Who Gives a Fuck About the Harbour Bridge
A report released today revealed that awful poor parents aren't giving enough money to their children, therefore creating child poverty. South Auckland children aren't bought presents for their birthday, haven't gone over the harbour bridge, and sometimes aren't provided lunch. Obivously this is their parents fault, and we need to change these parents so they start providing a better experience for their kids.
ARGH - really don't listen Linda Clark on this she's at her worst.
The way poor parents were blamed for not providing their kids with the stuff they can't afford was appalling, but there was also a strong current of racism throughout the Linda Clark interview. The principals of local schools were saying it was a problem that South Auckland kids never left their communities to venture into the rest of the world, that the community was self-sufficient. Someone said that you could live your life in South Auckland and believe that New Zealand was a polynesian country, as if this was a problem.
Did anyone ask North Harbour kids if they'd ever been to South Auckland?
Just to be totally clear the cause of child poverty is lack of money in families. The cause of families not having enough money is capitalism. Capitalism is bad, so we should try and end it. In the meantime we should get more money to people - we could start by extending the working for families package to beneficiaries.
Not that I'm a raving capitalist myself, but for curiosity's sake, but when the revolution comes, what are you going to replace capitalism with? Large scale planned economy socialism? That's been tried, and it led to huge famines in the countries concerned.
ReplyDeleteThere have been huge famines in countries without planned economies too. We need a democratic planned economy rather than a totalitarian one. But in my opinion it's not our job to plan out in precise detail how the world should be run now; we just need to get everyone else to understand how bad capitalism is, then we can *all* work on developing a viable alternative.
ReplyDeleteWell, since capitalism in a recogniseably modern form was developed sometime around the 12th/13th centuries by first the big european monasteries, then borrowed by the italian city states, the surpluses it generates, while often wasted, have been suficiently huge to fuel the biggest sustained increase in living standards the world has yet seen. I'm not sure there are viable alternatives that are physically capable of working around human greed, corruption and incompetence to produce similar results.
ReplyDeleteApart from agrarianism, of course :) Capitalism has done its job of making technology efficient, and raising our standards of living. It's time to call it a day for material progress, and focus more on making some spiritual progress.
ReplyDeleteAccording to Marx, capitalism is the greatest mode of production the world has yet seen. It was a radical and drastic improvement over everything that went before it. He figured it will eventually be replaced by something even better once enough people figure out that the democracy we've gained in the political sphere could eventually be applied in the economic sphere as well - but that's a long way from saying "capitalism is bad". Capitalism may indeed be bad, but it sure beats the hell out of tribalism or feudalism.
ReplyDeleteA.J.: materialism is only just past its birth pangs - to consider its eventual full adulthood check out the "Culture" novels by Iain M. Banks. We are the future, mate.