Chlöe Swarbrick has "destroyed" a free market "stan" after she referenced economist Adam Smith's beliefs in a post about poverty in New Zealand.
The Green Party MP shared a Facebook post explaining wealth inequality and how "a few people have more money than they know what to do with" while others work multiple minimum wage jobs. She attached an image of a tweet that says: "If only we hated poverty instead of hating poor people."
"It's not some natural phenomenon. It's because politicians have made laws over decades - sometimes centuries - which value some people's contributions (and the ownership of things) more than others," she wrote.
"Because we seem to value some people more than others. Because we've set up systems that enforce that.
"We can end poverty in Aotearoa. We have the data, the reports, the experts and the community leaders all saying the same thing. Raise incomes. Raise benefits. End the erosion of dignity. Restore autonomy."
Swarbrick's post prompted one user to comment: "Lol it's like Chlöe just discovered the free market."
The free market is a capitalist economic system based on supply and demand with little or no government control and prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately-owned businesses.
Swarbrick replied and said she "loves the enthusiasm" of the user, but used Smith's ideology against them.
"Perhaps one of my favourite facts for 'free market' stans is that Adam Smith, capitalism's godfather, didn't believe in Limited Liability Companies. He thought that those who build companies should wear their losses, not pass them on to workers and the rest of society," she said.
"The fact that we've built rules that entrench and protect wealth at the cost of pretty much everything else is rather more socialism/protectionism for the wealthy than the 'free market,' your preachers originally preached."
One person replied to Swarbrick's comment and said they "literally just come here to watch you destroy people with your onto it whakaaro".
Smith wasn't against Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) because they didn't exist during his lifetime, but he did criticise joint-stock companies because the separation of ownership and management could be inefficient.
"This total exemption from trouble and from risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in joint-stock companies, who would, upon no account, hazard their fortunes in any private copartnery," he wrote in The Wealth of Nations.
"The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own."
A report by Our World in Data says while free markets have had a positive effect on reducing extreme poverty and contributing to better living conditions over the last two centuries, it hasn't "been all about 'free-market capitalism'".
"Governments around the world have dramatically increased their potential to collect revenues in order to redistribute resources through social transfers and raise the living standards of those that are worst off," it said.
"It is true that the historical reduction of extreme poverty around the world happened as markets liberalised and capitalism flourished. But it is also true that this reduction of poverty and improvement of living conditions happened at the time that public spending and redistribution to the worst off reached by far the highest levels ever."
