Diets, Dieting, Tax Havens, Space Craft, Elon Musk v. Steven Joyce.

… there is inevitably that mistaken value arithmetic they apply of a long low-calorie life being better than a happy one.

* * *

$1.5 billion invested in a tax haven will ultimately benefit all of us; $1.5 billion into the black hole of upgrading IRD’s computer system is part of the system destroying us.

* * *

I don’t diet ... directly. I love food, I love booze, I’m carrying more weight than I should - 6 foot 3, 104.4 kgs, bodyfat index 29% - but I’m fit enough to enjoy life by dint of walking Daisy dog twice a day and kayaking. Though I walk and kayak because I enjoy walking and kayaking: there’s nothing better for uncluttering the mind than a ramble, and regardless, if you have a dog you have to, that’s the deal with dogs.

However.

Mrs H sometimes hears the little voices of the advertisers in her ear saying diet - if I think about it, there’s a pattern around springtime - meaning stints of dieting, and worse, because alcohol contains the main source of sugar we ingest, sobriety.

Because Mrs H diets from time to time, unfortunately, I diet by proxy.

Tiresome caveats. 

Don’t jump to subtweeting I diet by proxy because my wife is a slave waiting on me hand and foot and I can’t cook my own meals; we are equal partners in the kitchen, as we are in business. But Mrs H controls that room during the dieting stints, because I refuse to be the cause of my own unhappiness, I can’t be trusted near the fridge or the pantry at trying times like this, and I don’t know the liturgy of each new diet ‘attempt’. Mrs H’s odd foray into dieting further has nothing to do with any comment I have ever made on weight or appearance, because I never have (never will); Mrs H is as much dieting for perceived health benefits as for self-image, and regarding the latter, to me she’s gorgeous - merely a personal body shape preference, (not a value judgement), I like zaftig figures and find catwalk stick skinny unattractive.

No, my dieting is strictly for what is called in the Income Tax Act 2007, natural love and affection, a spousal support function, (well, truth be told, I don’t get a lot of choice, I’m simply told ‘we’re dieting’, but play along with this I’m getting to a point).

Anyway.

Thinking back over the last two weeks, there have been patches of diet-centric conversation leading up to the three saveloys that appeared on my plate for lunch this Friday, rather than the normal four. The trouble is talking about dieting is like talking about death: my survival instinct quarantines it to a hypothetical level and I never think it’s actually going to happen to me. And that in spite of the fact diets have come and gone before: I suspect I've blanked those dark periods out, (other than the lemon detox of ‘09; some life experiences are so bad they become hardwired; I won’t tell you how I know every pattern in the tiles on our toilet floor.)

So, we have entered diet and sobriety, nth iteration, from Sunday through Thursday; I’ve negotiated by treaty, sorry entreaty – I’m not proud of myself – Friday wine night, and Saturday night martinis (albeit I reckon Mrs H was wanting to lose those so she could remain pure of mind, while imbibing all the same.)

Still.

At least dieting under one of Mrs H’s regimes is nominally, in theory, hah-bloody-hah, voluntary. Unlike dealing with the tax state which brooks no choice, and no negotiation. I’ve been reading yet another Arrogance of The Healthy in England wanting the fat tax, the sugar tax, the life-sucking tax, because when these wowsers get the ear of politicians there is inevitably that mistaken value arithmetic they apply of a long low-calorie life being better than a happy one.

Well bugger off with that.

No official, certainly not the state, has the right to make that judgement on my life. I choose happiness. I try to be Zen and not hate, but these academic authoritarian food-denier types are bloody hateful.

I’ve written on the wowsers plenty of times, including the French judiciary which is trying to destroy the French wine industry, though for this post understand that if my happy self happens to die one year earlier than otherwise, it will be irrelevant, because the happy self will be dead; if the second lifers have it right I’ll be flapping around in white light, or as most probably the case, insentient worm fodder, (if the Christians are right, I’m screwed). Better, the happy self is statistically more likely to die quickly through a heart complaint, than the long lingering death quite possibly awaiting the life-denying dreary long lived sod, denying himself those things that would’ve made his life happy.

Update.

Look, the wowser Big Brother Wairarapa District Health Board bullied this pub over taking down their 'Beer Up Masterton' sign, and unfortunately the pub has succumbed. Even if this health board had any business here, and it doesn't, there is nothing wrong with that sign. Local council, local  bureaucrats of all hues, wowsers who've worked themselves into every public position, along with central government, are out of control, staffed by busy-bodies who want to control your life on the micro-level. Don't let them. Tell them to go to hell.

This alcohol hobbyist can't wait for driverless cars - not far away at all - when country pubs can again become the great meeting places and community they once were, and the wowsers have one less excuse to force their dreary lives on mine.

While talking happiness, unless something comes along first, let me use this post to advertise how my next full post will be a fourth literary ramble in the form of a classical liberal critique of our literature, taking its lead from the current curmudgeony around the New Zealand Book Awards. I’ll apologise for its content beforehand, here.

And so, Tax Havens.

Much of this blog concerns how our free Western democracies carried from the get-go the seed of their destruction: the ability of politicians to tax.

Forget GCSB and NSA, the tax state cannot allow a private life outside the surveillance of bureaucrats, so there being no freedom without privacy, the tax state was the end of a free society before it began: that’s indisputable.

With our freedoms and right to be left alone long gone, the tax take of the tax states have become so huge our economies are disintegrating. The evidence is everything you read about a cot-case Eurozone which is rotting to the core, and this just in from one of the many US based investment rags I receive via email:

Dear Concerned American,

The walls may feel like they are closing in on American business owners and taxpayers. A tax system that is both maddeningly complex and punitively steep has forced some of our most iconic brands to incorporate overseas and has convinced some Americans to renounce their citizenship. As political hostility toward the successful increases, we now must contend with new laws designed to keep us from finding relief, either at home or abroad. The persistence of enormous budget deficits, the shrinking pool of actual taxpayers, and the growing ranks of those receiving support from the Federal government means that the vice will likely continue to squeeze harder on those who write the checks.

But just when it looks like there may be no escape, a window has opened that presents a unique opportunity. Successful Americans need to know about the island of Puerto Rico, which some are calling "America's Tax Free Zone." The tax advantages offered to American businesses that incorporate in Puerto Rico, and to private citizens who live there at least half the year, may seem too good to be true, but they are very, very, real.

Let those who worship at the Church of Dependency have few fears; IRS will be doing everything in their God-like powers to ensure the open window of Puerto Rico is closed, those viewing through it hassled, harried and cajoled.

I don’t use tax havens, and wouldn’t even if I had the money (read my disclaimer at bottom of page please): diets aside, life is short, I don’t want to spend any of mine fighting a hapless war against our ruthless tax state with its punitive penalty system that kills - currently incidences of self-harm up alarmingly - and is impossible to beat because it makes the rules. But hats off to those individuals who foolishly do, because tax havens are the last havens of a freedom ethic from which the Free West, founded on the peace and prosperity brought and bought by capitalism, was born, and by helping to starve our tax states of funding, are hastening their destruction under the hubris of the rampant statism that has won the day, again.

Although.

One point about tax havens. They’re little written up in the business press, and remain almost solely the purview of an airhead sensationalist editorialising in the Green-Left-Liberal MSM – with full literary irony, such an editorial view is called Progressive: here's an example, the editor of The Dominion Post. The complaint of such writers is there’s ‘all this money sitting in tax havens doing nothing.’ That's doublespeak for this money is inaccessible to governments for growing welfare states, and thus is doing society no good. Rot. Is it to be believed these rich pricks are letting their capital earn no return? That money is doing more to keep our cost of living down, is seeding more start-up ventures, more innovation that will better all our lives, than Steven Joyce and his commissars ever could.

 

Why is Steven Joyce forcibly extracting tax from successful firms, stultifying their progress by stealing their most accessible investment capital, retained earnings, to shield from tax (subsidise) those firms he - total amateur - picks in the lottery of his head as future winners? (And no matter how he spins it, he's using the tax take to play crony favourites.) He's doing so because he knows taxes destroy innovation and drive business to lower tax jurisdictions, but thinks himself too important - he's a politician - to admit the Truth: the innovative economy is best fostered by lower tax to all and him keeping his grubby hands off it. He’s Nero fiddling the country’s books as Western economies burn.

Why is almost every container ship in a New Zealand port, freighting us the products we require for survival, and our high standard of living, registered in Cayman Islands or Panama? Because they are tax havens: look at Panama:

The Republic of Panama is a presidential independent, sovereign state. It is well known as one of the most developed international business centers. Panama has the fastest growing economy and the largest per capita income in Central America.

And:

No income, dividend and capital gains tax for income received outside of Panama. Therefore, Panamanian corporations (Sociedad Anonima) are widely used for doing business and holding assets outside of Panama.

Look around your home, in your fridge, your pantry, the car in your garage, the stuff in the fuel tank, the productive assets at your place of work including that tractor: now add world taxes onto the cost of those for freighting them in ships outside registration of Cayman Islands or Panama and see what that does to your household budget and your job prospects.

As Sam Morgan has wisely argued on Twitter, Joyce and his cronies can’t pick winners, only the market can. The market is the best intelligence and allocation system we have unless and until politicians like Joyce come bullying in with their thumping oafish mitts and destroy it. In a free market bad ideas are liquidated quickly, their losses not socialised by governments  scared of the next election result. In a free market good ideas, innovation that raises the standard of living of all of us, are funded by money voluntarily invested (including from tax havens), and winners are rewarded by consumers choosing to buy their products or services. That's the voluntary, prosperous society.

I reckon the tax takes and the welfare states are now so massive even tax haven money cannot stop the economic collapse (currently) occurring, but perhaps it also seeds hope that when Western states undergo the final economic collapse, minarchy and a free market system will arise from the brutalised societies, rather than outright tyrannies.

$1.5 billion invested in a tax haven will ultimately benefit all of us; $1.5 billion into the black hole of upgrading IRD’s computer system is part of the system destroying us.

This.

The above is in the same manner that space is finally starting to be commercially open to us, via the rockets of private enterprise, now the tax take of the US police state is required to merely feed itself, and tend to the millions of dependents it has created within itself.

Elon Musk is doing more to progress mankind in the Space Age than any Progressive who would tax business, enterprise, entrepreneurship, our living standards, back to the Stone Age.

Whatever.

Did you ever think you’d live to see the day that American citizens felt to be free they had to renounce their citizenship? Americans?! The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state, as a great philosopher once said, is time. The West is well past halfway down its road to our serfdom. In fact we’re so far progressed, our taxes pay academics to advise the Fortress of Legislation in Wellington, of what we can and, mainly, can’t eat; and don’t assume that advice is not about to be taken. Stock up on food and booze.

If you think some of this excessive, possibly, but judgement is a hard thing at the moment, you see … I’m starving, possibly hallucinating. In the novel I’m writing, now progressed to 115,000 words, I’ve just had Karl Marx run over by a Fulton Hogan truck in Christchurch. Imagine what a great place the world would’ve been had that happened; it would certainly be more populated.

Truth.

The only diet that’s ever worked for me was the cigarettes and coffee diet I did full time through all of my twenties. In every way this diet, and the lifestyle with it, was perfect.

Wind clock forward thirty years.

Unfortunately along with the diet - awful timing - comes hard work. As usual, I've been too slack enjoying life the first half of this financial year, so posts will be slowing down as I catch up with the day job. But watch out for my next post, there's something amiss with our literature, its state funded body of work having lost its subversive gene ... Literary Ramble IV, coming soon.

Brother's Keeper = Brothers' Slave

It’s simple economic and moral mathematics.

The welfare states, setting out with the best of intentions, started from the Christian premise of being my brother’s keeper, which has since been converted to the most vicious of secular religions by the Left, instituting the State in the place of God, and put into bloody practice by a whole list of tyrants from Stalin, on. Ignoring, however, for the moment, that assault rifle standing in the room of our social democracies  – last seen at the Dotcom mansion – and the fact that the welfare states were always going to be an economic impossibility, which is incontrovertible, proven by the current collapse of the West under a hubris of Keynesian debt,  or rather, the fact that politicians could never fund the welfare states from taxation alone, but had to use debt, and worse, debt to finance an enterprise that destroyed wealth, did not create it, thus was doomed to bankruptcy  … ignoring this, as our politicians have unfortunately done, my argument against our current social democracies is a moral one: our social democracies, based on forced redistribution (theft) are immoral from the foundation up. Or, I put it like this:

I am forced to be my brother’s keeper, except, we’re not talking about my brother: I wouldn’t need a brute state standing over me forcing natural love and affection for an actual sibling. In this instance, my brother is a total stranger: I have no natural love and affection for him, I have no say over his actions, I am not able to give him brotherly advice – such as, why are you and Mrs Brother having a sixth child when you have no job – and yet, if I do not allow the state to take my money to keep him, finance his sometimes stupid decisions, I am the one who will certainly lose my livelihood, and possibly my freedom, at the cold compassionless hands of the bureaucracy. So, given this, I have to conclude I’m not so much my brother’s keeper, as my brothers’ slave. And this is not so much the civilised society where natural love and affection is actually natural love and affection, as this is a Gulag where my liberty has been slowly starved of love.

And I write this little post over my breakfast cornies, looking at an IRD letter in front of me from a ‘Community Compliance Officer’, read Nanny Disciplinarian, who has just charged a taxpayer over $4,000 interest for an honest mistake they made, and for which we filed a voluntary disclosure, as soon as it was discovered. It’s the very last bill that taxpayer needs, and it's not community minded: the opposite. Still, I guess if they don’t survive it, they can go on welfare, and be kept by their brothers. …

... Community Compliance Officer ... Jesus. Oh no, that's where this whole mess started.

Of Taxing Double-Standards and No Beer

The IMF boss, Frenchwoman Christine Lagarde, has made the headlines this week villifying Greek taxpayers for not paying enough tax, laying the blame for Greece's woes on people greedily wanting to keep their own hard earned cash. Ignoring the fact that, to name a single instance, Greek state rail employs more people than it has passengers, meaning it would be cheaper for the Greek taxpayer to buy all the passengers of Greek state rail a taxi chit, indicating complete bureaucratic mismanagement on a scale that could not be fixed other than by the economic collapse we are witnessing, what Christine forgot to fess up to was the double-standard that she pays no tax at all on her grandiose salary, paid for by the enslaved taxpayers of the world:

Christine Lagarde, the IMF boss who caused international outrage after she suggested in an interview with the Guardian on Friday that beleaguered Greeks might do well to pay their taxes, pays no taxes, it has emerged.

As an official of an international institution, her salary of $467,940 (£298,675) a year plus $83,760 additional allowance a year is not subject to any taxes.

[Snip]

Lagarde, 56, receives a pay and benefits package worth more than American president Barack Obama earns from the United States government, and he pays taxes on it.

The same applies to nearly all United Nations employees – article 34 of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations of 1961, which has been signed by 187 states, declares: "A diplomatic agent shall be exempt from all dues and taxes, personal or real, national, regional or municipal."

At the heart of the Western police states, what really makes me angry living behind the IRon Drape, is the immorality of the whole damned, fetid edifice. 


And closer to home, if you enjoyed a Good Bastards beer from The West Coast Brewery, well, I have to call on the final round. IRD solicitor Helen Sumner has decided because of unpaid taxes, penalties and interest, it's better in this world-wide recession - and freedom can go hang itself - to liquidate The West Coast Brewery and its workers, and create another burden for those of us still left to shoulder the voracious tax appetite of our politicians. Why isn't IRD culpable for the economic harm they cause? (Rhetorical question, of course).

The tax amount aside, the truly obscene aspect of this story is how this company's tax bill grew, upon penalties and interest that would have made Al Capone blush, from $87,500 to the current total of $234,000. As Paddy Sweeney, the brewery's founder, says:

"Between the global financial crisis and the earthquakes, it hasn't been an easy time. The original amount ... had trebled in the three years since [the debt was incurred] because of penalties and compound interest. ...[These penalties] are a blight for how the government treated businesses trying to put matters right."

I would say it's simply a 'blight for how the government treated businesses', period.

There was a major revolution for freedom fought 236 years ago over less than the abuses Western governments now exact on the tax-slaves forced to pay-up for their tyrannies. Shame on you for allowing this to happen, Peter Dunne. If you were honourable, you would step down.

At the very least, something has to be done about the IRD penalty and interest system. It's the final brass knuckle of state being put into a business when it's on hard times, and it's driving good men and women to drink, and to the brink.

Zero budget - no. Nazi budget -yes.

In New Zealand's 2012 budget, Bill English just grew the fascist thug state by an extraordinary extent. The money allocations to health and education sounded like a Labour Party lolly scramble; there is in this budget only the further expansion of the state. As Clive James said of the Soviets, they thought they had free health care, but it ended up costing them everything they had. Well English just imported that hollow ethos to New Zealand. Significantly, the first money allocation in Herr English's speech was a huge $78.5 million to IRD audit. Now move your eyes up and read my blog by-line again. Read it, the paragraph in italics: understand what is funding every other allocation to the state. $78.5 million into the systematic persecution of this country's productive, who, unlike this government, haven't lifted a finger to initiate force on their fellow man.

Bill English, please take this personally, you are a true National Socialist: you are my enemy, as you are the enemy of all free men. I suggest you wear a brown shirt to Parliament from now on. I'm too angry to write anything further. When will there be the Western Spring, to wrest our liberty back?