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 Economic Suicide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Economic Suicide. Show all posts

Monday, November 11, 2013

Centre Politics: The Economics of Destruction. (Conservative Party V. Libertarianz)



Actually, over time it's always the economics of slavery, but if I use that word in the title, centre voters turn off, thinking me a writer of extremes which don’t concern their lives. Warning, there are extremes in this post, but they don’t come from me: they come from the debt figures produced by centre left and centre right governments, which hold complete power in New Zealand. The numbers are in my below comment to a thread on Whaleoil: my comment first, with context to follow:


I suspect some few of the Whale Army vote National. When National came in 2008 government debt was $10,258 billion. As of September just gone, that debt stands at $60,015 billion.

With the Christchurch earthquake costed in this government continues to borrow $27 million per day. That's per day; to fund government operations that make up over 44% of the entire economic activity in the country. And National is the party of small government ... yeah right.

Look at this fact from a different perspective. The government is borrowing $27 million a day for a country with only just over 4 million population, which we have to repay, with interest ... how's that going to work out?

Worse, a good fact from @RedBaiternz on Twitter, we have only just over 2 million taxpayers having to fund future annual budgets of $70 billion ... how's that going to work out?

Let's burrow - not borrow - down deeper. We know that the top 12% of taxpayers fund over 75% of the net tax take. Ignoring for now company, trustee income tax and indirect taxation that means about 250,000 people only are having to fund into the future some large part of $70 billion annual budgets, including debt servicing, so far, on $60 billion and growing.

Whale would call reasoned classical liberals such as Libertarianz the 'extreme fringe': no, the extremities are in the above numbers. The only way you fund that debt long term is increasing taxation -  I suggest markedly - and forcibly enforcing the continuing destruction of property rights, and personal civil rights, given the first thing the tax surveillance state must do to ensure the tax-take, is take away your privacy, while granting itself access to your property, starting with your income.

In fact, the only sane option 2014 is a vote for Libertarianz. Ironic most of the Whale army will be voting for the bigger and bigger nanny state, which is quickly become mathematically impossible, as the US and many countries in Europe are finding.


The context of this thread is interesting. It was Whale’s analysis of Rodney Hide’s NBR piece about how Colin Craig, leader of New Zealand’s fledgling Conservative Party, in an interview given some weeks before where he had stated his party would forcibly purchase (take) developers’ land from them if they didn’t build on it within a short time-frame suiting the politicians, thus destroyed the central premise of Conservatism, namely, sacrosanct property rights.

One of the first comments to that thread reasonably asked:


Wow i missed him saying that. So there is still no party in New Zealand that believes in Private Property Rights.


I replied that Libertarianz Party was founded wholly and unalterably on property rights. Of course Whale responded with his predictable scorn of the pragmatist, the type of pragmatist voting that has produced the figures in my final comment above:


Yeah, the libertarians...too pure to achieve anything, the happy hand clappers of nz politics


My reply to that stands on its own:


That's a meaningless response, Whale. Libertarianz are the only party left representing Western classical liberal values: the free society. If we changed any of the tenets of belief, as you suggest, then we become just another party representing nothing.

If people want to vote for a party that wholly respects property rights, there is only the one. I was simply answering a question.


In next year’s election, that truly is the voter choice: if you believe in property rights, then Libertarianz is your only option, if not, then vote for any other party, and help grow, at varying speeds, the mathematical impossibility of centre opportunistic fiat moneyed politics - read future tax indentured slavery of your children and grandchildren. And there’s a logical reason for how such politick destroys us; my most oft used quotation from Daniel Horowitz:


“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.”



Friday, June 15, 2012

Bernard Hickey - The Great Interventionist: Currency Controls

I see on Twitter today mercantilist Bernard - affectionately known on this blog as Kim Jong - is still pushing his  demand for currency controls. Time to reinstate an old post from Life Behind the IRon Drape v.1. for Bernard and all those who want government to intervene in our currency - Hattip to Donald J. Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek :


You seem to believe that a weak currency is an economic advantage, so I offer you the following contract. I shall exchange all the money in your house at the rate of 50 cents for each $1. Further, I will exchange all the income coming into your house, giving you 50 cents for each $1. You now have a weak currency and so will become an economic powerhouse (according to your theory), whereas poor old me am going to be hamstrung with a strong currency. I am, however, quite willing to offer you this contract/service. Do we have a deal? If so, we'll swap bank account numbers, you put all your money in my bank and I'll simply put half of that back in return. If no contact, why not?


Furthermore, I've seen Bernard write before that Singapore's economic meddling in this regard is something to aspire to. Evidence is abundant to the contrary, for example, from a Singaporean:


The high cost of living [in Singapore] coupled with low wages and domestic purchasing power condemns the average Singapore worker to an ignominious, monotonous and stressful working life. Singapore workers have to work harder to earn the same amount of money and save for a longer period to purchase the same product.

In 1991, Goh Chok Tong, then the Prime Minister, promised Singaporeans that we would be able to achieve the “Swiss standard of living” within a decade. Ten years later, we have a living standard which is closer to Russia than Switzerland.  Like Singapore, the Russians has a low wage and domestic purchasing power and Russia, especially the city of Moscow, has one of the highest cost of living in the world.

So, Bernard: do we have a contract?

UPDATE:

No takers. Right, so you wouldn't abide your household being run like this, yet you'd force it on a country. Interesting.