Someone Else’s Country looks critically at the radical economic changes implemented by the 1984 Labour Government – where privatisation of state assets was part of a wider agenda that sought to remake New Zealand as a model free market state. The trickle-down ‘Rogernomics’ rhetoric warned of no gain without pain, and here the theory is counterpointed by the social effects (redundant workers, Post Office closures). Made by Alister Barry in 1996 when the effects were raw, the film draws extensively on archive footage and interviews with key “witnesses to history.”
http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/someone-elses-country-1996
The problem is not privatization of production but the concentrated ownership of production and thus markets. Labor workers MUST acquire ownership in corporate wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital assets, and not support the concentration of ownership. The problem is New Zealand and all other economies operate based on one-factor (i.e., laboristic) assumptions that justify artificially and coercively inflated wage rates, which inflate market prices. Such also lead to mercantilist capitalist and protectionist labor interferences with free and open markets in labor rates, based on the counter-productive goal of “protecting jobs” at the expense of consumers, all in the name of national “full employment” rather than two-factor “full ownership” policies. The real-world reality is that the relative productiveness of labor has been diminishing in the labor-capital mix as creative individuals redesign our technologies. Conventional economists have based their notions of distributive justice on their outmoded one-factor paradigm by ignoring this trend that has been accelerating at an exponential rate since the industrial revolution took off about the time of the American Revolution. In the case of America, if the nation had adopted a Capital Homestead Act instead of the Employment Act of 1946, the minimum wage could have remained at 25 cents an hour but workers would have been receiving more adequate and secure incomes today from dividend checks and American industrial jobs would never have been lost under what best-selling author calls “wage arbitrage” to low-wage workers in China, India and elsewhere in the emerging global economy.
