"For the govt's managerial class, the primary purpose of the state is to create high income jobs and lucrative contracts for the cognitive elite..."

"Our fire trucks are breaking down, the road toll is up and we’re desperately in need of more nurses. But rather than tackle these urgent issues, the government drops billions on consultants, comms staff and various other removed, abstract thinkers...
    "It’s almost as if the primary role of the administrative state is shifting from serving the people to the redistribution of wealth to the staffers, lawyers, PR companies, managers and consultancy firms that work in them, or for them. A billion dollars a year in public sector consultancy is an awful lot of money when you’re running out of teachers and nurses because you don’t pay them enough, and the fire trucks are breaking down...
    "For [the government's] managerial class the primary purpose of the transport agency and the rest of the state is to create high income jobs and lucrative contracts for the cognitive elite – they are the true value creators, after all – and to deliver media campaigns celebrating the bravery of their visions, the nobility of their aspirations; to affirm that they are the good and smart people. The actual safety conditions of provincial roads are largely irrelevant.... the decision not to fast-track nurses into the country [is similar]. Nursing is a credentialed, moderately well paid profession. But nurses are not knowledge workers the way medical doctors and some other health professionals are. Nurses work almost entirely in the real not the abstract, therefore [with this view] they can’t be adding 'real' value to the health system, any more than safety barriers installed by uneducated manual labourers can reduce traffic fatalities, or fire trucks can put out fires....
    "I’m not arguing that [this] perspective explains everything (or that I agree with [it]). But I’ve come to the end of this essay in early August, and the health minister Andrew Little has just announced a suite of measures to address staff shortages in the health sector. No, he’s not changing the immigration rules for nurses – but the government is launching a media campaign, teaming up with Shortland Street to promote nursing as a career. The cost of the campaign will not be made public."
           ~ Danyl Mclauchlan, from his op-ed 'An Administrative Revolution'

"...the transformational power of the state..."

"There’s a paradox at the heart of the Ardern administration: it genuinely believes in the transformational power of the state – but it struggles (and often fails) to get the state to do any of the things it wants it to do."

~ Danyl Mclauchlan, from his oped 'If you need to create a new ‘Implementation Unit’, what is everyone doing now?'

"Sensing their slip to under 5%, the Greens seem to have decided that gerrymandering MMP for their benefit in time for the 2020 Election is preferable to dumping the Middle Class Woke Identity Politics that is making them so alienating and unelectable in the first place..." Bonus #QotD

"Sensing their slip to under 5%, the Greens seem to have decided that gerrymandering MMP for their benefit in time for the 2020 Election is preferable to dumping the Middle Class Woke Identity Politics that is making them so alienating and unelectable in the first place...    "I expect this kind of ruthless corruption of the electoral system from National, ACT and MANA on a good day, but [not] from the Greens ... 

    "Note that it’s not 1%, 2% or 3% ... oh no, it’s 4%, [which just so happens to be] the threshold that would most benefit the Greens while killing off any other proto-political movement." 

          ~ Martyn Bradbury

RELATED:

• Danyl Mclaughlan on "the terrible, terrible optics of a political party that is part of the government, and hovering just above the 5% threshold in the recent round of polls – and which routinely under-performs the polls on election day – attempting to alter the electoral system to its own advantage and consider the 5% threshold itself."

.

Where do we find good news these days?

 

There must be good journalism going on in New Zealand suggest Russell Brown and Danyl at Dim Post, but it’s too often buried under an avalanche of clickbait “pillaged from social media and the kind of trivia your stupid friend insists on sharing in their Facebook feed.”

Danyl suggests we quality-news mavens need to fight back with a decent NZ news aggregator to dig out the quality stuff, just like in the old days:

What I could really use is an aggregator. Way back in the day Kiwiblog functioned as a political news aggregator, linking and excerpting pretty much every political story with DPF writing ‘An excellent Herald editorial’ at the top or ‘Indeed’ at the bottom of them. If I had world enough and time I’d set up a New Zealand journalism aggregator, and call it ‘Indeed’ in honour of those salad days. But I don’t. I’d be very grateful if someone else did though.

Indeed.

..

Quote of the Day: On young people buying houses in Auckland–or trying to

 

“…the broader point is that having a tiny number of individuals making extraordinary sacrifices to enter the housing market is still a huge departure from historical norms.  Previously most people bought houses, because most people could.  But prices are currently at an historical high relative to incomes.  The fact that young people buying houses in Auckland is such a singular event that it is newsworthy is a signifier of the problem in of itself.”
~ Danyl McLauchlan, from his post 'Chart of the day, kids are too busy watching plasma TVs over Skype to make charts edition'

Fisking a land-tax looney

 

I argued Tuesday that any land tax introduced however presently circumscribed will see the shackles come off bit by bit until it there willl be no escape from the grey ones for any land-owner (When they came for foreign land-owners …”).

Already, not less than twenty-four hours after the trial balloon was afloat Gareth Bloody Morgan had already started blowing his own trumpet for the across-the-bloody-board imposition of the ten percent (or more) land tax on every single land owner in the country. (Not caring what this would do to cash-flow poors land-owners; or what it would do to the valuation of land if its entire income stream were ripped away.)

And not just land – Bloody Morgan wants the tax on land, on houses, on every bit of capital than anyone owns anywhere the government can get its hands on.

Just another reason for someone to slit that insuferrable bastard’s throat.

Few supporters of the tax care either for the economics or the morality. They have their own reasons for wanting land owners cut down. Here below is an ilustration of just how the land tax idea ia already being embraced by those who’d lke to widen the scope immiediately to give “the rich” a good kicking. Not to pick on this particular author per se, (but his intials are SP, and if he’s in for a penny…).

Just to make it easy, I’ve fisked it for you [his comments are in italics, my own are preceded by the ‘|’]:

Land tax is something I've loved for a long time…

| Loved! What sort of person “loves” a tax!

… and although a half assed one won't be enough it would be an amazing start that could be improved in future.

| By “won’t be enough” he means it’s not just foreign home owners he blames for high house prices, and by “improved” he he means “used to smack more people around.”

It doesn't sound sexy but it is awesome.

| “Awesome”?! I don’t know about you, but all this enthusiasm for a new form of legalised theft is already making me ill.

The point of a land tax is that it encourages investment in productive assets, like businesses that export goods, rather than houses, and makes people change their housing choices.

| Well, one sure and very immediate point will be that it will certainly discourage folk owning rental properties (especially if virtually all their rents are stripped from them) so that almost-affordable house renting, virtually the only almost-affordable thing about NZ’s big cities at the moment, will at a stroke be made as unaffordable as house buying. (How else would rental investors make any yield at all, or try to?)

By nature it has to be disruptive. It would make elderly people in big houses in leafy suburbs have to downsize. In theory they would move to nice smaller apartments nearby, but seeing they have fought against any kind of sensible density they will be out of luck.
So that'll be a shit-fight.

| You can almost see his hands rubbing togther as he looks forward to seeing old folk have to leave their family homes because they don’t have the incomes to sustain the level of tax that would be viciously levied upon them.

If universally applied it would halt land-banking, and spur efficient land use, it'd free up capital for productive industries, it'd mean being born asset-rich didn't just compound wealth and lock others out. It won't be that for a while, but there is some hope.

| Would it halt so-called “land-banking”? Well, no it wouldn’t: the predominant “land-banks” lie just outside the planners’ artificial ring-fences around our cities, where land can be bought for around one-tenth of the price of the same land just inside the ring-fence, and owners of this land could still wait just as patiently (and affordably) for the planners to rezone – whereupon they either sell or develop. There is no new “spur” in the newl-floated new tax just as there is no class in NZ born so “asset-rich” that it simply sits on bare land for generations simply for the sake of it. It’s just a class warrior’s pipe dream.
    If our envy-ridden commentator could remove his green-eyed lenses for a moment he might realise that even with the existing holding costs of empty land, you're only going to keep it empty if there's a huge windfall profit at the end of it – and with all New Zealand's major cities ring-fenced by zoning there's an assured bonus if he can just sit tight until the zoning changes (or if he can wine and dine the planners and councillors and encourage them to change it).
    He might understand that the biggest spur to freeing up these “land banks” and ridding us of this cronyism would not be the introduction of another form of legalised theft, but a simple removal of the planners’ ring-fence.

There's the saying only Nixon can go to China. In that same way only the party of landowners can introduce Capital Gains Taxes or land taxes. If National does manage to get a land tax in, in addition to the piss-weak CGT it introduced, then future governments can extend them until properly useful.
Fingers crossed.

And, sadly, what is described is both the modus operandi of this nutless National Government (ably described in yesterday's Herald by the otherwise loathsome Bryan Gould, who this time is almost wholly on the money)), and the certain long-term consequence of the land tax. There is nothing surer than that the inevitable consequence of this circumscribed tax is its extension by either this or subsequent government.

Danyl at The Dim Post is already talking up the opportunity”"::

It sometimes feels to me like Key and English realise they’ve done a pretty shitty job at modernising our economy so they’ve set up freebie policies for the subsequent left-wing government. There’s the capital gains tax on property sales within two years, which can be kicked up to ten years, and now it looks like there will be a land tax for foreign owners, which can easily be adapted to a land tax on undeveloped properties in urban areas (land banks), or even single owner-occupier properties in suburbs like, say, Remuera, to encourage the development of apartment buildings.

Could anything be more certain?

Could anything be more wrong.

RELATED POSTS:

• Spare a thought for Queensland property owners, who were hit with a retrospective land tax going back to June 30, 2002 – along with a redefinition of "unimproved" to include “the hard work of property owners, including (among other things) the buildings they have erected, the leases they have in place, business goodwill and infrastructure charges.” Would you rule out any of that happening here?
  `Retrospective land tax to hit Queensland property investors – PROPERTY TALK
• “The best solution to our housing affordability woes and associated unintended consequences, such as an epidemic of ultra-long commutes from rural towns to jobs in the unaffordable city, would involve a few new towns like “The Woodlands” springing up in the superabundant stretches of undeveloped land with which NZ (one of the world’s most lightly populated countries) is blessed. The existence of these highly competitive alternatives – for both home buyers and businesses (hence the excellent jobs-housing balance) – would soon take the pressure off the market in the existing cities, strangled as they are by NIMBYism as well as misguided planning.
      “Planned ‘releases of land’ however for a specific 10,000+ new homes per year in highly specific locations, could be a failure as a “housing affordability” policy per se. When we analyse previous housing bubbles and crashes around the world, we find that the most volatile ones are those in which the price inflation was accompanied by frantic amounts of building. This seemingly contradictory combination is the result of insufficient market freedom to convert cheap rural land to urban use without its original owners holding out for ‘planning gain’.”
  Will the Housing Accord cure the land banks? – Phil Hayward, NOT PC, 2013
• “Which means in order to make a purchase, developers will have to offer land owners an amount greater than the
  "present value" of what the land owner thinks the value might reach if he holds the land. And every developer has to out-bid every other developer for the parcels that might go on the market.  Meanwhile, the rising prices paid by developers feed heightened expectations on the part of the remaining land owners. And so it goes on like a nuclear chain reaction, blowing up this time in the face of would-be affordable-home owners.
      “And as with a nuclear chain reaction, it is impossible to have "just a little, harmless explosion." Urban planners need to understand that an Urban Growth Boundary does not cause a little, harmless explosion in greenfields land values.”
  How do you stop land banking? – Phil Hayward, NOT PC, 2013
• “Most of the planners in New Zealand's major cities have imposed what's called a Metropolitan Urban Limit around the cities. This is sometimes called an 'urban fence,' inside which development proceeds (in theory) according to the planners' whims, and (in reality) to the extent that developers and builders can get around these whims and get something done.
      “Outside the urban fence, development only proceeds to the extent that land-owners outside the fence can dodge the planners' desire to make a rural museum of the area surrounding the cities, and to the extent that developers who have built up land banks around the city can encourage their chums on council to relax the zoning, or to release the urban fence just a little. You might call this a sort of 'informal' public-private partnership. (Ask around, for instance, about how the car yards of Henderson were re-zoned from rural and who benefited most from the re-zoning; and -- more recently -- ask yourself who the major beneficiaries were of the recent relaxation of controls around Botany, Flat Bush and Albany.)…”
  Message to planners: "Don't fence me in!" - NOT PC, 2007
  .

Housing tax: Two quotes, two comments

“In the end, yesterday’s announcement looks a lot like political theatre.  As ministers, and the Reserve Bank, have rightly noted previously, CGTs don’t change the character of house price cycles, and attenuated ones like this are even less likely to.  Some will feel better that ‘something is being done,’ but it will just divert attention, and policy and legislative time, away from measures that grapple with the real issues.” ¹

COMMENT: It looks a lot like political theatre to this government, and last weeks’ Reserve Bank meddling makes it a two-cast drama. But while its off-Broadway now, a diversion, now that the door to CGT has been opened it will soon become main-stage centre-Broadway.

“What strikes me about the government’s new tax – which is totally not a capital gains tax <sarcasm>– is that (a) it will probably not deliver … because property speculators can just defer their sales to avoid the tax [for now], but (b) [because] there is now a ‘brightline’ tax on capital gains instead of a huge nebulous loophole … this is a big deal on a psychological and political level. It means that subsequent governments – or maybe even this one – can incrementally increase the two year limit out to five years, ten years, then no limit, and New Zealand will have a realised capital gains tax on secondary property.
Yes, the way it came about is absurd. Labour campaigned on a Capital Gains Tax. National opposed it. More than opposed – they tore Labour apart over it. So Labour abandoned it and now National’s introduced a dummy one. Someone else will give it teeth.”

COMMENT: Oh yes. They sure will. Someone else will certainly give it teeth. Big teeth.

Nobody voted for it.

A lot of you voted against it.

And you believed the blue lot when they said they opposed it. Yet here it is; the wedge just gently slipped in. all ready to be hammered home.

So who are the stupid ones here?

It’s the same ones who voted for those “meaningful” tax cuts in this Government’s first term.

You voted for tax cuts you didn’t get. And you voted against a tax you are getting.

Will you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

---

1. This comment is by Michael Reddell at the Croaking Cassandra blog. Unfortunately, he concludes by revealing himself to be anti-immigration. So, there’s that.
2. The comment is Danyl’s at the Dim Post blog. His analysis is spot on. His evaluation however is 100% removed from mine; he calls it Progress!

Quote of the day: “an unexpected side-effect of the modern surveillance state”

“This could be an unexpected side-effect of the modern surveillance state: our ancestors will get really kick-ass biographies.”
- Danyl McLauchlan reviewing books he read over the summer holidays

That’s democracy, David

I have to laugh at David Farrar getting angry because DotCon turns out to be a bigger blowhard than Winston Peters.

For months and even years we have given Kim Dotcom a slight benefit of the doubt. He claimed back in 2012 that he had evidence John Key knew about him before 19 January 2012. He said he would produce this evidence in court.
    He never ever did.
    But he kept insisting he had the evidence…Most of us thought the evidence would be ambiguous at best, or inconsequential – but thought he would at least have something.
    But it seems he had nothing at all. The claimed e-mail is so obviously a fake (see Danyl McLauchlan), that he didn’t even present it at the meeting…
   I’m angry about this, and you should be also…

David’s angry.

Why is David angry?

Because election. [Emphasis that follows is all David’s.]

   Kim Dotcom has tried to hijack our democracy and we should be angry about this… New Zealanders should have been having a final week debating . But Dotcom’s media manipulation has tried to make it all about him…
    Yes some of the stuff alleged by Snowden is of public interest …

Butt me no buts, David. The stuff alleged by Snowden and Greenwald is of public interest [emphasis mine] and no matter how flaky their host is, (which is substantial0 it is perfectly appropriate to spend a week or more debating their allegations.

It’s not like there’s really a major item of difference about which to debate what any of the major parties propose in the economy, the health system, the education system, jobs, incomes, welfare, housing or the like. All (both?) propose various degrees of state intervention, often along remarkably similar lines.

It’s true that there’s not really a scintilla of difference either in what they might do about what Snowden and Greenwald allege, but that doesn’t make it wrong to debate it in the last week of the election campaign. [Emphasis mine, that time.]

Because, you know David, in an election campaign there’s no “we should” about what we discuss.

You and the major party campaign managers might like to talk about the economy, the health system, the education system, jobs, incomes, welfare, housing or the like – and I talk about these myself, because I too think they are important. But some people want to talk about property rights and individual liberty; some want to talk about why they should be arrested for smoking a joint; some just want to talk about the lies that politicians tell (which are many) and the promises they tend to keep (which are few); but whatever they want to talk about in the last week of the election campaign is entirely up to them. [Emphasis, once again, all mine.]

That’s the whole point about democracy, I’ve heard.

In a democracy, you don't get to dictate what everyone gets to talk about. You don’t get to dictate what issues they want to vote about. What everyone talks about is, well, up to everyone. That I guess is one of the key  points about a democracy. Like it or not, it's not a bug, it's one of its features.

That’s the lesson for today.

If democracy is the counting of heads regardless of their content, and it is, then you don't get to complain about what those heads want to talk about, if what they want to talk about is not always of your own choosing.

#TeamKey: the best left-wing team since the last one [update 2]

#TeamKey and #TeamCorkery agree on one thing at least: they both want talk to be about policies, not dirty politics.

#TeamCorkery’s wish didn’t come true however because her Sugar Daddy wanted to talk about hacking. So, thought the media, hacking it is.  [UPDATE 1: Curiously, the story, which was all over the news yesterday, is in the process of disappearing down the memory hole. UPDATE 2: Or is the story’s disappearance ‘round the net just a correction, all having previously said DotCon had “admit[ted] to hacking.”]

Hard to complain about their subsequent questions when they were being taunted from the stage.

On the other hand, maybe it’s better if the media didn’t focus on National’s policies, because what they’ll find if they do is pretty damned limp – an effective vote of no-confidence in their own stated values.  From the point of view of the left, as Danyl McLaughlan summarises, they’ll find a virtual reverse takeover:

National’s ideology and values are not (yet) delivering any policy ideas during this campaign. Free money for first home buyers, free doctor’s visits for children and MOAR ROADS are not right-wing (or ‘centre right’) ideas, in the way that the partial sales of the energy companies was. Having a popular right-wing party simply unable to campaign on its values or ideas is a pretty sweet place for the left to be, long term. It would be nice to be in government, but having National in there implementing left-wing policies for us is the next best thing. 

John Key: the best left-wing Prime Minister since the last one.

The joke is on us

One debate and two political party campaign launches over the weekend, and this is supposed to be a political blog.

So I’ll try not to yawn.

Labour’s campaign launch at the Auckland Viaduct, an easy walk from David Cunliffe’s house, was overshadowed in news headlines by the antique joke of his near-neighbour Winston Peters, and in campaign strategy by National’s announcement they will launch in South Auckland.

Of the joke, not much can be said. It was funny once, but that once was very long ago. In the context of calling for bans on land sales to Chinese, it was hardly funny at all. Not that it would bother Peters: its job was to earn him a Monday-morning headline, which it did, about which he would be be having a good laugh.

Not so funny was Labour’s plan to allow taxpayers to fund GP visits for over-65s. A sort of Gold Card Plus costing a big minus to taxpayers. If you’ve any doubt about which two words to use to describe it, Danyl has them.

So while Team Red was being outflanked by Team Blue in their campaign launches, Team Red was trying to outflank Team Winston in trying to buy the votes of the country’s biggest voting base. And Team Winston was doing its best to keep ahead of Team Green in their hatred of foreigners exporting our land.

Team Green, earlier on the weekend, was struggling to stay ahead of the six other parties in the minor leaders debate, in which Metiria Turei’s hand was raised more than any matters of substance. Headmistress Turei had as much success in holding back the flood tide of effluent generated with seven party leaders in a room as Colin Craig had in distinguishing himself from Winston Peters, and Jamie Whyte did in distinguishing his flagship policies from association with his party’s disgraced former leader, this conflation of two policies and former leader presumably being Lisa Owen’s prepared question to Whyte about his one law for all policy:

Mr Whyte, you said that Maori are privileged before law; we should all be equal. So can you guarantee that a burglar on a third strike going into court is going to have the privilege of the same defence that your former leader, Mr Banks, did when he went to court?

Whyte looked as quizzical hearing that as you probably did reading it.

An interesting few weeks it won’t be.

What do David Bain and Kevin Rudd have in common?

So, a lot happened overnight, while I was otherwise engaged.

The wildest day ever ended at Wimbledon with favourites knocked out, honest journeymen injured on slippery grass and a spate of retirements right in the midst of games. Events never seen before in  London SW17.

One of the wildest days in recent memory ended in Canberra with the ALP shooting itself in the foot while stabbing itself in the back.¹ And Gillard went, bewailing her fate as a woman (“infamy, infamy, every misogynist had it in for me”) but gratifyingly just in time for everyone to switch over to Origin—a game where the enemy comes in from the front.

And back here at home? While Len Brown was probably out celebrating the National Party conceding him the election², it seems everyone else was glued to TV3 watching another wild theory about the Bain murders. A wild theory based on everyone having forgotten all that Robin Bain would have had to do to kill his family and yet be found clean and neat³ with just two dark lines on his thumb to show for it, right next to a rifle magazine in the most unlikely position possible.⁴

Danyl’s suggestion that debate about the case reminds him of the story of  The Umbrella Man is a good one.

So a lot happened.

Meanwhile, over in South Africa, a man who ended an apartheid state without bloodshed is slipping away as peacefully as the transition he inspired. The world was a better place for his existence.

So, in answer to my headline what do David Bain and Kevin Rudd have in common apart from everyone wanting to talk about them today?

Kevin Rudd wants compensation from voters for the wrong done to him (in his mind) by Julia Gillard, in the form of another long kick at a job he’s already been evicted from. And David Bain wants compensation from taxpayers for the wrong done to him by the courts in having found him guilty several times before releasing him.

Does either deserve it?⁵

UPDATE: Brendan O'Neill reckons the remarkable Rudd/Gillard bitch-fight tells a bigger story about the death of Labourism.

The deposing of Gillard by the substanceless, personality-free Rudd should worry us all, for it suggests that the managerial wing of modern politics, with its grey, autocue-reading, principle-dodging spouters of bland platitudes, is truly in the ascendant. They're now even launching coups…
    Anyone who cares to look closely at what has happened … might see more than a story of two Labor politicians at loggerheads; they might also see that the entire project of Labourism is now gasping for breath, dying slowly, finished off by the loss of purpose and growth of bitchiness in these old parties of the working man.

1. Yes, in the absence of anything more intelligent to say myself, I pinched the line from Barclay Anstiss. Thanks Barclay.
2. Not a U-turn but a loop, says Brownlee. And yes, this line was pinched from Tim Selwyn.
3. Summarised at The Dim Post: “I’ve always thought that David Bain was guilty – mostly because the defence counter-factual in which Robin Bain killed his family, took off all his blood-stained clothes, put them in the wash, put on some different clothes then committed suicide – didn’t really make any sense…”  Not to mention the contortions Robin would have to pull to shoot himself in the back of the head with a rifle.
4. Best summarised by Tim Selwyn: “Problem is the same photo that shows the correspondence does so as if it were posed for the purpose, as if it were staged by someone especially to demonstrate the marks go with the magazine clip. The magazine is on edge about a centimetre from the fingers of the hand with the marks outward… A clip sits on edge and on carpet only 1cm away from the hand of an adult male who has fallen dead to the floor (from shooting himself). Wouldn't the thud jolt the clip over, esp. on carpet? The chances of that happening like that in the photo are so remote. In the scenario I paint the planted clip is pressed into his hand by David and stood on edge to complete the story as a sure alibi…”
5. Whatever your view of David’s guilt or innocence or taste in woolly jumpers, a jury finally found him innocent not guilty—and the way justice is supposed to work after that decision is that compensation for the injustice committed by being wrongly locked up is then paid. Justice wouldn’t be served if it wasn’t. 
But there is nothing in justice that Kevin deserves more than a decent kick in his arse sending him out the door he came in. I expect Australian voters will give that to him swiftly, and deservedly.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Giving a bugger

“Key’s announcement that he plans to respond to the GCSB’s habit of
illegally spying on New Zealanders by making it legal for them to spy on
New Zealanders is the same as National’s previous response when the
police were caught illegally spying on New Zealanders. No one gets held
accountable, and the law is changed to enable the previously illegal activity.
    “The message to government agencies – that they can break the law and
violate people’s rights with impunity because the government will never
prosecute them and will rewrite the law to whatever they want if they get
caught – doesn’t seem very compatible with National’s nominal values of  
freedom, responsibility and limiting the power of the state over individuals.”
                  - Danyl, DIM POST

Godwin’s Law again [updated]

Here’s something to ponder.

Why is it that it is apparently okay for folk to yell “Godwin’s Law!” at people who compare them to Nazis, or who call people Little Hitlers, but those same folk have no problem leaping into print loudly and nastily comparing other people to the Norwegian mass murderer.

See what I mean? They’re all doing it.

Is it just me, or has a rather nasty line been crossed?

UPDATE: According to Danyl it’s okay to call someone a Nazi if they do things Nazis did. Fine. But bizarrely enough, he seems to think the Nazis’ only evil was the Holocaust. As if, absent that, the Nazis were simply a minor nuisance.  You know, book burning, tobacco banning, property thieving, invading Europe, treating human beings like cattle … all just “inconveniences,” apparently, with no relation at all to the ideology that created the Holocaust; so if anyone advocates something along those lines it would be wrong to call them Nazis.

Hear that George?

Meanwhile, emulate anything said by a Norwegian mass murder, anything at all, and you’re clearly an incipient murderer yourself.

A strange double standard indeed. One commented on rather well by Edward Cline in this post.

Minimum wages. Again. [Update 3]

Phil Goff has gone where common sense has feared to tread. Desperate for the attention of anyone, even Matt McCarten’s union, he told Labour delegates over the weekend that if he somehow found his way into Premier House in November, the first thing he would be doing is to price unskilled labour out of the employment market.

Which is exactly what raising the minimum wage to $15/hour would do.  In fact, that’s what having a government-imposed minimum wage does. It sets a floor below which freely-agreed wage rates between employer and employee are made illegal, and would-be marginal employees are instead made depressingly unemployed.

It’s like kicking out the bottom rungs of the employment ladder, and telling the unemployed you’re doing it for their own good.

Now I doubt that Phil Goff disagrees with any of the analysis suggesting his move would cost young and unskilled jobs. Like Paul Bennett, he cares more about his job than theirs.  But if you really think that raising the minimum wage by one-sixth (by $2/hour, from $13 to $15) won’t affect the number of folk to whom employers can offer paying work, then I suggest you buy just as much when the price of beer goes up by one-sixth; just as much milk and cheese when the price of milk and cheese goes up by one-sixth; just as much petrol, as many hamburgers, as much on your mortgage.

If you think that putting up the costs of a thing won’t affect how much of the thing can be bought, then I have a large number of overpriced things right here to sell you.

It’s no different for jobs than it is for milk and cheese.

The only way that raising the minimum wage rate won’t affect any jobs at all is if raising the rate is simply a ratification of wage rises that have already occurred due to increases in productivity and investment. And if you think you’ve seen any of those, I suggest you head to the nearest optometrist to get your eyes looked at.

John Key reckons he knows all  this. He reckons Phil Goff’s wrong. Mind you, if he did know it and if he did care about it enough, then his party wouldn’t have raised the minimum wage rate in February. But they did, so he clearly doesn’t .

And if he did know about, and care about its effect on marginal employees, his party would have voted for Roger Douglas’s bill to abolish the ban on youth rates and so allow employers to pay youth rates again to young unskilled employees (the abandonment of which has seen youth unemployment soar).

But they didn’t. So I doubt he does.

PS: Just as ignorant as the claim that raising minimum-wages by fiat doesn’t cause unemployment is that claim that it does cause price inflation.  That it sets off a so-called “wage-price spiral.” The proponents of this argument reveal an ignorance even greater than Phil Goff’s.

Price inflation is a phenomenon in which we see universally rising prices right across the board. But if the price of Product A goes up because the wages of the those producing it have gone up, then that leaves less in consumers’ pockets to buy Product B, C and D—in which case the reduced demand for these products will lead to lower incomes for these producers and unsold stocks of goods.

The only way the prices of all products can go up right across the board is if the government expands the money supply so that all products can be bought at the new higher prices. In other words, if the increase in money wages is accompanied by a commensurate increase in monetary inflation.

Which is, I suggest, what Phil Goff is counting on when he talks about raising money wages.  At root, he’s just another inflationist.

UPDATE 1: Higher wages do not create price inflation. Don’t just believe me. After all, I don’t even wear a tie:

UPDATE 2: “Could someone please ask Phil Goff [asks Eric Crampton]why, if a fall in unemployment following a small increase in the minimum wage during a boom period is post hoc ergo propter hoc evidence that a large increase during a recession would not reduce employment, why he isn't promising to raise the minimum wage to $20?”

UPDATE 3: Danyl at Dim Post drops this dangerous graphic into the conversation and concludes “more research is needed.”

Quote of the day: “An infinite amount more where that came from”

“Most of the state’s wealth comes from ordinary people working hard and then giving a huge chunk of their income to the government, so spending it is a sacred trust not an endless opportunity to squander it all on gimmicks and whims and political stunts…”
           - Danyl at Dim Post - “An infinite amount more where that came from”

Discuss.

Pseudo-economics and earthquakes

Reading Dim Post this morning, I see that Danyl McLauchlan still believes that money can be plucked from the trees—that it would be “economic stupidity” to cut taxes and government spending to help New Zealanders faltering finances recover from the earthquake.

The reality is [says Danyl] that government spending flows into the economy, so if you cut it you’re going to have basically the same impact as raising taxes.

In other words, it’s not important where money comes from to “subsidise” recovery, just as long as a stream of purchasing power emerges from somewhere. Anywhere. Even if that purchasing power must first be taken out of taxpayers’ pockets.

As if having folk in their role as taxpayers subsidise themselves as consumers somehow provides some sort of stimulus.

What Danyl forgets is is that subsidies are paid for by someone, and that no method has yet been discovered by which the community gets something for nothing.

And if  you think there has been, then I have a plastic waka to sell you.

The Welfare isn’t-Working Group [updated]

The Welfare Working Group reports today, and already rumours have been leaked about what it’s going to recommend.

What it needs to recommend is something drastic. In a country of four million people, there are 356,000 working age people and 220,000 children existing under the state’s welfare umbrella. Well over half-a million souls! than

That is unsustainable economically, culturally, and just in basic human terms.

But will the Working Group offer anything to change it?

I doubt it.

They won’t be changing the notion that the government is our brothers’ keepers—and our wallets are the governments to do with what they wish.

They won’t be changing the idea of “charity” by compulsion.

They won’t be challenging the idea that people should be responsible for their choices.

In other words, they won’t be challenging the system responsible for more than half the money government (over) spends.

But they might do something. They might do something to wean some children off welfare, and arrest some of the culture of intergenerational dependency.

They might.

They might, for example, as has already been leaked, require that solo parents on the DPB start work once their youngest reaches three—a good first start.

But the opponents of this recommendation, and of every other recommendation, have a point—and it’s not something the Welfare Working Group can do anything about, and nor is it something the government will do anything about.

Opponents say that there are no jobs, there is no affordable day care, and that costs to low-income folk are going through the roof.

And they’re right.

They’re right there is no affordable day care—there is no affordable day care because the occupational licensing of day-care providers and their staff has sent the costs of day-care provision through the roof. (Not to mention the cost of building a day-care facility.)

But the government will not be doing anything to change that.

They’re right that food prices are going through the roof—and they’re going through the roof because of the ridiculous sponsorship by international governments of so-called biofuels (which takes valuable land out of food production) and because of the US government’s stimulus packages, which have inflated international commodities (like milk and oil).

But the government will not be doing anything to change that.

They’re right that there are very few jobs around at the moment—and there are very few jobs around at the moment because the cost to businesses of creating an unskilled job is too high, much higher than the amount an unskilled staff member can produce.

But the government will not be doing anything to change that either.

They won’t be doing anything to change anything fundamentally.

They won’t be changing the government schools that continue to pump out youngsters who can’t read or write, and will never gain the skills to be anything but an unskilled employee at best.

They won’t be changing the Resource Management Act or the occupational licensing requirements that mean day-care providers must satisfy rigorous regulations and Resource Management Act requirements to open (restrictions that don’t come cheap), and to be staffed with degree-holders in order to stay open (and degree-holders don’t come cheap either, if you can find them).

They won’t be challenging the idea that “economic stimulus” is good, even though worldwide it is inflating the prices of everything from food to building materials. (It’s not just a local problem. What do you think started the rioting around the Middle East?)

They won’t be changing the pro-union legislation, occupational licensing and minimum wage laws that both push up the costs of employment and push down the productivity of those employed—and that between them raise the barrier for entry to the work force for everyone, especially the unskilled and semi-skilled; that virtually guarantee that labour markets will never clear; and essentially ensure that a huge pool of permanently unemployed will be permanently with us.

And they won’t be removing the handbrake of red tape, regulation and taxes that strangles every single business in this country (not to mention that big red handbrake called the Emissions Tax Scam), and at the moment means every business is focussed on its own economic survival rather than helping to create new jobs.

They won’t be removing the handbrake of red tape, regulation and taxes because the government itself needs them, because it needs the people who needs them (it thrives on them!), and because people keep voting for them—even the people whom it harms. They keep voting for a system that strangles businesses, stifles new jobs, discourages saving and new investment, keeps down real wages … and sees government consuming nearly half of what local businesses produce—even though that system itself is what keeps so many of those voters themselves in poverty.

So in the end, whatever is recommended today, the government won’t be doing anything to change anything. Not fundamentally, they won’t.

Why would they?

UPDATE: Can’t say I disagree with this prediction by Dim Post’s Danyl:

Like almost everything this government does, ‘welfare reform’ will be a political advertising campaign and nothing more.

Doesn’t mean they won’t be lapping up the do-nothingness in No Minister circles.

Blog Awards awarded [updated]

Damn. Bugger.  Blast.

The first annual Air New Zealand Best Blog Award has just been announced, and I didn’t win.

Damn. Bugger.  Blast.

Congratulations however to Cactus Kate, Dim Post, No Right Turn and Whale Oil who between them hoovered up the top prizes in what looked like a pretty fair judgement. Well, mostly fair.  ;^)  [Scroll down from the announcements to see some of the judges’ comments.]  This, in awarding Cactus the palm leaf was right on the money in describing her blog:

Intelligent, persuasive and influential, with the sort of investigative journalism Metro should be publishing.”

So true.

So congratulations to Cactus and the runners up, and thanks to all of them and my regular reads, and everyone else who entered, for helping make to make it worth logging on to the internet every morning.

Still and all: Bugger.

UPDATE: The gracious and the not-so gracious:

• Danyl at Dim Post accepts his “legally dubious runner-up award on behalf of Wellington based satirical bloggers everywhere.”
• Stephen Stratford: “All hail Cactus Kate, Queen Blogger!”
• And Cactus wins the award just as she demonstrates with this post about “Plane Shane” why blogs still have it all over the MSM when it comes to commentary: “Minister of Pinot, Porno, Putting and Private Planes”

Never mind the National Parks!

DPF writes about the negotiations with Tuhoe:

    “I doubt many people have an issue with the actual decision.”

Well, I’m one.  But let’s crack on.  DPF continues on with the thorny issue of the national park :

    “ No other treaty settlement has had a national park as part of it – unless it is gifted back. According to reports the Government has offered co-management of the park, which is not insignificant.”

To which Danyl at the Dim Post replies:

    “No other treaty settlement has had a national park as part of it – but no other tribe has been so violently dispossessed of their land and had it turned into a national park.”

“Violently dispossessed?”  Does this man know any history at all, I wonder?  Those two words suggest not.

Let’s look first at the direct reasons for the dispossession.  And to do that, let’s start with a story.

Imagine, if you will, that a savage murderer has been moving up the country, and he's heading your way.  He seeks refuge in your large, rambling property (which you share with extended family).  Instead of either handing him over or doing him in (in both of which you would be justified), you choose instead to join him in his savagery and plunder, heading out on expeditions of rapine and looting before coming home to hunker down in the least accessible parts of your refuge to fend off John Law, who naturally wants to put a stop to the lawlessness and brutality.

The law decides the safest option is to starve out you and your partner in crime, a strategy that meets with success—but whose perfectly justifiable results a century-and-a-half later are used to justify further pillage, this time of taxpayers apparently ignorant of the reasons for the original dispossession.

This is the short history of what happened when Tuhoe gave refuge to stone killer Te Kooti,  conspired in his genocidal killing sprees, for which you and I are now being punished for the punishment that was meted out then .

Quite apart from the issue of the national parks, does that seem in any way either fair or justified? Did Tuhoe’s behaviour not constitute some sort of reason for punishment?

While you think about that, just read in some more detail about what actually happened.

The year was 1869, and the Kooti One had gone on the run after murdering around sixty people (both Maori and non-Maori) in Poverty Bay, eventually finding support for his campaign of continuing  murder under the shelter of a supportive Tuhoe. For three years he and his Tuhoe allies waged war from the Ureweras on all around, with the full support and connivance of Tuhoe leaders, regularly crossing the Kaingaroa plains, the Urewera and surrounding districts to pillage, burn and kill.  Just one example of his blood lust was the slaughter of 64 defenceless women and children in the Ngati Kahungunu pa at Mohaka, murdered in cold blood as a “lesson” to their fathers and husbands.

Any decent government is going to put a stop to this, which is precisely what the colonial government did.

To drive him out of his lair, says the Oxford History of New Zealand, "Government forces applied a scorched earth policy so that the Tuhoe tribe could not shelter Te Kooti and the dwindling remnants of his band," following which he was driven out and 448,000 acres of Tuhoe land was confiscated as punishment, 230,600 acres of which was later returned.  (Ironically, as reward for his murders, Te Kooti himself was eventually given several acres of land in Ohiwa, BoP, in 1891! So much for justice.)

So the supposed  historic 'injustice' was the product of a tribe unwilling to live under the rule of law who knowingly harboured a mass-murderer, and who then joined him on a campaign of murder. 

“Violent dispossession”?  It looks to me like the initiation of violence went all one way.

In some circles, mere partial confiscation would be seen as being let off easily. 

If violent dispossession is to be despised, and it is, then surely the violent dispossession of people’s lives by Tuhoe and Te Kooti must be worth at least addressing, no? 

Because to talk about Tuhoe’s dispossession without any reference at all to the reasons for that dispossession is just inexcusable,  particularly when such context-dropping is used to justify scores of millions  of taxpayers dollars heading towards the wallets of the descendants of those who helped harbour the thug Te Kooti all those years ago. 

In today’s age of hand-wringing  and revisionist history however, nothing (and certainly not the facts of history) is likely to prove a barrier to today's Tuhoe 'leaders' receiving  large amounts of taxpayer largesse as a reward for living in the past -- a past which is largely a fiction of their own making.

So (to come back to where we first started), it seems popular bloggers just don't do history -- but then neither do the more mainstream media, the Government, or the Waitangi Tribunal.

Not to mention the farce of conducting a Waitangi deal with a tribe who never signed the Waitangi treaty, for an injustice that was anything but. 

If anyone’s being done like a dinner, it’s us.  We taxpayers. 

The only injustice perpetrated here is that being dealt to the taxpayers of New Zealand -- who once again will be forced to pay large amounts of money to tribalists for things we didn't do -- and to the tamariki of Tuhoe, who are being taught once again that tribalism and a focus on the imaginary grievances of the past will have a bigger payoff for them than will addressing and meeting the real challenges of the future and taking up the genuine opportunities of the present.

The whole damn thing is a disgrace.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Figures and quotes are taken from the Oxford History of New Zealand, (pgs. 186, 187);  Penguin History of New Zealand, (pg. 219); 'Te Kooti,' NZ.History.Net; 'Te Kooti,' An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, 1966.