09 November 2006

David Lange

An excerpt from David Lange’s engaging autobiography:

It was often remarked that I had no education in economics. This is somewhat ironic. In the early 1980s, nobody was better qualified than a lawyer to understand the New Zealand economy. It was a legal construct. Only the law could allow farmers to earn an income by killing sheep and burying them…. There was a ramshackle wall of legal protection around the economy…. [Prime Minister] Muldoon’s regulatory excesses were increasingly absurd. You did not need to be an economist to understand that; the question was what to replace them with.” My life (page141), David Lange

No comments: