Selwyn Dawson:
Nine fallacies
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Selwyn Dawson:Nine fallacies |
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The economic and political atmosphere in New Zealand has been dominated during the last decade and more by an interlocking series of apparently self-authenticating presuppositions which have become the new orthodoxy. These were adopted from overseas sources and acted upon by passionate politicians in a hurry, who believed that under their governance backwater New Zealand would soon not only refurbish its own economy but become a shining light to the wider world. Have these "infallible" propositions since been shown up as fallacies, impediments to a healthy functioning economy? I list nine such which still hold unthinking sway in governing circles, often I think, to our detriment. Long before the Asian crisis there were multiple signs that the systems in which we have invested so much of our national wellbeing are deeply flawed.
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Fallacy 1: THE STATE IS YOUR ENEMY | |
| In some strange psychological twist, the very people elected to safeguard and operate the machinery of government on behalf of the people have for years been busily engaged in hacking away at it - selling off its strategic assets, politicizing and diminishing its public service, handing over to the tender mercies of an impersonal market functions vital to the wellbeing of otherwise powerless citizens, refusing to use the mechanisms of the state to address the crying imbalances and inequities which increasingly rack civil society. Those who had counted on their elected government to work on their behalf have too often heard instead the chill message: 'You're on your own.' If ordinary citizens cannot count on their elected government to defend their ultimate interests, where else can they turn? | |
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Fallacy 2: EVERYTHING HAS A
PRICE | |
| Obsessed with statistics and the need to measure and control, administrators of public affairs have imported the idea of a free flowing and self correcting market to regulate every aspect of public life. Certainly in many areas of trade and commerce the law of supply and demand should run untrammeled. When, however, other aspects of our common life - education, health, conservation, television, labour relations - are left to the tender mercies of the impersonal market all kinds of absurdities and imbalances occur. When, for instance, the price-market criteria are applied to the sale or retention of strategic public assets the results can be gravely anti-social. And when the unchecked operation of market forces creates an ever-increasing disparity in living standards between sections of he community, warning lights should flash. Pure monetary and market systems are bereft of instrinsic ethics beyond profitability and "efficiency". Later generations may look back and see that the present abdication of government decisions to an impersonal market has deprived them of much of their birthright. As a matter of record, the alienation of major public assets and services at garage sale prices in the '80s was a scandal. It has siphoned off, irrecoverably, much public wealth and control. | |
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Fallacy 3: PUBLIC IS BAD - PRIVATE IS GOOD | |
| Even narrow 'efficiency' can be bought at too great a price. Every policy statement which begins "This is not the government's core business" ought to be examined with the greatest of scepticism. The concept of core business may well apply to private enterprise, but it should be quite differently applied to the business of government. Granted that government is not bound to undertake everything the public demands, it should see that everything vital to a healthy society is done, and if private interests either exploit public needs or refuse to undertake necessary work because 'there's no money in it' the government may be compelled to act in the interests of the whole. | |
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Fallacy 4: I CAN SPEND MY MONEY
BETTER | |
| An obvious truth - so far as it goes - but otherwise nonsense. The statement confuses public and private good, and we cannot do without either. If I could secure for myself roads, schools, hospitals, defence forces, law and order, provision for my future retirement, and all the multifarious services which make up a civilized and habitable society, there could be some truth in the assertion. But in fact we achieve our common wellbeing by each clubbing in through taxation to provide for the fabric of public life - and we receive back the use of these priceless public amenities as part of our social wage. Taxation is not theft, as some assert. Evasion of taxation is theft, no matter how sophisticated the procedures may be. John Kenneth Galbraith has rightly warned us against the dangers of private wealth existing side by side with public squalor, thus setting up tensions which are eventually bound to explode. | |
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Fallacy 5: YOU CAN'T SOLVE A
PROBLEM | |
| Like a half brick, this half-truth is dangerous because it travels further. Its constant repetition conceals that other truth - that necessary public services can be crippled by inadequate funding. When hospital waiting lists swell to scores of thousands, and CYPFS officers and mental health workers carry impossibly large case loads, these can be traced back to consistent underfunding. Is there any social service agency in the country today not wallowing heavily in the water because of underfunding? | |
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Fallacy 6: THE ECONOMY MUST BE
SOUND IF THE GOVERNMENT | |
| All of these factors may be desirable, even necessary, yet none of them takes into account that other critical factor in any economy, distribution. If a substantial part of the population is prevented through poverty from participating fully in the normal life of society, the prevailing economic system must be judged a failure, and the much vaunted trickle-down effect a chimera. This is exactly the burden of recent official surveys. No family would consider itself prosperous if three quarters of its members thrived while a quarter suffered from malnutrition, yet the widespread and seemingly permanent existence of foodbanks shows that poverty is deeply entrenched in our society. It appears that, while wealth may be accumulating in the hands of numbers of New Zealanders, up to perhaps 40% may be falling behind in the race for adequate living resources. Many are well below the poverty line. There is a pervading fear among others that their jobs may disappear. Recent decisions on superannuation have caused many elderly to realise that in their vulnerable years they are losing ground. | |
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Fallacy 7: NEW ZEALAND IS A LEVEL
PLAYING FIELD | |
| Economists seldom speak to social scientists - which is a pity. If they did, this sop to conscience would soon be stripped away. They would learn that historical causes (land dispossession of Maori), poor education (poor schooling in lower socio-economic areas), poor health owing to bad diet, overcrowding in a prohibitively expensive housing market, difficult access to health care, unemployment (there ares simply not enough jobs to go around) mean that, though some can rise above their handicaps, the scales are loaded against a sizeable number and growing proportion of New Zealand people. The abandonment of regional development by successive governments has doomed whole areas and communities to sub-standard living conditions. The level playing field cannot exist so long as the market rules and government stands by, its hands tied by faulty dogma. | |
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Fallacy 8: GLOBAL FREE TRADE IS
THE ANSWER | |
| This is the level playing field fallacy writ large. Free trade may well be of great benefit to some countries, some industries, and some people. But to others it may bring harship and exploitation. Granted that we are inescapably part of the world-wide community, we still have the right to keep a wary eye on those who profit most from open frontiers - the great transnationals at whose whim local industries can be destroyed, capital shifted from one place to another, markets opened up or bypassed. Free trade may be a desirable goal, but when doctrinaire politicians strike down local tariffs indiscriminately on the vague promise that workers can relocate at will to the new jobs which, hopefully, will appear from somewhere, sometime, one has to wonder. | |
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Fallacy 9: DON'T WORRY ABOUT
SOCIETY - | |
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Wrong. Both individual and society must be taken into
account, since neither can thrive without the other.
Eminent British jurist, Lord Radcliffe, once said,
"The purpose of society is to nourish and enrich the growth of every
individual human spirit"." A British poet reminded us of
the danger of building a society "where wealth accumulates and men
decay". The almost wholly individualist and materialist
emphasis of the New Right dogma, which has been in the ascendant for
many years, is now producing a harvest of dead sea fruit in the area
of social cohesion and human happiness. Fortunately there are
already signs that the counterswing is under way. The clock
cannot be turned back to traditional left-wing socialism, but
concerned people are groping towards some third way which will preserve the
benefits of individual initiative and capitalist development, while at
the same time ensuring that no one is shut out from the family
table. Is it time for ordinary people to question the received
economic doctrines, so deeply entrenched in the Treasury, the
Business Roundtable, some political parties, and the other
temples of the New Right? © Selwyn Dawson (1998) | |
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