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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Wednesday, October 17, 2012

MSM Feeling, Not Reporting Again: Tax dodgers cost country over $80 million – Really: Cost?


Here, in a short Herald piece by Alanah Eriksen, we see first-hand the unthinking statist immorality that has built the new surveillance states of the West, after the old ones of the early and mid-twentieth century were beaten by the Allies at huge cost. The same statist immorality promulgated by the Fortresses of Legislation that have built the welfare states which destroyed self-reliance and self-responsibility, dooming citizens to debt and tax slavery, and tragically, on the back of the economic and social destruction of the West’s fiat money systems and Keynesian socialism, seen fascism marching in Europe again, which has returned to the scary days of the 1930’s, courtesy of the Left’s Gulags of Forced Altruism.

I need do little more than highlight the central contradiction in Alanah’s (sob) story. She starts out correctly reporting fact:

Tax-dodging New Zealanders cheated the country out of at least $80 million in undeclared income last year … The Inland Revenue Department has revealed to the Herald that it received about 177 tip-offs a week from disgruntled Kiwis about earnings being concealed.

Albeit noting a society structured in such a way that citizens dob each other in for punishment, is the embodiment of the fascist state, where ultimately the bonds of natural love and affection are broken as children are urged to dob their parents in, that’s not the point I’m wanting to make, which is rather how Alanah leaves reporting behind from this point, and simply emotes over her keyboard, as I’ve written on before:

That's enough to feed more than 375,000 families of four based on the average amount spent on food in Auckland. It could have funded more than 8000 breast cancer surgeries, 1650 open heart surgeries, the redevelopment of children's hospital Starship twice over, or rebuild the earthquake-ravaged Christchurch Cathedral.

Dreadful, isn’t it, how can we argue with that? I could, in fact, just on the principle, for a start by asking whose money this is we’re talking about that Alanah would have spent on building a pointless steeple. And if 375,000 families need to be fed, then I put it to you in the twenty first century the Welfare state created that need, against which, mind, I may voluntarily choose to help feed a family that can’t feed itself, probably by helping them from my vege garden – no doubt wondering all the time, why they haven’t got one – but no state ever should force such ‘compassion’ from me, because that results in something much worse: the slave state and its creeping cruelty, building, building, building itself ever bigger by beating then eating the hands forced to feed it, all to grow the number of families that aren't self-reliant anymore. And why did you not think, Alanah, of the possibility of individuals simply insuring themselves against breast cancer and open heart surgeries, which they could afford to if the state didn’t strip them of the resources to do so, while leaving all of us free to pursue our happiness unmanacled to bureaucrats? You’ve just assumed a public health system is a given that must be paid for, even by those of us who want no bar of it, because we have learned, like the Soviets who felt they had free healthcare, that free healthcare always ends up costing a society everything. Though well done for literally bringing in affairs of the open heart in your shining example of how by not thinking, the MSM is feeling and slouching our way to the new police states.  As stated, I can argue all this on principle, but I don’t need to do so, for in her own article, IRD provide the contradiction at the heart of Alanah’s darkness:

"Often people are in pretty dire straits when they start evading tax by not paying PAYE and GST, they're often up against the wall financially already," said the IRD's group tax counsel, Graham Tubb.

"So you can understand that we might have difficulty recovering the money." He said there were cases of tax evasion that the department may never find out about.

How edifying. No surprises we’re going through hard times at the moment, so what we are really talking about here is many businesses, hardworking independent Kiwis, on the breadline, that aren’t able to pay their tax, without taking food from their own tables, or paying the insurance for the heart operations on themselves and their loved ones. That’s how the welfare state has punched an iron fist through the heart of self-reliance, with this reporter cheering ghoulishly from the side-lines. At the very least, this ‘fact’ reported by Alanah shows New Zealand needs a tax-free income threshold, of $35,000 to $40,000, that allows a family a living, and independence, before they have to start coughing up the tax to support the lives of total strangers and their life decisions, many of them monumentally mental.

And finally, that steeple, Alanah; are you seriously telling me building a slave state to extract tax from these struggling individuals just trying to survive and feed their families, is justified by their meal and insurance money being used to build the Anglican Church a new Cathedral in Christchurch in order the five church-goers there can praise some Monty Python character on Sunday? If he did exist, and if he’d walked around the Eastern suburbs post quakes, I reckon you’ll find Jesus - and most likely Brian - would be appalled with you turning morality on its head to this extent. Dreadful; the slippery, under-handed, hypocritical Left. This is not reporting you’re doing here, its sheer propaganda. And the editor of the Herald who let that paragraph past should be ashamed of him or herself: does professionalism not exist in our fourth estate anymore? This piece was pure op-ed, not for the news pages, and by publishing as such, Granny Herald becomes just another statist blog, pushing the line of the tyranny of the common good.

Please, for the sake of the free, decent society, next time you get the urge to emote an article, Alanah, trying thinking first.


Disclaimer: Per my by-line, if you evade your taxes, you’re a bloody idiot. Ironically, your prudent course of action is to go bankrupt trying to pay your taxes, then exist on a benefit while watching Sky News reporting the collapse of Europe and the US. And yeah, I know that’s insane in every respect, but this is social democracy. I can’t explain it, ask this bloke.

7 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. I read your Herald Op-ed ... and that 'was' an op-ed :)

      Though I think the real problem here is those taxpayers trying to survive who can't get above the 17.5% tax bracket. We need, at the very least, a tax free income threshold to allow workers and businesspeople to look after themselves before all the redistributing BS. At least we'd be promoting self-reliance rather than fostering dependence.

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  2. Wow, the 'op-ed' bit; that is a long memory Mark, impressive.

    I disagree with a tax free thresh-hold. That is a progressive tax. If the cost of running the state is 33k a year, then everyone should pay $33k. Why should I pay more or less than the person next to me?

    I think the Libertarianz are wrong here. Of course, if there was actually a poll tax you would see state services melt faster than a snowman in Somalia, but that of course would be the point.

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  3. Great column Mark. And Damien, I agree a tax free threshold is progressive tax, but it's a step in the right direction, i.e. everyone gets a tax break.

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    1. Cheers Richard.

      ... Do we have a new 'coalition' coming out of the Libz conference?

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    2. Discussions are continuing, Mark. I would like to think we will be putting up a credible list of candidates at the local body elections next year.

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  4. Damien Grant: "If the cost of running the state is 33k a year, then everyone should pay $33k. Why should I pay more or less than the person next to me? I think the Libertarianz are wrong here. Of course, if there was actually a poll tax you would see ..."

    Graham Tubb: "... that we might have difficulty recovering the money."

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