"Under a better Resource Management system [sic], there would be no need for fast-track approval processes."

"Under a better Resource Management system [sic], there would be no need for fast-track approval processes. The fast process would simply be the process."

~ Nick Clark from his op-ed 'For a better fast-track'

Paying bureaucrats is not a stimulus programme

"It would be a mistake to view public sector staffing as a stimulus programme for Wellington and cafes and bars."

~ Eric Crampton (and Liberty Scott) on Tova's tosh

 

"The capitalist system was termed 'capitalism' not by a friend of the system, but by Karl Marx" [updated]

"The capitalist system was termed 'capitalism' not by a friend of the system, but by an individual who considered it to be the worst of all historical systems, the greatest evil that had ever befallen mankind. That man was Karl Marx. Nevertheless, there is no reason to reject Marx’s term, because it describes clearly the source of the great social improvements brought about by capitalism. 

    "Those improvements are the result of capital accumulation; they are based on the fact that people, as a rule, do not consume everything they have produced, that they save—and invest—a part of it. 

    "There is a great deal of misunderstanding about this ... [not least that] capitalist savings benefit workers.

"An often unrealised fact about capitalism is this: savings mean benefits for all those who are anxious to produce or to earn wages. When a man has accrued a certain amount of money—let us say, one thousand dollars—and, instead of spending it, entrusts these dollars to a savings bank or an insurance company, the money goes into the hands of an entrepreneur, a businessman, enabling him to go out and embark on a project which could not have been embarked on yesterday, because the required capital was unavailable.
    "What will the businessman do now with the additional capital? The first thing he must do, the first use he will make of this additional capital, is to go out and hire workers and buy raw materials—in turn causing a further demand for workers and raw materials to develop, as well as a tendency toward higher wages and higher prices for raw materials. Long before the saver or the entrepreneur obtains any profit from all of this, the unemployed worker, the producer of raw materials, the farmer, and the wage- earner are all sharing in the benefits of the additional savings.
    "When the entrepreneur will get something out of the project depends on the future state of the market and on his ability to anticipate correctly the future state of the market. But the workers as well as the producers of raw materials get the benefits immediately....
    "The scornful depiction of capitalism by some people as a system designed to make the rich become richer and the poor become poorer is wrong from beginning to end. Marx’s thesis regarding the coming of socialism was based on the assumption that workers were getting poorer, that the masses were becoming more destitute, and that finally all the wealth of a country would be concentrated in a few hands or in the hands of one man only. And then the masses of impoverished workers would finally rebel and expropriate the riches of the wealthy proprietors....
    "If we look upon the history of the world, and especially upon the history of England since 1865, we realize that Marx was wrong in every respect. There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way. All these improvements of the last eighty or ninety years were made in spite of the prognostications of Karl Marx.
    "We must realise, however, that this higher standard of living depends on the supply of capital. ... A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital per unit of its population."

~ Ludwig Von Mises, from the collection of six of his lectures titled Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, and in Brazil under the title As Seis Lições (The Six Lessons) [hat tip Renato Moicano]

UPDATE:  Sad news just in that economic historian Robert Hessen has just died. David R. Henderson remembers him, and quotes from his contribution to the Concise Encylopaedia of Economics on Capitalism. 

"Capitalism,” a term of disparagement coined by socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, is a misnomer for “economic individualism,” which Adam Smith earlier called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” (Wealth of Nations).   Economic individualism’s basic premise is that the pursuit of self-interest and the right to own private property are morally defensible and legally legitimate. Its major corollary is that the state exists to protect individual rights. Subject to certain restrictions, individuals (alone or with others) are free to decide where to invest, what to produce or sell, and what prices to charge. There is no natural limit to the range of their efforts in terms of assets, sales, and profits; or the number of customers, employees, and investors; or whether they operate in local, regional, national, or international markets.

Here’s another great paragraph:

In early-nineteenth-century England the most visible face of capitalism was the textile factories that hired women and children. Critics (Richard Oastler and Robert Southey, among others) denounced the mill owners as heartless exploiters and described the working conditions—long hours, low pay, monotonous routine—as if they were unprecedented. Believing that poverty was new, not merely more visible in crowded towns and villages, critics compared contemporary times unfavourably with earlier centuries. Their claims of increasing misery, however, were based on ignorance of how squalid life actually had been earlier. Before children began earning money working in factories, they had been sent to live in parish poorhouses; apprenticed as unpaid household servants; rented out for backbreaking agricultural labor; or became beggars, vagrants, thieves, and prostitutes. The precapitalist “good old days” simply never existed (see industrial revolution and the standard of living).

And:

Despite these constraints, which worked sporadically and unpredictably, the benefits of capitalism were widely diffused. Luxuries quickly were transformed into necessities. At first, the luxuries were cheap cotton clothes, fresh meat, and white bread; then sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, and musical instruments; then automobiles, washing machines, clothes dryers, and refrigerators; then telephones, radios, televisions, air conditioners, and freezers; and most recently, TiVos, digital cameras, DVD players, and cell phones. ...

That these amenities had become available to most people did not cause capitalism’s critics to recant, or even to relent. Instead, they ingeniously reversed themselves. Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse proclaimed that the real evil of capitalism is prosperity, because it seduces workers away from their historic mission—the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism—by supplying them with cars and household appliances, which he called “tools of enslavement.”Some critics reject capitalism by extolling “the simple life” and labeling prosperity mindless materialism. In the 1950s, critics such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Vance Packard attacked the legitimacy of consumer demand, asserting that if goods had to be advertised in order to sell, they could not be serving any authentic human needs. They charged that consumers are brainwashed by Madison Avenue and crave whatever the giant corporations choose to produce and advertise, and complained that the “public sector” is starved while frivolous private desires are being satisfied. And having seen that capitalism reduced poverty instead of intensifying it, critics such as Gar Alperovitz and Michael Harrington proclaimed equality the highest moral value, calling for higher taxes on incomes and inheritances to massively redistribute wealth, not only nationally but also internationally.

A question for you all on those sackings [updated]

 

At times like this you might ask yourself:
"What would Sir Humphrey do?"

Imagine you're Sir Humphrey. Head of a government department.

Now, imagine you minister has issued instructions to sack a given number of pen-pushers in your department. Simply to sack a given number, without real guidance as to whom. Leaving it to you to decide on whom the axe will fall.

So, here's the question: do you sack the folk who are most effective and most needed?

Or are those to whom you give the DCM the least useful, most surplus-to-requirements?

I'll give you a moment to think about it ...

What to say post-fight

 

I don't recommend you tune into cage-fighting TV. Not unless you just skip straight to the post-fight interviews — though I doubt they're all as admirable as this one ...

"If you care about your fucking country," said rising Brazilion champion Renato Moicano, "read Ludwig Von Mises and 'The Six Lessons' of the Austrian economics school, motherfuckers."

He's right you know. You should. Motherfuckers. 

But a strange thing to have in your head, right, after several minutes of beating in someone else's. He explained later that "as his platform continues to enlarge, [he] wants to use his spotlight to help change the world, particularly the United States."

“A lot of people talk to me about money. But, the problem is, it’s not about how much money you get, it’s about how much money you can keep. With the inflation how it is…and this book, he explained what the government does with your money ,with taxes, and the way they [finance] debt… 

“[I]n Brazil, people are going crazy with [my interview], a lot of people have gotten interested in it and how people are getting taxed with inflation. My message is so important…it’s crystal clear. If you don’t control the debt, that’s going to ruin this country. We need a free market of ideas.”

He's right. We do. 

[Click here for the free e-book or PDF; and on the Ludwig Von Mises tag below to see what I've written over the years about the great man.] 

UN 'integrity'

"Twenty years of soft power, lobbies and corruption and we have a UN where Russia occupies the chair of Security Council, Iran chair of Disarmament, Saudi Arabia as chair of Gender Equality and Women's Rights."

~ Arthur Rehi

"The RMA’s starting position is that you need permission. It is going to be dumped." But ...

"Did you know it costs 50% more to build a house here than it does in Australia? ...
    "We [sic] have successfully regulated our housing market so tightly that only the children of existing homeowners can obtain the financing to purchase property. We [sic] have created a landed gentry. ...
    "There are two reasons for this; land use restrictions and building regulations.
    "Let’s start with land use. The Resource Management Act, or RMA, began life in 1991 as a blueprint for preventing Kiwis doing anything with their land unless it complied with a national environmental plan and had the consent of the local council. ...
     Again. ...
    "Simon Court, the Act MP and Undersecretary with the responsibility for drafting the replacement, has a different outlook. You can do whatever you want with your land, so long as it does not interfere with someone else’s property or rights. [Not true. See below.* - Ed.]
    "[But] this reform is 18 months away and will be in place for less than a year before the next election. ... National and Act have had six years to draft their RMA replacement. [And they haven't. - Ed.]
    "There are plenty of interested parties who would have contributed to this effort and a bill should have been ready to present to a select committee in the first hundred days. [Yes, it damn well should have been. - Ed.]
    "The longer any RMA replacement has to gain acceptance the more durability it will enjoy upon a return to a Labour-led government, and Labour have their RMA bill already drafted and ready to go; that being the one Court and his mates deleted on Christmas Eve. [Not to mention the not-insignificant regime uncertainty in the market until the replacement Act filters down to council's 'planners.' - Ed.]

~ Damien Grant, from his over-optimistic column 'Housing market so tightly regulated we’ve created landed gentry'

* Court's most-developed explanation of his proposed 'Urban Development Act' begins this way:

"Under ACT’s Urban Development Act, limits for urban development would continue to be based on locally-decided [council] plans."

So rather than a plethora of sackings of the unproductive, Court — a 'planner' himself by profession — proposes instead to keep his colleagues planners hard at work.

"These plans [his 'reform' plan continues] have democratic mandates [sic] and protect the legitimate expectations of property owners, while allowing councils to plan for infrastructure delivery."

Translation: Our party's two leading MPs represent home-owners in the country's leafiest suburbs, pledged to protect the unreasonable expectations of those suburbs' home-owners about what can be built next door.

"Councils [says Court] will not be permitted to restrict housing density more than the Auckland Mixed Housing Suburban zone."

Auckland's MHS "zone," by the way, essentially mandates for more of the same tightly restricted suburbia. And this confirms that zoning will still be with us, as well as planners. (How this reflects, as Grant says, 'doing what you want on your land as long as it doesn't affect someone else's property right,' Court alone knows. I suggest they both read Bernard Siegan.) 

"These zoning rules [Court says] have already been validated [sic] through extensive litigation in the Environmental Court ..."

One would have expected to see the back of that meddling court damned soon. Sadly, it seems however, we have a Court who refuses to meddle enough in his 'reforms,' and is doing it so damn slowly we will have years of uncertainty in what folk can plan to build on their own land.

 

"Whenever there is a proposal for a tax cut ... "

"Whenever there is a proposal for a tax cut, media pundits demand to know how you are going to pay for it. But when there are proposals for more spending on social programmes, those same pundits are strangely silent."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates [hat tip Cafe Hayek]

 

"...by definition, good people don't want to control other people's lives.”

“Some leftists believe that the communist world would work if 'good people' were in control. But they don't realise that, by definition, good people don't want to control other people's lives.”

~ attrib. Ludwig von Mises [hat tip Stephen Hicks]

The Governor who printed $50 billion of inflation ...

"Yesterday the Reserve Bank ... released a statement saying, 'The NZ economy continues to evolve as anticipated by the Monetary Policy Committee.' What a line coming from a Governor who told 'Bloomberg News' in the US in 2021, whilst he was busy printing $50 billion in cash, which is the primary cause of our current high inflation, that "The fear of the 70s, the 80s, stagflation, it is such a different world [now]." How amusing, given that stagnation, recession & inflation is exactly what we are now experiencing. How amusing that the RBNZ says our economy continues to evolve as anticipated when its forecasts could not have been proved more wrong.
    "It gets worse. ..."

~ Robert MacCulloch, from his post 'When will the Reserve Bank of NZ Stop Spinning and Stop Misleading Parliament and the Nation?'

"By any measure, the 'School Strike for Climate' was a disaster" [update]

"On Friday, March 15 2019, an estimated 170,000 New Zealand secondary school students took to the nation’s streets. RNZ still ranks that turnout as the 'second-largest' protest in New Zealand history. ... [Last] Friday morning (5 April 2024) RNZ was carrying the School Strike for Climate protest organisers’ predictions of a turnout in excess of 100,000. Protest rallies were scheduled from Whangarei to Invercargill. ...
    "By the end of the day, however, it was clear that something very serious had gone wrong with the plan to unite the Left’s fragmented movements by, in effect, piggy-backing on the huge numbers formerly responsive to the SS4C’s summonses. Rather than a turnout in the range of 100,000: across the whole country, and by the most generous estimate, the organisers of the 'Strike' turned out a derisory 5,000 people.
    "By any measure, the 'Strike' was a disaster ...
    "Certainly, the dismal turnout must have given Green co-leader, Chloe Swarbrick, considerable pause. After all, she has staked a great deal of her political credibility on the proposition that she and her party can mobilise, electorally, the young, the alienated, and the disenfranchised. After Friday, however, transforming the 2026 general election into a people’s crusade would appear to be a much taller order.
    "Contrariwise, the failure of the 'Strike' offers Messers Luxon, Seymour and Peters considerable cause for celebration. Their coalition is described on the SS4C website as: 'the most conservative government in our history' – a claim that would doubtless bring a wry smile to the lips of Bill Massey, Sid Holland, and Rob Muldoon. Still, if Friday’s flop is the best the New Zealand Left can set against the Great Strike of 1913, the 1951 Waterfront Lockout, and the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, then our Coalition Government can breathe a huge sigh of relief."

~ Chris Trotter, from his post 'Something Important: The Curious Death of the School Strike 4 Climate Movement.'

UPDATE: This chimes with news from the States "that just 3% of 18-to-34-year-old voters named climate change as their top issue, with most citing the economy, inflation or immigration." (Not that the latter is anything about which to be concerned either.)

"Let’s not forget, [notes Jo Nova] all these surveys are done on people who never see a skeptical expert on TV or a real documentary ... They don’t hear that carbon dioxide was higher for most of the last half billion years, or that 'climate change' causes record grain yields, and saves 166,000 lives a year. Most of the 18 to 35 year olds have been fed the climate diatribe from school — but even they don’t believe it. ...

"So the good news that the young can see through this, despite the wall of propaganda.."

It all started going wrong when they started calling themselves 'journalists' instead of reporters.

It's not like it's my job to fix the failing media's many problems, but here's where I reckon the problems started — and they were always about more than just disruptive technology ...

Here's my more detailed advice, which I first offered way back in 2009 (back when blogging was the latest next-big-thing):

Deborah Hill-Cone suggests in today's Business Herald that "bitter bloggers" who lambast the mainstream media for its manifest failings are duty bound to solve old media's problems for them, i.e., to shed some light on "how the [mainstream] media might turn a buck so we [the royal "we"?] can fund quality journalism." Ironically, her column is not online, so her audience have to rely on bloggers to retype it all for her, but here's her main beef, that 

"all this old versus new media aggro is just a distraction from the fact that neither [bloggers nor] Rupert Murdoch . . . have an answer for the future of journalism." 

Well, it's not like I'm duty bound to solve all the problems for the profession of journalism (there's more than enough problems in my own profession of architecture, thanks very much), but here's a simple enough solution for the old media to adopt -- so simple that even a journalist might understand.  Here it is:: 

            Recognise the division of labour, boys and girls, and just report the news!

We, the bloggers, can get on with commenting on the news, since that's what we do best; and you get on with finding and reporting the news, since that's what you're supposed to do best. In other words: 

• don't editorialise; 
• don't pontificate; 
• don't ask how people feel, ask instead what they saw; 
• don't report events as if people are outraged, just report the events themselves;
• don't report what everyone knows is transparent science fiction; report real science fact instead;
• don't report what "celebrities" do as if it matters a damn;
• don't report puff pieces about actors/musicians/writers as if they're not just puff-pieces for their new film/album/book; 
• don't report what everyone knows is just spin -- report instead what's being spun, and the news that someone is spinning, and who; 
• don't assume the whole world has the same values as your friends; 
• don't just rewrite press releases as if they were news; 
• and don't create the news yourself.
• In short, just report the news. All of it. Report it as if the truth actually mattered. 

Your role model in this new endeavour should not be Woman's Day, which your front pages and the Six O'Clock News more and more resemble, but the classic private detective whose motto should be hung over your desk in copperplate lettering: "Just the facts, ma'am." 

This week offers the perfect example of why people are switching off the mainstream. With 400,000 Americans taking up pro-freedom signs against their government, the mainstream media has either pretended they don't exist -- preferring instead to focus on the tough issues like the new White House dog -- or tried to suggest that all the protesters are insane. Meanwhile, the issue of the week in New Zealand, according to every news report every time I switch on the local media, is the latest in the Tony Veitch saga -— giving numb-nut so-called journalists the opportunity to interview each other over how well they did (or didn't) handle the story, and Mark Sainsbury and John Campbell the chance to wring their hands over the courage/bravery/pluckiness [delete one] of the two protagonists. 

No wonder no one can take mainstream "journalism" seriously any more. Instead of Philip Marlowe, we have to endure endless re-runs of Barbara Cartland. 

 

Tax cuts without spending cuts are not tax cuts

“Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax … If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or in the form of borrowing. The thing you should keep your eye on is what government spends, and the real problem is to hold down government spending as a fraction of our income, and if you do that, you can stop worrying about the debt.”

~ Milton Friedman, from his 'Q+A on Money and Inflation' [hat tip Patrick Phelps]

Nailing those targets

A target

It's nice to have a target. If you don't aim, you won't hit. 

Or that's the argument coming from the Blue Team about their just-announced targets.

But when their aims are all calibrated towards a date of 2030 — just far enough away not to be politically challenging — can we really take them seriously?

And even if you do aim, doesn't it matter what you aim at?  The Soviets knew all about setting (and meeting) production targets, didn't they. Set a target for a large number of nails, for example, and you'd get many, many very small useless nails. Set the target by weight, by contrast, and you get many fewer much heavier nails. Or one very, very big one.

Manager of a Soviet nail factory being awarded

the Order of Lenin for exceeding his tonnage

There's something that Christopher Luxon could learn there about his own targets: that their very specific focus look to be just as easy to get around.

• "95 per cent of patients to be admitted, discharged, or transferred from an emergency department within six hours," says the target. How easy would it be to "triage" patients before they officially arrive at ED to reduce the number appearing there.
• "95 per cent of people wait less than four months for elective treatment," says Luxon's target. Again, easy to reduce the number permitted elective treatment.
• "15 per cent reduction in the total number of children and young people with serious and persistent offending behaviour," says the naive target. Yet how easy it will be to simply redefine what "serious" and "persistent" look like.
• "20,000 fewer people who are victims of an assault, robbery, or sexual assault," says the wish list — and you'd damn well hope it were achieved. But aren't we already seeing the word "victim" politically redefined?
• "50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support Benefit," says the hopeful headline. Hard to "create jobs." Easy to simply create a new benefit for which those 50,000 might be "entitled."

I'll leave the remaining four for you to do as an exercise. You already get the point. Despite Luxon's comical business-speak about "chunking down" and "laddering up," even in their relative modesty these are pious hopes, not real targets. (Since he's so focused on business-speak perhaps he could read about Goodhart's Law while he's chunking up, often stated as: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".) And in their specificity they (like Building Minister Chris Penk's naive hope for quicker Building Consents simply because he's set a new target) could even make their targeted problems worse.

So perhaps it's a good thing that we have to wait until 2030 before any rubber really hits the road.

BREAKING: Pacific islands not disappearing

"An amount of land equivalent to the Isle of Wight has been added to the shorelines of 13,000 islands around the world in just the last 20 years. ... a net increase of 157.21 km2.
    "[T]he finding blows holes in the poster scare run by alarmists suggesting that rising sea levels caused by humans using hydrocarbons will condemn many islands to disappear shortly beneath rising sea levels. ...
    "The scientists observed that despite rising sea levels, many shorelines in Tuvalu and neighbouring Pacific atolls have maintained relative stability, “without significant alteration”. [The 101 islands of clilmate poster-child Tuvalu had grown in land mass by 2.9%, they said.] A comprehensive re-examination of data on 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls with 709 islands found that none of them had lost any land. Furthermore, the scientists added, there are data that indicate 47 reef islands expanded in size or remained stable over the last 50 years, “despite experiencing a rate of sea-level rise that exceeds the global average” ....
    "Of the 13,000 islands examined, the researchers found that only around 12% had experienced a significant shoreline shift, with almost equal numbers experiencing either landward (loss) or seaward (gain) movement. ...
    "The ... findings are important in helping destroy the claim that many low-lying islands will simply disappear beneath the waves in the near future due to human-induced climate change. They show how shoreline changes are a persistent and ongoing process that is subject to many natural and human influences. Most of the poster islands used for climate scares such as Tuvalu and the Maldives have increased in size of late, and are hardly suitable to whip up fear of a claimed climate ‘emergency’. Sea level rise is not a 'predominant' cause of the changing coasts, the scientists note."

~ Chris Morrison, from his article 'Islands That Climate Alarmists Said Would Soon “Disappear” Due to Rising Sea Found to Have Grown in Size'

"What stupendously depressing words, declaring the only way a human can be fulfilled is dependence on politicians."

"Although Ardern tried hard to divide Kiwis along every imaginable line for her own political benefit, an inescapable fact is that a profound cultural factor, way bigger than her, unites us all together. We have our roots in making our way through our own industry. 

    "When people started to migrate to NZ, whether indigenous or not, they had to depend on themselves, friends and family for survival. There was no welfare state back then. Out of this history, an important part of our culture became the 'can-do' attitude — Kiwi ingenuity, the number 8 fencing-wire, practicality —the taking calculated risks that many in the Old World had lost. Cut to modern times however, and this is the current philosophy of the NZ Labour Party, as espoused by its current and former leaders:

Ardern: 'People ... look for light, hope, a fulfilment of their own ambition and they will either find that in political leadership or they will seek out reasons why they have been failed.'

Hipkins: 'Governing is about choices — choosing subsidies ... '

"What stupendously depressing words, declaring the only way a human can be fulfilled - can achieve their dreams & ambitions - is dependence on politicians..."

~ Robert MacCulloch, from his post 'A brighter Future for NZ'ers involves the outright rejection of Labour's Make-the-People-Dependent Doctrine' 

More news from the War on Drugs™

"When President Nixon declared drug addiction Public Enemy Number One in 1971, it was with his 1969 declaration to Congress that the full forces of government must be marshalled “to cope with this growing menace to the general welfare of the United States.” Again, the nation was told, we would reduce crime and poverty, lower the scope and costs of incarceration, and stamp out a danger to the American family.
    "It is a vast understatement to say that these assurances were wrong ...
    "As of 2015, the rate of prisoners as a function of the population has grown from 100 per 100,000 in the period before Nixonian drug policy to over 500 per 100,000. As a result, the United States has become the world’s largest jailer, both in absolute terms and in rate. ...
    "Between 1973 and 2013, over $1 trillion was spent on drug enforcement in the U.S. alone. Yet, in 2016, Americans spent $150 billion on heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine, and marijuana, which doesn’t even factor in other classes of illicit drugs. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of these sunk opportunity costs is that despite a regime of increasing funding for supply-side enforcement, drug prices have continued to decline over the last four decades. This isn’t to say that they exist in cost parity with legal substances; their prices are still higher. What it does say is that current policy does little to abate demand.
    "Moreover, instead of reducing crime, prohibition simply creates more criminals. Everyone involved in the drug market, from supplier to distributor to consumer, is automatically a criminal. Absent the property rights protections and dispute resolution apparatus available via normal legal channels, interested parties must resolve their own conflicts, often leading to violent means. ...
    "Just as it was with alcohol during Prohibition, quality control is an issue with illegal drugs. As we discussed earlier, prohibitory laws create incentives to minimise the costs of production and transport while maximising profit, which in turn trends towards potency as the major concern. Because the product is manufactured by local entrepreneurs, however organised, there are no industry-wide safety standards. Hence, the current issue of heroin laced with fentanyl, for example. This leads to an increase in drug-related overdoses, and other related problems.
    "These are just a few of the more obvious social costs related to the War on Drugs™."

~ Tarnell Brown from his post 'Nothing New Thing Under the Sun: Prohibition, Drugs and the Iron Law'

"The politician is ... the pestilence of modern times."

“The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”

~ G.K. Chesterton, from a 1921 interview given to the Cleveland Press

More than half of all New Zealanders are on the mooch.

 

We're getting there ...
[cartoon by Nick Kim]

Great news everyone! We're not just over-lawyered here, turns out we're also now over-endowed with moochers.

I just knew you'd be overjoyed to hear that.

A new Treasury "working paper" just released shows that we're getting ever closer to the situation satirised above.

In 2016 more than 40 per cent of the population here were revealed to be on the mooch — 40 per cent of households paying less tax than they receive in cash benefits, 3 per cent paying around a quarter all the income tax that supported them.

And now, in 2024, that Treasury "working paper" tells us that we've now officially passed an important milestone, which is this: More than half of all New Zealanders are on the mooch. 

More than half. Mooching off the other half.

More than half of this country's population is now receiving more in government largesse than they pay in taxes, while an ever-diminishing percentage of the population if forced to pay for them.

What a welfare state to be in!

Nett tax take/contributions of all NZers, measured across deciles.

(Chart from Treasury working paper 'Fiscal incidence in NZ: The effects of taxes and 

benefits on household incomes in tax year 2018/19 (AN 24/01)'. [Hat tip Eric Crampton])

Specifically, Treasury's figures (summarised in "deciles" above) show that households bringing in the higher forty per cent of household income are nett taxpayers (those on the right, above), while those bringing in lower amounts (on the left, above) are, as a group, nett tax-takers.

This is actually what inequality looks like — the productive being forced to fund the unproductive, unequally.

Measured this way however, it does obviously undeservedly impugn some honest folk on lower incomes, and many moochers and parasites on higher incomes because they're sucking down government cash.

And at the same time it also fails to measure the various bureaucrats, bloodsuckers and parasites who work directly for government, or indirectly as a consultant or the like to help business-folk avoid being done over by government.

Yet it does show us that we're ever closer to the day arriving that the poor bastard in the cartoon above becomes reality.

NB: David Farrar and MT_Tinman also comment, as do several folk on Eric's original tweet ...

Overlawyered [updated]

 

Lawyers are a proxy for regulation. To get a feel for how destructive regulation is, you could maybe look at the number of lawmakers. Compared with the combined average of Denmark, Singapore, Norway, Ireland and Finland, New Zealand has 50% more Ministers, 156% more departments, and 280% more portfolios.* 

Or you could simply measure the exploding number of pages of regulations and statute law over the years and guess at how that strangles enterprise. But that would barely do full justice to its stultifying effect either. 

But just measuring lawmakers or the number of pages of legislation they produce doesn't fully measure the destructiveness of what's on those pages. A far better proxy measure is to look at the number of parasites who live off the law -- i..e, the lawyers who write, enact and feed off it. Way back in 1924 H.L. Mencken observed:

“All the extravagance and incompetence of ... Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we’d be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.”

He was right then. He's even more right now.

We don't have the rule of law any more, but rule by lawyers. When Mencken wrote that in 1924, New Zealand had roughly one lawyer per 1,000 people. We now have nearly three times that number — and we're less free, less safe, and our taxes have increased at least tenfold.

The number of lawyers in the country is a proxy for our level of (over)regulation, of the extent to which we're being strangled by the grey ones. And look at how the blood suckers have grown, especially post-WWII. And they keep growing, with around 3% more of the bastards every year.

It's frightening.

Source: Law Society ‘Snapshot of the Profession 2020’

* 'Too complex,' Max Salmon

UPDATE: "The 54th Parliament ... has proportionately more lawyers (17), managers (44) and analysts (22) than are found in ordinary life. Almost 14% of MPs have legal work experience, compared to 0.5% of the public. The construction sector is the least represented in Parliament...." [SOURCE: 'A Parliament of office workers']

It's Easter, so ...

Cartoon by Nick Kim

 

... so to save you searching for them, here are links to a few of my favourite Easter posts over the years here at NOT PC:

"What's the theme of Easter, and of Easter art? In a word, it's sacrifice: specifically human sacrifice. And more specifically, the sacrifice of the good to the appalling.
    "That's the Easter theme we're asked to respond to every year."
    Easter through art 

"Let’s summarise. In Pagan times, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity. Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word  'Easter' comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter.
    "But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become a veneration of torture and sacrifice ..."
    Easter Week, Part 4: Surely There Are Better Stories to Tell? 

"AND MAN MADE GODS in his own image, and that of the animals he saw around him, and he saw these stories were sometimes helpful psychologically in a a pre-philosophical age. But one of these gods was a jealous god. For this god was so angry at the world he sent one-third of himself to die to expiate the sins of those with whom he was angry, for sins that (in his omniscience) he would have always known they would commit.
    "It’s not just history the christian story challenges, is it. It’s logic."
    Easter Week, Part 3: The Holy Art of Sacrifice 

"Christianity didn’t start with Jesus, any more than the Easter story did. Paul, who never even met Jesus but who played the largest part in explaining his life, and his death, had a big hand in both.
    "Jesus’s death was a secular event his followers struggled to explain."
    Easter Week, Part 2: Enter Hercules…

"IT’S EASTER WEEK – a time, since human cultural life began up in the northern hemisphere, when men and women and their families came together to celebrate.
    "To celebrate what?
    "Why, to celebrate spring, of course. ..."
    Hey, hey, it’s Easter Week! 

"Politicians are not the cause of a culture’s trend, only its consequence."

"Politicians are not the cause of a culture’s trend, only its consequence. They get their notions from the cultural atmosphere, particularly from newspapers, magazines, and TV commentaries; they speak as these media teach them to speak. Who teaches the media? And now we come down to the root: of all our institutions, it is the universities that are primarily responsible for this country losing its way—and of all the university departments, it is the departments of philosophy." ~ Ayn Rand, from her 1972 essay 'How to Read (and Not to Write)'

"If you observe that for decades past the universities have been indoctrinating people with the modern philosophies, irrationality with epistemological irrationalism, moral subjectivism, with the whole complex of ideas, all tending to prove only one thing, that we can know nothing, nothing can be specific, definitions do not matter or do not exist, words and concepts are only a matter of public or social convention. When men come out with that intellectual equipment, they are helpless to deal with political abstractions, with abstract ideas." ~ Ayn Rand, from her 1964 interview 'Enemies of Extremism'

"Walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he’s incapable of knowing an objective reality. What, then, is his standard of knowledge and truth? Whatever others believe, is their answer. There is no knowledge, they teach, there’s only faith . . . . " ~ Ayn Rand, from her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged

"Ladies and gentlemen, higher education today has a remarkable press. We hear over and over about the value of our colleges and universities, their importance to the nation, and our need to contribute financially to their survival and growth. In regard to many professional and scientific schools, this is true. But in regard to the arts, the humanities, the social sciences, the opposite is true. In those areas, with some rare exceptions, our colleges and universities are a national menace, and the better the university ... the worse it is. Today’s college faculties are hostile to every idea on which this country was founded, they are corrupting an entire generation of students." ~ Leonard Peikoff from his 1983 article 'Assault from the Ivory Tower'

[hat tip Tal Tsafany] 

Public 'service' cuts

 

"It sure would be great if news outlets appalled at 7% cuts to Ministry rosters could remind folks that that would still generally be a substantial increase on pre-Covid staffing."

~ Eric Crampton, from his post 'Public service cuts and context'

 

The 'Success Sequence' for young adults

"The 'Success Sequence' [is] a formula to help young adults succeed ... The formula involves three steps: get at least a high school education, work full time, and marry before having children. Among Millennials who followed this sequence, 97% are not poor when they reach adulthood."

~ W. Bradford Wilcox + Wendy Wang, from their post ' Power of the Success Sequence'