Rethinking Karl Marx

I hate thinking. That's not true: I don't mind thinking, I just hate having my assumptions challenged. That may just be a sign of age.

I never studied Marxism - or any economic theory - at uni, but I was a rabid Libertarian when I was a teenager. I believed that personal liberty was paramount and the only legitimate function of government was to prevent one person from interfering in the peaceful activities of another. For me, that was the definition of "freedom."

This extended to the market, of course, and my argument was simple: A government, being comprised of citizens, can only do what its citizens are capable of; it does not have any magical powers. Therefore, any government interference does not "create" anything; it only forces people to behave in ways they would not normally choose to. To put this another way, if the Air Force wanted to spend two billion dollars on a new B2 bomber and they created a GoFundMe page that only raised $100 million, the difference -- in this case, $1.9 billion -- the government forcibly takes from its citizens via taxes. If citizens refuse to pay, they go to jail and their assets are taken. If they refuse to go to jail (and defend themselves) they are killed.

So for me, the definition of freedom necessarily included a free market, and in the post-industrial revolution, that meant capitalism. Even in the 80s, with corporate raiders, banking crises and a rising national debt (which had just hit $2 billion dollars!) I was unabashedly capitalist because I didn't believe government knew what was best, and all they could do was subvert people's free will and replace it with the desires of a few. In other words, all government intervention could do was introduce bureaucracy and corruption.

If I had problems with America's free-market system, you can imagine what I thought of socialist or communist systems. Now I won't deny I was a "cold war kid" (as described by Billy Joel) and was fed a steady diet of propaganda about the "Godless communists" (as described by Ronald Reagan). Of course, I conflated Russia, Communism and Karl Marx; the failure of one was the failure of all, making it easy to repudiate all three without thinking critically about any one of them.

My daughter is studying sociology and asked me to review a paper where she reviewed Karl Marx's approach to sociology. I was quite surprised because I'd always considered Marx an economist, not a sociologist, but here he wasn't talking about revolution or the value of goods, but instead about how society should treat its people. And he was doing so just after the first industrial revolution when society was completely redefining how people were treated.

Before 1760, most people were tenant farmers, and although they did not own their own land, they produced their own "goods" (in this case, food) which they sold for a profit. With the industrial revolution, Marx noted, most people no longer produced their own goods but instead sold their labour to the "bourgeoisie" who controlled the means of production. ("Bourgeois" was a medieval French term for a person who lived in a walled town that had become synonymous with the middle class.)

Karl Marx was asking what it meant to be "free" and, unlike me -- born into a society of wealth, social mobility and personal freedoms -- he came to a different conclusion. He argued that forcing people to sell their time in pursuit of wages, with no input or control over the finished product, not only devalued them as humans but also "alienated" them from their creative process and social relationships. They were no longer pluralistic individuals part of society but now simply cogs in a machine, incapable of being free.

Growing up in a capitalist society, I never considered any other option. The goal was to have in-demand skills which could command a high value in order to maintain a degree of freedom and a work-life balance. If you didn't have those skills, it was your fault, and you deserved to struggle. I always recognised how lucky I was to have in-demand skills, but I never considered how it would have affected my life if I didn't.

However, thanks to my daughter, I've been forced to question not only my world-view and my sense of worth, but also my views on Karl Marx. Whilst I still don't agree with his conclusions, I have to acknowledge that the questions we was struggling with 150 years ago are still valid -- if not more so -- today. For most people today, the only way to earn money is to sell themselves. Capitalism has turned the world's oldest profession into the world's only profession.

Moonlighting as a plumber

Initial LVR restrictions in October 2013 restricted banks to no more than 10% of loans beyond 80% LVR. In 2015, the restrictions were revised to target price inflation in Auckland, easing the restrictions to 15% over 80% LVR for non-Auckland loans, and increasing to 5% over 70% LVR for investor purchases in Auckland. In 2016 the restrictions tightened further on Auckland investors, to 5% over 60% LVR.

Merriam-Webster defines "moonlight" (verb) as "to hold a second job in addition to a regular one." However, I've taken a more literal definition.

Our property has been subdivided and now has three homes on one water connection. Normally when they do this, they put individual shut-offs on each property. (In New Zealand a shut-off is called a "toby" for some reason.) Of course, for our house, they didn't do this. Since Wellington doesn't meter water use, sharing a connection isn't a problem, only an inconvenience if you need to shut off the water for any reason.

For the flat behind us, the shut-off is on our garden tap (faucet) hose. It's not labelled and doesn't look like a shut-off; the only reason I know is because one day I shut it off...

Anyway, the point is that we don't have a shut-off for our house, and the kitchen tap (faucet) doesn't have a shut-off either. I don't know if this is a British thing or a New Zealand thing, but the pipes come straight out of the wall into the tap (faucet). In order to change a washer, you need to shut off the water to the whole house. Or in my case, I need to shut off water to three houses!!

So when our kitchen tap (faucet) started dripping, I just tightened the handle. When it started streaming, I tightened it more. When it started pouring, I tightened it more. Everyone complained they couldn't open it, and I don't know why I bothered: Tightening wasn't really helping. One night I measured it and found it was draining a litre per minute. That's over half a million litres (130,000 gallons) of fresh water wasted per year! Even though I wasn't paying for it, a sense of environmental responsibility goaded me to action.

So one night I went to the street and examined the tobies. I say plural because there was on on either side of my driveway, and no indication of which one was mine. I pried open the metal covers, expecting to see a valve, and all I saw was dirt. So I gave up and called a plumber.

New Zealand is going through a bit of a housing crisis. (There's even a Wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_property_bubble). For much of this crisis, the Conservative government was in power and their response was, "Great, our property values are increasing!". Even though New Zealand was hardly affected by the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, the Reserve Bank kept interest rates near zero for no economic reason. Loan-to-value restrictions were relaxed in 2015, so more people qualified for loans with less than a 20% deposit. And New Zealand is one of the few countries that doesn't have a capital gains tax, making property much more attractive than any other investment. (The government did introduce a capital gains tax for investors who flipped a property within five years, but all you had to do was register the property as your primary residence during that five years and you were automatically exempted!)

Of course, the Conservative government couldn't deny that housing was becoming unaffordable for most Kiwis so they did what any good government does: They blamed the Chinese. Seriously, even though less than 3% of home buyers were off-shore, the government pretended the issue was cash-rich Asians bidding up the market. Even though Labour won in 2018, sentiment was such that they passed a law forbidding foreign ownership. Two years on, it was shown to have had no impact in the housing market whatsoever.

The major problem, as the banks repeatedly pointed out, was immigration. New Zealand has always had a problem: A well-educated workforce with a small economy. There has always been a "brain drain" to other countries, particularly Australia, which could afford better salaries. In 2012, for example, 87,500 New Zealanders moved overseas, 60% to Australia, which was experiencing a mining boom. (Sir Robert Muldoon, Prime Minister of New Zealand, once famously said that New Zealanders moving to Australia "raised the IQ of both countries.")

However, in 2013 that mining boom collapsed, dragging down the entire Australian economy. By 2015, the Australian dollar had lost fully 25% of it's value against the New Zealand dollar, and Kiwis started returning en masse. They were educated, well paid, had cash reserves and needed housing. From 2015 to 2021, house prices doubled. In 2015, the median house price in New Zealand was $430,000. In 2021, it was $850,000.

And the underlying problem was that, because of the Conservative government's laissez faire attitude, new homes were not being built. In 2017, only 30,000 building consents were issued. In the same year, New Zealand had a net immigration of 70,000! Perhaps the government believed there were an extra 40,000 vacant homes around the country that could make up the difference?

When the Labour government came in to power, one of their first policies was "Kiwibuild" with the stated goal of 100,000 additional houses by 2028. Unfortunately they promised 1,000 of those houses would be available within a year -- when it turned out only 300 had been finished, the programme was largely ridiculed. However, it did have the effect of kick-starting the construction industry, and in 2021 48,000 building consents were issued, a 60% increase from 2017.

Which brings me back to my problem: I could not get a plumber for love or money. I tried several but they were clearly on bigger projects and coming out to change a washer wasn't on their radar. So the kitchen tap continued gushing. It was so loud, you could hear it over the television. It needed to get sorted.

So one night, as I was putting out the trash, I again opened the toby and started digging in the dirt. It wasn't long before I had exposed the valve, but I could not turn it. To be fair, it was inside a small pipe and I've been having issues with my shoulders, so I could not get a good purchase on it, but again I gave up.

One night I was in the garage, cleaning up. (I had recently installed a kayak hoist and gotten the kayaks off the garage floor, but that's another long, painful story.) I came across a very odd piece of metal that was bent and had a hook at the end; I have no idea where it came from or what it was for, but I realised I could insert it into the pipe and use it to leverage the toby closed. I waited until the wee hours, when the neighbours were asleep, and quietly snuck out to the street and managed to turn off the water.

I raced inside, disassembled the kitchen tap (faucet) and replaced the rubber washer. I went back to the street and turned the water back on. It occurred to me, since everyone in my house was also asleep, if something went awry the kitchen would be flooded by the time I got back to the house. I did it anyway.

Thankfully everything went fine. I went upstairs to find that not only was everyone awake, but my daughter had tried to take a shower at 1am and discovered the water was off.

(Who takes a shower at 1am?!)

Anyway, I was overjoyed but I didn't say anything; I wanted my wife to "discover" that the kitchen tap no longer dripped. Unfortunately, the next morning I discovered the kitchen tap was leaking almost as much as before! I googled it and noticed the tap was supposed to have a nut to keep the washer tight, which was missing on mine. That night, at 1am, I again sneaked out, turned off the water, disassembled the tap, found a nut that seemed to fit, and put it all back together. The tap leaked only a little bit.

While it was a marked improvement, I didn't understand why it was still leaking at all, so I googled it. It turns out, if you over-tighten the handle you can distort the brass "seat" the washer sits against, creating a leak. The solution is to get a "tap reseater" which is a little metal device that can gouge out the brass and create a flat seat. I bought one today, it's almost midnight and I'm just waiting for my dishwasher to finish so I can sneak out and turn the water off again....

P.S. It worked, sort of. As you can see from the photo, the seat was actually cracked and so water was leaking through the gap. The "right" solution would be to replace the seat, but that would mean drilling it out, tapping the pipe and then screwing in a new seat, which seemed like a lot of work. Instead I used the tap reseater to grind down the existing seat as far as I dare, hoping the washer could then cover the gap. I honestly didn't think it would make a huge difference but it reduced the stream to an occasional drip, which is good enough for me!