The Rates increases will continue until morale improves

There's an article in the Herald today about an older woman living in Karori who is leading the "revolt" against the rate increases in Wellington. And look, I get it. I live in Wellington, too, and yes, the rate increases have been a lot and made it harder to get by.

But...

The woman's rage is focused on the wrong people. It's not the current council's fault. It's not even the last council's fault; rather, it's been pretty much every council's fault since the late 1970s.

Boring history part

Hayek's economics gave birth to Milton Friedman's Chicago School of economics, which started to replace Keynesianism in most Western democracies in the late 1970s/80s. Everyone associates it primarily with Reagan, Thatcher, and, here in NZ, Roger Douglas.

Those of us on the left shorthand this theory to trickle down - make life cheaper for the rich, and the money they don't have to pay in taxes will trickle down like an inflamed prostate impacted piss all over the rest of us.

And so, low taxation became the mantra for nearly all governments in that era. Not just right-wing ones, either. French socialists implemented a form of Chicago School due to a deteriorating financial situation. The 1970s were shit for most places. Mainly due to the oil crisis, but many variables were at play.

And as with politics, whenever there are many varied problems, we find an overly simplistic silver bullet and fire it.

So for the last 45-odd years, particularly at the local government level, most candidates have run on a "we'll keep your rates low" campaign. And people have backed that approach. And the direct result of that is under-investment in infrastructure. Particularly, in Wellington's case, pipes. Because pipes ain't a sexy vote-winning thing to invest in. We can't see the pipes. We only even know about them when they are fucking out. As they are now. But for those running in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and even 2010s, not really a problem.

So we are seeing a direct result of a shitty low-tax political ideology from 45 years ago, showing up now because that'd be about how long you'd expect ageing infrastructure to last if it's not constantly being worked on.

So it's not that the recent rate increases are out of proportion and unfair; it's that rates have been artificially low for 40 years. And it just so happens that it's all fallen apart in the last two trienniums. It's taken more courage for this council to say, "We need to increase rates a fuckload because shit's expensive, yo" than it has for the previous councils not to make the hard calls.

This doesn't change how hard it is for the individual to cope with, and that's the hard part. This is not helped by the fact that we seem to only get media stories about ZOMG CYCLE LANES BAD instead of "this council actually ran on a platform, got elected on that platform, and is delivering on it—but also there's this other stuff that it turns out we haven't been paying for and actually need to, and it's about making hard calls." 

This is true of so much of life. We in the West all benefit from fuckery in other places, like if you really dug into how much your TV should truly cost based on what's needed to make it and what a fair wage would be for the labour required to do it, we should be paying thousands more. But we don't. We're not. And we just quietly don't talk about it.

I said on Twitter the other day that I thought there should be a complete CGT that captures all profit on capital, including that of a family home. And in among all the shit-head replies I got, there were so many who said that 'you don't make people wealthy by taxing them more', and I think we've been tricked into thinking about what "being wealthy" means. Because for me, if I'm paying more tax, and as a result we have a proper fully funded health system, and a functioning public transport network that's free, and all the other things that high taxation should bring, then yeah, I'd feel pretty wealthy. But the prevailing individualism around "fuck you, I got mine" is so insidious and widespread that I don't know how to shift minds on it.

So yeah, Chicago School + campaigning on low taxation + nearly 5 decades, and this is what you get. Don't blame Tory Whanau. Blame tory doctrine.