Living in NZ at the moment leads me to the question of which party to vote for..... vote...if I believed in the concept. Anyway looking at the parties on offer - The Labor Party (socialists-collectivists), the National Party (i.e. Conservatives-collectivists), the ACT Party (Libertarian Party, slightly collectivist), I am compelled to argue that the ACT Party provides the greatest promise in two respects:
1. It has the best intellectual base, best policies
2. It has the 2nd best leader - the current PM does present better
3. It has the potential to control the balance of power in parliament - not a fair place to come from, but a good basis to make change. i.e. If you believe in representative democracy, how could a minority party holding the balance of power serve representation. It doesn't. But then representative democracy is a sham. Consensus based democracy gets full marks.
This brings us to the ACT Party's policy on 'Three Strikes' - a popular conception from Conservatives. I am not a big fan of the policy, though it has merits if one recognises the following. This is an excerpt of my posting on their website:
The appeal of this policy is that it embraces the dictum that 'there ought to be consequences for actions'. It fails though in several respects:
- The same does not hold for parents, so children not raised by healthy values really get very little empathy. i.e. The context is dropped. Sadly as a society we only have an interest in people when they commit a crime. This is way too late, so there really needs to be done more through the education system and parenting education to resolve early childhood issues.
- 'Three strikes' does not really convey any education or values
- Society does not possess much in the way of integrity, so its inevitable that people screw up.
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Author
Andrew Sheldon
