Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Monday, June 11, 2012

Don't Blow Smoke in Nanny State's Face

Another story from the police state:

A 60-year-old Motueka man was fined $6000 in the Auckland District Court today for the unlawful manufacture of tobacco.


The man was growing enough tobacco to sell. Which raises a question: what's more important for a society, that an individual is left the volition to exercise the choice to grow tobacco that other individuals have the choice to buy for their own pleasure, or, that a government holds a suffocating mandate to punish those choices that lead to bad health outcomes,  or, just 'stuff' it doesn't like?

We've been here before.

Again, it's a moral question. It's freedom of choice versus the coercive state that can punish us for our own good, or the perceived common good of others - or at least the good as voted by a tyranny of the majority. Yes, sometimes the choices we make may harm us: freedom has to include the freedom to die stupidly. That is much better than the alternative: the thug state that steals our volition, and with that, our lives. The war being waged by the state against choice, is the war being waged against freedom, and the state is winning.


And, of course, this man's real crime: no doubt he wasn't giving his pound of effort to IRD on the sales.


UPDATE:

My comment posted to the NBR thread linked above:

"... In the battle between freedom of choice to live our lives as we would want, and the thug state that exists to tell us how to live those lives according to its want, I have to draw the nasty conclusion on who has won.

As for these 'tirelessly working customs officers', evident of the harm done through the new found glory they believe themselves to have received from that lowest common denominator of Monday night reality TV, a Harry S. Truman quotation would seem appropriate:

"Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship ..."



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2 comments:

  1. RichardJune 12, 2012 at 9:25 PM

    So our political masters are going to raise the excise tax on tobacco by 10% a year for the next four years ... and the price of tobacco continues its meteoric rise. Meanwhile, the price of an ounce of the good stuff has remained static for the past decade or so.

    There's a take-home message in there somewhere.

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  2. Mark HubbardJune 12, 2012 at 10:05 PM

    Especially with excise on alcohol set to go meteoric also. None of them seem bright enough to learn the lessons of prohibition. Or to understand a cause as separate from a symptom.

    Hey, got my eyesight back ...

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