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 David Cunliffe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Cunliffe. Show all posts

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Twitterings: Richard Ford on David Cunliffe: A Lack of Self-Awareness. Also #Euthanasia Via Lecretia Seale on Sunday Tonight.



Protagonist Frank Bascombe, from Richard Ford’s novel Independence Day, is correct in this wry observation (of him) made by girlfriend, Sally:


“She sees me, she says, in an odd priestly mode, which is in fact the worst thing I can imagine, since priests are the least self-aware, most unenlightened, irresolute, isolated and frustrated people on earth (politicians are second).”


Given Labour MP – and ex Leader – David Cunliffe’s business qualifications, it’s hard to think of a less self-aware, unenlightened politician – well, other than all of them:










Junkets are as this junket is. A junket is a junket is this junket.

It’s a junket.

The net result of David's junket will be, I can guarantee, to put even more government in the way of business start-ups, then tax the hell out of those that survive it - because he's a paid up member of the party that believes in the big state and the cult of redistribution.

But much worse than this; for making Maryan Street pull her euthanasia bill while you were leader, David, go to hell. I’ve had a gutsful of the cowardly conservative men of New Zealand Labour, who have now forced the dying Lecretia Seale’s to take her own case to die with dignity to the High Court. (She’s got better things to do with the time she has left you callous bastards.)

No, wait a minute, the cowards of every party, including, outrageously, the leader of New Zealand’s only [supposed] classical liberal party, David Seymour.

I challenge every politician in the New Zealand Fortress of Legislation to watch Sunday’s – TV 1, Sunday 7.00pm - piece tonight on Lecretia Seale’s fight in the High Court for her right to die with dignity, and then I challenge them to get off their fat arses and legislate for Lecretia and for us this basic individual right. Or even talk about it.

Reminding of why it’s so urgent this right is granted now.

Regarding (Free) Enterprise Zones, I recommend the above link to NotPC as a worthy read.


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Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Labour Electioneering On Economic Fascism: State Running Private Firms.


Last week I wrote how in New Zealand everything is tax avoidance now, and everything is illegal, hence every citizen is corralled and controlled by an all-knowing command state, even if it doesn’t ‘feel’ that that way because our shuffle into a caring totalitarianism has been so slow. This is why liberty is dead in the West, and Western command economies are failing, our living standards first stagnating, and in those high taxed countries like France, plummeting, as business leaves or shuts its doors.
 

I’ve not got time to go into the next piece until a blog at least next week, but enough to say that when everything is tax avoidance, then that logically justifies IRD officials, the state, to control and manage the financial plans, by veto, of private firms – noting that when you own a firm’s financial plans, you own its operations. If elected, New Zealand Labour leader, David Cunliffe, will turn this into policy:
 

Labour has previously indicated it wants to front-foot the thorny issue of tax minimisation on New Zealand revenue by internet-based businesses, rather than relying on international efforts led by the OECD group of developed economies, which is the preferred approach of the National Government.
 

[Snip]
 

Today's plan hinges on setting up a special commissioner for tax avoidance who would focus on multinational corporations.
 

Under that commissioner, a new corporate tax unit would "embed" Inland Revenue Department (IRD) auditors in corporations which have a history of tax avoidance either in New Zealand or abroad.
 

The embedded IRD officials would review multinationals' financial plans where they may affect their tax bills to prevent tax avoidance from occurring in the first place.

 

Cunliffe probably thinks this a conciliatory move because it backs off from his Revenue spokesman's earlier threat to ban these multi-nationals operating in New Zealand in total. And I’ve already had one person on Twitter run the debate this is a fine idea, one they’ll obviously vote for.
 

I despair, and wonder how the hell, with twentieth century social, political and economic history to have learned from, we’ve got to this. For every reader who has not yet understood my point that the tax surveillance state is where the truncheon of the totalitarian state meets our backsides, understand this story.

 
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Sunday, May 18, 2014

Labour’s Immigration Policy is Decidedly Conservative: Identity Politics Left & Right.

 

This post is partly to explicate the Libertarian advocacy of open immigration, and in doing so to demonstrate how libertarians don’t belong to either right or left politics, rather, existing  uncomfortably - though justifiably self-righteously because we do not call on others to pay for our ideals - in the schism between a free society and the authoritarian ones we now live in, governed by the brute fist of what has become a global, Orwellian tax surveillance state.
 

This morning I find leader of the Labour (Left) Opposition, David Cunliffe, is electioneering on what looks to be a Conservative immigration policy promising to slash net immigrant numbers from 40,000 per year to as low as 5,000. I write ‘looks’ because in fact Left politics in New Zealand has morphed via identity politics (that is, stereotyping bigotry) into a patriotic, nationalistic, protectionist and contradictory mess that makes a mockery of The Internationale. (I won’t even dignify this Labour policy with the economic argument against using immigration policy to ‘fix’ house prices, which is to miss, well, everything.) My initial response:
 








 

From this that arch-tweeter of New Zealand conservatism, Redbaiter, picked up on both this tweet, and an earlier statement by myself that drug legalisation was the litmus test of a free society. Note I like Redbaiter: there is a large divide between our views, but at least he has views held passionately, and I can have a good old ding dong with him on Twitter without him running childishly to the block, which far too many of New Zealand’s Left tweeters and bloggers do (though not all of them). I run the below Twitter timeline simply to show that Libertarians are not Conservatives, for we are social liberals, and to scope out (sorry everyone reading this from Christchurch where that has become a dirty word ) a policy of open immigration such as would exist in a free society constituted as a minarchy. I’ll do a final summary at end relating this theme back to my earlier posts on multiculturalism.
 












 

At this stage Redbaiter went to one of his own ‘themes’, which is the Chinese peril: you won’t be mistaken, but may be confused, at the associations this raises with both Labour and Green politicians statements against Chinese investment in New Zealand. The answer to the conundrum I believe lies not so much with economic ludditism - though that is part of it - but with the Left’s new found penchant with nationalism, born of protectionism - sorry, that's economic ludditism again - and long time conviction for identity politics; policy making, such as enforced quotas, on the basis of an individual's identity with a group (gender, race, etc) rather than a libertarian’s classical liberal individualistic ethic, and individual property rights as the only basis for law making. It’s a type of stereotyping the Left hold in common, ironically, with the authoritarian right, as exemplified in Redbaiter’s conservatism.
 
































 

For the record, typo alert, that tweet of mine above should read 'founded'. Anyway, then the reason why I like Redbaiter plus would be happy, if he were to uncloak, to carry the ding dong on over a bong … sorry, he’d have no part of that. Why I’d be happy to continue such debate over a beer at the pub:
 








 

But bottom line, there is only one word to describe what underlies Redbaiter’s, Labour, Green and for that matter, NZ First's, constant anti-Chinese sentiment: ugly.
 
 

Multiculturalism, Sharia Law and Open Immigration:
 

The other bogey the Right cite against open immigration is the threat of Islam and Sharia Law; to that I have two responses:
 

Firstly, the barbaric Sharia Law in every way I can think of breaches the non-initiation of force principle, thus much conducted under Sharia is rightly criminal behaviour in a free country. Western classical liberalism would never extend a hand to Sharia. So the crimes committed under Sharia in some (some only) Moslem-centric countries are not an argument against open immigration, including by a person of any race who describes themselves as a Moslem, for my understanding is a moderate Islam does not hold with Sharia.
 

Secondly, yes, of course I have huge ideological and philosophical issues with Islam, more so than with a Christianity which has thankfully has its sword blunted by the West’s Enlightenment, but, so long as any individual signs up to the non-initiation of force principle, and not to use our welfare system, then they are welcome here. Society has to be based on that. I have written on my views of this in my following blog post: Montesquieu and Islam: The Peaceful Crusade in Dunedin – Please Excuse my Discomfort.



Update 1: The Conservative / Libertarian Divide – Summary.

 

Firstly thank you to Brendan McNeill of AConservative Perspective for debating this with me in the below comments. The thread serves well to show the differences between Conservatives and Libertarians. Central to Brendan’s reasoning is the following:

 

I am capable of differentiating between Muslims as people, and Islam as a totalitarian religious ideology. Unfortunately we cannot tell by observation which Muslims will radicalize, and which will not.

If we accept that there is just as many good / bad Muslims as there are in the general make up of the population, adding the risk of radical Islam into the mix simply serves to make them the least desirable candidates for immigration.

 

Brendan would allow no Muslims immigrate to New Zealand. To sum up our differences, and my argument for an open immigration, I simply reason as follows.


A free society is not one where a group, such as Brendan’s conservatives, get to say, ‘yeah, not all Muslims are violent, but their belief system is awful so we’re letting none in, just in case.’
 

A society where that ethic rules is a bigoted tyranny of conservatism governed largely unknowably by subjective whim, every bit as bad as a bigoted tyranny of socialism - just with much better economics.


The opposite which I advocate, as a Libertarian basing first principles on individualism, is a free society in the form of a constitutional minarchy with an objective rule of law, and including, for the reasons I give above, open immigration with requirements for entry centred only as to each individual per their own case and history, not as identified with an arbitrary group, be it ethnicity, gender, religion, et al, which is always the (identity) politick of stereotyping and, ultimately, always, of bigotry.
 

Related:

Open Immigration: Marriage - Balwinder Singh & Glyn Kessell.

Open Immigration: Cutting Off Our Noses Because the Law Says So - Chinese Students.

 

 

 
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Thursday, May 8, 2014

Cunliffe & the Left’s Glaring Contradiction Redux: GCSB v. IRD v. FATCA – Corruption & Hypocrisy.


Because if this government will use an IGA and IRD’s Orwellian powers outside New Zealand’s privacy legislation for purposes which don’t involve that department’s collection of tax, but only for the spying on private citizens whom have done no proven wrong, every other future government can, and will, act as corruptly, conveniently, based on the precedent set.
* * *


According to this (paywalled) article at NBR:


Labour leader David Cunliffe says his party does not support blanket collection of intelligence on New Zealand citizens and believes ‘John Key is rewriting history.’


Weighing in on the intelligence debate today, Mr Cunliffe says despite Prime Minister John Key’s assertion that New Zealanders are not worried about spying, he says there is deep concern.’


It’s that glaring contradiction and hypocrisy of the Left again, regarding privacy and the free society. Below is the comment I would've made to the NBR piece, were IRD not data-mining that site (they make it here anyway, look at my site logs, but I don't make it 'that' easy anymore, plus I might as well use the department to drum up some site traffic: incidentally, on the contention that self-censorship is state censorship, ask yourself how comfortable you are with IRD data mining social media):



So given this comment, can I assume David Cunliffe will have 'deep concern' at our tax surveillance state which operates totally outside of our privacy legislation and essentially gives IRD officers open slather on our lives? Because government bureaucrats who can read our financial transactions and other essential communications, who data mine NBR daily as well as social media, and whom are almost unrestricted from doing so, including raiding business premises without need of a warrant, can read our lives in far more detail than a Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) officer can. That is, our politicians are concerned with our privacy to the point of weakening the protection of Kiwis from terrorism, but the total stripping of our privacy and right to be left alone, (so long as we do no harm), in order our own government can plunder the private property of its own citizens is fine? How and where did the concept of the importance of privacy in a free society change? Perhaps David could answer to that. What is the difference between an IRD officer being able to read my life in order to take my income, and a GCSB officer being able to read my life to protect me from Al Qaeda?
I've never understood the (im)moral underpinning of the tax state in this regard.

Worse, via the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) pulling together the various information sharing double tax agreements around the world, we now have a truly Orwellian global tax surveillance state that turns New Zealand citizens with US passports into second class citizens in NZ and every country in the world that sets out otherwise to protect privacy, and which deems the privacy abuses of NSA, PRISM, GCSB a mere sideshow. Indeed, regarding this article, I note in the current whitewash report on the submissions against NZ's appalling intergovernmental agreement (IGA) with the US government to implement FATCA there is no submission on such privacy concerns from Labour, as expressed by Cunliffe here, or any party in the sandpit at the Fortress of Legislation; even more surprising given Labour and Green MP’s, along with Left bloggers,  were out on the streets protesting against much lesser privacy breaches by GCSB, and despite the fact that IGA cynically uses IRD's God-like powers above our privacy legislation to deliberately circumvent that legislation for reasons that have absolutely nothing, repeat nothing, to do with collecting the New Zealand tax take, and thus everything to do with government being able to avoid an otherwise embarrassing political mess.  Why is Cunliffe not using this NBR space to speak out against such rank corruption? Because if one government will use an IGA and IRD’s powers above New Zealand’s privacy legislation for purposes that don’t involve that department’s collection of tax, but only for the spying on private citizens whom have done no proven wrong, every other future government can.



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Monday, March 17, 2014

Insulting the Rich for Giving, and the Culture that Spawns this. (Hattip Lindsay Mitchell.)


If you haven’t got Lindsay Mitchell’s blog bookmarked then you should: Lindsay is the first go-to for clearing the fog of propaganda and statistics abuse used to justify and build New Zealand’s welfare state. Over Saturday she posted an intelligent piece written by Helen Rittelmeyer of the Centre of Independent Studies which analysed the, at best, deceptive, and at worst, fraudulent, use of statistics in a Sydney Morning Herald op-ed with the overt socialist agenda of hyping, against the facts, a myth that only low income earners have a sense of community, and a further myth that the rich are essentially miserly and only using charity as a tax dodge. The analysis on Rittelmeyer’s post is an important read if for no other reason than to understand how deceitful the editorial stance of MSM outlets like the SMH are, and how they’re emoting the news, with that agenda, not intelligently presenting it factually to their readers.


It is also important to understand the second-hander culture that allows such shabbiness and lies, and inculcates it into the tyranny of the majority voting us all into the prison of each other’s minds. It’s not the free, but the fallen West:

















Coincidentally I read the piece on Lindsay’s blog after first reading about this couple who are in the process of giving $100 million to environmental and educational initiatives in New Zealand, and you can bet there are elements of the Left who without so much as a thank you, will scorn them for having that wealth in the first place. As much as I don’t want my life run by the Tories, there is a much too sizeable portion of the Left who are just plain cynical and nasty.


And while we’re on the topic of how according to the Left ethic such wealth should have been forcibly taken from this couple by the tax surveillance state so they couldn’t have the arrogance of redistributing according to their own philosophy, rather than the dictates of state, in response to David Cunliffe’s dreadful and mistake laden speech on how he’s going to destroy us economically (because we’ve already been destroyed philosophically), a personal note:







As ACT leader, Jamie Whyte, rightly points out in this weekend’s NBR:


David Cunliffe yesterday gave a speech to the New Zealand Initiative, an economics think tank. The talk outlined the Labour Party’s economic policy. It displayed so much economic confusion that it will take several posts to get through it all.



Follow Jamie’s critique in the NBR over the next few weeks, as I hope he drives home what a dangerous man Cunliffe would be should he storm the sandpit and grab all the toys at the Fortress of Legislation this coming election. I'm worried about this one; my opening allusion was to the fog of war in which the first casualty is truth, and that's the case in the West currently. There's a war on for peoples minds, which can only be won one at a time, and until that time, a new Enlightenment, there will always be enough voters to put a Cunliffe or a Russel in power.


Finally, this blog will only ever be partisan to the philosophy and the economics that derive logically of classical liberalism, never to a political party, but regarding this year’s general election in New Zealand, and Jamie Whyte, I’ll close this post by repeating one of my comments from that NBR thread:
 


… I'm finding it so refreshing finally seeing a true classical liberal ethic from a leader of a NZ political party which has a chance of getting seats, and though I don't believe Jamie is carrying anything like all of ACT with him, which is the past has been ruled by conservatism, great to see the liberal in classical liberal being accentuated in other of Jamie's writings. (And the wonderful contradiction of seeing the Left rush to pillory a man who is far more liberal than the bigoted Left can ever be.)


 

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Monday, September 16, 2013

The Nonsense Liquor Law That Made Mrs H and I Drink Too Much for Lunch.

Driving to the Mahau Sound this Thursday we stopped at a café in Middle-Of-Nowhere, South Island, to refresh ourselves over a meal and bottle of wine. Mrs H and I always order a bottle of wine when we lunch out, given the rip-off it is buying by the glass, plus, well, we like wine, and a couple of glasses leaves me within the limit – I've always assumed – for driving.

This day, however, we didn’t feel like drinking the whole bottle, and thought it would be a good idea to take it away with us to finish somewhere along the Kaikoura coast later in the afternoon while Daisy dog, who doesn’t travel well, stretched her legs by running around barking randomly at stuff.

But it was not to be. Imagine us listening incredulously as the café owner said she would not give us the screw top back, as we could not take the remains of the bottle, a quarter left, given the café didn’t have an off-licence.

You don't know someone intimately for twenty two years without knowing when a sense of foreboding is warranted.

Mrs H calmly took in a big breath, explained how we were adults, we’d bought that wine - and obviously to have with our meal - so please use some sense: surely the laws around off-licencing were only to stop underage teenage ninja mutants binge drinking in inner cities, and look, with a gesture of her hand to the only other patrons, a ninety year old couple who’d limped in from a funeral finishing up in the old stone church over the road, there were no teenagers in this joint. Indeed there were no teenagers in this town, the last had left with a joint in hand sometime in the 1960’s for the communes around Nelson. It was simply a place to retire and pleasantly, ultimately, expire.

But the café owner was adamant, and I guess I can’t blame her for that; it was her business at stake if she lost her licence. So, did we relent and do the sensible though stupid thing necessitated by the laws upon laws upon laws of the land and leave the wine there to be thrown down the sink?

Did we heck.

As when you sometimes lose the will to live, who knows why we sometimes do the stupid things we do: perhaps on this day we’d become too depressed on listening to David Cunliffe being interviewed over the radio-machine while we'd been driving through Christchurch on the various, nefarious ways he would be relieving us of our income and effort from 2014.

Mr and Mrs Bloody-Minded never letting good sense get in the way of a principle did not leave. Or at least, Mrs Bloody-Minded motioning to bar seating by the window said sit there husband of mine, we’re drinking this bloody wine which we’ve paid for. And we did, watching the departing funeral goers, hair pieces fluttering in the wind, from atop our high chairs of righteous indignation.

The unintended consequence of forcing rules designed for underage misfits in urban areas onto middle aged ornery folk from the country, is that laws designed to promote sensible drinking ironically made responsible taxpayers like us drink more than we wished, and possibly more than we should’ve.

Think about that while I put an unrelated challenge to Mr Cunliffe. I’ll email you a bottle of Noilly Prat vermouth, David, if in your next speech or interview that you intend to use the word collective, as you did that morning, you use Borg instead, to state your politick more correctly.

In the meantime I raise to you the first of many martinis in the Mahau, congratulating you for the leadership win yesterday, while wishing for your political failure next year. Nothing personal, just that the economic policies you believe in are unethical and when applied to our country will be our funeral. But then as Robert Heinlein said – hattip to economist Paul Walker from Anti-Dismal – trying to educate a politician in economic policy is like teaching a pig to sing: it wastes time and annoys the pig. Which might be a nice segway into a next post: pork barrel politics.
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