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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Thursday, August 8, 2013

Why This Surveillance State? Labour MP, Andrew Little, IRD Audit And Somalia.



The biggest surprise I’ve had since our politicians unwisely took to social media is how uninformed are our members of parliament who believe they have some type of qualification, and worse, moral mandate, to govern my life. I’m saying ‘govern’ and 'mandate', rather than represent me, because not one MP in Parliament represents me: each three years the vote I make is useless – I simply throw it away in principle on Libertarianz.

IRD Audit.

Andrew Little belongs to that party which upon taking over the sand-pit in the Fortress of Legislation again will be unleashing an orgy of new and increasing taxes, despite current taxation already allows government to constitute a ludicrous 44% of the entire spend in our planned economy. Yet, he has no idea of the vicious surveillance state such taxing unleashes; indeed, I posted the following tweet to him while he was crowing about how he was trying to stop that trite side-show the GCSB Bill (which, as bad as its mass surveillance of our metadata is, has nothing on the power of the tax surveillance state):



People in the tax community will be interested in the final part of his response:





What?





What?


 


So you heard it here first: who’d a thought dealing with IRD over an audit is voluntary, if you are an individual :)  When the next investigator rings you (which they tend to do before sending out ‘the letter' stating it's now too late to make a voluntary disclosure if your affairs are not in order; you are stuffed), cite the Magna Carta, say no thanks, Andrew Little says I don’t have to attend interview room 101.

Good luck with that.

And yes, I realise Andrew was trying to take some type of bean-headed literal view that the auditor would have to send you a letter and official notification before audit, but really, that is a nonsense argument. The sense that I was talking about is quite evident, and if Andrew could not deduce even that then go back and read my first paragraph again. Although, of course, there are IRD raids ... no notifications of those, as twenty nine Chinese restaurants in Auckland found out some time ago.


Somalia Comparison.

In the course of the Twitter debate Andrew also brought out that pearl of wisdom against the free society, that unless we have a near-communist, or near-fascist state that comprises half of the activity in an economy, stifling it, and that has given itself the shock and awe powers to ensure the individual has no power or volition against it, and so must be subservient, we will all be living in … wait for it, we all know it: Somalia.

The last statist who used that on me was Standard(less) writer Sacha Dylan who accused me of being juvenilely anti-authoritarian, but when I then tried to hold a reasoned debate with him over the topic, threw a tanty and not just disengaged, but like Joe Stalin proceeded to re-write history by deleting his whole side of the Twitter debate, (and do I even need to say he's been blocking me ever since, just like nine out of ten of the Left I try and engage in constructive debate).

Here’s the argument against that proposition in the bullet-points they’d use in Somalia:

This is Somalia:

The country is in a state of anarchy where power is wielded solely by force: by the gun. That is, the initiation of force is behind every transaction.

The country has no individualistic ethic, it exists solely on tribal allegiance: if you’re from the wrong tribe from in the wrong area, then group-identity is the only reason needed to kill you.

The country has no rule of law. Again, law comes from the tribe with the biggest gun.

The affairs of the tribe are more often than not ruled by the opposite of reason: that is, primitive mysticism. And hence the barbarity and brutality we see practiced there, for as Voltaire stated, ‘those who believe in absurdities become capable of atrocities.’


Compare with the New Freeland I advocate:
 

Based on a written constitution of New Freeland, that protects the smallest minority in society, the individual, and that especially from abuse of the state.

The only role of the small state is to police the non-initiation of force and fraud principle: run a police force, army, criminal and civil justice system (could be done by a voluntary 2% tax).

Based on, in other words, the rule of law.

Based on reason, humanism, et al: that is, based on a classical liberalism fought for and gained by blood over hundreds of years of Western history (remember the Enlightenment) that until the socialists and statists destroyed it, had made Western civilisation the peak of civilisation that humans had yet reached. An ethic that once wisely questioned every member and every tenet of authority, and so broke the shackles of monarchy.


Now compare how woefully short our modern day Western tax surveillance states fall short of that ideal. Read this blog – we have been shackled again by the vote of the tyranny of the majority.

I don’t know where we lost the fight for freedom, but lost it we certainly have. And every time our Fortress of Legislation sits behind the trough on its ever-widening combined chuff, it makes our lives worse, not better.


(End note: throughout the Twitter debate Andrew argued without 'much' ad hominem, and never disengaged, through to after 1.00am Wednesday morning. He argued reasonably, even if without reason ;) I thank him for that.)


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1 comment:

  1. UnknownAugust 13, 2013 at 4:45 AM

    Combating subservience and protecting your right to privacy should be a huge priority. There are many tools,techniques and methods once can employ in order to ensure that no one is violating your rights. Counter surveillance is a big part of any effort to protect yourself using tools such as a spy listening device or CCTV cameras.

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