Why There Must be No Compulsory Kiwisaver II: Inequality against Men and Maori – Personal Choices and Trade Offs. #Individualism

 

I finally get to use the term inequality for my side of the debate (any debate) for once. In my last post I wrote from an economic point of view on how Labour’s plan for a compulsory Kiwisaver will damage our prosperity. That is, a compulsory Kiwisaver via the then compulsory employer contributions, plus the higher income tax rates required to fund the government contribution, essentially drains (steals) the retained earnings that every small and medium sized employer can otherwise use – if they were left with their own profits - to innovate and grow their own businesses, and transfers it to a parasitic funds management industry trying to pick winners by investing this investment capital with an elite, small band of firms on the NZX. More crony capitalism, less innovation and diversity across the econosphere.

 

But I started that post with something that is unfashionable in the modern politick: political philosophy; namely the simple point that once the state introduces compulsion, the free and prosperous society is lost – there is no middle way on the form a society takes. Here’s the cost of that on individual lives; the below is breaking nothing new, but needs to repeated, often.

 

In research unrelated to Kiwisaver I happened to be looking at the 2010 Mortality and Demographic Data prepared and published by the Ministry of Health. Several things occurred to me upon reading this.

 

Firstly, males generally have a higher mortality rate than females: specifically 1.4 times that of females. Then I realised that when I looked at the main causes of male deaths, various forms of cancer and particularly heart disease, that I am a prime candidate. My father had his first open heart surgery when he was two years younger than I am now: 48 years old. More, I don’t do particularly much to help myself here: I drink way more than I probably should, I love food, plus while walking twice a day and kayaking in the Sounds, don’t really get the exercise I should. But here’s the thing: I’m happy with trade off in my own life of a shorter life, for being able to partake in that which I enjoy: food and drink, etc. Note, partly off topic, partly not, I also insure myself for the consequences (although from a public health point of view, my lifestyle is irrelevant to any debate over the dictates mandated by public health: indeed, I could argue that by dying sooner, quicker, I won’t be such a drag on the public health system, if I end up in that system at all. From a personal point of view, dying quicker will mean not having to find the increasing health insurance premiums generated from the actuarial tables as I progress through the age bands, (or not).)

 

And all this is fine, until I am forced by the state into a Kiwisaver that won’t payout until I’m 65, and possibly older as the goal posts are lengthened. There’s a very good possibility I won’t get to use the sum saved by that age, I’ll be dead, and it will be useless to me – though the SPCA’s gain, and noting further Mrs H, or I, are well catered for on the death of the other. For the purposes of this post, I am far better paid being able to spend this money now, or earlier, at least, than at 65 years old. The state has no right to deny me my shorter term pursuit of happiness, it’s my money, after all, and it’s immoral that it would seek to do so.

 

Now expand this out from me. Maori have a mortality rate 1.8 times higher than non-Maori. It is especially pronounced for male Maori who have a 1.9 times higher mortality rate over non-Maori males up to the age of 65. So, Maori males, whose main causes of death are heart disease and diabetes related afflictions, will be disadvantaged over non-Maori under a compulsory Kiwisaver, assuming they, like me, choose to not 'fix' their lifestyles either and thus the trade off of an earlier death. A compulsory Kiwisaver in this respect is a cause of inequality, surely? (He says, slightly mischievously.)

 

But this is how stupid we have become. I can guarantee, indeed, think I have already heard mooted the arguments from some groups who are mired in the slavery of identity politics that this means Maori should simply have a lower payout age. A different law is required, that is, to non-Maori. And so it goes on, as ever a proliferation of law upon law upon law to try and fix the unintended consequences of previous bad law, in this case compulsory Kiwisaver.

 

I end by simply pointing out the option the free society would take, the civilised society, is to leave such retirement decisions to the individuals who will me living their retirements: me, in other words. Do not force me into a savings plan that will be useless to me. I will plan my retirement and take the benefits of that and the consequences. I’m more than happy to do so. And don’t allow law makers, or the Labour Party, to be so patronising as to think Maori males aren’t just as well equipped and happy to do so, every individual one of them, indeed, statistics indicate it will be in their best interests. The only moral basis of law in a free society is according to this individualistic ethic, not a collectivist one, which is always the coercive boot of state in one's rump, which I'll grow to any width I like, thanks, it's only got to fit into my coffin and I'm paying the funeral costs.

 

 

Parker’s Plan is Anti-Innovation & Prosperity: Why There Must Be No Compulsory Kiwisaver.

A compulsory Kiwisaver works against prosperity for all of us, because it leads to a less innovative, less vigourous and less diverse economy. Thus David Parker’s announcement of Labour’s monetary policy this morning predicated on a compulsory Kiwisaver will be a needless drag on an economy which is currently growing faster than most world economies (including the economies of Europe and the US). In trying to fix something that is not broken in the way they think it is, Labour risks jeopardising our economic wellbeing.

Prob with compulsory Kiwisaver - other than the 'compulsory' - is every small/medium employer is forced to contribute their investment 1/x
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) April 28, 2014

@MarkHubbard33 ... capital 4 the largesse of 10 to 20 crony NZX firms. It's elitist policy from Labour, & a disaster 4 innovation in economy
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) April 28, 2014

To expand on my Tweets, I simply quote below the salient parts of an earlier post – the sixth most read post on this blog - which was in reaction to then CEO of The Financial Services Council, Peter Neilson’s calling for – with no conflict of interest I’m sure – a compulsory Kiwisaver (some may want to gloss over first paragraph because it’s … well, philosophy):

I don’t deny Mr Neilson makes some attractive arguments; obviously so because, yes, savings are vital to a thriving capitalist economy: if you could put the taxes you currently have extorted from you voluntarily into savings we would all be better off in every way. However, the minute the country has forced on it a compulsory savings into KiwiSaver from the Fortress of Legislation, then its philosophically lost every gain that has been made, because a capitalist economy is defined as a voluntary one – add compulsion, then there is merely another planned, big state economy. Capitalism can only work, and works better than any centrally planned mechanism, when individuals are left free to go about the business of bettering their lives voluntarily, following their pursuit of happiness, and rational self-interest. This is also the pre-condition of a free country. Unfortunately, however, because 99 out of 100 professionals and business people, and 100 out of 100 lobbyists and politicians, no longer understand the philosophical issues underlying a capitalist system, by which I mean classical liberalism, I am forced to break this Herald piece down on its own shallow terms:

Significantly, never mentioned in Mr Neilson’s lobbying, there is a huge cost to business via the compulsory employers contribution that employers must make, matching their employees contributions, that is ignored, completely, by him. He is advocating that every small and medium sized enterprise (SME), including farms, in New Zealand, that’s every entity which employs, is forced to give over the capital they could use to grow themselves, and employ, so a very minute, elite group of ‘favoured’ firms listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange can use those extorted funds to further their own interests. Rational and fair people will rightly see this as first, philosophically repugnant, and after that economically retrograde. This is called crony capitalism, which, mixed with an uncritical MSM such as the lack of balance in this Herald piece, simply accelerates us all down the road to our serfdom.

Secondly, not only is every SME stripped of their own capital via the employers contribution, they also necessarily have to incur a higher incidence of income tax to fund the government contribution to each KiwiSaver’s scheme, being 50 cents for each $1 invested. Yet more money taken from business owners to play favourites and skew the open market for investment monies, given SME’s investing their own money in their own businesses is the major part of the investment market of any free country, and the KiwiSaver scheme is twice attacking that important source of investment funding, namely, retained earnings … (now repeat my philosophic arguments in above paragraph).

Finally, considering the KiwiSavers themselves, for many, compulsory savings into KiwiSaver will simply not be in their rational self-interest; they may well be prudent paying down their mortgages more quickly, than being forced to invest in risky start-up ventures such as Xero, Bliss, et al, as good as investment in some of those companies may indubitably be: investment has to consider both risk and return of each individual.

Thus, I end this post exhorting David Parker, as I did Mr Neilson:

… please leave businesspeople, many of them struggling, brave entrepreneurs, alone – don’t make your career one of … forcibly taking the money, and hence the choices and opportunities, of these people who are our economy.

Legal Heroin Ban: PSA and the Evil of Politics.

I wish I had more time to write this post.

Search this blog for the Psychoactive Substances Bill, animal welfare, or animal testing, and you'll see around the time that 119 of New Zealand's 120 members of Parliament were enacting infamy, their egos driving them for a world first, I was warning them of the inhumanity they were about to force on us. Although now that the results of legalising synthetic, toxic poison - on the heinous principle of animal testing for our human recreation- has been in place for less than a year, even I am left breathless at the devastation and misery that has been caused.

This is what the 119 that I declared a philosophical war upon, have done. They legalised a line of hardcore addictive drugs in the league of P or heroin, nothing similar to the non-toxic, non-addictive, medicinal cannabis that many other countries are sensibly legalising, and then by keeping cannabis criminalised they successfully addicted possibly thousands of mainly young Kiwis to the equivalent of heroin, because by taking the legal heroin they would not face the force of the law, or lose their jobs, unlike smoking cannabis for which they would be convicted in the government war on drugs. So government policy addicted them to heroin, and I'll keep making this point, heroin, which is what I'm calling it from now on, because that's what this drek is: these MP's have been hiding behind the euphemisms legal high and synthetic cannabis for too long. They legalised a hardcore, psychosis forming, addictive drug while keeping the harmless option criminalised.

And then much worse. Because it's election year, and Campbell Live has been exposing the ruined lives that have been addicted to legal heroin, Labour decided it would be a vote catcher to announce a policy of banning it. Not to be outdone, merely minutes before Labour announcing its ban yesterday, the instigator of legal heroin, Peter Dunne, whose son, remember, is the foremost legal representative to the legal heroin industry, in a knee-jerk political action announced his own ban of all 41 legal brands of heroin currently on sale, from two weeks hence.

Now, hands up those who understand addiction, who believe that these new government created addicts are going to miraculously stop taking their heroin fix in two weeks? Of course they're not: they can't. No what Dunne has done with the ill-thought out ban, as the solution to his incompetent, ill-thought out legislation, is deliver a brand new customer base to organised crime; the violent gangs whom will happily take up supply at some magnitude of the current price, meaning a burglary crime wave is also headed our way. (Perhaps young James Dunne better line up his legal aide application.)

Has there been a better example of the evil transacted by government in New Zealand in our recent history? Noting an important point made by one tweeter that opposition to the Psychoactive Substances Act, is still consistent with the belief I hold that prohibition does not work: it's just that in this case government policy actually forced users to take the most harmful of drugs, by keeping harmless cannabis criminalised. As I write in too many of my posts; you can't make this stuff up. Thousands of lives ruined chasing world first law-making - that is, one man's ego - which is a disaster, and yet still, despite the evidence world-wide, including the states in the US seemingly experiencing no problems with cannabis legalisation, not a single MP in New Zealand talking of legalising non-toxic, non-addictive cannabis, to perhaps keep some of these new heroin addicts out of the clutches of the gangs while the ban is on. (Or forget the PSA, at the very least, to look at putting cannabis into hospitals to help manage the side-affects of cancer treatments, and many other of the medicinal uses cannabis has.)

I revise my former oft used epigraph by saying we're something a lot worse than a kindy of a country.

There are some questions I will quickly recite to end, but first another principled point. This post is all about ethics, but the MSM and majority of the political blogs will cynically write this up as part of the political game: who announced the ban first, how will it affect election chances et al. Most, other than John Campbell – and good on you John - will forget the addicts. This blog is probably considered by most as a political blog, which is ironic, as I hate politics, and politicians who are taking us all at pace from the free, civilised society, to their brave new world of politick,  which is a slave pit where the masses are kept chilled with legal heroin. Aldous Huxley got it right. Was Peter Dunne concerned with the addicts here? Hell no, his reply to Labour MP Iain Lees-Galloway on that party’s proposed bill:

@IainLG @caffeine_addict @manstaneditor and do you really think the government would have given you a victory on this?
— Peter Dunne (@PeterDunneMP) April 27, 2014

There’s no victory here Peter, we’re all losers. If there is one bit of justice out of this it will be your disappearance after this year’s general election.

Questions for the 119 MPs:

Dunne has stated all current 41 heroins will be banned until they pass the test of 'low or no risk': however as the legal heroin industry pointed out last night in a tweet, there are still no guidelines set out by our inept law makers as to what constitutes low or no risk. So what is this criteria? And after that, show factually why the plant cannabis does not comply, because I'm willing to bet it does, and you won't need to test a single animal for that, just look at cannabis use by humans over the last 6,000 years, with not one recorded death from toxicity.

I originally wrote on this Act when in bill form from the point of view of the cruel animal testing it proposed, which via a series of nationwide protests, Kiwis thankfully showed themselves to be implacably against, to the extent that to this stage no animals have been tortured for our recreation under the Psychoactive Substances Act. However in the last tweet from Mojo Mathers to myself, she stated that the expert advisory panel set up to look at the testing of this heroin was still stuck on - the barbarity - of using animals for reproductive testing, thus animal testing is still on the laboratory table.

I suspect there will now be huge pressure to use animal testing as a way to get one of these heroin brands back into the shops, and the economics of this has been changed. Formerly the cost of testing was prohibitive, however that cost is now tempered by the carrot of getting a single heroin to market, and so a legal monopoly.

Will every one of the infamous 119 MP’s who voted for this monstrosity, please put on record if you are going to allow a single animal to be harmed under the Psychoactive Substances Act. Don't you worry responding Peter Dunne: I've realised via this you’re a vainglorious, ego driven man who couldn't care less about an animal's welfare (or a human's as it has ended up.)

Signing off in my usual disgust.

ANZAC Day: A Post to Freedom Lost

I think every ANZAC I'll simply post this from 2013; just substitute Minister Invisible, Todd McClay, as the new Minister of Taking, replacing toxic crud promoting, animal testing, Peter Dunne;


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.

* *

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.

Related Posts:

Reply to Deborah Russell on Tax Havens

Reply to Deborah Russell on Tax Havens II

Fallacy of the Common Good:

1984 Comes to 2012: Children Nowadays Were Horrible.

Common Good: The Tyrant's Call.

FATCA: The (NZ) Officials’ Report –A Crime That Deserves a Revolution.

Opening synopsis and challenge:

To every one of the Left who protested against the GCSB, NSA, PRISM spying trilogy in New Zealand, understand that through the Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) between the US and NZ governments’ over FATCA, our government is using the huge powers IRD have to spy and exchange information outside the purview of the Privacy Act, to implement an American spy operation in our shores that has nothing to do with the New Zealand tax-take. If a government can corruptly bypass the rule of law for this, they can do it for anything else, demonstrating why a taxing authority must never be given the powers they have been given in the West; the powers of the full surveillance state.

So, why aren’t you all out protesting? How big a double standard can you personally take with your cult of redistribution?

Truth Telling:

Hundreds of thousands of words in the MSM on Kim Dotcom owning a copy of Mein Kampf, yet our public officials yesterday published  a copy as the manual they’ll be following from 2017, and not a squeak. It’s like Pearl Harbour printed in a half inch byline after the lonely hearts ads.

Think hard on this: did anyone reading this blog think they would live to see the day that middle of the road US citizens would feel their only option to live free lives would be to defect ... from the USA? Well they are now, due to FATCA.

New Zealand tax officials have just confessed, quite casually, the creation of the full, one-world police surveillance state under the auspices, sorry, the outright bullying, of our US masters.

This post will make more sense in the context of my previous one, but in summary the recent Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) privacy debacle demonstrates the single reason for New Zealand's Privacy Act granting some limited protection from ACC and other government departments, but allowing no protection at all against the IRD, must only be justification on the grounds of the sacred New Zealand tax take which is the God the Cult of Redistribution worships at the price of individual rights and the free society. Therefore, the Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) between the US and New Zealand governments implementing FATCA, (see below), which cynically uses the IRD’s God-like powers that render our consent null and void, as with our privacy, to an end which is clearly not in pursuance of the New Zealand tax take, but only the US tax take, must logically be corrupt. Every New Zealand politician signing that IGA, to bypass our privacy legislation, should stand down in disgrace.

It cannot be underestimated how important this is. To recap again how the mammoth US FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act which implements the US’s citizenship based tax ) legislation works:

These are the facts spelled out. The supply by New Zealand financial institutions – … including every bank - of the requested information to IRS [on all account holder US citizens in New Zealand] would rightly contravene the most sacrosanct provisions of our privacy legislation. Thus, under a cynical work-around IGA between US and New Zealand governments, which allows them to avoid the political fallout of breaching that privacy legislation and creating second class citizens in New Zealand, these same financial institutions now simply provide that information to the IRD which can legally, albeit immorally, send it to IRS given our privacy provisions do not cover IRD

And:

Our politicians have signed the New Zealand taxpayer up to FATCA which has no benefit, indeed, is a cost, to taxpayers and to every New Zealand bank and financial institution account holder, given the US government is reimbursing no costs to administer ‘their’ law. FATCA was cynically put on us via the privacy law circumventing IGA only to provide the US information on its citizens, and to fund the US tax take, not New Zealand’s. There is absolutely no benefit for New Zealand.

Yesterday IRD Tax Policy published a 310 page document, part of which was the officials’ response to the IGA between NZ and the US, and FATCA, and the submissions made against both by the public. That report becomes a good object lesson to all submitters of what a whitewash such exercises are, and what a sham our statist captured democratic processes have become.  The report proper started at page 112 of the document: it is sadly unsurprising the first 111 pages dealt with what you might have thought was such a simple thing as how employee allowances are to be dealt with (such is the complexity of our taxing legislation). Although I could only make it to page 117 before my eyes were so blurred with tears of fury, and I had no interest in reading on, even in these five pages, look at what this report says about our society, and our world, in 2014.

I said above that FATCA has no benefit to New Zealand.  What an innocent I still am. The first three pages sets up the officials’ premise of why this legislation must be legislated because, quote, ‘it is beneficial to New Zealand’. There is no contradiction here, only the difference in point of view between a man who knows the principles of a free society necessarily based on individualism and individual rights, and government drones who’ll be having none of that nonsense. Tell me why this next bit is not sensational? The officials’ believe this legislation beneficial because:

Without an IGA, in order to avoid FATCA penalties, New Zealand financial institutions would need to enter into separate agreements with the United States’ Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Under these agreements, the financial institutions would need to:

* identify US accounts and report certain information about these accounts to the IRS on an annual basis;

* withhold 30% on payments from the US to a non-participating foreign financial institutions or to a recalcitrant account holder (account holders who have not provided the required information); and

* close the accounts of these recalcitrant account holders.

Officials consider that New Zealand financial institutions would not be able to comply with these agreements under our existing legislative framework. Private details of individuals may be able to be collected and shared if appropriate amendments were made to customers’ terms and conditions. Terms and conditions may also be able to be used to close accounts in appropriate instances. However, it is not clear that a financial institution could ever legally act as a withholding agent for a foreign government. Entering into separate agreements would also impose significant compliance costs on all New Zealand financial institutions.

The only way such agreements could be effected would therefore be for New Zealand to enact specific legislation that allowed financial institutions to comply with their terms.

I’ll summarise soon, but first the killer bit:

In essence, not entering into an IGA and not enacting enabling legislation of some sort would leave New Zealand financial institutions with a choice of:

*  not investing either directly or indirectly into the US (to avoid withholding penalty); or

 * investing in the US and suffering the withholding penalty.

So, the IGA is beneficial to New Zealand only because it lowers the cost and penalties – I said PENALTIES - which the US government will otherwise impose on our local banks and  institutions for failure to implement their tax take.

Think about that: 'to implement their, as in the US government's,  tax take'. Penalising a New Zealand bank for not spying and collecting tax for the US government.

This is sheer US bullying of the highest order. It is US colonisation of its tax surveillance state at the expense and extreme prejudice of its allies and their rights, and their sovereignty. There is no financial benefit to New Zealand of FATCA, only cost as we are having to pay to administer the US government taxing its citizens abroad, most of whom have no plans on living in the US, and the best our politicians can think of is to try and minimise the cost to us. What a joke.  A free country and principled politicians would have declared war against the US for this infamy (truly), or at least asked for reimbursement of costs; circa 2014 our politicians legislate their own people’s rights away to accommodate it, all the while through our own tax take forcing them to pay for it. Win win for Obamamarx. Chamberlain’s sycophantic cowardice has got nothing on the yellow bellies that occupy the sandpit in our Fortress of Legislation.

As I said in the previous post, at least the Canadians are looking to test the legality of the US IRS being able to impose penalties on non-US banks:

As a side note, the Canadians are looking at their legal options over IRS’s assumed ability to impose penalties on non-US banks which don’t comply with FATCA: good on those Canadian politicians. Compare that to our gutless politicians who just signed the dotted line: ask yourself, what right does the US IRS have to penalise our banks, our bank account holders, over a matter that has nothing to do with us, and when we are forced to administer their information bureaus and their tax take at our cost for no benefit? It’s ludicrous.

From this point, the officials report just mimics every other piece of tyrannical literature that has destroyed lives though our modern history.

On privacy it is appalling; the full communist ethic:

Officials accept that, under the IGA, information will be collected and shared which is not currently being collected or shared.

It seems obvious from submissions that many of the individuals concerned do not consider information-sharing in this case to be appropriate. However, government is in the position of having to make such judgements on a national, rather than individual, level. As set out in ―Entering into an IGA‖ section of this report, officials consider that a sound public policy argument exists in this case that justifies New Zealand entering into an IGA – a necessary part of such an action being that the information collection and transmission contemplated in the IGA will occur. The privacy of the individuals concerned was a factor that officials examined in reaching this view, but it was, on balance, deemed to be outweighed by other public-interest considerations.

My highlighting at the end. Stated in cold black and white: the public good outweighs individual rights. For regular readers of this blog, that’s where the penny will drop.

I quote just two of my previous blogs on the tyranny of common good: from TheTyrant’s Call:

… the common good has been the battle cry of almost every tyrant throughout history. The common good has been so important, apparently, that hundreds of millions of individuals over the twentieth century had to be exterminated or killed by the state for it. Rights cannot attach to a collective, when you try to, you open the gates to tyranny and atrocity. That same common good is currently being used in Christchurch to usurp private property rights on a breath-taking scale. Just as the common good is used as the excuse to steal the property and effort of productive individuals while making those individuals victims to a department of state with literally the powers of the true Orwellian police state. To be meaningful, and cause no harm through the force of state, rights can and must only attach to individuals. A society must only base itself on protecting the smallest minority: the rights and property of an individual (and especially from the abuse of state).

And – politicians note – from this blog’s most read post, still with hundreds of weekly reads, and growing, despite having been written in 2012, 1984 Comes to2012, talking of how children in the UK were in a school education unit being taught to dob in suspected tax evaders in their neighbourhood (including mum and dad presumably):

Look at the ‘good citizens’ these children are taught to be in our schools, with all these ‘obligations’ to each other. And so strong is the programming, that I am confident more than ninety percent of those reading this would feel, deep down, that they have to agree with the teachers’ ethic here, with what this tax course in the schools is founded on: that self-sacrifice for the common good, is a noble thing, and the needs of others are what social democracies must hold at their centre. This is what New Zealand Socialist commentator, Chris - The Fist - Trotter forces on us.

But it’s a magic trick, an illusion, that’s been done in our minds by Gramsci, a linguistic sleight of hand, all the more evil because it initially appeals to our 'better natures'. All we need do to understand it, see the reality of it, is change the focus, the narrative point of view, and see what it really says, which is that for you to live your life, it is acceptable that the lives of others, total strangers, be sacrificed to you, their pursuit of happiness destroyed for you, and that the state will initiate force to back you up in this, and mince up the livelihoods, and freedom, of those who will not bow down to you. And part of being a good citizen, now, is for you to dob these people in, so they can be dealt to.

Free men know that the civilised society is not based on such an extinguishment of life, but founded on a bed-rock of the non-initiation of force, particularly the state against the people, and on each individual being responsible for themselves, and self-reliant. That a civilised society works on the natural love and affection between families and loved ones, on compassion and charity freely given for strangers, and on voluntarism.

The officials’ document then gets even worse, were it possible. I once thought the one world conspiracy theorists were flakes: apparently they were prophets. In that area of your life where the police state meets your wallet and your rights, tax, FATCA is finally the integrated one-world police state that had previously been working its way out steadily via information sharing double tax agreements:

From a Government perspective, officials also note that FATCA is now part of a major global initiative to combat international tax evasion. FATCA is based on the idea of global automatic exchange of certain information by financial institutions. Previously these information exchanges have occurred either on an ad hoc or ―on request‖ basis, or annually by way of agreement between tax authorities under various double tax treaties.

Automatic exchange of information between multiple jurisdictions is now the new international standard for automatic exchange endorsed by the G20 and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Officials consider there would be a severe reputational risk for New Zealand if it were not to be involved in this international movement. All OECD countries have either signed, or are negotiating, IGAs with the United States in respect of FATCA. The OECD itself has dedicated resources to devising a common reporting model for financial accounts, based on the FATCA model. This tax transparency is seen as complementing its base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) work. The BEPS initiative is aimed at ensuring that entities and individuals that operate in numerous jurisdictions pay an appropriate amount of tax. Automatic information exchange and transparency in tax affairs is seen as an important compliance tool for this programme.

Read that again. For every clueless Lefty out protesting the GCSB, NSA and PRISM, that is the full big brother, information swapping, spying, one-world police state. It is Orwell’s Oceania on a global basis in the real world, in the world we live, because a faceless official who can read your financial transactions, can read your life, plus worse, this official owns your income. And you retards, worshipping at the altar of redistribution, created it.

And I’m only on about the fourth page of the report. It’s just full of gems: here’s a lovely piece of doublespeak:

The New Zealand Government should not be funding FATCA.

As set out in the ―Entering into an IGA‖ section of this report, the decision to enter into an IGA is at least in part an attempt to lower compliance costs that would be imposed on financial institutions in any event. It is anticipated that, by centralising some of these costs, the compliance costs on New Zealand as a whole will be reduced.

I don’t have to explain the contradictions inveigled behind every word of that.

Under submitters concerns regarding ‘overreach’ occurs a real concern for all Kiwis married or partnered to someone with a US passport, and to their partners. Ironically, under submitter concerns on overreach it is evident there will be massive amounts of IRD time spent screening the data to be transferred to IRS to ensure Kiwi partners of US citizens privacy is protected by not being sent to the IRS – again, you can’t make this doublespeak bullshit up.

Submitters appear particularly concerned that information on the spouses of ―US persons‖ (where those spouses are not ―US persons‖) will be reported.

[Snip]

 Inland Revenue has established an IT working group with the financial services sector to ensure that only the necessary and correct information is transferred (noting that the first transfer of data to Inland Revenue is not due until about mid 2015).

 Inland Revenue’s proposed technology solution for IGA information will result in data transferred from financial institutions being electronically screened to ensure it complies with minimum requirements. From the 2017 reporting period, one of the required data fields will be the US social security number (called a TIN for tax purposes and essentially an IRD number equivalent) of the relevant person. A person that is not a US taxpayer will not have a social security number. So, even if a financial institution did try to report on a non-US person, the data would be rejected by Inland Revenue systems as being incomplete.

I would point out that an inevitable part of this IRD ‘electronic’ screening process will be IRD officials looking at all these individuals closely, so opening the prospects of many lovely fishing trips for them. It is one of IRD’s stated compliance focuses this year to find all New Zealand tax residents with income being earned in foreign bank accounts: so they’ve just landed a big one. Under FATCA banks now have to report to IRD all US citizens: I bet all names  will then go into an audit function to check out their world-wide affairs from the point of view of the New Zealand tax take. Of course, for IRD, the Lefty and Tory Cult of Redistribution, and in the public interest this will be considered a benefit, and the massive inconvenience and invasion of the private lives of these victims, immaterial: they may well be rich pricks, after all, not human, just that lovely productive group who are captured as the Left’s bank and whose lives don’t otherwise matter. Indeed tax officials and governments the world over will be loving FATCA: it's a sign of how far and fast the West has fallen from a sane classical liberalism and into Big Brother's suffocating bear-hug.


And that's the key to this post, and to FATCA: tax officials that run countries, in the blind pursuit of their job descriptions without regard to the philosophy required for a free society, have for a very long time been wanting FATCA: the global tax surveillance state so massive, so powerful, so complex, that no individual, group or corporation can possibly stand against it without being destroyed, and that the Left liberal majority in the West are fundamentally crippled from protest, because their every belief has sanctioned and called for it. The IGA between the US and New Zealand was never going to be any different to what was first drafted by the new intelligence operations that run the world; the taxing authorities, which now own the financial transactions that narrate the most intimate details of your life, and own your income and your property, in-country and wherever you are on the globe. FATCA is beneficial alright, the officials' got that right, but only to them, not to those of us who thought our birth right in the West were free lives.

Anyway, detoured: so I’m now on only page 117 of the Officials' Report. On and on it goes. To sum up the above, it’s a sickening document directly from the pages of Orwell’s novel 1984. Every damned word of it; and I don’t have the stomach or inclination to carry on. I’ve made my point. Hopefully even one person reading this has finally woken up to the major themes of this blog. If you skim your eye across all submitters concerns in the officials’ report, then pretty much nil, none, zilch, zero submitters concerns have been accepted, almost every concern declined: the whole process was pointless appeasement. Every submitter who thought they were exercising their rights in a democracy, was being cynically used and abused by a bureaucratic tyranny that is bound on the ethic individuals only exist to be sacrificed to the herd; to the hopeless underclass created by generations of dependency to the welfare state where self-reliance is misinterpreted as selfishness and scorned. Some critical mass of our population, and 100% of the staffers in the bureaucracies plus in the Fortress of Legislation, including our cowardly politicians, are useful idiots. As far as the US goes, repeating my previous post, Obama may as well print out the constitution in a roll and sell – what was I thinking, he's no capitalist, give it away – as toilet paper.

Though finally, here’s the amazing thing. This mammoth wrong the US is perpetrating through FATCA, the treason our politicians are doing us through the IGA, the US’s tax surveillance state colonisation of every friendly country on the threat of dire economic penalties to them, this bullying of their friends and allies, and yet how many rights and political philosophy based articles against it printed in our MSM, that same who were all over GCSB, NSA and PRISM?

Fucking NONE. Not even the NBR. Hundreds of thousands of words on Kim Dotcom owning a copy of Mein Kampf, yet our public officials just published a copy as the manual they’ll be following from 2017, and not a squeak. It’s like Pearl Harbour printed in a half inch byline after the lonelyhearts  ads.

Hopeless.

Again, again, again, we are so stuffed: slave societies forced to live in the prisons of each other’s minds, because those minds have been fed on emoting trivia through the state school system and effectively destroyed. There will be no Western Spring, there will be no needed second Revolution in America, until after the new Gulags are filled: and those Gulags have their foundations well built into very firm ground, FATCA going down as a cornerstone, and listen, you can almost hear the drones.


Addendum:

Given this post is being read so 'fast', compared to the previous, two important paragraphs from that post:

And as shown by the non-response by Sacha Dylan, and the pathetic bleating of the Left on Twitter over the ACC privacy issue, it remains important to constantly expose that central, lethal contradiction of the Left, whereby they want their privacy cake, while eating it too. They want their privacy from the state, while promoting a big brother state from which, to meet its ends, an individual must have no privacy: grow up, this is simply not possible. When your central beliefs contain a contradiction this big, you must re-examine your premises.

And:

Because extend this principle out. A New Zealand government didn’t want the political fallout which would come from breaching our privacy legislation, so they used IRD, being immorally above that privacy legislation, as a backdoor for US to spy on its own citizens. If they did this once, why won’t a future government find it convenient to use the Teflon IRD on other issues that might be a bit embarrassing politically? Answer: there’s nothing stopping any government doing this. It’s the premise of this blog that IRD and its huge powers, is where the rubber meets the road to our total serfdom. All the Left protesting against GCSB, NSA and PRISM, what’s the difference, again, please?

Update 1:

The Canadian Isaac Brock Society is a site set up to provide information on FATCA, and a focus point for whatever forlorn activism is available against it. That site has featured this post, and it's worthwhile taking a look at the growing discussion thread for more information.


Update 2:

New Zealand Left Libertarian Carrie Stoddart-Smith on her interesting blog, Ellipsister, has met my challenge to the Left and overall agrees with this post that FATCA is an appalling privacy invasion and is thus unequivocal in her opposition to it. I suspect it is the Libertarian in Carrie, rather than the Lefty - which I don't see how to reconcile :) - that sums up FATCA as follows:

For all the reasons above, I oppose FATCA and I encourage those who oppose the GCSB legislation to consider the implications of global information sharing based on an individuals citizenship and access to their financial accounts. You may buy into the ‘it targets the 1% who cares’ narrative, but FATCA is not about class. It is about privacy. It signifies the unacceptable encroachment of the State into the lives of every citizen. That is the dystopia we are heading for with FATCA.

Carrie also makes some interesting earlier comments, not covered in my post, at how FATCA stands as a worrisome precedent in international law. Please have a read of her piece.

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