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, May 28, 2014

Instigating The Uninformed To Take My Income From The Emoting Booth.


Warning: This piece contains Reactionary triggers.
 

As with every election year, there is started that campaign by the Left to get those to vote whom don’t normally, because they can’t be bothered; particularly youth.  No doubt this due in no small part to the Left thinking they know where this uninformed vote will go; and I’m afraid they may be right – that is, follow my money.
 




 

As usual in our age of Reality TV, the message goes right to that pseudo nouveau intelligentsia at the top, celebrity; because as we all know, singing tunes and learning lines gives one instant access to all scienpoliteconophilosophial knowledge:
 




 

Two thoughts; I apologise now before you read on:
 









 

Regarding the Daily Blog Post: no, this libertarian definitely does not want 16 year old high school children voting on how ‘I’m allowed’ to live my life, and how much of my income is to be taken for the privilege. Let them earn an income first. And while teaching civics in school sounds good, when 95% of our teachers belong to hard-line Left union the PPTA, excuse me for being terrified.
 

Bloody democracy: the Left would turn the voting box into an emoting box for the idealistic young who have not lived in reality sufficiently to understand they can only vote themselves a free lunch on my income, with consequences that frighten we adults who have a keen grasp on the history of the state, a state, and how it has always consumed our freedoms and our right to be left alone. I want people voting who have thought about these issues for some good deal of time, not just lunch-time before the bell rings.
 

Clarifications in the way of Excuses, Regarding this Reactionary and Celebrity:
 

I love and respect what Lorde has done for herself: her burgeoning career is an example of talent with confidence coming together into the best a human being can be. However, the conundrum is - with Keisha Castle-Hughes Green activism in mind, (remember before her and her boyfriend trashed that landlord’s house they were living in?), and the over thirty causes Justin Bieber promotes, (and no I'm too timid to go and look) - I am ‘over’ celebrity teenagers thinking they have the world so sussed, they should have any sort of a say in my life via calling policy at the Fortress of Legislation. Then again, with Lucy Lawless in mind, and Barbra Streisand, I’m over all-knowing celebrities and their busy-body ways, period – the only exclusion I can think of being Brigitte Bardot (animal welfare – um, albeit I’m selfishly leaving the orthodoxy on that one). Although that’s not quite it either: I’m just over everybody thinking they have a right to have a say in what an individual does when that individual is going about their life, minding their own business, doing no harm.  That is a right no one has, but which is unfortunately the ruling ethic of our collectivist times as we are all forced to live the Lives of Others, our freedoms sacrificed via the tax surveillance state to the manufactured needs of complete strangers.
 

Perhaps I’m being childish myself. On a Twitter thread some years ago Sacha Dylan once accused me of being like a spoilt child who was immaturely anti-authority: I tried to debate him rationally on it, as adults do, however, he threw a tantrum in pretty short order before doing the Lefty thing of re-writing history by wiping out the entire timeline. No, I don’t think I’m being childish, and certainly not selfish:
 

 
 

Rambling. Sorry.
 

Long live free speech, unless you’ve got your thieving paws on my wallet, or you’re a kid: in which case, bugger off ... please. My life is the one always-place your life has no right to be: we need a constitutional minarchy which protects only the rights of the smallest minority, the individual, and no vote to then emote that away, for it's time we stopped living bound lives, held down with a taxboot against our neck on someone else's bargaining table in an auction room. Though until we do, if there must be a vote, then I'll vote for a minimum voting age of 40, I think, perhaps deferred for those males still not through that little crisis we have around that age.
 

Now I’m off to that wonderful product of capitalism: iTunes.

 
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Saturday, May 24, 2014

Inequality Timelines, and Matt Nolan’s Tweet of the Day.


On Saturday morning’s TV3 current affairs program The Nation, the media’s love affair with the inequality debate was given continued oxygen. Below I’ve simply copied and pasted two Twitter Timelines in which I was trying to make a single important point, but first, tweet of the day goes to economist Matt Nolan for the final one in this timeline:













Drum roll ….





Love it.

Those collectivists that would attempt to ‘solve’ the virus of ‘inequality’ - however they define that -  seek to do so with the antidote of taxation, and thereby only grow our tax surveillance states, and the poverty through dependency and reward of imprudent life decisions they foster via the parasite of welfare.

As for my timelines, due to lack of time I copy with little further comment:

 

Timeline 1:





































 

Timeline 2:

To be honest, though relevant, my comment about taxation was off the mark. The point I was trying to make was that rich people are not the cause of poor people. They are unrelated. One individual accruing wealth from earnings on the capital of their mind, does not stop another doing the same. It’s the old adage of the Inequality Busters not understanding that capital/earnings/wealth are not a pre-set pie that must be divvied up so that what one get lessens the pool for everybody else. It’s concomitant with the Green fallacy that resources are limited. We create capital. This means that because rich people are not the cause of poor people, taxing the rich to transfer to the poor is going to achieve absolutely nothing: no, wrong, it makes it worse. Because taxes are used to create welfare states that promote dependency, imprudence and lazy thinking, they end up creating an even bigger proportion of poor without the skills to use their minds, because welfare, after killing the bonds of natural love and affection within families, then kills the mind and its ability to reason responsibly about the reality of circumstances, and it does this because individuals know that ultimately someone else will be forced to foot the bills for the 'selfishness' of foolhardy life decisions.

I returned to this point debating New Zealand businessman Selwyn Pellet who has an unfortunate case of rich man’s guilt which he works out not by using his own money to fix his perceived ills (or perhaps be does, that’s beside the point), but publicly by advocating the ruthless tax surveillance state as the answer to his perceived ills. Selwyn gets a hard time on Twitter as the companies he has made his wealth from have been big time receivers of government corporate welfare, thus the point he was making from the first tweet below, which is midway through a thread. I congratulate him on his success, hold no animosity toward him, and would rather interact on ideas – though the fact of Selwyn’s corporate welfare yet remains a double standard, as big, in fact, as my own, given no matter how I care to dress it, I make my income pimping the tax state, which, per my disclaimer (please, Mr and Ms IRD) I do conservatively.





























There was then, of course, the predictable barbs:





(Sorry Selwyn.)

















 

One point about Selwyn's statement that he made his money  from designing, manufacturing and employing. Yes, by increasing his earnings and capital, so he created opportunities for all the employees of his company. That is true wealth creation and a prosperous society. The opposite is the destruction of this same wealth via taxation. Finally, to view this from another angle, what does happen, however you define inequality, when you try to equalise everybody, whatever the hell that means? I’ve written many posts on that, perhaps best summed up in this one, reprinted below:

 

Inequality … No, No, No – Don’t Go there.

 
The NBR rich list is in the news again, with Labour MP’s showing us what to expect when they next take over the sand-pit in the Fortress of Legislation:

 

The rising wealth of those on the National Business Review Rich List raises questions about growing inequality in New Zealand, Labour MP Andrew Little says.

 

The 2013 Rich List is bigger and richer than ever before with the total minimum net worth of members now at $47.9 billion, an increase of $3.5 billion on last year’s list.

 

Graeme Hart again tops the list with an estimated net worth of $6.4 billion, up $400 million from last year.

 

When you see mention of that word, inequality, it only means one thing for the Left: the ledger has to be balanced up by the redistribution of taxation. Sorry, but the majority of families in New Zealand earning under $60,000 are paying no net tax after transfers, that’s near half the families in the country, while 12% only of households, the high income earners, are paying 75% of the tax take. Never was so much owed by so many to so few, yet the ruling ethic of a philosophically bankrupt West is those few must be put to the Income Tax Act 2007 and plundered even more.

So Graeme Hart and Bill Gates earn more than me: big deal. Doesn't mean their lives are any better than mine; I have the money to buy everything I need, and both these gentlemen and I squeeze through the toothpaste tube at the same rate and that'll be the case no matter how much more they earn. All our standards of living are unrecognisable to past generations thanks to the industrial revolution and the innovation and wealth creation of free markets. But to do what the social democrats are doing, regulating and destroying free markets and forcibly taking the earnings these men have generated through risk taking and entrepreneurship to 'even us all up', just takes all of our freedoms away completely, and puts us living in the jail of Nanny State, our pursuit of happiness destroyed. Best to leave people with their own money, and create the right incentives for a free and prosperous society: don't worry your neighbour might have more than you, because to 'fix' that you have to legislate the surveillance state and subvert the civilised society completely.

Before advocating legalised theft of other peoples' efforts, go rent a movie called The Lives of Others, and see if you really want to live in the world you'd have us all inhabit, Mr Little. Because that world ends in this:

 


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Friday, May 23, 2014

Prohibition: The Minister of Legal Heroin’s Wilful, Negligent Ignorance.


Advocates of the free society understand that democracy, while being an important step on the way, is not the free society promised by classical liberalism; it is the oft quoted tyranny of a majority, which, worse, has been largely hijacked by the ethic of the Left. That said, it would still be great to see, and a little glimmer of hope, if from time to time politicians showed they understood the spirit behind a democratic system: that we don’t vote them in so they get to pompously tell us how we are to live our lives as they would want us, but are voted in to ensure that we get to live as we want so long as we do no harm. This is no longer the case in the West, which under the corrosive partisanship of party politics, has become hoist on the petard of hubris and arrogance of a politician’s expectations for their career, lording it over we small people, everything about us regulated and known in our tax surveillance states. Case in point, again, Peter Dunne, Minister of Legal Heroin.  
 








 

No. I have summed up on this post the travesty, and the disaster for those individuals addicted to legal heroin by this government, of Peter Dunne’s Psychoactive Substances Act. This legislation was inept in inception, succeeded only in addicting some thousands to the most toxic substances created, on a league with heroin, while irrationally keeping non-toxic cannabis criminalised, and is now all the more cruel in its abeyance, given the Act’s failure. It was the enactment of one man’s ego with consequences that were 100% predicted by myself on this blog and other critics who cared to stay informed. To continue the above Twitter thread, it appears the Minister of Legal Heroin is so confirmed of his own opinion, he feels no need to stay informed, or interact in any way with those who are, for as usual, he disappeared into a bauble somewhere. He must step down.
 


















The New Zealand Drug Foundation, per their site, seems to take no overt position, other than that information is power. It seeks to bring the information regarding drugs, for and against, into one place so that individuals can be informed. More power to them. Especially the number of pieces that are rightly critical of prohibition for cannabis, information Peter Dunne seems too arrogant or ignorant to avail himself of, as with every other member of Parliament:
 

 


 

The article in that link advocating the decriminalisation of cannabis, written in 2007 before these evil synthetic, toxic heroins became so prevalent, is even more relevant today, but Mr Dunne and our masters in the sandpit at the Fortress of Legislation prefer to remain wilfully ignorant, while they try vainly to keep the baubles of power in this September’s general election. I don’t agree with everything in the below post, but certainly most of it. It would be interesting to know what Mr Dunne's thoughts were if he deemed to read it, but thinking, apparently, is not his strong suit: proof, his dreadful, calamitous for many individuals, Psychoactive Substances Act, and the continued harmful war on cannabis.

 

Time to end cannabis prohibition

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The current high levels of use and the level of black market activity indicate that the current prohibition regime is not effective in limiting cannabis use. Prohibition results in high conviction rates for a relatively minor offence, inhibiting people’s education, travel and employment opportunities. Prohibition makes targeting education, prevention, harm minimisation and treatment measures difficult because users fear prosecution. It also facilitates the black market and potentially exposes cannabis users to harder drugs.

-----

So said the Health Select Committee’s report on the inquiry into the legal status of cannabis, in August 2003.

Whatever your take on the health effects of cannabis – and we all have our opinions – it is clear that prohibition has not worked, and a drugs policy re-think is in order.

If the aim of prohibition has been to prevent use, it has failed spectacularly. Despite having the highest cannabis arrest rate in the world, more New Zealanders use cannabis now than ever before. Half of New Zealanders are criminalised by this law. Eighty percent of 21-year-olds have tried cannabis. How many should be arrested before prohibition is judged a success?

Enforcement of cannabis prohibition by the police, courts and prisons cost taxpayers $56 million in 2000. While more than twenty million dollars is spent every year chasing ordinary Kiwis for small amounts of cannabis, treatment services and effective education are struggling or, in places, don’t exist. Furthermore, fear of arrest is the biggest barrier to those seeking help.

Though use is widespread in New Zealand, enforcement of drug laws impacts much harder on Maori, who are five times more likely to be arrested for cannabis than non-Maori.

The present law is a form of institutional racism. Its enforcement alienates police from society and causes enormous harm to the lives, careers and families of more than ten thousand people arrested every year.

Research confirms that drug laws have little effect, if any, on drug use rates, but they do increase or decrease the harms associated with use. Countries that have reformed their laws have not experienced increased use, but have spent millions of dollars less on law enforcement than countries where prohibition remains.

The Dutch, who have allowed the sale of cannabis to adults since 1976, have one-third the per capita usage of New Zealand. In the United Kingdom, teen cannabis use dropped after it was made a non-arrestable offence.

There is no difference in use between those Australian states who have decriminalised cannabis and those that continue to arrest users. The United States also shows no difference between the ten states – representing half the population – who decriminalised in the 1970s and those that did not. Recent analysis of cities in California, Colorado, Washington State and Oregon showed there was no influence of medical cannabis laws on the extent of illegal cannabis use. The researchers said that the “use of the drug by those already sick might ‘de-glamorise’ it and thereby do little to encourage use among others”.

The most commonly voiced concern about ending prohibition centres around the protection of children. However, problems in our schools or communities are made worse under current law, not better. Prohibition promotes a ‘forbidden fruit’ mentality, glamorising cannabis as a token of rebellion. Open and honest communication is made more difficult in an environment of guilt and persecution. The untaxed cannabis economy is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and controlled by whoever is prepared to break the law. Violence and intimidation rule the market, just as was the case under alcohol prohibition in 1930s America.

So what should be done about it?

If we are genuinely committed to harm minimisation, we should immediately repeal cannabis prohibition and investigate the failure of current drugs policy.

Let’s control the way cannabis is used and sold through appropriate regulations such as age limits, health warnings, dosage and packaging controls, marketing restrictions and so forth.

Let’s use cannabis excise taxes to provide effective education about drugs so that people can make responsible and informed choices, and fully fund treatment services for those who need them. Let’s provide enough resources to research the effect of any law changes.

Modern research shows cannabis is an effective and safe medicine for many conditions including cancer, HIV wasting syndrome, glaucoma, chronic pain, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, paraplegia and epilepsy. Let’s allow doctors and patients to decide what treatment is best for them, not politicians or police.

Given the spectacular failure of the current law, the burden of proof should be on prohibitionists to show why we should persist with this expensive and destructive mistake.

·         Chris Fowlie is President of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws in New Zealand.

 

 
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Sunday, May 18, 2014

Labour’s Immigration Policy is Decidedly Conservative: Identity Politics Left & Right.

 

This post is partly to explicate the Libertarian advocacy of open immigration, and in doing so to demonstrate how libertarians don’t belong to either right or left politics, rather, existing  uncomfortably - though justifiably self-righteously because we do not call on others to pay for our ideals - in the schism between a free society and the authoritarian ones we now live in, governed by the brute fist of what has become a global, Orwellian tax surveillance state.
 

This morning I find leader of the Labour (Left) Opposition, David Cunliffe, is electioneering on what looks to be a Conservative immigration policy promising to slash net immigrant numbers from 40,000 per year to as low as 5,000. I write ‘looks’ because in fact Left politics in New Zealand has morphed via identity politics (that is, stereotyping bigotry) into a patriotic, nationalistic, protectionist and contradictory mess that makes a mockery of The Internationale. (I won’t even dignify this Labour policy with the economic argument against using immigration policy to ‘fix’ house prices, which is to miss, well, everything.) My initial response:
 








 

From this that arch-tweeter of New Zealand conservatism, Redbaiter, picked up on both this tweet, and an earlier statement by myself that drug legalisation was the litmus test of a free society. Note I like Redbaiter: there is a large divide between our views, but at least he has views held passionately, and I can have a good old ding dong with him on Twitter without him running childishly to the block, which far too many of New Zealand’s Left tweeters and bloggers do (though not all of them). I run the below Twitter timeline simply to show that Libertarians are not Conservatives, for we are social liberals, and to scope out (sorry everyone reading this from Christchurch where that has become a dirty word ) a policy of open immigration such as would exist in a free society constituted as a minarchy. I’ll do a final summary at end relating this theme back to my earlier posts on multiculturalism.
 












 

At this stage Redbaiter went to one of his own ‘themes’, which is the Chinese peril: you won’t be mistaken, but may be confused, at the associations this raises with both Labour and Green politicians statements against Chinese investment in New Zealand. The answer to the conundrum I believe lies not so much with economic ludditism - though that is part of it - but with the Left’s new found penchant with nationalism, born of protectionism - sorry, that's economic ludditism again - and long time conviction for identity politics; policy making, such as enforced quotas, on the basis of an individual's identity with a group (gender, race, etc) rather than a libertarian’s classical liberal individualistic ethic, and individual property rights as the only basis for law making. It’s a type of stereotyping the Left hold in common, ironically, with the authoritarian right, as exemplified in Redbaiter’s conservatism.
 
































 

For the record, typo alert, that tweet of mine above should read 'founded'. Anyway, then the reason why I like Redbaiter plus would be happy, if he were to uncloak, to carry the ding dong on over a bong … sorry, he’d have no part of that. Why I’d be happy to continue such debate over a beer at the pub:
 








 

But bottom line, there is only one word to describe what underlies Redbaiter’s, Labour, Green and for that matter, NZ First's, constant anti-Chinese sentiment: ugly.
 
 

Multiculturalism, Sharia Law and Open Immigration:
 

The other bogey the Right cite against open immigration is the threat of Islam and Sharia Law; to that I have two responses:
 

Firstly, the barbaric Sharia Law in every way I can think of breaches the non-initiation of force principle, thus much conducted under Sharia is rightly criminal behaviour in a free country. Western classical liberalism would never extend a hand to Sharia. So the crimes committed under Sharia in some (some only) Moslem-centric countries are not an argument against open immigration, including by a person of any race who describes themselves as a Moslem, for my understanding is a moderate Islam does not hold with Sharia.
 

Secondly, yes, of course I have huge ideological and philosophical issues with Islam, more so than with a Christianity which has thankfully has its sword blunted by the West’s Enlightenment, but, so long as any individual signs up to the non-initiation of force principle, and not to use our welfare system, then they are welcome here. Society has to be based on that. I have written on my views of this in my following blog post: Montesquieu and Islam: The Peaceful Crusade in Dunedin – Please Excuse my Discomfort.



Update 1: The Conservative / Libertarian Divide – Summary.

 

Firstly thank you to Brendan McNeill of AConservative Perspective for debating this with me in the below comments. The thread serves well to show the differences between Conservatives and Libertarians. Central to Brendan’s reasoning is the following:

 

I am capable of differentiating between Muslims as people, and Islam as a totalitarian religious ideology. Unfortunately we cannot tell by observation which Muslims will radicalize, and which will not.

If we accept that there is just as many good / bad Muslims as there are in the general make up of the population, adding the risk of radical Islam into the mix simply serves to make them the least desirable candidates for immigration.

 

Brendan would allow no Muslims immigrate to New Zealand. To sum up our differences, and my argument for an open immigration, I simply reason as follows.


A free society is not one where a group, such as Brendan’s conservatives, get to say, ‘yeah, not all Muslims are violent, but their belief system is awful so we’re letting none in, just in case.’
 

A society where that ethic rules is a bigoted tyranny of conservatism governed largely unknowably by subjective whim, every bit as bad as a bigoted tyranny of socialism - just with much better economics.


The opposite which I advocate, as a Libertarian basing first principles on individualism, is a free society in the form of a constitutional minarchy with an objective rule of law, and including, for the reasons I give above, open immigration with requirements for entry centred only as to each individual per their own case and history, not as identified with an arbitrary group, be it ethnicity, gender, religion, et al, which is always the (identity) politick of stereotyping and, ultimately, always, of bigotry.
 

Related:

Open Immigration: Marriage - Balwinder Singh & Glyn Kessell.

Open Immigration: Cutting Off Our Noses Because the Law Says So - Chinese Students.

 

 

 
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