alt Hacker NewsSince you criticize Ardern's left-wing management, what countries and time periods can you point to in which a right-wing government massively improved quality of life?
This would primarily mean higher wages, lower inflation, and general social well-being.
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> and general social well-being.
Your question was sane and sounded like it was genuine until that. That is an invisible goalpost that can be moved by the question-asker at will to negate any disliked answer, to allow one to create an illusion that no answer exists.
Chile. At least starting from the second decade onward Chilean growth significantly outpaced South America generally.
Taiwan. South Korea. Many others. Generally, right-wing governments almost by definition tend to be more free market oriented relative to leftist governments, while leftist governments tend to be more populist. You can get alot of graft and corruption either way, but the path to growth and out of poverty, if you can get there at all, is generally more right-wing, certainly at least for developing economies.
In poor countries, left-wing and right-wing, the rich hoard wealth, and they generally see the competition for wealth as a zero sum game. Leftism tends toward always seeing a zero-sum game, i.e. class struggle over a fixed pie. It's only certain strains of right-leaning governments that figure out you can grow the pie so rich and poor alike become wealthier. (Second-order inequality, i.e. growing wealth gap despite everybody becoming wealthier, is a thornier problem, but relatively recent in historical terms, and I'm not sure the old left/right dichotomy of political economy schools is useful here.)
But relative to historical exemplars, I'm not sure any advanced economy can truly be called leftist, rhetoric notwithstanding. Full throated leftist governments end up like Venezuela. New Zealand is hardly leftist by comparison.
Left-wing or right-wing rulers are both problems.
Like Ardern, they put pushing their stupid populist views to an ignorant electorate ahead of the harder job of making unpopular decisions to manage a country.
When a populist Prime Minister outrageously states that they don't care about their country's economy, it is obvious what will happen to that economy under their rule.
And it did.
And then she left that country.
Disgusting.
Howard/Costello era in Australia. Reagan 80s. Pinochet - fits your criteria.
Arden is indefensible. She increased the size of government, decreased social cohesion via critical theory, housing promises went nowhere. Worse balance sheet, worse outcomes, across the board.