Reply to Deborah Russell on Tax Havens.

I’ve written about Deborah Russell, Massey University tax lecturer, before, and in that piece promised a more substantive posting which never eventuated. The reason for that was because my entire blog is the refutation of Deborah’s position on tax issues – just scroll down the sidebar menu, and brief through my many tax avoidance emails.

Deborah has been writing again, this time on tax havens, and including the demise of the Westminster Principle in our tax courts, which I’ve dealt with the other side of in many of my posts. This is representative of Deborah’s dreadful Left ethic:

[Tax avoidance] amounts to saying that you just don’t give a damn about anyone else, and that all you want to do is take. And take. And take some more.

We’ve heard a great deal of nasty rhetoric about people on benefits in recent years, but very little about the scungy behaviour of tax avoiders and tax evaders. But of course, it’s always much easier to attack people who don’t have any resources and any other defences.

We’ll know that the government is serious about all New Zealanders contributing fairly to the common good of our society when they start asking hard questions of their tax avoiding mates.

Below is simply reported our brief exchange. Note I have no animosity toward Deborah (though the fight for justice against Thorny continues); I am a hippy at heart, that’s why I believe in laissez faire, and life is too short to net up enemies as one wades through all the crud of existing in our social(alist) democracies. But I will continue to promote my ideas, and the free society that should’ve been my birth right.

My Initial Comment. Note the Gramsci referred to is Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party who believed the Free West would not be defeated by the gun, but grabbing the minds of the impressionable young in our classrooms: with 95% of our teachers signed up PPTA members, he was right: they won.

Deborah, your entire piece is predicated on a sweeping assumption that the Left ethic of redistribution ruthlessly enforced by the state is the 'moral position': an ethic that many of us have come to realise has destroyed the Free West economically and philosophically, under the oppression of dependency and authoritarian rule.

The Soviets thought they had achieved this nirvana of redistribution and welfare from cradle to grave, but it ended up costing them everything they had. In place of the common good, they got the prison of each other's minds. In place of the caring state, they got the surveillance state to keep them all in line. You think you are preaching the caring society, you're actually laying the groundwork for Orwell's nightmare society.

Many of us believe the moral position is the free, peaceful society based on laissez faire, thus minarchy: that is, voluntarism and a classical liberal individualistic ethic, where we can be masters of our own lives.

The powers given to our IRD under the Tax Administration Act are those of the full police state, and we know what unbridled statism leads to. The sweeping away of the Westminster Principle at the hands of a judiciary now brainwashed by Gramsci at the head of our classrooms, is an abhorrent thing. Surely, as an academic, you have some type of onus to at least acquiesce to the fact there is another opposing point of view to the Keynesian Big Brother Surveillance socialism of this piece?

As importantly, do you carry this line through in the lecture halls of Massey to your students? Or just stick to technical tax? If the former, I'm rightly appalled.

Deborah’s response:

Technical tax, Mark. I’m very, very conscious of the need to not influence them in their thinking. I also tell them up front that I tend to be left wing in my political views, so they are aware of that about me, and can take that into account when they listen to what I say about issues such as tax avoidance and tax evasion.

My Further Retort:

They’re impressionable minds that haven’t lived yet: dissembling that left ethic on issues like evasion and avoidance is dreadful. No disrespect Deborah, but you’re wrong on this. And your society is the nightmare society for people like me. [Snip] Tell you what: every time you give that slant on society in your lectures, refer your students to my blog for the opposing view … put it on the white board

And of course that much abused word appears right at the end of Deborah's post - ‘fair’; but I’ve written on how meaningless it is.