Capitalism V Socialism

What's the difference?

Capitalism versus socialism is a wrong way of looking at the debate. It's really a question of a free economy (capitalism) versus a controlled economy (socialism), because what we call capitalism is at base nothing more than free trade among the populace. We call the free economy 'capitalist' simply because it allows for capital investment coming from private individuals, which drives its development.

Socialism, in practice, means a controlled economy - a centrally planned economy. It's called 'socialism' because that is its rationale. It's embraced to the end of achieving equal prosperity and eradicating poverty.

With socialism, capital investment in industry comes from the government, so you have collective ownership of the means of production. And with it, comes strict controls on how the people within the system can live and invest their personal resources, including how they can invest in themselves as a human resource.

The ultimate expression of socialism is what I would describe as a militarised economy, where the entire society functions like the military with regimented control. Every economy is to a degree socialist and capitalist. Ultimately we are talking about degrees.

Historic success and failure.

Very few people believe in the socialist system as an ideal, because socialism has been a failure wherever it has been tried from over the last 200 years, and now. And it has indeed resulted in the opposite of what it was originally set up to achieve. Socialist systems achieve economic development very poorly, and their inability to adapt to changing conditions historically leads to devastating scenarios.

A good example today is with Venezuela. Unlike New Zealand, which rapidly reformed to a much more free market system in the 1980's (as urgently required), Venezuela did not. Many people are beginning to starve now in Venezuela, and civil unrest has become serious.

There's no doubt about it. Free market economies make people richer and can adapt quickly to changing circumstances. And due to their strength, they have proven to be far more proficient in helping the needy who cannot help themselves.

Free market systems provide the best social security in practice. Mainly because a prosperous society will not tolerate the sight of people starving on their streets, and due to their prosperity they simply do not have to.

How capitalism generates wealth.

Take a man with a lot of money. He wants to invest his wealth into some kind of industry to get richer still. He sees an opportunity when he comes across a small group of 10 men cutting down trees for firewood for sale - with handsaws. The rich man then goes into town and buys 10 new chainsaws (that's capital investment), and employs the group of men to cut down more trees with the chainsaws, where they then achieve 5x the productivity.

The rich man gets richer as he makes a huge profit on the woodworkers labour. The woodworkers get a 10% increase in their earnings as well, but at first the gains mostly go to the capitalist.

However, as the supply of wood increases from the greatly amplified productivity, the cost of wood goes down. In this way, everyone benefits from the increased capital investment and likewise productivity - rich and poor.

As time goes on further, the rich capitalists start to run out of cheap labour to amplify the profits from their capital investments. This naturally forces a bidding war for available workers, amongst the capitalists. The workers wages then get bid up, over time even dramatically, and in this way the spoils are progressively shared throughout the maturing economy.

This process of free markets and its accompanying capital investment, has had such a powerful impact on the Western world that the living standard of even the poorest western people towers above what most people had just 100 years ago, when most people were lucky to see anywhere near their 80th birthday. It has also served the developing world extremely well. We have seen radical reductions in poverty rates, worldwide, from capital investment and economic development in the industrialising world.

How socialism generates wealth.

Socialism tries to generate wealth in the same way capitalism does (by capital investment), though the investment comes from the state.

One problem. The incentives and price signals in socialism are a mess. Contrasting, in free markets people know how to invest their money.

For example: If you get a particularly cold winter then the people will want more wood to burn. That extra demand naturally drives the price of wood up, and that in turn means that those who supply the wood make more money. This, in turn, gives us the *price signal* to incentivise those with capital to invest in more wood production, as naturally they want some of those greater yields for themselves. Then, as more wood gets produced, the price comes down to more normal levels (matching production costs + reasonable profit) as you no longer have an under-supply of wood.

Hence, capital investment is driven by price signals. Those price signals are erroneously called "the invisible hand". Erroneous, because there's nothing really invisible about it. The supply-demand-investment process is quite transparent.

So socialism, which responds to state dictates, controls the supply and inevitably does so badly. And not only does it force the supply, but those that make the decisions on investment have no personal skin in the game. Meaning, they do not spend the state's money carefully because it makes no difference to them, personally, if the investment proves either good or bad. Not only that, but in socialism the people in general are unmotivated, and in many ways unaccountable, leading to a lack of energy and public apathy towards progress and industriousness.

But where socialism fails worst, is when circumstances absolutely demand change. When a socialist economy receives a 'shock' and needs to adapt, it can't. People start to starve and riot. In the name of creating social security socialism ironically does the opposite.

The evils of capitalism.

For the most part, the evils that we see in capitalism are not actually capitalism at all. They are the socialist (centrally controlled) components in a capitalist system, rearing their ugly heads.

We've all heard of crony capitalism. What is it? It's when private capitalists get into bed with governments to skew free markets (via anti-competitive regulations) in their favour. So crony capitalism is basically a kind of privately-driven socialism.

The dirtiest expression of crony capitalism, in my opinion, can be seen in this thing we call schooling. Schooling was invented 200 years ago in Prussia to produce obedient military personnel. It was later embraced by governments backed by industrialists, who liked the kind of citizenry (corporate drones) that the Prussian system tended to create. This is not capitalism - it's socialism. Forced schooling as we know it is a socialist intervention, and a deeply intrusive version at that.

But there is another component of capitalism that might be seen as toxic. In free and (inevitably) competitive markets, the bottom-line is the only line. Any 'love' an employer gives to his employees is given only to the end of maximising the bottom-line. Which is a bit creepy if I may say so as the love is not real, and the truth behind it all (which is the never-ending threat that you will lose your job, as soon as you don't make economic sense) makes for an undercurrent of constant low-level intimidation. It's not natural, and probably not healthy, for humans to live like this ahead of a more community mindset.

To a degree, we try to mitigate against these effects by employing government to create laws to avoid the worst of this. But this has a somewhat impotent and double-sided effect, I believe. Government regulations on human conduct can too often do more harm than good, as intrusive laws originally meant to protect are notorious for being used as weapons, and likewise undermine goodwill. From my observation, we end up playing politics and find ourselves walking on eggshells, rather than communicating openly and sorting our differences that way.

However, again, I believe that at base this is a created problem not of the free market system, but of government interference in it. Because in a real free market the people, as a function of natural demand, would have largely solved this problem on their own - because they could.

If people did not want to live in "corptopia" then that demand would turn into new products, all on its own. You would end up with various forms of reclusive "micro-socialism" of the type that is manageable and effective (which in practice means small scale*) being supplied and sold under the umbrella of a national free market system. And indeed, alternative developments like this would hold the wider job climate to account. Respect that people only tolerate an unhealthy work climate when they feel that they have to.

But, I would argue that this secondary evolution that we might expect to see within a developed society, is being suppressed. Suppressed first through status-quo cultural indoctrination via forced schooling, and second through national laws that don't allow for private communities that are truly of their own design to be created.

But again, these evils are not really born out of free markets, but a lack of them. The natural demand for more community is being choked off through crony capitalism and the subsidised state sector (meaning socialist sector) of the economy. And the politically-engaged people who want more community are confused about how to get it. They need to understand that the evolution of community must be bottom up - not top down.

POST SCRIPT: WARNING:

Since the 2008 financial crises the US government, in particular, has been inflating their economy with cheap money (super low interest rates), which in itself suggests that the 2008 crisis was never solved, and that instead we've been operating on borrowed time with money printing. This will demand an economic correction in the future, as the game of money printing and deficit spending can't go on forever.

The great danger is that people, in feeling pain from a correction, start demanding change but without knowing what to change to.

The solution to a financial crisis is to let the bad investments take their losses, with bankruptcies and tears, and to in turn let the machines of production keep turning after their *rapid* price corrections. And then to enforce a stable monetary system, where the money supply can't be so easily inflated.

The solution will not be socialism, though no doubt many opportunistic ideologues will try to tell us that it is. And this is what I have tried to show, because nothing is more dangerous than a populace demanding change yet not knowing what to change to - yet thinking that they do. Stress-driven revolutions can be good - or tragic!

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*Think of a household economy expanded out to the size of a club. Go beyond a couple of hundred people and the social body loses awareness of its managerial head, and accountability and market-responsiveness will begin to collapse. I believe that if any form of socialist type system is to be effective, then it must operate on a strictly human scale.

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Extended: Good video which further looks at the differences:

And more, on Adam Smith:

Part 2:

Serious example of crony capitalism today (New Zealand relevant):

Public transport and driverless cars: How they will play.

By Andrew Atkin

Many people believe that driverless cars are decades away. They have not followed the technology closely, or thought seriously about its deployability.

My example is the Twizy car. It weights about a quarter of a modern sedan. Now imagine having this car in a car-sharing scheme where it can drive itself to the next customer, though you drive it when you're in it.

How far away is this car-sharing revolution, if that's all you need to provide for a major market impact? It should be with us in a year or two, in principle. The technology can already do this.

There are no serious safety concerns with a system operating like this when the cars are so light, and no one is in them when in driverless mode.

Now take the picture of little Twizy cars everywhere, costing a fraction of conventional cars to use, and using about 20% of the energy of buses, trains or cars. Where does this leave public transport as we know it?

Well for a start, a driverless twizy system is perfect for solving the last-mile problem of buses and trains. In particular it's good for supporting buses, as the supply for the demand is more spread out.

But driverless Twizy's will of course cover much more than the last mile. They will replace conventional public transport wherever they realistically can. Though where driverless technology can't go, public transport will survive.

Public transport:

The only places where public transport can survive as a competitor to driverless cars (car sharing) will be in areas where the transport demand is high enough so that congestion becomes an issue.

Assuming that congestion-charging is employed to control for congestion, certain roads will be costly at times to use. This is where buses step in. People can avoid the expensive road toll by using buses as a point-A to point-B bridge. This is somewhat easily done as passengers can switch from the driverless Twizy to a bus, at both trip ends, and maybe in as little as one or two minutes.

So this is how it would work...

Buses will be dead except for where they can provide capacity bridges for high-demand roads.

But to the end of providing capacity, buses can be very efficient in this context because:

1. They're operating on congestion-free roads.

2. Have high average passenger loadings.

3. Have rapid trip cycle times due to minimal stop-and-go (only 2 or 3 bus stops at each end of the major trip).

Certainly you should not require subsidies to support public transport in a driverless reality, if they stick to their sensible role.

Demand for collective transport:

However, buses and trains will have to compete with other forms of collectivised travel.

How about shuttle buses? And what about car-pooling specifically as a driverless service?

A driverless car can be built as, say, a 6-seater, with retractable partitions for privacy (ref. yellow lines on image). That will be cheaper and more efficient than a bus, be great for low-cost long distance travel, and provide a more responsive service.

Driverless car-pooling would probably make more sense in most applications than a bus, to the end of providing capacity relief as required. Many small vehicles are always going to be better than a few large ones, insofar as capacity demands allow for it.

End game:

It's very difficult for me to imagine how buses and trains can survive long term.

There will surely be demand for collective travel for where it makes sense as a cost solution, but buses and trains will probably prove to be an intermediate solution that will only survive until driverless solutions, plus some inevitable infrastructural upgrades, finally render them redundant.

It can't be under-stressed as to how close this movement is. Again, all that little twizy car needs to do is be allowed to transport itself to the next customer, and it's the beginning of the end for transport as we know it. The transition to driverless-based car-sharing will be rapid. The cost reductions and convenience of this kind of car-sharing are great, and it can absorb most travel demand pretty much immediately.

So to conclude, conventional public transport, as a solution, will serve as a capacity bridge and little more than that. And that somewhat minor demand will most likely prove very temporary as well.

Zero Crime Cities: You can run - but you can't hide.

By Andrew Atkin

If you want to defund the police - this is how you could actually do it.

I would like to highlight some major technological movements that will almost certainly, in good time, give us a new age in terms of safety and security within our cities (excluding what goes on behind closed doors, in the domestic world).

The advantages of appropriately employed technology will be particularity advantageous for cities that are seriously dangerous, and suffering from rampant corruption.

1. A cashless society.

With nearly everyone owning a smartphone, and with smartphones rapidly dropping in price, there is no reason why we can't have a cashless society as soon a given government enforces it.

Imagine: You open up a simple app on your iPhone, take a photo of the QR code displayed on your friends (or other) phone, and then from there you type in the cash to pay and then hit the enter button. You approve the payment with the thumbscan on your phone for biometric security. It can be as simple as that.

The result with a payment system like this, is that there is a record of where the transaction was made (via GPS) and who made it, when, and how much. It can all be recorded on a central database for every transaction that anyone makes, or can make.

The effect of these records, other than transaction and accounting efficiency, is it makes operating a black market virtually impossible (unless it's barter). If the police have a concern and want to look for possible criminality, then with a search warrant they can review people's transaction records on the database and identify any suspect dealings, and quickly.

2. Internet-based biometric security doors.

Imagine the equivalent of a simple, stripped back iPhone being a door lock.

So, to access any location you use a biometric lock that allows you to keep a record of who, where and when there was access to a given location. Often it will not function as an actual lock - just a biometric log in.

It could be one system. A private body could set up the security system, and sell the iPhone type door locks/logins to people wanting that form of security for their premises. People (especially contractors) could establish an account to use the system, and in turn apply for access to any given location.

The result would be extremely tight yet practical and fussless security. Forming temporary clearances, and blocking people, is dead easy. Also it creates a location trail for citizens which makes both guilt and innocence easy to prove for if there are problems, just like with the cashless money system.

Imagine the fuss it could remove in airports as well, if governments world-over embraced a single international system like this. No more passports - just your thumb scan.

This can be built as a totally private venture. Frankly, I don't know why this isn't being done already today. My prediction is that someone will produce this service soon. It makes sense and it should be very profitable.

3. Instant response police drones.

Imagine a grid of drones positioned over a city, with the drones positioned about 1 kilometer apart from each other. This would make no point in the city more than 700 meters from a police drone.
Now, if someone's security alert goes off, that drone could automatically transport itself to the location of concern, with an initial reaction time of less than a second. The instant the alarm goes off - the drone is moving. If the drone travels at say 80km/h on average, then it will be at the most distant (700m) point in about 30 seconds.

A drone can't detain people of course, but it can certainly track and follow them until a policeman can get to the scene. Hence the deterrence value is huge. You can run - but not hide.

You might need a couple of hundred drones for totally comprehensive coverage in a medium sized city. But if they cost say $10,000 each, then that's only about $2m. Peanuts.

-Note, the drones will mostly be stationery, mounted on poles. Hence their maintenance will be trivial.

4. Driverless cars.

Driverless cars will also work with biometric access for the public.

Again this allows us to create an explicit location record for any individual, and it also makes detainment easy. If necessary, the police could override the system and have your driverless car come straight into the police station (with you in it).

Conclusion:

What I have just described is a city with insanely good security. It's also cheap because it's directly rooted into the architecture of civil operations, and it's mostly just software.

One of the good things with security like this, is you can get rid of the police state feel that you might otherwise get with conventional policing. The image of some kind of Mr gestapo standing at the door holding a machine gun is completely eliminated. Police will be almost entirely invisible to the general public, mostly just dealing with domestic problems.

Rather than creating an atmosphere of authoritarianism, you create an atmosphere of trust as it becomes almost impossible for people to commit violent or serious crimes and get away with it, as the suspect lists can almost always be rapidly reduced to just a handful of people. Hence, only crazy or unusually foolish people will even try to steal and kill, etc (again this excludes the domestic world, which is where our most serious crimes really occur, in the industrialised world).

So does all this look Orwellian to you? Take your mind out of the movies, please! Technology will not increase the risk of us developing some form of tyrannical government. Indeed, if your government wants to be tyrannical, insofar as it can, then it can do so with our without advanced technology (they used to do it with just swords!). For a tyranny it's the legal infrastructure that counts - not the technological infrastructure. Reliable resistance to tyranny requires public education, good child care (no madmen, please), and political decentralisation. It does not require that we unnecessarily compromise policing and general security.

So what I am describing is nothing more than a system that allows our police to do their job, and with amazing efficiency. Your privacy would only be invaded if it needs to be, like it is today when the police obtain a search warrant. And note that the ability to prove innocence is of course the best protection against false accusations, which all of us can be vulnerable to.

And again, it can't be under-stressed that the deterrent value is enormous. The best police force is the one that hardly needs to be used.

So why don't we have these systems in place now, now that we have the opportunity to build them? Because it's only *just* now that we have in fact got the opportunity. Very soon I predict, we will see governments and the private sector making moves in this direction. And it will be a saviour for countries like South Africa especially, that are being devastated by a gross lack of civil control.

Addition: 09-05-17:

I will also make a note on security cameras, using modern technology.

Your face is a biometric object, and modern computers can identify you with a face scan, if you are on record. The problem is, security cameras generally lack the definition to see your face at a distance.

This can easily change if we used compound cameras. In other words, one camera for a broad view, and another camera which acts with a small telescopic lens that targets your face, and finally imposes a high-definition image on the low-definition image - giving relevant definition with minimal information.

None of this should be difficult or expensive. It gives us the opportunity for excellent security which is especially relevant for countries dealing with serious civil unrest. Indeed, if you had all citizens faces scanned and on record, so you can know who the bad guys are (such as Isis and their friends), then a domestic enemy could be automatically identified and neutralised without any human intervention at all. The ultimate in surgical warfare. And that 'neutralization' could be as simple and efficient as a pulsed laser to the eyes, instantly leading to permanent blindness. Better than watching peaceful civilians getting butchered by the tens of thousands? I would say so.

Addition: 09-07-17:

Here is another thought, and what I think would be an ideal Police drone. Also ideal as a scout drone, for search and rescue operations.

This is a simple system that achieves efficient hover mode, but also provides a fast and efficient plane format for when moving forward over large distances.

The hover rotors simply stop and line up to the travel direction, when operating in simple forward flight. They will cause minimal drag in this formation.

You don't need the extreme maneuverability of a quad-copter, though you may need to use the forward drive props to assist in stability in hover mode. To this end, they could tilt upwards.

Note, all helicopters are terribly inefficient and slow when it comes to forward flight. This hybrid system eliminates that problem and gives you the best of both worlds - most ideal for a fast and durable police drone.

-Even drones bought off the shelf today can do an impressive job. Just $2,300 each, max speed about 70 km/h, 30 minute flight time, and explicit video recording and control.

Extended article:

Fighting Domestic Violence with an App.

Arming a drone:

In a worst case scenario, a dangerous individual must be killed to save others, and as quickly as possible. There is of course the possibility of arming a drone with either a laser to blind, or even a lethal weapon.

However, mounting a lethal weapon under a light police drone is not easy. To be practical it will need to be extremely light, yet still able to emit a lethal projectile.

My idea to solve this problem is to create a gun that has no recoil, which is only possible if a mass is simultaneously fired in the opposite direction to the assault projectile. Yet this is easily done, as the following image shows.

This structure is extremely light, and also accurate due to the absence of recoil. As it is merely a light tube, it can be actuated quickly and precisely. It has the disadvantage of only being able to deliver one shot, as it cannot reload, but with precision control it should still nearly always be lethal in a desperate situation.

Addition: 18-12-2019: Military applications - Sniper drones:

The included [yippee-ki-yay] video describes a military drone supporting conventional firearms. It's adaptable but extremely inefficient, expensive, cumbersome, and hardly stealth.

Modifying my police drone example a little, envisage: Using a central gyroscope for added in-flight stability and power, and having the main props centred within the fuselage to greatly reduce forward-flight drag, and using an under-mounted firearm built specifically for a drone application.

With this, you have a military drone that is quiet (in fact silent, in glide operation) with much greater range and stability, and rapid and precise gun maneuverability for a fast kill.

It's logical that the front-lines will soon be the drone-lines, dramatically improving safety and providing lower casualties via ever more surgical warfare. It greatly reduces costs as humans are very expensive to train, deploy, and support and maintain by comparison.

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Addition: 04-09-2020: Policing traffic:

If we employed GPS-based location devices on all vehicles, we could effectively police traffic, and manage traffic, with little more than apps and a database. Primarily you would want to use it for road tolling. These are the advantages:

1. Easy congestion charging.

2. Easy car park charging.

3. Fair and accurate road user charging.

4. Easy speeding penalties around dangerous corners, with corner speed limits adjusted for different vehicle types. (An additional cellphone app will warn people of financial speeding penalties. You will not break the rules unless it's deliberate).

5. WOF checking based on actual usage - not time.

5. Easy identification of responsibility in the event of an accident (no more hit and run).

6. Greatly reduced need for traffic police.

7. Reliable identification of unusually poor or dangerous drivers, or problematic 'boy racers'.

8. Easy tolling mechanism for new roads, for where special roads would otherwise not be built.

9. Cleans up the roads to make way for driverless car integration, and ultimately universal full automation.

10. Potential automatic payment system for fuel and drive-through purchases.

11. An included phone app can provide direct information on parking and toll costs. The app can also warn people to reduce their speed on approach to speed-trapped corners, and assist with any other type of warning such as greasy and wet roads, etc, and provide other recommendations. A supporting app can be a powerful helper to keep people safe. The app can also inform you of poor driving behaviour.

No additional infrastructure required. Only a web server. All we need is GPS-tracking to be installed on all vehicles. The savings, road management advantages, and safety advantages are enormous.

Shooting at the wrong target: Education and child abuse

If I got a woman carrying two identical twins, took her babies from her immediately after birth, and then had them both brought up in two separate families....what would the outcome be, for if one family was right into schooling and extracurricular activities, and the other family was totally complacent and never made their child do homework?

In the short term (and this is based on many identical twin studies) the child being pushed to achieve would not only do better at school, they would also measure a higher IQ as compared to the child that grows up in the relaxed family.

But here's the surprise. The difference, as time goes on, progressively disappears and to the point where there's virtually no difference in measured intelligence and school performance between the two children. They will be pretty much equal by the time they're sixteen and older.

So what does that prove? It proves that all that preoccupation with early scholastic achievement doesn't mean much. Because the child who grows up in the relaxed family will have no difficulty mastering academia at a later time, for when life demands that they do.

Research on identical twin studies has shown that there are actually only two things that really matter, that do affect final outcomes. They are genes and child abuse. In other words you can't make your child brilliant, as that is in the genes, but you can certainly screw them up. You can't make them - but you can break them.

So why then are we as a society so obsessed with educational achievement, and not child abuse, and in a society where child abuse is lightyears from uncommon? A major part of the reason of course is ignorance.

The great assumption is that education makes the man. No it doesn't. A person with a healthy mind and a strong intellect will always learn what they need to learn, to be masterful in good time. And as every practical person knows, there's no need to institutionalise the learning process to achieve that end.

Note: Institutional learning as we know it (schooling) was invented 200 years ago in Prussia, with the shamelessly expressed purpose of creating obedient military personnel. Our ancient schooling system is (and probably still is!) really just adjustment to subordination.

But then why do employers demand formally educated employees, for if the skills provided by schooling are, usually, not even relevant to the job?

Because employers know that people who have succeeded in school typically make better workers than those who didn't. That's all they know and that's all they need to know. They don't need to know why they make better workers - they only need to know that they do.

But we, as a society, need to know.

The real reason why people with an education make better workers is not because they've learnt something good, but because they've demonstrated other *inherent* characteristics through their ability to tolerate their courses. They've proven that they're not stupid, have self-discipline, dedication, and are ambitious, etc. Characteristics that are essential for being a good employee in the modern workforce, in particular for jobs with responsibility.

To a large degree, this is what the education game is all about. It's about screening for characteristics that are already there. Education as we know it is mostly a testing system, not a human development system. It does not make people motivated - it tests for a motivation that was already there. And indeed, this is exactly why we had the old school certificate system from the past, where we failed half the country and only because the other half did better. Again it was always about screening people - not educating them.

So shouldn't we, as a society, not be targeting educational achievement in itself, but instead shooting for the characteristics behind the education that are what modern employers want?

Yes! Because if you manage to pull off some funky tricks and get everyone to finish highschool, and more, but you *don't* improve those all-important characteristics that employers really want, then the superficiality of schooling--and the non-achievement of what we thought was achievement--will become plain. And it will become plain the hard way.

You will have a society full of "highly qualified" people who will still be unemployable, because they will *still* possess those characteristics born out of child abuse and low intelligence. Rather than bringing those students up, you will simply bring the measuring stick of educational achievement down.

Hence, pushing for greater educational achievement yet without cutting back on child abuse, will come down to a glorious waste of time and effort. And all coming from a great false assumption - the assumption that education, in itself, means so much.

What means so much is protecting children from abuse so that their neurological hardware develops properly. This is what's real, and this is the reality that will have the final say with respect to social and economic outcomes.

So please let's stop obsessing over driving everyone through university, and instead start focusing on proper childcare for when it matters the most. And that starts from conception, birth, and infancy most of all, and then the first 5 years of life especially.

Making New Zealand

New blog site discussing urban planning, transport and housing affordability. Authored by myself and others, based in New Zealand.

Visit for interesting articles on the above topic. LINK

Also for the Facebook page. LINK

Enjoy!

Andrew Atkin

New Zealand: Interest for developing a new political party

Andrew D Atkin:

Proposition for interest in developing a new political party:

Personal video introduction: Here (5 mins).

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My objective is to explore for interest, to the end of developing a new political party.

At this stage, I am only testing to see what the latent interest is.

If you do have any interest, then please contact me directly by writing an email to:

atn_atkin@hotmail.com

Just explain the nature of your interest and your potential contribution.

I'm as much interested in the intelligent layman as the political veteran or academic expert. 'Normal' people are great. They can have a better understanding of the broad public mind I find, which is vital for effective communications. There are few places for "misunderstood geniuses" in politics.

Leadership: I am interested in being a spokesman for the housing issue, and also the child abuse issue. The latter in particular is very sensitive, and I believe I am probably the right person for that role.

The ideal party leader may be someone else.

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The reason I'm interested in the development of a new party is because the current options have become intellectually redundant.

I believe that Labour, National, the Greens, Maori, and even the ACT party (my closest ideological relative) have become almost entirely poll-driven, primarily concerned with protecting what they have.

These organisations, based originally on principle, have progressively (and inevitably I would say) evolved into little much more than job opportunities for career politicians.

I believe this is the way all political parties go in the end, as people of purpose are progressively replaced with people looking for a job. This wouldn't be so much of a problem today if we didn't have such serious concerns within our society. But we do. We need a political party that is more than a bureaucracy.

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Let me state 3 priority issues that I would like a new political party to be based on.

1. Housing affordability.

Housing affordability is so out of control that young people are struggling to create families. And that is about as dysfunctional as it gets.

We need to stop the political circus, and get on with building good homes at fair cost.

And we need to do it immediately - and we can in fact do it pretty much immediately.

It's all about political resistance - not practical resistance.

I will talk about this more later.

2. Education freedom.

It is crazy, in principle, that we hand our children over to the state to be educated. Whereby parents, even wealthy parents, have such superficial choice on how and what their children learn.

We never voted for this totalitarian-type situation. And we should not be tolerating it today.

For so many reasons we need to repossess education from the current regime, of chronic state control.

3. Child abuse.

Child abuse is not a '1% of society' problem. It's more like a 20% of society problem, or more.

Child abuse correlates directly with anti-social behaviour, poor health, and failed life-outcomes. Get rid of child abuse, and you can pretty much get rid of prisons and rehabilitation clinics as well.

Child abuse is the number-one social problem of our time, and it's time for the political world to give it the real attention that it needs. Even if it's a little uncomfortable, to do so.

Now, I will elaborate:

Housing affordability:

The idea that houses should be expensive to build is an insult to the public's intelligence. For decades we have been building houses for a fraction of what we are buying them for now. And the truth is they should on average be cheaper today than they have been in the past, due to technological advances.

The difference is purely artificial cost inflations, from mostly local government meddling, Metropolitan Urban Limits, and unfair taxation. Informed people understand this. So what is the solution?

Tweaking the RMA won't do it. Housing accords won't do it. Banning overseas buyers won't do it. And protesting central and local government will only induce them to pretend to do something about the problem, which is what National is doing today.

What will do it is the declaration of free-to-build zones just outside of Auckland's metropolitan urban limits, and other appropriate areas around New Zealand.

This means creating protected zones (like special economic areas) where houses can be built on rural cost land, with fair and reduced taxation, and a completely stripped back regulatory regime.

Give people the freedom to build at natural costs - not artificially inflated costs.

In other words, treat the housing crises like a national emergency. No more pussy-footing. We've already devastated an entire generation. We cannot let the current situation go on.

We need to use the big guns to solve this problem, and that again will be the enforcement of free-to-build zones. Anything less and we will be in the same situation we are in now, in 20 years time. That's not good enough, and utterly unfair on young people trying to buy a home and create a family. And toxic to the long-term prosperity of our nation.

Relevant link to extend: Here

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Education freedom:

Education as we know it was invented in Prussia, about 200 years ago. It was intended to create military personnel who dogmatically take orders rather than think for themselves (otherwise leading to chaos on the battlefield). Institutional schooling as we know it is indeed authoritarian and collectivist, and in the most real meaning of the words.

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When you look at schooling from a 'naturalistic' position, you can see that it really is a bit of a freak show. We obviously never evolved, as a species, to have our childhood learning process institutionalised into a military format.

Schools as we know them are over-crowding hot-houses that separate kids from their families, put them into age and even sex segregation, and then force them to follow rigid learning timelines, and rigid content, that may be entirely inappropriate for them personally. And the quality of the learning in schools is too-often as questionable as the meaning and validity of the tests that we use to measure it.

We know from alternative forms of education that none of this is really necessary, and usually not even desirable.

Most often kids can and do learn what they need to learn easily, if we simply give them the freedom to learn in the way that they find best for themselves, personally. Not one size fits all. And they can learn faster than kids do in conventional schooling.

Indeed, it does seem a bit strange that we should need to so heavily institutionalise something as human as the learning process, does it not?

I could go on.

But the real tragedy is that we let the government dictate how your children must learn, with personal choice being only superficial. As though some detached bureaucrat should somehow have more rights over your child's development than yourself.

Schooling as we know it is and long has been actually somewhat extreme social engineering, and we do not need to tolerate it. We can and should bring true choice back into education.

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We can integrate education funding with the family support system so the funding follows the child, and so parents can be free to allow their children to learn what they need to learn, and in their own way and time.

And note the homeschooling option should be as equally funded, per child, as the institutional options. This might well implode the schooling industry as we know it, if most of the demand transfers into homeschooling clubs. But if it so happens that that is what most people want, then we should have no role standing in the way of it.

If Wellington bureaucrats don't like true parental choice and think they know best, then that's fine. Let them sell their supposedly better systems in the market place. And let parents reject their product if they don't like it nor agree with it.

This is the way it should be.

Imagine an education system where children are treated like valued customers. That's what you get with true choice. And all we have to do is vote for it, if at least one well-promoted political party can stand up for it.

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Child abuse:

It is estimated that about 1 in 5 young girls are seriously sexually abused in their childhoods, in the Western world today. This is a profound trauma that changes people permanently, like being in front-line battle.

And there are other childhood trauma's of course. Such as serious neglect, emotional abuse, violence, and the damage that occurs in the earliest years and months.

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Child abuse is most prevalent in lower-socioeconomic groups, but the middle-classes are hardly without their problems as well. And it's important to note that a lot of the damage done to children is not just a result of a lack of caring, but simple ignorance.

However, the impact is enormous. Child abuse robs people of their lives on an experiential level, and it correlates to all kinds of obvious (and not so obvious) problems throughout people's lives.

Child abuse is pervasive. Almost no-one has had the 'perfect' childhood, and it is the number-one social problem of our time - by far.

Most other problems in the materially-prosperous world are trivial compared to child abuse, and are indeed often little more than an effect of child abuse.

From drug addiction, to violent religious convictions, to severe depression, to premature death. The list driven by child abuse goes on.

Good video: Here

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When political parties turn a blind eye to this issue they make fools of themselves.

And I know that every political party in New Zealand today avoids confronting the problem like it should be confronted.

Child abuse is real, deadly serious, and requires serious attention. And sometimes that serious attention may mean the use of serious policies. Like stopping convicted serious child abusers (who are clearly emotionally disturbed) from having any more children, if need be.

But for the most part, what we need to do is put the conversation on the table and to do so on a mostly scientific level.

This issue cannot afford to devolve into a hateful blame game. That will get us nowhere. Before anything child abuse is a cyclic human problem - not a "bad guy" problem.

We need to drive forward a public education programme on the facts, beginning in secondary schools, and as a society we need to declare a 'war on child abuse'. Because right now we have an entire society missing out on life and in ways that do not have to be.

I declare: I will have no part in any political party that refuses to confront this issue, and in the broad and realistic manner that it should be addressed.

-And please don't believe there are no votes in this. Practically everyone knows that this child abuse elephant-in-the-room-problem is there, and most people do understand that it needs to be dealt with and the status quo is not working.

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There are other important issues of course, but a new 3rd party cannot afford to promote too many policies at once. We must and should heavily prioritise the focus.

Other important issues include:

1. Equal rights before the law:

To make my point clear, I will say that I do not believe that a non-Maori in need should get less assistance from the government than a Maori in need, and if only because they are not Maori.

Special treatment for Maori ahead of others, based on their race, is intrinsically racist.

The real problem I believe, is that the bigger the racial grievance industry gets, the more politically powerful it becomes, and in turn the harder it becomes to cut it down to size. Which I believe is the situation New Zealand is dealing with today.

We really do need to get on top of this issue. Tolerating race-based privilege is destructive to any authentic democracy, and opens the path to malignant special interests and unfortunate racial tensions that should not otherwise have had to exist.

2. Better policies for economic development: 

We need to make sure New Zealand makes sense for enterprise, as this is irrefutably essential for real economic development.

We need to respect that every new parasitic regulation and tax we introduce, just gives business another good reason to set up shop in some other country - ultimately, forcing us to pay the difference via lower wages, as we miss out on the capital investments.

What we want to achieve to this end is of course free-market capitalism - not crony capitalism.

And we certainly don't want socialism, which (loosely speaking) is really just crony capitalism taken to its zenith.

Simple video: Here

3. Keeping New Zealand a safe haven from the global terrorist threat: 

About 300 million people, world over, believe in honor killings and sharia law, etc. Does it really make sense to invite those people to come and live in New Zealand?

It is our country. We are allowed to be choosy.

There are plenty of needy refugees out there that we can help out, and who won't cause us any serious grief. Maybe we should just stick with those people?

We don't need to make life difficult for ourselves. With just a little common sense, we can be sure that New Zealand does not ever turn into another France.

Excellent video link: Here

4. Achieving a stable monetary system: 

It is ridiculous, in principle, that financial crises should even exist. We need to explore new (or old) methods of making the economy about the real economy, not the credit economy.

We want real economic development - not financial bubbles.

We could look at bringing back the gold standard, if it's a solution.

5. Rational environmentalism: 

Making sure we invest effectively in environmental defense and advancement.

This means not letting special interests turn non-environmental issues into political issues, for political profit (it does happen). And instead just making sure that environmental investment is well-researched and prioritised, to ensure that we get the biggest green bang for our buck.

We also need to resist nonsense assertions on climate change, such as "the science is settled". Clearly we cannot yet even model the relationship between climate change and anthropocentric carbon emissions.

Video: Here

6. Achieving a better health system: 

We want free-market dynamics introduced to drive superior efficiencies and innovation. Because you can't beat vibrant free-markets to that end.

And we should probably invest and incentivise more into prevention, and healthy living.

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Some people believe that health and education are too important to be let out to the private sector. I don't know what they mean. I would sooner say these areas are too important not to be let out to the private sector.

We want the best service - not the ideological service.

7. National fertility:

Throughout the industrialised world we see fertility rates falling, sometimes well below replacement levels (~1.1 children per women, in Hong Kong). Also, people are putting off having families into their late thirties and early forties, as opposed to their twenties, which is notably past the biologically optimum age. This can't be intrinsically normal.

The character of national fertility is another very important issue that needs to be put onto the table, in time. If we are making it unusually difficult for people to breed, and to breed well, then this certainly needs to be addressed.

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Concluding:

Of course I could go on a lot more, but I won't.

This is a good outline of where I'm at with politics, and where I would want the orientation of a new political party to go.

You could call it a classic-liberal party that I want to create, though I find these labels essentially empty in today's world. All I really care about is what's fair, what makes sense, and what works for achieving the ends that we all want to achieve.

So again if you have any interest then feel free to express it to me via an email, and I will add you to my collection of possible participants.

Confidentiality will of course be respected.

If the interest I get is strong enough over time, I can then look more seriously at developing a political party from there.

Because I certainly can't do it on my own. I would need a lot of help. And other than this statement I hardly know where to begin.

Thanks very much for your attention.

My Facebook page: Here