I Don’t Like Political Hypocrisy. (Nor Gareth Morgan's Independent Tax Setting Body.)

If you come from a party that believes in the big state, with its big tax take, you have no grounds, certainly not moral, for tweets such as this. File the below hypocrisy in that planet-sized bureaucracy called busy-body bossy left politics.

@DavidClarkNZ And how does a govt that believes in 'hands on' regulation, & that needs a higher tax take, intend to reduce compliance?
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) June 27, 2013

@DavidClarkNZ It's called eating your cake, eating my cake, then having them still, David. U only achieve that thru bogus religion.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) June 27, 2013

Needless to say, I got no answer. David was trying a cheap shot, and took off his toe again.

I also note this week Gareth Morgan writing of the need for an independent tax setting body to take tax decisions out of the politicians hands – he now sees this as the only way of taxing housing, property, business equity (I seem to remember), that is, capital. Sorry, Gareth, as bad as these politicians are, it’s called representative democracy. I am worse off with a technocrat setting tax policy – and let’s take it for granted I’m not going to agree with your technocrats – than a politician, because at least I have this tiny, incey wincey possibility of helping to vote a politician out of office, whereas I will have no control or voice, whatsoever, in the role, decisions or careers of permanently established Humphrey Appleby technocrats. Technocrats will be as open to self-interest as politicians are, but will be utterly beyond my reach. Worse, this then truly does institutionalise the notion of taxation in our society, and freedom lovers like myself, libertarians, the very odd librarian, classical liberals, are implacably opposed to that. We’ve all forgotten how much of our taxation, certainly income tax, is a very recent concept, and the only revolution that has had lasting good, that American one, was rightly set off by the imposition of taxes at minute levels our current parliaments pass annually without comment, even through excises (forget the really big taxes).

We need a conversation about tax, alright, but that conversation starts in philosophy, and the role of government in our lives, and whether the West is about freedom, or this surveillance state we find ourselves in.

Dunne’s Multinational Tax Crackdown: The Assault on Privacy and Prosperity.

In the global war being waged by Western Police States on private enterprise and your freedom, New Zealand’s Minister of Taking and Privacy Desecration has wed his knuckle-busters to those of Opposition Revenue Spokesperson David Clark, and announced a war against the consumer via a crackdown on multinationals operating here who are not paying that mythical amount of tax politicians call ‘fair’; the definition of which not one of them can give me – Messrs Dunne and Clark, another chance here: what is a fair amount of tax please?)

In this single stroke, Mr Dunne, and from 2014, Mr Clark, by ensuring these multinationals pay more tax are going to:

First, force up the cost of books, technology, music, and all manner of goods and services that make your life better, while, with the ruthless Orwellian boot of statism kicking the head of entrepreneurship forever, slowing the pace of innovation these firms risk their capital for, to the detriment of all of us – and for some of us the technologies involved may mean the difference between life and death. As I have said before:

“ … income tax is a cost: when you advocate a boycott on firms not paying what ‘you’ think is enough tax - and we know for you there will never be enough tax - then what you’re telling consumers to do is boycott firms until they increase their costs, and so, necessarily the prices they charge for their goods and services sold to consumers. You’re asking consumers to protest against not being charged more for what they buy from private companies, and thus you’re advocating a harsher life for low income earners on strict budgets, not a better one.”

Second, in the case of New Zealand, both these men by selfishly pursuing such policies ensuring our Statedom is kept in the funds – in a former, honest age, called booty - to keep financing the wet dreams of politicians, will miss an immense opportunity to attract foreign investment that could benefit all Kiwis, not just those suckled to the succubus of the Fortress of Legislation. Mr Dunne is on record:

“The issue of large multinationals shifting their profits to countries in order to gain the most favourable tax result is of huge importance to OECD member states who are concerned about how this practice can distort and erode their respective tax bases, ..."

Why not reduce, Mr Dunne, our tax rates to the lowest in the OECD so that these multinationals want to shift their profits here? New Zealand is at the bottom of the world, with higher freight costs to our markets than our competitors, and this is an opportunity for the brave to get a march on them by boosting the necessary foreign investment we need to be a prosperous nation. All this talk of attacking tax havens, let's become one, and a lifeboat to those firms bailing out of the big taxing, collapsing regimes of Europe and the US.

And finally, most harmful of all, Mr Dunne is again letting loose the dogs of war in the relentless onslaught by Big Brother State on your privacy and right to be goddamn left alone. An attack on the privacy of these corporates cannot be contained to them in either principle, or in practice. Mr Dunne admits this:

Any measures would involve trading off transparency versus privacy and Mr Dunne hinted taxpayer privacy is likely to come out second best in that trade-off.

Disgusting. The Minister has again forgotten whom he works for. 

 And have no doubt given the size of these firms, the coercive, intrusive, privacy busting laws that will be employed by the bloated bureaucracies of the West, are going to be shock and awe, and the victim on the receiving end is not just these corporates; it’s you. Sadly, Mr Dunne is no student of economics, or history, for economics shows us free markets are what have delivered the West the highest standard of living mankind has ever seen, and history has shown us the type of society that evolves and slithers out from planned economies that necessitate planned lives enslaved to a voracious hubris of tax debt: it’s the society where the bureaucrats get to spy on the lives of others; and where your freedom and pursuit of happiness, your aspirations, dreams and goals, are sacrificed to the lives of others. It’s the society where individual-you has been expunged. Mr Dunne is a member of that Arrogance of Altruists creating the frightening society director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck brought back to us from recent history in his movie The Lives of Others:

And why are we doing this?

To build a violent world of dependency that produces the likes of the ungrateful young man in this post, to whom Mr Dunne daily enslaves you via the tax take.

If the Founding Fathers could see how free men are bound, again, by our immoral masters, there would be a Western Spring.

I Demand Higher Prices You Immoral Capitalists.

Imagine a rent-a-crowd protestor outside a supermarket with this on his placard:

We demand to pay more for our staple dietary requirements. Raise your prices!

I think we are agreed that would be mind-numbingly stupid. However, that’s what 'ethical consumers' are protesting for in their planned boycott of Amazon, Google, Starbucks, et al. Tax is a cost to business: a protest to raise taxes paid, is a protest to raise the price a consumer pays. 

I put it to you the ‘Ethical Consumer’ is not so much ethical, as just plain bat-shit stupid, and for some reason during a recession has decided to declare war on the struggling consumer. Socialism … it’s really silly, and it’s hurting good, honest working people. If you want to even the playing field for local small and medium sized businesses, lower their tax rates to what the Googles' of the world are paying here: then we would all benefit. But for that to happen, irresponsible governments which spend like free men can't, need to get their spending under control (or even stop borrowing would be a start).

War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Fairness is Higher Prices.

Related Posts:

Amazon is our hero, not the villain in the piece.

Bernard Hickey’s latest outage, sorry, outrage.

Labour’s David Clark declares war on the consumer.

Labour's David Clark Declares War on the Consumer.

While working I listen to BBC3’s online radio stream of classical music: yes, it's state radio, but it’s pleasant to have in the background, and helps keep me calm. It also means I get to listen to the BBC’s hourly newscast. I don’t think I’m lying when I say there hasn’t been a broadcast this week that did not mention the UK’s IR - Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs - vicious war being waged with the multinationals: Google, Amazon, Starbucks, et al – the British government has just allocated £104 million  of consumers money to HMRC to fight for same consumers to pay more for the goods and services these innovative firms sell to them - (as if life isn't hard enough for many struggling consumers).

No wait a minute: what did I just say? Surely a government doing that to its people would be absurd?

Anyway ...

According to UK politicians, the amount of tax paid by these multinationals is not enough to be ‘moral’ - apparently, as with 'fairness' there's a level of tax that is either moral or fair, or the alternate. But what and whom determines that?

I’m not surprised by the fact I’ve not had one politician in New Zealand take up my challenge of defining fair for me in relation to tax.

And as for morality, as Dominic Lawson has ably shown in The Independent, politicians should not be in the business of throwing stones from their particular glasshouse:

… one should always be wary of legislators when they talk of morality …. For example, Danny Alexander, who as Chief Secretary to the Treasury is responsible for making the public budgets add up, has said that he is personally boycotting Starbucks because of its artful tax avoidance. Yet the talented Mr Alexander had designated his London apartment as his second home, for the purpose of claiming £37,000 in “parliamentary” expenses, but then described the self-same residence to HMRC as his main home, to avoid Capital Gains tax when he sold it.

In so doing, he behaved quite legally, as many other MPs had done, including the present Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow; but this constituted tax avoidance, in the sense that a course of action was undertaken solely for the purpose of reducing tax payable. There is, naturally, a vast difference in scale between the operations of Starbucks and that of the MPs, but I am not sure where the moral distinction lies and therefore how much authority these MPs have in criticising such businesses as “immoral”.

This may also be a doubt in the public’s mind; who knows, they might actually have more trust in Starbucks and Amazon than they ever would for the politicians urging a boycott.

It is timely I put this post up for on Twitter last night, Labour’s Opposition member allocated to the Revenue - and there is no less aptly named portfolio, a government doesn’t earn revenue, it just take yours - Mr David Clark, advocated publicly for a boycott of these multi-nationals in New Zealand.

  David Clark ‏@DavidClarkNZ

“@guardiannews: Top story #tax loophole 'costs UK more than Olympics' http://gu.com/p/3c9ez ” boycott on multinationals not paying fair share?

I simply pointed him to my piece on Amazon … and asked who the real enemy of the people was: Amazon that delivers me cheap books wherever I am in the world, and whom I can trade with (or not) voluntarily, or him and the government gun he wishes to hold at consumers heads from 2014, as he empties out their wallets? And perhaps he could have a go at devising the required legislation of 'fairness' our taxing law needs so it might attain some semblance of, well, fairness. He never replied to me, though I see I’ve had .govt.nz trawling through my blog this morning.

Yours in the Freedom you would know nothing of, David.