Recap: Slavery versus the Social Contract – First Glimpse of my Novel.

Before I put up my piece on the Founding Fathers fallacy regarding the 'inalienable' nature of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (sanity), that has been at the heart of the destruction of classical liberalism, a little recap on some of this blog’s themes to date:

The Anti-Slavery Society define a ‘modern slave as ‘a person who is treated as a slave or is reduced to a condition of slavery if another exercises power or control over that person: (1) to restrain their personal liberty; and (2) to dispose of their labour against their will. Furthermore, “forced labour", in international law, refers to those forms of labour obligations or penal labour imposed by a state or an agency or agent of the government or state.

Interesting, when considered in the following light:

Not counting the extensive and growing indirect taxes I pay – GST, excise taxes, et al – on my tax bracket, income tax alone takes, by force, one third of the reward from my labour: one third of my effort, despite this is a theft, and like all thefts, a violent one, and regardless I am implacably philosophically opposed to probably ninety percent of the uses to which the state puts that money to grow the increasingly violent prison of the welfare state – that is, outside of simply protecting my person from the initiation of force or fraud. Worse, when the Left (and I know it’s hard to see much difference to the present National Socialists) get back in power in 2014, and Keynesian Devotee, David Cunnliffe, takes command of the chains from Wellington, that percentage will rise to 39% of my labour – at least.

In order to extort this effort from me, the state has had to give to IRD, as ex-MP Rodney Hide admits, the full powers of the totalitarian state in snooping, search and seizure to necessarily ‘restrain my personal liberty’. The individual is allowed no privacy from the IR's, cannot deny their interrogation demands, has no legal recourse against them under any form of judicial review, just like the secret police in every thug state throughout recent history. Life is legally an open book to the IR’s, on pain of the full force of our immoral law. As my byline states, despite our inept mess of tax law, you better get it right, or the state will squash you like a bug. And be warned, such has been the success of Gramsci, our judiciary have abandoned their role as a safeguard in the classical liberal society: rather than being there to protect me from the state and its abuse of power, they're complicit in the abuse, delivering my life to the bureaucrats, all in the name of the war for fairness (*), which is always the war against choice, thus the war against voluntarism, thus the war against freedom. Thanks to a compliant, philosophy bereft judiciary, the IRD have won every major tax case that matters over the last ten years, because the taxpayer merely exists to be his brother's slave, at least, that's what the opinion of the Law Society has crumbled down to.

In the New Zealand government accounts to end of April just gone, despite the global financial crisis, and slow domestic economic activity, the government tax take went up by $772 million, and yet it still continues to borrow to grow the State bigger and bigger in dollar terms, consigning future generations to the tax slavery that I am trapped in. The Finance Minister’s ‘zero-budget’ of May this year was doublespeak: he’s spending more than the last Labour government who openly believe in the thug state, and that individual lives exist only to be sacrificed for the common good of total strangers, plus it would be a pretty good bet that next year's budget will see a bigger dollar spend again. Though as bad as that is, in the US their government debt is on the path to grow to twice the size of their entire economy within the next twenty five years.

All of this is something much more menacing than the wilful insanity of our politicians …

Considering the above, leads me to an inevitable conclusion: I live in a society not founded on Rousseau’s civilising ‘social contract’, which would be the only reasonable counter argument; I live, instead, in a society, behind the IRon Drape, founded on slavery, enforced ruthlessly by the state. Unfortunately, just like the proles in Orwell’s nightmare novel, 1984, until you come up against the state with its nanny mask off, you cannot understand the true nature of it, though that doesn’t change the nature of it, as more and more of us will realise when our Western economies go down under the weight of debt taken to pursue the fool’s illusion of the welfare state. That’s why in the novel I’m writing, imputing Orwell’s desire to create political writing as art - and my book is firmly character driven literary fiction - I’m putting all the major characters of 1984 into a modern day tax audit, in which, frighteningly, I don’t need change any of our current tax and enforcement laws to make the above point. (Although, note, I do need to get the permission of Orwell’s estate, because that novel is still in copyright for another seven years).

Um, by the way, just for good measure, slavery is also indicated by the restriction of the movement of individuals.




(*) Quoting from Stephen Franks post:

One of the Law Society reps gave orthodox lawyerly analysis. The other offered worthy sentiment couched as economics and legal theory. If it was either it was from schools unknown to me. I think I heard Rajan Prasad  cited as an economic sage, but I must have been mistaken. And it must have been hard for the other lawyer to sit politely when the committee was told that they should over-ride freedom of contract by competent adults because "law should mimic what a perfect system would produce if everyone was acting fairrly and in each other's best interests".

That is theology not law. It could only be administered by priests, with god-derived powers to know more than the parties to contracts.