How business leaders helped save New Zealand from socialism—Lessons for Washington State

<Speech delivered to the Executive Business Roundtable of the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce on January 9, 2020 at the Overlake Golf and Country Club, Medina, WA.>

It’s an honor to be speaking here. The Bellevue Chamber of Commerce and other groups like it are important institutions for advocating on behalf of businesses and advancing policy debates in a civil society. Today I’m going to share how one organization of business leaders in New Zealand played a pivotal role in enabling the South Pacific nation to turn away from socialism, and become a vibrant and free economy.

I’ll discuss parallels I see between the path New Zealand was on prior to the country’s reforms and the policy trajectory Seattle and Washington State is currently on. And I’ll share how the lessons we learned Down Under might help us change course here.

My wife and I live in Green Lake with our two young kids. Our local elementary school is allegedly one of the best in Seattle, but after a little over a year we learned the hard way that the quality bar in Seattle Public Schools is set very low, even for its top schools. Both our kids are now receiving a Catholic elementary education.

The other day, on the drive home from school our nine-year-old wanted to talk about saints and how you become one. I explained that a saint is someone who has performed miracles. At one point in the conversation, she said:

“I think Granddad Kerr was a saint. He led New Zealand from the wilderness. I think that was a miracle.”

I replied that yes, I think a lot of people thought that was a miracle.

What she was referring to is the headline of a tribute we have framed in our living room that was published in Australia after my father, Roger Kerr, passed away in 2011. The columnist Janet Albrechtson entitled it, “The man who led New Zealand from the wilderness”. She discussed how my father’s work as an economist “played a critical role in turning around the economic fortunes of New Zealand in the 1980s.”

In 1984, the country’s economy was on the brink of collapse. Our woes were entirely self-inflicted following decades of poor policy choices. To give you a sense of what I mean, let me cite a few examples of pre-reform New Zealand.

• To protect dairy farmers, for a period of time you needed a prescription from your doctor if you wanted margarine.
• To protect the government monopoly on rail, trucks were banned from carrying loads more than 30 miles – that’s from here to Tacoma.
• Bars couldn’t open past 6pm, resulting in a culture of binge drinking.
• If you think Bernie Sanders’s policy of free college tuition is crazy, he’s got nothing on New Zealand. College wasn’t just free; the Government paid all students who attended university – as a result it became a lifestyle choice for many.
• During the oil crisis in the 1970s, the government didn’t bother with price controls, it simply banned people from driving their own cars, with a policy known as ‘carless days’.

Government owned all manner of things, including but not limited to: one of the largest hotel chains in the country; both television channels (New Zealand only had two until 1989); many radio stations; major banks; a steel mill and a publishing house; all the country’s airports and universities; and, the telecommunications, electricity, airline, rail and ferry companies.

In 1984, my father was an economist at the New Zealand Treasury and a senior member of the team that wrote the briefing paper delivered to the incoming government. The Labor Party, traditionally the country’s left-wing party, won power in the midst of an economic crisis, which was the result of decades of socialist policies implemented by consecutive governments from both major parties.

The paper, titled Economic Management, is widely considered to be the blueprint for the wave of free market reforms that followed. It was embraced by several key politicians who, like The Treasury, realized that we needed to change course in order to raise our standard of living and get back into the league of wealthy nations.

Key economic reforms implemented by the government, which was reelected with an even larger share of the vote in 1987, included:

• State-owned enterprises were required to operate like private businesses, including the post office, railways, ferries and electricity company. Many were subsequently privatized, including the hotels, banks, telecommunications company, airline, airports and ports.
• The dollar was floated, foreign exchange controls were removed, corporate and individual taxes were reduced and a broad-based goods and services tax was introduced (similar to a VAT).
• Price and interest rate controls were removed, and tariffs were eliminated or drastically reduced.
• Agricultural subsidies were removed.
• The Reserve Bank Act was enacted, which made the bank’s primary focus targeting inflation.

A second wave of reforms began in 1990 following the election of the National government (traditionally New Zealand’s conservative party) and included further privatizations, as well as welfare, health care, education and labor market reform.

In 1986, two years after the start of the reforms recommended in the Treasury blueprint, my father was approached by the chief executives of the country’s major corporations who had earlier established an informal group called the New Zealand Business Roundtable. They wanted to appoint an executive director and formalize its operations.

He felt it was important that the business community support the reforms and turn its back on the old habits of lobbying for favors and corporate welfare. Under my father, it became a think tank, much like the Washington Policy Center, with a formal mission of advancing policies in the interests of all New Zealanders. It favored free markets and limited government.

By 1986 New Zealand had turned the ship of state around, but it wasn’t yet making waves and was still well short of reaching cruising speed. The leadership of the Business Roundtable was worried that the government’s appetite for further and necessary reform might wane. My father and the organization’s chairman and vice chairman were determined to help maintain the momentum as well as push politicians to address areas of the economy they’d been thus far unwilling to touch.

It’s important to note the challenges they faced. In particular:

• The media were hostile to the reforms. Newspapers published countless editorials arguing against the majority of them.
• Academics in their ivory towers counseled against most of the reforms. Economics professors, for example, undertook stunts like signing joint letters predicting doom if certain policies were adopted.
• With the lone exception of the Business Roundtable, business organizations like chambers of commerce, and industry organizations such as Federated Farmers and the Manufacturers Federation almost universally opposed the initial waves of reform.
• Unions benefited from compulsory membership and collective bargaining agreements. They went on numerous strikes and marched in the streets of major cities, much like we see in the streets of France today.

In order to overcome these challenges, the Roundtable employed a number of tactics. Given the media hostility to the reforms, it was immediately clear that my father, a relatively unknown economist, was going to struggle to advance the debate in the press. Instead of being the sole voice of the organization, he made the chairman, vice chairman and other board members the frontmen. These were titans of New Zealand business, leading large enterprises and employing tens of thousands of Kiwis.

Sir Ronald Trotter was the first chairman. By day he was the CEO and chairman of the country’s then largest company, Fletcher Challenge, a conglomerate with interests in construction, forestry, building and energy. As Business Roundtable chairman, between 1986 and 1990 he traveled up and down the country delivering 15 speeches to various groups such as the National Press Club, the New Zealand Society of Accountants, rotary clubs and chambers of commerce. In 1986, he gave three speeches over the space of three months alone. Two were advocating for labor market reform and one was a general speech on the principles of economic reform. Until 1989, he also had a two-minute slot entitled ‘A Piece of His Mind’ that ran each weekday morning on a radio station.

My father understood that scale was as important in policy advocacy as it was for Trotter in his business. Dad realized how Sisyphean the task would be if he was just a one-man band beating the drum for reforms. Getting his chairman and other business leaders out front in the policy debates meant that while the major daily newspapers could and often did decline an op-ed submission by Roger Kerr, a speech by Sir Ron Trotter was major news. It often made the front page, but if it didn’t it would appear on page one of the business section. It was also frequently picked up on the radio and television news.

The vice chairman was Doug Myers, then CEO of the Lion Nathan brewing empire and for a long time the country’s wealthiest businessman. (In 2011, several years before he passed away, he sold his $45M mega yacht to Google cofounder Larry Page.) As Business Roundtable vice chairman and later chairman, he too stumped the country, as did future chairmen and many other members of the board over the years.

Given their stature, Trotter and Myers were also able to sit down with newspaper editors to discuss the policies they were advocating. My father would join them and they’d often air some grievances about the treatment journalists or their editorial pages were giving the Roundtable. Over time they were able to get many papers onside or to at least give them more fair coverage.

A newspaper that took longer to convert than others was The Press, Christchurch’s major daily. One specific tactic that helped and that I inadvertently had a hand in was shaming them. My father had followed their editorials over the years and knew they’d been universally hostile. During my 1995 summer vacation, he sent me to the New Zealand parliamentary library to flip through hundreds of copies of the newspaper. Over several days and using an infernally slow handheld scanner, I captured on rolls of thin, curly thermal paper a decade’s worth of The Press’s editorial commentary on the economic reforms.

In a speech to the Christchurch Rotary Club that year, he quoted The Press’s positions on the major policy debates and then noted that history had proved them wrong time and again. He ended on a somewhat conciliatory note by saying:

None of us gets it right all the time. My point is simply that the community’s understanding of economic issues, which is necessary if we are to make progress, is not helped if an institution as important as the media lets us down. Newspapers may not be able to hire trained economists on their editorial staff but they have a duty to strive for informed, high quality commentary—or else not stray outside of their field of professional expertise.

An amusing footnote to this story is that I bumped into The Press’s parliamentary reporter a week or two later. He had, of course, read the speech and thought it was very fair. He also remarked in amazement that they had no idea Dad had been collecting all their editorials over the years. I just smiled back.

To counter the hostility of academics, my father never shied from debating them in the media, on their own campuses or anywhere else for that matter. He was also happy to let the results of policies speak for themselves, and in this way slowly but surely won a large number of them over. Some of the more honorable ones who’d been particularly critical even sent him notes of apology many years later.

Another tactic for countering domestic academics was to bring out experts from around the world. The dozens of guests the Roundtable flew in includes a veritable who’s who of leading figures in their fields. Among them were: Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute; Tyler Cowen of George Mason University; Richard Lindzen of MIT; British historian Paul Johnson; Nigel Lawson, the UK’s former Chancellor of the Exchequer; Veronique de Rugy of the American Enterprise Institute (now at the Mercatus Center); Francis Fukuyama of Stanford; Russian economist and politician Yegor Gaidar; and, Italian economist and politician Antonio Martino.

In addition to countering local academics, bringing these experts to New Zealand was another way the Roundtable was able to scale. As well as delivering one or more speeches to audiences, the guests would meet one-on-one with journalists, resulting in considerable media coverage. They’d visit cabinet ministers and other politicians, heads of government departments and so on. Many speeches by these visitors were subsequently turned into papers or monographs.

For example, Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School made four trips to New Zealand. One study of legal publications between 2009 and 2013 identifies Epstein as the third most frequently cited American legal scholar. His visits Down Under not only generated plenty of press, but the recordings of his talks resulted in 32 published monographs relevant to New Zealand public policy that are still applicable today.

Some of these international visitors, including Epstein, would be the guest speaker at the Sir Ronald Trotter Lecture, an annual dinner inaugurated in 1995. By necessity, Washington State think tanks tend to use their annual events to fundraise. Because the Roundtable didn’t depend on donations from benefactors, it generally used the dinner to continue advancing policy debates. For example, Beno Schmidt Junior, then CEO of Edison Schools and the former President of Yale University, spoke in 2001 on the subject ‘Reinventing Public Education in America’. He opened his talk as follows:

It is a privilege to be invited to your beautiful country to present the seventh Sir Ronald Trotter lecture. A lecture honoring one whose career has been as distinguished and far-reaching as Sir Ronald’s puts a heavy burden of persuasion on any speaker, even without the record of the Trotter lecturers who have gone before. The quality of each speaker’s contribution has already given this series great luster in the global marketplace of ideas about public policy. It is therefore somewhat daunting to stand in their footsteps this evening. However, I am confident of one thing: the subject of my talk is one of the most critical issues of public policy in the constitution of every free society.

The Roundtable would host a table or two for journalists, whom it handpicked to attend. Board members would sponsor tables and invite politicians, policymakers and other people of influence to join them. And of course, the speech would later be published and distributed broadly.

In the early years of New Zealand’s reforms, other business and industry organizations were generally opposed. Over time, however, the results of the policies were undeniable and almost all these groups changed their positions, joining the Roundtable in supporting further reforms. Indeed, in the late 1980s and 1990s they co-sponsored many studies and submissions on legislation.

Farmers, for example, protested in the streets of Wellington during the initial wave of reforms when the government removed subsidies, minimum prices and other incentives for agriculture. But by 1989, their lobby group, Federated Farmers of New Zealand, published a joint study with the Roundtable arguing for major reform of ports. In the 1990s, the Roundtable partnered with the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Wellington Chamber of Commerce to sponsor a study entitled “Moving Into the Fast Lane” in which they jointly argued for a new wave of reforms.

Most unions were extremely radical and opposed the reforms every step of the way. Protests in the streets of major cities were common. One group of protesters, having tipped off a news crew, even visited my father’s offices and barricaded themselves in along with a TV cameraman. Fortunately, it was a peaceful sit-in. Given his predicament, Dad joined the rest of the family for dinner via the prime-time news that evening. After he consulted with the police by phone, we were able to watch him at his desk working on his latest project while he waited for the trespassers to leave.

Because of the Labor Government’s traditional union support, labor market policy was one of the only areas of the economy it did not reform—in fact, it granted them some modest additional privileges in its first term in office. Due to this absence of reform, following the dramatic policy measures taken in 1984 and 1985, the rigid labor market wasn’t able to adjust rapidly and unemployment was higher than it otherwise should have been.

As mentioned earlier, labor market reform was one of the first policies the Roundtable advocated for in 1986. It took two elections and a new government before it received the attention it needed. But it’s proof of Victor Hugo’s adage that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. My father was always happy to play the long game in public policy debates.

The results of New Zealand’s reforms from 1984 to the early 1990s were remarkable. The country went from being an economic basket case where government intruded into every aspect of your life, to a dynamic, cosmopolitan South Pacific nation filled with opportunities and choices not previously enjoyed. Economic growth ran for several years at above 5% per annum and tens of thousands of jobs were created annually.

The Business Roundtable played a pivotal role in pushing governments to go further and not take their eye off the ball. Perhaps equally importantly, these business leaders provided politicians the opening necessary to get legislation done. I’ve spoken with former government ministers and they’ve explained to me that while they sometimes wanted to go as far as the Roundtable was recommending on a certain policy, it wasn’t always politically feasible. But because the organization had a stake in the ground on a certain issue, it gave the politicians space to get something close to it done. Without that space, it wouldn’t have been possible to move the ball at all.

Labor market reform that made it easier for companies and individuals to negotiate their own employment terms is a good example. While the legislation ended collective bargaining agreements and compulsory membership of unions, the Roundtable didn’t get precisely what it recommended. In particular, the Employment Contracts Act of 1991 established a new Employment Court, separate from the general court system. My father argued that this was a mistake and history is on his side. Employment Court judges have and continue to make radical decisions undermining prior employment case law. However, the net gains to the country have been profound, with regular nationwide strikes a thing of the past, a resilient labor market better able to respond to external economic shocks, and a consistently low unemployment rate.

Sadly, New Zealand wasn’t the last country to be brought to its knees by socialism. It’s still on the march in places like Venezuela and it’s making progress here both at the national level with elected members in the House of Representatives and candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, as well as here in Washington State where things have moved more quickly.

Since arriving in Seattle in 2005, I’ve observed the steady decline in the quality of policy debates and the growth of government in our lives. I’ve lived through this before and I know where this story ends if we don’t heed Edmund Burke, who wrote in 1770:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

If we are unable to change the course of the policy trajectory that we are on, we too will be the victims of absurd policies like needing a doctor’s prescription for margarine. But the bigger picture is that we’ll be nowhere near achieving our full potential, and that ultimately is the consequence of abandoning a generally free market and adopting socialism.

More importantly, the people who will suffer the most, and that we should all be most concerned about when it comes to public policy, are the poor. Everyone here in this room, I would argue, will be fine no matter what happens. We’re all talented and many of you are very wealthy. We’ve got plenty of options to ensure that, no matter what the policy environment, we’ll be OK.

Pick a country and year and I’ll show you the wealthy and privileged doing very nicely indeed: Soviet Russia; Cuba today; the UK before and after Thatcher; New Zealand before and after the reforms of the 1980s; China before and after Deng Xiaoping.

The same can’t be said for the condition of the poor. It was only after free market reforms in the UK, New Zealand, China and other nations that hundreds of millions of people were and continue to be lifted out of poverty.

Another observation I’ve made over the past 15 years is that there are striking similarities here to the situation my father faced in New Zealand in the 1980s.

The Washington State media is generally hostile to the sorts of economic policies that were mainstream in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and America in the 1980s. The quality of the editorial pages of the Seattle Times has declined steadily. Former Starbucks president Howard Behar had to resort to buying a page in the newspaper to present the case he wanted to make against the proposed scheduling law. While my own op-eds have been accepted in national and local press in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, the treatment I’ve received by the Seattle Times op-ed page borders on unethical at best. Crosscut is not much better, The Stranger is a lost cause, and while mynorthwest.com publishes some good pieces by its own talent, it doesn’t accept external submissions. The Puget Sound Business Journal is a lone exception, but it lacks significant reach and most of its content is behind a paywall.

Academics are doing little to counter the crazy coming out of the Seattle City Council, Olympia or the state Supreme Court. While not related to economics specifically, the recent gross mistreatment of the University of Washington’s Cliff Mass and the tepid response by the college’s leadership is indicative of our campuses’ general hostility to independent thought.

As in New Zealand in the 1980s, unions enjoy special privileges, pour millions into political campaigns and seek special privileges in legislation. Fortunately, because of the recent US Supreme Court Janus decision along with the excellent work of the Freedom Foundation and other groups, they are on the decline. While unions make reforming our state harder, we can see that in New Zealand, major policy successes are still possible in the face of union opposition.

Business advocacy groups in Washington have been ineffective at best and part of the problem at worst. The Bellevue Chamber of Commerce has done markedly better in the past year with useful contributions recommending reforms in important policy areas such as transportation and liability insurance. I commend the direction Joe Fain is taking it in. However, most other organizations are little more than social clubs and are completely ineffective when it comes to advocacy.

Arguably the worst is the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, where the cost of membership buys a nametag for the representative of the member business and little else. When it came to voting for the final $15 minimum wage measure by the mayor’s advisory board, the Seattle Chamber didn’t even use its vote; it simply abstained. Which begs the question: Why does the organization even exist if it won’t take a stand on important policy positions?

The Washington Roundtable is only marginally better. I’m reliably informed that sometimes it does effective work behind the scenes in Olympia. But its 2020 Policy Agenda, much like those in previous years, lacks ambition, fails to lay out a positive vision, covers few issues and does nothing to advance any important policy debates in the state.

To be fair, much the same can be said about the other Washington business organizations. But I’d argue that is precisely one of the problems we face if we want to turn back the tide of big government here. If these organizations aren’t willing to stand for anything, then they stand for nothing.

Some groups have a diverse range of views on their boards. But if that means they’re unable to stake out any important policy positions and advocate for them, then why continue operating? The starting point needs to be establishing a core philosophical direction for the organization from which policy principles can be formed. If your business doesn’t agree with that central philosophy, then don’t join.

The New Zealand Business Roundtable was unabashedly supportive of free markets and limited government. The board’s CEOs renewed their memberships annually knowing that the research coming out of the organization would result in policy recommendations stemming from that core philosophy.

In what became a cautionary tale, in 2004 a small number of non-member CEOs formed a rival group named the New Zealand Institute that was more open to larger government. Because of that policy stance, for most of its short life it struggled financially. In 2011, it approached my father and the Business Roundtable board requesting a friendly takeover. It was completed in early 2012, shortly after my father passed away.

In the United States, what’s on the line if business leaders don’t step up was neatly summed up in 2017 by Pulitzer Prize winner Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

One of our two political parties is being swept by a young and rising new left that is fiercely progressive and on fire for socialism. It may well in coming decades sweep the CEOs and their corporations away if they cannot rouse themselves to present economic freedom as an ultimate and democratic good.

This may be the last opportunity for business leaders to do what hasn’t been done in a generation, and that is defend the reputation of capitalism.

More recently a Wall Street Journal editorial in response to a statement from the US Business Roundtable about stakeholders argued:

…CEOs should talk about the broad benefits that flow throughout society if their companies succeed. But sooner or later they will also have to defend the morality of free markets as the greatest source of prosperity for the most people in human history. Platitudes about stakeholders won’t stop President Warren from lining them up first for the gallows.

At a local level, we could substitute President Warren with Jay Inslee or Kshama Sawant. While the Journal was urging CEOs to step up at a national level, Seattle and Washington State more broadly are way ahead of the curve in terms of progressive and even socialist policy. It’s even more important for business leaders here to be advocating for free markets. Leaving it to employees of business groups and the state’s excellent think tanks to do all the heavy lifting is insufficient and will never scale.

In 1996, Doug Myers eloquently explained to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and Industry why he and other Roundtable board members joined my father on the front lines of the policy debates:

Business is where the community gets its living standards from; it is the nation in its working clothes. Don’t leave it to the next person, or the professionals in the business organizations. You employ people, look after people’s savings, meet consumers’ needs – you have a vital role in your communities. All of us in business who want to see New Zealand do better yet have a duty, I suggest, to give a lead, educate politicians and help build support for necessary changes. We have come an enormous distance as a country in a few short years, and can go a long way further. Now is not the time to drop the ball.

In addition to Howard Behar, I’ve seen a handful of notable businesspeople engaging in local policy debates. Kemper Freeman, Bob Wallace, Matt McIlwain, Suzie Burke and Tom Alberg all come to mind, and there are others to be sure. Notwithstanding Alberg’s recent and useful contribution in the Puget Sound Business Journal, most of the time those that do speak out are only saying no to crazy policy proposals. While that is critically important, it’s not a sustainable or long-term strategy for winning. When groups that are openly hostile to business are out on the front lines every day, coordinate their policies and have sympathetic politicians on the local council or in the legislature, you’re never going to win any battles of ideas let alone wars.

The recent Seattle City Council election is an interesting case in point. I understand the attractiveness of the hypothesis that the election turned into a referendum on Amazon. It provides an elegant and simplistic explanation of what happened, but I think it’s the wrong conclusion to reach.

My interpretation of the results is that once again business leaders threw money at the problem rather than stood up and eloquently made the case for change. Were Jeff Bezos or any of the individual members of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce speaking out about the failed policies of the council or advocating for a new direction and a new policy agenda? No. They were nowhere to be found. Instead they relied on proxies that lacked their influence.

Businesses and business leaders can pour money into election after election, but it won’t make a difference if there’s no policy debate influencing voters’ decisions by making the case for change and ensuring that the case is heard.

Following the November elections, The Discovery Institute’s Bruce Chapman commented on a funny meme about Seattle that a mutual friend had posted on Facebook. He wrote:

You can whine about Seattle, you can fight Seattle or you can try to educate Seattle and bring it around. Take option three.

Our friend replied: “Option 4: Live outside Seattle.”

Bruce commented back:

Fine, but with huge, one-sided margins in Seattle, you lose most state-wide elections. Trying to win without any appreciable vote in Seattle does not work well.

I think Bruce has it right. New Zealand demonstrated what is possible when you educate at scale. The reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s came about as a result of major policy debates led by a remarkably brave set of politicians and business leaders. They educated the electorate and won it over, and the electorate rewarded governments by re-electing those that did press forward with reform.

Someone once remarked to me that the country I grew up in was as socialist as you can get without being communist. We’re not even close to that here, but it’s the path we’re on. The unending growth in government and the increasing restrictions on individual liberty here have predictable consequences. In 1900, New Zealand had the highest GDP per capita in the world. Decades of socialism in New Zealand in the second half of the 20th century resulted in a catastrophic decline in relative living standards. Today the country ranks about 30th in the world, well behind its neighbor Australia. My hope is that we can steer Washington off its current path before such an outcome befalls us. To do that we need more brave leaders here.

In 2010, Doug Myers received a knighthood for services to business and the community. The following year he passed away and a tribute to him in one of the major daily newspapers correctly expressed why he was on the front lines in the important debates of the 1980s and ‘90s.

Speaking up for further reform was not for the faint-hearted. Myers did so knowing it would not make him popular. He had no personal need to do it… He did it because, as all who knew him can attest, he fiercely loved this country.

Our state, of course, is named after our first and one of our greatest presidents, George Washington. When reading Ron Chernow’s 2010 biography of Washington recently, I thought about the many parallels he had with Doug Myers and Ron Trotter. Like these great Kiwis, he had no personal need to fight for America’s freedom or later lead it. He did so because he was a patriot.

After George Washington married into a wealthy family and inherited a sizeable amount of property following the passing of a relative, Chernow noted:

These sudden windfalls gave Washington new social standing and considerable freedom to maneuver. In time, this wealth would free up the better angels of his nature and give him the resources to back up his strong opinions.

My hope is that more brave business leaders who fiercely love Washington State will step into the fray of our local policy debates, educate our politicians and the electorate, and help steer us back to a dynamic, free state where government doesn’t intrude into every aspect of our lives and where individual liberty is paramount. While it’s not necessarily a path to sainthood, it is what’s necessary if we want to allow every resident of our state to reach their full potential.