The Westminster Principle in Taxation: It’s What the ANZAC’s Were Fighting For.

It’s worthwhile reading to the end of this one, for it finishes with an ANZAC story about New Zealand’s war-time hero, Charles Upham (V.C. and Bar), and the sad knowledge he gained about the society he came home to after WWII, as it changed about him into something that more resembled what he had been fighting.

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This ANZAC Day it is worth remembering our birth right in the West, paid for by blood, was classical liberalism; that philosophy of limited government and liberty of individuals: freedom of speech, markets, religion, assembly, of thought and intellect, and a free press (free to criticise and oppose, without fear of retribution) - the state as servant of the individual, protecting their person and property, not the state as tyrannical master, plunderer by force of property and liberty.

It was this ideal that the ANZACs were fighting for, and died for: men and women. And incalculable more men and women have died trying to escape the state tyrannies they were born in, be it the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, North Korea, et al, to be perhaps capable of the chance of living free lives.

Within this philosophy the very notion of a compulsory taxation does not sit well, frankly, although if we must have such compulsion forced on us by the state, voted for by a mobocracy looking for the illusory free lunch, then Commonwealth countries have had in legal precedent since the 1930’s a landmark classical liberal principle, referred to as the Westminster Principle, that gave the individual some small degree of liberty from the all-powerful state in its taxing operations, which is the operation of the authoritarian surveillance state:

Every man is entitled if he can to arrange his affairs so that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure that result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax. (IRC v Duke of Westminster [ 1936 ] AC1 (HL)).

That is, the individual can arrange their affairs vis a vis structuring, estate planning, et al, according to their own rational self-interest - so long as 'artificial' (non-commercial, non-market) steps are not taken to 'avoid' tax - and not pursuant to supplying the maximum revenue, necessarily, for the coffers of the redistributive larceny conducted from the Fortress of Legislation: the individual ascendant, not the state.

It is a disgrace that in New Zealand even this principle has over the last decade been destroyed, and destroyed utterly, in the very courts that were meant to be the individual’s buffer against the tyranny of state. I’ve explained why on this post: the minds of our children have been captured in the classroom, generation after generation, and immured on the treacherous reef of belief in a statist theocracy; 95% of our secondary school teachers belong to that hard Left union, the PPTA, with a similar percentage of primary school teachers signed up the NZEI. These teachers preach the forced sacrifice of the individual’s liberty on the bloodied altar of the common good, and the state as redistributor of private property in a morality turned on its head. Our School Curriculum Document imposes this Soviet ethic into the basis of our very curriculum.

So it is not surprising to find Deborah Russell, Massey University lecturer in taxation, openly declaring her Left politick to the impressionable minds being taught by her, and perversely rejoicing in the op-ed of the Dominion, about the demise of the Westminster Principle:

This principle has been beaten back in recent years, in particular by laws that ask people to consider whether the tax minimisation scheme they have entered into is so artificial that instead of merely avoiding tax, the taxpayer is actively evading tax.

But even if the procedures used are legal, it’s not clear that they are ethically acceptable. This is in fact the closest I can get to understanding exactly what a rort is: it’s something that is technically legal, but nevertheless pushes the law to such an extent that it is immoral.

And it is immoral to make such a big effort to avoid paying taxes. It 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.

[Snip]

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.

The capitulation of freedom and the ethos of individualism is complete in these four paragraphs: we don’t have tanks on the streets, but it gets little worse than this, for we have lost the battle where it matters: in the minds of the citizenry. Because when the Westminster Principle was lost, by the same process in every sphere of life in our social(ist) democracies, every value that made the West the best civilisation to live in, ever, is gone. I only need to parse the news this week to prove the point (and my blog shows I can do this process every week).

Here, a judge in our employment courts has just disallowed a redundancy on the grounds the employer didn’t have the ‘business case’ for it:

It has been confirmed the Employment Court can inquire into the business case behind a redundancy to see if it is genuine.

Confirmation, with major implications for employers, is found in the recent judgment of Employment Court Chief Judge Graeme Colgan, who found the rationale behind a Hawke's Bay farm’s decision to make a farm worker redundant did not stack up.

If you’re not certain what just happened here, then the below two comments made to that thread demonstrate the gravity of it:

So the lawyer judge stands in the shoes of the employer making financial decisions affecting other staff and shareholders but with no responsibility for the company's operations.

And:

On the face of it, the company had made a judgment that the job did not require a person of the existing holder's skill/experience and it would save money by downgrading the position. Offering the position to the present holder at a lower salary is OK in theory but it will only work if the person concerned accepts the situation. As often as not, as a result of the downgrade, the person has a 'chip' on their shoulder. As a general rule, judges with little or no senior management experience are not competent to make these sort of decisions.

There is no philosophical or political difference, from the demise of the Westminster Principle, or to the fact of an employer’s business being everybody else’s business but his own. There's not one without the other: everything connects.

And again this week, to cite another example of the rampant statism that rules, a practitioner of a once proud free press in the United Police States of America, preaching the nationalisation of children:

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, responding to a backlash for a promo she recently appeared in, doubled down Monday on her claims that children do not belong solely to their parents.

“This isn’t about me wanting to take your kids, and this isn’t even about whether children are property,” she said. “This is about whether we as a society, expressing our collective will through our public institutions, including our government, have a right to impinge on individual freedoms in order to advance a common good. And that is exactly the fight that we have been having for a couple hundred years.”

The MSNBC host has been thrust into the spotlight lately for a network promotion she appeared in, claiming that kids belong to whole communities.

“We’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours, and your responsibility,” she says in the ad. “We haven’t had a very collective notion of ‘These are our children.’ So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents’ or ‘kids belong to their families,’ and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

This entire notion is so horrific, children belong to ‘communities’, just as my wallet and my bank accounts do via the tax department, that if I have to explain it to you, then sorry, you’re one of the fallen, there’s no coming back to humanity for you. What do you think of your children belonging to the community, Deborah?

Returning to these shores, and to where I started this piece, the Dawn Parades to commemorate the heroic fallen on ANZAC Day, an anecdote provides no better place to sign off on.

I have in the past talked to several IRD staffers in Christchurch, who commented on how ‘unpleasant’ it was dealing, before his death, with Sir Charles Upham, VC and Bar, on his farm north of Christchurch, and I don’t mean audit, just routine advisories, for example, when GST first came in: please don’t take offence, my friends in IRD, but after he got through with fascists in Europe, Sir Charles came home and obviously realised with rude shock the enemy was in-country: that enemy was the rampant state that maintained by force and coercion ascendency over the liberty of the individual, and the rubber met the road bearing the police-state to Sir Charles’s farm via the Inland Revenue Department, so he dedicated himself, it seems, whenever the opportunity arose, to make life particularly unpleasant for IRD staffers who dealt with (to) him.

So, and sorry, in what might seem a very low blow, but in fact is simply me having to  get down to the bottom of the grave in which classical liberalism has been buried; to the Deborah Russells, to the politicians that hold the theocracy of themselves over our lives, to the bureaucrats in the departments that daily usurp the rule of law by enforcing police-state powers upon us; if you woke up early this morning and attended a Dawn Parade, then what the hell were you thinking? Sir Charles understood the enemy, and I'm afraid it was you. Daily, as you go about your work, you disgrace and pile dirt on top of what the ANZACs were fighting for: our freedom; Classical liberalism; the Westminster Principle; our right, if we are harming no one, to be goddamned left alone by you and this enormous, lunatic state that’s comprises over 44% of the spend in our entire economy.

Finally, it is further worthy to note, when the Westminster Principle was being attacked, mutilated, by the hive mind of our judiciary, and then buried without ceremony, what was our current Minister of Taking, Peter Dunne - tweeting this morning about the Dawn Parade that he had attended - doing? Did he straighten his back, go to battle in the Fortress of Legislation, using the law to reaffirm the primacy of that principle to New Zealand as a free Western nation? No: everything Mr Dunne has done since holding that office, farcically, though damningly symbolic of the statism under which our system runs, under both a Labour, then a National government, via coalition, has been to merely write the epitaph on its tombstone, and bury it, with our liberty, as deep as he could, thinking he is legislating the fair society. What do you think Sir Charles would have to say to you, Peter? I know what that would have been, from my conversation about him, but I can’t write it here, suffice to say it would be along the lines of what I have said on this very blog before: George Orwell wrote a chilling view of the nightmare society in his novel, 1984, in which he said ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever’; well you, Peter, have your head stuck so far up the politick, you have lost sight and feeling for those taxpayers, faces down, necks exposed, you spend your career stamping on, and as your department is commissioned to do, forever … Every year liberties continue to be lost as the state grows itself, and we are taken down the road to our serfdom.

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