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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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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4 comments:

  1. Brendan McNeillMay 24, 2014 at 2:33 PM

    "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. "

    Absolutely, and no one in a liberal democratic democracy like New Zealand is impoverished by the risk taking weath creation activities of others, as you rightly point out.

    Most of the economic inequality in New Zealand is born by solo parents living off the welfare state. The increase in economic inequality has been the growth in uptake of this option in recent decades.

    This is the elephant in the room that the left refuses to acknowlege or discuss.

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  2. Courtenay Blackburn (@SEEVed)May 24, 2014 at 3:13 PM

    Income Inequality is an issue how ever the understanding on what causes it and how to stop it is lacking. It is far more complex than the simple Liberal complaint and the solution isn't simple ether as using Free Market Capitalist principles that are now becoming irrelevant because of a collaborative economy that is eating capitalism as we speak and cheaper technology driving down marginal costs of production increasing unemployment in the process.

    The problem of inequality is not the 1% having more wealth than the 99% total combined. The problem of inequality is because of the wealthy having the capital to build and operate the means of production this i have to say 'IS' their 'right'. The capitalist system we are running with is a system that is always looking for the most cost effective method of production. These methods are Worker exploitation (China+Apple), Automation (Robotics,Computer ICT) & shifting manufacturing to locations with Low taxes and cheap labour.

    All of these have the effect of causing unemployment to rise and for wealth to bleed out of a nations economy as workers are now competing for jobs local businesses can now take advantage of low wage part time workers without having to worry about loosing workers to competitors with higher wages. So lower wages are leading to inequality in how much savings the poor, middle & upper classes have.

    The Liberal solution is to tax the rich and give to the poor which I agree is theft. Liberals forget that they are buying inequality by buying from the rich eg that iPhone or iPad that they love to hypocritically love to tweet from. sorry just had to get that out there.

    The other solution that keeps popping up is that people need to be more entrepreneurial and innovative which is total bullsh*t with the entrenched monopolies that we have making it imposable to compete with a company that has a bigger financial base than an individual with a small start up not to mention that the entrenched company will use PR to sway customers away from the start up with "We have more experience" or "We can provide better support for our product" even though the smaller start up can provide better one on one support for far less.

    This is more of a complaint about the consumer culture (Flock of dumb sheep) how ever this complaint can go into the IP/Copyright fortress that are used to extract wealth out of those that work for there wealth with out really innovating the IP or using IP & Copyright to attack competition to maintain market dominance while not innovating there product and charging a high price for it.

    To counter inequality with out needless taxation is to form cooperatives as the means of production is owned by the workers so the wealth generated remains in the poor and middle classes keeping inequality down while providing the financial base to compete with the large private corporations and to prevent market monopolization and protect competition remove Artificial Property rights and replace them with a law that protects the idea, innovation or invention form exploitation of secrete sourcing this will lead to greater collaborative innovation as we have seen in free & open source software, open source ecology and the innovation of the bicycle into a mountain bike.

    Now we are getting into a Free Market Collaborative Commons. A Tax free Liberty based society with out big governments or big corporations with a strong social glue and no inequality.

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    Replies
    1. Mark HubbardMay 24, 2014 at 6:51 PM

      Right, big comment. Have found it Saturday night after too many martinis :)

      Nelson tomorrow(delayed by today's storm), so will reply next week.

      Cheers for the time you put into this.

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