OPINION
On numerous occasions both on this website and in real life I’ve been strongly critical of the silly welfare state created by the socialists in 1938 and the enormously adverse effects it has had on vast numbers of New Zealanders. It has infantilised huge numbers of Kiwis, treated adults like babies, and caused substantial over-taxing and under-delivering for almost everybody else.
What is the alternative? As with so much socialist wickedness we’ve experienced during six Labour Governments, the problem has never been easier to solve; the new Government could do so quite easily if they so desired. What I propose is to take a good look at the New Zealand population; one thing you find fairly quickly is most people are able-bodied, gainfully employed, and neither seek nor require the state to take care of them.
We should therefore allow people to opt out of the welfare system and make their own arrangements.
Yesterday I went to an insurance company website and undertook some theoretical quotations. These were the following:
1. $250,000 life insurance
2. $2500 per month of income protection insurance for up to five years
3. $125,000 of serious/critical illness cover (i.e. if you have a stroke or heart attack or something like that)
If you compare these payouts with what the socialist welfare department doles out (for which you’re meant to feel grateful and assume it’s all incredibly virtuous), you find it’s considerably more: notwithstanding the fact that nobody actually wants a payout!
I sought quotations for the following scenarios which are not too far away from an ordinary man in the street:
1. A 25 year old male, non smoker, earning $55,000 per year
2. A 30 year old male, non smoker, earning $65,000 per year
3. A 35 year old male, non smoker, earning $70,000 per year
4. A 40 year old male, non smoker, earning $80,000 per year
It should be noted that the actual income earned doesn’t matter, doesn’t affect either the premium or payouts – lest anyone claims to be 40 and only earning $53,000 (in which case you really need to pull your socks up!).
The premiums are as follows:
1. $876 ($73 per month) for the 25 year old
2. $912 ($76 per month) for the 30 year old
3. $1044 ($87 per month) for the 35 year old
4. $1332 ($111 per month) for the 40 year old
There is absolutely no reason or justification why several hundred thousand people who are, as I say, able-bodied, gainfully employed and fit as a fiddle cannot opt out of the welfare system and make their own arrangements where any claim made would vastly exceed what the state would give them. The premiums could be funded by a 2 percentage point reduction in their income taxes (ie: reducing their 17.5% tax rate down to 15.5%) and then with a stroke of a pen we will have a sizeable chunk of the population self-reliant and no longer treated like infants.
What is the worst aspect of all this, what proves how far we have sunk as a nation in recent decades, is that the sole argument against such a proposal is socialist ideology; the left-wingers want people indigent if they fall ill and dependent upon the state. Cruel, evil, and unspeakably wicked: further proof of how much left-wingers actually despise the ‘people’. Add into the mix Kiwisaver beavering away creating a tidy capital sum by retirement age and we could easily create a nation of hardworking free people once again.