Privacy in NZ: This Week’s Signposts on the Road to Our Serfdom. IRD & GCSB

Writing this week in the sad, funereal dimness of the death of the last Western leader who understood Western Classical Liberal values, Margaret Thatcher, let’s take a peek at this week’s signposts of our forced shuffle down the road to our serfdom.

The term ‘road to serfdom’ was coined by a free man called Hayek who said, paraphrasing, government policy leads always to unintended deleterious consequences which allows bureaucrats and politicians to promote as solutions, more government policy, until in this way we are all lead down the road of slavery to the State. Indeed, statism has an incredible advantage over freedom, as Daniel Horowitz points out:

“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.”

Returning to the current affairs of the last week, despite I’ve lost count on the privacy breaches of government departments over the last twelve months, noting that in a country with a population of just over four million the victims are in their hundreds of thousands, and yet this week the Minister of Taking, Minister Dunne, on top of the intricate web of information sharing agreements his department has with international governments - because the war on freedom is global - wants to give more powers to IRD for sharing information with police in ‘serious crimes’.

No, Mr Dunne. It always sounds reasonable of course, and is nothing given the total absence of privacy this department symbolises for all of us, but the surveillance state is already huge: stop requiring information of us, stop recording information on us, stop sharing information on us. Just. Stop. Doing.This.To.Us.PLEASE.

And then on news this week, leaked, laughably, about our state spies illegally spying on people they shouldn't be; the fix? Why of course, to make their illegal activities legal.

@johnjcampbell Hayek called it the road to serfdom. Everyone who says state must do this, state must do that, is peddling our lives down it.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) April 9, 2013

See what I mean? Remember my yellow high-lighted byline out to the right of this post, at top of page.

Update 1:

As fast as we are being shuffled down the road to our serfdom in New Zealand, the litmus test of totalitarianism being the powers granted to the revenue gatherer – remembering  the powers of IRD are obscene – in the United Police States it seems to be a sprint to the Gulag, the individual’s right to be left alone an historical fantasy:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people's emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.

Hattip Peter Schiff