politics – Page 138

Does New Zealand Need Commieblocks?

New Zealand was founded on the idea of being a land of opportunity, where enough hard work would see a person rewarded with a standard of life unattainable in Britain. Part of this involved owning your own small house – referred to as “the quarter-acre dream” – but that dream is dead. We may now have to face up to an awful question: is it time for New Zealand to build commieblocks?

The opportunity inherent in New Zealand was mostly about getting away from the horrific overcrowding of England. At the opening of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, millions of workers were forced off the land and into the cities for the sake of supplying manpower to the factories. This new way of life proved hellish for a number of reasons, in particular the disease and pollution that came with the overcrowding, but also because of the unnatural life away from Nature.

This life was miserable enough that many of these millions chose to abandon Britain entirely for an uncertain life in the colonies. So badly did it suck to live in overpopulated filth, these people were willing to trade it all for an uncertain life as a settler on a large island – full of cannibals – on the other side of the planet.

In Europe, where the population density is many times higher than it is in New Zealand, and where workers will protest before they accept living in a car, a solution to the sudden need to house these masses arrived in the form of ‘commieblocks’. The name refers to the mountainous, blocky, concrete-and-steel structures that were a favourite of post-war Communist nations making good on their promises to house the masses.

These enormous buildings were able to contain hundreds or even thousands of apartments in the same space that would have been occupied by a few dozen villas. This meant that the price of the underlying land could be divided up among a multitude of people, minimising the cost of housing. It’s essentially battery farming for humans, and it has the psychological effect on people that battery farming could be expected to have, but it’s unavoidable once the population density increases past a certain point.

New Zealand managed to avoid this nightmare scenario by keeping the population density low. A low population density means that every person can have a certain minimum amount of space to themselves, and so there is no need to wallow in each other’s shit and piss like the populations of Europe, India and East Asia. When this was the case in New Zealand, we had no need for commieblocks.

Unfortunately, the greed of New Zealanders meant that we were unable to maintain a population in proportion to our ability to build houses for it. Helen Clark opened the borders to cheap labour from the Pacific Islands, and then John Key threw them open to the whole world. Now we have so many people here that our ability to grow outwards to give them all space has hit its limits. It might be time to admit that the quarter-acre dream is dead.

Is it commieblock time?

As a previous VJM Publishing article showed, the average New Zealand wage would have to be over $79 today if workers were to have the same chance of owning their homes as workers 26 years ago. This is clearly impossible – New Zealand employers will not pay that much money. Therefore, a majority of the current generation of young people are effectively locked out of home ownership unless they are lucky enough to inherit.

Immigration from sources of cheap labour has been so liberal, and capital investment in worker productivity so meagre, that our wages have plummeted far below the level at which owning a home and supporting a family on a working-class income is possible. With women and a large number of Third Worlders now in the labour pool, any hope of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work is gone. Wages will not rise to $79 within the next half a century, and house prices will not come down unless a large number of new ones are built.

We might have to face up to the reality that a large (and growing) proportion of the workforce will simply never be able to own their own home, unless we build large numbers of commieblocks. If a new KiwiBuild home costs $649,000, and if this is supposed to be a cheap alternative to buying a house on the market, then it’s really time to bite the bullet. We need to accept that wages in New Zealand are too poor for everyone to own a villa, and this means that it’s time to build commieblocks.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

The Case For Cannabis: Cannabis Meets the Industrial Needs of This Century

For better or worse, humans will always use drugs to help them cope with the demands placed on them by the daily need to survive. Whether to help focus, relax, kill pain or to see beyond, people will always find reasons to want to change their perceptions so as to best meet the demands placed on them. This article will argue that cannabis law reform is superior to prohibition when it comes to meeting the industrial demands of our time.

During the Age of Exploration, the drug of choice was alcohol, usually rum in particular. Rum had a high alcohol volume and was easy to keep. For men spending months or years at sea in ships, rum offered the best bang for the buck. Wherever European sailors took harbour, the rum trade followed. Names like Port Royal and Kororareka became synonymous with drunken debauchery and destruction.

In the first half of the 20th century, we ran out of places to explore and started killing each other over what had been discovered. This required a combination of drugs, and these – because of the necessities of wartime – were indulged in without shame or sanction. Alcohol was still used to a great extent, particularly for its ability to give men the courage to face enemy gunfire, but use of opiates and tobacco were also widespread, the former on account of its use in physical medicine and the latter on account of its use in psychological medicine.

In the second half of the 20th century, the focus shifted from killing the enemies of liberal capitalism to making money. During this time, people were mostly tasked with social office work. This required more tobacco, but also more caffeine. It was here when the idea of becoming “caffeinated” to deal with the pressures of the day came from. The idea was that the buzz from caffeine would make the inherently safe and secure office jobs less boring.

So far this century, a lot of this work has become antisocial. This has necessitated the rise of caffeine, in order to concentrate for longer periods of time despite low levels of stimulation. This rise has been aided by the increasing unfashionability of tobacco smoking, so that caffeine has now become the go-to drug for anyone wanting more yang energy.

It’s not easy to forecast the precise details of the future, but if one understands the basics of a subject it’s possible to forecast general trends. What seems apparent, in the case of the Western World, is that cannabis has come to replace some of these other drugs as the one that best helps people meet the demands of the workplace, and will continue to do so.

Because of automation, it’s no longer as important for the workforce to be attentive, alert and focused. This is still important for certain roles, but those roles have become an ever-diminishing proportion of the workplace. The roles that have become an ever-increasing proportion of the workplace are those in the creative professions, and the demands of these roles are compatible with cannabis use.

It’s widely known and accepted that much of the world’s production of quality music is made by people on drugs, and this is true to a lesser extent of literature as well. Cannabis (especially cannabis sativa) helps with the process of creativity by breaking down old conditioned pathways of thought and replacing them with novel ideas. This has made it a favourite substance of people in many creative occupations – not just music and writing but also design, cuisine, hospitality and programming.

In order to meet these industrial needs, we will not only need to legalise cannabis, but to go further. At a minimum, cannabis will need to become legal so that people who need to use it for the sake of their work can do so. For the sake of creative occupations, it will need to be gently encouraged in the workplace in the same way that coffee is encouraged in offices, and tobacco is encouraged in factories, already now.

The world is changing faster and faster, and as a result of this people find themselves confronted with original situations ever more frequently. These original situations demand original ways of thinking. The desirable qualities for employees of the future will be flexibility, originality and breadth of thought, instead of the obsessive focus and repetition that has characterised the workplaces of the past. These qualities are well enhanced by cannabis, which makes it a good choice for the workplace of the future.

This article is an excerpt from The Case For Cannabis Law Reform, compiled by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2018/19.

VJMP Reads: David Seymour’s Own Your Future XI

This reading carries on from here.

The tenth chapter in Own Your Future is ‘Environment’. Seymour begins with an anecdote that gives us an idea of the moral sentiments that led Seymour to the ACT Party. The child Seymour didn’t like the moralistic implication of the Captain Planet writers that humanity was inherently evil on account of our environmental impact.

Seymour soon has a go at the Greens, who he labels hypocrites. He does make an excellent point: none of the Greens have any scientific background. This is certainly very curious for a party that makes such a point of having scientific backing for their policies. They also waste an incredible amount of money on junkets, especially when climate change is the excuse.

Another fair point he makes is that the price distorting effects of Big Government intervention often have environmental consequences. This is especially noticeable in the case of agricultural subsidies, which tend to lead to overproduction and exploitation of land. Much better to let the market solve such questions, as with water rights.

When talking about the importance of property rights, he unwittingly reveals the secret logic behind much of ACT Party thinking, when he says “pricing and property rights go together”. In the ACT mindset, wealth equals rights. The more money you have, the more rights you have to do things, including doing things to the land and to other people. The RMA gets attacked here again as a quasi-communist institution.

Seymour makes a very clever point when he says that productivity growth is the basis of prosperity. ACT have been heavily criticised in the past for taking a “rape and pillage” approach to New Zealand’s native areas, in which everything can be sold off for money. In this essay, Seymour switches focus to productivity gains from technology and software.

However, he doesn’t stray far from the general neoliberal path. Globalisation is good, and signing the TPP is a good thing. Not for Seymour any sympathy for those who have lost out from neoliberalism. The wealthy benefit from it, and ACT is fundamentally a party for the rich.

Noting that the left/right political divide correlates strongly with alarmist and sceptical positions (respectively) on the issue of global climate change, Seymour declares himself a “luke-warmist” who agrees that some degree of climate change is man-made but does not agree that it will necessarily have devastating effects.

The environmental idea that seems to appeal the most is the idea of having inland sanctuaries, naturally run by private investors. This, Seymour believes, is the only way that New Zealand has a chance of bringing back the dawn chorus that was sung by our birdlife several hundred years ago. Curiously, he wants to have a large trust to dole out grants for these sanctuaries, which, along with his support for foreign refugees, makes one wonder if working-class Kiwis are the only people he doesn’t care about.

It is interesting that ACT might have so detailed an environmental policy, because it seems like an attempt to attract alt-centrist voters. Both ACT and Green voters are young. Indeed, ACT and the Greens could be considered the alt-right and alt-left of a new paradigm of politics, or at least one that has been remodelled to appeal to the young.

Are The Greens Sexist Against Men?

The male suicide rate is over 300% of the size of the female suicide rate, suggesting that men must suffer a much greater share of society’s burdens.

Despite this, the Green Party has only 2 men out of 8 Members of Parliament, and one of them is willing to state that men are solely to blame for all the poverty in the world.

Are the Greens a sexist party? If so, should they face repercussions?