Dear Editor
In New Zealand there are still those who think that the machinery of government can be used as a substitute for personal responsibility on the part of the governed. This idea, as we know only too well, is the open road to disaster. It changes persons with responsibilities into robots with rights.
And while we New Zealanders will last a little longer than the rest, your doom is also assured if you, like us, rely upon politics and collective action to relieve you of the normal and natural responsibilities of healthy people. For socialism is not a system: it is a disease. The ‘something for nothing’ mentality is, in fact, an economic cancer.
In our country we have suffered nearly six years of ineffective socialist government. But that is only the beginning of the story; we are merely completing many years of a sloppy sentimentalism in public affairs of which the present socialism is merely the logical outcome. In the process we have murdered old virtues with new deals. Well-meaning, shallow-thinking, kindly people, aware of the scriptural injunction that ‘the greatest of these is charity’, have failed to notice the distinction between the real article and the giving away of other people’s money. So, having lost our faith, we come to the end of the story; we have accepted false hopes and practiced a charity which is nothing of the kind.
We can never, ever let this travesty of injustice and complete incompetence rear its ugly head again.
New Zealand must reinvent itself with honesty and integrity.
David R
