During urgency last week, parliament ratified, through amending legislation, two new FTAs: one with Malaysia and the other with Hong Kong (technically, the HK treaty is called a Closer Economic Partnership (CEP) agreement).
Labour supported the passage of both Bills. After all, former Labour Trade Ministers Jim Sutton and Phil Goff did the ground work. However, I have major concerns about the government’s (and Grosser’s) ability to put the framework in place that will allow NZ companies to take advantage of these agreements.
In last year’s budget the govt cut $110m over 4 years from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise’s (NZTE) budget, thereby slashing the funding that Labour had directed towards developing NZ international markets.
Why is a government overseas development agency important? I could write a book on this, however, in a nutshell, 97% of NZ companies are SMEs (they employ 19 staff or less). This means the vast majority that may have export potential simply do not have the resources to: a) employ a full time International Marketing or Market Development Manager, b) set up an office in an off-shore market, or c) fund the level of due diligence necessary to justify capital expansion in order to become ‘export-ready’.
Only 12% of our exports now go to Europe – and these two FTAs were ratified with countries that have completely different cultures, customs, languages, legal systems etc. Exporting into Asia is a whole new ball game and success requires a significant level of competency that is in short supply in NZ. The Fonterra’s and Fletcher’s will be able to take advantage of these FTAs as they do have the resources, knowledge and networks, but as we know, these firms are few and far between.
This is where NZTE should come to the fore. This government organisation should, in my view, be NZ’s international eyes and ears (and a lot more besides…). About 6 months ago, I asked the retiring CEO of NZTE if his organisation was NZ’s international market development manager, and he replied “if only…”.
How can NZ achieve an international vision when $110m has been cut to the budget of the country’s off-shore operators? Quite simply, we can’t.
I think we all agree (except the Greens..) that if NZ is to achieve a high level of sustainable economic growth, it has to be though a much greater level of international engagement (ie grow our export volumes, value and competencies). Negotiating free trade agreements is an important step, however, helping NZ companies see the possibilities and reach their potential is vital if we are going to make it a reality. National is failing on this one I am afraid.
Nice post Stuart, hope you follow this up.
The question I have is why is NACT thought of as the natural home of business and private enterprise when National clearly have no idea of how to support productive business operations. (Beyond cutting corporate taxes for banks and other large companies. They just know how to game the economy not grow it).
Labour – time to be seen as the natural base for productive advanced industries and for growing our export capabilities to generate increasing levels of income.
NACT’s hands off laissez faire approach will never get the job done.
(By the way, didn’t the Govt just give the wine industry several million dollars to promote itself in export markets?)
Comparitive Advantages don’t exist anymore … can we stop rushing like a bull at the dogma of free trade…
Stuart, without resorting to either plain ole ideology or handwaving like “I think we all agree” etc, can you make a logical and balanced case in favour of FTAs? (In the context of NZ, here and bow, I mean). By balanced, I mean one that considers both risks and benefits.
This is an important issue and I don’t think we fully understand it yet.
Doesn’t matter Rainman I think if God/The God’s/Whatever’s up their came down in all their mighty glory and said FREE TRADE IS WRONG people would still do it coz we’ve already reached the Dogma
Jobs will continue to be lost, absolute advantage of the richest nations will continue to be pursued, people of poorer nations will continue to pay the price of what the people of richer nations will pay for goods/services, debt will continue to rise in countries with an imbalance in exports/imports on their current account balance, economic imperalism will continue to strip nations of self sovreignty…
Until we abandon the Dogma but the nature of the Dogma is that it’s near impossible to abandon once it’s been reached
Dylan – a free trade agreement can be of help to NZ if it gives us access to new markets for our mature and competitive industries to sell into.
It is of course of less help if overseas players enter our markets and squeeze our less competitive industries out before they are ready to go toe to toe.
Remember: “ALL FREE TRADE IS WRONG” is merely another dogma.
Doing what is needed to grow foreign currency receipts now and in the future – that’s practical.
“I have major concerns about the government’s (and Grosser’s) ability to put the framework in place that will allow NZ companies to take advantage of these agreements.” – Don’t worry, mate
, you’d be surprised how much a dude can get done while he’s drunk! 
Spud, that’s not up to your usual standard of humour. And Stuart, the man’s name is Groser. It has one ‘s’.
@Spud
I dont care how drunk a person is as long as the work they produce is up to standard…
‘Dylan – a free trade agreement can be of help to NZ if it gives us access to new markets for our mature and competitive industries to sell into.’
Competitive is the key word there. Loota, how do you expect New Zealand to be competitive in the world market. We are an tiny nation with 4 million people and our GDP is a coin toss compared to the larger nations of the world.
‘Doing what is needed to grow foreign currency receipts now and in the future – that’s practical.’
As long as we have Free Trade our export receipts will NEVER EVER outweigh our Import payments.
Our export of Agricultural good’s contribute to 2/3 of our export income. This is not a benefit to New Zealand. It’s a reliance that is hanging by a thread. You guys do realise that we are the only developed country in the world to do free trade with Agriculture and if another developed country were to liberalise their Agriculture we would not be able to compete.
And with the whole world pushing harder and harder for globalised free trade that day is coming ever closer.
It would be like Britain joining the EU all over again. And this time we won’t have all the SOEs to sell off to bail us out.
What do you see the NTZE doing that KEA can’t..?
http://www.keanewzealand.com/
Do you see us setting up NZTE offices in places like London, New York, LA, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, etc and having a register of all NZ small companies and what they do and do some advertising, in country, to check out the NZTE..? Can you explain to me how that isn’t the internet..?
@rainman: IMO FTA’s are excellent for NZ for two reasons:
- Goods are cheaper for consumers here
- Our exporters have greater markets with which they can create wealth for NZ
The tradeoffs are:
- Lower job security
- Greater wealth inequality
It’s a tough compromise but overall I think it raises our standard of living more than what we used to have (GDP grow of 1.5% for 30 years) and the government can control wealth inequality through the levers of power (taxes)…
@Chris
a,
Oooooh 
b, So you’d hire me if I was standing there swaying?
c, I wanna work for you, I’ll buy one of those beer hats
@Spud
I’d check you work history and references first
Dylan said:
Let’s put defeatism aside for a moment and think of – Sir Ernest Rutherford, climbing Mount Everest, the World’s Fastest Indian, nuclear free NZ, NAVMAN, TradeMe, home made NZL-60, battling multiple times world champions Italy to a draw…until 25 years ago we were toe to toe with Singapore (who was a tiny nation with 4 million people and a GDP a coin toss compared to the larger nations of the world)…we have not had our lands invaded and ruined by war (China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, all of whom now have thriving high tech industries)…and our Govt is not saddled by unmanageable amounts of debt so we can invest in our productive capacity (unlike UK, Greece, Spain,…)…and not so captured by lobbyinsts and special interests we cannot make real change (US).
The world is NZ’s bluff oyster my friend!
Although I should say Dylan you make a number of very salient points. Our continuing reliance on hort/ag is our achilles heel.
JMH:
I imagine that a Govt agency would have access to areas and officers that others may not.
The internet cannot organise face to face meetings with key locals like a well established and well connected NZTE office can. (Important for doing business in Asia).
No reason why synergies between the approaches could not be explored.
“I’d check you work history and references first” – I’ll supply you with my CV and list of favourite drinks!
I’ll get some testimonials from my mates 
I can even boast with clear headedness while drunk! I even occasionally blog here drunk!
As for our dairy industry, I see someone wants to bring out sparking moo juice now
“I can even boast with clear headedness while drunk” – Typo, I meant I can be clear headed while drunk, just the drunken worker you need!
@Dylan I believe you are wrong on all three of your previous posts:
Our size can be our competetive advantage; there are a few studies showing that small urbanised nations can rapidly change their fortunes, we can be flexible, a melting pot for new ideas and given our multiculturalism other culture’s ideas but we must be open to change and stop looking at the past like it’s something we should return to…
This small size gives us an advantage as we are going to have to be ready for big changes, by the time I die (in hopefully 70 years but most likely 50) we will have computers with higher analytical powers than a human mind and drugs tailormade for your DNA, Asia will be the centre of world economic power, the world will be unrecognisable… Remember that 90% of the scientists that has ever lived are alive today and the first 10% gave us – Gallileo, Einstein, Newton, Descartes, etc…
We are an open (but isolated) nation that must rely on trade… Every FTA should be celebrated and it is a reasonable goal for us pursue an FTA with every nation of the world (eventually) and eliminate tariffs…
On agriculture an FTA with the US and EU would massively open up their markets to our farmers, we farm without subsidy, liberalisation of developed economies cannot hurt us, we are bloody good at it, we outcompete them, non-liberalisation of their farms is hurting us (and costing their consumers)… Next field Days I have to get down to it…
The only thing stopping our CAD from returning to positive is that individuals are not saving… In many cases buying things they don’t need… It cannot go on forever – as the Americans are about to find out – they’ll need an emergency budget within the next 2 years I believe…
No need to be so down, the future is looking great and this is one of the most exciting times to be alive ever – in history two things have always been true:
- The world has almost always been getting better
- Almost everyone has thought it’s getting worse
Jeremy, the negatives you give higher up in the thread don’t make FTAs a “tough compromise”, they’re potentially catastrophic. In the short term, sure, cheaper imports and possibly increased exports are nice, but the lack of resilience on the other end of the ledger is likely to cause problems in the long term.
All the low skill workers who lose their jobs as a result of FTA pressure can’t benefit from cheap imports much anyway, and combined with the increased inequality you list, end up costing us as a society in economic and social terms. (They’re not all going to jump off and start snazzy KBE businesses that generate export revenue, you know). Not to mention that they themselves bear a tremendous cost, as do the effective slaves working for little money in terrible conditions who produce the now-cheap import goods. This is just a race to the bottom, for the benefit of the few. Those cheap imports aren’t actually that cheap, if you add up all of the costs.
Also, of course, once we shut down all of our local manufacturing because the imports appear cheaper, we get locked in to getting things shipped to us, which assumes transport costs will remain low. I’ll bet they won’t, as we enter into a significant energy transition in the medium term. When costs go up, we have to go back to what we can readily (and maybe rapidly) produce locally – which will be a harsh adjustment indeed – or pay elevated prices.
Your “logic” that the world is almost always getting better and people often think this is not the case (so therefore the future is looking great) is, to be a bit direct, idiotic. Things can and do collapse, be they resources or societies – there is ample evidence for that – and just before things turn bad and begin to decline, they do appear to be the best that has ever been. Everything is grand, right up until it isn’t, anymore. The endless arc of progress is but a childish fable. Sorry to break this to you.
We value preparedness in the face of disaster, and self-reliance – in fact we love to vilify those who, for various reasons aren’t readily able to look after themselves – yet won’t apply the same value system in our economic and social planning. I think we are, collectively, mad.
Depends if you lived in Cambodia, Somalia, Sudan, the collapsing Soviet Union, or more recently in Haiti…
I agree NZ has very much to look forwards to and your point that small countries can pull themselves up rapidly is very true but sadly not every location on Earth is blessed like us.
@rainman, thank you for your thoughts but I have to respectfully disagree… I don’t view energy descent as a bad thing, we can restart manufacturing and repairs, the price system can take us to some pretty green places and in part I hope energy descent saves us from ourselves…
I think we’ll fundamentally disagree about how best to plan an economy, I don’t think it’s prudent to plan one as though the sky was going to fall at any mintue… Look at a graph of world pop over time and world wealth over time… I don’t share your bleak outlook…
@Loota, obviously it’s not great living under dictatorships or natural disasters, the number of people living in freedom grows every year, if China’s increasing economic freedom leads to a change to political freedom, the majority of the world will switch from bondage to freedom for the first time…
Jeremy M Harris
I am interested in you reference to world population and wealth growth. Do you see that as a sustainable trend.
Much of the wealth has been pivoted on exploitation surrounding energy from fossil fuels and inflated future values using growth as an underpinning security.
I agree with reduction in energy use as it will happen anyway with our unsustainable consumption. Transport and travel which FTAs assume as a given, will rise in cost and diminish in viability.
Overseas trade in daily household supply items is an importers dream without a very big future. That will be two way also affecting our exports.
A dim picture if we remain on a more of the same path.
One way of strengthening our position is to have trade agreements that facilitate the growth of local supply reducing the need for imports. The guts of many local supply industries were ripped out with so called “reforms” of the 80s and 90s.
We import food from Asia, not just niche products but food lines grown here. Check your tins and packets.
Because we are a small island nation then our need for the future are very different to those of Asia and Australia.
Our loss of sovereignty very much affects our ability to shape our economy.
Very American presidential style sentiment. You mean political freedom particularly? Because plenty of places have a fair degree of economic freedom but not political freedom.
Does credit card and monthly repayment bondage count?
Time to watch ‘The Matrix’ again.
@John W: No I definitely don’t see world population growth as sustainable, it looks like it is going to top out around 9 – 11 billion, my guess is will be much lower eventually, after oil peaks at some point over the next twenty years – hopefully via natural decline – and then it will decline until energy demand meets what we can sustainably produce – I believe about 25% of our current use, until solar becomes truly sustainable…
We waste massive amounts of energy today, invest in bio diesel, insulation, solar and geothermal power, bus and rail companies, etc if you can… So ultimately I see our standard of living declining but I also see massive increases in efficeint energy use… I worry about coal to liquid technologies etc…
As for economic growth – yes I do see continued economic growth after a period of transistion and decline but I think it will be different than today, businesses that fulfill the triple bottom line, while growing, and find ways to utilise already extracted resources that have been discarded – ever and ever more efficeintly – will prosper…
A lot of really great, sustainable industries that aren’t profitable today become so at oil prices 2 – 3 times what they are today…
On overseas trade this will decline quite a lot, it is not out of the realms of possibility that container ships may be powered by some form of sail again in my lifetime but this is a good thing, more manufacturing at home, more broken items repaired rather than discarded, better use of resources, more local food production etc. to quote Jeff Rubin, “the market can take us to some pretty Green places”…
I think we differ in that I believe a system of free trade is more adaptable to the big changes coming in the next few decades, if the government tries to predict and direct exactly where to go and what to produce they are very likely to get it wrong and charge us higher taxes to get it wrong, a system that can quickly adapt to change and incentivises people to make the change is what will work best IMO…
@Loota, are you calling me George W..?
Yes I mean political freedom, who cares about money if you can’t say what you think, do what you want and go where you want…
@Loota at 1:55: Dude you just mentioned a whole lot of great things NZ and NZer’s have done THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ECONOMICS
Yeah sure we can invest in our productive capacity but never to the amount of overseas economies which will out compete us in every area always.
@Jeremy Since we have a comparitive advantage to America in theory they should import what little supply of ag. goods we can export before supplying themselves with higher cost (in comparison to cost of production in other goods) goods and export to make up for what they imported but it just doesn’t work out that way anymore because of Mobility of Capital.
What America might do is get multi-national with Agriculture, they could set up agricultural buisnesses in countries other than their own like some third world country and supply themselves with cheaper ag. goods. Considering how rich America is now they could very well do something like this. They don’t do it now because there’s not much profit to make in it because the subsidy makes food so cheap there. And the end of the American ag. subsidy would mean the American govt. didn’t care about protecting their farmers anymore, so probably nobody would stop American investors from doing this.
Hell, maybe NACT would accept American buisness buying some of our own farm land? Wasn’t China trying to do this to us recently?
Also another thing to consider Jeremy, even if you consider American capital not mobile enough to get mult-national with agriculture into countries that have comparitive advantages in agriculture, comparitive advantage isn’t everything.
Comparitive advantage doesn’t consider the effect of quantity supplied on the final price of the product. You can say there is a lower cost of production in us producing ag. goods in comparison to other goods in comparison to the comparison (not a typo) of America’s cost of production of ag. goods and other good’s they make, but the sheer quantity that they are producing compared to our small quantity of ag. goods could outdo the higher cost of production they have in ag. goods, i.e the Quantity of a good/service that is around is relative to price aswell as cost of production.
Now Yes comparitive advantage theory states that even though they can supply themselves with cheaper ag. goods than us they should still import from us Because America should focus their resources on good’s that they can supply and export at a lower cost of production to make an Even biggger profit and export that for a bigger profit than the loss they would make in importing our ag. goods that are more expensive… But this is where the fact that we have market’s other than America comes in. When a country which does not specialise in Agriculture needs to import it who are they going to choose us or America? Though America should import our ág. goods even though they can make them cheaper *for themselves because they should focus their resources on industries so much more profitable that it outdoes the loss on importing ag. goods, this is not to say that the American agricultural sector will dissapear entirely essentially because we are too small and our supply couldn’t match their demand, and since their Agricultural good’s have a lower price than our’s other countries will import from them more.
Although I have not considered the possibility that American consumers may be willing to pay more for ag. goods than overseas markets so American farmers may not export. That being said they may well not be America’s wealth lies in it’s corperations not it’s consumer base America does have 13 million people below the poverty line along with plenty more people just above it. Anyway I’ve already typed too much and I think I’ve made myslf clear apart from that last point which is down to numbers instead of theory.
Hmm I think I just figured out why American’s are so fat. Subsidies cause over production that is one of the leading arguments against subsidies (it was with the farmers I talked to last time I was in Gore) and that would occur much more in America than it did with us because their country is bigger…
American farmers can’t export surplus because of the subsidy so…
Maybe American’s decided to over demand the over supply of food as the price would always stay the same. Considering the marginal utility on food diminishes slowly. American’s would get fat.
@Dylan, you spent half of your reply arguing for what I was saying and then talked about what America could do… So I’m going to assume you agree with me…
On overseas investment in agriculture:
A few years ago, Graeme Hart sold $2,000,000,000 of CHH forests to the Americans, nobody cared too much then… I’m not really sure why people weren’t outraged about that but seem to be about $1,200,000,000 of farmland to Chinese… The fact that “farms” are “Kiwi” and “forests” aren’t maybe..? Race..? Dunno…
Fonterra owns farms in Uruguay (from memory) and of course milk powder factories (49% of them) in China…
Dylan – Here’s a graph of agricultural subsidies versus federal nutrition recommendations in the US. Such wise administrators there
JMH:
Actually its been illegal to buying chewing gum, US Cosmo, or dance on bar tables in Singapore on and off for the longest time and expats flock there for the income and the lifestyle. Yeah and try speaking out against the ruling party…
The Chinese govt is also using increased wealth to keep citizens satisfied and the state stable, with some moderate success to date.
Dyl. said:
NAVMAN and TradeMe were great entrepreneurial successes. THe America’s Cup showed that we have the design, productive and technological capabilities. The All Whites show that we have the human motivation, determination and drive to succeed. What more do you want?
We were neck and neck with Singapore in terms of income per capital right through the ’80′s and they are a country with very limited natural resources, which was originally largely swamp and jungle taken over by the Japanese during WWII. ANd look at them now.
There is a long history of small countries (<20 million pop.) being able to compete very strongly and very well in the world.
I don’t really get what your point is…
We’re talking about the world flicking from most people living in fear, to most people living in relative freedom and you bring up gum, girl’s mags and table dancing in a country of 4 million..?
China has let the genie out of the bottle, it is only a matter of time, might not happen in our lifetimes but ’89 was the first shot…
Jeremy: You have not really addressed my points. I agree the price system could take us to some pretty green places (but will it?), and we have tremendous waste that we could address – indeed, perhaps these will help us mitigate the impacts of any prospective future decline. (Aside: we could of course wonder why the price system doesn’t address the issues of waste and non-greenery BEFORE a crisis, and therefore question the virtue of always slavishly believing “The Market will save us”… but perhaps that would be a bit churlish).
Even if free trade increases wealth in the aggregate (and it’s not completely clear to me that it automatically does), or is extremely agile, that’s no good if the distributional effects (across people, countries and time) are negative. Or if it increases risk.
“I think we differ in that I believe a system of free trade is more adaptable to the big changes coming in the next few decades, if the government tries to predict and direct exactly where to go and what to produce they are very likely to get it wrong and charge us higher taxes to get it wrong, a system that can quickly adapt to change and incentivises people to make the change is what will work best IMO…”
I’m not arguing the government should pick winners, but rather that they should ensure resilience for the citizens of NZ. Building export revenue at the expense of jobs for the many seems to be the wrong way to go about this.
JMH – just highlighting that some rich countries with bustling modern economies don’t entertain the same levels of political and behavioural freedom that you espouse.
As for China – good to know that you think China has let the ‘genie’ out. Sure, they may one day have a representative democracy, but they haven’t yet in three thousand years so I’m not holding my breath.
@rainman, don’t get me wrong the market is falliable, everything is to a certain extent, it seems to me to be the best system we’ve yet devised… (Ditto democracy) I’ve often wondered myself why extracting and refining raw materials seems cheaper than recycling existing materials, maybe whoever cracks this will make Bill Gates look like he’s got pocket change…
I think the evidence shows that the rich are getting richer but also that everyone’s wealth is going up, the Greens argue this is bad for us all as this inequality leads to a worsening society, there was a seemingly pretty seminal book written recently by a couple of professors whose names escape me right now and which I haven’t read… Lol, not very helpful, The Spirit Level maybe..?
If we want full employment we have to pay the price and that involves much higher inflation, lower growth, higher taxes and yes, the government picking winners via subsidies and tariffs…
@Loota, it’s a process taking hundreds of years in some cases, Singapore will be the same… There are already some not so subtle rumblings coming out of China, technology, globalisation, these make repression of wealthy citizens very difficult…
Dylan said…
Comparitive Advantages don’t exist anymore
Do you have any evidence? Can you cite some publications?
Worth bearing in mind that modern democracy hasn’t outlasted the Romans, nor Feudal England yet. And both of those occurred well after the Greeks. Then the example of China…3000 years without democracy so far including a good 15 or 16 centuries as a unified country. Yes agree, China is experiencing a more active citizenry slowly but surely. But the end result of that will be???
I’d add that someone who is worth few billion dollars doesn’t make any difference JMH if a regime really wants to shut them down. Khodorkovsky vs Putin comes to mind, and he is just an obvious one that the press noticed.
Again all I am saying is that forces and trends don’t simply go one way and there is nothing divinely ordained that representative democracy is the way of the future for all future.
‘@Dylan, you spent half of your reply arguing for what I was saying and then talked about what America could do… So I’m going to assume you agree with me… ‘
Wait what? My entire first two replies were trying to proove that it would be disastrous for us if America stopped subsidising their agriculture. I was kind of argueing your point at one point but that was to proove later points I was going to make you obviously didn’t read everything I said. I don’t blame you though it was a long post.
@FFF
Comparitive advantages don’t exist because of mult-national corperations. They do still exist to some extent but only because subsidies and tarriffs do still exist all over the world, e.g in the EU. IMO if free trade truley reigned worldwide, it might take a few decades but several large countries would emerge with absolute advantages in all industries.
An example of this is Coca Cola taking over Sugar cane production in which south american countries have a comparitive advantage in. One of these countries best comparitive advantages is being absorbed into the American economy
@Loota
‘The America’s Cup showed that we have the design, productive and technological capabilities’ And then all our Americas cup players leaving our team straight after showed just another way in which we let Foreigners walk all over us as they left our team in pursuit of more money.
Yes there have been some entrepreneural successes in NZ Loota I’ve never said we should abolish the entire private sector. There is a place in NZ for private enterprise we do have Some capital even though there is a lack of it causing corperate debt to be 131% of GDP.
@Quoth
Haha I saw the graph Is it saying that only 0.37% of the American govt.’s subsidy went towards fruit and veges? Haha yeah that is definitly why their so damn fat I believe in subsidising food but geez if your gonna do something do it right
Also Jeremy that whole second post of mine was an argument to fall back on if you could somehow show how mobility of capital doesn’t compromise comparitive advantage theory, considering you haven’t the post is kind of pointless, also I should have deleted it once I realised it was down to numbers instead of theory, if the American ag. subsidy ended weather we would boom or bust on ag. exports would depend on weather American consumers would be willing to pay more than our current export markets do. If they were great we export what we can to them. If they can’t not only would we not export to them, their farmers would start exporting to OUR current markets and out compete us on their lower prices goods.
@Dylan, sorry my statement that you agreed with me was tongue-in-cheek – doesn’t come accross very well on the internet..!
@Loota, you’re absolutely right, however I think that democratic development is the trend and long my it continue as it seems not to be the natural state of man…
Jeremy – Peak oil has long gone.
Sustainable world population has a figure of about 3.5 billion for the long term.
There are many things being left out of the equation with current discussion.
Our global position is unique in time.
Historical arguments may provide thinking exercises and fulfill a sense of justified political stance but reference to consequences of our present declining ability to expand is pertinent.
Possibilities will not eventuate just with a will to have them.
The magic of the market is a hope with large investment placed in it but many times the market has fallen well below expectation. It is hardly a reliable explanation for what is needed ahead.
The fat in the system is being generated at a growing expense.
Equity is the first casualty.
The rich have earned their lot
The poor are too blame for what they have or have not.
And so the market has ruled.
Democracy and the market are to a large extent in opposition.