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
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.
ReplyDeleteYes. Anyway, he refuses to interact with this blog.
Delete... More on that soon.
ReplyDeleteOf 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"
ReplyDeleteWhen 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!