Race, the Welfare State and the Green Party’s Child Poverty Policy – Plus a Retraction to Metiria Turei.

Following is a further extract (hence the opened ended reference to Native Affairs) from my still to be posted full piece on race relations, per my previous post.

 

Referring to the Green Party’s announced child poverty policy, I made the following unfortunate – on a personal level - tweets to Green co-leader Metiria Turei:

@metiria Plus, all your child poverty spend allocated after a child is born in often imprudent circumstances, thus a subsidy. @Liberatenz
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) August 21, 2014

@metiria That can only increase #s born in imprudent circumstances and increase cycle of poverty. Cynical electioneering. @Liberatenz
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) August 21, 2014

 

My use of ‘cynical’ in that tweet was correct on a party level, but not on the personal level of Metiria, I regret using it and will use a further post to retract, sorry Metiria, but these topics press my buttons because they are so important. Morgan Godfrey has recently published on The Daily Blog, an interview with Metiria, which contains further examples of that type of every day racism people of my upbringing cannot comprehend in how thoroughly and intimately it soaks the lives of non-pakeha, but in which Metiria also says, referring to her Left roots:

 

“I come from a working class Maori family, but we had a very strong upbringing… we were the household where everybody would come and stay if they were in trouble, particularly financial trouble. There was a constant flow of people… My parents, at the same time, wanted to create a middle class life for us. On the outside we had a very flash house, but on the inside it never had any carpet or anything.”

 

In that statement is the point of difference between Metiria and myself, which is between the Left ethic and myself. If the welfare state resulted in extended whanau/families functioning like that, it would have been an arguable success. But welfare has done the opposite, as shown in this Native Affairs piece, by atomising community and family relationships. From pages 77 and 94-95 of David Schmidtz’s contribution to David Schmidtz’s and Robert E. Goodin’s important 1998 book, Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against:

 

 

If communitarians are right to say Western society has been atomized, then surely one of the causes has been the state’s penchant for making itself (rather than the community) the primary focus of public life….

 

What explains market society’s unparalleled success in helping people to prosper? The key, I have argued, lies in background institutions, especially property institutions, that lead people to take responsibility for their own welfare….

 

The welfare state would have made people better off if it had led neighbors to rely on each other and on themselves, but it seems to have done the opposite.

 

[End of post.]

 

Turning to my race relations piece, which involves a change is some important aspects of my thinking, it’s just too awful and incoherent yet, but I’ve decided to put it up once I pull some order into it, my only problem being if I don’t make it by next Tuesday then I’m away for at least ten days (trying to fix our EQC house in Diamond Harbour). That piece now has a new beginning, which I post below, not to tease, but to indicate the direction it is moving toward:

 

We've had enough of the attacks on the Māori seats http://t.co/wJC9Oi7Y6c
— Te Ururoa Flavell (@TeUruroaFlavell) August 19, 2014

@TeUruroaFlavell If Left take over Maori seats, everything is lost for Maori identity; it's just another ruddy class war. #tangatawhenua
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) August 19, 2014

 

 

That favourite on my tweet was Te Ururoa, and I'm glad he did, although I’ll do him the respect of distancing his considered self from myself: he would be left of centre, in my estimation, but his favouriting means he realises the Maori seats are about something separate from a dialectical materialism that has nothing important to say about Maori ethnicity or identity and worse, the socialist program spawned by it which is the enemy of self-determination - (well, Te Ururoa might not go that far, but I will :) ).

 

The Left are the Borg of politics: their premise requires assimilation to its edicts of the population in total because socialist societal structures, and the funding of, cannot allow for opt out: it’s a society necessarily based on compulsion, surveillance, coercion and penalties for non-compliance, not on a peaceful voluntarism. Look at the history of socialism and of communism; look at the New Zealand Tax Administration Act. Therefore, if socialist political players such as the Green Party, Labour, and/or Internet Mana hold any of the seven Maori seats, what’s the point of the Maori seats, which are about ethnicity, identity and Maori self-determination? Only within the framework of tangata whenua do I support the Maori seats, my position prescribed by the principles of classical liberalism which allows for free expression and thus self-determination - Maori plus my own - despite too many one-law-for-all classical libs and libertarians, such as Jamie Whyte, seem to have forgotten this.

 

That’s possibly got your attention; this post is a wild one …