The blackest day in our nation’s history was election day 1935 when the Labour Party first became the government. This ragtag band of mean-spirited, spiteful, envious losers ushered in a welfare state and other silly socialist measures which did untold damage to our nation.
Fortunately, half a century later the game was up, changes were made, then communism collapsed and the left was completely discredited. In a blind panic at their irrelevance left-wingers realised something had to be done – and quickly! Instead of being intelligent enough or big enough to simply accept they were wrong, they sought to breathe life into their own corpse by inventing something that didn’t exist.
If you go back 50, 60 or 100 years in history and cast a glance around places like Ponsonby, South Dunedin, or Westport, certain things were self-evident. There were lots of stupid, ignorant, lazy people and criminals, and there were also working class no-hopers who were dug in like ticks: living in hovels, letting their wives and children starve whilst they pissed their wages up against a wall. Then houses were built, pensions and the family benefit were introduced and their children were let into universities. Problem solved dammit!
Never again would the left allow that mistake to be made; oh no; oh no sireeeee – henceforth they’d devote themselves, in politics, academia, and professional protester circles, to solving something which (literally!) cannot be solved. Henceforth the left-wingers would champion… ending poverty.
Because it had been solved and no longer existed they had to recreate it; poverty was now defined as 60% of the median wage.
Due to 60% of the median wage being an absolute they rejoiced. An unsolvable problem – with long careers in Parliament making fake crocodile tears speeches denouncing “poverty”; long careers in Academia buying beachfront holiday houses and new cars with the proceeds of “research grants” to think up ways to tackle “poverty”; long careers in the public service creating an endless number of departments and agencies and paying themselves huge salaries to solve “poverty”.
And no fear of capitalism eliminating the problem making them irrelevant as happened in the 1980s!
This new definition of poverty saw lots of fertile ground spring up almost overnight –
1. Lots of elderly people living in million-dollar houses (bought in 1969 for $10,000) and living on income from several hundred thousand dollars on term deposit at the bank, or rents from rental properties, were now living in poverty!
2. Lots of single people with a standard of living their grandparents couldn’t even visualise, and enjoying everything from the latest phone to Uber Eats, foreign holidays, and fashionable clothing, were now living in poverty!
3. Children who were well housed, well clothed and well fed were now living in poverty!
It sounded good on the TV news; everyone felt it made them seem a pretty rotten person if they didn’t support this band of virtuous, selfless socialists on their anti-poverty crusade, and so the left got away with the scam for quite some time. Best of all for the left-wingers, it cannot be solved due to 60% of the median wage being an absolute.
If incomes doubled overnight the exact same number of people are living in poverty.
Whenever someone (ahem!) pointed out that if you got 200 billionaires into a room it would mean that Sir Robert Jones’s income meant he was “living in poverty”, they would be denounced as cruel and heartless for not caring about those living in poverty. See how easy this is? See how lucrative this is? See how the scam works?