Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 16/09/1999
Music - Die Fledermaus
Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Thursday September 16, proudly sponsored by Tuariki Tobacco Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.
Music up, music down!
We knew there was something funny about it, didn't we? The Daily Marxist editorial last weekend in praise of free trade? This is the Daily Marxist whose Finance Editor was a participant on one of the AUS witches' anti-APEC seminars at Auckland University, the Daily Marxist that runs endless campaigns about various ills of society created by its sorts of policies and then shrieks at us that these ills are OUR responsibility; the Daily Marxist that has become the print arm of the Alliance which is as anti-free trade as it is anti-freedom in EVERY area of life; the Daily Marxist that day after day spews out Stalinist economics on its op-ed pages courtesy of sundry unappetising statists from pseudo-academia. Yes, something was decidedly odd about that editorial, headed up, ever so accurately, "Trade has no losers." Julian Darby wondered if it might have something to do with the fact that the chairman of Wilson & Horton, Cameron O'Reilly, was in town for APEC - perhaps his local employees didn't want to display their Alliance sympathies while the boss was in town?
Whatever, he must have been gone by yesterday, when the reactionaries started in with a vengeance. Garth George, who never misses an opportunity to bore us witless with his former drink problem and his intoxication with socialist economics, harrumphed away about the demon of free trade and what tariff removal had just done to the Alliance Textiles spinning mill in a South Otago town - i.e. closed it down. Funny, the textile industry has a history of blinkered individuals wanting to protect it from both external competition and new technology.
There were riots when Arkwright invented cotton-spinning machinery in 1760, yet 27 years later the number of people employed in the cotton-spinning industry was 4,200% higher.
Now the point about a tariff is that it is a tax. As such, it is immoral. It is the insistence by government that importers pay a compulsory levy over and above what they have agreed to pay their supplier - it is yet another instance of the initiation of force by government against its citizens. Many importers are exporters as well, and their costs are pushed up, so you could say that a tariff is a tax on exports as well as imports. But, we are told, if we don't protect our local industries from overseas competition, they will go under. Well, as with other forms of compulsory taxation, I would countenance an argument for phased, rather than immediate abolition - and if we can persuade our trading partners to move with us, so much the better. Even if we can't, the kiwi purchaser benefits from the lower cost of imported goods and the kiwi entrepreneur benefits from extra purchasing power released by tariff removal. Inevitably, some local industries will indeed go under. No one has a divine right to be protected in perpetuity from innovation and competition. The free market is not a playground for dinosaurs.
But none of this is really the point as far as the likes of Comrade Kelsey and the Daily Marxist are concerned. They don't want to see free trade EVER. They are delighted when Bill Clinton slaps a tariff on NZ lamb exports or when the Japanese dig their toes in about removing the wall of protection from their economy, because it gives them a semi-plausible excuse to advocate the reinstatement of such silliness here. The spectre of genuine free trade where nobody creates artificial barriers, of the flow of commerce unimpeded by politicians and lobby groups, is one that is anathema to them on principle, because they are totalitarians and free trade is just that - free. They won't be happy until all the economic Berlin Walls are back up a there's a new Stalin back in the Kremlin overseeing a "planned" economy and killing off mavericks presumptuous enough to buck the latest Five-Year Plan. But that's still some way off. In the meantime, the Daily Marxist & Comrade Kelsey have the inauguration of Commissar Neanderton, also known as Jim-Il Sung, to look forward to. I suppose there's one consolation - a few months on a diet of Neandernomics will sure as hell make us skinny.
Politically Incorrect Show, beating the bastards back - 309 3099.
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