code? That would alloy hackers an open book. It is not the mechanism but the outcome that needs scrutiny. The mechanism is proven secure, that’s why banks use it. Any vote code would not be a part of the banking operation so could be viewable if required. It works in much the same way different programs sit on your computer. They’re separate. To spell it out simply: you would put your verified voting card into the ATM, it would recognise that it is a voting card and take you to the appropriate screen. You would enter your pin and then your decision, which would be sent to a database. Scrutineers could view that information and confirm results if required. You could view your decision online and what percentages the yes or no vote had. Each vote would have a verified activation number from the card. Anonyminity could still be maintained.
BJ would like to see a receipt printed from the ATM for follow up security reasons.
Alternatively you could enter your vote online or by text. If properly implemented, I would trust that systems accuracy over the current one. The cheat that Gerrit proposes would be easily seen by firstly the voters who could confirm their votes online and then the scrutineers. A few thousand votes without verified cards miraculously appearing would be pretty conspicuous. It would also require an initial “conspiracy” while the process was implemented or being run and rely on the system not ever being checked. Likelihood of success = 0.
Argument against propaganda making direct representation a farce… You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Steps of implementation:
1. Inform the public
2. Get politicians on board
3. Undertake a referendum concerning direct representation
4. Develop the software (if it doesn’t exist already) for ATM’s etc
5. Repatriate ATM’s if required
6. Implement a secure voting website
7. Develop unbiased television programming
8. Repatriate broadcasting networks if required.
I know… easier said than done. Viva la revolution!
We could always just keep flogging the dead horse while sitting on an old broken cart full of outdated thinking.
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Those who think that the electronic voting system is secure might like to read and follow the links here
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm
They who control the software (Diebold in this case) controls the vote.
If you want transparency in vote counting then one must absolute have, if not open sourced software, software owned by the people and its code open to inspection.
Unlike the privately owned and not open to inspection (for “commercially sensitive” reasons) software as used in the USA and other countries.
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Todd
You only have to fool some of the people most of the time to influence the outcome of elections.
Which is actually pretty easy.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe.” – Einstein
Gerrit was making a point similar to mine, you can’t have a single strand of counting, you actually have to have redundancy and mixed supervision and accountability to get anywhere close to something trustworthy enough for the voting process on which our democracy is based. You have to be able to produce a paper trail or an audit trail that ensures that the entity tallying the votes does so honestly, and yet you want the ballots to remain anonymous.
Moreover, you HAVE to have an election process, with a time set aside for doing that and another time set aside for voting your decisions, in order to have the debates and research that inform the public opinion.
I take your notion that the politicians cannot be trusted well, I don’t trust them either, but I don’t see this as working better because the perpetual state of debating every aspect of government and voting on every issue and being informed about every law… that is a lot of work, more than most people are able to shoulder on top of their “day job”, even if they have the ability and are inclined to do it.
Which some of us do, and you meet us here every day. You are in fact, one of us.
My Wife and my Mother-In-Law vote but most emphatically do not participate in these things. Nor would they ever.
______________________
In Florida when Bush was elected and in Ohio when Kerry was defeated, there were clear instances in which the vote tally was inverted from the poll results. A 60-40 Dem->Republican ratio on the ground voting 40-60 in the machinery. The results untraceable once they entered the machinery. It is not ever trustworthy when it is hidden…. and those are not the only ways in which the hardware and software can be subverted.
Triplicate and open. This isn’t impossible, just expensive and inconvenient… which is also the case with the audit-trail paperwork, and the current system.
As best I can analyze what you want to do, we’d get
1. election results faster
2. from elections held more frequently
3. about more detailed issues that apply to
4. lower levels of the political and legal process.
Which is pretty much how any “direct democracy” has to affect us.
The cost of this is:
1. more public education and involvement required.
2. more frequent elections and campaigns
3. more expensive voting hardware
My take on this is that the costs are not worth the benefits overall… largely because of the expense of the voting hardware.
I am not telling you it cannot be done. I agreed that it CAN be done. However, the risks that need to be dealt with include a level of insider reprogramming and influence that has no business in the foundation of a democratic process. That’s why I am insisting on redundant, independent counting systems and preservation of an audit trail.
BJ
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Not exactly a smoking gun Gerrit! I’m pretty sure we can develop something a bit better than what the US has tried. You really are a bit of a defeatists sometimes.
A paper trail, having the people own the software, utilizing a verification process and employing trustworthy people would help to deter vote cheating.
If we put your argument up as a reasonable one, then similarly we would have to get rid of the monetary system, because money is used to cheat people all the time. We would need to find a use for all those ATM’s then.
Just as I believe the will of the people should decide what direction the country goes in, I believe that we can implement a fair and impartial electronic voting system that is infinitely secure. something definetily needs to change.
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Todd
When programmed to be part of the bank, the bank will insist on complete ownership of the machine with no other software installed.
That is because they have a fiduciary relationship with the people who use the ATM as an ATM.
Using it as a voting machine requires different programming and different communications arrangements which are entirely independent of the ATM function. It cannot be “dual-purposed” in anything like less than a day, tests would have to be performed after each changeover.
Cheaper and easier to create dedicated “voting ATM machines” and the rural ballot would wind up getting under-represented because they’d have to travel a lot further, or more expensive as you’d have to have one at each farm.
BJ
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Samiam,
Indeed, though there are a few whom may be considered sufficiently responsible for such power. The advantage of the elected representative system which we presently operate is that the representatives can, on occasion, be held to account; even if it is just a resignation here and there. Because they can be held to account, and because they can be voted out, they are forced to repress their selfishness somewhat or make it more devious. With a direct democracy there is no such accountability.
They are certainly not the brightest bunch, but they are all, even Brownlee, substantially more capable than the vast majority of people. I would make the point that Goff has a first class Master’s, lectured, and had a number of other prizes and positions far out of reach of most; even if he is an incompetent leader of the opposition. Key, while his academic qualifications are lesser, has shown himself to be very good at manipulating his environment; both people and money. Gerry, well he is a worry; but still more intelligent by far than the majority. The system is not perfect, but even with these it has managed to enhance, substantially, the intellect and resources of the legislature.
~*~*~*~*~*~*
Todd,
That is odd. I, a psychologist whom deals intimately with intelligence and related factors, would suggest that anyone below one standard deviation above the norm could not understand the implications of policy even if they tried and that anyone below two standard deviations above the norm would have trouble even if they wanted to. Having just consulted a number of other psychologists (got to love those feudalistic universities, aye?) the conclusion is that about 84% of the population could not understand the policy even if they tried. Less than 10% being able to comprehend it at the level we really need them to.
It is not a case of class, but a case of ability; of merit. The ones making the decisions should be the ones with the ability and understanding necessary to lead the society down the path which most benefits it. Representative democracy is a reasonable compromise between meritocracy and democracy which allows people of ability to lead while safeguarding against actions which are too unpopular. The current system is not operated as well as it could be, but it is a substantial benefit over and above that which you propose.
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Anyone fiddling with the money system is found out pretty quickly. We ALL self check (or should) that the money in the account is accurate.
Done on a daily or weekly basis.
A vote is not able to be verified unless you printed ALL the votes out on a paper trial and let people see where their vote was recorded and allocated to.
Diebold problems were 20 years ago. Much changed since then?
Try here
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/indias-electronic-voting-machines-have-security-problems
Defeatist, Nah.
Realist, Absolutely
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I would probably put voters who are too stupid to understand the information presented or the implications of their decision at around 10%. That same 10% voted in 2008 to elect the current government.
What a load of crap.
The reason that the current government is where it is, is because the previous one was so rotten and due for a change that the collective stink served to wake up the sleeping masses!
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BJ
Most people are informed through the news and formulate an opinion. Most would like that opinion to be listened to. People often have a predetermined set of values that make them always vote a certain way. In that case ignorance is bliss.
I think the implementation cost would be reasonable. Most of the hardware is in place. The manufacturing of vote cards would be of minimal cost. Development of software that was not owned by any entity that had a vested interest might be costly, but not overly so. After all, what price do we place on our freedom?
Basically the current system is not sustainable and for continued functionality for the country, we need a political system that is not passé.
An ATM can in fact be dual functional. It’s a computer; it will do whatever you program it to. The system would only require further communication arrangements to utilise what is already in place in hardware Just like an ATM informs a bank account that an amount has been changed, the system would be similarly secure. If banks insist on ownership of the device to limit voter utilization, then the devices need to be repatriated. There is no point having machines all over the place.
People who live in rural areas usually travel to townships that have ATM’s around once a week. Even if we were to discount Internet voting.
The bubble will eventually burst and unless we pre-empt the crises we will be left with a big mess to clean up.
Sapient
84% would not be able to comprehend policy even if they tried… you have to be joking! Perhaps amongst the people your Psychologist friends associate with, but not in the real world.
We have not tried what I propose so there is no relevance to your statement.
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Shunda, I defer your argument onto Sapient.
Gerrit
A vote is able to be verified by the voter who has access to the website that retains their preferences and previous votes.
I would prefer not to get bogged down in the technical aspects of implementing a direct representation process. Suffice to say that it can securely be achieved. There is always resistance to good ideas that have far reaching consequences to the way we live. The current political system has proven itself unsustainable, this is but one idea I have had to try and rectify the situation.
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Todd, do you think the anti smacking referendum should have been listened to by the government?
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Shunda, I defer your argument onto Sapient.
Don’t bother, I was talking to you.
You seem to think that our current govt was elected illegitimately, do you really think there would have been a different result with your ‘system”?
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Shunda, that same 10% also voted for the prior Labour government. You have misinterpreted the meaning from my statement. I simply put the amount of the population who is too dumb to comprehend policy at 10% Sapient puts it at 84%. Where do you put it?
My personal view is that the law that protects parents from properly being charged in accordance with their crime when they brutally kill a child, should not be reinstated.
I think the anti smacking referendum should implement a direct representation process. I believe the Culmar Brunton poll was around 55% which would have upheld the anti smacking legislature.
I’m not sure if a different election outcome would have resulted. But I am sure that much of the consequential controversial legislation would not be implemented under a direct representation model. At the moment, National could bring back the death penalty if they wanted, just because they have the numbers.
Time to do some work…
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I don’t think very many people are too “dumb” to comprehend policy, it is more that to many people are wilfully ignorant and can’t be bothered.
And this is the greatest problem with any form of democracy, it only works well if people care to use it.
In my home town we have currently elected the most knuckle dragging regional council in our history. It is not because the majority wanted these people there, it is simply because the majority didn’t vote!
I can’t see how an electronic system with better more balanced media coverage of issues will change the attitudes of people that just don’t care.
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Todd,
When it comes to analysing and making connections, people are terrible. Teaching people to analyse and make connections in one of the most important parts of any science, particularly psychology. We have a compulsory paper on the subject every year of education. I mark work regularly and what one sees coming through from undergraduates is crap; most undergraduates will struggle merely to get a C-average when all you have to do to get a higher mark is analyse and draw connections. They cannot do it. The average graduate has an IQ of about 115, if you are below that point then you are going to have a rather hard time of undergraduate education. These people really have to struggle to do what I, and perhaps you, take for granted; this does not come naturally to them and comes only minimally through repeated education on the matter. I would consider being able to do this a bare minimum for weighing in on these matters. A score of 115 takes out 84 percent of the population just like that. Even being far more generous, and saying that people with a score of 100 are minimally competent, that is still 50% that is not.
I would make the point that I am one of the few ivory-tower psychologists, the others are all clinical. They deal with real people from all groups. Even being an ivory-tower psychologist, my area of study is focused on flaws in peoples thinking and the results of those flaws; I see the silly little mistakes that everyone, even I, make.
If that is not enough, consider this: The main part of the most effective therapy we have for psychological disorder, more effective than drugs and used on all of the more common problems, is little more than asking pointed questions so that the person realises how irrational their positions are. The other part is little more than, essentially, slapping them and patting them on the head.
I have not tried going to the town square and killing everyone with a fully automatic weapon, but I know it is a bad idea regardless. We do not have to try this when we can use our knowledge of human nature and capacity to extrapolate the likely outcome; this is the whole point of science, to explain, through explaining to predict, and through prediction to manipulate.
It can be achieved, certainly. It will, however be very costly and inefficient to fully protect it all or open to manipulation if not protected it fully. It is not a case of if it can be achieved but if it is practical; I can strap explosives to a boat, but it is not the most practical way to cross the strait. In my experience, it is always worth listening to the objections of BJ and Gerrit, especially given their expertise in related areas.
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“Goff has a first class Master’s, lectured, and had a number of other prizes and positions far out of reach of most; even if he is an incompetent leader of the opposition. Key, while his academic qualifications are lesser, has shown himself to be very good at manipulating his environment; both people and money…”
I don’t regard any of this as evidence of intelligence, training perhaps. Nor am I certain that intelligence is required to be an effective politician.
I do think that if we arranged for much more effective public participation in politics, people’s level of understanding and knowledge of the issues they have to deal with would rapidly increase, as would the willingness to create resources for the public and teach them the skills they need.
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Although I have some respect for BJ’s viewpoints, I often take great umbrage at Gerrit’s, Shunda’s and your statements Sapient. Some of the silly right wing and anti religious sentiments expressed are completely off the planet. It is exactly for that reason that I believe Direct Representation despite all of your protests and supposed reasons for it being unpractical, is a good idea that could change the system for the better and ensure that a democratic political process is maintained.
You don’t need to jump off a cliff to know it’s a bad idea either, but I’m not arguing that you should. You have not extrapolated any negative potential outcome that I can see. My extrapolation is that stupid legislature would not get past the direct representation format. The fact that rich kids are not smart does not surprise me in the least. These people become the politicians that we’re meant to vote for. Again the proposed dynamic you pose has canceled itself out.
There has been no argument that I have not categorically answered:
1. People have the same IQ now as they would in a direct representation model. The implications to a voting system because of a supposed mass low IQ, is the same in both systems. However I believe that New Zealanders in general consist of an intelligent and informed populace. Paradoxically if your 84% low IQ is factual, you hint at education through repeated exposure to information as being a solution. Education as it should be now, would be the answer.
2. The technology is already in place and is a proven secure format. It is more likely that the current system has more voter falsification than a secure and verified electronic voting system could ever have. I have no qualms about upsetting the status quo… I wonder what David Garret wanted that false passport for?
3. The cost of a direct representation model compared to employing numerous politicians with multiple financial streams and multiple skill sets would effectively save taxpayer money. I’m interested to see that an argument about ‘cost of implementation’ has arisen when there has been no projection done. The election system would also benefit from such a format, if financial saving, is our only objective.
4. Television programs can be developed to correctly inform and educate the public.
PS I have a high IQ, but I forget exactly what it is
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If banks insist on ownership of the device to limit voter utilization, then the devices need to be repatriated
Each and every such device will require a day’s downtime for the vote (including the removal of the money) and a second day for the “repatriation” for the banking purpose it was designed.
This isn’t going to happen any other way, and I doubt it will be permitted this way either. The ATM belongs to Westpac or Kiwibank or whichever, and it would play merry hell taking them out of service on any sort of regular basis.
People who live in rural areas usually travel to townships that have ATM’s around once a week. Even if we were to discount Internet voting.
If they travel all on the same day… which they do not, this can work.
Discounting internet access and voting is necessary unless you are willing to give up anonymity. The vote being required to be traceable to an individual who is assuredly registered. I do not think this is a good trade.
An ATM can in fact be dual functional. It’s a computer; it will do whatever you program it to.
Probably it a good idea NOT to try to tell me what computers can do
… the limitations on the ATM are commercial and legal as well as programmatical. The ATM is not hooked up to external networks, it is networked through the bank. Some of that is likely programmed in firmware, in EEROM or otherwise locked in. Permitting some program, even some official government program, to traipse through that secure network is not going to happen, possible or not. I wouldn’t do business with a bank that permitted it, nobody I know in my firm, would.
The most likely and most appropriate method of dealing with this is dedicated ATM-based or ATM-like voting booths. The reason that CAN work better is that they don’t need to be switched , can be equipped with their own ROM and network, and it allows frequent updates of the questions to be voted on.
The trade-off of identifying rural voters who use internet based voting might be up to the voters. They already know they are in an inconvenient place. They could use mail-in ballots as easily, which also identify them, so it isn’t a completely unusual arrangement.
I don’t really want to give you such a hard time, but the aspects of this that make it difficult are real. I still don’t see the gains worth the costs. If we could get balanced media coverage, that alone would cover a multitude of sins.
The Green Party candidate for Mana was stiffed by the Kapi-Mana press, and just now by NPR. Someplace there is a special hell for the reporters responsible for FAILING their readers at this level.
respectfully
BJ
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Hey BJ, all we have to do is fundamentally alter the behaviour of all human beings and Todds system will work just fine.
I have to ask, how would the media be made to report “balanced” news and who would ensure the definition of “balanced” is balanced?
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Actually there is already a government network all set up to do what the privately owned ATM’s cannot do.
That is the pokie machine reporting network run by the Department of Internal affairs.
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/3FA9C0DE888C7222CC2572C000762BE5
Not suggesting voting be done on the pokie machines but it would not be out of the question to run the network into each branch of KiwiBank and intall a dedicated Eletronic Voting Machine.
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Sam,
It certainly could be training, that would explain why Goff is such a useless leader. I do, however, doubt that this is the case. I know a lot of idiots with Master’s degrees and a lot of idiots whom lecture but I have yet to meet one which is so retarded as to be comparable to the mean. In the absence of more information the default assumption for someone with such a degree and position is that they have an IQ of at least 115, probably upwards of 130. It seems reasonable to assume that Goff is not so different, especially given that he has managed to get himself in to a position with some potential; even if he does not know how to handle it.
I do agree with you here, somewhat. We should be pursuing such education regardless of if we use our present system or a direct system. Even with education and the drive which may be associated with direct representation, however, I strongly doubt that the level will raise sufficiently to actually make the system work.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Todd,
Umbrage … lol. I guess it is good to know I achieved something, at the least.
The choice that the individual makes when voting will be directly affected by the individual’s perception of their own personal benefit and the benefit to other causes about which they care. The perception of the individual as to the benefit of any given vote will be related directly to their degree of contemplation on the subject as well as the amount of information available to them and the quality of their contemplation. Individuals whom are poorly educated in the area, whom are less intelligent, or are less inclined toward contemplation will thus tend to make poorer judgements regarding benefit than individuals with a greater endowment.
In direct representation systems all individuals which satisfy the criteria are able to vote in relation to a piece of legislation or a proposal. As all individuals vote, the degree to which the perceived benefits represent the actual benefits is the average of the understandings of all individuals whom did vote. Additionally, as there are many anonymous individuals voting rather than a few heavily identified individuals, there is no critique of the voters to ensure that their choice may actually be seen as having some benefit to the community. Thus the individuals are free to vote however ignorantly or self-centred they desire.
In a representative democracy, however, the people with the votes are professionals whom spend most of their time looking at legislation and the effects which that legislation may have, thus increasing contemplation. They have funding and teams of researchers to acquire information for the, thus increasing understanding. As they are critiqued by the media, observed by the population, and elected by the party body to promote the party, the individuals will naturally be selected/culled for the ability to deal with their environment, thus increasing the mean intelligence. As the individuals, and parties, are few in number and are watched, they must justify their choices and act according to paths which, at least appear to, benefit the community or face removal. While the individuals which elect the representatives are just as intelligent in both systems, our representative system promotes contemplation, understanding, and intellect among those whom actually vote on the legislation. Additionally, this allows the citizenry to vote for a party or candidate based on agreeing with them in general rather than having to know or research each matter each time while this leads to parties like Labour and National, it is preferable to your proposal where uninformed people will be voting on the issues.
Before you say it; no, there is no amount of advertising or education campaigns which could raise awareness enough for your system to even break even. Your system would work great if everyone was highly intelligent, fully interested, and spent all of their time researching the matters. Until that happens, though, it will be an idea which belongs alongside the notions of communism and the free market.
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Well said BJ.
The implementation of a separate application within an ATM is realistic. ATM’s already have dual-purpose functions such as making donations, toping up mobile phones, or even buying postage stamps. Many of these processes communicate with external databases. Realistically a workaround is achievable and I would not discount the proposition without proper investigation.
As previously mentioned, the vote card would direct the ATM to the appropriate program making any “traipsing over banking processes” none existent. It would all be in the design of the application, which would require a testing and implementation process.
I don’t believe any addition ATM’s or PCI cards in existing ATM would be required for them to be utilized in the proposed manour. Inputting a program that is OK’d by the banks should be a simple process. The code would be available to them. It would be advantageous to use the same error recovery mechanisms etc that are already in place. I presume you mean EEPROM. Even reprogramming such technology or having a separate array of EEPROM transistors is not out of the question. Voting issues would be updated in the same manour the bank updates information on the ATM. It is not a difficult process. If the application is developed properly, we could run it off the EEPROM so that it is quick thus making voting even more efficient.
The commercial and legal aspects would be interesting. Hopefully there would be no commercialising of the voting system. Incorporating an incentive for the banks for the use of the ATM machines is not out of the question. Although I am personally for the repatriation of such items from the banks, being that they are duplicitous in causing the worlds current economic underperformance. I am not sure that they are to be trusted. Any master passwords would need to be reset so that dual bank/government technical aspects were foolproof.
It was my understanding that ATM’s and EFTPOS utilized the telephone network, so your claims that ATM’s are only networked through the bank is probably not correct. There’s no reason they can’t be networked through any system including the Internet. Although I have not heard of any hackers accessing ATM’s through cyberspace. Any of your proposed issues are not insurmountable hurdles.
You wouldn’t use ATM’s that had the dual purpose of money dispensers and voting mechanisms? That seems like a strange decision to me.
Living in a rural setting can be more convenient than living in a city. It all depends on your perspective and values.
PS You spelt programmatically wrong.
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I have to ask, how would the media be made to report “balanced” news and who would ensure the definition of “balanced” is balanced?
At the moment my daughter is ready to wreak mayhem on the notion that we are non-violent on the body of any reporter she gets her hands on
BJ
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Sapient
Implications to a personalised and sometimes selfish voting process, is of concern. Thinking such things as “I like to eat tuna even though I know the stock is limited, I will vote to continue fishing for Tuna” is a realistic concern under the current and a direct representation model.
Can you legislate to safeguard against the all-pervasive human condition? Probably not entirely. Direct representation would be a step away from feudalism though.
I’m not saying that politicians should not give due consideration to the issues before they go to be judged by the public. In effect a vetting system would be advantageous, especially if the fascists start breeding like wild fire. But consideration off re-election is not an issue the public has. The overall public are far more likely to be conscious of the right thing to do than any self interested, private business-owning politician that has to tow the party line. That is the crux of the matter.
Direct representation allows the citizenry to vote for a particular topic based on agreeing with a party or candidate in general rather than having to know or research each matter each time as well. You don’t mind if I borrow your argument for my cause do you?
Break even? Ease of use, proper coverage of important topics, empowering the people and creating a democratic process that undertakes true representation. That is the payoff.
I wonder if that applies to Shonkey Honkey when he advocates violence against Labour ministers. Maybe that can be Nationals new bill entitled “Labour… They can all go to hell”! Is that the type of intellect you are advocating for Sapient?
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I never said a revolution would be easy BJ.
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Todd,
What is feudalism in this context and why is it automatically an undesirable thing? While I agree that we should do away with class-based relations, doing away with all thing which were associated with class-based relations does not follow. What I am trying to say here is that, even if representative democracy is closer to feudalism than direct democracy, it does not that mean that representative democracy is worse; if it works better than a model that is further from feudalism then it should be adopted despite its relative closeness. The model which should be adopted is the model which provides the greatest advantages.
The philosopher-king model of government requires only one intelligent person but has almost inevitable corruption. The oligarchy requires a few intelligent people, but corruption is most likely. The representative democracy requires many intelligent people but corruption is somewhat curtailed. The direct democracy has no major potential for corruption but requires each individual to be far more intelligent than he may ever hope.
Just wait and see what happens. The unintelligent will be culled quickly enough upon displaying such.
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Sapient. My, admittedly subjective, observations have been that often the higher the IQ the less the common sense. Especially after having to train many graduates to work in the real world. MBA’s are the worst. The professor who can’t put his own socks on is not entirely a myth.
Certainly many of the staff I work with, who have little or no academic qualifications, have a clearer view of how the world works, than a lot of people I met at University. Which is somewhat its own little sheltered world.
It is particularly arrogant to say that people are not entitled to some say in their own lives simply because someone thinks they are less intelligent.
Todd. Yes the Government should of revisited the anti-smacking bill when 85% of those who voted expressed concerns about it. That is democracy.
Sue Bradford went way down in my estimation when she basically said in her blog that the majority who disagreed with her were to thick to understand the question. Whatever side of the question you are on it is still a badly drafted ambiguous bill.
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The chicanery available at the low level is still pretty ugly and needs to be open-sourced, but you are correct that the private networking used by the banks is usually not completely physically isolated. It is connectable and separate encryption can be used and separate hard coded addressing can be used.
The unfortunate thing however, is that I don’t trust the bank’s politics and do not know that we would ever have enough control over such a system to prevent mass fraud, and I still see no way to make the vote anonymous any more.
Nor do I trust my fellow programmers any further than I could have thrown my first disk drive.
Abandoning anonymous voting for the moment.
We each get a “vote card” with a chip and access to biometric data… which I suggest is in the voter registration DB and not on the card. Card contains the hash code to get at the biometrics. Match is made to prove you are you with a right to vote the questions.
Questions presented, answered, a digital signature is used in sending the vote out, and it is routed to 3 counting centers.
It is verified from each of the counting centers by receipt of a digital countersignature over your vote. The counting centers are run by competing parties. Their tallies must agree.
Alternatively you are provided with a bar-code printout of your ballot which is encoded and signed by the single counting center. Random checks are made to ensure that the ballot was correctly tallied.
What we’ve given up is the secret ballot. Not sure I know how this affects us in the long run. The principle that the vote be anonymous is breached often enough, but it is still important to a lot of us. We hold views privately and are not compelled to state them publicly, nor persecuted for them.
I think I would settle for dissociating the votes from the validating information as soon as possible, and make illegal revelation of the raw data that contains the association of the two, except in a verification exercise or challenge. Which would be triggered if the 3 centers get different results.
You still need election campaign periods on each issue submitted for a vote.
You still need professional legal wording of each issue submitted for a vote.
You still have a need for a formal period of time in WHICH to vote.
By giving up anonymity you open up the possibility of on-line voting.
People registered to vote who do not can be tracked.
Counterfeiting a card is no good as the database of biometric info will also have to be altered.
Lost cards, stolen cards, cannot work without the biometric matchup.
Biometric readers are required for the home voter.
Handling voting peaks (response times ) and being able to prevent unauthorized access to the biometric DB both remain tractable issues…
OK…
How important is the anonymity of our ballots. Actual question is can we be punished or rewarded for how we vote… I think the alternative which loses the connection fairly early in the piece, is adequate. The abandonment of the rigid-absolute anonymity allows your idea to work.
However, you very very much need to have 3 distinct centers for counting/clearing votes or a paper audit trail.
respectfully
BJ
respectfully
BJ
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Accepting the technical feasibility as I have, I still side with Sapient in the notion that the questions at issue will be properly understood by less than a third and possibly less than a quarter of the population.
That is of course, not any change from the current situation.
The difference is that with direct democracy the confusion of the masses is more likely to give bad results as the bills placed before them are going to be more detailed, lower level decisions appropriate to the direct voting process.
Electing a representative who’s opinions reflect your own but who has more ability than you do, is akin to hiring a lawyer.
“Common Sense” is not at issue here. Being unable to fully understand things is hard for me to even imagine. I regard that complete communication between people who differ in intelligence by more than two standard deviations, is impossible. The bandwidth mismatch is too great.
The politicians aren’t MUCH brighter than the general population on average. Ours are, but the cleverness of the weasels running the show should not be confused with actual understanding of issues.
That, more than anything else, is the sticking point. With more responsibility for the outcomes resting on the voters, who will have to work harder to keep up, and the ease with which misinformation can find its way through the media, there is still plenty of scope for this scheme to go awry, and plenty of reason to regard the representative form of democracy to be more appropriate. Using this method to elect and inform the representatives on a more frequent basis at first, is probably wiser.
respectfully
BJ
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You wouldn’t use ATM’s that had the dual purpose of money dispensers and voting mechanisms? That seems like a strange decision to me.
I am extremely security conscious. I do not trust a system which has access to my money, to be running software that is not associated with the primary purpose of handling my money, or to be connected with any other network.
My bank should not have the ATM printing phone card top-ups.
That isn’t actually a choice.
BJ
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Suppose there’s a full parliamentary “election” every 6 months using this method, with the opportunity for the makeup of parliament to change much faster than it does now.
So frequent that actually “campaigning” is no longer the operative paradigm, it is current performance that gets you sacked or keeps you in place.
That would of course, make actually “forming” government nigh-on impossible. Every year ?
I prefer my randomization scheme, so that it the period of incumbency is on average long enough to do something, but the ability to rely on it is removed.
BJ
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Personally I have much more faith in the great unwashed to look at things more rationally than politicians. Politicians, by definition, tend to be idealogs with an exaggerated belief in their own superiority. Bit like Sapient without the detachment.
Years of having politicians ignore evidence because it does not accord with their beliefs has proved to me that nothing should become law unless the majority of the interested population support it. “Even if it is the wrong decision, (in a democracy) it is our decision to make”.
It is hard to imagine the public doing any worse than politicians have.
In a Swiss style democracy the need to persuade and explain policy to the public is a big brake on stupid legislation.
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Sapient
Intelligence is a very subjective thing. Your hypothesis doesn’t appear to be happening in politics very fast. I could read some fascist ideals into that statement Sapient.
BJ
A level of mistrust of programmers is advisable. But having faith in your and other programmer’s abilities to spot “cheater code” is also advisable.
I totally disagree that biometric security is required. I believe the verification process I pointed out earlier would ensure enough security for the system to work effectively. There is no reason to overcomplicate things.
Anonyminity can be retained while voting with an ATM or the Internet. It is all in the development of the mechanism.
Yes! The three centres would be a good idea. However I was thinking of a separate department, which was independent of any political parties agenda. Your scenario could play out that a particular party would change their vote count so that the process would need to start again. I would not put such things past some parties. Therefore an independent organization should have access to the database. Party representatives could take on a scrutineering function, but not have access to change data.
Confusion of the masses would only happen if questions were worded badly or media coverage was twisted. We need to fix the media and political propaganda machine even if a direct representation model is not implemented. I know… Easier said than done.
We have tried the current system for a long time now and it has proven over and over again that it is a failure. It would be wise to try something new.
The direct representation model does not require an election process to be any different than it is now. It does require the public’s input on policy that ultimately affects them. It does require proper coverage of issues so that the public can make informed decisions. The infrastructure is already all in place; it is just a case of changing it slightly so that it works properly. Time for an upgrade.
No more straw men please.
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Confusion of the masses would only happen if questions were worded badly or media coverage was twisted. We need to fix the media and political propaganda machine even if a direct representation model is not implemented. I know… Easier said than done.
Easier said than done? it is impossible! Any attempt to “fix” it would result in tyranny faster than Gerry can munch through 3 mince pies!.
Explain how and who could fix it, explain how an issue would be judged “needs fixing”. What would it be Todd? anything you don’t agree with? anything John Key doesn’t agree with? Who’s version of ‘right and wrong’ would we use?
We have tried the current system for a long time now and it has proven over and over again that it is a failure. It would be wise to try something new.
How is it a failure? because a party you don’t like got elected?
This whole discussion leaves out one fundamental aspect of our existence
PEOPLE DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYONE BUT THEMSELVES, regardless of intelligence, wealth, or otherwise.
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PEOPLE DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYONE BUT THEMSELVES”,
If that was really the case society would not exist.
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The Dalai Lama says: According to my own experience, the highest level of inner calm comes from the development of love and compassion. The more concerned we are with the happiness of others, the more we increase our own well-being. Friendliness and warmth towards others allow us to relax and help us to dispel any sense of fear or insecurity so we can overcome whatever obstacles we face.
It would appear that the people in your world may not care about each other, thankfully I don’t live like that. My friends and family care a great deal about me. I feel a bit sorry for you in that regard Shunda.
So what you’re saying is that Politicians cannot work together to formulate policy?
Perhaps a panel of the public could be posed a question and they could score it based on relevance to a topic. I’m not sure exactly how that aspect would work, but I have faith that a workable process can be instigated.
The current system is a failure because… do I really need to spell it out for you? Have a read of the newspaper, look up some stats, talk with your neighbors and wake up.
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If that was really the case society would not exist.
Give it a couple of years!, because we have been trading on our kids future for last 50 years.
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The Dalai Lama says: According to my own experience, the highest level of inner calm comes from the development of love and compassion. The more concerned we are with the happiness of others, the more we increase our own well-being. Friendliness and warmth towards others allow us to relax and help us to dispel any sense of fear or insecurity so we can overcome whatever obstacles we face.
Yeah ok, sounds nice, I got a warm tummy by just reading it.
But I counter with something Jesus said:
“the gate is narrow and only a few will find it”
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Anonyminity can be retained while voting with an ATM or the Internet. It is all in the development of the mechanism.
This is one I have to doubt until you present the mechanisms – that you must either explain or abandon.
Either voters are registered or they are not eligible to vote, and this check is required. I personally see no method whatsoever to guarantee the identity of the voter in your arrangements unless it is coupled with the ballot at some level. This is not fatal.
Possession of a card and a keycode alone lends itself to immediate potential abuses. The identity of the person behind the keyboard is critical to whether a ballot entry is legal.
Can it be done without biometrics? Yes, we do it at banks all the time of course… but the banks have a fraud problem which they can control partly because we are all watching our individual accounts for errors. I’d have to vote “maybe” because the sort of personal questioning that would yield an acceptable level of assurance that I am me isn’t easy for the bank either.
The biometrics are apt to be becoming part of ATMs in the near future anyway.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10687826
I am trying to help you refine your answers to each challenge here. Call it a technical design review.
I am NOT persuaded about the value (not convinced it will change things as much as you think), but barring the anonymity question I am inclined now to agree that the feasibility exists, and that it can be made cheap enough to consider it. Carefully reckoning it is possible.
The paper trail and random checks method would allow anonymity to be preserved almost completely… other methods would I think, leave enough electronic clues to identify the person behind a given ballot… in theory. This can be made sufficiently difficult to be acceptable in any case.
When I mail my ballot, some relaxation of anonymity or voter eligibility verification occurs. It is not a fatal weakness.
Confusion of the masses would only happen if questions were worded badly or media coverage was twisted. We need to fix the media and political propaganda machine even if a direct representation model is not implemented. I know… Easier said than done.
The difficulty is that no matter how good we make the media and restricted we make the political propaganda machines, we have the problem that the issues themselves are often too complex for voters to understand. Too complex to be explained in 2 minutes, and often not in 20 minutes… So to vote on them requires the use of time on the part of each voter able to understand at all, and randomness on the part of the others. The lost person-hours and lost efficiency is considerable.
The randomness added by the 60% who will NOT understand (Sapient, I know I am being optimistic) is difficult to analyze as well. What does that actually do? In other words: With the elected parliament we have a pretty good idea of what sort of errors the government will be making, for any given given government. Would this randomize things, making the errors less predictable? Is that a good or bad thing?
…and would the outcomes be greatly different from the current system?
People would gravitate towards their self-reinforcing argument centers, some here, some to kiwiblog, some to red alert. They won’t really understand but will rely on someone else to do that… for them. So one difference may be that the “elected representatives” would be replaced by various opinion shapers on blogs.
Maybe not a bad thing there either… but how is it, strictly speaking, different from the current arrangement? One person “understands”, others follow and the one who understands is empowered through the number of his/her followers. No formal vote takes place. What is he/she paid and by who?
This is still a work in progress… don’t take it amiss… it is a more practical idea than I first thought.
However, just because we CAN do something doesn’t mean we should.
You have persuaded me that we can. We are working on the “should” now. Often a harder question. This is your idea and you will have to champion it if it is to go anywhere. Best to have answers to all the questions before they are asked – because thinking them up on the spot risks the chance of success on a single mis-statement.
respectfully
BJ
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This is, perhaps, true. Those whom live their lives in academia have little need for ‘street smarts’ and thus tend not to develop such smarts. Such smarts, though, are of very little utility when it comes to analysing policy and the effects such policy is likely to have.
I would make the further point that MBAs are the toilet-paper of university degrees. They are produced in great numbers and are only really at universities because they act like a cash cow. There is no real reason that the skills couldn’t, and aren’t, taught at polytechs.
I am not saying that they are not entitled to have a say in their own lives. I am saying that, if their decisions will be to the detriment of society as a whole, the negative impact of their decisions on society should be minimised.
Well, no. Society exists because there is benefit to individuals through participating in society. By enforcing social rules, obligations, and laws, we stop having to watch our backs 24/7 and we gain more time to pursue other options, such as growing food. In larger societies we can gain economies of scale and the division of labour and in doing so further enhance our ability to pursue our goals.
Society exists exactly because we are so selfish.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Todd,
Intelligence is not a subjective thing. Intelligence is a measure of the degree to which an individual is able to approximate ultimate manipulation of their environment. It is very much an objective thing and can be visually depicted via a ROC curve in many instances. The critical thinking skills and ability to draw connections which are discussed here are central to intellect. The only subjective component is which items we consider to load on to the underlying intelligence factor.
My memory may be flawed but I seem to remember that only recently Pansy Wong stood down for something as, relatively, small as her lack of ability to justify her use of funds outside of the constraints of their terms of use.
I am a pragmatist; I will adopt whichever position I see to most benefit my cause. I am not an ideological nut and thus I do not hold any set position as inherently bad or to be avoided. I do not think that fascist principles are the way to go, but if I can be shown otherwise then I would be happy to support them. Likewise, I would be happy to embrace Rand if someone were to convince me that she had the right of it (a.k.a. hit me over the head with a mallet a couple of times).
I like it that you admit to it being faith; a belief held in the absence of supporting evidence or in the presence of evidence to the contrary. As we have discussed previously, faith should never be a grounds for the making of public policy; decisions which affect so many should be well thought out and backed up.
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“Such smarts, though, are of very little utility when it comes to analysing policy and the effects such policy is likely to have”.
So Sapient. You would deny people the right to have a say in their own lives because you consider them, “too thick”.
Well. I believe they are entitled to a say.
People I know have no problem figuring out the effect of policy. Especially as they have seen the detrimental effects of policy on their lives over the last 30 years.
Actually most people are not as stupid as you think. And the worst idiots I have met have had degrees.
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Kerry,
I would not deny them the right to have a say in their own lives, but I would seek to minimise the damage that they do to the lives of others.
They may be the worst, as they are more effective for being more intelligent. The most stupid people I have met tend to be in their twenties and in intermediate. Degrees indicate intelligence but not wisdom or insight; derivation of wisdom and insight are, however, limited to the intelligent.
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I think they are the worst because they have been taught enough new words to give the illusion of intelligence.
The most damage that is done to the lives of others has always been by smart people without a conscience.
Some of the best insights have come from people who would not be considered intelligent.
As an old Skipper said to me once. “trust your own judgment, but always listen to the deckboy”.
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The main feature would be that a mechanism would be in place where politicians through all their “intellect and contemplated understanding” have to justify policy changes to the public. Many policies would not be implemented under a direct representation (for lack of a better name) model because a lot of policy goes against the will of the people and is often negative in terms of economic sustainability and environmental protection. It should be implemented because it will help retain the Kiwi dream.
You’re asking me to design the application. Although this is not above my abilities, it is not practicable at present because of time constraints.
The registration process would continue as it is. However voter preferences would not be available publicly. Likewise special voter details would not be made public. This is a simple feature to implement within the application.
Sapient
OK then… through my limited knowledge, I believe that a workable Direct Representation system can be implemented and will work in the prescribed manour. As BJ points out, the idea needs clarification before it comes under scrutiny. Because I have limited knowledge in many of the areas such a system would utilize, I used the term “faith” in my limited knowledge to underpin that the theory is practicable. If I must get all psychological about it to subdue your anti-religious sensibilities.
Intelligence is a very subjective thing, in that intelligence for most people is not about objectifying their intellect. The majority of work does not require it. I can see why such thinking is required in your profession. However psychologists like politicians are often disassociated from the real world. A thug has ultimate manipulation of their environment; in that they can smash things and kill people, this is not intelligent.
The IQ rate for people, who would not be able to comprehend enough to make decisions, has been place from 10% to 84%. This would seem to be a very large variance. One must consider the points of view in that I would like to see a Direct Representation model implemented and you would not. Therefore it is likely that both our figures are not correct. Even with respect to the theories about the population’s intelligence your esteemed colleges have iterated.
That is a poignant statement. Perhaps it is not the publics intelligence we should be debating, but the publics conscience. Most of the people I know have a conscience and form political ideas/decisions because of that conscience. Having “faith” that the public can undertake such a simple task as making an informed decision, I don’t think your argument holds water.
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You’re asking me to design the application. Although this is not above my abilities, it is not practicable at present because of time constraints.
Something like a shibboleth federated server, passing back through the browser with a cookie and so allowing the web-app that serves up the voting menu to know that it is allowed to continue, but without letting it know the identity of the user.
I can’t help much more, it is after all your pigeon not mine, but I am thinking about ways it can be done, as it isn’t beyond my technical abilities either and those as can do this sort of thing usually can’t help doing it. I did want to see what you would come up with. I sense you are losing patience. Don’t.
______________________
Many policies would not be implemented under a direct representation (for lack of a better name) model because a lot of policy goes against the will of the people
…and many others, foolish but popular, WOULD be implemented because “the will of the people” is usually poorly informed and extremely fickle.
I’ve no brief here but Sapient and I both know that the number of people who are going to understand things well enough to be able to pass informed judgment is South of 40%.
Their moral judgments are more accurate, but their actual understanding of consequences is going to be a function of who used the most persuasive sound bite last.
…and those who don’t understand always outnumber those who do… part of why the Green party is not apt to gain a majority stake in government until Mother Nature contributes her “reality bite” message.
respectfully
BJ
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Thanks for your encouragement BJ… It’s been a long day.
That is presuming that public opinion will be formulating policy. I’m also unsure if such a public driven apparatus would be advisable. That’s why I said Politicians would need to work together in formulating policy that still goes through the normal process but is also presented to the public before becoming law. It really comes down to perceptions of public ability. As a species, if we have the foresight coupled with excellent organization and drive, nothing is really unachievable to us.
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Yeah, well, being an old fart in this game means I don’t get to do as much inventing as I used to, but I know how to ask the harder questions. I know I gave you a hard time for a while there.
My specialty is real-time-embedded, signal chains for instruments and remote devices. C and parallel DSPs and PThreads – working for NASA JPL. QNX and Lynx. Design synthesis. Not a lot of call for that here, so I do what there is some demand for – Identity Management for Hyro Ltd out of Sydney, working from home here in Wellington. It’s a good space… LOTS of demand for it and more to come to be sure. I just miss counting clock cycles and creating interrupt handlers in an environment where a millisecond is… a really long time
You take care
respectfully
BJ
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“That’s why I said Politicians would need to work together in formulating policy that still goes through the normal process but is also presented to the public before becoming law”.
Pretty much what the Swiss do. It has worked for them for a while now.
The public can initiate laws also.
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Direct representation will not work. There will be expensive ad campaigns and dodgy news articles. Business round table with funding from pharmaceutical giants and other global corps on one side with 10 trillion to spend, up against the left with 45 cents. Most people wont bother to be continually voting. When election turnouts are slack the right wins.
We have proportional representation now. What it needs is for more people to speak out. Maybe 10 times as many as the few who do now. For the journalists to have more courage . . .
NZ currently owes $170 billion. Interest per year must be – say – $8 billion? The govt alone is currently borrowing $12 billion per year. At some point you would think the penny will drop. The free market is dead as a dodo. All it needs is a little push.
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The David and Goliath scenario is not strictly true. Many Green philosophies receive funding, although there is a marked difference of funds available, it is not an insurmountable condition. The left often believe in what they are working towards making volunteering feasible. This is not very often the case with the right, who generally require payment.
There are certainly impracticalities to a direct representation model, but most of them derive from the current failed system. Many aspects of the system would need to be “fixed” such as the biased media, disparity of financial campaign funding and private businesses influencing political processes, before a direct representation model would work properly. Likewise aspects of the current failed system need to be fixed for the current political model to work properly for the general masses and not just a few rich businessmen.
Conglomerates like pharmaceutical companies would find it harder to publicly manipulate the masses than they do now in acquiring the help of politicians to further their goals. Bribing a few politicians verses huge expense in convincing the public to go against their interests. In fact the conglomerates will put up a large fight to not have such a system implemented. Even if such eventualities as unfair representation of issues were not legislated for, I think that enough people are nformed through other avenues and would vote appropriately, to make direct representation a workable alternative.
I agree… the current free market system appears to be dead. But I would be weary of its death throes.
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