Apolitical.

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Politics is the art of the possible. That is the art of how much can the politician possibly steal from others in a legal fashion.

ruveyn

I found this: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/ar ... le_base_54

So in deed New Zealand is even further to the right than US.

I am happy now.

I know a lot of apolitical center-right people who have stopped caring.

I actually think if apolitical people started voting, we'd have much better govt because it wouldn't be ruled by the fringe elements of each party.

of course, that assumes the apolitical people take interest in politics and make informed decisions.

New Zealand is sometimes referred to by American right-wing think tanks, without a trace of sarcasm, as the "libertarian miracle".

Let's just say that it's not so easy to consider it a "miracle" when you live here. More like a tragic mistake that we are slowly recovering from.

What are the problems in New Zealand?

ruveyn

It is more right wing than the US.

If that's not good alone to scare you, I don't know what would.

It is like if you found a country more left wing than Cuba.

That is possibly a misleading thing to say. "Cultural" right-wingers are actually pretty rare in New Zealand. There is very little religious identity politics, for example.

But economically, we went through a massive process of privatisation and regulation-cutting, which is quite odd since we used to have a massive welfare state, pieces of which still remain in place. Even stranger is the fact that this privatisation was carried out with very little mandate by a Prime Minister from the "centre-left" Labour party, who must have discovered Milton Friedman while in office or something.

The results are: the crippling of unions, the creation of ugly cities due to lack of civic planning, a growing economic stratification, and a whole lot of monopolies and cartels seizing control of essential services and ripping us off.