Friday, May 16, 2014

Friday Review: Where Does the State End? Tax Surveillance Grown in Budget … Again. Paid Parental Leave. Surveillance Down on the Farm. Failure of Prohibition.

 

Random views of the Police State from sitting in bed this Friday morning, strolling through Twitter.
 

First, the surveillance state down on the farm. Health and Safety officers are watching farmers from roads … no really. Bloody hell:
 

A Rai Valley dairy farmer says a $15,000 fine handed out to a Marlborough farmhand for not wearing a helmet while riding a quad bike is "absolutely bloody ridiculous".

 
Kerry Robbins said he felt sorry for Rangi Holmes, who had been punished for doing something all farmworkers were guilty of at some point.

 
[Snip]

 
WorkSafe New Zealand inspectors had been visiting farms in the area more often, making farmers uneasy about being seen to be doing the right thing, he said.

 
"You feel a bit like Big Brother is watching you, they sit out on the road there, you're too scared to fart in case someone hears you."

 

On news that the police have come out publicly to oppose legalisation of cannabis by dint only of the affect this may have on road safety, my response:
 




 




 

It is the role of the police to enforce the non-initiation of force and fraud principle: it is not the role of police to say what private citizens can or cannot do if they are doing no harm to others. If you include in harm to others the road statistics, then by the exact logic the police must also demand prohibition on alcohol. Yes, driving under the influence of cannabis, as with alcohol, should be a criminal offence, but that is not an argument against the legalisation of either. On the same theme, if someone wants to die stupidly by not wearing a crash helmet, that is not the business of safety officers stalking farmers on their farms.
 

In passing, now I’ve mentioned prohibition, I read another article this morning (didn’t bookmark, sorry) on how the program of legalising cannabis across many states in America is for the first time achieving what the DEA were never capable of by ruining countless many innocent lives in the infamous war on drugs: destroying the violent drug cartels in Mexico, by market forces and people going about their lives voluntarily, taking away demand for their product. Minister Dunne and all of our own MP’s, who’ve just handed the legal high addicts they created to the gangs in New Zealand, please take note.
 

Twittering on, it soon become evident some guy from our spy agency, GCSB, was being interviewed on Radio New Zealand; I didn’t listen, didn’t need to, for Twitterdom was alight with the indignant Left, who yet advocate the complete destruction of our privacy under the tax surveillance state. I’ve been blogging on this hypocrisy a lot lately.
 

And as if to prove my point, in Minister Bill English’s 2014 budget delivered yesterday, the budget spend for the GCSB was reduced, I said, reduced, by $260,000, but the surveillance state proper, the real one against which we have legislatively no privacy protection, at all, and against which even the burden of proof has been turned against the taxpayer, namely, the tax surveillance state, part of an Orwellian global surveillance state, was given a boost in funding: $132 million, that’s million, additional funding to IRD audit over next five years, on the jackboots of, and on top of, the $94 million boost given to IRD audit funding in the 2013 budget, that on the jackboots of the $90 million additional funding to IRD audit given in the 2012 budget, and so on back to the point classical liberalism was gutted in the West by the tax state, and our road to serfdom began.
 

That 2014 budget also demonstrated how National is simply Labour-Lite: included in a government annual spend of $73.1 billion, a figure that has risen for every English budget - this the political party of small government (yeah, right) - was a rise in the length of paid parental leave from fourteen to eighteen weeks, to ensure many more young woman who wish to start careers, probably won’t get given the chance. And of course eighteen weeks is not enough for the Green Party, they want twenty six.
 

Green MP Catherine Delahunty started off Friday morning pushing the slavery of equality, ending with:
 




 




 

Catherine chose not to answer that one, not silly of her at all, though she had a crack at the paid parental leave:
 




 




 




 




 




 

No answer to that one again. Other Twitterees entered the fray; the usual ad hominem Lefty brigade:
 




 




 

Although in ending my Friday morning, Tweeter LittlePakeha, who I unfairly dissed at one stage when I confused a tweet he made with someone else – it happens on Twitter, sorry about that – made a good point to which I answer as follows, to the effect policies like this, as with gender or ethnic quotas on boards, etc, hurt the groups most they’re trying to promote:
 




 




 




 




 




 

That final tweet ended with ‘other than perhaps not liking me’.


Have a good weekend; don’t forget that today is officially Sauvignon Blanc day: we’ll be sure to have a few in the Mahau.

 

 

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