Totalibungling the Rebuild - Let’s Put a Wall Around Christchurch and Call it East Berlin

Because that wall seems to be the main structure being built in Christchurch. Local and central government are totalibungling the rebuild to the extent the garden city will soon look like that prison city did before the irrepressible moral right of freedom struck the wall around it down, and availed it of the sanity of free markets – or as near to as we have left in the West now.

Eric Cramption reports on EQC’s new policy for those who want to opt out of the EQC/Fletcher’s rebuild program:  that is, quoting this morning’s Press:

‘In what have been labelled bullyboy tactics, the EQC released a new policy this week saying property owners opting out of the Fletchers repair scheme must pay all bills themselves and wait to be reimbursed by the commission.’

Yeah right, good luck with that. For some this could cost up to $115,000, and because they’re dealing with government EQC, there is no guarantee that all expenditure will be reimbursed, as EQC seem to be able to make the rules up on that as they go along.

I don’t need say much more than my comment to Eric’s thread:

We've still got a house in Diamond Harbour, and the next door neighbour is a very good builder who we want to do our repairs, though EQC are making that damned hard now. As with yourself, the net result is that more people will feel trapped in the Fletcher system, and an even bigger bottleneck will exist than already does. The answer is in de-centralisation of the repair work, not this, the opposite. Put a wall around the city and change its name to East Berlin.

Anyway, for us, after finally getting our 'first' EQC report after six or seven months, and it not telling us anything useful, or what the next step is, we're just going to 'shelve' our house there - its being rented, so covering costs at least - for a couple of years then look at repairs. We might have heard from EQC again at some stage in that timeframe (if we're lucky).

Laissez faire capitalism works so well because it allows, especially in the age of the Internet, for the decentralised marrying of the complex needs and desires of all individuals within a society as they go about pursuing their happiness. When, however, a centralised planner tries to funnel the resolution of these myriad needs and desires through a single point, government, as in all planned economies, then you always will end up choking on a bottle-neck of human misery and chaos because markets cannot work toward the spontaneous order they are so good at if left unfettered (by regulation and the taxman). And this is not a comment on the people in EQC, the people we’ve dealt with are fine, it’s a comment on philosophy: centralisation and planned societies don’t work on every level, right down to four phone calls over six months to get a completed report emailed or snail mailed.

Local and central government have to get out of people’s lives in Christchurch, and we need to get rid of EQC. If my wife and  I could have dealt straight with our private insurer I suspect our Christchurch issues would have been largely resolved by now: as it is, per my previous comment, all we have in our hands is a report that took EQC over six months to get to us, which tells us nothing in terms of the figures we’re looking at, or what they propose per the necessary repair work.

So while we all wait for the rebuild, I invite you to look at these fascinating photographs of East Berlin first under the planned economy which we’ve largely voted in, and then under capitalism.  Why would sane, freedom loving individuals choose anything other than capitalism?