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 Choice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Choice. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Bloody Jamie Oliver Cashing In On Food Wowserism.



UK Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson reckons the celebrity chef’s idea of taxing sugar a good one:


Why Jamie Oliver's sugar tax is a good idea

The Government should forget about industry lobbying and act on the national scandal of sugary food and drink …


Pearson joins a long line of MSM journos who love pushing the line of wowserism, which serves none of us well. Below is the comment I posted to Pearson’s thread.


I'm so over this food fascism.

Questions on the State attempting to change our diets via the tax surveillance state - one of the most ruthless surveillance states in our history - are not a matter of science (even if the science was certain, which it's not: for example, the same people who would tax sugar would tax some forms of fat which are good for us). These are questions of philosophy.

A tax on food choice is a tax on choice, period; it's an atta(x)k on our individual freedom. I love Jamie, but I'm angry with him on this one. And the author of this piece can jackboot herself off the scene too, please.

One of the biggest threats to our liberty, in the details of the minutiae of our lives, is wowserism. Every time you find yourself about to voice an idea, or write an article, that would have the state force an individual who is doing you no harm to live according to your own (selfish) edicts … stop. Don't do it. Because you're being a prick.

And let me end on this point.

Jamie was aired on New Zealand TV over the last week: I noticed he's much 'bigger' than he used to be, especially around his neck and jowls.

I put it to Jamie one of the issues with his obvious weight gain may be all the (lovely, sumptuous) pasta in his cookery books (and his restaurants), which is fattening. So be careful going down this route, Jamie, you don't end up on a hellishy boring diet, thus reduced quality of life, served up on your own petard.

Proof?

Thin Jamie with chin:



Plump pasta’ed Up Jamie:


 

Addendum:

Further comments on this thread & my reponse:

Well if you demand total freedom of choice, the so be it. You can then also be responsible for the costs of the consequences of your free choice, not the rest of your community. Is it not reasonable for the community to encourage good behaviour for the benefit of all of the community, especially the young?


A long range Dutch study proves the obese and smokers cost public health systems less as they tend to die quickly, and younger, whereas the lingering long lived - who still die - use health services longer. So cost is not an argument for sugar taxes.

But yes, speaking as someone who eats healthily, hasn't had a soft drink for over 30 years - but loves alcohol - and is the correct weight for my height et al by application only of self-discipline, let's privatise health so we cop the consequences of our choices. Obesity is at the hands of Nanny State that breaks that vital link.

Though, bottom line - hang on, got to refill my wine - I'm sick of the arrogant, and the self-anointed arbiters of my happiness who would force me to live by their joyless dictum a long lived, sober, low calorie life is somehow better than a happy one.


Related:


Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Having to Break People Away from the ‘Choice Habit.’ #Obamacare #TaxState

 
This post will end with the following stultifying quotation from the Chief Executive of a Crony Inc benefitting from Obamacare:

 

We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has,” said Marcus Merz, the chief executive of PreferredOne, an insurer in Golden Valley, Minn., that is owned by two health systems and a physician group. “We’re all trying to break away from this fixation on open access and broad networks.”

 

Many of my latter posts have been on how the Land of the Free has voted itself into a perverse mirror image of the hope once held; the enlightenment shining from its revolution extinguished. It is a central contention of this blog that the tax state killed the free state, because without privacy there is no state of freedom, and the rigours of the tax take necessarily have seen our privacy displaced by a comprehensive state surveillance. IRD will most likely read this post – look at my logs – and via our current government’s intergovernmental agreement with the US to implement that country’s Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), cynically and corruptly using IRD’s powers outside of our privacy legislation to bypass that legislation for a purpose which yet has nothing to do with our tax take, the multitude of double tax agreements are pulled more closely together into global surveillance state that is truly Orwellian.
 

And following from this along the logic of a compulsory redistribution, don’t be deluded the tax state operates by anything other than terrorising a country’s own citizens to take their income and assets: this’s not hyperbole, those running the tax state admit it:

 

The IRS has become morally corrupted by the enormous power which we in Congress have unwisely entrusted to it. Too often it acts like a Gestapo preying upon defenseless citizens.

 
-- Senator Edward V. Long

 

The real point of audits is to instill fear, not to extract revenue; the IRS aims at winning through intimidation and (thereby) getting maximum voluntary compliance.

 
-- Paul Strassel, former IRS Headquarters Agent Wall St. Journal

 

 
Regarding that last quotation, Herr Strassle doesn’t even understand the meaning of voluntary anymore: tax states as we have in the West based predominantly on self-assessment are not voluntary tax systems. Try not paying your tax or being found wanting in an audit.
 

And for every police state power given to the IRS, so have IRD been given in New Zealand. For a start, my below pieces:


 

 

 

In the West, circa twenty first century, there is little not justified, or property right left unsacrificed on the altar of the tax take; just this week individuals in the UK found that direct theft from their bank accounts is demanded otherwise more extortion in the fencing racket that is state tax:

 

Taxes will have to rise unless officials are given new powers to raid people's bank accounts, David Cameron has said.

 
The Treasury select committee warned that allowing HM Revenue and Customs to remove cash from bank accounts without court orders is "very concerning" because of its history of mistakes.

 
Mr. Cameron yesterday claimed that the alternative was to "put up taxes". He told Sky News: "We have a choice here. If we don't collect taxes properly and make sure people pay their taxes properly we look at the problems of having to raise tax rates. I don't want to do that, so I support the changes the Chancellor set out in the Budget which is to really say that not paying your taxes is not acceptable."

 
 

If you’re a worshipper in the cult of redistribution, you’re not a little worried yet? And it’s not concerning, members of the Treasury select committee, because of HMRC’s history of mistakes; it’s concerning because it means our bank accounts are merely state property: no wonder Bitcoin has become so popular.
 

I underlined ‘choice’ in that last quotation because Cameron’s complete semantic purging of it is matched only by the evil of CEO Mr Merz pimping ObamaMarx’s Obamacare, gleeful that patients are to have much less of it – my underlining again:

 

In the midst of all the turmoil in health care these days, one thing is becoming clear: No matter what kind of health plan consumers choose, they will find fewer doctors and hospitals in their network.

 
These so-called narrow networks, featuring limited groups of providers, have made a big entrance on the newly created state insurance exchanges, where they are a common feature in many of the plans. While the sizes of the networks vary considerably, many plans now exclude at least some large hospitals or doctors’ groups. Smaller networks are also becoming more common in health care coverage offered by employers and in private Medicare Advantage plans.

 
A bottom line is never going to be compatible with patient satisfaction, safety and comprehensiveness of care.

 
Insurers, [read CRONY CAPITALISTS] ranging from national behemoths like WellPoint, UnitedHealth and Aetna to much smaller local carriers, are fully embracing the idea, saying narrower networks are essential to controlling costs and managing care. Major players contend they can avoid the uproar that crippled a similar push in the 1990s.

 
“We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has,” said Marcus Merz, the chief executive of PreferredOne, an insurer in Golden Valley, Minn., that is owned by two health systems and a physician group. “We’re all trying to break away from this fixation on open access and broad networks.”

 

 I’ll put money on it that Obamacare, administered by the IRS, of course, because it’s entirely about compulsion and limitation of choices, will lead to deteriorating (narrowing) healthcare in America, and that is quite apart from the immeasurable damage already done to the minds of Americans, growing their dependency on what has become one of the most coercive political systems, and downright abusive with its surveillance networks, in the world – the United Police States of America. Again, if you were marching against PRISM and NSA, yet are on the Left and are voting for the bigger and bigger state, what is going on in your head? Like Orwell foretold, you must be adding two and two to make five.
 

We have to break people away from the choice habit everyone has.’ That, right there, is the end of the free world. This fascist Mr Merz, and I say fascist advisedly on his own terms, not stopping to think why this ‘choice thing’ is so important to everybody, and wanting his government to overrun the choices of everyone anyway, which of course all governments will do nowadays,  in order to deliver a health system that patients will be less satisfied with, and which will feature less safety and comprehensive care. Revolution is the only way back from here, a Western Spring, with the most effective revolution from this point being a tax revolt. Won’t happen in my lifetime, though: and don’t look to me (or at me IRD staffers); I’m no martyr, I’m just drinking my way down the road to my serfdom, hoping to avoid the booze bus along the way is this new era of wowserism. Albeit next time you see another of your choices taxed away from you, whether it be buying a drink after 3.00am in Auckland, or soon a soda pop, remember that I, and people like me, Libertarians, told you so, but too many of you were voting for what you thought was a free lunch, and free health care, which has ended up, as with the Soviets, costing us everything, and I’m not just talking my income, I'm talking our whole way of life.

 

 

Friday, July 20, 2012

Headlines 2012 and 2022: Choice = Freedom. The Tryanny of Each Other.


Headline: 2012.

As reported by Stuff:

Gang members, a grandmother and beneficiaries were all arrested in the country's largest cannabis bust which resulted in the seizure of drugs with a potential worth of $130 million.

More than 2500 people were arrested in the six-month crackdown, which has made a massive dent in New Zealand's cannabis supply, police said.

As well as arresting 2573 people, police also confiscated 280 kilograms of plant material, estimated at $5.6m, and destroyed more than 130,385 plants and seedlings with a potential street value (at maturity) of up to $130m.

Following 2009's Operation Lime, which targeted businesses and individuals selling cannabis-growing equipment, the latest raids were dubbed Operation National, which was the largest operation of its kind, Detective Inspector Paul Berry said.

Police targeted drug dealers working out of houses. The crackdown was complemented by Operation Kelly, which used aircraft to spot cannabis crops during the growing season.

When they raided homes police found multi-million dollar operations, including one which was allegedly run by a Wellington grandmother …

Every gang in the country was involved, including the Mongrel Mob, Head Hunters and Rebels, Berry said.

"This is bread and butter for the gangs. This is how they make their money."

Police also found 248 children, who would have watched their parents grow drugs and sell them at the door, Berry said.
Many of those children had been referred to CYFs.

They seized 14 properties, worth a total of $4.6m, eight cars, a boat, and cash and bonds worth more than $1m, some of which was seized under the Criminal Proceeds Recovery Act.


Headline: 2022.


Supermarket owners, a grandmother and dairy owners were all arrested in the country's largest soft drink bust which resulted in the seizure of soft drinks with a black market potential worth $130 million.

More than 2500 people were arrested in the six-month crackdown, which has made a massive dent in New Zealand's soft drink supply, police said.

As well as arresting 2573 people, police also confiscated 280 kilograms of fat laden hamburger meat, estimated at $5.6m, and destroyed more than 130,385 packs of cigarettes with a potential street value (in the schools) of up to $130m.

Following 2009's Operation Squash-Choice, which targeted businesses and individuals selling soft drink selling equipment, such as shelves and refrigerators, the latest raids were dubbed Operation No-Choice, which was the largest operation of its kind, Detective Inspector Paul Berry said.

Police targeted soft drink dealers working out of houses. The crackdown was complemented by Operation Orwell, which used children to spot soft drink in their homes and dob in their parents.

When they raided homes police found multi-million dollar operations, including one which was allegedly run by a Wellington grandmother …

Every corner dairy in the country was involved, including On The Spot Dairies, and 4-Square supperettes, Berry said.

"This is bread and butter for the capitalists. This is how they make their money."

Police also found 248 children, who would have watched their parents selling soft-drink, and drunk it themselves, Berry said.

Many of those children had been referred to CYFs.

They seized 14 properties, worth a total of $4.6m, eight cars, a boat, and cash and bonds worth more than $1m, some of which was seized under the Criminal Proceeds Recovery Act.

I’ve written on this before. I don’t smoke or ingest cannabis, but like alcohol and soft drink, both of which, in excess, are harmful to you, also, it’s a choice, and a tax or ban on choice, is a tax or ban on freedom, which is a fundamental attaxk on freedom. We only need to police for the initiation of force or fraud. It is as simple as that. Look at what Bloomberg is doing in New York, don’t think that second headline won’t happen.

I’ve also written on how we’ve had our privacy voted away in our semi-police states, and see yet another government department is abusing it: WINZ. Those who understand how important it is to own our lives, to control our privacy, to have choices, have had that privacy, that right to be left alone, to have choice, voted away from us at the polling booth.  Of course we have abuses like this from within the fortresses of bureaucracy: we are owned by the most brutal tyrant of all: each other.

Monday, July 2, 2012

TVNZ 7: Freedom has a Price.


I’m going to take a big breath and say it: I liked TVNZ Channel 7. I understand from what I have read about the ratings, and despite what the save campaign say, on some of their programming it may have only been me watching. But it was possibly some of the best programming, for me, outside the Food Channel. Emily Perkin’s ‘The Good Word’ show about all things bookish was one of my favourite spots of the week on our TV.

And let’s get this whole sordid confessional over.

During the day when I’m working I am normally streaming Concert Program or BBC3 – currently listening to the Early Music Show as I pen this. I listen to a lots of the arts related slots, especially books and writing, on BBC4; I listen to a lot of Kim Hill’s interviews via podcast; and in a nauseous orgy of state broadcasting I’ve started listening to National Program’s Checkpoint at 5.00pm over Larry Williams on ZB, and I even – face palming, ashamedly looking through the frost chapped cracks in my fingers - have been known to listen to Jim Mora for an hour or two.

Woe is me. Woeful am I. Losing TVNZ 7 hurts.

But this said, I do not support state broadcasting. Why? Read every other post on this blog, that’s why. Freedom is a package deal: I can’t just pick those parts of the big state I like, and ignore the rest and the fact the whole edifice is based on a theft enforced by the police state powers of tax enforcement, and thus the truncating of liberty. And yes, persecuting rich pricks, more than they already are, so I can watch The Good Word, is immoral. So instead of philosophising on the last rites for TVNZ 7, I would like to point to something that has been missed in the debate – that is, why is commercial TV so awful? Because there’s a connection.

I suggest it’s because after so many decades of Gramsci in our state school system, and the dumbing down that has occurred, there’s a nihilism – as in gaggle - of unemployable youth being churned out, barely able to speak intelligibly anymore, and commercial TV, to survive, has to generate its revenues off the scary menace their minds have become: thus, as this generation would txt, our welfare mentality, reality TV has become ‘a bit shit’. The crap that is commercial television, merely represents our age of crap that has been begot of the welfare state, which has replaced the creative, free individual, and his pursuit of happiness, with the collective ascendency of a coke swilling, binge drinking moronacy of barfing idiots. And as I’ve explained, already, I don’t believe this is fixable anymore, as the philosophical rot is seventy years deep.


The only question left from this is why not, then, grab onto that which is good, as in uplifting for the secular soul, anymore, no matter it may be served up on taxpayer money. Why not turn a blind eye to the persecution of the rich pricks, who are most likely uncouth businessmen who wouldn’t know Shakespeare from Shakespeare’s Sister anyway? Right?

Well I once posed the following question to Lindsay Perigo on his SOLO site; what if lack of regulation, say, of fisheries, led to fisheries being depleted, possibly wiped out? His answer was that men acting in their self-interest would probably not do this, but it was possible, yes; freedom has a price. And he’s right. For me, the price is no TVNZ 7; I have not participated in any protest online or off. As much as I love that channel, I would rather have my freedom, than be reading Shakespeare in a Gulag, even if I say this from the depressing vantage point of knowing I will never be a free man.


PS: Mr Dotcom, yes, I saw you on the funeral march: quite apart from all the ironies involved, what Sky channel was TVNZ 7 on? …. Yeah, I thought so.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Don't Blow Smoke in Nanny State's Face

Another story from the police state:

A 60-year-old Motueka man was fined $6000 in the Auckland District Court today for the unlawful manufacture of tobacco.


The man was growing enough tobacco to sell. Which raises a question: what's more important for a society, that an individual is left the volition to exercise the choice to grow tobacco that other individuals have the choice to buy for their own pleasure, or, that a government holds a suffocating mandate to punish those choices that lead to bad health outcomes,  or, just 'stuff' it doesn't like?

We've been here before.

Again, it's a moral question. It's freedom of choice versus the coercive state that can punish us for our own good, or the perceived common good of others - or at least the good as voted by a tyranny of the majority. Yes, sometimes the choices we make may harm us: freedom has to include the freedom to die stupidly. That is much better than the alternative: the thug state that steals our volition, and with that, our lives. The war being waged by the state against choice, is the war being waged against freedom, and the state is winning.


And, of course, this man's real crime: no doubt he wasn't giving his pound of effort to IRD on the sales.


UPDATE:

My comment posted to the NBR thread linked above:

"... In the battle between freedom of choice to live our lives as we would want, and the thug state that exists to tell us how to live those lives according to its want, I have to draw the nasty conclusion on who has won.

As for these 'tirelessly working customs officers', evident of the harm done through the new found glory they believe themselves to have received from that lowest common denominator of Monday night reality TV, a Harry S. Truman quotation would seem appropriate:

"Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship ..."