Professing to be Wise, He Plays the Fool

Nick at the Politburo Table

Nick Smith, New Zealand's Climate Change Minister is displaying his coruscating brilliance yet again. You have to wonder just how mentally challenged old Nick really is. Firstly, you would have to be a sandwich short of a picnic to agree to take responsibility for the climate. Secondly, Nick seems oblivious to his misfortune that every time he opens his loquacious mouth these days he merely changes feet. Fool me once . . . .

We suppose it is too much to ask that old Nick would stop and listen to himself with even the barest modicum of self-critical sense. He recently trumpeted his previously reviled, now worshipped ETS, using the following mindless mantra:

The emissions trading scheme provides a price-signal advantage for sea freight and rail over road transport because it's far more fuel-efficient.

So, sea freight and rail--previously dying forms of outmoded, inefficient, costly, slow, and cost-ineffective means of freight transport--now are more competitive against road transport because of old Nick's new tax upon petrol. Wow. So we are now being subjected (forced) to use the slow, outmoded, inefficient, more costly, and cost-ineffective modes of transport and freight--and this will benefit us how?

Old Nick sounds like a Minister for the Five Year Plan, or the Great Leap Forward. This sort of talk was common around the Politburo tables decades ago. No doubt it was also no stranger when Muldoon attempted the command economy, with its wage and price controls. What a blast from the past!

The entire enterprise of trying to plan an economy centrally to take it in a certain direction deemed holy by the Party has failed in every place where men have been stupid enough to attempt it. This is not by accident. This is God's world and it runs and functions His way. Those who attempt to operate or run it otherwise are doomed to abject failure. When governments attempt it, as our rulers are currently doing, we are all doomed to suffer. We will all inevitably bear the costs of their folly.

But wait--maybe the unanimous verdict of human history has been too hastily delivered. Maybe old Nick is a superman who can leap over the tallest buildings. Maybe the entire weight of evidence damning centrally planned economies is wrong because old Nick will make the difference.

A couple of weeks ago, while changing feet, old Nick bared his soul. He told us that he would die a happy man if he could only depart this terrestrial ball having seen New Zealand's carbon emissions reduce. Sadly, we need to inform this wisest fool in Christendom that his great wish will not be granted; if he continues in his folly, he will most certainly die an unhappy man.

Pity those whose calling it is to play the fool. No-one can take pleasure from watching it.