bullshit artistry – Page 39

New Zealand is a Military Outpost Masquerading as a Country

New Zealand: plenty of money for guns, no money to feed kids

Many of the decisions made by New Zealand politicians are baffling to the average Kiwi. How can it be possible that we can find $400 million a year to enforce cannabis prohibition, which the people don’t want, but we can’t find $100 million to feed our own children, which the people definitely do want? This essay explains why so many of these decisions are made: New Zealand is not a real country, but a military outpost masquerading as one.

Key to understanding this is understanding the guns and butter model of government spending. Essentially, we can measure the degree to which a government acts as a steward of its people – compared to using them as tools to achieve the economic ambitions of the ruling classes – by measuring how much of the nation’s production is diverted to consumer goods as opposed to military goods.

Understanding this helps explain why our Government would approve a $20 billion military spending bill while rejecting a $100 million proposal to feed hungry New Zealand children.

Why is buying weapons two hundred times more important than feeding our own children?

The answer is grim, and dark. New Zealand isn’t really a country, in the sense that other countries are countries. We’re not an association of families that formed a tribe and then met other tribes to form a clan and then made peace with other clans to form a nation. Most of us just washed up here, many of us without the consent of the people who already lived here.

It’s obvious that New Zealand itself has no need to spend $20 billion on armaments, any more than Iceland does. But to think like this is to commit the error of seeing New Zealand as an actual nation, whose will is that of individual New Zealanders and made manifest through its leaders, like European nations. That isn’t how it is.

The accurate way to conceptualise New Zealand is as an Anglo-American military outpost in the South Pacific, something like a forward operating base for moneyed interests that mostly operate out of the City of London, who have enslaved the New Zealand population by way of a debt-based central banking system.

Most Kiwis don’t understand the geostrategic importance of the archipelago they live on. It’s very easy to look at a static map and think that New Zealand is a long way from anywhere, and therefore that it can’t have much strategic value. This way of thinking reflects a myopia that’s typical of New Zealanders. The truth is much more involved.

Firstly, whoever controls New Zealand controls Australia, in effect, because controlling New Zealand enables one to project force into the East and South of Australia, which is where all the people live. The Japanese Empire realised that landing an expeditionary force in Northern Australia and then marching to Sydney was not practical, and so their Imperial Navy’s invasion plans assumed a prior invasion of New Zealand. It just makes sense.

Secondly, whoever controls Australia controls Asia. This is because Northern Australia serves as a staging ground for the projection of power into South Asia, in particular naval power into the South Asian Sea, which is necessary in order to keep the main sealanes open (and therefore the global economy humming). Given that the Anglo-American Empire already has effective bases in Japan and the Philippines, being able to project power into the Southern South China Sea is the last piece of the puzzle.

Seen like that, it’s obvious why the New Zealand Government would vote for guns sooner than food for its own children. Because New Zealand isn’t a real country, there’s no incentive for the Government to act in the interest of increasing the well-being of its people – the Government doesn’t represent those people. New Zealand is first and foremost a military outpost run by imperial interests, and as such the mental health of its citizens is far from the top priority, as evinced by our OECD-leading homelessness and youth suicide rates.

If growing up poor, scared or traumatised means that a person will be more useful in a military capacity, then that is what the Government will encourage. Inequality correlates positively with psychopathy, with America being the obvious example. The rulers of New Zealand have also calculated that an underclass of poor and desperate people will make it much easier to recruit the necessary numbers for a professional volunteer armed force, and have structured society accordingly.

Hermann Goering once said “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.” Understanding this sentiment is the key to understanding the spending decisions of the New Zealand Government.

The New Zealand ruling class is simply not interested in keeping the population in good physical or mental health, which is why nothing is ever done about our suicide rate or housing crisis. All that matters is keeping the population in a state of war readiness in case it should later be necessary to use them to achieve some geopolitical objective.

The cannabis laws follow the same principle. Every idiot knows that it’s worse for the people to have alcohol legal than to have cannabis legal, given the plague of violence, sex crimes and drunk driving deaths that follow in the wake of alcohol use. So why have that legal, while criminalising a recreational alternative that doesn’t make people aggressive, impulsive and violent? The answer is, sadly, because our ruling class wants broken, damaged, fearful and violent people.

Unfortunately for us, the reason why New Zealand is not run along the lines of Switzerland or Japan or even South Korea is because our supposed leaders are beholden to foreign interests. We are not an independent nation, and we will never be, for our independence would pose too great of a threat to the military position of the Anglo-American Empire. Kiwis are, as Dwight Eisenhower put it when he warned us of the Military-Industrial Complex over 55 years ago, hanging from a cross of iron.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis).

Why Neoliberals Love Mass Immigration

Mass immigration is often supported by the left, but it happens to also achieve a number of major right-wing goals

Neoliberalism is a right-wing movement in the sense that the ultimate aim of it is to take power away from the poor and give it to the rich. However, it is not a conservative movement, because neoliberals don’t care at all about the disruption that their policies have on people’s lives. So some of their positions are hard to understand at first. This essay seeks to explain why neoliberals love mass immigration so much.

Classical conservatism recognises that the wealthy already have the power, and so the wealthy try to keep things the same to preserve their good position. Change is therefore considered bad. Where this differs from neoliberalism is that the neoliberal tries to entrench the already strong position of the wealthy by further weakening the position of the poor. Accordingly, changes to the social structure are permissible if they make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The basics of labour solidarity work like this. The rate of pay is a function of the supply and demand of labour. As long as labour is not available below a certain level of pay, then the rate of pay must rise above this to meet a higher equilibrium. So if all the workers in a certain area or industry get together and agree to not work for less than, say, $15/hour, this constricts the supply of cheap labour, which presses the price of labour upward.

To counter this, employers like to import cheap labour from outside of the area. The most infamous example of this is the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but the importation of labour doesn’t have to be involuntary. To the contrary – there is a virtually infinite supply of cheap labour in the world that can willingly be brought in to work for less, because there are always impoverished shitholes with high birth rates that people want to escape from in exchange for the McDonalds lifestyle.

Seen in union-busting terms, immigrants who are brought into the country by capitalist interests to work for less money than the locals are effectively scab labour. After all, there’s no real difference between scab labour that breaks a picket line and someone willing to immigrate to another country to do work at a wage lower than the locals would accept: both push wages down.

Not only does this outside labour have the effect of lowering wages through the scab effect, but it also makes future labour organisation more difficult. It’s much harder to conduct the conversations necessary to start a union when the workplace has no common language, and no-one is going to start a union anyway if their work visa is dependent on pleasing their employer.

It can be seen, then, that liberalising immigration through globalising the workforce has the immediate effect of not only driving wages down by increasing the supply of labour, but it also makes it harder to agitate for a higher wage, a double effect.

In other words, mass immigration is simply another example of the same union-busting behaviour that the ruling class has always used. The only difference is that it destroys the bonds of solidarity on the national level, instead of only destroying them in a certain area or industry. With a menagerie of different languages and cultures in the same area, the solidarity necessary to resist the divide and conquer attempts of the ruling class cannot be achieved. If that area is the whole nation so much the better.

Regular conservatives are a bit leery about destroying the working class in quite so brazen and irreparable a manner. The fear seems to be that they might rise up in anger and riot. Neoliberals have to be understood as significantly different to regular conservatives in this manner. They’re not at all shy about rubbing the faces of the Western working class in dogshit, knowing that their complete media domination makes the threat of retaliation essentially nil.

The real beauty of the mass immigration issue, from the neoliberal perspective, is that they can destroy the Western working class in this manner with the kindest of rhetoric. Mass immigration is presented by the mainstream media – almost completely owned by banks – as a compassionate solution to foreign poverty, only opposed by racists, bigots and rednecks.

This means that the already disadvantaged classes tear themselves in half as the globalists feel solidarity with the immigrants and refugees and the nationalists with the indigenous people. The neoliberals laugh all the way to the bank.

Can North Korea Teach the West How to Have A Humane Cannabis Policy?

Our media has been giving us the Two Minute Hate about North Korea for over two decades. Anyone who has read 1984 knows that most of the reason for this is to distract from the crimes of our own politicians and industrial leaders. One of these crimes is the War on Cannabis: Western Governments could learn from the North Koreans how to have a humane, honest and fair cannabis policy.

For the past 40-50 years, Western Governments have conducted a War on Drugs against their own people, without the consent of those people. Trillions have been spent during these decades to persecute tens of millions of Western citizens, many of whom had not caused any harm to anyone. This mass human rights abuse – because that’s what it is – continues to this day, despite small wins for the people in some areas.

This War on Drugs has been justified with a rhetoric so clumsy and corrupt that even a 1930s-era propagandist would be embarrassed by the lack of subtlety. From the infamous “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men” to “Cannabis use causes psychosis” to today’s horseshit stories about how buying cannabis is supporting Mexican narcoterrorism, no more hamfisted effort has ever been made to sell anything.

For roughly half a century, Western families have been ripped apart from having one of their family members sent to prison for a cannabis offence. Tens of millions have been forced into a traumatic encounter with the Police and justice or prison systems, treated as criminals when most were mentally ill and needed help. In America in 2016, there were 574,641 people charged with the crime of simple cannabis possession.

One would expect then, that the punishment for cultivating cannabis in a place as fundamentally evil as North Korea would be horrifically draconian and senseless. If it’s up to seven years imprisonment in New Zealand it must surely be life in prison or even execution there.

To the contrary – far from scheduling cannabis as belonging to the most dangerous category of addictive drugs with no medicinal value as America does, North Korea doesn’t even consider cannabis a drug. Not only are people free to cultivate it without sanction, but it grows freely by the roadside in many places, being a weed and not being subject to eradication programs. North Koreans are free to harvest and smoke it every single day – and they do.

Many would personally be happy to trade all the supposed Western freedoms to drink booze, watch television and chase loose women for the freedom to smoke cannabis, have quality conversations with intelligent people and at the end of the night still be capable of maintaining an erection. So one has to ask: who’s actually better off?

The thawing of relations between the West and North Korea might have implications for cannabis policy in the West. Those Westerners who are still labouring under primitive superstitions such as “cannabis causes brain damage and therefore people should go to prison for it” might learn something from the more enlightened approach taken by the North Korean Government.

Perhaps North Korea could send advisors to the West to educate our politicians about how large industries conspired to make cannabis illegal for the sake of wiping out a competitor, and that keeping it prohibited is actually an immoral thing to do. These North Koreans could also be tasked with going through our Police and justice system employees to root out the sadists who believed that imprisoning someone was ever a fair or reasonable response to drug possession, because they are morally defective and cannot be trusted to serve the public.

VJMP Reads: David Seymour’s Own Your Future III

A Liberal Vision for New Zealand in 2017

This reading carries on from here.

The second chapter of Own Your Future is titled ‘Tax’. Seymour opens with a complaint about wasteful government spending, citing the example of Gerry Brownlee flying to San Francisco on the taypayer’s dollar for a photo op. Indeed this was an appalling waste of money for no benefit to the nation, but Seymour leaps from this fact to the tacit assumption that all tax money is likewise wasted.

Seymour is right when he says it’s stupid that the Government is running surpluses while the average New Zealand household is at record levels of debt. The solution is, naturally, lower taxes. Here Seymour makes a sharp distinction between “our own” money, and “another person’s” money. Not for him the interdependence of all things. In Seymour’s world, there are very clear lines over who owns what.

Government takes in taxes equal to 40% of GDP, Seymour notes – “exclusively” another person’s money. Seymour doesn’t agree with the idea that the state is the most efficient provider of many services on account of the economies of scale afforded by its unique size. For him, the Government is merely a parasitic entity that sucks tax money out of hard-working Kiwis and wastes it frivolously.

Breaking step with the usual neoliberal choice of target, Seymour points out that there is a tremendous amount of corporate welfare in New Zealand as well. This only lasts for a few sentences, because he’s soon back to crying about taxation. Bracket creep comes in for particular ire – for Seymour, the wealthy aren’t getting a big enough share of the spoils of economic growth.

True to being a politician, he is dishonest. He claims that bracket creep happens because wages rise (which is true) but he also claims that wages rise to meet the increase in the price of consumer goods. The truth is that wages are not linked to the inflation of consumer goods – they are a function of the relative leverage that the employer has over the employee. When consumer goods become more expensive, this gives the employee absolutely no additional leverage through which they can negotiate a higher wage with their employer. If anything, it gives them less leverage because the lower standard of living makes them more desperate to settle.

In one paragraph, Seymour abandons even the pretense of reasoning and simply lists American libertarian slogans: “High tax rates… drag the economy down”, “people spend their money better than governments do”, “Money goes more good in the private sector than in the public sector.” Again one senses the cold shadow of the millions starved to death by Communism.

Seymour makes some good and fair points when he talks about the bureaucratic waste in the system. The problem is that this waste is the only thing he sees – all Government spending is hip-hop tours and junkets to San Francisco. He will not acknowledge that tax money is used for anything good, or that taxpayers get anything back for their tax money. National are the good guys because they levy less tax; Labour are bad and the Greens are the worst of all.

It’s hard to disagree, however, when he complains about the top tax bracket being $70,000. One doesn’t have to be wealthy to concede that someone earning $70,000 a year is far from loaded.

In all, one feels that Seymour is capable of making some good points but has a dishonest method for selecting and presenting them to the reader. Despite that, it’s easily arguable that Seymour and his party are tasked with playing an important role in New Zealand politics – that of keeping a check on Government waste – even though they are apologists for neoliberalism.