Dying the Death of a Thousand Cuts

The Inevitable Downward Spiral

We certainly have a crisis every day, it would seem. In a recent Herald article were were told that the entire medical profession in New Zealand was now under threat.

And the cause of this threat? Australia has decided to remove all remaining barriers to practising medicine in Australia for doctors trained in New Zealand. Expect a rapid medical professional drain as doctors move across the Tasman in droves. Why?
Higher wages and better working conditions. We already have a doctor shortage. In the Auckland region, for example, last year one quarter of the medical positions in the regions hospitals were vacant. Association of Salaried Medical Specialists president Jeff Brown commented on the Australian move:

Certainly from a senior hospital doctors' perspective we'd see that as very frightening because Australia could soak up almost the entire New Zealand medical workforce to fill their vacancies.

This is merely one example of a much deeper and wider cancer that is eating away at New Zealand. Our ever shrinking relative economy means that more and more trained and specialised personnel vote with their feet and move offshore to work. We have referred to this hollowing out as the niueanising of New Zealand. (Niue is a small Pacific island whose population has successively moved to New Zealand to find work, leaving the island increasingly poor. Now the same reality is hitting New Zealand as the global economy sucks up our skilled labour force.)

The solutions to this slow economic bleed-out of a thousand cuts are pretty simple. Personal living standards need to rise in New Zealand to enable us to compete successfully in a global labour market. The biggest impediment by far is the bloated, ever burgeoning state apparatus and its redistributive welfare policies. Cut taxes, and cut them deeply, to provide a real increase in wages.

But the concomitant cutting of government spending and state largesse is political suicide. Therefore, it will not happen. Politicians are above all self-interested. Therefore, while there will be plenty of high sounding slogans, hand-wringing, talk-fests, committees, reports, summits, and colloquies all with the noble objective of increasing New Zealand's competitiveness and productivity, it will be a waste of time and yet another waste of money. The real solutions will remain firmly in the "too hard" basket. Cutting taxes is politically easy. Cutting off the government hand that feeds us is impossible.

If you want to survive in politics never touch an entitlement programme, except to increase it. This is why the entire edifice will collapse from the inside out, like a slowly deflating balloon. Now, when we say this we are not being cynical. The collapse is inevitable, and it is important that it actually occur. The superstructure of our nation is built upon a foundation of graft and theft: virtually the entire population insists that the state steal or expropriate from some to bestow "entitlements" upon others. It tries to sanctify this institutionalised system of theft by calling it justice! Our entire modern political system rests upon unjust and immoral foundations. It cannot succeed, for in the end there is no honour amongst thieves.