Source: ACT Party
The Haps
The Chinese navy has made a big mistake. Sending what Defence Minister Judith Collins called a ‘formidable ship’ so close to Sydney, and interrupting Air New Zealand domestic flights, shows the New Zealand public we need to spend more on defence. ACT supporters have been alone in voting for two per cent of GDP on defence, we predict there will now be more.
We remember the Ukrainians who’ve lost their lives and their homes in the three years since the Russian invasion. Free Press remains resolute. There are basic facts that cannot be changed. Russia is the aggressor. The war is not just or legal. The breach of borders by force is dangerous to free people everywhere. We must never accept might is right, but we must build our strength so the world doesn’t end up that way.
The Most Important Fact Schools Don’t Teach
Schools are teaching children all sorts of things, but so far as we are aware they are not teaching the most important fact of human life. The fact they’re not teaching this fact tells us how mindless education has become, and it limits children’s thinking.
The fact we’re talking about is the astonishing growth of human life expectancy in the last two centuries. For 100,000 years, people lived to thirty on average. Now, the global average is 72 years.
People have different ideas about what a good life is. But (except for a few terrorists and cults), everyone agrees being alive is better than being dead. Something in the last 200 years gave us a whole extra life.
If the education system teaches children nothing else, it should teach that something happened in the last 200 years and it doubled life expectancy. Once they know that, they can learn what works.
We think the answer might be the problem. The education bureaucracy, academics, and teacher unions don’t want to teach that capitalism is a raging success.
They’d have to teach about the genesis of the free market in the swamps of the Netherlands. People driven to the lowlands by violence decided to make something of themselves. They drained swamps and built dykes, creating usable land that was theirs.
The result was a society where ordinary people could make a difference in their own lives. They demanded property rights because they’d literally created their own property. If you couldn’t take then you had to trade, and tribalism gave way to the market. It was around this time Abel Tasman discovered New Zealand for Europe.
William of Orange, a Dutchman who became King of England, helped take the revolution across the sea, where it germinated on an island buffered from invasion. The common law and the market, along with the enlightenment made the industrial revolution possible.
In turn the British Navy opened up the world’s sea lanes to trade, and spread their system of democracy and capitalism to the new world, ensuring it would endure for centuries even when they themselves came under attack from fascism.
All the while ordinary people could get enough calories to be healthy, live in cities with sanitation free of disease, and medical care would stop children and their mothers dying in childbirth or shortly after. Violence that was normal for most humans most of the time, and shortened many lives, is now an exceptional event for most people most of the time.
The revolution spread further after the Cold War, lifting billions from poverty in the East the same way they had thrived in the west. That same prosperity has raised their life expectancy too. Now the whole world lives twice as long on average as it did before the industrial revolution, but your teacher won’t dwell on that basic fact in most of the world’s schools.
Instead we have an epidemic of anxiety and depression amongst young people. The tremendous gains of the last two centuries are barely understood. Instead the gains are banked and forgotten while children worry about comparatively small problems.
We spend a lot of time worrying about differences between people living today when, in reality, everyone is doing vastly better than everyone was even a few generations ago. So much division, so little reality, and not enough hope.
Imagine if the most important thing children learned was that we’ve doubled our lives in 200 years after 100,000 years of misery. That could be springboard for asking what works and building a much more hopeful future. We just need the Left to make peace with capitalism.