Dialogue: When extremists blow their tops

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Extremists say the funniest things. What they do when they pump themselves up with hatred is often horrific but their propaganda is usually a hoot. For example, few images are more hilarious than the white supremacist explaining - dull-eyed, beetle-browed and stumble-tongued - that he belongs to a superior strain of the human race compared with others whose pigmentation is darker.

Or the Christian fundamentalist from within the stockade of his certainties hassling us irrationally with the news that only he and a handful of colleagues understand the absolute truth.

Or the people from away over on the political left or right whose narrowed vision of the world comes down to a set of rigid ideals aloft on a platform of platitudes, and whose impatience with fools as blind as us is palpable.

In my contribution to the Herald's series on core values, I said that among New Zealanders' greatest qualities are "tolerance and acceptance of difference, the strong belief in a fair go." These are great peace-making virtues because anger and envy are socially corrosive.

But that doesn't mean to say we don't have volatile and intolerant people lurking in the undergrowth, the sort who when they disagree with you rant and froth a bit with abuse.

Last week I asked how corporate representatives could urge taxation cuts and tut-tut about redistribution of income and, at the same time, advocate higher spending on education and business incentives. A reasonable question, I would have thought, in the context of New Zealand's recent history and the contemporary world.

Well, I got this hilarious letter from Tauranga signed "Libertarianz" (and I quote exactly): "What Gordon McLauchlan is really saying is that, if you and I were to get our tax dollars back, we would not be capable of expanded our own education, or finding a better education for our own children than what a bunch of parasitical, bum licking, vote chasing politicians can come up with using money stolen from us. That is of course, after taking a huge slice of the top for themselves to fund their own revoltingly generous superannuation schemes and junkets around the globe.

"Jeez such arrogance and ignorance from a supposed professional journalist caused my tummy to fly into pre vomit spasms.

"Mr McLauchlan may not be capable of finding a better education for himself using his own talent and money, however unless he is prepared to name the people whom he claims can't, then he should stop the slander and keep his trap shut on such matters. How dare he suggest we are not capable of finding a better education with our own money, how dare he suggest the state knows what's best for us, using our money, how dare he even be a human being. He's enough to make me vote."

I read it twice laughing and wondering for a while if he meant to be funny or was unconsciously ridiculous. The latter, I decided.

Another letter was edged with abuse but was also pompous: "The facts of the matter are that lowering tax rates increases the tax take. Ireland, Hong Kong and the American state of Wisconsin have found this to be the case. Lower corporate and personal taxes reduce the marginal cost of doing business and open up more business and employment opportunities. The main benefit arises for smaller businesses, which employ most New Zealanders. More business activity means more tax collected from businesses and individuals."

Those are "the facts," self-evident to all but me who "has never allowed his own ignorance to get in the way of clogging your newspapers column centimetres with drivel ... As if any one cared about what keeps him up scribbling at night."

What? Not even enough to write an hilariously irritable letter?

He should go lecture the Scandinavians or the Dutch or those in some other high-tax European countries where business is booming and where social services are vastly better than they are in Hong Kong and Wisconsin.

I don't know whether that's the answer, either. But the whole point of my argument last week was that if we just trot along behind theories offered us as unassailable truths and don't think things through, we'll just weave from one imported ideological disaster to another.

Another thing this correspondent says is that I pursue an "ideological grudge against big business." It is not a good week, given the humiliation of Air New Zealand, to suggest that one should respect the record of corporate governance and management in this country.

Why I'm especially interested in these two letters is that it's the first time I've received such angry, unsophisticated correspondence from the right, a part of the political spectrum occupied for more than a decade with such condescending confidence.

When people's beliefs are losing ground they are most likely to blow their tops when under attack. The little explosion will, perhaps, distract attention from the decline.