That's the only way to describe John key's plan to sell our state-owned enterprises and use the money to pay for schools and hospitals. To point out the obvious: these things are part of ordinary government spending, normally funded from ordinary taxation. Funding them from asset sales is the equivalent of selling your car to pay the weekly grocery bill.
It doesn't make any sense economically either. At best, Key would swap profitable assets for unprofitable ones. If that's the thinking of our business class, then its no wonder their businesses are failures, no wonder the banks are falling over.
But what it really shows is the vacuity of National's asset sales agenda. Privatisation has never been a good idea; instead, its always been a solution looking for a problem. First they tried to sell it to us to pay off debt, then to give the poor dears on the NZ stock exchange something decent to invest in (building profitable companies something the government apparently does best), and now a way of paying for basic services. But all along, its been about privatising the dividend stream, diverting that public wealth into the private pockets of the few. And that is not something we should accept. These assets are ours, and they should stay that way. We should not allow John Key to steal them for himself and his rich mates.
