Best of 2025: Ryan Bridge - We shouldn't have to work for the government

Do you know what's really starts to rub me the wrong way?

It's governments telling us to do more things.

This morning, we've got the government coming out with yet another hotline.

Point of Order: How good (or bad) is China’s economy?

If you enjoy extreme scenarios, you won’t want to miss the rant essay Why Chaos Favors the Strong in the Coming Great Decoupling on the Campbell Ramble blog — a spirited case for a strong power slowly strangling a weaker opponent that merely looks strong.

David Bell: Child Sacrifice and Our Desire to Ignore It

Some actions of humans are so dark that we prefer to ignore them, avoiding the darkening of our own thoughts. When others assist us by denigrating truth-tellers or censoring news, we may be quietly grateful as life seems better when not intruded upon by the pain of victims or the abuse of their torturers.

Peter St Onge: Every Bureaucrat Destroys 138 Jobs

An Auburn University study says every single regulator destroys fully 138 private sector jobs every year you keep him on the job.

With nearly 300,000 federal regulators, the shock is that we still have any jobs at all.

Bert Olivier: Is Peace Possible Today?

As we approach Christmas, with its connotations of peace and goodwill to all people, and the New Year, when one traditionally comes up with ‘resolutions’ for the year ahead, with the intention of compensating for mistakes made during the past year, and of initiating creative projects for the future, one has to ask: is all of this just Heideggerian ‘idle talk,’ or is peace a realistic possibility?

Andrew Lowenthal: Free Speech Wins the Culture War

"Gradually, then suddenly,” Hemingway’s bankruptcy quote can just as easily be applied to politics. If you had told me six months ago that a motley crew of free speech advocates would deal a thumping blow to the censorship leviathan I would have been deeply sceptical.

I had thought the Twitter Files would be the blow, but it turns out that was just a softening-up affair. The Twitter Files certainly moved the needle in the culture at large, but the institutions mostly continued their stiff resistance to accountability and change.

Jeffrey A. Tucker: The Revolution of 2024

People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?

More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.

Peter St. Onge: They Have the Money - We Have the Numbers

Authoritarianism is back across the West — from Europe to the Biden-Harris censorship regime that would fit perfectly in Communist China.

I think many of us were surprised during Covid to realize just what the supposedly liberal West has become: Essentially the Soviet Union but with better uniforms — well, better video games, anyway.

Of course, it was decades in the making — Covid just showed their cards.

The question, as always, is What’s Next.

Daniel Klein: Don’t Let the ‘Infaux Thugs’ Close Down Debate

Today’s censors wield cudgels with the word ‘information.’ Content they don’t like they call ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation.’ The justification is fake. The protection is faux protection. Pretending to protect people from bad information by means of censorship may be called infaux thuggery.

The cudgels are hidden, of course, but it is not hard to see through the pretence and discern the underlying message: knuckle under or we will hurt you.

Rebekah Barnett: ACMA’s Role in Australia’s Censorship Campaign

Last year, the Australian Government’s proposed legislation to combat misinformation and disinformation was shot down in flames after a strong backlash over the threat to free expression, and the unfairness of special exemptions for government and media.

Critics complained that the bill would result in the censorship of a staggering range of speech, on issues from the weather, to scientific debate, to elections, to religion, and public health.

Peter St Onge: Save the Voters, Replace the Schools

It’s a modern fetish that we’re brilliant while our ancestors were idiots. After all, they didn’t have iPhones, the Internet, or Kim Kardashian.

This is also academic consensus, for what it’s worth: called the Flynn effect, the idea is people do better on puzzles so we must be smarter.

Jeffrey A. Tucker: Ten Points About Post-Lockdown Economics

The sudden economic lockdown of March 2020, the world over, was one of the more shocking moments in history. The very core of the economic problem from the beginning of recorded time was getting more of what people needed to them in a way that was sustainable given the inherent scarcities of the state of nature.

Regardless of the system, creating wealth was the stated goal, and humanity gradually discovered that trade, investment, marketing, and access to more via travel and creativity was the way forward.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 22/7/23

Mahuta aims more missiles – of the sanctionary variety – at Putin and his cronies

Was that wincing we heard from the Kremlin?

Probably. It would have been triggered by the news being communicated to Vladimir Putin that Nanaia Mahuta has announced a new tranche of 23 sanctions as part of New Zealand ongoing response to Russia’s illegal and unjustified assault on Ukraine.

Suze: Teaching the Truth about NZ History

Which version of NZ history are they teaching?

Last week a Northland school librarian hurriedly removed history books from a high school library lest student minds become contaminated by the “racist” propaganda. Why the panic, you ask, and how did the books get there?

2023 is the first year that NZ history is a compulsory subject in schools. Stuff have outdone themselves with accounts of horrifying reactions to books on NZ history that challenge the “authorised” (substitute sanitised) version of the Treaty, essential to implementing co-governance, separate Maori law and institutions.

Karl du Fresne: The incredible disappearing journalists

Over the years I’ve worked with hundreds of journalists. To all intents and purposes, most have vanished from sight.

Some have gone quietly into retirement, but many are still active – just not in journalism. People whose bylines were once familiar to newspaper readers have effectively gone underground, along with the sub-editors who massaged their copy into shape. They have mostly been absorbed into the nebulous world of public relations, or comms as it’s now known in the trade.

The digital revolution inflicted huge damage on the print media, precipitating a hollowing out of newsrooms and an exodus of skill and experience into the comms business. According to the Sapere report commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, the number of journalists fell by 52 per cent between 2000 and 2018.

Guy Hatchard: Shining a Light in Dark Places—Ten Ways the Government Controls the Pandemic Narrative

Ten ways the government and its allies control the pandemic narrative to ensure most of us are none the wiser!

This week Dr. Ian Town, chief scientific advisor to the Ministry of Health, announced that the unvaccinated are six times more likely to be hospitalized with Covid than the vaccinated.

Dr. Town prefaced his remarks with the caveat “the data is reasonably preliminary”.

Two weeks ago epidemiologist Dr. Michael Baker told us that the unvaccinated are 9 times more likely to be hospitalized.

So who is right, or do you, like me, smell a rat?

Bryce Edwards: What happened to the big “immigration reset”?

The Government promised a major reform of New Zealand’s immigration system, but when it was announced this week, many asked “is that it?”

Over the last two years Covid has turned the immigration tap off, and the Government argued this produced the perfect opportunity to reassess decades of “unbalanced immigration”. A “reset” was promised, and expectations built up that something quite significant was in the works.

Last year a “pathway to residency” was created for up to 165,000 existing visa workers. This had a hugely positive impact for those migrants, and was also a pragmatic solution when borders were closed, and labour shortages hit home. It was, however, a “one-off”, and the real issue has always been what will happen once borders fully re-open.

Mike Hosking: Three Waters another attack on democracy

I assume you didn’t miss the latest Three Waters announcement that was made on a Friday. It's an old trick, but this lot appear to love it.

Trouble with the new deal is it sort of changes things but then actually changes nothing.

The Government's argument is that they have listened to the committee that made various recommendations, they have accepted them, therefore that’s that. Trouble is, it isn't. That's because it must be remembered that many councils didn’t actually accept the changes offered.

The reality is things haven't changed right from the start. Three Waters is a bad idea and they want no part of it.

Point of Order: Enhancing numeracy skills will enable students to work out taxpayers’ share of compensation offer

Taxpayers and Wellington ratepayers will be picking up the tab for yet another political decision that has resulted from the breakdown of law and order and the surrendering of the grounds around Parliament to protesters for three weeks.

Wellington City Council and the Government have agreed to support inner-city Wellington businesses which lost significant revenue during what they described as “the illegal occupation at Parliament grounds” with a $1.2 million business relief fund.

Michael Bassett: Centralising everything

When Labour governments run out of ideas they have usually resorted to centralisation and more controls. In its final term, Peter Fraser’s ministry that had been one of the most creative in New Zealand’s history, centralised as tired ministers hoped their trusted bureaucrats would keep Labour’s faltering show on the road. The ministries of Walter Nash, Norman Kirk and Bill Rowling followed similar paths. Jacinda Ardern’s government, you’ll recall, had very little policy to start with. So little in fact that when it came to office in 2017 it had to set up more than two hundred committees and inquiries to tell it what to think and do. The results were pitiful. Almost no Kiwibuild houses were constructed, homeless numbers increased, poverty figures rose rather than declined, educational achievement standards kept slipping against other countries, and major infrastructure construction fell well behind schedule. Whenever criticised, rookie ministers blamed the previous government, and then Covid. Message? Centralising everything can’t compensate for the absence of carefully-thought-through policy.