Islam and the West

A brief exchange on Not PC's blog has made me realise how ignorant many non-Muslims are about Islam. I wrote a comment saying that Islam has two main tenets - submission (which, of course, is what Islam actually means) and the belief that it is the one final religion for all of mankind. The gentleman who took issue with my comment said that Christianity and Judaism are equally about submission. This illustrates his ignorance about all three religions.

The central tenet of Christianity is faith, not submission - faith in God, faith that Jesus Christ was his Son (and was God at the same time) and faith that belief in Him will redeem your sins.

The central tenet of Judaism is the law, which God gave the Jewish people so that they may live righteous lives.

Christianity and Judaism emphasise the concept of free will, which is almost completely absent from Islam. Free will implies genuine moral choices. In Islam there is only the words of the book - the Koran - and you are meant to follow them without interpretation or ambivalence.

One area in which Islam is not unique is the perpetration of violence in its name. All the Abrahamic religions adhere to the Old Testament, which exhorts violence in the name of God almost to the point of tedium. Christianity at least tempers this with Christ's message of pacifism.

We often hear, usually from non-Muslims, that Islam is a religion of peace. This is perhaps the most misunderstood statement about Islam. It is true in one sense - if you submit to Allah, you will find peace. Islam is like Buddhism in this respect - its adherents seek to find inner peace through their belief. This does not mean Islam is a pacifist religion.

Islam is growing at a rate that will soon make it the biggest religion in the world and there is little doubt that it presents the biggest philosophical challenge to modern Western values since Communism. It is a mistake to regard it from a position of ignorance and prejudice but it is equally a mistake to put our heads in the sand and believe that it has the same values as classical Western liberalism.

All immigrants need is life, liberty and the opportunity to pursue happiness

In recent days we have seen a lot of hand-wringing, particularly from the Western liberal-left media, about the influx of refugees into Europe from Syria. On the one hand they say we must "do something", on the other it is clear they don't like the idea of letting such people into their own countries. In fact, modern so-called liberals tend not to be liberal at all when it comes to immigration. This is not surprising because immigration poses a dilemma for Western democratic socialism.

Marx's ideal of international socialist solidarity has morphed in Western countries into a highly nationalistic socialism that is all about preserving the privilege and exclusivity of the domestic welfare state. Western socialists pretend to be concerned with the victims of repression in countries like Syria but actually they see such people as a threat to their increasingly fragile world. They realise that each immigrant is a challenge to the carefully constructed power balance in Western societies between the increasing unproductive majority of the population and the productive minority who support them. Unproductive immigrants add to the burden on a base of taxpayers already staggering under the weight of welfare demands, and productive immigrants merely serve to show how unnecessary and counterproductive much of the modern welfare state really is.

The reason I am truly liberal on immigration is because I am a humanist. Socialists try to paint themselves as humanists, but a true humanist is someone who values human potential. A true humanist sees immigrants for their opportunity to add to our society as producers, not as victims who only ever consume limited resources.

A guest post by Alex Nowraseth from the Cato Institute on Not PC's blog proposes building a wall around the welfare system to exclude immigrants. Personally, I think this is morally indefensible. Are immigrants merely slaves to the indolent native-born? The only moral solution is to reduce, or better abolish, the welfare state so that the productive of society, whether immigrants or native-born, are unshackled to pursue their own interests.

The Statue of Liberty was inscribed with the famous words from Emma Lazarus' poem "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and America lived up to this exhortation by absorbing more than 30 million immigrants between 1850 and 1920. It was only a comparatively free and capitalist society like the United States was during that period that could afford to absorb so many from those huddled masses. Americans understood back then that immigrants bring with them in their minds and bodies the opportunities they create. They don't need to be given anything other than life, liberty and the opportunity to pursue their own happiness.

The True Cost of Election Bribes

We have an election campaign underway in New Zealand. You would need to be a blind and deaf hermit to miss all the bullshit the media have been spouting about it. But in between the wall-to-wall coverage of the petty name-calling and downright lies, we are beginning to see some policy announcements from the parties and almost every one of them is trying to bribe voters with promises of more government spending. Even the so-called centre-right National Party thinks it can bribe first home buyers into voting for it (and Not PC gives a very good account of why that is a silly idea in this blog post). 

Unfortunately, many voters are too gullible to question where the money for these bribes comes from. Every dollar has to come from some hardworking taxpayer's pocket. In fact, every dollar of government spending means that around $1.25 has to come from a taxpayer because there is a transaction cost in collecting and spending the money. It costs to run the tax department and it costs to run all the government agencies that spend the loot the government extorts from taxpayers - and despite the ease of the task, they're none too efficient at spending the money because they have no incentive to be efficient (unlike businesses who have to compete with other businesses to be ever more efficient at producing the products and services they produce). 

But, in reality, it's even worse than that. The true cost of the government spending one dollar is much higher because the taxpayer's $1.25 probably would have been invested in a business (either directly by buying shares or indirectly via a bank) and that $1.25 of capital might have enabled the business to produce an additional $20 worth of products or services. That $20 worth of revenue to the company would have been spent on, say, $10 in wages, $5 of supplies and $3 in rent. And the workers that earned the wages would have spent their additional $10 on food at the supermarket or put it towards an Air New Zealand flight to see grandma, and the supplier would have spent some of his $5 on wages, and the landlord would have spent some of his $3 on paying a contractor to get the roof fixed, and so on and so forth.

Now you start to see the true cost of that one dollar the government is promising to spend on you. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

They doth protest too much, methinks

The reaction to the cartoons from Al Nisbet (shown on this blog), about the government's newly-announced policy to provide children with breakfast at lower decile schools, is more interesting than the cartoons themselves.  The cartoons have really brought the political correctness brigade out of the woodwork including that old Marxist, John Minto, who laid a complaint with the Race Relations Conciliator, Susan Devoy.

The cartoonist is not saying much more than I said myself in a comment on Not PC's blog.  I pointed out that the policy would give parents the moral mandate not to feed their children breakfast (in fact, Al Nisbet's words in his cartoon were so similar to mine I wondered whether he had read mine).  I didn't identify the issue as being specific to Maori or Pacific Island families and, actually, neither explicitly did Al Nisbet. Some of the characters in his cartoons have Polynesian features and that was enough for the professional offence takers to do what they always do - that is, take offence irrespective of whether offence was intended.

Green Party leader Metiria Turei asks about the cartoons, "Does our country really hate us?"  My response to that, on another blog, is when you treat the rest of us like slaves who exist merely to serve you, are you really surprised?  The productive minority in this country, who pay all the taxes (17% of New Zealand households pay 97% of income taxes), are getting tired of being the milch cows for those who are not prepared to take responsibility for providing for the children that they bring into the world.  We have a right to be resentful and Al Nisbet was insightful and absolutely correct to express that sentiment.

The reaction to the cartoons, just like the satirical Danish Islamic cartoons, is indicative of how their author found his mark.  As Shakespeare's Queen Gertrude said, the likes of Minto and Turei "doth protest too much".  They are shouting that tired cliche "racist!" because they would rather not address the sharp truth in Al Nisbet's satire.  The real question, as I said on Not PC's blog, is how can anyone justify paying these parents welfare benefits (including supplements targeted at the care of the child) while at the same time relieving them of the responsibility of feeding their children?

Why New Zealand is well on its way to Third World status

I read in Not PC's blog that the assets controlled by the NZ Government (including local government) are six times the value of the listed companies on the New Zealand stock exchange. I found this such an incredible statistic I decided to look into it myself. This discussion was in the context of Prime Minister Key proposing to look at the partial sale of shares in some state owned enterprises (SOEs) if his government is re-elected later this year. The proposal is only to sell minority stakes and is hardly a wholesale reversal of the previous Labour Government's steady nationalisation of companies such as Air New Zealand and the Tranzrail but it was enough to set the fox among the chattering chickens of the media and political commentators.

Amazingly, the statistic is true. I believe Not PC got the statistic from ACT MP Muriel Newman's blog, who in turn quoted it from former National Party leader Don Brash's last "state of the nation" speech to the Orewa Rotary club (a tradition started by 1970s/80s prime minister Muldoon). One thing you can say for Don Brash is that he does his research. My own investigations reveal that the total value of shares listed on the NZSE is currently about $56B. The total assets of the Crown in the latest Treasury financial accounts is $223B. Local government assets are approx. $98B. So the total value of all government assets is around $320B or six times the value of the shares on the stock exchange. The government has $95B invested in SOEs and investments including the government's superannuation fund, although the net asset value would be somewhat less than that. New Zealand has a total "capital stock" of about $570B, so the Government's share of that is around 56%.

It is difficult to do direct comparisons with other countries but New Zealand's figure seems to be unusually high. The US Federal Government's assets are only about US$3 trillion of a total US asset base of approx. US$200 trillion (1.5%). Okay, that doesn't include the assets of state governments but even if they are ten times the federal value they are still a much smaller proportion of national assets than New Zealand's. The last figures for Australia I could find had the Federal Government assets at about A$350B compared with a total national asset base of more than A$5 trillion (7%). Again, it doesn't include state governments but you get the picture.

When commentators look at government involvement in the economy they only tend to look at government spending as a proportion of GDP and on that measure (39%) New Zealand is on a par with other countries. But based on these asset ownership figures, our government completely dominates the economy. In fact, I'd guess we have one of the highest levels of government asset ownership in the world.

I hear the lefties saying, so what? Well, I believe that this is a significant factor in New Zealand's poor economic performance over past decades. We have slipped from number 3 or 4 on the OECD table of GDP per capita in the 1950s to number 23 today. That is an appalling decline that we should be ashamed of. In the 1950s we were ahead of Australia in GDP per capita and now they are 45% ahead of us (and unlike us they are still well above the OECD average).

So why has New Zealand done so poorly in comparison to almost every other Western nation? The asset ownership figure provides an obvious answer: our inability to grow wealth in our private sector (which, after all, is the only place wealth is ever grown). Every country that has prospered over the last few decades has done so on the back of building large numbers of significant new private sector enterprises. In Scandinavia it has been high tech industries such as mobile phones and software, in the United States it has predominantly been in IT and entertainment products, and in Australia financial services, manufacturing and mineral exploitation. What has happened to New Zealand by comparison? Well, we've destroyed all our large companies through mismanagement and heavy-handed Government intervention. Think about it. What happened to Fletcher Challenge, Carter Holt Harvey, BNZ, Watties, Brierley Investments, and pretty much all the other big companies we used to have. They have been either taken over by foreign owners or are shadows of their former selves or they don't exist at all. And don't quote Fonterra as an exception - that's a state sanctioned monopoly that hasn't progressed beyond the low-value commodity producer it has been since the 1930s.

Oh, what about all the new technology success stories, Navman, Xero, TradeMe and so on? Well, even the largest of these are small fry in comparison with a Fletcher Challenge.

But, I hear you say, no one likes big business anyway and most New Zealanders are happy with their lot. Standard of living is not all about financial measures and aren't we one of the happiest societies in the world? So let's examine what will happen if we continue to slide further down the OECD ladder.

In another decade or two, at current rates of decline, most New Zealanders won't be able to afford to travel overseas at all. The tradition of overseas experience, especially for our young people, will be beyond our reach. We won't be able to afford to pay the welfare benefits we currently pay or the generous superannuation scheme we have for our retired people. We won't be able to keep our hospitals and schools running at current levels and certainly won't be able to buy the best drugs and medical equipment. We won't be able to have all those neat technology devices we crave, like iPhones and flat screen TVs. Forget the late model motor vehicles and the fancy imported foodstuffs and seeing foreign artists perform in our stadiums, or any of the other miriad of First World luxuries we take for granted.

You don't believe me? Just take a look at Greece or Portugal or Ireland at the moment. These countries lived beyond their means for too long and are now paying the price. Some of my friends and relatives in these countries, even the well-off ones, can no longer afford to travel. Interestingly, of these three countries, in spite of their economic troubles, only Portugal is below New Zealand on the GDP tables.

So what is the solution? It's simple really; we need to double the size of our private sector without increasing (and ideally reducing) the size of the public sector. That means a massive shift of investment and expenditure from the public to private. It means providing huge incentives, through tax breaks, for investment in the private sector and cutting our public sector cloth to suit. It won't be sufficient to match other country's tax incentives, we will have to be well below them to attract the investment we need. That is the simplest and the only solution. Don Brash and his 2020 Taskforce have been saying it and most economic commentators worth their salt have been saying it. I'm sure many New Zealanders don't want to hear the message but they need to understand the consequences of not doing it. Hopefully they will wise up before we drop completely off the bottom of the OECD list. Then we will be Third World, perhaps the only country in history to suffer the ignominy of going from the mansion to the poorhouse.