Colinxy: Capitalism Isn’t Utopian — And That’s Why It Works

A commenter on Breaking Views left this remark under a repost of one of my articles:

"NZ’s largest malt mill closed today and 230 jobs lost. That’s the right for you, economic destruction.

It’s an emotionally powerful line, and I understand why people reach for it. Business closures are painful. Redundancy is miserable. I’ve been through it myself, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Colinxy: The Origins of Equality - A Genealogy of an Idea That Took Millennia to Mature

Equality is one of those concepts that modern politics treats as self‑evident, universal, and morally compulsory. Yet the road to equality is anything but straightforward. It took thousands of years for the idea to even form, let alone become politically actionable. And even today, we fight over what equality means: equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes (now rebranded as equity). For readers wanting the deeper dive into that modern conflict, see my earlier piece: The Equalities: Merit, Marxism, and the War Over Fairness.

Colinxy: What Have the Left Ever Done for Us?

A Guided Tour Through a Meme, a Myth, and a Manufactured History

A meme has been making the rounds on social media — a Left‑wing riff on Life of Brian’s famous “What have the Romans ever done for us?” sketch. The structure is familiar:

Colinxy: The Industrial Revolution and the Myth of Capitalist Child Labour

How Prosperity, Not Poverty, Ended the Drudgery of Childhood

One of the more curious accusations routinely hurled at the Industrial Revolution, and by extension at capitalism itself, is the charge of child labour. The argument is delivered with theatrical indignation, as though the moment steam engines appeared, Victorian factory owners spontaneously invented the idea of putting children to work.

This is historically illiterate. Child labour did not begin with capitalism. It predates the Industrial Revolution by millennia.

Colinxy: Man’s Oldest Story

If humanity has a single shared story — a myth so ancient it predates nations, languages, and even our migration out of Africa — it is the story of the Pleiades. No other tale appears so consistently across cultures, continents, and epochs. While the details vary, the core narrative is astonishingly stable: a cluster of seven stars, often described as seven sisters, seven maidens, or seven beings, with the persistent puzzle that only six are visible to the naked eye.

Colinxy: Why the Minimum Wage Hurts the Poor.....

Why the Minimum Wage Hurts the Poor — And How Unions Used It to Enforce Racial Exclusion

Few policies enjoy such unearned moral prestige as the minimum wage. It is presented as a simple act of compassion: raise the legal wage floor, and the poor will rise with it. Politicians love it because it costs them nothing. Activists love it because it sounds righteous. Unions love it because it protects their members from competition.

Colinxy: Qiulae Wong - Technocratic Marxist

Qiulae Wong, current leader of The Opportunities Party (TOP), presents herself as a modern, data‑driven reformer. But when you examine her intellectual influences, policy preferences, and institutional affiliations, a very different picture emerges: a synthesis of technocracy, ESG managerialism, and soft‑Marxist redistribution — what I have elsewhere called Technocratic Marxism.

Colinxy: A Tax Suggestion for the Coalition

Marama Davidson recently told Ryan Bridge she’d be perfectly happy to pay more tax. Chloe Swarbrick claims people approach her all the time, saying the same thing. And every election cycle, a parade of self‑anointed “rich people” step forward to publicly announce their eagerness to hand more of their money to the State.

Fine. If they’re that desperate to give the government more of their income, let’s make it easy for them.

Colinxy: Is There a “Cost of Greed” Crisis?

Chlöe Swarbrick recently declared that New Zealand is facing a “Cost of Greed Crisis.” It’s a catchy line; the sort of slogan that fits neatly into a press release and even more neatly into a worldview where every social problem is caused by someone else having too much.

But let’s take the claim seriously for a moment. Is there a “Cost of Greed Crisis”?

Surprisingly, yes. But not in the way Swarbrick imagines.

Colinxy: White Babies Are Racist…According to Racists

Every few years, a peculiar claim bubbles up from the activist‑academic complex and spreads through the media like mould on damp plaster: “White babies are racist.”

Sometimes it’s softened to “all babies show racial bias by 6–9 months.” Sometimes it’s framed as a scientific breakthrough. Sometimes it’s used to justify ideological programmes in early childhood education.

But the core message is always the same: Racism is innate, universal, and detectable before a child can crawl.

Colinxy: Profit vs. Plunder - The Two Economic Moralities

Two Ways of Seeing the World

Every political ideology rests on an implicit theory of how wealth comes into existence. Strip away the slogans, the moralising, the academic jargon, and you find only two fundamental worldviews:

Colinxy: Labour’s “Three Free GP Visits”......

Labour’s “Three Free GP Visits”: A Policy That Solves Nothing Except Labour’s Need for a Slogan

Labour’s Health Spokesperson, Ayesha Jennifer Verrall, is often introduced to the public with the reassuring phrase “she’s a doctor.” True—though her practising licence appears to have lapsed…and she is now the face of Labour’s latest health‑sector miracle cure: three free GP visits for every New Zealander.

“Free,” of course, being the political euphemism for taxpayer‑funded, which in turn is the bureaucratic euphemism for you will pay for this, just not at the counter.

Colinxy: The Genealogy of New Zealand’s Education Decline

How a world‑class system was slowly hollowed out by ideology, bureaucracy, and bad theory

New Zealand once had one of the strongest education systems in the world. High literacy. High numeracy. High trust. Minimal bureaucracy. Teachers who taught. Students who learned. Parents who understood what schools were for.

That world is gone.

Colinxy: Why Is Labour Delaying Its Policy Announcements?

The politics of silence, vagueness, and strategic fog

Labour’s refusal to release its full policy platform is no mystery. It is a strategy, and not a particularly subtle one. When a party is confident, it releases policy early. When a party is terrified of how voters will react, it releases policy late, in fragments, or not at all.

Chris Hipkins’ Labour is firmly in the second category.

Colinxy: What Are Erica Stanford’s Education Reforms Really About?

And are NZ teachers correct about where the system is headed?

I’ll start with a confession: I am pleasantly surprised by Erica Stanford. Not because she is perfect, no minister is, but because she is the first Education Minister in decades willing to say the quiet part out loud:

Critical Pedagogy, the Neo‑Marxist backbone of our curriculum, has to go[i].

Colinxy: The Evolving Māori Language — and Who Controls It

Every so often, I encounter the claim that “most of the Māori language is made up.” Is that fair?

Only partly. All living languages evolve. They absorb new words, shift meanings, and quietly abandon older vocabulary. Māori has survived into the 21st century, so of course it undergoes the same pressures as English, French, or Japanese.

But the real issue is not whether Māori changes. It is how it changes — organically or by decree.

Colinxy: Reclaiming the West

There are moments when it feels as though the twin cults of Marx and Islam, each with its own absolutist creed, each hostile to the foundations of Western civilisation, are poised to overwhelm the cultural, moral, and institutional inheritance that made the modern world possible.

What follows is not a master‑plan or manifesto, but a set of practical strategies for halting the erosion and beginning the long work of recovery.

Colinxy: The Infantilisation of the Citizen

How Bureaucracies and Activist Movements Turn Adults Into Children

One of the most striking features of modern governance, not just in New Zealand, but across the Western world, is the steady infantilisation of the citizen[i]. Adults who were once expected to be treated as responsible agents are now spoken to, managed, and regulated as though they are children in need of constant supervision[ii].

This is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of a bureaucratic culture that sees itself as the parent and the public as its dependents.

Colinxy: The Success Rate of Rehabilitation of Criminals

New Zealand Labour’s crime policy is built on a simple premise: rehabilitation works, and therefore the best way to reduce crime is to focus on treatment, programmes, and reducing reoffending. Labour rejects the “tough on crime” approach and frames rehabilitation as the humane, evidence‑based alternative.

Colinxy: The New Zealand Mounted Rifles - The Forgotten ANZAC Elite

Some New Zealand schoolchildren can recite Gallipoli like scripture. They can tell you about the cliffs, the trenches, the futility, the sacrifice, the mythology. What they cannot tell you, because the curriculum barely mentions it, is that our most consistently successful soldiers of the First World War weren’t on the Dardanelles at all.

They were on horseback in the Sinai, Palestine, and the Jordan Valley.