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To: critical_mass who wrote (64089)	5/23/2005 5:50:28 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

<//Now, if I am right, and Jay is right, and all of my thoughtful friends are right, and there is a TeoTwaswKi moment...// will there be a moment or a slow transition period of months and years after which the collective consciousness of the general public is overwhelmed with the epiphany that "things weren't like this before" ?> In 1935 Labour won the election in New Zealand. My mother told me her parents said "Well, that's the beginning of the end" [or words to that effect]. She, and I at the time, about 1970 if I remember rightly, were of a socialist bent and thought them wrong. Now, I think they were right. The Labour party promptly set off on a welfare trend which has continued to expand to now, with 600 people a week leaving permanently for Australia [and elsewhere], and swarms of children [maybe quarter] living on some kind of benefit, solo mothers in legions and cruel carnage in many children's lives. It took a generation or two for the work ethic to be whittled away. Bludgers were very much frowned on. Now they are the cool. There has been a huge cultural shift, not all of it bad I should add - life was very bad in many ways back then. Overall, New Zealand has gone down the gurgler from about number 3 on Earth in income per person and top with quality of life thrown in [according to me anyway] to way down the list somewhere above third world but hanging on grimly to first world. While I can point to that particular turning point, most people would just say, as you suggest, "Hmmm, things weren't like this before". At 600 a week, that's 30,000 a year, or 300,000 in ten years. There are only about a million good quality taxpayers and they are getting older, many heading for retirement and death in the baby boomer bulge. While the productive leave and the dissolute breed, the trend is not my friend. Other things could happen, such as high value immigrants taking over and changing the culture again. But that might or might not happen. Mqurice