Lindsay Perigo
Lindsay Perigo

The Politically Incorrect Show - 27/07/2001

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Friday July 27, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down!]

Recent electricity price rises & the spectre of power shortages, caused by low lake levels & exacerbated by the shambles in the industry itself, have roused the state-worshippers to fever pitch as they denounce "deregulation" & demand that the "guvammint DO something." The "guvammint" is only too pleased to oblige, & is proposing a whole new quango with a whole new bunch of regulatory powers. Talk about taking more of the poison that was killing you in the first place!

Let me repeat here formally the ad-libbed comments I made on the situation yesterday. What Max Bradford of the National Socialists gave us was NOT "deregulation" but a half-baked dog's breakfast that left the government owning most of the industry & forced a completely gratuitous & stupid split between generators & distributors. This dog's breakfast is most assuredly not a free market in electricity. A free market would allow for the unrestricted development of any form of energy that anyone wanted to ahead with or get involved with. It would not be dogged by government ownership, participation & restrictions. It probably would have long since rendered hydro-generation obsolete, but about that we can only speculate. It most certainly would NOT have produced the catastrophic collapse of the power supply that plagued Auckland for three months a couple of years back & made us the butt of jokes around the world. After decades of public ownership & utter neglect of cable-maintenance, the authorities didn't even know where to dig to repair or replace the things! THOSE are the "halcyon days" to which the state-worshippers are baying for a return!

Californians will feel some empathy for New Zealand's plight. They've had the same nonsense there, & public & politicians alike are promoting the same sorry solutions. The upcoming issue of my magazine, The Free Radical, includes an article by Scott Sutton analysing & chronicling the Californian power crisis & the political football it has become. I commend it to your attention. In the meantime, I invite you to reflect on this quotation from Ayn Rand which is included in Scott's article & is especially apposite here:

"If a detailed, factual study were made of all those instances in the history of American industry which have been used by the statists as an indictment of free enterprise and as an argument in favor of a government-controlled economy, it would be found that the actions blamed on businessmen were caused, necessitated, and made possible only by government intervention in business. The evils, popularly ascribed to big industrialists, were not the result of an unregulated industry, but of government power over industry. The villain in the picture was not the businessman, but the legislator, not free enterprise, but government controls."


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