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 Selwyn Pellet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Selwyn Pellet. Show all posts

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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Monday, April 7, 2014

We Are Living *The Lives of Others* - The Snitch Society Again.


Sadly, to understand where our lives are headed in our tax surveillance states, you only need watch a movie called The Lives of Others, which follows the lives of East Berliners under total surveillance from the Stasi in the final years before the Wall came down. We exist not to pursue our individual happiness, but to be sacrificed to the lives of others, via the tax take and the cult of redistribution - and I use the word cult because it's based entirely on emotion, with no reasoned philosophising upon it regarding the nature of freedom, rights, or the travails of dependency created.

Read my Twitter timeline for any thirty minutes, and you’ll see what I mean. Look at this.





How cold and clinically the statists talk about owning you.

I’ve written before on how the Left – men such as Selwyn - believe freedom loving producers and wealth creators, taxpayers, don’t need to be treated as humans with their own goals and aspirations, toiling away with their minds, bodies and capital for their own betterment; they’re just the nameless who exist to fund the Left’s and Selwyn's egotistical idea of the fair society. I’ve also written on what a sham their fair society is, asking why I am forced to fund a society I have no agreement with.

No more than ten tweets after the above, Liberty Scott, reinforced the point:




It is unsurprising to me my most read post, with 7,000 reads – 1984 Comes to 2012: Children Nowadays Were Horrible - and still the most actively read despite writing it in 2012, commented on just this confluence of historically and philosophically bankrupt ideas which are leading us into replicating the snitch societies of the Soviet Bloc, China and North Korea, et al, where if you dare be different, free in your mind and actions, you are to be reported and dealt to. I’ve even written a post on the nature of the snitch society in New Zealand as created by Inland Revenue Department compared with Hans Fallada’s novel of life in Nazi Germany. Another top ten read post on this blog.

Although at least IRD aren’t paying blood money, yet: as in so many fields nowadays, the US and IRS win the tyranny stakes:

The Internal Revenue Service paid out more than $53 million to whistle-blowers in 2013 who turned in friends, family and co-workers.

What an ugly world we’ve voted in.

I began that earlier post with a quotation from Orwell’s 1984:

"Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it… All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children."

Comparing this quotation with how British school children were being encouraged to dob in tax cheats in their neighbourhoods, I summed the truth as follows:

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.

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.

This is the ethic of the societies our democracies have voted in on belief in the illusory free lunch. It’s barbaric, the hatred of life itself for:

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.


I read somewhere over the last week, probably a book site, that modern youth love dystopia fiction because they think they live in a dsytopia: I agree.

Is there hope? No.

The greatest philosopher in the twentieth century summed it up pretty well:



Welcome to the pig pen. Don’t panic, Selwyn is lobbying the government to supply you with swill, you won't need to do any work for it, or be self reliant to any extent at all.

Me? I married my best friend, and we try to stay as far away from the pig pen as possible, enjoying the scenery and a drink or three on the way to the new Gulags:

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Friday, May 3, 2013

Asset Sales: Nationalisation Versus Privatisation – Anecdote in Process.



New Zealand businessman, Selwyn Pellet, is both an undoubtedly successful because innovative entrepreneur and businessman, and, on Twitter, a gentleman: respect to Selwyn on both counts. However, he is one of a type of businessmen who have made it via private enterprise, who then after the success, start preaching statism, and hence the destruction of a free market and so the free society, despite the evidence of their own lives. It confuses me, because it seems to beg both philosophy and economic theory, and I wonder what the wellspring of this phenomenon is. I suspect, or at least wonder if, it’s tied somehow to that hobby horse of mine regarding the growing propensity under the Left ethic brainwashed into us via the New Zealand School Curriculum document, chasing that bloodied altar of the common good, to emote on issues, rather than think rationally along the lines of cause and effect, so that Selwyn while extremely clever in his field of expertise, misses the big philosophic and economic picture.

Anyway, here’s an interesting little Twitter scenario, I’ll be interested to see Selwyn’s response. He is an implacable opponent of National’s upcoming partial privatisation of power generator, Mighty River Power (MRP), believing in a state monopoly for power generation; on the back of his tweeting a radio show host to this effect, I have put the below query to him:





Answer:

Even by the time of publishing this piece, Selwyn has provided the below answer. I will let it stand for now, and will come back to it again soon:



My further replies:




End Piece:

Labour and Greens have both stated that if they win next year’s election, then MRP, et al, will be renationalised in order to lower power bills for consumers. Unfortunately, and the reason for why power was partially privatised in the first instance, once you break any connection to market signals, a state which believes itself to have a limitless purse in the tax take for cross-subsidisation across government functions, ultimately leads to such endemic and then systemic distortions across the economy, that economies ultimately fail. Proof: history.

Labour and Greens for a short period of time will be able to regulate prices to the consumer lower, but they cannot regulate the cost of generation, and lack of new generation will be the first of the effects felt via brown outs.



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