Of Law Revue Girls & Thorny – Privilege & the New Puritanism; Blog Inequality; Identity Politics; Quotas.

Next time you seek to silence an individual who has offended you in some way with words, especially one sworn to an ethic of do no harm, and you seek to silence them with their privilege, then wonder if you’re not simply reinforcing it. That’s privilege as a wall of your making, over which two people can no longer even shake hands to explore the differences that make life the celebration it should be, rather than each left to guard their side of the wall, wallowing in a morass of ignorance, and too often, fear.

[The first section below was originally this post’s ending; I’ve rearranged the order as the initial two sections were only ever about getting to this …]

Identity Politics and Privilege – Law Revue Girls & Context of Comedy:

On Twitter, Saturday night, identity politics got itself into its usual abject mess. Though of all its victims, I wouldn’t have put my money on the Law Revue Girls, clever makers of that  feminist parody of Robin Thicke’s execrable Blurred Lines:

Saturday night the Law Revue Girls Twitter account tweeted the following, defending feminist Lily Allen’s music video from being racist:

I would put calling @lilyallen racist up there with calling Macklemore privileged,  in the stakes of no purpose. Missing the message.
— Law Revue Girls (@LawRevueGirls) November 16, 2013

You can imagine what ensured. Let me show you:

For all those who don't understand why we make fun of #WhiteFeminists, the @lawrevuegirls multi part tweet defence of Lily Allen sums it up.
— Aunty Haurangi  (@_surlymermaid) November 16, 2013

And:

@LawRevueGirls yes, how nice for you #privilege
— Gina Rangi (@mokai77) November 16, 2013

Despite one of the Law Revue Girls described herself as a racial 'fruit salad', they belatedly attempted to extract themselves from the shit-pond they’d unwittingly dived head first into:

Not trying to start a war, I *just* think the world's a bit screwy if the only thing you notice when watching a music video is skin colour
— Law Revue Girls (@LawRevueGirls) November 16, 2013

They should’ve known better; the Left aren’t forgiving, and they’re hardest on their own, and so it on went all night. I suspect the Law Revue Girls will now do what all wise people should do – I’m not a wise man - when their privilege is stuffed into in their mouths: shut up. Even Left stalwart, Chris Trotter, admits this mainstay of Left politics, on the silencing of Willie Jackson and John Tamihere:

Rather than korero, the left-wing social media’s first instinct was to condemn, threaten, punish and shut down.

Because the Left typically, arrogantly, are not interested in interacting with differing opinion: they simply seek to shut that opinion down. (For Libertarians reading, that’s an interesting link).

Was Lily Allen’s music video racist? Here’s her defence: you decide.

That’s not the point for me anymore; which is this new linguistic puritanism stalking the land through our fellow citizens, sifting every word for privilege and thought crimes. Giovanni Tiso used this new puritanism of language (hence thought) to take down Willie and JT: I’ve written why I’m not comfortable with that. I wonder if Giovanni understands he’s put himself in the same moral arbiter role of ‘the people’ as Whaleoil has, who would shut down, I suspect, much of the comedy I love: I’ve written on that, also – can a rape joke be defended. About the time radshitzy, neo-Marxist feminist Thorny put herself so humourlessly in my life, checking my privilege for daring to enter her Tweet timeline – that’s all I did, I chipped in on a tweet – I noticed she was also attacking comedian Raybon Kan; I have no idea why, it would be some joke or other she thought he should be shut down for.

I love comedy. Read this link. I love comedy; ‘it lights a fire that warms the coldest nights of my mind’. I record the stand-up on the comedy channel to watch on Friday night: so let’s not kid ourselves where this leads. I suspect less than fifty percent of the stand-up acts on Apollo Live, et al, would survive this new citizen policed thought-crime puritanism. Of home-grown shows, I can guarantee you 7 Days, and Jono and Ben at Ten, two great shows, will very soon not pass muster.

I’m over it. And remember no surveillance Big Brother state can survive for long without an acquiescent people: the secret police usually only ended up on your door when your neighbour potted you in. So though this post doesn’t initially impact on the coercive state, you can bet it ultimately does: hate speech laws, cyber bullying laws, will be the legislative manifestation.

The ethic of this blog is individualism. It is only a classical liberal individualist ethic that will ultimately heal the –isms: sexism, racism, et al. I’ve written further on collectivist identity politics on my post regarding that radshitzy clique of neo-Marxist feminism, but for the record:

In some enlightened age we will meet each other as individuals, representing only ourselves,.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) November 16, 2013

Next time you seek to silence an individual who has offended you in some way with words, especially one sworn to an ethic of do no harm, and you seek to silence them with their privilege, then wonder if you’re not simply reinforcing it. That’s privilege as a wall of your making, over which two people can no longer even shake hands to examine the differences that make life the celebration it should be, rather than each left to guard their side of the wall, wallowing in a morass of ignorance, and too often, fear.

[Following, is how this blog post started …]

Gender Quotas:

I’ve been meaning to get back to the Labour Party’s gender quota again: passed, at last, in their annual conference some weeks ago, they'll be running a quota to ensure women comprise 50% of their caucus. This weekend, my loquacious slanderer, Thorny, has kindly provided me with the impetus to make a comment, albeit vicariously. By showing the logic hole, or at the least, missing piece, in her latest post, Ladies, Step Up To The Platform, - Just Not The Mic - nice title Thorny - I wish to keep a promise I made to the Labour women MP’s in this old post of mine concerning this year’s Labour Party leadership contest, which ultimately no woman MP contested (link below):

… all I’m saying is a Labour woman MP must have a tilt [for the Labour Party leadership]. Because this will become my business if, when Labour ever gains that sandpit in the Fortress of Legislation, it then attempts to implement not just a gender quota within the party - which I couldn’t care less about, that’s Labour Party business - but also force it on the private sector, making gender quotas an issue of the voluntary, free society, versus the coerced one again. If no woman contests this [leadership], I'll be pointing out the double standard here. [Why should you demand, by force, what you’re not prepared to do the hard yards for?]

I would love to put the below questions to Thorny by posting on her site, but like so many Left blogs, she lacks professionalism, either deleting comments, or worse, over-writing and mis-representing them, so here we go. Thorny is opining the representation of women in Martyn Bradbury’s Lefty diatribe, The Daily Blog:

Just one question.

How the fuck are you going to do any of that when you’ve already got a roster which is 38% women …

But those women only provide 6% of the posts?

I have done this math.  I have a goddamned spreadsheet.  Because I’ve seen so many people comment about the fucking flood of chaff which covers the TDB front page.

38% women posters.  6% of the total posts.

Trouble is, the accuracy of her conclusion of misogyny, or certainly larceny, can only be proven by a second series of related questions, namely:

Have more women that those 38% approached Bradbury about contributing content, and has he turned those women down?

If this is the case, Thorny has a valid point, given Daily Blog’s Left-Liberal-quota agenda nonsense. Unfortunately Thorny provides no evidence of this; so I’d be interested to know from Bradbury’s point of view what the answer is. Perhaps someone might ask him for me: while I read widely amongst the cross section of blogs, my experience has been very few of the Left have any interest outside their own bullying world view, and if I'm not mistaken, that walking ego, Martyn Bradbury, has blocked me, also.

Further, of the 38% of female contributors providing only 6% of content, are they actually producing an equivalent 38% content which Bradbury is then refusing to publish? Is their productivity that of the men on the site? Bradbury can only publish what he’s been furnished with.

Again, if that is the case, Thorny has a point, but no evidence is provided of same. It’s just the accusation not backed up with detail, and the smear against a Bradbury it's postulated is concerned only with his ‘liberal cred’- (on which Thorny may well be right).

Until those points are answered factually, then based on the fact that ultimately no Labour woman MP did put their hand up to contest the Labour Party leadership, preferring, instead, an enforced quota, I’m going to fantastically – don’t you dare take this out of context – put myself on Bradbury’s side of the equation, until the numbers are given one way or the other.

Mind you, the Left continuing to pull itself apart: what a shame. I guess the bright side is the more time they spend being vicious to each other, the less time they have visiting viciousness on the rest of us.

Blog Inequality:

By the bye, Thorny’s statement in her piece that her blog is ranked in Ken Perrot’s Open Parachute blog rankings, led me to do the irresistible: checking her ranking against mine. Damn: she’s above me in the blog rankings :) Over October she was placed fortieth, I – ahem, low posting month – was way down at eighty fifth.

That's hardly fair; surely my viewpoint is being stifled here? In the worthy cause of combating blog inequality, shouldn’t her readers be forced to read mine to give equal weight to our views? Just as I am forced by that ruthless mechanism of state, the tax department, to share my income with all and sundry, and supporting Thorny's tax surveillance state I have no agreement with, then why shouldn’t Thorny be forced to share her readership with me?

… The answer is obvious: because such a notion is stupid. More than that: unjust. But that’s exactly what the Left advocate with my income, and if you speak up against them, then as is their modus operandi, they will simply seek to beat you into silence with your privilege.

Albeit, before leaving this topic, I would like to take the time to sooth my sore ego, almost the size of Thorny’s, who the odd time I’ve ‘interrupted’ her on Twitter since she first falsely foot tripped me, has - pot/kettle - laid the charge against me of attention seeking; ironically in the exact manner Edwardian gentlemen sought to side-line the suffragettes by condescendingly calling them attention seekers, as if they were but truculent little children.  It seems Thorny has gone full circle.

But of course my readership is minute: my central ethic, unfettered freedom of an individual human being to do and say as they like so long as they harm no one, is an ethic not shared anymore in the West. The battle I fight was lost a long time ago, and I'm just filling in time between drinks, while they remain legal. And I’m not overlooking the seeming illogic that Libertarian NotPC gets something like thirty thousand visits a month, way more than me also: people who believe in freedom tend to be working people, with little time for reading, and what is happening here is that over more than twenty years of hard grafting, Peter Cresswell has formed for himself a monopoly for that time – bastard. I’m working on my complaint to that oxymoronic Commerce Commission right after this missive, to see if I can get them to pare him down to my size: my recommendation will be that he only be allowed to post once a fortnight until his visits are reduced to my level. I don’t plan to do anything different, such as be more productive or more creative: I don’t need to so long as the state will intervene to take the share he has won in the market of blogs, and give it to me under the sanction of fairness.

Related Posts:

GenderPolitics / Rape Culture: The Unbearable Silencing of Willie Jackson and JohnTamihere.

Radshitzy Feminism, Police Investigative Technique:Identity Politics Deconstructing Law and Sense

This is None of My Business, but … Labour LeadershipQua Women & Maori MPs

Rape Culture: The Roast Busters

Of Comedy, Whaleoil, Kim Dotcom Freedom of Speech and Bounded Liberty.

Radshitzy Feminism, Police Investigative Technique: Identity Politics Deconstructing Law and Sense.

…  the Left is always hardest on its elderly: Chris Trotter, Brian Edwards, Rosemary McLeod, and Martyn Bradbury, all forced to limp bravely through their after-careers, the twitter-latte sniping at them down their noses from the high towers of the margins and the cafes.

Looking at New Zealand’s high profile criminal court failures, particularly murder trials - and there may well be another one coming with Mark Lundy - has any other amateur sleuth noted a problem with police investigative technique?

I assume a police investigation starts with an open mind to all the facts, but at some stage in the process a decision is made on charging a single suspect, and then for reasons unknown, perhaps something as inane as budgetary constraints, perhaps the way police career advancement is attained, the entire process narrows down to making the case against that person, and seemingly, nothing else. At that point, only the facts that bend toward the police line are included; facts, including new evidence, that prejudice their case are either put to the margin, or in some atrocious cases, tampered with or destroyed. What Peter Williams QC calls 'the striving for conviction'.

That investigative process needs total overhaul surely from a closed system to an open one. It has to remain receptive to all new facts, even those, no, especially those, that might go against the course of the enquiry. Investigation must be without prejudice and flexible enough to withdraw from an untenable, or even unlikely, position, and start again from a new matrix of data. And a deaf ear needs be turned to public opprobrium vis a vis accusations of time wasting, incompetence, or whatever on long enquiries: to the investigators only the truth must matter, politicisation of their function cannot be allowed to interfere, particularly by the Fortress of Legislation.

This blog post about the continued troubling uptake of a Left feminism, starting as it did from a personal prejudice, almost made the same mistake. Chasing the wrong approach despite the facts, even when I knew better. This was my original, imprudent opening:

If you put the words radical, bat-shit, and crazy together you get radshitzy. This post pertains to that small cool clique standing loudly atop a soapbox anonymously yelling their foul mouthed invective, in an otherwise sane and important debate on feminism, which I am heretofore going to call radshitzy feminism. Last week radshitzy feminism managed to storm the bastion of a necessarily dispassionate and gender/race/religion-blind rule of law by contending that women who make false rape complaints should not be prosecuted by police.

The ‘radshitzy’ creation was of course designed to be incendiary because it was born of that radshitzy form of feminism that did once reach out to touch me in the form of Thorny. Her anonymous hate site with its wall of scum continues still. But such an approach applied to the authors’ of a piece published last month would be a mistake, because I don’t believe either author has malice, per se, they are just rightly angry as hell about rape. Albeit the end point of what they wrote would be, even if unwittingly, evil. So let’s start again, navigating my way fearfully through the vicious battleground that is becoming the closed system of feminist discourse 2013; vicious because one such as myself must crawl on their belly across barbed wire to avoid the poison pill loaded bullets of mansplaining, privilege, and being a patronising git that have taken even some of New Zealand’s Left stalwarts off the field, because the Left is always hardest on its elderly: Chris Trotter, Brian Edwards, Rosemary McLeod, and Martyn Bradbury, all forced to limp bravely through their after-careers, the twitter-latte sniping at them down their noses from the high towers of the margins and the cafes. (Although did Martyn ever have a career?)

The contention that women who make false rape complaints should not be prosecuted by police was made in a co-authored piece published in The Guardian by Lisa Longstaff, spokesperson for UK group Women Against Rape, and Lisa Avalos, assistant professor of law at the University of Kansas. The paragraph in question comes at the end of the article, so I’ll start with it, then work backwards to the context and the intention of Lisa squared – squared, because in the language used by Lisa and Lisa, the notion of an individual human being has been dispensed with, which ultimately, is the problem:

But the prosecution of women for alleged false reports strengthens the myth that women frequently lie about being raped and discourages victims from coming forward. It diverts law enforcement away from thoroughly investigating rape and lets rapists loose on the public. It is not in the public interest, and must be stopped.

I don’t need to check my privilege – that is, impose a gagging order on myself – to say this is wrong on every level. Even if privilege is tortured from my words by the post moderns, I’d still rather speak my mind, thanks, because free speech is the very definition of freedom in just two words.

First, the face value argument put forward that police should never prosecute women who make false rape complaints, because a) that may discourage future rape complaints, and b) we can’t have police time wasted on serving justice over false, and one must assume, malicious, complaints. All police time should be devoted solely to catching rapists.

Taking each of the limbs separately, it is incontrovertible from the statistics given that a high level of rape goes without prosecution. That’s appalling. However the fix for that is greater resourcing of police, not to commit the further wrong of advocating freeing up police time by not prosecuting known crimes, such as the serious false allegation of rape. On this basis why not also free up police time for prosecuting rapists by not prosecuting the lesser misdemeanours of house burglaries or car thefts? Once you’ve made the decision to ignore one set of crimes to police a ‘greater’ crime, where do the police start drawing the line of what laws not to police? It's a mirror image of how many rights of each individual does the state abrogate in chasing the greater common good – (the answer to that is none, incidentally).

An extension of this argument was that Lisa squared quoted the cases of three woman falsely found guilty of making false claims, allowing their rapists to commit further rape crimes. Again, appalling, and bringing my post back to where it started: deeply flawed police processes. But such miscarriage of justice is not confined to the prosecution of rape complaints. Do the numerous instances of false verdicts in murder cases mean we don’t prosecute murder cases? Of course not, that would be absurd.

More worrisomely, Lisa squared in their report admit that the three false convictions cited would not have occurred if police had done their job correctly:

IACP guidelines were clearly not followed in the three cases above. In each, police decided early the woman had lied, disregarded physical evidence of the rape and investigated her rather than her rapist. They also put severe pressure on each woman to retract. DM and Patty did, and the police then used the retraction to charge them.

IACP guidelines also state that a report of sexual assault can only be considered false "if the evidence establishes that no crime was committed or attempted" and "only after a thorough investigation". If this one guideline had been followed, all three prosecutions would never have happened.

The authors identify this is again a matter of police resourcing and in the event, police deficiencies in the investigative process, perhaps even corruption, yet don’t choose the answer as addressing this, but the fantastical notion police should not prosecute woman making false rape complaints. Why was this? The answer to that is why Lisa squared are so important. I believe they are looking to deconstruct the very concept and operation of Western jurisprudence itself.

The contention women not be prosecuted for making false rape claims is anathema to the classical liberal foundation of Western jurisprudence. But that classical liberal position is itself the enemy of a feminism bound to, and bound by, collectivism. [Flak jacket on] My explanation following is not mansplaining to the associate law professor on the philosophy of the rule of law she is supposedly teaching, because that would involve me telling the professor what she already knows, which would appear to be nothing of consequence. Our Western rule of law cannot operate outside the central tenet of individual responsibility for one’s actions, and therefore taking the consequences of those actions. It’s the flip side of rights which similarly must only attach to individuals.

A just justice system has to be founded on acknowledgment of individuals as volitional actors responsible for their actions, and thus taking the consequences thereof. The only rightful defence against this being the plea of insanity. Furthermore, only on this basis can a legal system also seek to change an individual’s behaviour and rehabilitate them. Allowing a group arbitrarily consigned by gender, race, religion, et al, to be freed of the consequences of their behaviour, for any reason, turns a legal system into a mechanism for vendetta and politicking, as well as denying the possibility of rehabilitating an individual’s criminal behaviour (because the underlying logic is individuals are not responsible for their behaviour, or at least don’t have to be; as with Thorny blogging her invective anonymously). Enforcing such a system would be a total abuse of the already inappropriate powers of our modern nation states. Justice has to be blind to gender, race, religion – that is, to group identity and to any agenda toward identity politics. That fact is self-evident: how could a law professor fail on such a basic premise?

Worse, this contention of Longstaff and Avalos thus effectively turns feminism on its head. An identity based ethic as proposed by Lisa squared in this article, ironically the wellspring itself of the ‘isms that sadly still afflict our societies; especially racism and especially sexism. In this instance, stereotyping an individual by identity with a group, objectifying a single woman before the court as a unit of gender only, denying her uniqueness, thus allowing her to slip out from under her responsibility for what she says and does.

For proof, let’s get Socratic. Explain to me how the following conclusions misstate the logic of the no-prosecute proposition:

The contention that women should not be held responsible for their actions in making false rape complaints is also the contention that women must not be viewed by a blind justice, but in terms of identity as that group, women, and thus of needing a lesser capacity before the law.

How could it not mean this?

Furthermore, a lesser capacity before the law, must therefore infer a lesser competency outside of the law.

How could it not mean this?

Based on this Lisa squared would appear to defy the definition, or at least the movement, of a feminism at all, surely? How is not every women belittled by their argument?

And noting, as already intimated, this nonsense doesn’t stop here. If we have to make this special case in law for women, what of concessions for other groupings such as race or religion? Once justice is disposed of, how are we not left only with a system of injustice which will devolve to using the might of the state to advance causes and cliques, consequences be damned?

One more thing about the historical dead-end of radshitzyism, in all its guises, not just this branch of feminism, albeit this instance as applicable to Lisa squared. As this piece destroys Lisa Avalos’s credentials to be teaching law, in my opinion, so it casts doubts on the advocacy of Lisa Longstaff. I’m drawing a direct line from women shouldn’t be prosecuted for making false claims, to it must, surely, be quite alright for women to tell lies about men in court, period. Once language is detached from its concrete legs in semantics and thus veracity, then it becomes a slippery slope indeed. Which is the clue to where we arrive again, whenever I look at feminism: it's always that dictatorial Mr Marx and his group-think. Lisa squared's article is the logical illogical end point of a pointless academic feminist discourse that has finally deconstructed itself to nothing, as in, one’s word means nothing because words mean nothing. Well no, worse than that. A woman’s word means nothing, but a man is still to be held to his, with all the retrograde symbolic inferences that creates for gender relations.

Finally, to widen the frame on the piece to include its context, it started with this opening paragraph; note the language (my underlining):

Every time a celebrity is acquitted of rape allegations, a pernicious media campaign clamours for anonymity for defendants to stop women and children from wrecking vulnerable men's lives. Most recently, we saw this after the [Coronation Street star] Michael Le Vell trial.

I personally have misgivings even with the logic that flows from the issue of anonymity of defendants (men) standing trial for rape, to the argument of not prosecuting false complaints of rape. How actually are they connected? I see them as quite disparate.

Regardless, taking this opening on its own terms, I think there certainly is a valid argument for defendant anonymity in the criminal jurisdiction, and across all crimes, not just rape, including women who are on charges of false rape complaints. This because privacy is what truly marks the march toward the civilised society, which is why the tax surveillance states of the Left and Right in the West have seen the death of a nascent free, voluntary society. As I have written before on this blog:

I believe there should be no cameras in court. I believe that we all are innocent until proven guilty, and that other than in the very rare case of public safety, to be decided by the police, all defendants before criminal trial should have name suppression unless, or until, proven guilty. That’s the civil and civilised society. Yes, we must have reporters in the court, as a check on corruption and to ensure the law is delivered without bias, but that need only be an embargoed print media, with proceedings reported either only after a guilty verdict, or by withholding names in the case of innocence.

Can someone tell me why feminism has tied itself so wholly to the Left? Liberation can only be achieved within an individualistic classical liberal ethic (aka libertarian, or even anarcho-capitalist). Free the individual and you free the woman. The Left politick binds all to the state by force, never liberates. The Left politick is about pure state force required for redistribution, and thus can exact its violence only by the surveillance state. The contention of Longstaff and Avalos further proof. If carried into practice their contention would obliterate the notion of individuality, casting all men as rapists and all women as victims, with the enormous harm to innocent individual men from such false claims supposedly superseded by the ‘greater good’. That is evil. I know feminists aren't man-haters; the problem with Lisa squared being that is exactly what the language they use infers, such inference a pernicious falsehood. Will a reasoning feminism ever pull itself back from the brink of this, and enter into a civilised discourse? And don’t confuse my use of civilised with mainstream. Whatever the case, to do so it will first have to drop any hope of liberation by this too long engagement with Mr Marx; he’s always been a jailer, chaining us to the lives of complete strangers.

Or to simplify all the above, seriously, allowing women to make false complaints of rape with no consequences: neither of these women can see the consequence of this? Because every lawyer who has seen more than a clutch of marital separations and consequent custody battles could. Has Lisa Avalos ever actually practised law in the wild?

3rd Degree: If We Don’t Like The Truth, Let’s Vote it Something Different, Facts Be Damned. Kids & Poverty/Parenting.

I note, bemused, that Marxist feminist, Queen of Thorns, has been busy all week on Twitter marshalling the Cult of Thorny to ensure tonight’s vote on TV 3’s 3^rd Degree comes out on what they think is the truth for the question: ‘Our Kids: The Problem’s Not Poverty, It’s Parenting’. According to the political Left, it’s poverty, of course, there is no such thing as personal responsibility, thus it can't be parenting, and The Vote will show this because somehow in their minds majoritarism can decide truth, no matter how complex and uncomfortable that truth is.

The Marxists believe, apparently, that a vote based on emotion, and that old bogey of this blog, fairness, can decide the truth and the nature of a thing, regardless of the facts. They will vote for poverty - as they do every national election - and that will justify more redistribution, and the growth of the surveillance state to extract it.

This is wrong on every level, just as democracy has become; throwing away our liberty, thinking the illusory free lunch can be voted into reality.

The question tonight is crippled mainly in its simplicity. Poverty, as regards the question asked, is in big part caused by clueless, irresponsible parenting, so the The Vote tonight for me is a non-issue from the get-go. In a wider view, poverty is now the main by-product of the welfare state: because irresponsible decisions, especially around family size, and family situation, are subsidised and grown by it; see my stories:

Family of eight in Christchurch, complete with criminal record.

Family of nine needing a bigger state house for their Sky remote.

And in a wider context again, poverty is sheeted in by huge government distortion of Western economies, not allowing free markets to do what they do best: provide the best standard of living civilisation has seen, ever.

So while I go to work now, Thorny will ensure her cult votes the truths of her cruel ideology, facts be damned, as the Left will vote in 2014 for more redistribution, hence more surveillance, hence more authoritarian government, hence a deteriorating standard of living for all of us.

Proof: look at this:

@nzben How would other costs increase if we paid less tax (considering we then don't have the dead transactional cost of bureaucracy)?
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) June 18, 2013

@nzben If US medicare was a country, it's the 8th biggest economy in the world. That's not privatised health. 'Bulk discount': where from?
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) June 18, 2013

Of course taxes increase costs: they are a cost to business so increase product and service cost, as I've also written on before:

Bernard Hickey wanting a higher cost of living for consumers.

Labour’s David Clark wanting higher cost of living for consumers.

The ‘discount’ this Tweeter talks of is of course redistribution: taxpayers, such as myself incur much higher costs through taxation, and worse, the loss of our liberty and right to be left alone, so that those, many making and benefiting from imprudent decision-making, get the discount, in a system where the dead weight of bureaucracy adds huge transaction cost, and more importantly, skews coordination in an economy so like all planned economies, ultimately, it fails. We all lose in this.

Finally, talking of the surveillance state, next post will be Judith Collins’s – and in so many ways I love Judith Collins, but Judith, you have this dreadful authoritarian tendency – Anti-Money Laundering and Countering of Terrorism Act, in which further surveillance, further costs, and of course, onerous penalties, are laid on individuals just for wanting to move their money around – because it’s always about the money for big spending government. And this right down to financial institutions will have to report to police and FMA all transfers out of the country from just $1,000 up – Christ, Mrs H and I can drink that in a fortnight.