National advocates less big government yet have already outpledged Labour in government spending:
As a National voter you are less likely to have chosen rationally than a Labour voter. In other words, the present basal temperature of NZ is Blue; Red or Green requires an expenditure of energy, as does Brown or Black. It is this to which media pundits are responding.
To find out if this is true, try the Glassbooth New Zealand Election 2008 survey provided by Pundit.
The great irony is that as the world swings to the left, away from Milton Friedman and monetarism, New Zealand, the pioneer of deregulation and everything-must-go state asset sales, could veer to the right. And who would be grabbing the wheel to lead to this historical accident? Certainly not JK himself.
A majority may aver that they do not trust him in the driver’s seat. But that does not mean they will not elect him. In fact, that they don’t trust him is an argument in his favour. It flatters the general populace with the notion that they are nobody’s fool.
As with George Bush II, that evidence was available of his lack of suitability for high office and of his ineptitude and that he was a puppet of the neo-cons, that this was all, as they say, transparent, made him a solidly see-through contender: the conspiracy is that there is no conspiracy.
The voting public was let in on the joke. That the joke was dangerous and would not act in the interests of the people was not so compelling as the fact that we were instrumental in making the wheels spin. They’re not going to spin our way? They were never going to anyway.
Perhaps what motivates a John Key or a Dubbya is what makes them both men of the people: they recognise their ineffectuality. They too like us are strapped on the Ixxion wheel. Their putative humanity resides in the extraordinary narrowness of the horizons they set for themselves. Like us, their choices are irrational. But they are choices that have to be made.
[Bryan Gould addresses himself to the historic turn to government intervention in the market precipitated by crunchy credit crises here.]
Ixion like a lion in Zion!
When will people get it that Friedman was a hack? You should never believe what an economist tells you – mostly because they have the sense not to believe it themselves.
Blind faith in free-market Darwinism just predisposes us to the belief that because it is 'natural' to let these things sort themselves out, that it must be good. I am pretty sure that nature is a hideous beast that often results in things getting eaten alive and gored and that such a way of running an economy or a society is similarly brutal. I foam!
Can't wait to see JK as king, though – you mean John Kirwan, right? Or Justin Kingston? Jeremy Koney? Judge Kredd? Jacky Khan?
Jesus Khrist?!?!?