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 International Tax Regime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label International Tax Regime. Show all posts
Mike
O’Donnell (9/12) welcomes the Revenue Minister cracking down on multinationals
such as Amazon so they pay more tax. Tax is a dead cost to business. If we
force more tax on these firms they have to increase the prices they charge for
goods and services. O’Donnell is thus advocating for an increased cost of
living for Kiwis. That is not a good thing. Why not reverse his thinking? So
local retailers can compete, we need to get rid of GST. Then why not slash the
size of a state that over 70 years of welfare has grown poverty and dependence, then we could reduce income tax to a level where these multinationals
want to bring their profits to New Zealand. Use tax competition to become a
wealthy nation.
Chances of this
happening? None. Prepare to pay more for life in this theocracy of state, New
Zealand.
A stepped up effort against tax
avoidance by multinational firms will feature strongly in Inland Revenue’s
much-delayed compliance document, expected to be released within the week.
The document, Compliance Focus, is
usually released at the end of July or early August and sets out the IRD’s
priorities on tax for the coming year … The multinational dimension though is
understood to be the main cause of the delay. Key to this is the impact of work
by the OECD and other international agencies, along with other tax authorities,
on what is called BEPS’ – base erosion and profit shifting - by multinational
firms.
Put simply, this is involves a small
number of high profile firms – such as Amazon, Apple, Google,
Facebook, Starbucks, and global rock bands such as U2 – shifting their declared
profit, revenue and intellectual property to the most tax advantageous
regimes.
Let’s
rewrite this to understand what is actually happening, remembering that
taxation is a cost:
Minister
Todd McClay and IRD will soon issue their document setting out the process
required to increase the living costs of all hard working Kiwis.
Minister McClay is effectively saying he demands higher prices for books, higher prices for the
computer gear we all use, higher prices for that Starbucks latte over which to contemplate the higher costs of everything thanks to the tax take. While his department may have looked
at the possibility of simply making our tax system more competitive, he's decided
Kiwis have it too good, so by increasing the taxation cost of these firms, he can force
them to raise the prices of their products and services.
Minister
McClay is also saying that increasing the cost of taxation for these firms
world-wide is a worthy part of a concerted one-world-tax-state attempt to slow up
innovation in the private sector. Why would they want to squash innovation? Perhaps they are thinking this a good thing? Looking toward the new iPads coming out next month, I guess it'll mean we won't have to update our Apple
shit so often. Who needs choice and freedom.
(Footnote:
though by all means, send the IRD storm troopers in on that hypocrite Bono, who would strait-jacket us in those 'responsibilities' he won't wear himself.)
A Government-commissioned report is urging dairy and sheep industry players to seize opportunities to farm overseas. [The report’s writer] acknowledged there were already New Zealanders … farming in Chile, Brazil and Uruguay, but few were operating at any scale.
I will take just a brief call at this point to acknowledge the work of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, in particular, in dealing with what I think is the second-largest tax bill to come to this Parliament, the Taxation (International Taxation, …) Bill. This is an 842-page job. It does not beat my previous effort of 3,500 pages, … I acknowledge the fact that the select committee had a monstrous job in working through some very important, complex legislation in order to get it to this stage. I note that Supplementary Order Paper 34, which I have tabled, is 50-odd pages, so it is nearly a bill in itself. All those things really go to point out how complicated our tax law is …
Oh yes, let’s all jump into the penalty system known as our, quoting the Minister, ‘monstrous’ and complex, international tax regime. Perhaps the boffins who wrote the report, which I definitely agree with, should first have a word with the boffins who’ve made our mish mash of international tax laws. When you have a contradiction like this, then the Minister, and government, needs to re-examine their premises, and in this case some fundamental ones on how our society is structured, which has led to such complex tax laws being required to fund the ‘monstrous’ size of our state, where in every budget delivered by Bill English, despite the rhetoric, the state spend continues to be bigger in dollar terms than the year before, and approaching 50% of the entire spend in our economy; a phenomenon which is currently destroying the economies of Europe and America.
And I write this with the somehow connected thought in my mind, a thought in the form of a joke, of watching the article about Australian farmers on TV 1’s current affairs show, Sunday, last night, who are partaking in the black market their government has created in selling raw milk.
Yes, I said milk. Australian regulation has created a black market in milk.
Said one such farmer who was raided by food safety officers and armed police, after an expensive multi-departmental sting operation on him daring to blatantly sell milk to hippies at a farmer’s market - ‘I kept trying to tell them,' he said, 'all these officers with guns; it’s just milk. This is a farmers’ market, and I’m just selling milk.’ His fine was A$184,000, and his last musing to the camera was whether it was perhaps heroin in his plastic bottles: but no, it was just raw milk. I guess he’s no longer thinking of taking his farming overseas: he’s probably just thinking of taking himself overseas. At least if he’s got any sense.
Now remember that 380 page food bill signed off in New Zealand last year, where Minister Wilkinson’s comment on the draconian powers being given to our food officers was, ‘well, they’ll not be used.’ If they’re not going to be used, then they shouldn’t have been given such draconian powers, at all. And yes, I know, raw milk could, in the rare case, kill you: but if an individual wants to take that choice, because such milk also has more nutrients, then that’s their choice. A society must operate on that basis, for there’s far more important principles at stake. The freedoms we should be able to take for granted in the West - freedom being the right to be left alone - sometimes involves the freedom to take risks and die stupidly, whether it be test piloting a new jet engine, or drinking raw milk, for without risk, there will be no innovation, and it’s by innovation from the entrepreneurial pursuit fostered by true capitalism, that we have the best standard of living from any generation before us in history, that has allowed us to live in the first world, where we can have the absurd problem of a black market in milk.
And don't go thinking we're alone: I said this was a Western problem - hattip Offsetting Behaviour have a look at this clip and wonder no longer why the West is falling over:
