Paying for views you oppose

One of the chief evils of offices of political advocacy is that taxpayers opposed to views which they hold to be wrong-headed, destructive or plain vicious are required, nonetheless, to dip into their pockets and pay for bureaucrats to promote those views.  Paid political activists whose time is paid for by their opponents – what could be more outrageous!

Latest example of this outrage is a magazine issued by the Families Commission which fiercely upholds the power of  government employees to enter your home and tell you how to discipline your children.  While Families Commissioner Christine Rankin has been told by her bosses to keep her mouth shut on matters pertaining to the anti-smacking referendum, you and I and and the opponents of the anti-smacking legislation are having our pockets picked to pay for advocacy which we oppose.  Advocates like Bob McCoskrie of Families First and his supporters are required to find the money to promote the “No” vote campaign, while all the while being required to up the tab for their opponents as well.

Such is the evil of offices of political advocacy like the Families Commission, which opposes the sanctity of the family, or the Children’s Commissioner, which under Cindy Kiro favours the nationalisation of children.

Into this debate steps Stephen Franks, arguing that things have gone so far that it is time to consider the heresy of “a new publicly funded agency to remedy failure in the marketplace of ideas”: an Office of Devil’s Advocacy – and office paid to provide opposition to the paid political advocates of the “dreary anointed.”

Sounds like a job I might enjoy – if, that is, I could stomach the heresy of picking my opponents’ pockets to pay for the unpalatable advocacy I’d be required to promote.  :-)

The biggest dead rat of all [updated]

The National Party spent all last election swallowing dead rats, to the loud applause of its staunchly Labour-Lite supporters who thought this tactic was sheer genius. 

Interest-free student loans to bribe university-age voters? Me too, said the geniuses in the National Party strategy machine. KiwiSaver? Me too, they said. Labour’s Emission’s Trading Scam – a deadweight tax directly on producers – me too!  Foreign policy? Me too. Welfare for Working families?  Me too. No privatisations?  Promising not to slashing bureaucrat numbers? Keeping the cap on GP's fees? No bulk funding for schools?  Income-related rents for state house tenants? No strike force for the Air Force? Keeping the Families Commission? Spending hundreds of millions on a motorway bribe to Peter Dunne-nothing? Me too, me too, me too was the refrain.  There was the faintest whiff of controversy?  Oh, go on then, me too.

National supporters swallowed all the dead rats and kept on coming back for more. They went along with it.  They talked up the “moderation” and they talked about tax cuts.  They kept talking about tax cuts.

But we now know that they lied.  There will be no tax cuts.

When it comes to choosing which promise to break, one of the very few promises National made last year that was worth a damn is the one they choose to break. Like a thin man after an all-you-can-eat competition, what was swallowed so eagerly under all the bright lights now has to be paid for.  By you.

But you asked for it.  You wanted Labour-Lite, and you’ve got it. But now you can remove the word “Lite,” and any claim that this lot are either honest or competent.

You might object that no one could know in the election campaign of October/November last year that things were about to collapse.  That Billy Bob and John Boy wouldn’t know how bad things were until Treasury’s frightening forecasts of December last  year. This is just bullshit on a stick.

First of all, anybody who could read a newspaper in October last year could see that the crash had already happened.  It wasn’t about to happen, it already  had (see the graph at right of the Dow Jones index from July 2008, and notice just when exactly it all fell off a cliff).  And despite the almost surreal election campaign, when “don’t mention the crash” seemed to be the refrain, anybody who could understand what they were reading back then would have realised right away the implications for the government’s budget and the spending promises being made.  If they didn’t know, they were incompetent.  If they did know, they were lying about all the promises.

Second, this was a party who – even in the face of the world economic collapse – were promising to borrow to fund tax cuts.  This is reprehensible enough in normal times.  In the face of the worst economic collapse since the onset of the Great Depression, it was either a promise that those who made it knew they could never deliver, or a promise they were too incompetent to know they could not deliver.  They either lied, or just didn’t care enough to tell the truth.

A responsible political party doesn’t promise what it can’t deliver.  It would know that it can’t promise tax cuts without corresponding cuts in government spending.  John Boy and Billy Bob thought they could fake it.  That they could borrow and spend and promise the earth – and somehow never be found out.

But this Thursday it’s crunch time.  Caught between the rock of an economic slump that had already happened when they started swallowing dead rats, and the hard place of credit-rating agencies about to mark down a government about to go heavily into debt, the Billy Bob and John Boy are about to kick in the teeth are those very people who’ve been over-taxed for the last umpty-tum years, while keeping the good times going for all the parasites they’ve been paying for.

And people wonder why we call them bastards.

UPDATE 1: Paul Walker points out National have now given us the National Infrastructure Advisory Board to go along with all the other dead rats on the sinking fiscal ship.  Aren’t we lucky.

UPDATE 2:  And just to show I’m an equal-opportunity despiser, its worth pointing out that the ACT Party will be voting to support the National Party’s broen promise on Thursday – voting for no tax cuts, no real spending cuts, and around a decade of solid deficit spending. 

Is that really what you’d describe as “the courage to do what’s right?”

Uptown Top Rankin [updated]

There must surely be many more useless government departments than the Fatuous Family’s Commission, and there is surely fierce competition for the spot, but the government department created by the Clark Government as a bribe to keep Peter Dunne on side (and to foster the illusion that his years in parliament had actually achieved something) must be the most well known as a prime candidate for the chop.

What has it actually achieved? Nothing. What was it supposed to achieve? To fool Done-Nothing's supporters into thinking he'd achieved something in his career.

So when former bureaucrat Christine Rankin was appointed to the position of head of the Fatuous Commission yesterday it hardly made my heart sing. Yes, she took the right stand on the anti-smacking bill promoted by Sue Bradford (who yesterday was disgracefully characterising Rankin as being a promoter of violence towards children) but she’s still just a wasteful bloody bureaucrat in charge of a department that should not exist.

So that’s what I was thinking as I listened to her interviewed on Newstalk ZB last night. That anyone who could make both Sue Bradford and Peter Done-Nothing expose their true character can't be all bad (and aren't they nasty when they're crossed) , but this is still just another high-spending bureaucrat in charge of just another useless quango.

But then she said something that made my jaw drop. Larry Williams put to her that very point – that the Families Commission was nothing more than a political creation, by expediency out of MMP, and a complete waste of time, space and money – and she agreed. And she said that if after examination she still held that view, then she would be working to close it down.

I’ve never heard a bureaucrat say that before – even with those few weasel words. So just this once, I’m going to support the appointment of a new bureaucrat, no matter how wasteful she's been in the past. Well done Ms Rankin. You now have a year’s grace before I see you as just another jobsworth.

Here’s a song which may or may not be related to this discussion:

 UPDATE:  Oops.  A commenter points out that Rankin isn’t boss, “she's only one of seven. Also look up the FamCom website to check out the drivel they produce. The thing should have been abolished....full stop.”

Message to National: Stop the spending [updated]

The Hive has a bunch of excellent questions that have just the one obvious answer:

Here we are in the midst of the greatest shock to the global financial system since the 1930s and where is the government response???
Everywhere around the world governments are in crisis mode trying to do something about restoring confidence but all we have here is a government talking about the money being spent, something they seem pleased about because it makes it difficult for the opposition to campaign on the positive agenda of providing support to the productive sector.
We welcome National's announcements today on the tax front, but hope they move more onto the front foot during the election campaign about the need to refocus activity away from boosting government to boosting more productive activity. Don't worry about Michael Cullen. He has no credibility left. He has just been forced to admit that he has squandered nine years of good growth.
What have we got to show for it? One of the lowest productivity growth rates in the OECD and continuing slippage in the per capita wealth ladder.
Why is National not hammering home this message, and why are they not slamming the current crowd over the waste that has occurred under their management?

Why is National not hammering home this message? For the simple reason that their message to date is essentially no different to the other team's. This afternoon is their opportunity to change that.

Let's be clear, if by "government response" is meant bailouts, deficits and spending on "public works" -- the "depression fighting" nostrums tried and failed in the past -- then I definitely mean none of the above.

But National's tax-cut announcement today, so strongly signalled long before the arse fell out of the world's banking system, leaves them in a bind. The Dominion's Tracy Watkins understates the problem:

After a day of carnage on world money markets and grim Treasury predictions of rising government debt and ballooning deficits, National has taken a knife to its tax-cut package - but leader John Key said the pledge to deliver about $50 a week to workers on the average wage remained on track.

Let's get some perspective: the tax-cut announcement comes not just after "a day of carnage," but (as the Hive says) in the face of the greatest shock to the global financial system since the 1930s, with more, much more, to come. It's not just "rising government debt and ballooning deficits," it's collapsing economies and expectations we're staring into an economic void. In the US in the 1930s the sort of carnage we're seeing now led to a whole decade of carnage. That's the enormity of the problem that any tax-cut package needs to address, because whatever problems with government spending were presaged in the 'PREFU' figures, they're dwarfed by the scale of the economic collapse now racing around the world's markets.

And just by the way, if anyone thinks that in a time of such uncertainty that economists can predict government receipts for the next ten years then I have a bridge I can sell them. There's no way to predict ten years ahead as the PREFU has tried to do -- and especially not now with all the changes afoot in the world's economy. This is the sort of crystal-ball gazing that makes economists look about as reliable as TV psychics. Hell, the PREFU figures were prepared just five weeks ago, and with the world collapsing around us they were already out of date on the very day they were released.

Not the least of the many uncertainties is how governments will respond to the ongoing crises, and the effect that will have on the chaos.

Which is the real interest at the heart of this afternoon's announcement, isn't it: Not so much in the size of the tax cuts, but whether Key and English have realised the enormity of the international problem, and whether they're adept enough to address it. (And when you see the words "adept" and "Bill English" used in close proximity, you realise the nub of the problem.)

English said on Monday immediately after the books were opened that the tax cuts would still go ahead as planned. Key said yesterday they would still go ahead, and would be slightly altered. And he said they'd be tax cuts without borrowing,

That doesn't give cause for encouragement. First of all, we're all of us aware the economic outlook has more than slightly altered. If the plans haven't more than slightly altered, that's a worry. And second, we already know Key is spinning when he says he's not borrowing for tax cuts.

A responsible political party doesn't spin. They don't need to.

A responsible political party would know that a cut in taxes should be accompanied by a corresponding cut in government spending.

They would know that when the economy tanks, then government receipts go down -- so even more cuts need to be made.

They would know that if they cut taxes without borrowing to fund either tax cuts or infrastructure, they bid valuable resources and capital away from the people who do grow the economy, leaving them in the hands of the unproductive government sector.

(They would know too that to the extent they don't cut government spending at all, they divert valuable resources and capital into the unproductive government sector, and away from the people who do grow the economy.)

And they would know too that they need to resist the siren calls of those who claim deficit spending is desirable in a depression because it provides the "purchasing power" to "stimulate" the economy. They know that the US government under both Hoover and Rooosevelt ran enormous, eye-watering deficits right throughout the thirties and early forties, with the only effect being to delay the recovery for that long (the deficit went from 20% of US GDP then to 40%, then finally, desperately, to 128% of GDP! It was "bold" interventions like this that prolonged the Depression, turning it into the only market correction that is associated with an entire decade. (The Depression actually lasted 16 years, all of which featured high-powered deficit spending.))

What anyone with a brain does know is that things are going to be bad, and that when things are bad government receipts will drop -- there's just no way round that. So what's crucial this afternoon is to see whether National knows this, whether it has planned for this, and whether therefore its tax-cut plans include plans to cut spending to match those cuts in receipts.

It's not like Mother Hubbard's cupboard is bare. It's not. It's just dripping with fat, fat rich with pork -- much of it very easily excised. It's just laden down with sacred cows that need killing. You could start with these boondoggles and just work on down:

• Cindy Kiro's Office for the Children's Commissioner (he hasn't stopped the killing, has he)
• Peter Dunne's Families Commission (ditto)
• Paula Rebstock's Commerce Commission (AKA Communist Commission)
• David Lange's Ministry for Women's Affairs
• Jim Anderton's Ministry of Economic Development (the economy would develop quite nicely without Jim, thank you)
• The Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs
• The Ministry for Maori Affairs (let all 'their people' organise their own damn affairs)
• The Race Relations Conciliator (have you noticed him successfully conciliating any races? No, me either)
• The Ministry of Youth Development (let hoodie-wearers buy their own spray cans)
• Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand
• Asia New Zealand Foundation
• Electricity Commission (nice work, guys, well done)
• Energy Efficiency & Conservation Authority (ditto)
• The National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women, part of Department of Labour (bet there's some unemployable women on this 'council,' right?)
• The Department of Labour (let's see them work for their money)

As PJ O'Rourke points out, the first secret when you're trying to balance the budget and give tax cuts the size of Texas is to avoid looking for ridiculous examples of government waste. Nope. What you have to do, particularly when things are as parlous as they are now, is to slash wholesale, cutting bone if necessary -- after all, this is only government bone, with most of it concentrated around government skulls.

There's no shortage of spending to cut.

There's no shortage of parasites to sack -- thirteen more hectares of the buggers since 1999!

There's at least $20 billion of fat to cut.

You can stop the wasteful spending on FailRail in its tracks -- stopping the expensive electrification, and the upgrades to Auckland's rail network from which few will ever benefit.

You can stop some of the more ethereal roading projects, like the Penlink highway in Whangaparoa, freeing up construction resources for more important private activity.

You could pull some or all of past and future election bribes -- interest-free student loans, Welfare for Working Families and the like.

You can realise there are 407 -- four hundred and goddamn seven! -- government departments, offices, organisations, councils, SOEs and quangos just waiting, nay demanding, to be chopped down to size, in which hundreds of thousands of people spend their days drawing down a tax-paid salary just to dream up new methods by which to get in our way. Given the parlous economic conditions, it would be foolish indeed not to liberate these guys and gals just to get them off our backs, not to mention to save us millions of dollars in tax.

You could do all or even some of that ... or you could make it obvious to everyone that you're not a responsible party, that you have no idea how to respond to the world's economic crisis, that you'd be no damn different to the current bunch of thieves except in the form your election bribes take.

In just a few hours time I guess we'll have our answer.

UPDATE 1: We had our answer: it was the latter. Liberty Scott summarises: The top tax rate inches down to 37% over 2 years, the bottom rate from 21% to.... 20%! The envy tax stays. The threshold for reaching the 33% rate moves up to NZ$50,000. And for low income earners, there's actually a small increase in tax.

Truly pathetic.

UPDATE 2: Pacific Empire updates the complete list of bureaucratic sacred cows that need to be slaughtered. See How Big is Our Government?

MMP?

MMP?  STV?  First Past the Post?  Doesn't matter to me which electoral system is used in New Zealand -- frankly, the whole argument is a populist sideshow.

What's important is not the method by which governments are elected, but the way in which they're tied up.

What's important is not the counting of heads regardless of content -- whichever method is used to count the empty heads -- but putting things beyond the vote that are far too important to leave at the mercy of an empty-headed majority.

Sure, we can look forward every three years or so to several weeks of no government while the power-lusters negotiate how the cake is carved up, but when the new Government is inevitably formed it frequently looks like a mongrel combination of both fish and fowl, and it frequently ends up spending even more than it would otherwise due to the need to buy off smaller parties (did someone say Families Commission, solar panels and Gold Cards?).

Sure, it can slow down legislation.  A little.  But it's also true that the minority 'tail' gets to wag the whole country, introducing legislation that's a real dog (how amusing that Greens's co-leader Russel Norman sees minorities gaining power through the construction of the electoral system as a problem).

As Lindsay Perigo points out, "MMP has already done its damage, giving unreconstructed socialists like Banderton and the Luddite Greens clout in government out of all proportion to their popular support."  The point is not to change the electoral system, but to to protect ourselves from Nanny governments.  We might begin by remembering that

Democracy, so often and so tragically confused with freedom, allows for the destruction of freedom at the behest of majorities or pluralities. In particular it enfranchises welfare cannibals who vote for the party that promises them the greatest amount of money stolen from its legitimate owners. Elections become, in H. L. Mencken’s immortal words, ‘an advance auction of stolen goods.’

"Any meaningful electoral reform must at minimum disenfranchise those who suck on the state tit. Bailey Kurariki, who is no doubt looking forward to voting Labour, the party that most conscientiously spawns his ilk, should not have the vote at all until he is self-supporting.

"Most importantly, the inalienable rights of every individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness must be placed out of harm’s way, beyond the vote. Politicians must be constitutionally prevented from violating those rights, no matter how many state-indoctrinated zombies demand such violation.

"Every adult human being has the right to live his life as he/she chooses, constrained only by the requirement to respect the right of others to do the same. This right should be enshrined in a constitution and made sacrosanct in law,” Perigo concludes.

MMP or not?

The MMP electoral system used in New Zealand and Germany is a mess. Sure, we can look forward every three years or so to several weeks of no government -- something for which we can at least be thankful -- but when the new Government is inevitably formed it frequently looks like a mongrel combination of both fish and fowl, and it frequently ends up spending even more than it would otherwise due to the need to buy off smaller parties (did someone say Families Commission, solar panels and Superannuation?).

Political paralysis is one of the features of the MMP system; while all the MMP-generated ducking and shoving does perhaps discourage significant reform, when the appetite for reform is mostly in the direction of more government rather than less, it seems to me that any paralyis is a good thing. When 'reform' means the imposition of more meddling, as it usually does in Helengrad, then a handbrake is what you need, not the promise of an open road. Frederic Sautet of the Austrian Economist has surveyed the landscape after the recent German and NZ elections however, and he disagrees:

Germany and New Zealand are in difficult situations: they both have similar electoral systems and they both have coalition governments. Whether Merkel will be able to implement social change à la Ludwig Erhard is difficult to say. While this is what Germany badly needs, my guess is that it won’t happen. As for Clark, she will be in the hands of her coalition partners and more backsliding is to be expected for the next three years in NZ.

In Clark's case, 'backsliding' is to be encouraged; imagine what she'd be doing if she really had her druthers.

What was the election for, then?

For once, I'm almost in agreement with Rodney.

TV One’s Guyon Espiner reports what the parties want:

Greens: 500,000 solar panels and a “buy kiwi made” campaign.

Maori Party: Review the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

New Zealand First: Golden Age card increasing entitlements to senior citizens and removing GST from petrol.

United Future: No change to cannabis law and retain the Families Commission.

Add in Labour’s free loans to students. And ask yourself was that really what the whole campaign was about?

No steps forward then (with the possible exception of the unjust Foreshore and Seabed Act), but at least only baby steps backwards. Given what we've had to put up with in preceding years, that's some sort of a boon. The legislature will soon be back in session, and as Mark Twain warned neither property nor liberty will be safe, but if this is the extent of the new impositions to be exacted upon us, we might at least reflect that while things could be an awful lot better, it could very well have been much, much worse.

Stop taxing families

It's truly a hold-the-phone day when a National Party press release is found to be talking sense, but that day is now here.

Judith Collins points out today that the Labour Government's Working for Families package is an election bribe paid being paid for with voters' own money, and furthermore it's a bribe that is damaging to both families and the economy. She's a little less succinct than that of course, but that's her essential point and one with which I can only agree.

Stop stealing from people and give then their money back, she (almost) says - unusual stuff from a National Party who was once pretty good at election bribes themselves: "Keeping families functioning and healthy is a tough business," she correctly concludes. "It is certainly too tough for a bunch of politically correct 'experts.' I say, give the money back to the families that are functioning, looking after their own children, paying their way and raising responsible adults."

Quite right. The only thing I might add to this is that all the money stolen from them by government should be given back, not just the billions wasted on the Families Commission and on turning the middle classes into welfare beneficiaries.

In this respect I invite Ms Collins and her readers to reflect that when the total tax-take is getting on for 47% of the country's GDP, then one parent from each working family is going out to work just to pay that family's tax bill.

If Ms Collins or Mr Maharey really would like to build stronger families, then perhaps they might consider advocating stealing from them a lot less. If taxes were just a fraction of what they are now, then both parents going out to work would be a choice for families to make for themselves, and not a necessity.

Tags: Economics Education

• Politics-National