Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: 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 had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Thursday, May 8, 2014

Cunliffe & the Left’s Glaring Contradiction Redux: GCSB v. IRD v. FATCA – Corruption & Hypocrisy.


Because if this government will use an IGA and IRD’s Orwellian powers outside New Zealand’s privacy legislation for purposes which don’t involve that department’s collection of tax, but only for the spying on private citizens whom have done no proven wrong, every other future government can, and will, act as corruptly, conveniently, based on the precedent set.
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Labour leader David Cunliffe says his party does not support blanket collection of intelligence on New Zealand citizens and believes ‘John Key is rewriting history.’


Weighing in on the intelligence debate today, Mr Cunliffe says despite Prime Minister John Key’s assertion that New Zealanders are not worried about spying, he says there is deep concern.’


It’s that glaring contradiction and hypocrisy of the Left again, regarding privacy and the free society. Below is the comment I would've made to the NBR piece, were IRD not data-mining that site (they make it here anyway, look at my site logs, but I don't make it 'that' easy anymore, plus I might as well use the department to drum up some site traffic: incidentally, on the contention that self-censorship is state censorship, ask yourself how comfortable you are with IRD data mining social media):



So given this comment, can I assume David Cunliffe will have 'deep concern' at our tax surveillance state which operates totally outside of our privacy legislation and essentially gives IRD officers open slather on our lives? Because government bureaucrats who can read our financial transactions and other essential communications, who data mine NBR daily as well as social media, and whom are almost unrestricted from doing so, including raiding business premises without need of a warrant, can read our lives in far more detail than a Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) officer can. That is, our politicians are concerned with our privacy to the point of weakening the protection of Kiwis from terrorism, but the total stripping of our privacy and right to be left alone, (so long as we do no harm), in order our own government can plunder the private property of its own citizens is fine? How and where did the concept of the importance of privacy in a free society change? Perhaps David could answer to that. What is the difference between an IRD officer being able to read my life in order to take my income, and a GCSB officer being able to read my life to protect me from Al Qaeda?
I've never understood the (im)moral underpinning of the tax state in this regard.

Worse, via the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) pulling together the various information sharing double tax agreements around the world, we now have a truly Orwellian global tax surveillance state that turns New Zealand citizens with US passports into second class citizens in NZ and every country in the world that sets out otherwise to protect privacy, and which deems the privacy abuses of NSA, PRISM, GCSB a mere sideshow. Indeed, regarding this article, I note in the current whitewash report on the submissions against NZ's appalling intergovernmental agreement (IGA) with the US government to implement FATCA there is no submission on such privacy concerns from Labour, as expressed by Cunliffe here, or any party in the sandpit at the Fortress of Legislation; even more surprising given Labour and Green MP’s, along with Left bloggers,  were out on the streets protesting against much lesser privacy breaches by GCSB, and despite the fact that IGA cynically uses IRD's God-like powers above our privacy legislation to deliberately circumvent that legislation for reasons that have absolutely nothing, repeat nothing, to do with collecting the New Zealand tax take, and thus everything to do with government being able to avoid an otherwise embarrassing political mess.  Why is Cunliffe not using this NBR space to speak out against such rank corruption? Because if one government will use an IGA and IRD’s powers above New Zealand’s privacy legislation for purposes that don’t involve that department’s collection of tax, but only for the spying on private citizens whom have done no proven wrong, every other future government can.



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