One of the most telling moments in politics last year was deputy prime minister Michael Cullen's extraordinary outburst in Parliament in which he shouted "rich prick!" at National Party leader John Key."
We should all be alarmed by this. Not so much by the fact that one of the most senior politicians in the country, a highly educated man of intelligence and wit, should have so little self-control that he resorts to infantile schoolyard abuse - although that in itself is cause for disquiet.
No, what is more disconcerting is that the outburst offered a rare glimpse of a mindset that is probably not Dr Cullen's alone, but which I suspect permeates the Labour Party. It is an ugly mindset that is resentful and envious of wealth, and spiteful towards those who have acquired it.
What makes this unhealthy is that we live in a capitalist economy. More than that, we live in a capitalist world. And capitalism depends entirely on people with energy, initiative and ambition - the sort of people who are prepared to take the risks involved in starting a new business or launching a new product.
Some of these people fail. But many are successful, building up businesses that provide employees with jobs and customers with useful products and services. They also pay a large amount of the tax (some would say a disproportionately large amount, under our progressive taxation system) that enables governments to carry out a wide range of functions on behalf of the citizenry.
Some are content to run small businesses - panel beating workshops, restaurants, building firms, light engineering firms and suchlike. Many of these ``small'' capitalists are happy just to make enough money to acquire the ``three Bs'' - BMW, boat and bach. But some are driven to build bigger companies and extend their horizons beyond New Zealand. Those who export goods to other countries are especially vital to New Zealand's economic future.
They are all capitalists and they all help create a prosperous society whose benefits we all share, to a greater or less extent. Without taxpaying capitalists, large and small, we would not have hospitals, schools, universities, roads or welfare. And without capitalism, politicians like Dr Cullen would have no airlines in which to fly first-class to international conferences and no luxurious, leather-upholstered limousines to whisk them from airport to office.
The most successful of these capitalists become very wealthy. Mr Key (for whom I am no cheerleader) reportedly made millions in currency trading overseas before returning to New Zealand and committing himself to politics. But by becoming rich, he and others like him render themselves open to savage attack by centre-left politicians like Dr Cullen, who in a moment of unguarded candour revealed that he nurses a grudge against them.
What's troubling about this is that Dr Cullen, as minister of finance, is the politician charged with ensuring New Zealand's economic wellbeing. Far from disparaging successful capitalists, he should be holding them up as examples to the rest of us, because we depend on successful capitalists to keep the economy ticking over.
Either he fails to understand what drives a capitalist economy or he secretly dislikes capitalism and resents the fact that it makes some people rich. Perhaps both. Either way, he hardly seems a suitable choice for minister of finance.
A big part of the problem, of course, is that Dr Cullen and most of his Labour parliamentary colleagues have had very little direct engagement in the private, capitalist economy that provides most of us with our incomes. He is a former university academic, as is the prime minister. They have been on the public payroll all their working lives.
Look around the Labour caucus and it's much the same story. It's stacked with former academics, teachers, public servants and trade unionists. Some Labour MPs have never known a life outside politics.
No one could pretend that Labour's MPs are representative of the community at large. Only a handful have meaningful private-sector experience, although it's the private sector that generates our wealth as a country.
Hostility to capitalism within the Labour Party is hardly surprising, given the party's history. Labour grew out of a determination to defend a vulnerable working class against exploitation by the rich and powerful, and to use democracy to achieve a society in which everyone was given a fair go. The battles between trade unions and the ``robber barons'' of capitalism are embedded in Labour mythology.
But it's a different world now. Labour is no longer a party of the working class (if any such thing still exists), but of middle-class, university-educated intellectuals. And capitalism's robber barons have been subdued by the rising tide of democracy. Democracy has forced them to behave properly because people in liberal societies such as New Zealand refuse to accept rampant injustice and exploitation. The fact that someone is rich doesn't mean they have climbed over the backs of the working class to achieve wealth. Yet old political prejudices die hard.
Capitalism is not a perfect economic system. There will always be greedy and powerful people who will try to exploit the less powerful and advance their own interests at the expense of others, which is why democratically elected governments pass laws to check abuses and excesses.
Winston Churchill famously remarked that democracy is the worst system there is, with the exception of all the other systems that have been tried from time to time. Substitute ``capitalism'' for ``democracy'' and the statement still holds true. But the combination of capitalism and democracy is a potent one that has given the world greater freedom and prosperity than ever before.
The world has seen other systems at work - notably communism and socialism, in our own lifetime - and observed what catastrophic failures they were. Not only did they fail to deliver the promised prosperity, equality and freedom; far worse, they allowed ruthless tyrants to brutally control, repress, torture and when necessary exterminate their fellow citizens, without the slightest hint of conscience or remorse.
One of the great mistakes of my generation is that we have allowed ourselves to be convinced that capitalism is a dirty word, to be mentioned only with a sneer, while socialism is held up as noble and heroic.
I find it utterly bizarre that there are still plenty of people in the Labour Party who are proud to call themselves socialists, despite socialism having been thoroughly shamed and discredited.
I hope Dr Cullen isn't one of them, but I can't be entirely sure.
© Copyright; Foundation for Economic Growth and various authors. Individual authors retain their own copyright.
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