Many governments are focused on geopolitics (competing economies between countries) or their own Gross Domestic Product (GDP) basically their own countries economy, I believe in the phrase from the forward from George S. Clason’s Richest man in Babylon which said “Our prosperity as a nation depends on the personal financial prosperity of each of us”, this seems to have been completely forgotten by everyone who has never tried to begin or run a business which has never been demonstrated better than our own government, they assume that just because NZ’s economy is there then it will always be there, with about 97% of all business within NZ is small business, when I speak of start up I don’t mean take the money from the tax payer to begin a business or ask wall street to finance your start up, I mean use your capital that you saved and put your money where you mouth is and start something with your and even your partners (normally husband or wife’s) money.
Starting something from scratch is important, firstly you are part of the competition you help drive innovation, lower prices for the consumer not just for product but also services, there are a lot of benefits for the consumer for the owner it’s a lot of hard work, you get paid less than a normal job, 9 out of every 10 businesses go bust in the first year and 90% of them will go out of business within the next 10 years, so whats the point, well, the economy needs it, you get to be the captain of your own future, the market is very honest but you need to listen, being in business helps you to respect other peoples hard work not just your own, some examples are; your employees, contractors, other businesses, you see things in a new way, when you go to a business that is thriving you stop and look at their systems, people, training etc. this is why it is important for New Zealand to be full of true capitalism not the monopolistic government contract caught, venture capital funded system that buys success (usually smaller businesses that compete), the main issue is that these businesses normally have their head quarters somewhere else and whilst they may employ a large number of people and appear to be part of the community if you were able to see their system behind the scenes you would find most of their systems were to suck all profits out of the community rather than help build it, not to mention the 3% of business that are large corporations tend to have government support or they help government create laws (barriers to entry) which favour them.
In the short term almost anyone would argue and I would say quite successfully that this is not true, how dare I even say this, so let me just explain how they used to do things back in the day and no I don’t mean 10 or 20 years ago, I mean Athens, Greece roughly 800BCE – 300BCE, these guys and gals realised that in order to be a free and independent or sovereign citizen you had to be financially independent from the rich and the state, you feed, clothed yourselves and when needed you paid for your own weapons to go into battle, this enabled you to not be beholden or dependent on anyone and so when it was voting time you didn’t want the state to pay out massive contracts to the rich and you didn’t want to vote in laws that would overburden the state with excessive welfare and bankrupt her, this was how wars start, fast forward to today and what do we find, NZ as a whole still has a lot of small businesses working hard paying taxes that are wasted on non productive agendas and we are also a flush with foreign owned and operated corporations sucking the money out of your economy, the products are not made here and as a result we don’t own our economy, when words like inflation occur people don’t understand if you don’t own your own economy especially your own production, then you don’t control prices or the amount of money/currency in it, the government can print and spend as much in a district as possible but you will soon see it leaves quicker than it arrived and what is worse is that the money comes back to NZ to buy more of our assets and control more of the market, one example is the milk factory on the west coast, this was sold under Key’s as prime-minister, this should have been bought by a state organisation if no Kiwi buyer was found as part of our national food security.
So what’s the answer, firstly try swapping the things in your economy, if you want to go out to dinner go to one owned by a local family, if you want to buy groceries try buying them from a different source even direct from a farmer and try using a home kill professional when buying your meats, I know this all sounds like a lot of work but if you lead the way the next time someone complains about the prices at the supermarket, you can show them your economy made up of local suppliers, remember the person you buy from today might just end up being able to start that business and keep the money in the economy long enough for us to build those houses we need and plant or purchase those pine forests for the timber we need for them too.