The economic ignorance and illiteracy of the Left wing is well documented. All heat and no light. Consider the following piece of antediluvian ignorance from a Labour candidate.
The back-story is the the government's proposal to build some new government schools using a private/public partnership approach. This erudite Labour candidate shows she can jump right to the chase, putting front and centre the ignorant prejudice which bedevils the Left when it comes to economic reality. No wonder they struggle for electoral traction. There are few things more telling than this post.
It is always the assumptions which kill in these matters.
The first is this: economic reality is binary. There only ever can be winners and losers. Someone gains at the expense of someone else. So if corporates make profits from building schools it necessarily means that education becomes sub-standard. The fundamental concept of free contracts for goods and services is that they make possible a win-win outcome where both buyer and seller profit. Not so in the Leftist worldview. If corporates "win" it necessarily means that kids suffer.
Second, profit is always evil. That's why Megan Woods makes the jump to McDonalds when looking for a poster child for evil corporate greed in an argument discussing the construction of new government schools. To our knowledge, MacDonalds has never built a school and has no interest in doing so. But that's no matter. McDonalds symbolises a business which makes a profit. Therefore, it is both vulpine and rapine in its modus operandi. It exploits and does damage to people.
In the simplistic world of the Left, profits are bad because they represent more money which could be ploughed back into schools (presumably). So, if Corporate A made a profit building a government school, which it subsequently leased back to the government, the profit component of that deal would be "lost". If the government were to build the school and not take a profit, more money would be available to operate said government school, leading to a higher quality education. Note the closed, binary logic. It's either one or the other.
Think about what is being implied here. Every non-government economic activity is implicitly evil because it seeks profits. If a contractor makes a profit from building a road, it is an evil exploitation. Government alone must build it. How about growing vegetables? Farming? All of this could be done at a higher quality standard if the profit component were not taken--that is, if the government did it all. If the government were doing it, or building it, the quality would be higher, because profits would not be taken and more cash could be ploughed back into the development or economic activity.
But let's not stop there. Employees are making a profit from their wages. Ergo, the quality of the government build is not at an optimum because its employees are also dirty profit seekers. Government should not only be the only economic producer of all goods and services, but to optimise the quality, it should not pay its employees anything--thereby releasing even more money to pour back into even higher quality roads, farms, and knitting shops. Thus passes the scintillating economic doctrines of Ms Megan Woods and the Left. These folk aspire to govern New Zealand.
Another bedevilling assumption in the Left's world-view is that the supply of government money is inexhaustible. Suddenly, when the government becomes an economic player things are not at all binary. In Megan Woods's wonderland, governments will always have enough money to build schools as well as operate them. It need not take profits because it can always get more money at any time. It's called taxation, or borrowing, or the money-printing press. In Woods's world the government never runs out of money. It is Alice in Wonderland stuff. The concept of using private businesses to develop and lease back school buildings to the state so as to save the tax payers money has apparently never occurred because the concept could not gain entry into the close-gated mind in the first place.
Another assumption, which boils with ignorant, xenophobic prejudice is an extreme bias against multi-national corporations (that is, companies doing business in several or more countries). We are sombrely told that a quarter of bidders to build and lease-back school buildings are multi-nationals. Gasp. How horrific. Presumably in the mind of the Left that makes for the terrible travesty of dirty profit becoming even more dirty because it will flow back to foreign people. Presumably, for the avoidance of hypocrisy, Megan Woods will be down at the corporate headquarters of Fonterra or Fletcher Building next week protesting the evils of those multi-national corporates. Not a chance. Why? Because Ms Woods and her Lefty colleagues are likely too blinkered by prejudice to think outside their myopic square.
Last, but not least, we cannot let the irony of Ms Woods final assertion go by: Labour, we are told, "stands for quality, universal public education" (sic). If so, then the cause is being undermined by embarrassing advocates whose economic ignorance and base prejudice imply "quality, universal public education" (sic) is an oxymoron. Sadly, this is all the more so because Ms Woods has a doctorate in history, earned from the University of Canterbury. Words fail.
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