How The Economy Looks From Canada
By Murray Dobbin - Financial Post - Canada

Vaunted privatization push devastated the country, rather than saving it. It has been so long since anyone in the business press has praised the New Zealand "miracle" it is almost as if we imagined the whole thing . . . .the fifteen year free market experiment has been an unmitigated disaster.

The suffering caused amongst ordinary New Zealanders is well known . . . the economic disruption of hundreds of thousands of lives and health care, education and other social services devastated by the mad marketplace scientists.

Only the wealthy in New Zealand could see any success in this destructive exercise in social engineering.

There are lessons from New Zealand, but they do not involve adopting that tortured country as a model.

* The first lesson is that the unfettered application of ideology is inevitably destructive -- not just of democracy, social peace and equality but of the economy . . . .

* The second lesson is that parliamentary democracy Anglo- Saxon style has proven extremely vulnerable to the ravages of ideology. A virtual executive dictatorship can implement policies that are never even debated during elections - as happened in New Zealand in 1984. . . .

And that leads to the last lesson. Globalization is not inevitable nor irreversible.

The current New Zealand government ( a coalition of a chastened Labour Party and the left-wing Alliance) is unfortunately still committed to signing free trade and investment agreements. But it is reversing many of the most destructive policies . . .the pity is that New Zealanders had to suffer through so much in the first place. .

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