If Good Enough For Film Industry, Why Not The Economy?

Why is the film industry so special compared to the rest of the economy? Constantly this clamour it must be given a special (lower) incidence of tax so it can survive and grow. Which I agree with: but it applies for every other industry also. There's nothing special about the arts. A builder finishing a house, a farmer casting their eye down a straight and true new fence-line, get every bit as much creative satisfaction as a film producer does.

Or is the arts community signifying somehow aesthetics and culture puts them above all us grunts? Isn't that an elitism that contradicts this sector's otherwise overwhelming call for the fist of state to destroy individual wealth so we are all equal in income poverty?

What grows the film industry would grow the prosperity of all of us: a lower incidence of tax, signifying less government. 

 

@hamish_keith If tax reductions produce jobs & growth in film industry, y not apply 2 all other industries: tech, tourism et al
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) October 26, 2013

@MarkHubbard33 They do and they are
— Hamish Keith (@hamish_keith) October 26, 2013

@hamish_keith I've not got a single client getting any type of tax subsidy. They're just the grunts paying the tax to buy Jackson's learjet.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) October 26, 2013

Russell Brand: Radshitzyist, Populist, Light-Weight Fool.

I’ve dealt to a radical, batshit crazy – radshitzy – feminism this month, that demands no prosecution of women making false rape complaints; now to an equally worrisome broader radshitzyism that is getting too much uptake.

Twitter, especially the radshitzy cliques, have been agog with worship of the below Paxman interview with Russell Brand on BBC. Employing their full kit of irony, I’ve even seen radshitzy feminists, fawning at the altar of the nonsense spewed by alpha-male messiah Brand, and wanting to have his babies. Such is the blindness caused by their familial bond with Brand, namely, Mr Marx.

Free women and men watching this interview will be rightly troubled at how intelligent people can be so taken in, again, by the contradictory ramblings of a personality cult.

If you can stomach it, listen to it. But here’s the précis. Brand wants a full blown revolution. When pressed by a bemused Paxman, it is evident Brand has no idea of the nature of his revolution or the system of governance it would bring in – I’ll tell him that soon – he just wants a revolution that taxes rich people to being poor people; a revolution that taxes corporates to non-existence, truly – as our own IRD and Minister of Revenue aren’t immune from – all summed up in Brand’s infantile belief that profit is the ultimate evil stalking the Earth, and must be taxed to nothing. There will be no profit post revolution. There will be no free market economy.

The contradiction underlying this interview is that Brand sees himself as not so much a radshitzyist, but as a hip, anti-authority, rebel. Yet free men and women with even a scant knowledge of history know instantly his revolution has already happened, and it was all about the enforcement of an absolute authority that was lethal; it was called the Russian Revolution, it was called the Chinese Cultural Revolution: both revolutions with the aim to destroy profit, with the aim to make everyone equal, but which ended with everyone equal in poverty only, while murdering over 200 million of their own underclasses, the underclass Brand wants to lift up, and turning whole nations into surveillance states and slave camps.

Because anti-authority rebel Brand hasn't the wherewithal to conceive that no state can tax me, business, or free women and men, to non-existence without first turning itself into a totalitarian big brother surveillance state. Brand is the ultimate totalitarian statist, and it’s not as if he doesn’t have any modern day examples to learn from. The radshitzyist experiment in Venezuela has ended up with a command economy so moribund, it can’t even coordinate a supply of toilet paper. By all means get upset at our current systems of social democracy. There needs to be a revolution, yes, but against the crony capitalist, fiat money system, and toward a stateless, or at least minarchical, laissez faire free market system. The free society.

So Russell should stick to light roles in silly comedy movies, because he’s turned his life into one with this nonsense, and in the process is sending-up grownups with their degrees who ought to bloody well grow up and read some history so they know better. His interview is below, if you want a primer in full-blown radshitzyism, press play, especially from 3 minutes 59 seconds, and remember the byline of this blog:

The Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they got the surveillance state to keep them in line.

Related Posts:

NBR Rich List – Inequality … No, No, No – Don’t Go there.

Minister McClay & National Government To Increase Cost Of Living For All.

From Rob Hosking behind the NBR pay-wall:

A stepped up effort against tax avoidance by multinational firms will feature strongly in Inland Revenue’s much-delayed compliance document, expected to be released within the week.

The document, Compliance Focus, is usually released at the end of July or early August and sets out the IRD’s priorities on tax for the coming year … The multinational dimension though is understood to be the main cause of the delay. Key to this is the impact of work by the OECD and other international agencies, along with other tax authorities, on what is called BEPS’ – base erosion and profit shifting - by multinational firms.

Put simply, this is involves a small number of high profile  firms – such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Starbucks, and global rock bands such as U2 – shifting their declared profit, revenue and intellectual property to the most tax  advantageous regimes.

Let’s rewrite this to understand what is actually happening, remembering that taxation is a cost:

Minister Todd McClay and IRD will soon issue their document setting out the process required to increase the living costs of all hard working Kiwis. Minister McClay is effectively saying he demands higher prices for books, higher prices for the computer gear we all use, higher prices for that Starbucks latte over which to contemplate the higher costs of everything thanks to the tax take. While his department may have looked at the possibility of simply making our tax system more competitive, he's decided Kiwis have it too good, so by increasing the taxation cost of these firms, he can force them to raise the prices of their products and services.

Minister McClay is also saying that increasing the cost of taxation for these firms world-wide is a worthy part of a concerted one-world-tax-state attempt to slow up innovation in the private sector. Why would they want to squash innovation? Perhaps they are thinking this a good thing? Looking toward the new iPads coming out next month, I guess it'll mean we won't have to update our Apple shit so often. Who needs choice and freedom.

(Footnote: though by all means, send the IRD storm troopers in on that hypocrite Bono, who would strait-jacket us in those 'responsibilities' he won't wear himself.)

Related posts:

Bernard Hickey’s Lates Outage, Sorry, Outrage. Increase Cost of Living Via Tax.

Amazon is the Hero, Not the Villain in the Piece.

In Defence of Sir Bob Jones.

Don’t panic, just driving traffic to my blog, like Herald was with Bob’s piece.

Though I’ll make an observation that he’s a very literary man, Bob. Knows his motif from his mojo. No surprise his brother is a wonderful author; theirs must have been a bookish family, surely. That last link is to a post where I question if someone with a love of literary fiction could be, amongst other things, misogynist? For what it's worth.

Talking of authoring I see he's provoked my radshitzyist nemesis Thorny into working up her language skills again. While the alpha-males of the radshitzy cliques pontificate haughtily over their lattes at those of us having a laugh.

Anyway, the night’s fast is almost broken, a little stroll with The Civilian, who plays out his opinion with satire, just not of Bob's satyr-ical bent, then off to work to be fed into the tax take for me. Shite, look at this, the top 12% of households by income are paying 46% of the total tax take. Account for the tax credit transfers back to lower income households - Working for Families, Accommodation Grant, etc - and that 12% are paying a whopping 76% of the tax take. Talk about inequality.

Cup of green tea first I think.

Taxation is Slavery.

This is an opportune time to remind readers the blogs listed on my blog list (bottom right hand menu) are not necessarily ones I agree with, just ones I find interesting. Though one of them is starting to annoy me greatly. Yesterday Matt Zwolinski tried to raise an argument on Bleeding Heart Libertarians that taxation is not slavery. The below is simply a comment I made to that thread, and provides its own context.

Quote:

"Except that [tax is not slavery]. Even with a rate of taxation of 100%, no one would be forcing you to labor, they would merely (“merely”) be forcibly extracting 100% of the proceeds of your labor."

Your central argument is I'm not a slave because I can choose not to work and thus avoid the imposition of a mandatory tax. The corollary is obviously that I am expected to either starve, or go back to feudal, subsistence living with no specialisation of labour, because if I trade my skills in the cash economy the tax surveillance state can, and will, jail me. I will lose all my freedom.

I once debated with a deluded socialist who seriously maintained he was a slave to the capitalist supermarket owner because his body forced him to eat.

I'm afraid that argument and the one being made here are a mirror image, and the mirror is one of those you find at circus side-shows. Absurd, not reflecting reality at all.

Just as von Mises said there is no middle way between a free economy and one bound by socialism, so is there no middle way between a free life, and one where the surveillance state owns me. Matt is merely arguing about the size of the chains that bind us, blind to the chains that bind us.


My further comment to thread:

BallsAndStrikes and Matt don't seem to understand that this issue falls entirely on voluntarism versus coercion.

A free society cannot exist without an ethos of self-reliance and self-responsibility. Thus yes, you have to work otherwise through the tax surveillance state the state will force me to work for you.

But working in the private sector, in absence of state regulation, is 100% voluntary. You can choose what job or career you do. You can choose who your employer is, and you can change that employer. You can choose to work for yourself and employ others. It is also remarkable how little work you need do to get by: it depends on what your goals and aspirations are. This is a society based on voluntarism.

Regarding the tax state, and its prerequisite, the tax surveillance state, your every relation is governed by force, giving you merely the slave's choice of comply, or lose your freedom. Under the tax state you have no right to privacy; no right to refuse interrogation in room 101; here in New Zealand, IRD can raid without warrant; even the burden of proof is turned against you, meaning for the victimless crime of not paying your taxes, before the law you are at the disadvantage of murderers and rapists whom the state must prove the guilt of (in tax jurisdiction the IR simply assesses you and you have to prove them wrong); and finally the state routinely applies both tax law and precedent retrospectively to rewrite a taxpayer's history.

Because the tax state and tax surveillance state can and does, daily, surveil its citizens, plus by force punish citizens for victimless crimes, that tax state under any definition most certainly owns you.

And if that's not slavery what is? .