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, April 10, 2013

Privacy in NZ: This Week’s Signposts on the Road to Our Serfdom. IRD & GCSB



Writing this week in the sad, funereal dimness of the death of the last Western leader who understood Western Classical Liberal values, Margaret Thatcher, let’s take a peek at this week’s signposts of our forced shuffle down the road to our serfdom.

The term ‘road to serfdom’ was coined by a free man called Hayek who said, paraphrasing, government policy leads always to unintended deleterious consequences which allows bureaucrats and politicians to promote as solutions, more government policy, until in this way we are all lead down the road of slavery to the State. Indeed, statism has an incredible advantage over freedom, as Daniel Horowitz points out:


“We must understand that there is an imbalance of power in the political system of any democracy in that the forces of statism have an innate advantage over the defenders of freedom. It takes but one legislative or administrative victory for statism to succeed in guiding society on an indelible path towards dependency. We cannot perpetuate the free-market, but we can perpetuate statism by creating inveterate dependency constituencies. Statism enjoys the inherent advantage of self-perpetuation through its own pernicious activities that engender a continued need for the government programs.”


Returning to the current affairs of the last week, despite I’ve lost count on the privacy breaches of government departments over the last twelve months, noting that in a country with a population of just over four million the victims are in their hundreds of thousands, and yet this week the Minister of Taking, Minister Dunne, on top of the intricate web of information sharing agreements his department has with international governments - because the war on freedom is global - wants to give more powers to IRD for sharing information with police in ‘serious crimes’.

No, Mr Dunne. It always sounds reasonable of course, and is nothing given the total absence of privacy this department symbolises for all of us, but the surveillance state is already huge: stop requiring information of us, stop recording information on us, stop sharing information on us. Just. Stop. Doing.This.To.Us.PLEASE.

And then on news this week, leaked, laughably, about our state spies illegally spying on people they shouldn't be; the fix? Why of course, to make their illegal activities legal.




See what I mean? Remember my yellow high-lighted byline out to the right of this post, at top of page.



Update 1:

As fast as we are being shuffled down the road to our serfdom in New Zealand, the litmus test of totalitarianism being the powers granted to the revenue gatherer – remembering  the powers of IRD are obscene – in the United Police States it seems to be a sprint to the Gulag, the individual’s right to be left alone an historical fantasy:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people's emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.

Hattip Peter Schiff


19 comments:

  1. Appealing to Mr Dunne's better nature won't do any good - he is just another rat in the entire genus of rodentia that is the Key Government.

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    Replies
    1. Yes. Anyway, he refuses to interact with this blog.

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  2. Of course - serfs - in NZ anyone on any benefit, including WFF, student loans, ACC, EQC, civil servants, NZEI/PPTA teachers etc - have no "right" to privacy"

    When you food comes from someone else's dollar, that person has every right to know everything about you.

    Leaks from ACC, EQC & WINZ especially - just giving information to nett taxpayers that we deserve as of right. It's our damn money!

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