Governments which want to force their citizens to have a good time don’t have a good track record. The Nazis had Gemeinschaft Kraft durch Freude: “Strength Through Joy”. The Fascists had Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, the “National Afterwork Club”. The Soviets had Gotov k Trudu i Oborone, “Ready for Labor and Defense of the USSR” (which has enjoyed something of a revival in the Putin era).
You get the picture — and so should New Zealanders, the instant Jacinda Ardern started her fatuous prattling about a “wellbeing budget”.
Like everything Ardern blatherskited about, from housing affordability to child poverty, the “wellbeing budget” was a miserable failure.
And, like Ardern’s witlessly-parroted, bien pensant socialism, it wasn’t even original. But then, leftists aren’t exactly known for their originality or individualist thinking. As anyone who’s endured the Australian left brainlessly honking the imported, American nonsense phrase, “First Nations” knows.
Naturally, then, the dimwits of the Australian left are aping Ardern’s failed, warmed-over policies.
Jim Chalmers has made the commitment to hand down wellbeing budgets, with preliminary discussion of the concept contained in last October’s budget.
Chalmers seems ignorant of the fact his department incorporated a wellbeing framework in its deliberations for years.
The only problem was that Treasury quickly realised that wellbeing isn’t something that can be reduced to a simple score on an accountant’s spreadsheet.
When former Treasury official and investment banker John Fraser was appointed secretary in 2015, he quickly came to the conclusion the framework was confusing to officials, and was not being implemented in any case. He duly dropped it.
As David Lee Roth once said, “Maybe money can’t buy me happiness, but it can buy me a yacht big enough to sail right up next to it”. Behind Diamond Dave’s braggadocio is a blunt truth: money may not buy happiness, but to a large degree it very, very strongly correlates with it. When expressed as GDP, that still holds true. High GDP per capita correlates pretty well to health and wellbeing. Being poor sucks.
But the socialist argument that, “all economists care about is GDP” is missing the point.
There is not a sensible economist in the world who thinks GDP is everything or that GDP growth should be pursued in a single-minded manner. Its main purpose is as a shorthand indicator of how the economy is travelling. Obviously, there are many non-economic considerations people value. This said, strong economic growth underpins the growth of revenue needed to fund the many calls on government.
We also care – as governments do as well – about how economic rewards are distributed. Hence, we have a vast tax and welfare system, initiatives to boost the opportunities of individuals, particularly those from disadvantaged groups, and the funding of a range of public goods.
The Australian
Even the socialist argument against using GDP as a proxy tacitly demolishes the premise of Ardern’s “wellbeing” prattle. Happiness cannot be quantified. Hence economics professor Jonathan Pincus declared that it was “useless or worse than useless instrumentally”. By hanging the budget on a fundamentally subjective and intensively personal measurement, “wellbeing” could be used to justify any policy imaginable.
As the original “Strength Through Joy” regime proved.