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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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Three Things: GCSB’s New Powers & IRD - A Question. Central Banks - The obvious. And a Revolutionary Thought on Protest.



Three not entirely related items - not entirely unrelated either.

First, to isolate a question buried in my last post on Judith Collins’s Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism legislation with its extension of the surveillance state: under the increased powers proposed for the GCSB, safe guarding - alongside issues of national security - New Zealand’s economic well-being (at the expense of the freedom and privacy of every single one of us), a question plainly put for the Minster. Given that:


The legislation also gives the Cabinet the power to decide by regulation that agencies other than the GCSB, SIS and police are enforcement agencies for the purpose of the bill, allowing them to request that particular service providers have interception obligations placed on them.


And upon my prior post on taxing authorities moving to police social media for thought crimes,  does this now allow the Inland Revenue Department, as an enforcement agency, to use the intrusive powers and methods of GCSB and/or SIS, to augment their existing considerable privacy busting powers, to gather information on taxpayers to enforce that department’s tax mandate for the ‘economic well-being’ of New Zealand? (As farcical as this would be, given taxation destroys economic well-being). And if such power is given by the Cabinet under regulation, will that be public knowledge, or under secrecy (as seems usual for the operation of government now, since our politicians have given away the possibility of remaining a free society)? Noting all the while that such eavesdropping would be in breach of the privilege that otherwise exists between a taxpayer and, say, their lawyer.

Actually, given IRS maintain they have the right to lift all a taxpayer’s electronic communications, email, texts, et al, without a warrant, can the New Zealand taxpayer be given the assurance by the relevant two ministers, of Justice and of Taking, such criminality, hence breach of privilege, isn’t occurring in New Zealand already?


Unrelated, an interesting post by economist Matt Nolan on TVHE recently, concerning the dependence, or rather lack of, and increasing politicisation of central banks. Matt makes the worthy points:


The point of an independent central bank IS NOT so that technocrats can do fancy things without needing a democratic mandate … it is actually just the way democratically elected governments tie their own hands with regards to monetary policy, just monetary policy.

All these other “structural” policies in the broad economy, they should be determined by our democratically elected government.

If technocrats/economists are not able to “persuade the public” about risks, this is not a reason to use public office to “force” the public to accept this – it is instead a call to try to make your argument more compelling, and to learn to accept that sometime society may not agree!  I’m not a political scientist, but a situation where unelected technocrats punish us if we don’t do what they think is right doesn’t sound like the right way forward …


I only wish to make the point that libertarians have always known: bureaucratic bodies, including those that distort free markets, such as central banks, will always be politicised. Every government department and function is political: IRS in the US certainly have been proven to be so this year, and I contend IRD in New Zealand have been so for some time. This is the precisely the reason we need limited government and the small state. Never trust government. Never trust bureaucracies that will always seek power for themselves, and that seek influence according to their own agenda, or, as bad, allow themselves to be used by politicians for their own advancement. The notion a politician or bureaucrat does not work for their own self-interest is childish and dangerous.

Minarchy …. Please.


Finally a thought:


Why doesn't New Zealand just opt out of the global surveillance net, in a similar manner to our protest on opting to be nuclear free? Let's shout out we're the free society, we will not be part of this Orwellian nightmare on its world-wide scale; we don't want to be defended by the crony Western military complex; we'll assume as our own defence against terrorism, simply to mind our own business (in every sense) and not piss off those who would become terrorists. And we'll trade peacefully with everyone. Of course this means all surveillance must stop, so stepping away from every information sharing double tax agreement ...

Oh. No. Silly of me.



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