In New Zealand we live in one of the most regulated and controlled nations on earth. Soft despotism is more advanced here than just about anywhere. The "revolution" of the Douglas years is now a distant memory. The past ten years have seen a criminal squandering of much of the hard won gains of the eighties and nineties.
The Trans-Tasman newsletter had this to say:
No Government can ever get policy initiatives and responses 100% right. History shows too many imponderables from oil shocks to war, from disease to depression and simple lack of aspiration, to ensure perfection. They can only aim at good, not perfect, results.
What Governments are indeed sworn to is the search for profitable directions and good results, say well above the 50% and hopefully towards the 80% mark.
Observers are still surprised to think how, in the prosperous decade from 1999, the Clark/Cullen Government retreated from those goals. In seeking greater social justice, it chose to slice and dice the national cake.
Cited in Kiwiblog.
Pursing "social justice" is code for sanctioned government theft, redistribution, rules, regulations, controls and an explosion of government intrusion upon society. But still we limp on. Like the mortally wounded bull in the ring, leeching spears make the very life blood drip in rivulets upon the ground, but still the beast staggers on. How can this be?
One reason is accidental. It is the very smallness of the country which prevents the worst excesses of soft despotism being manifested. Politicians are accessible: the massive ship of state, while vast, can still be given the odd course correction to avoid the worst of the rocks. The smallness of the country makes the "feedback" mechanism more direct and focused.
We in New Zealand have universal public health care, compulsory state education, a universal (non-means tested) entitlement to one of the most generous retirement funding schemes in the world, perpetual sickness and unemployment benefits should anyone choose not to work, a pervasive and invasive occupational safety and health regime, a no-fault universal accident insurance scheme--to name but a few. All of these bring in their wake a vast state bureaucracy, committees, commissions, rulers and regulators, administrators, advisers, and compliance officials who have a mandate to govern almost every human action. Yet still Leviathan staggers on.
In the US, by contrast, the country is having conniptions over introducing a public health system. The signs are that government involvement in this naive exercise in social justice will collapse inwardly. Why will public health in the US be the end (as Mark Steyn has argued) whereas in New Zealand we have struggled on with it for decades? One simple and direct answer is the size of the US means it is inherently more complex; complexity means sclerotic legislation and administration which in turn means that the system is unworkable from the very beginning.
The various public health bills now circulating through the Congress are respectively over 1,000 pages in length. No legislator has or will read them. It is impossible to do so with any comprehension--even if months were allowed for the task. Consider the honesty of one Democratic Senator, Tom Carver (who is a specialist in health care legislation).
When asked about one of the bill's which his committee has been working on he disclosed that:
he does not “expect” to read the actual legislative language of the committee’s health care bill because it is “confusing” and that anyone who claims they are going to read it and understand it is fooling people.
“I don’t expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I’ve ever read in my life,” Carper told CNSNews.com.
Carper described the type of language the actual text of the bill would finally be drafted in as "arcane," "confusing," "hard stuff to understand," and "incomprehensible." He likened it to the "gibberish" used in credit card disclosure forms.
See the actual interview below:
Here is the point: if the legislators cannot understand the bill, what hope is there for those who must interpret and apply it? Very quickly the whole thing (if ever passed) will become a boondoggle of the worst sort. It will weigh upon the nation like the proverbial albatross. It is difficult to see the US ever coming back.
So if any in New Zealand think that the US and public health is a survivable issue by virtue of the fact we, in our nation, have survived for decades with our particular version of the boondoggle, think again. Because we are small, our version may take another ten decades to kill the nation off. In the US, it would be a matter of one or two decades at most.
When the hubris of unbelieving men demand their governments go beyond the limits and bounds ordained by Almighty God, the life blood of a polity begins to drip out upon the ground. Whilst men cling to their vanity and Unbelief the drops eventually become a mortal haemorrhage.
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