Oddbean new post about | logout
▲ ▼
Ajax | 14 days ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +6 
 Excellent, well-reasoned article. I read it and couldn’t help but draw parallels with the feckless political class here in NZ.  The problem persists in most modern liberal democracies, it seems - team red vs team blue mentality, voter apathy combined with (often blind) trust in our leaders / institutions etc.  It needed to be said, so thanks for using your platform to address the many elephants in the room.  Hope to see you in Sydney.
▲ ▼
petermccormack | 14 days ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +17 
 Interestingly when I was reading up on when governments have tried more Libertarian ideas, NZ in the 80s and 90s was a case study I found.
▲ ▼
Mark | 14 days ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 Libertarian? You might need to nail that term down a bit. NZ in the 80s was a leader in the nuclear nonproliferation movt, leading to being bombed by the French and frozen out of ANZUS.

The people-lead nature of this lends itself to an anarchist, or even Social Democratic label.

https://pmcarchive.aut.ac.nz/articles/flashback-nzs-nuclear-free-law-1987-challenging-goliath-4359.html
▲ ▼
fitpaula3 | 14 days ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Interesting. What happened to NZ?
▲ ▼
Ajax | 14 days ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Sorry didn’t mean to hijack this thread to be a conversation about NZ.  But there were a bunch of liberal economic reforms that took place in the mid-eighties, the so called “Rogernomics” after the then Labour Minister of Finance, Roger Douglas.  Devaluation of the NZ$, deregulation of state-owned enterprises, tax cuts, removals of tariffs and subsidies, etc.  It worked really well for a while, but much of the populace want to keep their snouts in the trough and for the rich to pay for it all.  The last (Labour) government bumped up the top income tax rate to 39% (GST, the sales tax equivalent, sits at 15%) and now the (liberal) media is full of articles about how we need wealth taxes and capital gains taxes.  They see it as a revenue problem, not a spending problem.  When I asked Adrian Orr (current Governor of the Reserve Bank) if they had plans to hold bitcoin as a treasury asset, his answer was a derisive “no”.   Disappointing.