Taxing Language: A Question for the Politicians - Fair: What Do You Mean?

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.

Statists of all hues have taken to the word ‘fairness’ with the glee Chris The Fist Trotter has to the use of state violence, in order to make the theft that is compulsory taxation seem a little, well, fairer.

The slanderous union economist, for example, Bill (unfortunately named) Rosenberg, not letting facts get in the way of persecuting a minority, yet again, interrupted his Chardon-day, yesterday, to emote:

“... How many of the rich list pay a fair tax?”

And if Messrs Dunne and English had a blog label cloud pinned to their foreheads, ‘fairness’ would be in a huge font, over-clouding everything else. Just Google ‘fairness’, ‘tax’, and either of their names and you’ll get pages of quotes.

And so my point. I have a simple question for these three men: what does fairness, in relation to taxation, mean? Plus what is a fair amount of tax, please? How do you derive it, both in terms of the amount taken, and morally? Explain it to me, because I truly don’t understand. There is nothing in any of our taxing acts to give any guidance on this, and yet going on your constant utterances, taxpayers are, daily, being crucified on it.

In the first instance I want a generic principle, clear enough to write into tax law, which shouldn’t be too hard, given you write so much law in the fortress of legislation. And secondly, or rather, ‘but’ secondly, to test this law, for once, before foisting it on us, please interpret it, here, in relation to the below three scenarios.

Taxpayer 1:

Single man, twenty three years old, lower order contract milker putting in seventy hour weeks, earned $186,000 last year. He’s doing it hard, on himself, because with cow prices reaching $2,500 his ability to be able to buy his first herd, and so be in a financial position to propose to his girlfriend, and start a family, is looking more and more remote.

Taxpayer 2:

Family, three children at state school, both parents working to bring in a total of $60,000 per annum, only, to the household. They can’t afford a house in the current market, and with the rental squeeze due to government making it unattractive to be a private landlord, they’re having to pay $750 a week rent for a sub-standard house in Auckland, after which, when they pay for the essentials they have no pay left: indeed, all their credit cards are maxed out.

Taxpayer 3:

Family, two children, dad’s a banker, earning $200,000 per annum, mum stays home to look after their new baby, plus their first child has genetic disease meaning he’ll never be able to look after himself, so mum has taken on that job, for life. The couple have paid over half a million dollars over the last two years traveling around the world to see specialists, for operations, and so forth, and have had to re-mortgage their Fendalton home, twice, to the maximum amount possible. Husband is having to put huge hours in to make it all work financially, and with so much stress and little time together, the marriage is floundering.

So, for the statists, surely this should be easy: please write in the comments the interpretation of the tax fairness law you write for us, in relation to these individuals?

Finding it hard? Well, assuming intelligence on your behalf, you should find this impossible. And that’s even before I move to my position on tax which is not to use the word fair, but unjust. I wonder if we should ring Her Majesty for some input, given, in a story as stunning as it was alarming, the UK’s IR, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, expect school children not only to be able to define what is a fair amount of tax, but, taking their state to its Orwellian conclusion, expect them to dob in adults who don’t play fair on a playground where the biggest bully is the state itself. Politicians should at least admit there is nothing 'fair' about tax in any of the above instances, or period: tax is an arbitrary imposition of the state, enforced with the full draconian powers of the police state. That's the truth. Let's at least acknowledge the implied violence and immoral act on which our society is based, because from that, we may ultimately find a kinder way to live our lives, which would be a society that constitutionally protects the smallest of its minorities: the individual, and particularly from what is now the biggest abuser of an individual's right to be left alone - the state.

1984 Comes To 2012: Children Nowadays Were Horrible.

Arising from my previous post.

Excerpt: George Orwell, 1984:

"Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it… All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children." 

Excerpt: The Telegraph, 2012:

School children are being encouraged by HM Revenue and Customs to tell their teachers if they know of anyone "in their local area" who is not paying their fair share of tax … One module, headlined “tax responsibilities of a good citizen”, aims to help teenagers “understand the obligations if being a good citizen and discuss what should happen to those who are not prepared to work under such obligations”. One lesson plan – targeted at 14 to 16 year olds … continues: “Show class the remaining factfile slides on tax evasion. What do students think of those who refuse to pay tax … ? “Can they think of any example they may have heard of in their local area?”

 

I’ve written before on how the founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, told his fellow revolutionaries that the West would not be won on the battle field, but they must instead play the long game: slowly infiltrate the schools, and capture the minds of the young.

He would be a happy man today.

Look at the ‘good citizens’ these children are taught to be in our schools, with all these ‘obligations’ to each other. And so strong is the programming, that I am confident more than ninety percent of those reading this would feel, deep down, that they have to agree with the teachers’ ethic here, with what this tax course in the schools is founded on: that self-sacrifice for the common good, is a noble thing, and the needs of others are what social democracies must hold at their centre. This is what New Zealand Socialist commentator, Chris - The Fist - Trotter forces on us.

But it’s a magic trick, an illusion, that’s been done in our minds by Gramsci, a linguistic sleight of hand, all the more evil because it initially appeals to our 'better natures'. All we need do to understand it, see the reality of it, is change the focus, the narrative point of view, and see what it really says, which is that for you to live your life, it is acceptable that the lives of others, total strangers, be sacrificed to you, their pursuit of happiness destroyed for you, and that the state will initiate force to back you up in this, and mince up the livelihoods, and freedom, of those who will not bow down to you. And part of being a good citizen, now, is for you to dob these people in, so they can be dealt to.

Free men know that the civilised society is not based on such an extinguishment of life, but founded on a bed-rock of the non-initiation of force, particularly the state against the people, and on each individual being responsible for themselves, and self-reliant. That a civilised society works on the natural love and affection between families and loved ones, on compassion and charity freely given for strangers, and on voluntarism.

So these are not ‘good citizens’ being trained in this course, on their social obligations; just as in the Orwell quote, these are spies, these truly are little savages. When I went to school, at the age of these children, William Golding’s frightening novel, Lord of the Flies, was on the curriculum. Just over thirty years later, the curriculum has been based on it.

Thus, aptly, I shall end with another quote from Orwell’s novel, and I’ve used it before:

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

Tax Havens et al - Persecuting Rich Pricks Again / Dobbing in Daddy Dodger.

There’s a real beat up in the MSM at the moment over tax havens, and the supposed one percenters having the effrontery to want to protect and spend their own money – for the benefit of all of us in capital markets - against the avarice of the Big Brother State that believes Its divine right is to spend their money for them, despite having taken a mere seventy years to destroy entire western economies through successive governments coercive Keynesian statism.

I don’t have time to write this week, other than to say, as I’ve been saying on this blog, ‘rich pricks’, so named, appallingly, by a previous New Zealand finance minister – the finance minister who decried the institution of knighthoods, then took one -  are the new scape goat of this century. Remember what the twentieth century did to its scape goats. Even as I said - although I thought I was joking - that rich pricks would soon be forced to wear little yellow dollar signs on their lapels so they could be identified, and singled out for retribution, I hear this morning on the radio, Westminster is now looking to force all UK advisors to disclose for vigilante judgement, their clients who are using legal measures the politicians might not agree with, to manage their tax affairs. Goodness me. The next step is usually convincing children that's it's patriotic to dob in their parents. I’m not going for the ultimate Godwin, here, just pointing out the undertow of it, and that this ‘get the rich prick’ screeching that is reaching fever pitch, is ugly, and to free men, worrisome. Especially as I’m starting to hear in every debate a null, dull eyed nationalism being spoken, again, from the forked tongues of our politicians. A peaceful world can only be built upon the voluntary transactions of a laissez-faire capitalism, both domestically, and across the meaningless political borders drawn up by politicians, but capitalism is being destroyed, no, has been destroyed, long ago, in the play-pits of every western government.

Frankly, I don’t need to comment further, as I’ve written regarding this most state persecuted minority in our society here, and again here. I’ve said everything I need to say in those two posts. And I’ve written on the proof of Mankiw, that from 2009, via middle class transfers, even the American middle class, what’s left of them, are net tax takers, and the situation would be similar in New Zealand. Meaning these ‘rich pricks’, vilified by the state, and the greedy, freedom-hating ninety niners - who don’t exist, they’re all just individuals, but let’s not let actual people get in the way of slogans and another flag waving cause - are amongst the very few left paying the tax that has been carrying everyone in our semi-police states. The sick and sad place this leads us, is already evident in the food lines of Greece, and those same queues being cordoned off with police batons in Spain, with the rest of Europe and the US to follow. Saying that the solution to anything, is to give politicians yet more of free mens’money, and thus the lives of free men to cannibalise, is like trying to,  … well, it’s like trying to stimulate our centrally planned economies with more of the stimulunacy that brought them to the brink in the first place, via the printing presses of fiat money and the empty, evil bromides and bribes that built our Gulags of Forced Altruism.


 UPDATE 1:


And just when I wonder if I'm getting a bit beyond reason, I find that I'm not even keeping up with the statists. Above I wrote:

The next step is usually convincing children that's it's patriotic to dob in their parents.

 And then, hattip Crusader Rabbit, I find the statists are already there - incredible:

 School children are being encouraged by HM Revenue and Customs to tell their teachers if they know of anyone "in their local area" who is not paying their fair share of tax.

It's all there, I'm afraid, George Orwell's novel 1984 made real: we're living the nightmare.

Austerity is Not Discretionary: Inter-generational Theft A Last Time.

A theme has been unwittingly working its way through my blog posts of the last week. It started with my retort to Chris The Fist Trotter’s boast of how the baby boomers were going to use democracy as a weapon to make tax slaves of the next, and the next, ad infinitum, generation - especially read the closing postscript from Maudlin, and figures from Mankiw in the first update. Then worked to a fuller expression in my partial refutation of The Cactus’s assertion that there was no inter-generational theft, namely, my position being that the welfare state was always an economic (and ultimately, moral) illusion from the inception of it, thus was knowingly based on a necessary higher tax take, certainly in dollar terms, for successive generations (along a trend line), and so, by definition, a theft of the future, and this is proven by the fact governments have, with few exceptions, always spent more dollars than they have been able to take in through tax, and, therefore, have always had to meet present unfunded commitments via borrowing, until, after seventy years of doing this, we arrive at the present inevitable stage we are witnessing of Western economic collapse under a Keynesian hubris of debt – and noting all the while our own National government, which according to its own Internet site believes in limited government, continues to borrow $300 million a week to fund the biggest government dollar spend, ever, and which grows under every Bill English budget, despite the rhetoric. And if you don't think we're undergoing an economic collapse, ask a Greek standing in a food line, or one of the over a million of American elderly who can't afford to stay in their homes anymore.

Thus it’s fitting that I complete the series by referring to an economist, which I’m not, on the topic of how this inter-generational theft, and the slow moving Keynesian train wreck, have been exacerbated by the outright political fraud and larceny of unsound money, over the harm of the just straight debt that has been accumulating under the incompetence of politicians, in a manner no responsible business or household could ensconce.

The interviewee is David Walker, the United States Comptroller General from 1998 to 2008, and you can watch a YouTube of the whole interview, and even better, a transcript for those of you who need text to truly comprehend ideas - like myself - at this link. To whet your appetite, I’ve copied some of the gems from it below; the title for this post comes from the second quotation:

… you can't live beyond your means because it's pleasant. It's not sustainable. Clearly the level of debt that we have is not sustainable. We have a whole generation – the Baby Boom – that's about ready to retire, and they have no retirement savings. We have a federal government that is bankrupt, literally. Its [debt is] $16 trillion and growing by a trillion a year. Something's going to give. We can't pay for all these entitlements. There won't be the revenue generation in the economy to do it.

So as a result of that, we are deluding ourselves if we think we can just continue to spend. Look at the GDP that came out in the first quarter of this year. It was only 2.2%. Most of it was personal consumption expenditure, and half of that was due to a drawdown of the savings rate, not because the economy was earning more income or generating more real output. It was because of a drawdown of savings. That is exactly the wrong way to go – an indication of how severe the crisis is going to be.

And:

… the clamoring and clattering that you hear from the Keynesians (or even mainstream media, which is pretty clueless economically) that austerity is bad, forgets the fact that austerity isn't an elective course. Austerity is something that happens to you when you're broke. And yes, it is painful and spending will go down and unemployment will go up and incomes will be impaired, but that is a consequence of the excess debt creation that we've had for the last thirty years. So austerity is what happens when you break the rules.

And somehow we have this debate going on. They're making a mistake. They chose the wrong strategy. Do you think Greece chose the wrong strategy with austerity? No. No one would lend them money. That's why they ended up in the place they were. Do you think that Spain today is teetering on the brink because they said, "Oh, wouldn't it be a good idea to have austerity?" No, they had a gun to their head. They were forced to do this because the markets would not continue to lend, and even now their interest rate is again rising. The markets are losing confidence, and unless the ECB prints some more money and bails them out some more, they are going to have austerity. So the austerity upon us is the backside of the debt supercycle we had for the past thirty years. It's not discretionary.

Finally:

The Fed has destroyed the money market. It has destroyed the capital markets. They have something that you can see on the screen called an "interest rate." That isn't a market price of money or a market price of five-year debt capital. That is an administered price that the Fed has set and that every trader watches by the minute to make sure that he's still in a positive spread. And you can't have capitalism if the capital markets are dead, if the capital markets are simply a branch office – branch casino – of the central bank. That's essentially what we have today.

Well worthy of a listen.

Postscript:

Stop the train, I missed Walker's best quotation: 

 This market isn't real.

Update 1:

As I said, we are witnessing a Western economic collapse: Spanish  hemorrhage going terminal:

 Spain is heading for a general bailout. It may not happen immediately, but that is what the figures suggest - that sometime in the autumn, maybe sooner, the country will need a full-blown rescue”

 

Headlines 2012 and 2022: Choice = Freedom. The Tryanny of Each Other.

Headline: 2012.

As reported by Stuff:

Gang members, a grandmother and beneficiaries were all arrested in the country's largest cannabis bust which resulted in the seizure of drugs with a potential worth of $130 million.

More than 2500 people were arrested in the six-month crackdown, which has made a massive dent in New Zealand's cannabis supply, police said.

As well as arresting 2573 people, police also confiscated 280 kilograms of plant material, estimated at $5.6m, and destroyed more than 130,385 plants and seedlings with a potential street value (at maturity) of up to $130m.

Following 2009's Operation Lime, which targeted businesses and individuals selling cannabis-growing equipment, the latest raids were dubbed Operation National, which was the largest operation of its kind, Detective Inspector Paul Berry said.

Police targeted drug dealers working out of houses. The crackdown was complemented by Operation Kelly, which used aircraft to spot cannabis crops during the growing season.

When they raided homes police found multi-million dollar operations, including one which was allegedly run by a Wellington grandmother …

Every gang in the country was involved, including the Mongrel Mob, Head Hunters and Rebels, Berry said.

"This is bread and butter for the gangs. This is how they make their money."

Police also found 248 children, who would have watched their parents grow drugs and sell them at the door, Berry said.

Many of those children had been referred to CYFs.

They seized 14 properties, worth a total of $4.6m, eight cars, a boat, and cash and bonds worth more than $1m, some of which was seized under the Criminal Proceeds Recovery Act.

Headline: 2022.

Supermarket owners, a grandmother and dairy owners were all arrested in the country's largest soft drink bust which resulted in the seizure of soft drinks with a black market potential worth $130 million.

More than 2500 people were arrested in the six-month crackdown, which has made a massive dent in New Zealand's soft drink supply, police said.

As well as arresting 2573 people, police also confiscated 280 kilograms of fat laden hamburger meat, estimated at $5.6m, and destroyed more than 130,385 packs of cigarettes with a potential street value (in the schools) of up to $130m.

Following 2009's Operation Squash-Choice, which targeted businesses and individuals selling soft drink selling equipment, such as shelves and refrigerators, the latest raids were dubbed Operation No-Choice, which was the largest operation of its kind, Detective Inspector Paul Berry said.

Police targeted soft drink dealers working out of houses. The crackdown was complemented by Operation Orwell, which used children to spot soft drink in their homes and dob in their parents.

When they raided homes police found multi-million dollar operations, including one which was allegedly run by a Wellington grandmother …

Every corner dairy in the country was involved, including On The Spot Dairies, and 4-Square supperettes, Berry said.

"This is bread and butter for the capitalists. This is how they make their money."

Police also found 248 children, who would have watched their parents selling soft-drink, and drunk it themselves, Berry said.

Many of those children had been referred to CYFs.

They seized 14 properties, worth a total of $4.6m, eight cars, a boat, and cash and bonds worth more than $1m, some of which was seized under the Criminal Proceeds Recovery Act.

I’ve written on this before. I don’t smoke or ingest cannabis, but like alcohol and soft drink, both of which, in excess, are harmful to you, also, it’s a choice, and a tax or ban on choice, is a tax or ban on freedom, which is a fundamental attaxk on freedom. We only need to police for the initiation of force or fraud. It is as simple as that. Look at what Bloomberg is doing in New York, don’t think that second headline won’t happen.

I’ve also written on how we’ve had our privacy voted away in our semi-police states, and see yet another government department is abusing it: WINZ. Those who understand how important it is to own our lives, to control our privacy, to have choices, have had that privacy, that right to be left alone, to have choice, voted away from us at the polling booth.  Of course we have abuses like this from within the fortresses of bureaucracy: we are owned by the most brutal tyrant of all: each other.

There Is An Inter-generational Theft: It Shows In The Tax System, And Government Debt.

Apparently to keep, or develop, a blog readership, there must be new content, which is not easy for someone working full time, so I may as well use the comments I make on other blogs where they are relevant to the themes here. More importantly, this blog is the central repository of the brain of Mark Hubbard, so when the men in the little black vans (either the ones with pies and Playboys in the briefcases, or the ones in the bottom postscript with the panoply of police-state laws on their side) come for me, then you’ll be able to refer to this, for this is what I believed.

The Cactus has an interesting post up (as always), making an argument, via housing, that the generational theft oft talked about in the MSM is a nonsense. I agree with her regarding housing, but not otherwise, though, would also disagree with the MSM argument that this is something new: it’s not, indeed, that’s the problem, as it’s been happening since the inception of the Welfare State, working through the tax system. The two comments I put up on The Cactus’s thread state my position well enough – the below is the amalgam of them:

I do think there is a generational theft, indirectly, though have never thought of it in relation to housing: you are pretty well right as far as that is concerned - and farm succession, for that matter. However, as in my Trotter blog of two days ago, especially the postscript quotation of Mauldin, regarding the chickens coming home to roost finally from 70 years of accumulating unsustainable government debt chasing an economic illusion (the welfare state), and we are the generation to witness the collapse of western economies because of this; plus the update of Mankiw who showed since 2009 the middle class in the US are net tax takers, not payers, in a manner similar to the middle class welfare we have here through tax transfers such as Working for Families; I focus this issue solely on taxation: that is, to support the baby boomers, on top of and due to the Keynesian train wreck that is crunching up all economies, progressive taxes/rates over the next twenty years are going to have to rise, and rise dramatically. Taxation is theft, and that theft is set to rise to the levels seen under Muldoon, and the 90p in the pound under Healey, and when Cunliffe has my wallet from 2014, he'll use the baby boomers as the excuse to empty it at an ever increasing rate to build a state I have no agreement with.

Which is to say, to make my point succinctly; the welfare state has been, since inception under Micky Savage, founded on an inter-generational theft through the tax system, as the increasing government dollar spend has always outstripped current taxation: proof? Governments have always had to borrow to meet present unfunded commitments. If our welfare states had been affordable, not reliant on the deeper tax slavery of the next generation, and the next, then there would be no government debt. And we are the generation where the debt racked up is bankrupting entire western nations.

I will be paying more tax than my parents did, as well as financially supporting them. That's the 'theft'. I don't mind supporting my parents, but I sure as hell do the taxation that is making the whole problem of the welfare state worse, and paying for which I've lost my freedom to do with my money as I please, and my freedom per se.

Postscript: while on the topic of inter-generational theft, regarding the enforcers of it, I noticed a three column IRD situations vacant in the Press yesterday, looking to hire another Schutzstaffel of auditors (yes, plural): as if the current recession – and there is one outside of the rural sector - wasn’t bad enough, government wants to make your life in the Gulag of Forced Altruism behind the IRon Drape harder, scarier, and just plain more miserable. And public sector job losses? Apparently not where enforcing the Ponzi scheme of Big Brother’s welfare state is concerned. At the hands of Messrs Dunne and English, it’s getting uglier out here for free men and women; in fact, downright vicious, as we all sit on our hands, trying to be invisible, yet are jackbooted further from the civilised, voluntary society.

Worthy of note, was that according to page real estate, the ad was by far the biggest advertisement in the whole situations vacant, which is apt, considering the bigger that department gets, the fewer vacancies there will be in a private sector that is the most persecuted scapegoat in our society now. We need, desperately, a Western Spring: but don’t look to me for it - look at the whites of my eyes, I’m terrified, hell, I just put Schutzstaffel and IRD together in the same sentence, and I think my old mum thought I was bright: pfui.

Chris (The Fist) Trotter. Squeezing Freedom Until Its Pips Squeak.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.

George Orwell – 1984

Chris (The Fist) Trotter, socialist political commentator, is quickly becoming New Zealand’s most useful, ‘useful idiot’, in that often he will let that urbane, reasonable fiction of his image drop and let us see the mean-spirited, malevolent heart of the coercive statist that slouches beneath. He posted the below comment, as stunning as it is appalling, to economist Matt Nolan’s TVHE blog thread on superannuation: it speaks so usefully for itself, I need provide no context.

Yeah, well think again, Matt, because we Baby Boomers are way ahead of you.

The moment you try that stunt, we’ll rediscover our socialist roots, reach out to the poor and marginalised members of Gen X and Gen Y, and join together in a festival of redistribution. The BBs will preserve their National Super, the majority of Gen X and Y will improve their standard of living, and well-paid capitalist apologists like yourself will be squeezed by the IRD until the pips squeak.

Like “Dragonfly” said, it’s who’s got the votes that counts, and for the foreseeable future we, the old and the poor, will remain the many, and you and your kind, Matt, will remain the few.

Ain’t democracy grand!

What you have to remember about a ‘festival of redistribution’, is that it’s a brutal orgy of theft. Innocent people are having their property taken from them, with their heads held down under the ruthless gun of-out-of-control government. There’s nothing nice about this, a nice man wouldn’t gloat about it, though Matt Nolan being the nice man that I’m not, made the below reasoned, good humoured reply: it’s worth reading, as it shows who the greedy one here is:

LOLOLOL “capitalist apologists”, good fun.

[Snip.]

So you are saying baby boomers are happy with free enterprise and choice for themselves, but are willing to subject future generations to a world of limited opportunities and enterprise.  You seem to make baby boomers sound like even more selfish and evil individuals than I have ever imagined!  I guess I’ve been lucky to meet generally well meaning and good natured baby boomers in my time

Full marks to the economist, and there's an even better quotation in the postscript of this post from analyst, John Mauldin, on the inter-generational theft being lauded here, however, first, befitting the themes of this blog, it’s not hard to figure out my angle, unless you’re one of the new alcohol induced generation  produced by Chris (The Fist) Trotter's welfare state, who will be incapable of thinking and reliant on government for the rest of your lives. For freedom lovers, The Fist’s post is, I hope, a wakeup call. His is the morally bankrupt ethic of too many of our politicians who take the compulsion route, every time, for what they think is good for us, and much worse. It’s not often you get to see the ‘caring socialist’ revelling joyously to this degree in the power of the state to destroy lives. And ironically the lives of those, to put the boot in - as he would want to - of those who’ve been forced, already, to fund the entirety of the coercive, thieving edifice of his thug state, which persecutes this group unlike any other group in our society. Capitalists, including that sub-set, ‘the rich’, have been cast as the scapegoats of this century, albeit the politicians have learned how to keep them on life support as they are cannibalised and eaten alive. Obviously The Fist has never had his world turned violently on its head, a complete stranger with the power of the totalitarian state – read my blog byline – picking over his every intimate cheque and receipt. It’s an appalling process, an IRD audit. A process that begins with a letter or phone call saying, 'I'm going to investigate your affairs for the last four years, starting with a two hour interview; please present yourself at Room 101 …' Think about receiving a call like that. Really think; hear the voice of that stranger, and understand you can't deny it anything. You will have fewer rights than a murderer or rapist. And your crime? You run a business, bettering the lives of all of us. This is happening to business people every day. An audit is a rape by the state of the innocence of privacy, and the right for the innocent to go about their peaceful lives unhindered and unruffled by brutes. It’s a disgrace: the barbarian state, extinguishing the civilised society. And The festive Fist is here cajoling and cheerleading, as in a day out at the guillotine, laughing through his gaping maw at the state built gallows of our lives, his included. ‘Squeeze’em, squeeze’em until their pips squeak’.

Free men please learn from this, that in the mind of The Fist, and it’s the hive mind that rules the country under statism, including John Key's lot, if you have money, regardless the personal cost of making it, you are not a human; you're a wallet for the collective, and as a previous finance minister contemptuously called you, rich pricks: despised, shamed, and shunned.  Some large segment of society, which owes you its very standard of living, has been taught to spit on you. As far as they’re concerned, their needs, manufactured by seventy years of statist policy, trump your ownership of what you have earned and saved, and your life, of course: they do not consider your emotions, your goals for yourself and your loved ones: statists deal in de-humanised collectives and aggregates, as the Keynesians do, explaining why our economies are failing, also. Your humanity, your individuality, is expunged in this comment, in almost every way that matters, aping the darkest immorality reaching out its claws again from the darkest places in human history, which is the place The Fist crawls from. And that is why, on a slight tangent, Mr Bryce Edwards Left Libertarianism is an oxymoron; explain that to me without the Left contradicting the Libertarian. And why the Left feminists over at the Hand Mirror are set to be eternally disappointed. Free the smallest minority in a society, the individual, and only then will you truly free yourselves, unless, of course, you aim to gain your freedom atop the bodies of others?

Every time a brute statist like The Fist shows us the whites of his fangs, and the avarice in his dull eyes, all I can do is repeat the rationale of my advocacy of classical liberalism, and it’s concomitant laissez faire capitalist system: the end point is not money, it’s never money, for me, it’s voluntarism, as I said in this post:

Unfortunately my advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism - noting the crony capitalism we have is to capitalism what sea horses are to horses - has never been about money; it's only ever been about that wonderful, evolutionary thing that capitalism, and only capitalism, is based on - the voluntary transaction. I'm a freedom freak: peace baby, the true sixties legacy, not those suited communists in the Greens Party whose every policy is the advocacy of force. Only on the voluntary transaction can there be a voluntary, free society. I said unfortunately because this has meant that while I'm comfortable, I'm not rich enough to build a space station. That's what I would do if I had money in real quantity. I'd build a space station and remove myself from the ugly, brute society we've created for ourselves, yet again. As generation text say, 'I'd be outa here'.

There’s a cliché that statists of all hues, left and right, refer to when justifying the life of tax slavery they advocate: we all are part of, and must live in, the village. By which what they really mean is, the village must own us, and if we don’t have sacrificed our liberty and our life, quietly, to the whim of the tyranny of the majority, then we'll be put on the rack, and ‘squeezed until our pips squeak’. Just like in every reign of terror throughout history, from which we never seem to have learned a damned thing. Freedom lovers like myself want to live in the village, certainly, but on the basis of voluntarism, pursuing our happiness from trading via the voluntary transaction, and not having to fear bullies whom monopolise only misery, such as The Fist would enjoy visiting on us, like the big brother state does. But I'm dreaming again, for by July of 2012, via the voting chamber, free men have long had our pips ripped out, we are ball-less, so must resign our lives to lying castrated before the bureaucrats of state, The Fist’s henchmen in crime. Hell, I'm a prudent man, so I'm scared of them. Yeah, Chris, ain’t democracy grand, when you have the numbers. Doesn't make it right, though. And for many of us, this ain't living. How many times do humans have to keep doing this ugliness to each other?

Coincidentally, I'm writing this missive Sunday morning on that great invention of capitalism, the iPad, but my first job tomorrow morning will be to ring IRD to begin negotiating a payment plan for a businessman in Christchurch - as if he didn't have enough problems with the quakes - running a sales fleet of seven cars to sell his products, and for whom the quarterly Fringe Benefit tax bill of over $6,000, plus penalties, plus interest at rates the finance companies wish they could get away with, is proving to be a bill too far. There's been a recession in his industry since 2009, with the year before being the last he earned more than any individual in his sales force. Indeed, after two years of losses he's been living on the hope, only, of 2012's small profit, and then toughing it out until 'it all turns around'. It's notable that despite the hardship over this time, he has never waivered by using legal measures he could have employed to mitigate the FBT bill: this is a tax based on the cost of the vehicle, so he could have halved it by running a lower cost, second hand car fleet, over buying, always, new vehicles, like he's continued to do. However, his sales staff, paid salaries, not commission, rack up a big mileage, and new cars are safer: not once over the last three years has their safety been negotiable. And the same applies to the individual staff 'owning' their own cars on operating leases and his company paying reimbursements to get around the FBT either: all the added complications, bookwork and higher risk will take his mind off core business, and that's where the answer for all of them lies, if the government would only leave him alone. Slowly, he's turning it around, but it's sick that monsters like The Fist, with an understanding of business, and capitalism, only as deep as his navel, will be ecstatic to see this 'capitalist apologist' being squeezed until his pips squeak.

So I leave the reader with the image of The Fist, salivating over a word processor invented for him by capitalists, punching the tortured face of liberty until its pips squeak - forever.

Remember that image next time you see The Fist in the media.

_________________________________

Postscript. 

I'd just finished this piece and US analyst, John Mauldin's, weekly investment eletter has hit my in-tray, and it might have been a taylor made response to Chris (The Fist) Trotter's tantrum to Matt Nolan, expanding on the point made by Matt – again, it’s worth a longer quotation:

What I am bearish on, however, is governments gone wild with ever-increasing taxes and spending, and especially governments that take on too much debt. When governments decide to spend today more than they can collect in taxes; when they borrow ever-greater amounts to live a national lifestyle that is beyond their means, obliging our children to pay in the future for our spending today to maintain that lifestyle; we know that there will eventually be a day of reckoning.

That day comes when the debt is growing faster than the economy. The final Bang! moment happens when the total interest on the debt overwhelms the nominal growth of the economy.

When that happens, whether to a family, a company, or a nation, either spending must be slashed or taxes raised (which will hurt overall growth), or there will be a default. There comes a moment when investors start to worry more about the return of their capital than the return on their capital. Rates begin to creep upward and the process turns into an ever-tightening spiral of rising taxes and falling spending (which we currently call austerity), which hampers the growth of the nation and makes it ever more difficult to escape the debt trap.

In the course of human experience we have watched this process unfold literally hundreds of times, yet we never seem to learn. Somehow, we always manage to tell ourselves that this time is different. Someone else can pay more taxes. We can grow our way out of the problem, just like we did the last time. Or we settle for the desperate, cynical belief that future generations will sacrifice their lifestyles so that we can get paid our unfunded pensions and health care.

UPDATE 1:

A couple of points.

First, US Professor of Economics,  Greg Mankiw , on studying the US tax-take for 2009, has found that the US middle class in that year, under stimulunacy , were, via credit transfers, net tax takers, not tax payers, so, it would appear the ‘rich pricks’ truly are carrying everyone, making their scape-goating all the more reprehensible:

The most surprising fact to me was that the effective tax rate is negative for the middle quintile.  According to the CBO data, this number was +14 percent in 1979 (when the data begin) and remained positive through 2007.  It was negative 0.5 percent in 2008, and negative 5 percent in 2009.  That is, the middle class, having long been a net contributor to the funding of government, is now a net recipient of government largess.

I recognize that part of this change is attributable to temporary measures to deal with the deep recession.  But it is noteworthy nonetheless, as other deep recessions, such as that in 1982, did not produce a similar policy response.

Second, Lindsay Perigo, over at SOLO has completed my education. I probably should’ve known the quotation, or at least that Chris Trotter was alluding to someone else:

You may not be aware, since you are too young to remember, that the expression "squeeze them till the pips squeak" goes back to Harold Wilson's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey. I remember him saying it. At that time top tax rates were already in excess of 90p in the pound.

If you follow that latter link, you’ll also see confirmed the nature of The Fist, as portrayed above.


 

UPDATE 2:

Over lunch, I’ve been quickly researching the lineage of the ‘pips until they squeak’ quotation. It seems that Healey wasn’t the first to use the expression either; he was quoting Lloyd George:

We began gently with an attempt, at my suggestion, to establish once and for all that Healey never came out with the quote that the Conservatives are still fond of digging up, namely that he wished 'to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak'.

'I never used it. I quoted something from the 1920s. That can happen. Jim Callaghan never said "crisis, what crisis?".' What the then shadow chancellor in fact said, at Labour's 1973 conference, was 'there are going to be howls of anguish from the 80,000 people who are rich enough to pay over 75 per cent on the last slice of their income'. The 'pips squeak' was originally used by First World War leader Lloyd George; Healey did quote fellow Labour Cabinet minister Tony Crosland, requoting it 'in reference to property speculators, not to the rich in general'.

UPDATE 3:

I said above: "Capitalists, including that sub-set, ‘the rich’, have been cast as the scapegoats of this century, albeit the politicians have learned how to keep them on life support as they are cannibalised and eaten alive."

 

The proof is in  the media every day. Pity politicians weren't so circumspect in keeping their own irresponsible spending in check, so that we free men might have kept our privacy, and our lives.

Democracy: The Problem & New Symptom – Foetal Alcohol Syndrome.

This started as merely a marker post put up for two reasons: a) for a post I’m working on regarding Chris (The Fist) Trotter, which will be published sometime over the weekend, or next Monday, and b) as a reference point to refer back to in various online ‘debates’. It's morphed into something a bit else, although I'll start with what I had in mind from inception; the central problem with democracy:

Take the case of a social democracy that consists of just ten people: let's say four are black people, and the remaining six are white. This democracy decides to hold a plebiscite on the proposition that white people shouldn't have to work, as they have an entitlement to live off the efforts of black people, which they propose to do via the instigation of a special tax on the incomes of black people.

Guess what? The proposition is won by six votes to four. A democratically made, majority decision has just taken away the liberty of black people, all in the name of the common good of the tyranny of the majority. Now, simply take away the emoting use of ‘black people’, and exchange that for ‘taxpayer’.

Further, tied lethally to the notion of democracy as a tyranny of the majority, the welfare state has over the last seventy years proven its Achilles Heel: that politicians, wanting to be ‘caring’ and ‘compassionate’, cannot help but bribe electorates over the long term with an illusory free lunch, and that over time, social democracies will, thus, create, and ultimately procreate, enough voters to be reliant on this illusion, until the economic imperative takes its ultimate, and logical course, as it’s doing now in Europe, and the US. Meaning that what started out with the best of intentions, has ended up the Gulag of Forced Altruism, with its creeping cruelty.

Note there’s a particularly annoying branch of the Left – and please don’t infer from that I belong to the conservative Right - that arrogant, smug, patronising personality who is sooo caring, clever, and morally superior to the rest of us, such as the sanctimonious Sanctuary on this thread, who says, to use the latter’s argument against me when I used just the above argument on Imperator Fish’s blog, quote:

To me your question is a nice intellectual conceit for teenage undergraduates intoxicated at the first exposure to political philosophy and worrying themselves silly at the idea of the tyranny of the majority. So to me, If you have failed to advance from that first flush of giddy outrage to a deeper understanding of democracy that is your problem, and your loss, not mine.

It is the sort of absolutist question you often get from the intellectually immature - the rhetorical equivalent of a playground "nah nah nah so there." The great strength of democracy lies in its refusal to be weighed and measured, to provide a neat tick box solution for every problem, to excuse you from the bothersome and tiresome need for debate across numerous disciplines. Your question is nonsense, since it pre-supposes democracy is as rigid and nonsensical as your own philosophy. Democracy is a living, moving, warm blooded beast, when you yearn for a triumph of the taxidermist's art.

The smarmy arrogance in the tone of this is typical. And it all begs the question, because yes, by Rand I believe in absolutes, over the evil (im)moral relativism of the Left: this ‘is’ the problem with democracy, and it's a terminal one for the civil society based on voluntarism, the evidence and the harm of which is viewable simply by looking at the facts of reality of the world we now inhabit: watch the news every night.

And it gets worse. As I’ve written before, I am under no illusion: classical liberalism is dead; I shall never be a free man - this blog is, itself, a marker, merely serving as a warning that democracy is about to get a whole lot deeper mired in the mincer of State, because the next generation is looking to be the first truly alcohol induced one, a big enough portion of which is going to be sufficiently literally retarded and violent to drive us all further down the road to serfdom as they will be incapable of looking after themselves – or, at least, that’s what people are going to think, because they are incapable, any longer, to think anything else. Previously there has been an insurmountable philosophical barrier to attaining the freer society, over the bound one, due to Gramsci in our schools, rotting the children’s minds from within, but now this goes to its inevitable conclusion: Generation Foetal Alcohol Syndrome, born of a welfare statism that has destroyed self-responsibility and self-reliance. And the final proof of where it’s all wrong? The Left’s response to the above link of the growing incidence of foetal alcohol syndrome? To attack alcohol, the product, and ultimately, my freedom to enjoy it responsibly, rather than changing the culture drinking it. For how can they attack the cause: it’s a culture their policies have created, it just took seventy years to ferment, to the stage the bottle cap has been taken off. We are the generation that starts to pay the price.

… Chris (The Fist) Trotter, coming soon.


UPDATE 1

 Just happened on a great quotation regarding the advantage a freedom stifling statism has in a democracy:

We must understand that there is an imbalance of power in the political system of any democracy in that the forces of statism have an innate advantage over the defenders of freedom. It takes but one legislative or administrative victory for statism to succeed in guiding society on an indelible path towards dependency.  We cannot perpetuate the free-market, but we can perpetuate statism by creating inveterate dependency constituencies.  Statism enjoys the inherent advantage of self-perpetuation through its own pernicious activities that engender a continued need for the government programs.

Immigration: Cutting Off Our Noses Because The Law Says To.

Only time for a fleeting post this morning, in the form of a question. We currently have the 279 peaceable - by all accounts - Chinese students of the story that broke yesterday, spending their parents' hard earned money in New Zealand, while getting an education.  What’s the problem with this?

Our immigration department, if they can extract themselves from nosing through the private lives of their clients, are now going to spend unknown quantities of my taxpayer money, rounding these individuals up, hounding them, and deporting them.

The result will be everybody involved loses. The students (whom seem to be innocent victims of a fraud in China, and will be devastated to have their studies interrupted), the educational institutions they're at in New Zealand, and all those local businesses providing goods and services to the families involved.

In a free, classical liberal society, so long as immigrants do not initiate force or fraud and comply with the rule of law, and do not tap into our welfare system, then we can only gain by their presence, and thus they are welcome. There’s too many laws. Laws upon laws upon laws upon laws. Save us from this rule bound moribund Social Democracy.

(Postscript: I’d welcome someone who can give an update to the English family that featured on Close Up last week. The parents and one daughter, in that case, have been given citizenship, but a second, remaining daughter, was to be sent back to England because ‘she had been working here,’ which was a technical foul under law applied immorally, and with no compassion. Yet another appalling decision by Kate Wilkinson on the back of her 380 page Food Bill. I can’t find out what has become of this family.)

Statism and Privacy: IE, You Have None. And Bossy Teenagers.

I got through the first two articles in Granny Herald this morning, and have had to stop. I've set out my thoughts on privacy on this post:

A major theme that readers will soon pick up in this blog is that civilisation is a movement toward privacy, the police state the reverse: that if you have no privacy, then you have no liberty. [Snip]. To carry out their program of theft, sorry, redistribution, the Left from the get-go had to destroy the privacy of every individual: for IRD to be able to take my earnings and my property, my privacy before state officials first had to be disposed of; it was a given from the time the first Left dictatorian decided it was better that they, not I, should decide what was to be done with my money, just like in every police state from history. [Snip] And don’t give me the Privacy Commission as a safeguard: a society only needs a Privacy Commission after it has first destroyed my privacy – it’s simply an admission of the crime already committed by the state, and the Commission is state run, so that’s no safeguard.

Now let’s ignore privacy busting behemoth, IRD, and how they can, and do, turn the lives of innocents over, daily, with no hope for the audited of redress against the utter, complete devastation of their privacy and dignity; the audited whose only crime is to run businesses that better the lives of all of us. Let’s, instead, turn the torch of freedom on another Orwellian department of the type the state is so good at growing: immigration.

Staff at Immigration New Zealand are being accused of using a confidential client database "like a dating site", and of looking at information on wealthy applicants. [Snip] A former immigration staff member, who spoke to the Herald on condition of anonymity, said staff sometimes logged in to look at information on wealthy and interesting clients "just for fun".

Yeah, just for fun. It’s only their privacy; their lives. What would bureaucrats care about those. Mind you, that, fun, leads me onto the second Herald piece: is this foul mouthed teenage solo mum, who doesn’t seem to like paying her way, or mind a bit of vandalism, and whose life choices to date would seem, at times, a bit inchoate, the same one that just recently has been telling the adults on some Pacific island or other how to live their lives with an arrogance that would take your breath away faster than the emissions emanating from a bull’s backside?

Oscar nominated actress Keisha Castle-Hughes yesterday settled an acrimonious rental dispute by phone after she left a Tenancy Tribunal hearing upset.
The 22-year-old leased Roger McCracken's $1.4 million Mt Eden home with her friend Michael Graves for a year before moving out in November. Mr McCracken asked the tribunal for more than $5000, claiming damage to carpet throughout the house, fixtures and storage costs.
Early in the hearing adjudicator Amanda Elliott called for a 10 minute break after Castle-Hughes yelled "I go through f***ing hell", when told the matter would be reported.

There’s that lovely song, ‘It’s a Wonderful World’. The bloke with the divine deep voice. Anyway, he was wrong in the Police State circa early twenty first century. We are all forced to live our lives, again, as with the tribes of an older barbaric time, in the public bear-pit, with even teenagers, minds either barely formed, or deformed by alcohol, and their bums hanging out of their pants, having inculcated the ludicrous, but brutal, ethic that they have the right to determine the rights in lives of total strangers.

I must shelve 1984 for a  while, and pick up ‘Lord of the Flies’ again.