Beneficiary Fraud Versus Tax Evasion. Redux.

Jacinda Adern, along with Massey University Tax lecturer, Deborah Russell, on news last week of the beneficiary fraud turned up by government departments sharing data, have been opining that tax evasion is a bigger scourge on society, with much bigger numbers: which is, of course, to compare rotten apples erroneously with political persecution: to confuse benefit abuse, with abuse of the power of state. Let me get to the point of this post via a detour.

Tax evasion and avoidance versus benefit abuse is the difference between an individual trying to hold onto the money they have earned from their risk taking, their effort, and employing their capital, versus those who think the property of such individuals is their own simply to be taken and lived on due to an artificial right created by the state; that right being the only real fraud in this story. It’s the vacuum in people’s heads that has destroyed the free West.

This is the philosophical argument: I’ve written it out to the right in yellow. Remember the tax take requires the surveillance state, and nothing short of that. It is based on the premise an Arrogance of Altruists in the Fortress of Legislation know better how to spend your money than you do, and appallingly have the right to do so, because they've enacted those powers that no state should have been given again, to separate you from your property, and thus your liberty. This is the world in which though you are harming no one, you have no right to be left alone. Note, these are the same cruel geniuses who’ve just decided torturing animals is fine so humans can get stoned on Friday night, while putting such a basic human right as euthanasia up for a lottery. The tax state was always the death of classical liberalism, which was the death of our Western freedom: I’ve written before in relation to the demise of the Westminster Principle, how war hero Sir Charles Upham figured this out by the end of his life. There’s so much hypocrisy involved with this issue: we look askance at the midget thug Putin, viewing him in disdain as he sends another political rival to the Gulag, but then must pretend that Edward Snowden doesn't exist, sitting in exile in a Russian airport – because understand the tax surveillance state is the surveillance state, there is no separating all the complex arms of state surveillance, as they come from the same sanction; it’s the ascendant state, the individual enslaved. It’s everything we do, everything we say, watched, analysed, filed, and having to explain ourselves to complete strangers. You don’t think it happens in New Zealand? Hell, within a couple of hours of me blogging how the IR’s are searching social media for thought crimes, IRD arrived into that very same post (see update 1 at bottom). As an aside, how comfortable are you with that, Deborah?

Let me be clear: tax evaders are stupid in the way those who bravely fought the American Revolution were not, (a revolution, note, over an amount of tax that is but a grain of sand on the beach, compared to the taxes and excise we pay today). Modern day evaders and avoiders are stupid because they will lose, many of them everything: it is truly the Orwellian state we’re up against now, not just some fusty old state half a world away with something so crude as an armoury and munitions. You can’t beat the online state circa this stage in the twenty first century. You don't own your property, just as you don't own your life; this is not the free world, it's a world where individuals are sacrificed to the needs of total strangers. I certainly wouldn’t evade my taxes and I don’t, nor would I avoid them: I’m no martyr, I have responsibilities, and when viewing the truly ruthless armoury of the state; all those words on top of words on top of words in statute after statute, I’m a prudent coward. And a warning, as we are witnessing on the business news every day, the increasing tax take needed to get ourselves to the new Gulags of welfarism, can only be met by increasingly repressive tax law and more surveillance. If the state weren’t vicious enough already.

At least, the above is what I could say in response to Deborah and Jacinda.

If I wanted to get a bit more specific, and a lot less floral, I could also say - indeed I’ve said it before in this blog, repeatedly - I couldn’t care less about benefit abuse. Deborah and Jacinda are correct: the figures involved in benefit abuse are minuscule, hardly worth worrying about. No, I’m not worried about benefit abuse, I’m worried about benefit use: the legitimate benefit use paid for by myself, the taxpayer, under duress, necessarily, because I have no agreement with the road to serfdom society is careening down like a boy racer on animal tested party pills. And I'm against it not just cognisant of my own enslavement; the welfare state is ironically one of the cruelest constructs we humans have created, and it's not as if we didn't have enough history to know better.

I’m about to issue Deborah and Jacinda a challenge, but first a personal note. I don’t like writing posts like the two I’m about to link to. The point of this blog is I hate the global surveillance state, both the thought of it as well as the feel of it, and singling out individuals, even those who put themselves out there as targets, doesn’t sit easily with me. In his excellent novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote this wonderful explanation of why the protagonist would not take part in street protests against the Soviets after their put down of the Prague Spring:

When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand.

Well part of that evil is the singling out of people to make examples of them. That plus I’m so over surveillance and bullying, while I can ethically justify the data sharing that has caught these beneficiaries out, given when you live off the state you have no privacy, the other side of the coin has been that those of us forced to pay for it don’t get to keep our privacy either, and so all the surveillance and data mining is linked, and personally I’m over ALL the ruddy surveillance and the unveiled threat of state force to exact the money from me to keep the dictatorians in the Fortress happy, which will never be enough for them. So I’m (probably) not writing those posts anymore, I’ll just keep referring to the ones written into this blog already, and leave the ongoing marching of irresponsible, stupid people to the public stocks for Whaleoil.

To which end, Deborah and Jacinda, read my two posts below, or at least the first link, all of it, and tell me honestly if you have no qualms at all about benefit use also, because the numbers on that are huge, and are the mathematics of the police state, social decay, and ultimately societal chaos. Look at Europe.

State Housing – Is There Any Better Example of What Is Wrong With The Welfare State? 

And:

Sorry, But Irresponsible People Breeding Generational Poverty Is Annoying Me, Jacinda.

And with this, I’ve got a busy week, so my only remaining blog target is to get my response to Todd McClay on animal testing for stoners penned. I know that Deborah Coddington – quite a different Deborah altogether  - is filling in for JT and Willie on RadioLive, afternoons, this week, and will be devoting at least some of one of her shows to this. If you get time, please listen in and join the protest against animal testing for human recreation.


Update 1:

To the Inland Revenue personnel member/s who read this post at 8.46am this morning, 24 July, note very clearly I said tax evaders are stupid, and read my disclaimer at bottom please.

I'd be far more interested, however, in knowing in what 'work' capacity you are here: surfing the net, or looking for thought crimes? I pay my taxes, surely I'm owed an explanation?

Chester Borrows & Beneficiary Fraud - Calm Down Jacinda.

Chester Borrows brought in new measures yesterday to battle benefit fraud in New Zealand, including the ability to prosecute partners (in crime) of welfare fraudsters. However, the day became most marked by how Labour tried so hard to make us all look the other way. The chief diversionary tactic was exemplified by MP Jacinda Ardern, confusing two completely separate topics, asking why Borrows wasn’t so ruthless over hunting down and shooting tax evaders. Twitter was alight with how Chester Borrows was beneficiary bashing, why wasn’t he going for tax evaders, why wasn’t he going for bankers, one tweeter wanted to know why he wasn’t taking down the HSBC.

Let me dispel some of the confusion for the Emptiness (new collective noun) of Airheads that’s is becoming the chief voting block in New Zealand:

Q: Why did Borrows bring in new measures to bash beneficiaries with, not tax evaders and banker wankers?

A: Because he’s Associate Minister of Social Development. It is Minister Dunne who would bring in measures against tax evaders, etc and so forth. (This stuff is not hard). It would be no more likely or appropriate he brought in measures against these other groups, than introduce health reforms.

Q: Why is Borrows bashing beneficiaries?

A: He’s not. He’s merely attacking benefit fraudsters. If laws attacking benefit fraud are beneficiary bashing, then laws attacking shop lifting are shopper bashing. To make this mistake, the Emptiness must believe that all beneficiaries are fraudsters?

But my main gripe is with Jacinda who in her heart of hearts – because she doesn’t use her head at all – plainly believes that every businessman owes beneficiaries their living, and every businessman is a tax evader.

First, beneficiaries and tax evaders aren’t even comparable, Jacinda: it’s like comparing thieves to apples. Beneficiaries who are playing the system are living off the effort of others, and are happy to see honest taxpayers have their property, including earnings, and privacy stripped from them by force so they can live parasitically. Tax mitigators are free men and women living by their own means, trying to protect what is theirs – their property – from out of control politicians who have no morality at all.

You know, in ending, around the time of the American Revolution, the only revolution that has had lasting good, tax evaders were called heroes and the champions of liberty. The Jacinda’s of this world champion only Soviet styled slavery. And as for her ludicrous statement that New Zealand’s Secret Police force, IRD, aren’t going after tax evaders, I can only assume Jacinda is clueless as to what shock and awe powers her Arrogance of Altruists in Wellingrad have given them: and on this she has no excuse, because I spelled those powers out directly to her last October, and the proof of how they are used to destroy honest taxpayers, from half way down this post.

MSM Feeling, Not Reporting Again: Tax dodgers cost country over $80 million – Really: Cost?

Here, in a short Herald piece by Alanah Eriksen, we see first-hand the unthinking statist immorality that has built the new surveillance states of the West, after the old ones of the early and mid-twentieth century were beaten by the Allies at huge cost. The same statist immorality promulgated by the Fortresses of Legislation that have built the welfare states which destroyed self-reliance and self-responsibility, dooming citizens to debt and tax slavery, and tragically, on the back of the economic and social destruction of the West’s fiat money systems and Keynesian socialism, seen fascism marching in Europe again, which has returned to the scary days of the 1930’s, courtesy of the Left’s Gulags of Forced Altruism.

I need do little more than highlight the central contradiction in Alanah’s (sob) story. She starts out correctly reporting fact:

Tax-dodging New Zealanders cheated the country out of at least $80 million in undeclared income last year … The Inland Revenue Department has revealed to the Herald that it received about 177 tip-offs a week from disgruntled Kiwis about earnings being concealed.

Albeit noting a society structured in such a way that citizens dob each other in for punishment, is the embodiment of the fascist state, where ultimately the bonds of natural love and affection are broken as children are urged to dob their parents in, that’s not the point I’m wanting to make, which is rather how Alanah leaves reporting behind from this point, and simply emotes over her keyboard, as I’ve written on before:

That's enough to feed more than 375,000 families of four based on the average amount spent on food in Auckland. It could have funded more than 8000 breast cancer surgeries, 1650 open heart surgeries, the redevelopment of children's hospital Starship twice over, or rebuild the earthquake-ravaged Christchurch Cathedral.

Dreadful, isn’t it, how can we argue with that? I could, in fact, just on the principle, for a start by asking whose money this is we’re talking about that Alanah would have spent on building a pointless steeple. And if 375,000 families need to be fed, then I put it to you in the twenty first century the Welfare state created that need, against which, mind, I may voluntarily choose to help feed a family that can’t feed itself, probably by helping them from my vege garden – no doubt wondering all the time, why they haven’t got one – but no state ever should force such ‘compassion’ from me, because that results in something much worse: the slave state and its creeping cruelty, building, building, building itself ever bigger by beating then eating the hands forced to feed it, all to grow the number of families that aren't self-reliant anymore. And why did you not think, Alanah, of the possibility of individuals simply insuring themselves against breast cancer and open heart surgeries, which they could afford to if the state didn’t strip them of the resources to do so, while leaving all of us free to pursue our happiness unmanacled to bureaucrats? You’ve just assumed a public health system is a given that must be paid for, even by those of us who want no bar of it, because we have learned, like the Soviets who felt they had free healthcare, that free healthcare always ends up costing a society everything. Though well done for literally bringing in affairs of the open heart in your shining example of how by not thinking, the MSM is feeling and slouching our way to the new police states.  As stated, I can argue all this on principle, but I don’t need to do so, for in her own article, IRD provide the contradiction at the heart of Alanah’s darkness:

"Often people are in pretty dire straits when they start evading tax by not paying PAYE and GST, they're often up against the wall financially already," said the IRD's group tax counsel, Graham Tubb.

"So you can understand that we might have difficulty recovering the money." He said there were cases of tax evasion that the department may never find out about.

How edifying. No surprises we’re going through hard times at the moment, so what we are really talking about here is many businesses, hardworking independent Kiwis, on the breadline, that aren’t able to pay their tax, without taking food from their own tables, or paying the insurance for the heart operations on themselves and their loved ones. That’s how the welfare state has punched an iron fist through the heart of self-reliance, with this reporter cheering ghoulishly from the side-lines. At the very least, this ‘fact’ reported by Alanah shows New Zealand needs a tax-free income threshold, of $35,000 to $40,000, that allows a family a living, and independence, before they have to start coughing up the tax to support the lives of total strangers and their life decisions, many of them monumentally mental.

And finally, that steeple, Alanah; are you seriously telling me building a slave state to extract tax from these struggling individuals just trying to survive and feed their families, is justified by their meal and insurance money being used to build the Anglican Church a new Cathedral in Christchurch in order the five church-goers there can praise some Monty Python character on Sunday? If he did exist, and if he’d walked around the Eastern suburbs post quakes, I reckon you’ll find Jesus - and most likely Brian - would be appalled with you turning morality on its head to this extent. Dreadful; the slippery, under-handed, hypocritical Left. This is not reporting you’re doing here, its sheer propaganda. And the editor of the Herald who let that paragraph past should be ashamed of him or herself: does professionalism not exist in our fourth estate anymore? This piece was pure op-ed, not for the news pages, and by publishing as such, Granny Herald becomes just another statist blog, pushing the line of the tyranny of the common good.

Please, for the sake of the free, decent society, next time you get the urge to emote an article, Alanah, trying thinking first.

Disclaimer: Per my by-line, if you evade your taxes, you’re a bloody idiot. Ironically, your prudent course of action is to go bankrupt trying to pay your taxes, then exist on a benefit while watching Sky News reporting the collapse of Europe and the US. And yeah, I know that’s insane in every respect, but this is social democracy. I can’t explain it, ask this bloke.