Taxing Language: A Question for the Politicians - Fair: What Do You Mean?

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.

Statists of all hues have taken to the word ‘fairness’ with the glee Chris The Fist Trotter has to the use of state violence, in order to make the theft that is compulsory taxation seem a little, well, fairer.

The slanderous union economist, for example, Bill (unfortunately named) Rosenberg, not letting facts get in the way of persecuting a minority, yet again, interrupted his Chardon-day, yesterday, to emote:

“... How many of the rich list pay a fair tax?”

And if Messrs Dunne and English had a blog label cloud pinned to their foreheads, ‘fairness’ would be in a huge font, over-clouding everything else. Just Google ‘fairness’, ‘tax’, and either of their names and you’ll get pages of quotes.

And so my point. I have a simple question for these three men: what does fairness, in relation to taxation, mean? Plus what is a fair amount of tax, please? How do you derive it, both in terms of the amount taken, and morally? Explain it to me, because I truly don’t understand. There is nothing in any of our taxing acts to give any guidance on this, and yet going on your constant utterances, taxpayers are, daily, being crucified on it.

In the first instance I want a generic principle, clear enough to write into tax law, which shouldn’t be too hard, given you write so much law in the fortress of legislation. And secondly, or rather, ‘but’ secondly, to test this law, for once, before foisting it on us, please interpret it, here, in relation to the below three scenarios.

Taxpayer 1:

Single man, twenty three years old, lower order contract milker putting in seventy hour weeks, earned $186,000 last year. He’s doing it hard, on himself, because with cow prices reaching $2,500 his ability to be able to buy his first herd, and so be in a financial position to propose to his girlfriend, and start a family, is looking more and more remote.

Taxpayer 2:

Family, three children at state school, both parents working to bring in a total of $60,000 per annum, only, to the household. They can’t afford a house in the current market, and with the rental squeeze due to government making it unattractive to be a private landlord, they’re having to pay $750 a week rent for a sub-standard house in Auckland, after which, when they pay for the essentials they have no pay left: indeed, all their credit cards are maxed out.

Taxpayer 3:

Family, two children, dad’s a banker, earning $200,000 per annum, mum stays home to look after their new baby, plus their first child has genetic disease meaning he’ll never be able to look after himself, so mum has taken on that job, for life. The couple have paid over half a million dollars over the last two years traveling around the world to see specialists, for operations, and so forth, and have had to re-mortgage their Fendalton home, twice, to the maximum amount possible. Husband is having to put huge hours in to make it all work financially, and with so much stress and little time together, the marriage is floundering.

So, for the statists, surely this should be easy: please write in the comments the interpretation of the tax fairness law you write for us, in relation to these individuals?

Finding it hard? Well, assuming intelligence on your behalf, you should find this impossible. And that’s even before I move to my position on tax which is not to use the word fair, but unjust. I wonder if we should ring Her Majesty for some input, given, in a story as stunning as it was alarming, the UK’s IR, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, expect school children not only to be able to define what is a fair amount of tax, but, taking their state to its Orwellian conclusion, expect them to dob in adults who don’t play fair on a playground where the biggest bully is the state itself. Politicians should at least admit there is nothing 'fair' about tax in any of the above instances, or period: tax is an arbitrary imposition of the state, enforced with the full draconian powers of the police state. That's the truth. Let's at least acknowledge the implied violence and immoral act on which our society is based, because from that, we may ultimately find a kinder way to live our lives, which would be a society that constitutionally protects the smallest of its minorities: the individual, and particularly from what is now the biggest abuser of an individual's right to be left alone - the state.

Asset Sales and Foreign Ownership: I Don’t Care - Here's Why.

This post is a challenge to Selwyn Pellett  who posted the following Tweet last night:

So difficult 2 understand how intelligent folk can justify selling our energy assets that return a net $100m. Guess they're not intelligent

I responded by saying that such assets would simply sell for the net present value of future cashflows, so the government was simply taking those future cashflows now. Sensible, what was the problem?  I then pointed him to this blog, and stated that the asset sales were not, firstly, for me, an economic issue, they were a philosophical and moral issue, namely: governments owning such assets are part of a planned economy which is reliant, always, on a government planning my life for me, starting with the extortion of taxes. That is, the issue concerns my freedom from the big state and my desire to move to a free, classical liberal society.

Selwyn didn’t get this: sadly, as with most businessmen, these guys don’t understand the link between philosophy, economics and politics, and the combination of these that has allowed their success (and conversely, those factors still holding them back, while keeping us all in the prison of state). His last post, and I’d gone to bed so haven’t responded yet, was:

I believe when I'm overcharged under current model it's just a tax, not a foreign dividend flow! Huge difference to NZ

You’ve missed the point on all levels, Selwyn. Okay, let’s ignore philosophy, I’ll answer you by a setting out the problem with this last statement, from the point of view of erroneous thinking, and my challenge to you is tell me how I’m wrong (remembering my challenge to Bernard Hickey still remains unanswered). This reply is indebted to the multitude of economic blogs and sites I read, which have become intermingled in my mind, but I suspect the below answer is particularly indebted to Paul Walker at Anti-Dismal – my apology if that attribution is wrong.

Selwyn, say that I’m a Mexican, and I buy a shareholding in one of the energy companies here when it is floated. After the first year I’m going to be distributed a dividend of NZ$100k. You call this a ‘foreign dividend flow’, and seem to think it bad for New Zealand. However, think about it, I can’t spend NZ dollars in Mexico, the drug lords just don’t want them, so the only way I can spend this dividend is to first exchange my NZ dollars with pesos, that is, I have to find someone to sell my NZ dollars to. The only person who is going to buy those dollars from me will be doing so to spend back in New Zealand, that’s the only place they can be spent, ultimately. So, where’s the outflow of physical dollars from New Zealand? Explain it to me.

That’s my question to Selwyn, as one of the - per his first tweet - ‘intelligent folk’, but it is also the precursor to another blog soon regarding all this nationalistic BS. In late 1930’s Europe, a very evil man used the emoting nonsense of nationalism to get himself voted in after a banking collapse. With Golden Dawn, Fascists, just voted into the Greek Parliament, is anyone feeling nervous in 2012?

To a freedom freak like me, national borders mean nothing. My freedom is indeed dependent on global laissez faire, which is also the best recipe for global peace. Yet businessmen like Selwyn are happy to whip this emoting foolishness up all over again over issues like this. And unbelievably, the Left in New Zealand seem to have done away with the Internationale, and nationalism has become one of their guiding polices. Chris Trotter’s social democratic credo drips with the blood of nationalism in his final stanzas. How do they square that? How do they square a union protecting a cushy job in New Zealand, thereby taking the food away from a subsistence family in the Third World reliant on an increasing standard of living by working in a sweatshop? Surely their lives are not worth less than ours'?

More coming soon … Over to you in the meantime Selwyn.

Related: Asset Sales II.

Liberty Challenge - A Gap in the Language

Over the last few days I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember the last time I heard or read a New Zealand politician, from any party, utter or use either of the words, ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’. Including in their electioneering.

And I can’t. I can’t recall a single instance. Anybody else?

What does it mean that those two words have disappeared completely from the political lexicon? Our politicians don’t even bother anymore to pay lip-service to that ethic the West was supposed to be based on?

Now what about use of these words in a single MSM editorial or op-ed? I still draw a blank. In fact I draw blanks in every media outside blogs. And even then, as I said in this post, to bring up freedom as a goal in any blog, is normally to earn either half-witted sneers, or that annoying, cloying, assumed Lefty superior type of intellectual (though it’s the opposite), paternal opprobrium (which in fact is merely cynicism).

I’m wondering if we even got close to either of those words here, in our history, ever, or from inception did we get side-tracked by the word ‘egalitarian’? And hasn’t that word had its meaning shamelessly subverted to being, ironically, now turned against ‘freedom’ in 2012? Part of the post-modern apocalypse brought down on us by the collectivists, first hoodwinking the well-meaning liberal heart of academia that language is slippery, then using that to insert their agenda against the identity of the individual, and thus the possibility of their freedom from the minds of their brothers.

What of overseas? In the US, take out the singing of the national anthem, which Obama couldn’t sing with a straight face, as he believes in a secular theocracy, where the State trumps an individual’s freedom, and if he gets replaced this year it’ll be with a Mormon for whom God trumps an individual’s freedom, so do those words have both use in their lexicon, and their original meaning anymore?  Worse, Obama is the first American president I can think of who openly repudiates the word freedom, as in:

“The market will take care of everything,” they tell us…. But here’s the problem: it doesn’t work. It has never worked. It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.

—President Barack Obama, Osawatomie, Kansas, December 6, 2011

That statement is wrong on every level, including the facts, and represents the complete capitulation of the Revolution that cleared the way for America’s first black president. There is one important secular holy trinity: philosophy, economics and politick, and if you do not believe in markets, then your philosophy cannot be one that will nurture or promote the meaning in two of the best words in our language: liberty and freedom.