Beneficiary Fraud Versus Tax Evasion. Redux.

Jacinda Adern, along with Massey University Tax lecturer, Deborah Russell, on news last week of the beneficiary fraud turned up by government departments sharing data, have been opining that tax evasion is a bigger scourge on society, with much bigger numbers: which is, of course, to compare rotten apples erroneously with political persecution: to confuse benefit abuse, with abuse of the power of state. Let me get to the point of this post via a detour.

Tax evasion and avoidance versus benefit abuse is the difference between an individual trying to hold onto the money they have earned from their risk taking, their effort, and employing their capital, versus those who think the property of such individuals is their own simply to be taken and lived on due to an artificial right created by the state; that right being the only real fraud in this story. It’s the vacuum in people’s heads that has destroyed the free West.

This is the philosophical argument: I’ve written it out to the right in yellow. Remember the tax take requires the surveillance state, and nothing short of that. It is based on the premise an Arrogance of Altruists in the Fortress of Legislation know better how to spend your money than you do, and appallingly have the right to do so, because they've enacted those powers that no state should have been given again, to separate you from your property, and thus your liberty. This is the world in which though you are harming no one, you have no right to be left alone. Note, these are the same cruel geniuses who’ve just decided torturing animals is fine so humans can get stoned on Friday night, while putting such a basic human right as euthanasia up for a lottery. The tax state was always the death of classical liberalism, which was the death of our Western freedom: I’ve written before in relation to the demise of the Westminster Principle, how war hero Sir Charles Upham figured this out by the end of his life. There’s so much hypocrisy involved with this issue: we look askance at the midget thug Putin, viewing him in disdain as he sends another political rival to the Gulag, but then must pretend that Edward Snowden doesn't exist, sitting in exile in a Russian airport – because understand the tax surveillance state is the surveillance state, there is no separating all the complex arms of state surveillance, as they come from the same sanction; it’s the ascendant state, the individual enslaved. It’s everything we do, everything we say, watched, analysed, filed, and having to explain ourselves to complete strangers. You don’t think it happens in New Zealand? Hell, within a couple of hours of me blogging how the IR’s are searching social media for thought crimes, IRD arrived into that very same post (see update 1 at bottom). As an aside, how comfortable are you with that, Deborah?

Let me be clear: tax evaders are stupid in the way those who bravely fought the American Revolution were not, (a revolution, note, over an amount of tax that is but a grain of sand on the beach, compared to the taxes and excise we pay today). Modern day evaders and avoiders are stupid because they will lose, many of them everything: it is truly the Orwellian state we’re up against now, not just some fusty old state half a world away with something so crude as an armoury and munitions. You can’t beat the online state circa this stage in the twenty first century. You don't own your property, just as you don't own your life; this is not the free world, it's a world where individuals are sacrificed to the needs of total strangers. I certainly wouldn’t evade my taxes and I don’t, nor would I avoid them: I’m no martyr, I have responsibilities, and when viewing the truly ruthless armoury of the state; all those words on top of words on top of words in statute after statute, I’m a prudent coward. And a warning, as we are witnessing on the business news every day, the increasing tax take needed to get ourselves to the new Gulags of welfarism, can only be met by increasingly repressive tax law and more surveillance. If the state weren’t vicious enough already.

At least, the above is what I could say in response to Deborah and Jacinda.

If I wanted to get a bit more specific, and a lot less floral, I could also say - indeed I’ve said it before in this blog, repeatedly - I couldn’t care less about benefit abuse. Deborah and Jacinda are correct: the figures involved in benefit abuse are minuscule, hardly worth worrying about. No, I’m not worried about benefit abuse, I’m worried about benefit use: the legitimate benefit use paid for by myself, the taxpayer, under duress, necessarily, because I have no agreement with the road to serfdom society is careening down like a boy racer on animal tested party pills. And I'm against it not just cognisant of my own enslavement; the welfare state is ironically one of the cruelest constructs we humans have created, and it's not as if we didn't have enough history to know better.

I’m about to issue Deborah and Jacinda a challenge, but first a personal note. I don’t like writing posts like the two I’m about to link to. The point of this blog is I hate the global surveillance state, both the thought of it as well as the feel of it, and singling out individuals, even those who put themselves out there as targets, doesn’t sit easily with me. In his excellent novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote this wonderful explanation of why the protagonist would not take part in street protests against the Soviets after their put down of the Prague Spring:

When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand.

Well part of that evil is the singling out of people to make examples of them. That plus I’m so over surveillance and bullying, while I can ethically justify the data sharing that has caught these beneficiaries out, given when you live off the state you have no privacy, the other side of the coin has been that those of us forced to pay for it don’t get to keep our privacy either, and so all the surveillance and data mining is linked, and personally I’m over ALL the ruddy surveillance and the unveiled threat of state force to exact the money from me to keep the dictatorians in the Fortress happy, which will never be enough for them. So I’m (probably) not writing those posts anymore, I’ll just keep referring to the ones written into this blog already, and leave the ongoing marching of irresponsible, stupid people to the public stocks for Whaleoil.

To which end, Deborah and Jacinda, read my two posts below, or at least the first link, all of it, and tell me honestly if you have no qualms at all about benefit use also, because the numbers on that are huge, and are the mathematics of the police state, social decay, and ultimately societal chaos. Look at Europe.

State Housing – Is There Any Better Example of What Is Wrong With The Welfare State? 

And:

Sorry, But Irresponsible People Breeding Generational Poverty Is Annoying Me, Jacinda.

And with this, I’ve got a busy week, so my only remaining blog target is to get my response to Todd McClay on animal testing for stoners penned. I know that Deborah Coddington – quite a different Deborah altogether  - is filling in for JT and Willie on RadioLive, afternoons, this week, and will be devoting at least some of one of her shows to this. If you get time, please listen in and join the protest against animal testing for human recreation.


Update 1:

To the Inland Revenue personnel member/s who read this post at 8.46am this morning, 24 July, note very clearly I said tax evaders are stupid, and read my disclaimer at bottom please.

I'd be far more interested, however, in knowing in what 'work' capacity you are here: surfing the net, or looking for thought crimes? I pay my taxes, surely I'm owed an explanation?