Another stray thought

Why is it that the term 'social experiment' is only applied to leftwing initiatives?

Any attempts at intervention, redistribution, is dennounced as 'social experiment,' possibly including the words 'politcally correct,' 'metropolitan,' 'liberal elite,' 'Wellington,' if the dennouncer wants to convey extra disapproval.

But it is a meaningless term, because any policy foisted on us, whether by the PC or unPC elite in Wlellington, is a social experiment. What was the neo-liberal reforms of the 80s and 90s other than a massive - and disasterous - social experiment? Those decades left us with unemployment, soaring drug use, alcoholism a social underclass and a prison population that would have been unthinkable before Roger Douglas got his bloody hands on the levers of power.

We're seeing it again, in the laissez-faire approach to recession management. Faced with a massive social problem in the making, the government has done nothing, in the hope that everything will somehow sort itself out. It is a foolish, ideological, stubborn refusal response. So lets call it what it is - a social experiment.