Okay, before I write anything else, let me get this off my chest. Winston Peters promoting Choysa?! Mind you, Mark Todd was the face of Bell Tea for a number of years. Before we know it, the Unabomber will be on screen endorsing Tiger Tea.

Anyway, onto other equally strange matters…

As I write this, Green MPs Sue Bradford and Nandor Tanczos are in Melbourne preventing Finance Minister Michael Cullen from attending the World Economic Forum. This truly must be the most blatant example of dissent in a long, long time. Why it is going largely unnoticed by the general public is a tribute to the Government’s ability to create diversions. There is no chance of the Government stepping in and reversing the Dollar’s fall until Tanczos and Bradford return, that’s for sure.

What I do not get is why some people are so opposed to capitalism. Members of Fightback Waikato (‘Communist Students on Prozac’ was deemed too much of a mouthful) send out countless emails to each other rambling on about the evil business sector and right-wingers who just don’t want to spend their lives on the breadline. I could have sworn they were set up to achieve free education. It is instead the bastion of socialist students from all over the country.

A recent press release from Prebble’s Rebels President Clint Heine summed them up nicely. In their quest to join Bradford and Tanczos in Melbourne, Fightback held a sausage sizzle to raise money. If this succeeded, they would (somehow) be able to fly over to Australia and join in the revolution. But hang on, isn’t a sausage sizzle just another example of FREE TRADE? And how would they travel to Melbourne? Answered Mr Heine, “on a privately-owned airline using American-made planes”. These anti-capitalist utopians use free trade every day of their lives and don’t even think about it. It makes me laugh just thinking about it.

On a less funny note, while listening to Youth Parliament a fortnight ago, I heard Sandra Lee’s representative (I forget her name, which buys her more time to change her tune before she publicly tarnishes her reputation) attack the whaling industry in her speech to her fellow Youth MPs. She blamed the success of the industry on, you guessed it, capitalism. There is an element of truth in this. The profit the industry earns is a rather nice incentive to carry on slaughtering Moby Dick and co. It is, however, bold to assume that abolishing capitalism will somehow eliminate the demand for whale meat.

There is an even bigger point to be made however, and it’s this: a few negative side effects is no reason to abolish something that, on the whole, works. Going by that logic, most, if not all, medicines would never have been sold to the public. Imagine the world today if penicillin had never been created.

These students, Bradford and Tanczos and others like them are out of touch, out of fashion and in many cases, out of their minds. I do not profess to be an economist, but it is quite obvious that the Marxist and Keynesian experiments of the twentieth century ultimately failed. The Soviet Union failed to bring prosperity to the working masses. North Korea is pretty self-explanatory. New Zealand’s economy was inefficient and losing a lot of money under Muldoon’s National Government and several administrations before his.

Yet people still maintain that these systems are the perfect solution to all of life’s problems. They want more and more government involvement in their everyday lives. They think businesses are evil and self-serving. They consider anyone on the Right to be heartless and probably millionaires. Veterans of the anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear movements find themselves without a cause, so they seemingly decide to just pick one out of a hat, make up some catchy slogans and pretend to be representing the majority in a noble cause.

And what does the majority do? They save their views for the ballot box. The vast majority of New Zealanders voted for pro-free trade parties. Of the two anti-trade parties represented, only the Greens seem to be unaffected by the reality of having to be kind to the export sector. Jim Anderton and Michael Cullen, misguided as they are, genuinely BELIEVE they are doing what is in business’ best interests. The Greens, as evidenced by Bradford and Tanczo’s actions in Melbourne, seem bent on destroying business.

I don’t pretend that capitalism is perfect, but throughout history is has proven itself to be the best way we have of generating revenue. And that is the only way we are ever going to help the poorer people amongst us in the long term.

Now that I’ve finished this little rant, I think I’ll go and unwind with a nice cup of tea. Choysa of course - the other brands are nothing but an orchestrated litany of lies.

ENDS

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