User Pays

As a community, what are our politics in New Zealand, what are our public ethics (if that is a real term)? The question occurred to me as I sat through another another committee meeting with those paragons of all the virtues, the New Zealand business men.  As always I left the meeting feeling spiritually and intellectually deflated.  I wondered why I find these people so unstimulating; after all they were all, without exception, successful, wealthy, driven etc.  All the best qualities for a human, or so we are now taught. And yet they seemed dull, envious, whiney, grasping....Are these not the characteristics of left-wingers like myself? According to the New Zealand Herald they are.
The particular event that precipitated my wondering was a "discussion" (more on this later) about billing for services.  Should services, say, be a shared cost or an individual cost?  Take medical care, and the use of Pharmac as a bulk purchasing instrument. A quick calculation showed that these result in a cheaper, more efficient system, which reached more people than the alternative, the American private insurance system. Cheaper and with fewer losers.  I made a huge mistake; I laughed when men and women at the meeting proposed in all seriousness that we adopt the American system.  I was made to understand that this was a War on Sin and that no cost was too high to ensure that each person was made to pay for what they consumed individually; that there should be no community payment.  I was even lectured on green issues; only by making each person pay for their own consumption could I ensure that people didn't waste! If people have to pay for their own health costs they will take better care of themselves. I looked at the man who spoke, as he puffed on a cigar, clutching his huge belly filled with fats.  I asked if an individual bill would make him focus on his health.  He said that it wouldn't because he was very, very wealthy.  However it would make poor people attend to limiting waste, and it is after all the poor who need that discipline...
The discussion widened.  I did my usual adolescent thing of arguing by reductio ad absurdem - "So" I said "As an Aucklander I should not have to pay towards the roads or health care of the West Coaster?"  Quite right, was the answer.  "So presumably we should not all be paying for the rescue of the trapped miners?" Now I was being silly; it would be unreasonable to expect the mining company to pay for this, some things must be a community responsibility. Things like the bail out of the banks and finance companies.  Things like the bail out of the Hobbit.  Parliamentary salaries.  Policing to protect property, although not to protect citizens from violence - that should be a private cost.  And so on.
Anyway, it started me wondering when we adopted the Thatcherite notion that there are only individuals, no societies.  When did we drop the old Kiwi attitude that we were one (small) country and united we stand, divided we crumble into the role of slaves to the powerful. Why did we swap the notion of equality to the notion that we have a monied aristocracy who "deserve" to have all the money?
When I talk to my children about free health, free education and so on they stare at me as if I were an aboriginal talking of the dream time - a mythical time that probably never existed.  And yet it did; and within my short life time too. So the change must have happened in the last thirty years.
So here is the central question: are we members of a community or a disparate group of competing individuals, owing nothing to each other? If you say the latter (waving "The Fountainhead" around) then where do you say Polynesian society fits into your brave world? A primitive hang-over from tribal times which they will grow out of, or something Europeans and Americans can re-learn from?  Do you say that if you are willing to have resources shared then your individuality is reduced, or enhanced? Sarah Palin-Key-Brash-Hide-Douglas would seem to say that any penny taxed reduces that tax-payer to a slave; whereas I am totally happy that my work can be used constructively to smooth out the slumps and booms which are the only (and doubtful) "gifts" of capitalism. And finally ask yourselves this; why do those clever people of the right, those that believe in the power of humans to solve every problem simply give up like faint-hearted Victorian ladies at the thought of planning a society and planning for the future?  Why do those who dismiss  all religion (when you look at the religious right they actually denounce most of Christ's teachings as communist) have this weird faith that so long as people are allowed, encouraged to indulge their individual greed without thought for anyone or anything else that things will inevitably come right and improve? 
When did we stop being New Zealanders and become Yankee clones? Roger Douglas; it cannot be said too often, this is the locus of the infection. We are to blame for believing him, but he brought the infection into our house.  So why did we give him a knight-hood instead of a prison term?