A Revolution is What's Needed

The Uncommon Herd

Fabian Socialism (aka Totalitarian Communism by stealth) proceeds on the assumption that the state and its agencies know what's best for us.

Compulsory government schools, for example, exist because they are built on the assumption, the febrile assertion that the State and its bureaucracies know what ordinary parents don't.  The state knows how to educate our children far, far better than we ever do or would.  And that ruling assumption, dear reader, is why New Zealand's education standards are dropping, illiteracy is rising, and absenteeism from schools is rampant.  Actually, in one sense, the state's claim to competence has a grain of ironic truth in it: the State knows how to educate to irrelevance and ignorance much more competently than, say Maori iwi in Rotorua, who have had the temerity to set up a Charter School for their children, only to have the Government forcibly shut it down.

Another example of "We Know What's Best For You" is the state broadcasting organs.  If ever there were a state administration that is an absolute failure on just about every conceivable measure it is the state broadcasting agency--NZ On Air.  As long as two people put their hands up to say they enjoyed a particular gummint programme, the statists swell with pride and claim the "public" has voted with their eyeballs, justifying the millions upon millions spent on puffed up cotton wool.

Broadcaster Mike Hoskings pokes the borax:

NZ On Air is in charge of millions of our dollars. It funds programmes which look to be getting increasingly eclectic, and watched by fewer and fewer people.  We don't know all of it for sure, because NZ On Air only publishes the numbers for its 10 most popular shows.  But given it funds hundredsof hows, there's a lot of dross that never really sees public scrutiny.

The most famous of late is, of course, Spinoff TV.  The website, which for reasons no-one can really fathom, got $700,000 to indulge itself in a more visual version of what it does online.  Given it had never made TV before, it went pretty much the way you thought it would: straight to the dustbin of TV history. Virtually no one saw it after the handful who watched the first one ran for the hills, or in this case the remote.

And here is part of the problem is: the snobbishness that drives NZ On Air.

Actually, snobbishness drives not just NZ On Air.  All forms of Fabian Socialism are riveted from floor to ceiling with purblind arrogance--the State knows best; ordinary people are both ignorant and incompetent; we bureaucrats and politicians do everything better by far.

Challenged to release data on its successes and failures in making programmes and broadcasting them, a spokesperson demurred.  The problem with that stupid suggestion, apparently, is that ignorant clowns get to influence what NZ On Air makes and broadcasts (for our good, naturally).

Regarding releasing figures about the success of their choices, an NZ On Air spokeswoman said: "I don't know there would be a great deal of appetite for it, because you are sort of inviting the court of public opinion to make decisions about things."  [Ibid.  Emphasis, ours]

The ultimate insult is that these self-sanctified "betters" expropriate our hard-earned coin to fund their insults and condescending superiority.  We, apparently, are smart and hard-working enough to generate an income, but we are far, far too ignorant and stupid to spend it prudently and wisely.

Behold the intellectual dwarves of statism.  They live and breathe a disdain for ordinary people so deep and so intractable they are no longer self-aware of what they do not know.