If You Support The Voluntary Transactions of Capitalism, Avoid NZ Banks. #Privacy

Quite apart from MP Judith Collins’ monstrous Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act making banking at times damned near impossible, and hugely inconvenient always, even on the simplest of transactions, (try opening a bank account for your kid), this post references the philosophical quagmire individuals find themselves in with a central banked system captured completely by the Big Brother State – and not just for the tax take, (although that moral battle was where freedom was lost).

This week political activist Nicky Hager found out what every taxpayer knows: if you’ve got a bank account, then the state has a convenient source for spying on every aspect of your life. That was when Westpac handed over all his bank transactions for a requested period directly to police, without his knowledge, or a warrant. I’m employing no hyperbole here: give me your bank transactions for a year, and there’s not much I couldn’t tell you about your life in the broad strokes, or intimately.

IRD routinely get this information from the banks - for up to four years - also without their customers knowledge; my understanding is they often go on such fishing trips initially unwarranted (albeit that’s a moot point, regardless, given obtaining such a warrant is a mere routine procedure for the Department. I wonder if there has been even a single case of a judge turning them down (bet there’s not).)

Last year I wrote how in the most cynical of political workarounds our government signed an Inter-governmental Agreement (IGA) with the United Police States of America, for all the information held by New Zealand banks on every dual US citizen (anyone with a US passport), to be sent annually first to our own IRD (because that gets this process around our Privacy Act which IRD work above), and then from IRD to IRS. This allows the US government to track all US citizens no matter where they are in the world, and makes the activities of NSA, et al, look civilised. It's notable via that IGA the godlike powers handed to our IRD are for the first time I can think of, used for a purpose that has nothing to do with our tax take -  with such a precedent set by the lawmakers, without a squeak of protest from the tax-take worshiping Left, well … That post is in my top ten and  worth a read to understand how privacy has no meaning in a political context: it simply doesn’t exist.

And in today’s Press this:

Thousands of dollars belonging to a charity advocating for medicinal cannabis has been returned after a bank stonewalled its moves to open an account.

United In Compassion (UIC) is a non-profit group advocating for New Zealand-based research into the therapeutic effects of cannabis-based medicines.

Kiwibank was the third bank that UIC, which has been trying to set up an account in the lead-up to a national symposium in April, has hit hurdles with.

On Wednesday afternoon Kiwibank agreed to release the money immediately but won't open an account for the group until compliance issues are sorted.

UIC co-founder Toni-Marie Matich approached Kiwibank for help in June and close to $5000 has been sitting in the account for the last month.

On Tuesday a Kiwibank manager told Matich he wasn't sure whether the account would be approved.

Initially the bank stalled over validating all the trustees but after each one spent hours in their local Kiwibank branch filling out forms Matich thought the green light would be given.

Matich's daughter, Monique, suffers from intractable epilepsy - a seizure disorder that cannot be controlled with conventional medicine.

Although here’s the killer paragraph – if you don’t understand how monstrous this is, then you are beyond hope, as is the banking system:

Matich said both she and her business partner, Damas Manderson, had been told by the same Kiwibank manager that there were moral and ethical concerns about the account being set up.

There’s no other logical viewpoint to hold, anymore, than that to support the ethos which made the West the pinnacle human civilisation once reached, the ethos that is the beating heart of capitalism, namely, the voluntary transaction, then you must avoid New Zealand banks. They’re not instruments of capitalism, they’re instruments used routinely by authority in the long-lost war of the individual to be free of the rampant state. Think of your bank account like a telephone, that's been hacked, with a bureaucrat listening to everything said. Twenty first century, meet twentieth century.

And politicians wonder why Bitcoin has captured the imaginations of the free …