Marc My Words… 27 October 2006
Political comment
By
Marc Alexander

The absurd thoughts of Chairman Trotter

Isn't Chris Trotter a silly bugger? He seems to spend every waking moment excusing the Labour government of anything and everything they do without a hint of self-mockery. He appears to be cocooned in an imaginary universe where the only real life is the one crafted by government and overseen by an appropriately acronym-ed bureaucracy fuelled by a faith that the world owes everyone a living.

Last Sunday he scribbled a column in the Star Times that made me chuckle until I realized he was deadly serious. He had a crack at what he perceived to be the National Party's representation of 'all New Zealanders'. He did this mischievously in accordance with the antiquated and lazy Marxian distinction between those who own the means of production and those who, in his terminology, 'work'. He could just as easily have chosen to discern them as those who worked, saved and invested in their business, with those who chose to work, spend and avoid the extra hardships his preferred government has cumulatively imposed in terms of compliance and tax costs. But that, of course, would have sullied his Kremlin red tinted perspective.

He went on to lament the burden of work such distinctions imposes upon the honest toiler who, in his parallel world, is subjected to slave-like subsistence shoring up the wealth of his bosses. He goes so far as to call them "modern day serfs". After reading his gibber jabber you get the impression that if you fired a good idea into his head you wouldn't hit a single vital organ.

Frankly, Trotter and his apologetic babble serve as a useful warning to others of what happens when you absolve yourself of the need to think. Even Marxists who used to believe this claptrap now understand that irrespective of how you earn your living, the share market (if you choose to invest) can make you a co-owner of the productive process. And it's available to all. Besides, most business owners in New Zealand are fairly small family enterprises who made the choice to forgo present luxuries to have a go in some business venture. What successive socialist governments have done though, rather than empower such entrepreneurship, have instead made it ever so much more difficult. Instead of liberating potential, Labour governments have imprisoned our capabilities and aptitude with the snare of mediocrity inducing benefits. Aspiration has been replaced with numbing complacency.

Meanwhile the arch-villain remains the necessary but necessarily 'evil' capitalists to provide the jobs, goods and services, and tax money, for the government to extract in order to keep them in the power and comfort to which such hypocrisy has enabled.

But Trotter doesn't finish here. He goes on to proclaim, as only the deluded can, that conservatives (to use his words) "detest democracy, because it establishes a new political nation based not on ownership, but citizenship".

How democratic is it, Mr. Trotter, to expect people who work longer, harder, and smarter to pay a penalty for their efforts? Why should someone who takes up two or more jobs pay an incentive undermining secondary tax so that others, who choose not to, can live off them?

The reason, I suspect, is that socialists don't particularly like the idea of the vast majority getting on with their lives without the necessity to look to government for direction. God forbid that someone somewhere might actually be having fun without government help. Socialists by their nature are busybodies who want to be wanted, or at least needed, so they don't appear like the parasites they are. Even countries that went down that extreme socialist path, like the Soviet Union, have learned from their disastrous experiment and are now fully embracing incentive and individual responsibility to grow their country, their wealth, and their aspirations.

Isn't it a choice we all have the capacity and right to make? If you can't afford a pet don't have one. If you have to choose between going on a holiday, smoking cigarettes or eating better, then make the choice but don't expect others to furnish you with something beyond your present means. That's exactly the point of having a choice: to choose and be responsible for the consequences of your decision.

People like Chris Trotter speak from the vantage point of never having lived under the yoke of brutal socialism. That's why they can advocate it with such tear inducing conviction. He may be as pleased with himself as if he'd done the world a favor by farting silently in a crowded elevator, but it should fool no-one. His beliefs can only be embraced by fools and idealists not under the full weight of a system they defend.

The 'human rights' that socialists are so fond of using as an excuse for what they do, is not contrary to property rights but basic to them. Once we get rid of the right to property, its use, and its consequential individual and community economic benefits, we will have socialist dictatorship.

Freedom will die at the same time.

Ends

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