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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Showing posts with label Gender Quotas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gender Quotas. Show all posts

Monday, April 20, 2015

Gender Pay Gap [Questions Thereto] | Mansplaining Rodney Hide’s Herald Piece on Paul Henry.



By dint of being a classical liberal, hence an individualist, I am a feminist, married to a very individualistic classical liberal, career feminist. I advocate for the individualist ethic of classical liberalism because only in that will the free (and prosperous) society be founded. The enemy of that freedom is the unbounded statism that has overthrown the West, ironically via the emoting booth, funded by the tax surveillance state. One of the bastions of statism has become identity politick feminism, also called Marxist feminism, and thus my regular - reflecting now regular MSM reportage -  attacks against that tyrannical liturgy foundered too often on falsehoods. On the current course we are not many years from state enforced public (certainly) and private sector gender work place quotas. The following Twitter feed is but one example of how you must always dig deeper into assumptions and statistics.

Note I don’t cite the below Twitter timeline to ‘get at’ respondent Marianne. She’s great, albeit unfollowing me on this. [I will defend my principles until proven wrong by reality; unlike Progressives, sadly – and this is part of the problem – who too soon disengage when their mantras are questioned, either leaving the fray, as Marianne did, or much worse, goose-stepping off to advocate the ban and the boycott, or trotting out that offensive word which overuse has rendered useless; misogynist.] I post the following only because it explicates the theme of this post, being what I think is the massaged wonk behind the statistics being used in the current gender pay gap debate, and, as with the climate change debate, the wholesale unthinking, uncritical buy-in to the agenda of the identity politick by those who are intelligent enough to know better. This post is also, as will become plain, a request for anecdotal information please.

This is the first part of the timeline:












Before moving on that link is important, although there is now a better source here. Senior Fellow in Political Economy and editor at large of The Independent Review, Robert Higgs’s piece is worth quoting directly, my highlighting:


The quality of economic journalism in the United States is terrible. Day after day, journalists write about the causes and consequences of economic conditions and events without understanding the underlying economics of the situation, and their articles are, as a rule, simply bunk. Here is an example.

I have not examined the actual report whose findings are described in the article, but I am familiar with many studies of the same question that economists have conducted over the years. Moreover, I myself have made many applied econometric studies in a variety of areas, and I know how delicate the findings of such studies are to a variety of details—sample period, sample size, sampling method, data collection details, model specification, estimation methods, and so forth. I know, too, that the best studies—those with the best data, most sensible model specification, and most exhaustive set of controls—have found virtually no difference in the amounts that men and women are paid for doing the same work. The key is “doing the same work,” which is another way of saying “providing equally valuable services to the employer” in the sense of adding equally to the employer’s net income.

[Snip.]

In sum, the so-called gender gap is almost certainly a myth, a persistent misapprehension kept alive by leftists—feminist ideologues and politicians posturing as special friends of women—who wish to use the power of government to benefit members of their political constituency. If employers truly discriminate between equally value-productive male and female employees, however, they do so only in cases that are few and transitory, because the systematic, persistent conduct of such discrimination is inconsistent with everything we know about how people make decisions in labor markets and about what we presume business owners in general are trying to do, namely, make profits.


It’s worth reading the whole piece, but I bet that goes against the perceived reality most readers will have on the gender pay gap. Noting I view Higgs as authoritative. From this, to the second part of the Twitter timeline, and my request for anecdotal information please:













Marianne never did confirm she knew of a single case of a female employee receiving less in the same job, same employer. Nor did David Farrar. I repeat I know of no case. And more than that, I professionally have a lot of farming clients; especially when a young farming couple are starting out, off-farm wages are often required. In every case I can think of it’s the female spouse who does the off-farm work, not for any type of sexist reason, but because the female is indubitably better qualified, and can command a higher wage off-farm than the male spouse could.

So, comments are open, I don’t moderate or edit in any way, a respect you won’t see on many statist blogs. Can anyone cite actual New Zealand examples of what would be a true gender pay gap, please: male/female in same job, same employer, paid unequally.

***

While on this topic, Rodney Hide’s Herald piece from this weekend weighing into (New Zealand's) Equal Employment Opportunities Dr Jackie Blue’s decision to publicly scold breakfast TV broadcaster Paul Henry on his Hilliary Clinton comments was spot on. Dr Blue is a tax payer funded identity politick agent shoved down the necks of those of us who know better and are forced to pay for her commissariat. Henry’s remarks were not sexism – judge for yourself:


Henry had said in regard to Hillary Clinton's run for the White House: "Why, if feminism has come so far, does she feel the need to highlight the fact that she's a woman?

"Shouldn't she be selling herself on the fact that she's the best person, the right person, for the job, no matter what her sex?"

Henry also noted other high-profile females had "fallen into the same trap", including Helen Clark in her bid to become Secretary-General of the United Nations.


I’ve written what I think of this tactic so shamelessly being used by Clinton here: let’s not mistake criticism with persecution. Hide makes an exemplary point (my inserted comment in orange):


Henry has a good point. The feminist complaint was "jobs for the boys". The argument was women shouldn't be excluded because they're women. But the argument has become that women must be selected because they are women. [Unless, it’s worthy of note, those women are Margaret Thatcher or Sarah Palin, apparently - and that because this is a Progressive agenda, there being the rub.] Clinton and Clark have replaced sexism with reverse sexism.

Blue declared Henry wrong. "Feminism hasn't come further than Hillary Clinton and Helen Clark, feminism will only ever go as far as they and other women go."

I have wrapped my head in a wet towel, meditated for two days, and still don't know what she is saying.


Of course Hide was castigated on Twitter for mansplaining, but as I’ve always found, those who toss that term around so liberally do so because they don’t have the wherewithal to debate content (after they've normally dropped context). Retorting with ‘mansplaining’ is that Progressive tactic of soft censorship they try on first, able to rely on null-think from the neophytes, before they then go to the full ban and boycott approach and the fist of government, that is, mandatory quotas. Pfui!

I have no clue what Blue is on about in that ‘feminism hasn’t come further than Hillary Clinton and Helen Clark’ sentence either, given Helen Clark was Prime Minister of New Zealand for nine years; perhaps a radfem could inane-splain it to me, but as for my tax money being used so Nanny Blue can monitor breakfast television for thought crimes, bugger off with that, I'll take a refund please.

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Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Of Espresso; Nuts; Prostrate Cancer; Grammar; Labour Leadership – The Three Boring Men & Quotas Again.



Please excuse me for being prescient.

On this post I offered to drop almost all principles I hold, and to vote for Maryan Street if she had a tilt at the Labour Party leadership, and so could guarantee the passage of her End of Life Choice bill. I meant it.

On this post, given not Maryan nor any other woman Labour MP stepped into the sandpit with her hand up, I posted the below regarding the call by Labour women for a gender quota  one month earlier:


I am also disappointed that after wanting gender quotas just last month, not one Labour woman MP has tried to contest the leadership away from this dreadful man [David Cunliffe], and save us from him. Apparently Labour women do expect to be given by quota what they don’t have the gumption to contest when they have equal footing. There’s plenty of capable women Labour MPs, why aren’t any of you contesting? You know you’ll be getting this shameful hypocrisy pointed out to you when at some stage in the future you’re furthering the coercive state by legislating gender quotas on the private sector, because we know that’s the agenda.


My prescience comes in when we now look at what’s happened: with no woman MP contesting, the labour leadership contest has turned into a boring showcase of manliness, barely a policy to be seen, other than one uncosted goose-step to the Left after the other into the shock and awe tax surveillance state this party will be taking us 2014:



He's right.

Grant Robertson is interviewed by Seven Sharp at the pub on his love of rugby.

On the same show, following night, David Cunliffe has moved from scaring the horses to scaring the fish, filmed outcast on a reef somewhere, rod in hand.

And Shane, threatening a no show on Seven Sharp tonight for reasons I'm not au fait with, well, giving him the due of being himself – and I do like him for that - he’s just stayed being the bloke we all know he is. Albeit on Q&A, Sunday, I gained a lot of respect for his economic conservatism, at least as compared to Chavez Cunliffe, with his choreographed smile dancing around his face in some mad dervish with his hands, and Living Wage Grant Robertson who has become invisible somehow. But unfortunately it’s evident from his lexicon that Shane is a racing man, and can't lose his racy stripes:



So, in protest, I’m devoting this blog to issues of manliness. My purpose is to be as boring as watching these three statist men trying to out-bid each other for our affections, and thus serve as punishment for the Labour women expecting representation on a plate served up by the coercive state, rather than fight for it even when they had an equal opportunity.

Indeed, leaving politics aside, manliness issues are timely on this blog. I’ve made as many posts against the barbarity of hunting and the various other incidents of sickening animal cruelty that too many (mainly) men in New Zealand have perpetrated, as I have made posts against statists and the politics of big state slavery; so my bloke cred is no doubt running on low to stuffed for those many readers who happen on this site not truly understanding that I am a liberal. Indeed, the only manly thing I’ve done lately is not go to a doctor, which I've not done so I can stay as uninformed about my health as these three Labour men are about economics or the philosophy of individualism that once shone so brightly upon a free West. For I’ve spent the last two months with this dull pain in my groin area, low down, sitting there like a weight that had got me hypochondring, as you do, on if I might have prostrate cancer or something equally dreadful. For dreadful it would be given I’m a prude, I was brought up that way, so I’m not going to no doctor until some bright spark invents a test for prostrate cancer I can do with my trousers on and preferably alone. Though I’m happy to report this time I think I've beaten it off on my own resources.

I had tagged the peak of this pain to about mid-morning, then plateauing to a level some notches below that for the duration, though ameliorated by the pleasant anesthesia of the six o'clock martini. Given the timing, as an experiment Monday morning just gone, instead of for breakfast drinking double shot short blacks until my vision began to blur, normally six, I had a cup of green tea. The pain went, weight lifted, and has not been back again. And it was that quick. So I’ve either found the cure for prostrate cancer, or perhaps just good sense: either way, the best thing is now I know what the discomfort was, it's not that bad, I can put up with it, so I can ditch the green muck and go back to espresso.

Because I'm going to live only this once.

Talking about nuts, while writing I’m watching on Seven Sharp the three contenders standing suited in a paddock … is it? Yes, a paddock, perhaps a park, under a cabbage tree, sadly trying to express their individual identities, as men must, through the colourful ties noosed around their necks.

Sorry, nuts, as in cashews – I’ve drifted off topic. I’ll end this nonsense with a manly tip.

Every real bloke will understand the pantry raid. We get hungry, men, thus have to graze, often. My grass of choice, given the real stuff is illegal in this kindy of a country, is cashew nuts. Despite we share the cooking duties, for some reason the pantry, together with the weekly expeditions to keep it stocked, are solely the domain of Mrs H. I do lawns, vege gardening, vacuuming - I'm quick because I don't bother going under things - and wheelie bins. Because Mrs H was taught if you save the pennies - Mrs H is English – the pounds will look after themselves via the magic of compounding, cashew use outside of cooking, given they're expensive, can be a source of contention. So, of course, being like a good martini, one part clever to two parts stupid, I have devised various means of stealth. This manly tip concerns how to defer a day of judgement within a marriage or the rainbow of relationships.

The photo below shows how a man without wile would approach such pilfering.



Note how the offender has eaten half the cashews on the top shelf, and he will be found out as soon as his significant other enters the pantry. Here’s what you do:



Note how I’ve tipped the remaining cashews up one end so that when you put it back in the shelf the container looks to be full.



If you follow this tip you can put the absence of nuts off right up until that time those nuts are needed for the curry being cooked for friends coming over in just one hour and it’s too late to get to the supermarket to replace them. Admittedly this then becomes a bit of an unholy mess, maritally, but we’re men, that’s how we swing.

Conveniently, containers looking like they are full of substance, but otherwise empty, returns me full circle to the contest for the Labour Party leadership. A fellow blogger has suggested to me that perhaps none of the women MPs felt up to the task of nannying the nation this time around? Two answers: there are many able Labour women quite up to the task, though secondly, if we take this question at face value, and assume that were the case, then a gender quota in leadership would have put a woman into a position of power she was on her own terms not comfortable with, and thus possibly not capable of. Think about it.

Which reminds me, finally. In the Q&A mentioned that played on TV 3 this Sunday, both Nathan Guy, and then Harvard educated David Cunliffe, used the word‘learnings, instead of the correct lessons. What is going on here? Learnings is used by people who want to patronise someone: it’s used to look-down on the people or person it is employed against, to put them down, as if they were a ‘little simple’ of mind. So why would two politicians use it on national TV in reference to people they want to vote for them?

The only answer is, they must be stupid. Or simple of mind. Whatever, stop speaking like that, please; leave it to the hate sites, not the Fortress of Legislation.

Right, noting I’ve not worn a tie since at least 2002, not even to a funeral, I've got this sore shoulder thing happening so I’m off to worry about that for a bit.


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Tuesday, August 27, 2013

David Cunliffe and the End of the Free World, Again.



The dreadful No Right Turn summed up Keynesian Socialist David Cunliffe’s victory nomination speech yesterday well enough:



Note his delight in the scale of theft he knows David will enact. It’s sick. It’s the ‘fuck yeah’ of Chris Trotter delighting in squeezing my pips until they squeak.

Here’s an interesting notion, those of us bloggers writing political blogs, put up on our menus the income tax we’ll be paying over the coming twelve months. Let’s see which of the statist’s are living by their principles. I don’t have to because this blog is about my privacy, and how I have so little of it, but tomorrow I’ll be paying a third of this year's provisional tax, and it’s five figures.

This is David’s true slogan:

New taxes and spending.
New taxes and spending.
New taxes and spending.

Same old.
Same old.

Writing from a house in that 27% of households paying 70% of the tax take, and constraining ourselves and our finances this year to pay our tax bills so mum of nine can have the extra room for her Sky decoder, I ask David, who used the word fair seven times in a one and a half page speech, to take my fairness test please, because not a single politician has felt themselves up to the task yet.

As a man who has had to have my privacy and right to be left alone before the tax surveillance state taken from me, because apparently David knows how to spend my money better than I do, let's first replace fair with serfdom.

Then looking further through David’s speech in place of community, let's write dependence. Community can only exist on voluntary relationships and the voluntary transaction, not on David’s viciously coercive tax state and the welfare that corrodes self-respect, self-responsibility, and the bonds of natural love and affection between families by incentivising the most imprudent life choices.

And the sad thing is we have all the evidence we need at where his Keynesian socialism leads economically: let’s take at random any country in Europe, say, France:


France's Socialist government has admitted that the country cannot cope with any further tax rises and promised no more hikes just days ahead of the country's largest ever tax bill.

Returning from their summer break, the French are about to discover stinging rises in tax bills in their letter boxes – the result of a series of new levies enacted by President François Hollande as he seeks to plug the French deficit and bring down public debt – now riding at 92 per cent of GDP.

But the extent of the hikes has apparently even shocked the very Socialist ministers who implemented them.

The total tax pressure (taxes and social security contributions) will account for 46.3 per cent of GDP this year – a historic high – compared to 45 per cent in 2012.

Some 16 million households will see an automatic 2 per cent rise in income tax as calculations are no longer mitigated by inflation.

The rich will see the highest rises, following Mr Hollande's decision to raise the rate to 45 per cent for those earning more than 150,000 euros – effectively 49 per cent due to an additional levy.


And here’s the truly offensive bit:


“The problem in France — for both the Left and Right — is that nobody has the bravery to slash state spending, which has now reached 57 per cent of GDP. Just how high can it go?”


Really, is that what we want for New Zealand? Because that’s what David Cunliffe and the cluelessly vicious No Right Turn will bring us. And No Right Turn is further clueless in his campaign against the GCSB Bill, last month, when he takes this blood lust thirst in the tax surveillance state – figure it out. The Left double standard.

Talking of double standards, recalling my blog post from yesterday I am also disappointed that after wanting gender quotas just last month, not one Labour woman MP has tried to contest the leadership away from this dreadful man, and save us from him. Apparently Labour women do expect to be given by quota what they don’t have the gumption to contest when they have equal footing. There’s plenty of capable women Labour MPs, why aren’t any of you contesting? You know you’ll be getting this shameful hypocrisy pointed out to you when at some stage in the future you’re furthering the coercive state by legislating gender quotas on the private sector, because we know that’s the agenda.

Finally, unlike No Right Turn, who certainly lives up to the first part of his name before the forward slash, none of this post is about money. It’s about the voluntary society versus the planned economy dependent as that is on our centrally planned and surveilled lives.

If David makes it to the sandpit in the Fortress of Legislation in 2014, I’ll be either semi or completely retiring: I won’t be  his serf.

Because if David wins, it really is the end of the free world, again.


Update 1:

Ele Ludemann has a great post up, also, on the foolishness of taxing and spending Cunliffe.


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