So says the happy Google machine. I am still recovering from International Men’s Day, the one day of the year where we get a break from doing what our wives tell us. At least that is the idea, I assume.
I think Google is talking about crooks that steal your money. One definition has it:
… the use of deception or manipulation intended to achieve financial gain.
Well, where to start? There is no doubt that we live in the scamming age. Unfortunately, most of the scammers are elected politicians, highly paid, Canberra-based bureaucrats, totally unnecessary Human Resources managers of corporates, Big Pharma grifters and private equity companies funding most of the world’s ills.
Scammers in plain sight who can never be arrested for their crimes. And whom we can never escape.
Old libertarians like the late, great Murray Rothbard and the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick used to say that taxation was on a par with forced labour.
In 1974, Robert Nozick famously claimed, “taxation of earnings is on a par with forced labor.” If we assume that forced labor is morally objectionable, something akin to slavery, then Nozick’s claim about taxation challenged the very heart of socialist redistributive liberalism.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/sjp.12395
See also:
https://mises.org/profile/murray-n-rothbard
It was, and is. Now, more than ever. Some institutions still celebrate “tax freedom day”, that day each year when we cease to work for the State and start to work for ourselves.
https://providenceproperty.com.au/understanding-tax-freedom-day/
Of course, tax freedom day gets later and later every year.
The traditional supporters of the minimal state were horrified by what was, back then, only a little more than a minimal state. Governments in Australia did so little back in the 1950s that the Prime Minister of the day, Robert Menzies, used regularly to head off by ship to the mother country, such was his state of relaxation about political affairs back home. He would meet the Queen and watch the cricket, blissfully confident that all would be well during his extended absences. And, by and large, it was. Canberra, then, did very little.
What the anarcho-capitalists would make of governments that routinely hose up against the wall gazillions of dollars of our money, solving problems that either don’t exist or cannot be solved by government, is anybody’s guess. Their words would likely not be flattering. Take a few examples, in no particular order:
· Getting the taxpayer to participate in his or her own economic Armageddon by subsidising renewable energy in the form of bird-chomping eco-crucifixes (as James Delingpole calls wind farms) and solar panel farms;
· Having taxpayers pay for the State to raise the children of women who somehow have been conned into believing that wage slavery means emancipation;
· Getting us to pay for endless wars that America wants and which they and we never win, because we cannot;
· Paying for public servants to attend casual racism awareness course and the like;
· Having our governments spend close to a trillion dollars of our money to combat a virus of decidedly middling proportions while locking us in our homes, destroying our small businesses, preventing us from travel and throwing us out of work. Oh, and killing a goodly proportion of us with their compulsory jabs;
· The spend, in billions, on quarantine camps for the Covid hordes, camps that are now empty;
· Did I mention desalination plants? Needed for when the rain stops falling;
· The bloated salaries and expenses of Australia’s delegation to the UNFCCC (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), aka COP 28 in Dubai, convened to combat “global boiling” and lie to us endlessly about the climate non-emergency. The delegation is led by one Dr Sally Box, and yes, there really is a term “climate diplomacy”;
· Giving the World Health Organisation $100 million on top of all the other money we give them, so that they (with their funding mates Bill Gates and the Chinese Communist Party) can relieve us and our nation of the freedom to determine what we think is a pandemic as opposed to a mild virus;
· The various non-projects of Daniel Andrews like the Commonwealth Games and the east-West Melbourne Tunnel, paid for by the taxpayer but – literally – not built or staged;
· The rampant out-sourcing of government functions for which we pay, to cronies, political mates and consultants over whom we have no control whatsoever;
· The Liberal Party pretending to be liberal, or, dare one think it, conservative;
· The modern Labor Party pretending to care about the working class.
The last two should involve prosecutions under the Trade Practices Act. These were or are all scams. Every one of them. They are a mere drop in the bucket when one thinks of the whole gamut of government activity that we never vote for yet endlessly support with our forced labour.
Now we live in the age of immoral governance 2.0. If it is morally wrong for any government to make its citizens pay tax – beyond funding the basic, minimal state functions of policing and international relations – what should we make of the morality of governments which make us pay for things of which we utterly disapprove, things they didn’t even seek, let alone gain, our permission to do, and things that they said they wouldn’t do, but now are doing?
We should resist them. They daily offend every tenet of liberal democratic theory, the foundational principle of “no taxation without representation” – I am not represented by anyone in the Australian Lower House; nor are probably more than 20 per cent of the voters – and the notion of political obligation requiring the consent of the governed. Not to mention the flawed but still oft-quoted “mandate” theory. I am yet to see an informed, compelling rebuttal of Nozick, Rothbard and their ilk. I would like to see someone try to defend the practices of the twenty-first century Hyper-State on moral philosophy grounds.
The doyen of Austrian economists – with all due respect to von Mises – Friedrich Hayek based his theory of, and support for, limited government on the “fatal conceit” of central planning, that governments can know what the preferences are of all the scattered individuals in society. Of course, they cannot. His theory was outlined in his 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and in his 1948 book, Individualism and Economic Order. Hayek’s theory is all about distributed knowledge versus centralised power. As even Wikipedia understands:
Hayek argued that information is decentralized – that knowledge is unevenly dispersed among different members of society – and that as a result, decisions are best made by those with local knowledge rather than by a central authority.
There are two elements of the hubris of modern governments that, together, flip the bird at the obviously correct Hayek. The first is that governments now simply don’t care whether they act in order to deliver on the wishes of their voters. They could not give a rat’s. The second is that now, governments actively pursue what they know the voters do NOT want. Take mass immigration as but one example.
Something that neither Hayek nor Nozick nor Rothbard would have seen coming is the globalisation of government scamming and the active involvement of the private sector in this process. Stakeholder capitalism, the currency of the great reset, just wasn’t a thing then. As Tucker Carlson says these days, “business hates your family”. Back in the day, it was only national governments that scammed taxpayers. Now it is a free-for-all, and globally. The scam? That there are “global problems” and that they require “global solutions”. There aren’t, and they don’t. It was a scam thought up by the Rockefellers in the 1950s. Make the problem global and you are half way there.
In the case of the Covid non-event, they used every tool of propaganda out of the Edward Bernays playbook, all the way to (taxpayer funded) “nudge” units to get us to do things we did not wish to do. Followed by endlessly repeated government advertising campaigns. It cannot get much worse than that. Getting us to pay for their schemes that are patently NOT in our interests, and lying to us in order that we act against our interests. We. Paid. For. Covid. Policy. The global Milgram experiment in which our embedded obedience to authority and our tax dollars combined in lethal ways to do us in and crush our liberal democracies.
https://simmonsopinions.medium.com/revisiting-milgram-in-the-coronavirus-era-8222289ec94c
We all paid, literally and in every other way.
Enjoy Scam Awareness Week. It might be one of the few of these multifarious celebration days that actually strikes an unintended chord with the scammed.
Paul Collits
28 November 2023
I remember when it didn’t matter who was governing or who won. They left us alone to get on with our lives. Now government and big business are in our face. They do exactly what we don’t want to appease a minority.
Re "Canberra, then, did very little."
And now what does it do? Not working in our best interests that's for sure.
All the legislation, the bills, slipping through the parliament with rubber stamps.
We're so over-governed.
And we didn't consent to it...