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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Friday, November 2, 2012

NZ: The Party of Small Government Making More Big Government Laws: Craig Foss and Low-Ball Offers.



No government should ever legislate their nose into a voluntary transaction between two consenting adults where there is no element of force or fraud involved. This National government’s coming Low-Ball Offer regulation is an inappropriate intrusion of the state, yet again, into the private, voluntary transactions of individuals. Worse, it’s treating New Zealand adults, as if they were children, in this kindergarten of a country. Understand that I know  what’s good for me better than any bureaucrat, and certainly any politician, so (Anti)Commerce Minister, the authoritarian Craig Foss, can take his regulation back to the Fortress of Legislation, and rescind it please, while giving the taxpayer their money back for the time that has been squandered over this.

Just in case Foss is confused by this attack on him, here’s what he doesn’t seem to understand: if a company wants to make me a ridiculously low offer on a share or bond I own, I don’t need to take it. I can simply say no. Armed with the Internet or a phone to a broker, I can find out the market value of any stock or bond I own within five minutes: I don’t need protection from a low ball offer.  And worse: sometimes a low-ball offer may be to an investor’s advantage. During the period of the finance company disasters, a low-baller willing to take a risk by offering a lower price for a bond than an investor might have got out of liquidation, could well be doing that investor a favour simply by offering them liquidity. If I was ninety years old and a low-baller offered me $10,000 for a bond I might receive $20,000 for from a liquidator in five years, well, time considered, $10,000 in my hand now may well be the prudent decision, because I might not be here in five years, or perhaps that money is needed now for medical bills that will make my life better. That type of opportunity, which may well improve my life, is the beauty of the functioning voluntary free market that Foss is trying to destroy.

Though, bottom line, it’s always about philosophy: freedom of the individual versus the mollycoddling of an out-of-control state.  And philosophically, here’s the final insult: for the act of a low-baller making me an offer that I can voluntarily accept or not, without duress - it’s just a letter through the post for Rand’s sake - and an offer that may well be doing me a favour, that low-baller, conducting their right of the voluntary offer, can be fined $30,000.

This legislation is every bit an insult as the recent IRD and MSD privacy breaches, therefore, I ask Foss to voluntarily step down from his portfolio please: if nothing else, he has proven he does not understand his party’s stated ethic of small government, by just placing the fist of state, in the form of the increasingly draconian Financial Management Authority (FMA), into my stomach again. And let me reiterate, the continuing power grab by the FMA, represents a bigger threat, and menace, to business, investment, and prosperity in New Zealand, than every low-baller does.

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