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.

Britain Is Drafting a Name Change: Oceania

On the heels of my post about no privacy, hence Liberty, in New Zealand, yesterday, I wake this morning to find that Big Brother is drafting his all-seeing ability in Britain. No hyperbole, this law is directly from George Orwell's nightmare country, Oceania, in his novel 1984:

British authorities unveiled an ambitious plan to log details about every Web visit, email, phone call or text message in the U.K ... the surveillance proposed in the government's 118-page draft bill would provide authorities a remarkably rich picture of their citizens' day-to-day lives, tracking nearly everything they do online, over the phone, or even through the post. All that data would be kept for up to a year ready for browsing whenever anyone in authority wanted it. In some cases, the bill envisages monitoring the information in real time.

Stunning as it is chilling.

How have the bureaucrats been able to finish off the individual's final remaining liberty, their right to privacy, like this? In exactly the same manner as Big Brother employed in 1984 - manufactured fear:

 ... the nation's top law enforcement official accused those worried about the surveillance program of being either criminals or conspiracy theorists.

 From the Home Secretary, who should resign for being as naive and stupid as this:

 Home Office Secretary Theresa May said in an editorial published ahead of the bill's unveiling that only evil-doers should be frightened.

The free air of classical liberalism was polluted by an out-of-control state so long ago, Rousseau's social contract thrown back in the faces of free men, that despite the valid fears of a few wise souls in Britain, dissent will be ignored:

 Yet plenty of people were worried, including a senior lawmaker from May's governing Conservative Party.

"This is a huge amount of information, very intrusive to collect on people," David Davis, one of the proposal's most outspoken critics, told BBC radio. "It's not content, but it's incredibly intrusive."

Human rights defenders were aghast. Privacy group Big Brother Watch said the proposal risked turning Britain into a "nation of suspects." Civil rights organisation Liberty said the law would mean the "indiscriminate stockpiling of private data."

This is the age of Big Brother. There is such a dearth of philosophical thinking left in the West after Gramsci has done his work through the state  education system, that the tyranny of the majority vote this offensive nonsense in, laughing all the time moronically at the state-built gallows of their lives. So of course this will be made law: it's a certainty.

I would say that there should be just one exam before anyone is allowed to enter a state sector job: that they must read Orwell's 1984 ten times, and pass a two hour examination on the principles that a free country would take from it. Though that would be pointless, as the ones conducting the exam would now be reading Big Brother as the damned hero, Winston Smith as 'the criminal' - they would be on the wrong side entirely of the narrator.

The novel I'm writing at the moment (albeit I still need to get permission from Orwell's agent) puts all the major characters of Orwell's 1984 into a New Zealand tax audit, and I don't have to change any of our tax administration laws. The same would now apply in Britain under their surveillance laws (and I don't kid myself our surveillance laws are only three to five years off this.)

I get so angry when I read this offensive garbage, and frustrated that so many of us just 'don't get it'. All is gone. I have no choice but give the government of New Zealand my money, per my blog byline above, otherwise they will squash me like a bug. But I do have a choice about giving these thugs in Britain any of my effort: when this legislation goes through, I will never darken the shores of their grey and loathsome little police state, and I urge all freedom lovers around the world to do likewise. And from now on, all references in this blog to Britain, will be to Oceania, which rather makes the coming Olympics an uncomfortable echo of those games in Berlin ...

I'd hate to think you missed it ...

Taxes just went up again.

We've had a supposedly zero (increase) budget in which the government dollar spend was higher than last year, which was 22.2% higher than the year before, which was higher than the last year of the Labour government.

The Finance Minister is talking about capping government expenditure, but all he means is capping 'the rate' of future spending increases to population growth and inflation (and the government controls inflation). Plus despite all this, we're still borrowing $300 million a week, over and above the prison of our taxes, to keep the welfare monster legislated on life support.

Despite a near recession to end of April, the tax take went up by $772 million, and income tax rates are going to have to go up something in the range of 28% to afford the miserable state pension by 2050 - that's at least a 61% tax rate.

It's called the doublespeak of the police state. And the police state just keeps growing and growing ...

I'd say the MSM was there to protect me from the doublespeak, however, MP Judith Collins just got rid of the right of the media to protect a source from government, and it got no more than a byline. And when I submitted a question on this afternoon's Q&A with Prime Minster John Key at Granny Herald, on the immorality of the IRD penalty and interest system, and how it was destroying businesses on the edge of the recession, it was dumped in favour of questions asking him what cheese he gave to the Queen last weekend, what were his hobbies, and what brand of watch did he wear.

As a country, we seem to be staffed and populated by more than our share of the completely retarded.

Quote: "One cannot force men -- or nations -- to live as human beings if they prefer to be swine in a collectivist pig pen." Guess who said that?

Please, let me off this insane bus, it can come to no good. I know this, because of history ...

... bear with me, a better post coming soon on the rights I require to be free of this BS, and why I'll never have them.

Crown & FBI Hand Dotcom Their Case

First, in a sobering display of the abuse of state power, seventy keystone cops armed with assault rifles raid Dotcom, his pregnant wife and nannies, over alleged non-violent crimes. Disgusting. And incompetent given the paperwork was so badly drawn the raid looks to have been illegal anyway.


I say the above as a supporter of IP: it is a valid property right, and copying is theft. Although that is not the case against Dotcom. Rather, merely that he built a platform on which unassociated individuals were trading pirated files - no different than prosecuting the owner of a road for crimes that road was used to commit, or an ISP for crimes committed by it's users.

But it gets worse. To compound the multitude of errors already made by the fumbling crown and FBI, now on the latter body illegally taking clones of Dotcom's hard drives out of the country, they've come with the following justification that hands Dotcom the case, morally, if not in actuality:

FBI agents who copied data from Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom's computers and took it overseas were not acting illegally because information isn't "physical material", the Crown says. ... Crown lawyer John Pike, for the attorney-general, said the material stored on the hard drives could be shipped overseas for the FBI to examine because it did not constitute "physical" material. The relevant legislation applied only to physical possessions rather than information ..."

Outside of the fact these two government bodies have time and again acted as if they're above the laws they are charged to uphold, they've just used as their justification for taking these files, an argument almost on all fours with the anti-IP anarchist scarcity argument - the nonsense that it is - that IP is not a physical possession, thus taking/copying files is not stealing, or, in this case, against the law. Surely, if there is no law broken by sending such copies, then Dotcom, even if he did copy files/information himself, by their own reasoning, has committed no crime. Alternatively, they have just committed the same crime they are prosecuting. Case over. Dotcom's business destroyed, livelihood taken from him by force, by two out-of-control states, for nothing.

It will be interesting to see if the defence makes something of this.

You wouldn't want these clumsy oafs, sorry, gun welding clumsy oafs, who since the raid have been making it up as they go along, re-scoping each law as they break it, running your life for you. Oh, wait a minute ...

You Don't Think The IR's Own You?

Then you better think again. Read my blog byline above, carefully, then translate that to this report from the Economist regarding Argentina - how long before this comes to a town near you?

FROM this week, any Argentine wanting to take a foreign holiday must not only provide his tax identification-number but also tell the tax agency (known as AFIP) where, when and why he is going. Officials say this violation of privacy is needed to fight tax evasion and money laundering. In reality, the reason is that the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is starting to run out of dollars. Since the inflation rate is already over 25%, the government is terrified of letting the peso depreciate. Instead, it is resorting to a siege economy.

The IR's are the new totalitarian state storm troopers and secret police in one. You are not free: be very afraid ...

And for the record, the government of Argentina who would authorise a crime like this on its citizens, has lost, utterly, the mandate to rule, anybody. Disgusting, though none of us living behind the IRon Drapes in the West are far from this point Argentina has reached ... I wouldn't be surprised at all to see it in the US by three years, New Zealand by ten years.