Taking Down The Dom Post - Fallacy Of The Common Good & The Social Contract. An Un-American President. The Morality of Tax Avoidance.

‘Selfishness is not living as you wish; it’s making others live as you wish’.

(Oscar Wilde.)

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

(T.S. Eliot)

German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt accused Jewish leaders of abetting the slaughter and, most controversially, coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to advance her principal idea: ordinary people, even nobodies, can commit evil acts if they simply renounce the duty to think.

(Film Review: Hannah Arendt.)

I’ve been writing a series of posts – upcoming – critiquing identity politics and the alarming legal outcomes proponents of identity politics are trying to achieve, including the harm of reversing the burden of proof in rape cases, and then along comes an example of such harm, albeit on the surface looking to be unrelated. I can tell you with certainty what happens when the burden of proof is reversed and there is no innocent until proven guilty, because tax cases are the only existing category of ‘crime’ persecuted prosecuted on that basis; what it does is put the individual accused on the back foot,  far more likely to face a miscarriage of justice than otherwise, leading in the tax realm, certainly, to the tax state ascendent, an individual's freedom at its discretion, especially as happens when new tax precedents are policed retrospectively, which over time cowers a population, and stops people thinking dangerous, un-stately thoughts, until we get editorials like last Friday's in The Dominion Post, which evidence the final capitulation of a Western civilisation that held so much hope.

I don't read The Dom, although if I did this editorial would have cured me of it. No surprise this publication serves the city our Fortress of Legislation resides, and the legions of bureaucrats whose job it is to wrap our lives in the millions of words that are printed into statutes to embalm us with. This appalling editorial can be summed up by quoting the first and last paragraphs:

Aggressive tax avoidance has gone the same way as smoking: once common and even respectable, nowadays it's seen as a vice. Wealthy people like to make a fuss about the difference between tax avoidance ("perfectly legal") and tax evasion (a crime). But morally there is no difference. Both are forms of theft from the common weal and both are a breach of the social contract which requires all members of the community to contribute.

Perhaps with time this backlash against tax avoiders will become more widespread, like the campaign against smoking. Tax avoiders might come to be treated as pariahs, just as smokers are. In fact, of course, the tax avoider is far worse than the smoker. The smoker is an addict and is a genuine victim of Big Tobacco. Tax avoiders are anti-social creeps who have no-one to blame for their sins but themselves.

Perhaps we’ll include this paragraph also; note the tawdry, emoting use of selfishness to describe someone who simply wants to keep half (HALF only) of their own income:

Singer George Michael and actor Michael Caine were among a herd of celebrities who tried to shelter inside [aggressive tax scheme] Liberty. Caine never made any secret of his selfishness. He had threatened to move to the United States if the British government raised taxes above 50 per cent.

This editorial is unutterable evil; pure communism. Plumbing the shallow depths of The Dom's lexicon, ‘perfectly legal tax avoiders’ are anti-social creeps. The philosophy bereft editor who wrote this has a mind which has renounced the duty to think, negating reason and the entire Western Enlightenment, settling for an infantile feeling about issues instead. It’s an editorial uninformed on every level, so on every level, I shall demolish it, noting particularly the false assumptions I have underlined in the above.

The editor writes on the social contract, but doesn’t know what that is, confusing it instead with nothing less than a slave contract. As I have written previously, the social contract in the original was concerned with the rights required for an individual’s freedom and so the civilised society:

… the originator of the term was Rousseau in his 1762 treatise 'The Social Contract'. Significantly, that document starts, quote: 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' Moreover, Rousseau argued that in a society founded on laws devised upon mans’ reason, that is, the rule of law, no man would, or should, logically, surrender his freedom for a state of slavery. The contract was at its heart about safeguarding rights to property, and better, an individual was free to exit such a contract, and be as free again as when he was born.

… the social contract, according to Rousseau, and according to classical liberalism, was only ever about creating the conditions for a civilising freedom, by protecting that smallest minority in any society: the individual. Under the rule of law the state would protect that individual from the use of force, on the understanding that individuals would exercise those responsibilities that make it possible for us all to live in a free society – the primary responsibility being for one’s own life, and the acknowledgement that no man’s need forms an enforceable claim on the life of a total stranger (that is solely in the realm of compassion, namely, the noble acts of generosity and charity). The problem is that under the cynicism of the Left, of Statists of all hues, the state has now assumed those responsibilities that should solely have been in the purview of the individual, and so we have had voted in, on the bribes of irresponsible and immoral politicians, the Thug State, where the Thug State is the chief abuser of my rights as a free man, and is consequently the chief initiator of force. We are far closer to the trapped, slave society of Soviet Russia (for KGB, secret police, read IRD – they have all the same powers of snooping, search and seizure), than to the civilised free society envisaged by Rousseau made possible by his social contract. And listening to Statists, including every politician in parliament, [or this editor of The Dom], use the social contract as the justification of the state’s use of force on me, makes my skin crawl, as it would have Rousseau’s.

Let me remind the editor what has made the West, in terms of human rights, living standards and liberty, once the pinnacle that any civilisation  had reached, and the reason, indeed, for why this editor has a free press to spout such offensive politicking nonsense from: it was classical liberalism, the philosophy, economics and politics of the free society. A classical liberal society was not one where the state spend, as it is now, makes up almost half the economic activity of an entire economy to create unparalleled, unaffordable, inter-generational dependence, and the poverty that comes from that; nor where government departments have been given police state powers above a necessary privacy legislation to run tax surveillance states that interfere in the minutiae of people’s lives who are doing no harm. The classical liberal society was:

… that philosophy of limited government and liberty of individuals: freedom of speech, markets, religion, assembly, of thought and intellect, and a free press - 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.

That quotation was from a post where I explained how the expression of classical liberalism in the tax field, the Westminster Principle of 1936, pursuant to which an individual could structure their affairs in ways that suited them, without regard to the taxing authority, has over the last fifteen years in New Zealand been destroyed by an airhead judiciary as unthinking as this editorial, and I gave the reason for how this has happened:

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 [and like a virus it thus now informs our judiciary in every precedent they set.].

Note my closing reference to the ‘common good’; I’ll be coming back to that, for this editor wants to chain free individuals to that hoary, barbaric old fallacy as well. But first, the legal advantage the destruction such statism and this editor’s mentality has is explained by Daniel Horowitz:

“We must understand that there is an imbalance of power in the political system of any democracy in that the forces of statism have an innate advantage over the defenders of freedom. It takes but one legislative or administrative victory for statism to succeed in guiding society on an indelible path towards dependency. We cannot perpetuate the free-market, but we can perpetuate statism by creating inveterate dependency constituencies. Statism enjoys the inherent advantage of self-perpetuation through its own pernicious activities that engender a continued need for the government programs.”

The price of the Westminster principle being squashed, the burden of proof turned against the taxpayer, is that the state has come to own us, our liberty destroyed, meaning as the editor admits, indeed, pursuant to IRD’s latest draft policy on what constitutes tax avoidance, everything is tax avoidance, circa the twenty first century, because everything is illegal if the state says so, thus we can be herded and coerced: 

And so in New Zealand every business and estate structuring and transaction that doesn’t involve paying the maximum amount of tax is now tax avoidance, no matter you may be trying to achieve ends that have nothing to do with the tax take. It’s that point where the pragmatism of IRD bureaucrats mindlessly pursuing their job descriptions, plus judges, [editors], and politicians who don’t believe in property rights or the Free West anymore, as George Orwell wrote at the end of his nightmare novel 1984, becomes like a boot kicking the face of our liberty forever.

Over the course of writing the above piece, an apt quotation has been posted on Café Hayek, from Bertrand de Jouvenel’s 1951 The Ethics of Redistribution:

The role played by the state in transferring incomes evidently entailed some increase in the volume of public encashings and payments, but this volume has grown out of all proportion to the needs of this function.  Such growth has encountered only the weakest opposition; my argument is that a change of mind toward public expenditure has been induced by redistributionist policies, the greatest gainer from which is not the lower-income class as against the higher but the State as against the citizen.

 What we almost achieved as that wonderful peak of human cooperation and innovation, the classical liberal, peaceful, capitalist Free West, where the state was our servant, is no more: there has been a war of ideas, and those totalitarian ideas have won, yet again.

The harm here is inestimable. We have had our freedoms voted and legislated away from us to make huge welfare states we can’t afford. Worse, the editor might want to read my post Beneficiary Fraud Versus Tax Evasion, which starts:

Jacinda Adern, along with Massey University Tax lecturer, Deborah Russell, on news last week of the beneficiary fraud turned up by government departments sharing data, have been opining that tax evasion is a bigger scourge on society, with much bigger numbers: which is, of course, to compare rotten apples erroneously with political persecution: to confuse benefit abuse, with abuse of the power of state.

Tax evasion and avoidance versus benefit abuse is the difference between an individual trying to hold onto the money they have earned from their risk taking, their effort, and employing their capital, versus those who think the property of such individuals is their own simply to be taken and lived on due to an artificial right created by the state; that right being the only real fraud in this story. It’s the vacuum in people’s heads that has destroyed the free West.

Or better, the editor could spend a weekend reading Lindsey Mitchell’s blog to learn how tax dollars are turned into creating dependency and learned helplessness that justify to the mindless more and more welfare, setting off a cycle of poverty that is destroying first the lives of human beings, then whole countries, as we are herded down our road to serfdom. And while on that, would the editor want to take a bet those four vicious thug-childs aged 14 to 16 we saw on our screens last week brutally beating up a shop employee, had their thieving little ruthless lives procreated and funded by tax dollars? Theirs was certainly the ethic of welfarism: no responsibility for their actions; no respect for the property – including to life itself – of others; a belief that which they haven’t earned, is theirs for the taking, and no responsible parent loving them and guiding them wisely so they would know better, and would have boundaries in their lives. Such is the moral vacuum the welfare state leads us, a vacuum replicated in this editorial. Regarding the welfare state, David Schmidtz’s and Robert E. Goodin’s important 1998 book, Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against, pinpoints the central problem and the welfare state's failure:

If communitarians are right to say Western society has been atomized, then surely one of the causes has been the state’s penchant for making itself (rather than the community) the primary focus of public life….

What explains market society’s unparalleled success in helping people to prosper? The key, I have argued, lies in background institutions, especially property institutions, that lead people to take responsibility for their own welfare….

The welfare state would have made people better off if it had led neighbors to rely on each other and on themselves, but it seems to have done the opposite.

And so to the editor's related invoking of the ‘common weal’. Perhaps the most lethal fallacy born of emoting that has crippled the West, and which forms the central ethic of life destroying creeds of communism and socialism, is the notion that individual lives and liberty are to be sacrificed by decree and the sanctimonious for the good of the mob. Whereas in truth societies that try to found themselves on such common good are characterised by greed, by selfishness,  by incivility, and ultimately, by our private lives being hollowed out or betrayed under the brass knuckles of out of control surveillance states, followed by the viciousness of the snitch society the likes of which were created in every hellhole state in human history. There's a depressing movie called The Lives Of Others, about life behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin before the Wall came down, chronicalling how life grinds down to a frightful animal existence when lives of individuals are spied on, tracked, and classifed by the state in the pointless, always barbaric, perpetuation of its own existence, that existence justified as the mechanism serving the common good: its the society this editorial envisages. The philosophical underpinning of my argument is simple:

… 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 you open the gates to tyranny and atrocity. …. To be meaningful, and cause no harm, 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).

 Or to shine the light of reason on the evil that flows from the common good in a manner more intuitive; this, 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.

So that’s the social contract and the common good arguments dealt to regarding this communist tract printed in The Dom, now to move from the philosophical to the mundane: some questions I’d love to see answered by this editor.

First, why the – envy ridden – concentration on the wealthy?  There are oft quoted figures from every western country to the effect the wealthy pay by far the greatest proportion of income tax. In New Zealand families 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. Indeed, in terms of running public services, and providing  a good portion of the population with a  living, never was so much owed by so many to so damned few, yet The Dom’s ethic, that of a philosophically bankrupt West, is the wealthy must yet be put to the Income Tax 2007 and plundered again and again.

More particularly, why no mention of that huge contributor to tax evasion, being the cash economy: tradies doing cash jobs, beneficiaries being paid under the table, and online trading? Last estimate had the black economy at $7 billion per annum. Read that again: $7 billion per annum. Does it not fit the communist ethic of The Dom that these people are perhaps ‘anti-social creeps’ also? Just put your jackboot into the wealthy, because they have become the new scapegoats for the insidious cult of redistribution promoted by mindless, state worshipping brochure rags like The Dom promoting big brother Soviet styled society from which frankly we're better off dead?

Secondly, is there some tax rate at which these anti-social wealthy tax creeps, and even the poorer ones making up the $7 billion cash economy, become entitled to defend the property right they have in their incomes? 50%? 60%? Perhaps as in France, 75% Are they allowed to get just a little pissed off with only keeping a quarter of their income. I challenge the editor to watch the below clip on how over half – that’s not hyperbole - of France’s young would leave France if they could as they see ‘no future in a country that hates the rich at political level’; and French businesspeople are prudently leaving their country in droves in protest at its 75% income tax rate ‘and its unsustainable addiction to welfare.’ In France government spend is currently 57% of its entire GDP.

Tax it; destroy it, including countries, where whole populations – at least those left who can’t escape - can become equal in poverty thanks to over-spending, bribing, corrupt, crony, incompetent, airhead, philosophy bereft, irresponsible politicians, judges, editors and voters wanting the illusory free lunch.

And which is more anti-social: a country that taxes so irresponsibly its citizens are clamouring to leave, or those wisely leaving so they can own their lives again, look after and love their families, and pursue their goddamned happiness free of the clutches of the greedy, selfish, communist, power crazed, and frankly insane, such as this editor, who like every well intentioned murdering tyrant throughout history, demands an individual's liberty, effort and property,  be sacrificed for total strangers  who are apparently not expected to show any constraint! There’s no compassionate, caring society to be found here, only a vicious thug state, read the goddamned history of the twentieth century, then move along.

Thirdly, can anyone tell me what The Dom’s editorial position was on the GCSB, NSA spying scandals? I hope they weren’t so hypocritical as to express concern for our privacy, as David Cunliffe has just done. I have already linked in this piece to the police state powers given IRD to run a tax surveillance state that has to operate outside of our Privacy Act, indeed, that must have no regard to a taxpayer’s privacy, or their right to be left alone. Statists such as the editor of course turn a blind eye to the contradiction because they see themselves serving a higher (blood soaked  im)morality with their cult of redistribution, with these mighty powers required to force and coerce us to be good to one another: for them any power, including those of the full blown police state, are justified to feed their bottomless pit of a tax take.  The problem is with this, that over just the last two months, with the Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) implementing that piece of US tax colonialism known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), we now look at rank corruption in the use of that power:

 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.

Thus we have an IGA that cynically uses IRD’s shock and awe powers, which in a free society represent an excessive abuse of the power of government, for nothing to do with the tax take, but to allow spying and information swapping on US nationals. Can the editor point me to the editorials they must surely have that are rightly appalled at this, for if one government can so easily abuse the powers given our taxing authority  in this manner, then the precedent is set and future governments will follow. In fact why not just carry out GCSB and SIS operations via IRD? Even that Lefty organisation Techliberty wrote worried ditties about FATCA and the NZ/US IGA, so where are The Dom’s please?

Finally, I challenge this editor to take the test not a single politician or bureaucrat has been up to: answer for me what you think the ‘fair’ from your fair society means, in terms of the tax take, and the three scenarios I set on this post. A post which opens with my blog masthead:

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.

Or perhaps Thomas Sowell says it more succinctly:

I can’t believe this editorial, yet it is wholly unsurprising: it is the Soviet Union served up in a New Zealand daily, and cannot go unchallenged. Here's the deal, if I am doing no harm, then I can do what like, and it's nobody else's business. If you are a businessperson subscribed to The Dominion: don’t. This editorial shows it's bottom feeder copy, mindlessly loading your mind with emoting, dangerous drivel, and as producers and capitalists, despite you bring us choice and via capitalist free markets the best standard of living any civilisation has seen, this editor hates you, seriously hates you, anti-social creeps. And that even if you give charitably in ways you know won’t create dependency, but create self-sufficiency, and for causes that promote prudent life decisions, not the dreadful ones subsidised and promoted by welfare states the massive size they are now.

To the editor, also search my blog for ‘wowser’, I can guarantee from reading this piece you’re one. In fact start with this post, Scarlett Johansson and the context of joy, wherein if France doesn’t have enough problems being closed up with all that life destroying taxation, their judiciary are doing their best to close down even the French wine industry. No really, their wine industry, astounding as that is. The trouble is socialists are so immured of the idea there is a bottomless pit of stolen booty to draw on they end up with no instinct for survival, so they end up destroying all lives, although before that, the reason for an individual living at all. Free men and women love ‘living in the village’, but in the Free West, the village doesn’t ruddy well own them, so editor, get a life, and stop advocating your ownership of mine. And stop writing this tripe.

I’ll end this post with the Gorbachev quote of my last post, because it aptly fits almost every post in here, and The Dom may as well print it into their masthead. I’m off to try and calm  down over a martini (if I drink enough I’ll forget the 75% excise tax on the gin.) Might also put on a Michael Caine movie – I’m starting to like him a lot - with a bit of George Michael playing in the background; even though his music is shite, it's better than this shite spewed across the page of The Dom.

For government officials – and by the way Mr/Mrs/Ms Editor, they mine my blog, as with social media and publications like NBR just like the Stasi did in East Berlin; great, ain’t it – as ever, please read my disclaimer at bottom of page. I do not use any type of tax scheme such as the one this editorial is written on, I complete my taxes conservatively so the state can spend my money on the whole range of initiatives I have no agreement with and which are destroying human lives by funding generations born on the scrapheap of dependence; I do not use such schemes, for I do not want to spend any of my life going bankrupt fighting a pointless court battle with IRD which I cannot win because this is no longer a free world, and any case will be judged by an emoting ‘mind’ such as this editor. Proof, read their dictatorial in The Dom.


Update One - The Most Un-American President:

Pertaining to every theme above, the following from the United Police States of America:

Obama: Companies that avoid taxation are downright un-American. http://t.co/6BM7M9QP1u
— MarketWatch (@MarketWatch) July 25, 2014

@MarketWatch Considering the freedom ethic America was built on, I can't think of a more un-American president than Obama.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) July 25, 2014

@MarketWatch & I never thought I would see in my lifetime US citizens voluntarily renouncing citizenship to remain free: it's called #FATCA
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) July 25, 2014

 

Just in case you're not aware of America's latest launch into colonialism, the tyrant's call of FATCA.