Sad Farewell to Blogger, Diana Neutze.

I only knew Diana through her blog,  which I’ve been following for some time now. The concept of her blog was simple, to blog and post her poetry about living, and dying, with MS, over the last 40 years. Her achievement was immense. There are two words that sum up her poetry for me, first honest, sometimes brutally, then beautiful.

Diana died 4.00am Thursday morning.

I hope her blog and poetry site are both kept going; in case not, however, I recommend a few contemplative hours reading them.

Condolences to Diana’s family and close friends.

Diana’s poem below is one of my favourites, because it shows despite the disease, she was living life on her terms:

The third bell

I have sprung a leak, am taking on water.

Perhaps in my sleep, I drifted across

a ragged rock or coral reef.

It's not yet dangerous: no sound

of swooshing in the hold.

But it's only a matter of time.

I have presented myself

with an arbitrary date: forty weeks,

a spiritual pregnancy.

The bell rang for my birth and marriage;

it's time now for the third bell.

I have to learn how to die,

to die with dignity; not sign off 

a snarky, snivelling wretch.

I am practicing stoicism.

I am loving more deeply

the things that matter: visits from friends,

music, light on the walnut tree.

It's been several years since I have seen

the night sky; so I will be taken out 

to drink my fill of moon and stars.

“Virgin namesake, moon-Queen at night fall.”

Or, the Duchess of Malfi's magic words:

“Look you, the star shines still.”

My mind wavers and I wonder at times 

whether I can retain my stubbornness.

But then I remember the hardship

of each days waking,

remember I can no longer consent

to the pain and endurance,

nor transform them into any

meaningful pattern.

I am asked whether I will find it hard

to say goodbye.  But, consider

how many times I have already said it:

feeding, cleaning, dressing myself

turning over in bed

walking, singing, playing the piano,

cooking, stitching my tapestry,

hugging my friends from their or my need.

The list could go on forever.

I have lived, so far, nearly three 

of the forty weeks yet to come.

There will be only one ending,

an ending I must learn to trust.

Premise Checking Chris Trotter: Mining, Protest, Indigenous Rights, Externalities, Free Markets.

In his latest column, Chris Trotter has written on what he sees as a paradox within free markets. The below post is my rebuttal. (Minor qualification: it was written on a sunny Tuesday afternoon over a bottle of Mud House pinot gris, so is possibly wordier than otherwise.)

* * *

Chris, you've gone beyond question begging to premise begging, signified even in the language used: your premise is phrased entirely in the coercive paradigm of the Left, therefore using a lexicon anathema to a peace loving, force hating, free marketer, indeed, you’ve written your post in terms that are irrelevant to the thinking of free marketers. Your post demonstrates the paradox is in your thinking, not in free markets.

From the beginning you set up a hollow straw man when you set your premise as follows:

For prosperity to be guaranteed, argued the free marketeers, the power of the state must be curtailed, and its interfering hands forcefully removed from the economic levers.

The paradox of the free market lies in the political implications of those two words: “curtailed” and “forcefully”.

You then argue how, in your opinion, free markets 'paradoxically' require the use of state force, using as your proof the legal clampdown on protest against deep sea drilling off the east coast of New Zealand, to protect the activities of the big corporations involved. To surmise same, you plainly do not understand a free market, and the misunderstanding is on a more fundamental level than the usual Left confusion between our current crony capitalist systems, and true laissez faire capitalism (which is as sensible as comparing sea horses to horses).

I am a free marketer, thus  a classical liberal, thus a libertarian, thus a minarchist, which is to say I advocate a constitutional republic wherein the role of state is only to protect the individual from the initiation of force or fraud imposed by other individuals, groups, or most especially, government. That is, to uphold a transparent, non-arbitrary, rule of law (including a civil and criminal legal system), based at bottom always on a property right.

In the context of the above there is first no question of having to ‘curtail’ government, or 'forcefully' remove government from the economic levers - though that latter point, incidentally, and only slightly off topic, shows where your thinking is further wrong in your premise setting: you, as with Keynesian socialism, are adrift from reality at the get-go in your illusion held regarding supposed economic aggregates, for there is no macro in economics, there are no 'levers'; the free market is merely an expression of the needs and desires of the individuals in a society, and the meeting place where such needs and desires are voluntarily, peacefully resolved  – a free market exists in its workings only on the micro level, and with such a complexity, the oaf central planner will always destroy it. That's precisely why governments thinking they can 'pull levers' cause so much damage in the lives of individuals.

Um, returning to my point :)

A properly constituted - both meanings - government doesn't have to be 'forced' or 'curtailed', because nor does it ‘force’ or ‘curtail’ a society; if it has come to that point, then it's already outside the free marketers premise of what a limited government is about: property rights. Your paradox – which I’ll soon define in concrete terms via the example you use - comes from your misconception of the ethos of a free market: philosophically and politically there are no contradictions such as you suggest in the workings of free markets, per se, as they exist on voluntarism, not the use of force that the entirety of the Left politick is founded on. Indeed it's their lack of contradiction that brought me over to the politics (libertarianism/classical liberalism), philosophy (are you sitting Chris, Objectivism), and economics (laissez faire) of a freedom ethic, intellectually; and driven to that by the glaring, lethal contradictions in the Left.

In other words, free markets are about peaceful, non-coerced living; a peace that is not possible under the Left - look at history. I’d go so far as to say the true expression of the 60's hippy/peace movement is laissez faire classical liberalism, not Left thuggish Big-Bossyism? In your Left paradigm the state is always the prime mover, master of all, in mine, my servant, protecting my property and my person only.

Regarding the specific case of deep sea mining you mention, in order to get to the instance of your paradox, we might in many ways have more agreement than you think: as I said above, the rule of law issues turn on what is considered a property right, and I think the property rights of indigenous peoples, or rather how our social democracies have dealt with them, are, frankly, a mess (a mess which has arisen historically from colonialism). I pretend to give no answers to those issues here. There is also the thorny issue of externalities such as Green Peace are concerned with, on which I am starting to think more and more, and with some trepidation, given the slippery slope they represent into subjectivity and away from an objective law. (The only solution for bringing externalities into the property rights field where they belong is good science, and then from there to the valuation problem). But my point here is you are confusing the debate over the role of government in a peaceful society, the nature of a property right, and the importance of property rights for a free society, with the nature of what a free market is, and the structuring of a properly constituted limited government that concerns itself only with the issues of rights. Your paradox is in the Reagan quotation you gave, ‘“Government isn’t the solution … Government is the problem.” Despite your paradigm trying to bend this backwards, you cite this mining/protest example whereby you believe government has egregiously overridden a group of rights in favour of big corporates - and I agree with you that governments are now sadly the chief abusers of property rights - yet your paradox is that you believe always in ever bigger, more omnipotent government as a solution (to governments being already so powerful, they destroy property rights, and in this case, possibly, freedom of speech and protest).

That’s nonsensical: the same type of nonsense homeopathy that has Keynesians religiously believing the problems of too much debt can be solved by more debt. These are amongst the myriad of paradoxes that plague the Left, and more aptly, statists, to the point that I’m sure in some more sensible age, rational people will view an historical belief in the Left politick and its theocracy of state, akin to a belief in Father Christmas. Although needless to say, this New Enlightenment of reason and healthy suspicion and limitation of all authority won’t be in my lifetime.

I put it to you that governments are now so huge, our welfare states exhausting so much wealth, up to 50% of the activity of our entire economies needed to feed an out of control state sector and force-fed dependency, that governments have had to become abusers of all our property rights, including our right of free speech and protest, to feed their voracious appetite for tax revenue which now makes all foreseeable generations tax slaves. The state, or more precisely, the authoritarian surveillance states now in place, have destroyed the Free West, and with that, civilisation.

As you started with Reagan, I’ll finish with him:  ‘It’s about up versus down, freedom versus statism’, … and every party in Parliament today is a party committed to statism, committed, thus, to coercion and the use of state force, with the price paid the destruction of liberty. National are as big a culprit in this as Labour and Greens are. The answer to it is free markets and a free people, and there is no paradox, which is why some few left of us, continue to strive for our freedom against that chief butcher of the twentieth century, the state, which you keep giving a free pass to, via the theft of redistribution.

Update 1: Chris’s Reply:

I've underlined and made bold the important part.

Chris Trotter said... 

I must say, Mark, I'm tempted to rebut your rebuttal, but experience has taught me there is nothing to be gained by doing so.

Those who believe as you do are simply not available to the sort of debate that takes as its starting point the reality of events in historical time and their continuing influence on the present and future.

This sort of debate assumes an opponent who exists in the same historical time-frame, and who is subject to the same physical laws as myself.

Which you do and are, of course, but, mysteriously, you don't think you do.

Yours is a strange Platonic sort of universe: a world of ideal concepts and forms - which simply doesn't respond to the logic of the gritty old world the rest of us inhabit - down here on Planet Earth.

So, I'll just say that I enjoyed your posting. It is, I reckon, a little masterpiece of its kind.

But, in terms of having a discussion about what really happens - or is likely to happen (out there on the high seas, for example) - there really isn't anything to get to grips with.

Like Plato's ideal chair, it looks very sturdy in my mind's eye, but, unfortunately, when I try it sit down on it there's simply nothing there.

The Slouching Beast of Socialism in NZ: My Respects to Kathy & Eric Hertz.

You no longer have to go far in New Zealand to witness and understand how sick is that stunted welfare child born of the Left politick.

Two great individuals have tragically died this Easter weekend, two individuals whose combined efforts have done more to increase the standard of living of all of us, than the entire Labour/National cabinets have for decades. And they did this simply by providing competition to our major Telcos, to give cheaper, more diverse Telco services to all of us. Kathy Hertz, and her husband Eric, CEO of 2degrees.

I know nothing about this couple, other than what I have read since their plane went down on Friday, but I know enough to surmise the following:

To deliberately introduce them as Kathy and Eric, out of no disrespect to Eric, but to identify their marriage/partnership as the synergy integral to 2degrees: from my reading, it’s a similar marriage to my own – I operate under a company called Mark Hubbard Limited, merely because I am whom my clients deal with, however, take out Mrs H, and there would/will be no business. Ours is a 50/50 partnership, as I glean to be the Hertz’s.

To thank them for their efforts in creating 2degrees and turning it into a free market success; because I exist on telecommunications.

To note that everywhere Kathy and Eric have operated, they have put as much effort into their charitable activities as in their business activities, working with the disadvantaged and raising them up via voluntarism, (as opposed to the state’s malevolent method of clobbering the independent down to the dependence of the disadvantaged while creating the surveillance state to control them).

I don’t need to go on, just Google and read the eulogies. But here’s the point of this post; when you read the eulogies, remember the slouching beast growing ever stronger that would, and will, destroy everything good, every freedom. You can see that slouching beast in the comments to this NBR post on the the Hertz’s. On each comment to an NBR thread other readers have the option to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ a post. The first comment is from ‘JB’:

A great loss. Condolences to the family, friends and 2 degrees.

Number of likes, at time of posting this, 13, number of dislikes, 17.

If you can get yourself past the callousness and cruelty of those dislikes, think about just what they mean, because it takes your breath, and final hopes, away. Then look at the dislikes on the rest of the otherwise respectful comments. Including this one:

I had the absolute pleasure to host Eric and Kathy a few weeks back at the Tongariro Lodge and my step daughter and I were lucky enough to fly with Eric and Kathy around the central plateau in their plane. I feel richer for the experience of meeting 2 such wonderful and giving people. The world is a sadder place today. 

Graeme Smith
General Manager | Tongariro Lodge

At the time of my post, 4 likes, 3 dislikes.

The fifth comment to that thread sums it all up:

Really sad news. A great guy who made a real difference.
I cannot understand all the "dislikes" for this and other condolences. Words fail me.

2 likes, 6 – yes, 6 – dislikes.

Words fail me also. Whenever I glimpse the slouching beast, I am always left first speechless, then sickened, then angry. It’s the slouching beast most often that I’m trying to spear in my blog.

I would like to know from even one of the dislikers, let’s call you haters, what you are thinking - ‘we’ decent folk would like to know because once our freedom, lost now, depended on understanding you.

Some of this will no doubt be because Kathy and Eric  just happen to have been Americans, and the New Zealand Left have become strangely nationalistic, while identifying with the ethic of the slave prisons in China, rather than the sadly gone land of the free. But mainly it will be because Kathy and Eric were decent, upstanding, independent, compassionate, passionate – loads of that by the sounds of it – charitable, successful human beings who championed freedom and free lives in everything they did, even by not trying to do so. To the haters born of the Left politick, and remember they all have the vote, there is nothing worse, it would seem, than successful, decent people like these. The haters aren’t individuals; they’re the stench that rises from the cesspit created by socialism, bottom-feeders, their gills blocked with the poo of an ideology that has destroyed the West.

When will enough of us finally understand that the shining example of the Hertz's is not enough anymore; the disease has travelled too far into our minds, for it starts in the state classrooms. There is nothing in this society worth saving; it’s all gone, the slouching beast resides in the Fortress of Legislation in Wellingrad. It won, the Free West is lost.

Kathy and Eric I never knew you, but through the magic of markets you bettered my life, regardless: a heartfelt thank you. Condolences to the family.

To the editor of NBR, there are friends and family of the Hertz’s reading that thread, for pity’s sake, turn off the offensive like/dislike function, because really, what’s the point of it, in this context?