“Is nationalism not a rational decision especially for New Zealanders who want to see farm and home prices become affordable?”

Given that people are nationalistic it must be rational yes. But something being rational doesn’t mean it is right.

In this case there is some capital that someone owns – and they want to sell it to someone else. People find this trade abhorrent as the person wants to sell their capital to a person from another country – as a result they obviously value the idea that foreign people can not own bits of capital that New Zealander’s have had.

Now this might be rational, but does it sound moral – does it make a sound basis for policy? Society was previously happy with the idea of slavery, but that doesn’t make it right.

The kicker here is we have private land, private capital, but society has put some sort of value of ownership over it – just because they have. But society isn’t the owner, and if we were going to describe the issue openly we should recognise this difference.

We get paid the capital value of the land and products, which we value at a lower level. The individuals that own the land can then use those funds to invest or consume, it is a voluntary trade.

“racist’ has connotations of Mississippi, however it could mean (in this case) that as a group they will out compete us (which is a sort of compliment and not such a silly observation?).
Is nationalism not a rational decision especially for New Zealanders who want to see farm and home prices become affordable?

Trust me, local owners have shown themselves to be just as willing to ignore negative externalities 😉

The best solution would be to actually price the externalities, not to attack ownership structures methinks.

So you are saying we are in debt so we are selling off assets to pay it back right. Well that was the nations choice, it is normal for a debtor to start complaining when they have to pay something back – but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t.

If people in debt choose to sell assets instead of doing whatever other option is available there is no issue – if the individual has the property right over the land we shouldn’t wander off and block the sale.

“I think people should go easy on the racist claim. We have protocols for (say) dog and dog but humans are animals also and the Chinese are the other tribe. Apart from that i believe there are legitimate concerns and the parable of selling the golden goose comes to mind.”

I’m not sure there is any other claim that we can make but racism – or as I’ve been told in the past its nationalism and the term racist is too strong. I just can’t help myself though 😛

When we think about the parable of selling the golden goose we need to think about who the relevant agent is – it is an individual (or firm) selling there “possible golden goose”, not the nation as a whole. As a result, if we want to “tell anyone that lesson” it should be the person selling it.

Now if the person still doesn’t believe in it, we should let them sell it – if it turns out they are making a dumb mistake it is there problem. The issue with nationalism is that is clouds the environment where these transactions take place, it makes people act like the barter among individuals from differing countries is somehow taking something from them – when it is not.

they have more money to buy them because they have a huge population and cheap labour and we were silly enough to buy all the plastic widgets. In the future we (as a nation) may look back and think “shouldn’t have done that”. Not that “we” own the farms in question but that is another issue: that it is o.k to sell key assets (such as NZ property) to foreigners rather than keep it in the family (as in limit sales to poorer family members)?

I think people should go easy on the racist claim. We have protocols for (say) dog and dog but humans are animals also and the Chinese are the other tribe. Apart from that i believe there are legitimate concerns and the parable of selling the golden goose comes to mind.

In saying this, the key issue I guess isn’t who owns the land but what they do with it. Dairy pollution has not been dealt with too well so far in NZ and its hard to see that improving as the lust for overseas investment clouds our judgement on environmental issues.