Trim the government and give people fewer things to fight over
Dan Hannan
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We often talk as though the anger and authoritarianism in our politics were intrinsic, part of some global cycle, or perhaps a response to news fragmentation and the attention-deficit-inducing clickbait of social media. But some countries have managed to hold out against the trend, and it is worth looking at why.
Most European states, it is true, have seen their established political parties upended. The old parties of the Center-Left have been obliterated in France, the Low Countries, and most of Eastern and Central Europe. The Christian Democrats with whom they used to alternate in power have also lost ground across the Continent. Leftist voters have largely gone to more radical parties, especially the Greens. Rightists have turned to populist parties that have little interest in free markets.
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In the United States, where primaries anchor the parties to public opinion, these changes have happened within the established political blocs. Democrats have become obsessed with identity politics; Republicans have succumbed to Führerprinzip. Both hate free trade.
But things don’t have to be this way. I am writing from a country that is subject to the same cultural trends as the other great English-speaking democracies, where lots of people watch Fox and MSNBC and have strong opinions about U.S. elections, but that has just elected a mainstream conservative government on a platform of cutting tax, spending, and debt.
Welcome to New Zealand, where a three-party coalition was formed last week on a platform that America’s dwindling band of Reaganites can only dream of. National, the traditional party of the Center-Right, won 38% of the vote and will lead the government. ACT, a straightforwardly libertarian party, won 9%, a score surpassed among libertarians globally only by the one-off phenomenon of Javier Milei in Argentina. And New Zealand. First, the closest thing New Zealand has to a populist party, won 6%.
Their agreed program promises tax cuts, balanced budgets, and radical deregulation. To give you a flavor, they plan to scrap New Zealand’s drugs regulator and instead automatically approve any pharmaceutical product that has been signed off by at least two regulators in developed countries — the FDA, Europe’s EMA, Britain’s MHRA, and so on. This is the kind of sensible, cost-saving reform that Right-wing think tanks in every country propose but that politicians almost always hold back from implementing for fear of controversy. Not in New Zealand, where the Right-wing think-tankers are being eagerly hired by ministers who mean to waste no time in delivering.
What makes New Zealand different? How is it that even its populist party, normally happy to promote all sorts of eye-catching government schemes, is on board with cutting spending?
Has the country escaped U.S.-style culture wars? Not entirely. Regular readers will know that a regular complaint in this column is that American wokery has been exported across the Anglosphere, and New Zealand is no exception. Here, it takes the form of rows over the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the nation’s founding charter, whereby British sovereignty was established and Maori rights guaranteed. It is true that some of those rights were subsequently violated, but the treaty provided for a legal compensation process, and until an eye-blink ago, everyone was happy with it.
But BLM altered the mood, and the Labor government, supported by activist judges, began to go beyond the plain text of the treaty to create a jurisprudence based on vaguely defined treaty principles, all of which tended to promote collectivism in the name of Maori rights. The present government promised to halt that process, and was rewarded.
No, what makes New Zealand different is that its past leaders were prepared to make reforms which, though unpopular in the short term, proved hugely successful in the long term. Farm subsidies were scrapped, tariffs dropped, welfare reformed. Once these things had happened, few wanted to go back. New Zealanders, for example, are by far the biggest enthusiasts for free trade on the planet, with more than 90% of them approving of liberalization. And so, for once, the status quo bias favors small government.
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In the rest of the world, politicians balk at doing things that generate bad headlines, which free-market reforms almost always do. Lobbies defend state intervention, whether ethanol subsidies to sweeten Iowa primary voters or sugar tariffs to appeal to swing state Floridians. Politics becomes a tussle for resources, and everyone ends up grumpier.
You want people to go back to the relaxed, live-and-let-live attitudes we had before these ghastly culture wars? Then trim the government. It gives people fewer things to fight over.