JD: We Want More

Guest post on The Good Oil by JD

Let’s start from this general premise: humanity is genetically programmed to want more.

To our ancient ancestors, the difference between no food in the cave and enough for one or several days’ supply was profound. Effectively a matter of life and death. More stuff to hand meant less need to venture out and less chance of succumbing to the many dangers lurking all around.

Across the board we’re all driven to want more: even billionaires want more billions.

Of course, they often claim the dollars don’t matter, or ‘it’s just a way of keeping score’, but then they always want a bigger score, so the premise holds good.

But hold on, what of the hermit, the sadhu, the aesthete who forsakes all worldly goods. Are they not an exception?

They are not. Eschewing possessions, they instead pursue concepts of ‘purity’ or ‘godliness’ or whatever other spiritual desire drives them, with the bottom line being they want more of it.

As Alexander Fraser Tytler, Scottish legal scholar and historian, famously said as far back as the 18th century:

While man is being instigated by the love of power – a passion visible in an infant, and common to us even with the inferior animals – he will seek personal superiority (i.e., ‘more’) in preference to every matter of a general concern.

Accepting that this drive for more is innate, we should not be surprised to see it expressed across the political spectrum in NZ.

National wants more for business and the farmers, Labour ostensibly wants more for the working classes (albeit a fast-disappearing group in our welfare-centric society), TPM wants more compensation for grievances and ‘Māori’ (however loosely defined), ACT wants more for everyone equally, the Greens want more for every woke subgroup the other parties haven’t thought of and Winston Peter’s NZF just wants im(more)tality for Winston.

To quote Tytler again:

At best, man will employ himself in advancing the public good as the means of individual distinction and elevation: he will promote the interest of the state from the selfish but most useful passion of making himself considerable in that establishment which he labors to aggrandise. Such is the true picture of man as a political agent.

Clearly, then, politicians who claim to be part of humanity, even despite counter argument from many, want more for themselves and, to further that ambition, they will hand-on-heart promise, to anyone who will listen, that they can deliver more for them too. ‘All you have to do is vote for me and you can have your heart’s desires, plus a trip for two to Trinidad,’ is the common theme behind all political campaigning.

There is of course one small difficulty. How to pay for it? And that, since no one wants to pay more taxes, means borrowing or printing money as the only alternative… and the problems compound.

Crisis develops as the government debt to GDP ratio in NZ (as across Western democracies in general) rises to unsustainable levels.

Society begins to collapse under the weight of ever-increasing demands for government funding of every idea the populace wishes to pursue, with the concurrent demand for welfare support that this entails.

Inevitably and paradoxically, as more and more people enjoy government largesse, fewer and fewer people remain in productive employment to generate the wealth and taxes required to fund it.

Current estimates tell us 12 per cent of the working age population of NZ is on some kind of government benefit, and four out of five Kiwi adults are either pensioners, government and local government employees or employed in the wider government sectors of health, education, law enforcement, etc.

That means only one in five Kiwi adults are engaged in the private, wealth-producing areas of the economy (consequently, should you chance upon one of this rare breed in the street, it is recommended that you stop and shake their hand).

Eventually, as the welfare state expands and the tax base atrophies, wild promises are made from the left that ‘we will pay for it all by taxing the rich’. But, given that capital knows no boundaries, this mythical tribe, the Kiwi Rich, simply buggers off overseas leaving the government no choice but to borrow, or print more and more money to fill the gaps until the currency collapses and economic turmoil results.

This burgeoning of state-funded largesse to the point of fiscal collapse is a problem repeated, throughout history in civilisations and empires all thought of in their day as being ‘permanent’. The Romans, the Spanish, the French, the British, Weimar Germany, together with more current examples in Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela and Turkey.

And so we come to this final quote attributed to Tytler:

 

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.

From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”

NZ is clearly in the penultimate stage, “from apathy to dependence”, and we need only look towards the US to see an example of a nation which may be entering the final stage under the “executive order”, neo-dictatorship, of Donald Trump.

Is NZ also teetering on this brink? Probably not yet. We’re most likely due for one or two more big-promising, big-spending, but ultimately ineffective, rounds of government before the reducing size of the economic pie, and the internecine battles that engenders, drive us to the point where our very own dictator appears to ‘Make NZ Great Again’.

However, given that this appearance is inevitable, the question then becomes will that ‘Great Leader’, come from the Left or Right?

Sadly, knowing the track record of both of these manifestations of dictatorship throughout history, we wait with interest and no little trepidation.