justice – Page 78

Is It Time to Nationalise Empty, Foreign-Owned Houses in New Zealand?

It isn’t fair that Kiwis sleep on the streets while houses sit empty because their foreign owners are gambling on the New Zealand housing market

As seen by its climbdowns on the TPPA, on medicinal cannabis and on immigration, the Sixth Labour Government lacks courage. This means that the time has come to make some truly bold suggestions. Given that our homelessness crisis has long ago reached critical status, it’s time for a bold solution to the housing shortage. This essay proposes that we nationalise all empty, foreign-owned houses to provide shelter for our own people.

The state of homelessness can be summed up by the fact that there are believed to be 24,000 homeless in Auckland alone. This gives New Zealand by far the worst homelessness rate in the OECD, a list which includes much warmer and poorer countries like Mexico.

Per capita, our homelessness rate is far worse than the second-placed Czech Republic and around twice that of Australia, despite that it’s much easier to be homeless in the Australian climate. It’s gone beyond being a national disgrace, to the point where it is threatening our status as a developed country with a functioning society. It’s time to consider extreme measures.

It’s hard to get an accurate figure on the number of New Zealand homes owned by foreigners. The people making most of the profit off selling them have a vested interest in restricting awareness of, and information about, their activities. However, we can make educated guesses.

A 2016 census revealed that over 8% of Vancouver homes are unoccupied. From the same link, we can see that slightly fewer than 6% of Vancouver homes are both unoccupied and owned by foreigners. So roughly two-thirds of empty homes in Vancouver are also owned by foreign residents.

There are believed to be 33,000 empty houses in Auckland, with others saying 35,000. If two-thirds of those houses are both empty and owned by foreigners, that makes for 22,000 homes – about the same number as there are homeless people in Auckland.

The Vancouver solution so far is to charge a 1% property tax on an annual basis for every Vancouver property left unoccupied. This amounts to $10,000 in taxes for a million-dollar property. Vancouver is infamous for its overheated housing market and perhaps represents an extreme case, but the basic principle is the same as in Auckland: most of these foreigners are speculators who have parked money in real estate for the capital gains, and they have no interest whatsoever in the ability of the locals to find affordable housing.

The question naturally arises: if there are so many foreign residents who are keeping houses empty purely for the sake of making a profit, and so many Kiwis who are going homeless because of the shortage of available housing, why be satisfied with a tiny bit of tax as compensation for the damage done? Why not nationalise empty houses that are owned by foreign residents?

Nationalisation could proceed on the grounds that owning a house in New Zealand and deliberately keeping it empty is a crime, in much the same way as owning a business and refusing to serve a customer on the basis of their race is already a crime.

Deliberately keeping a house empty when there is a housing shortage would therefore be declared to be a crime equivalent to refusing to stop to ascertain injury at the site of a motor vehicle accident. In other words, it would be an action that represented a criminal level of disregard for the well-being of the people of this nation.

The logical punishment would be forfeiture of the property.

After nationalisation, the houses would simply be added to the existing Housing New Zealand stock as an asset on the balance sheet. From there, Housing New Zealand would proceed to treat them as regular state houses, and they would be rented out or apportioned to the needy as was necessary to meet their needs for shelter.

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What Would the Average Hourly Wage Be in New Zealand If Wages Had Kept Up With House Prices?

New Zealand is torn by inter-generational tension right now. The young have no hope of finding houses they can afford and the old simply blame them for being too lazy to work hard enough to afford one. However, the numbers show that workers today get a much worse deal than they did 30 years ago. This article looks at what the average wage in New Zealand would be if it had kept pace with the price of houses since the late 1980s.

This graph from the Trading Economics website tracks the increase in the New Zealand Average Hourly Wage over the past 30 years. We can see that the average hourly wage in New Zealand, as of the beginning of 2018, is $31.03. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand website contains many interesting statistics and graphs, many of which can be downloaded from this link. This article will combine both sources.

In March of 2001, the House Price Index (from the RBNZ link above) stood at 700.2. At this time, the average hourly wage was $17.70. So if a person wished to purchase a $300,000 house, suitable for a growing family, they would have to have capital equal to 16,949 hours of work at the average wage.

According to this article by Human Resources Director, Kiwis work an average of 1,762 hours a year (this figure was for 2014, but for cultural reasons this figure does not change much over time). This means that, in March of 2001, buying a house suitable for raising a family in required capital equal to 9.62 years of full-time work at the average wage.

How does that compare to today?

After seventeen years of red-hot growth, the House Price Index now stands at 2480.8. This represents an increase of 254% over those seventeen years, and it means that a $300,000 house in March 2001 now costs $1,062,000 (all growth factors assumed equal). As mentioned above, the average hourly wage in New Zealand has increased from $17.70 in that time to $31.03, which represents an increase of 75%.

In other words, in January of 2018, buying a $1,062,000 house, suitable for raising a family in, requires capital equal to 34,224 hours of working at the average hourly wage. This is equivalent to 19.42 years of work at the average hourly wage.

We can see, then, that when measured in terms of a person’s ability to purchase a house suitable for raising a family in, the average New Zealander is less than half as wealthy as they were only 17 years ago. To have the same house buying power that it had in 2001, an average wage in New Zealand would now have to be $62.65 per hour.

People working in 1989 – when the majority of Baby Boomers would have been in the workforce – had it even better still. In December of 1989 the House Price Index stood at 453.5; the average hourly wage stood at $13.07 in the first quarter of that year.

So our standard family home that cost $300,000 in 2001 cost a mere 64.8% of that price in 1989, whereas the average wage in 1989 was 73.8% of what it was in 2001. Put another way, the average house suitable for raising a family in cost $194,400 in 1989, which represented capital equal to 14,873 hours of labour at the average wage. This was equivalent to a mere 8.44 years of saved labour.

The average house price has gone up 447% over the past 30 years in New Zealand; the average hourly wage has gone up 137% in that time. So to have the same house-buying power as the average New Zealand worker in 1989, a Kiwi in 2018 would have to get paid $71.50 an hour. This would allow them to buy a decent house after saving around 14,000 hours of the average wage, which is the standard of living that the average worker had in 1989.

In summary, the average New Zealand worker has lost almost 60% of the house-buying power of their wage over the past 30 years.

Buying a decent house in 2018 costs savings equal to 19.42 years of work at the average wage; 30 years ago buying an equivalent quality of housing cost savings equal to 8.44 years of work. So if a Kiwi left home at age 18 in 1970 and saved half of their income on the average wage they could own a house by age 35; a Kiwi who left home at age 18 in the year 2000 and saved half of their income on the average wage can’t expect to own one before they turn 57.

Despite tiny relative savings on consumer electronics, it’s obvious that the standard of living for young people is much lower nowadays than it was 30 years ago. The fact that wages haven’t come close to keeping up with housing costs is the main culprit.

Dan McGlashan is the man with his finger on the statistical pulse of New Zealand. His magnum opus, Understanding New Zealand, is the complete demographic analysis of the Kiwi people. Available on TradeMe for $35.60.

The Key to Generating Wealth is Artificial Scarcity

Artificially restricting the common property of the masses drives up the price of private holdings of capital

Work hard, and you’ll get rich. All Westerners have been told this since we were small children – and it used to be true. Back in the days when there was natural scarcity, this made sense, because what was lacking was productive capacity. Now that human productive capacity is effectively infinite (at least when it comes to meeting physical demands), economics works on a different basis – that of artificial scarcity.

The definition of artificial scarcity is “the scarcity of items even though either the technology and production, or sharing capacity, exists to create a theoretically limitless abundance”. Many people have noted that the productive capacity already exists on Planet Earth to create a theoretically limitless abundance of most things, and the reason why we don’t already have it is a matter of politics.

Understanding artificial scarcity is a matter of understanding that every financial transaction is a matter of leverage, and that leverage is a matter of the supply of that good or service, and that the supply of any good or service is a function of its scarcity (or of the scarcity of its basic constituents).

Looked at another way, the more scarce a good or service can be made, the more desperate people will become in order to obtain that good or service, which means the purveyor of it has more leverage, and the price of that good or service will therefore increase. Once your own supply of a particular good or service is ensured, profit can be increased by restricting supply of it to everyone else.

Strangling someone to get them to give up their wallet is an example of inducing artificial scarcity, in this case a scarcity of oxygen to the brain. Understanding this extortionate power is key to understanding the whole point.

In a state of Nature, people are free to hunt and gather from the commons to which all land belongs. There is therefore no such thing as artificial scarcity, because all scarcity is natural. Today, however, because everything has been enclosed, fenced off, walled off, there are no longer any commons, and consequently there is a massive artificial scarcity of food, whether game meat or gathered fruits, nuts, berries, mushrooms etc.

This artificial scarcity of food has created immense scope for profits for the land-owning class. The masses who had their land taken must now serve those who took it in order to get enough of that wealth to live. There is such an immense scarcity of land that anyone with an enforceable claim to own it can become rich by simply charging rent, because there will always be someone with a productive enterprise that needs land on which to operate, and they will pay rent.

In other words, the people continue to work the land for sustenance as they always have done, but now that sustenance passes through an intermediary (the landowner) who takes as big of a cut as they see fit (possibly subject to anti-exploitation laws), and leaves the remainder for the workers. Thus it can be seen that artificial scarcity can arise as a form of gangsterism.

Artificial scarcity is usually defended by those who profit from it, and from the sycophantic dogs who are happy to take a slice of that profit in exchange for enforcing it on the masses. To the extent that these two groups hold power in society, artificial scarcity will exist.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution made it cheap to produce everything, those who wished to gain political and economic control over the masses switched the emphasis from helping those masses overcome natural scarcity to imposing upon them artificial scarcity. George Orwell wrote about this in 1984, when he had Emmanuel Goldstein write about how politicians need to destroy surplus production in order to keep the populace under control.

Speaking as the author of The Theory And Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Orwell teaches that the main motive for introducing artificial scarcity is political power. If the people have a surplus of goods and services, their standard of living will rise. As their standard of living rises, it becomes increasingly possible for motivated individuals among them to become educated and free-thinking, and, consequently, to become the sort of person who will challenge the control system.

Defending the control system, therefore, requires that the people are impoverished.

An excellent example of artificial scarcity in the modern world relates to housing. The Baby Boomer generation have realised – now that they own all the houses – that by increasing demand for those houses (through mass immigration) while simultaneously decreasing demand for them (such as refusing to build new ones or restricting access to old ones through tricks such as New Zealand’s meth house scam), they can push the younger generations into more desperation and thereby a weaker negotiating position.

Tightening the supply of housing is like tightening the grip around the throat of the young who are desperate for it – which is how the Boomers are now able to extract so much rent.

Cannabis prohibition is another good example. By artificially restricting the people’s access to cannabis, the politicians gave great leverage to their friends in the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries, who had one fewer competitor for monopoly of the recreational drug and medicine markets, respectively. The cannabis laws also have the benefit of primarily destroying black, brown, young, poor and freethinking people, which further entrenches the power hierarchy.

So getting rich isn’t about working hard anymore – it’s about getting your fingers around the throat of someone who does.

An Anarcho-Homicidalist Explains the Last 50 years of Workplace Relations

The social contract is held in place by a fine balance. Perhaps most famously expressed as the 13th-century ultimatum given by English barons to the despotic King John that led to the Magna Carta, it can summarised as: treat us well or we’ll chop your head off. This is to say that, the king has the right to be the king, but if he becomes tyrannical then the rest of us reserve the right to overthrow him.

This social contract is not unique to humans – it’s a natural feature of life for all social animals, perhaps most apparent in observing the political machinations of male chimpanzees. The alpha male chimpanzee might get his pick of the females, and he might even get to preoccupy more than one female at any one time, but if he gets too greedy, and tries to monopolise all of them, then the betas will band together from a solidarity borne of mutual frustration and tear him to pieces.

After all, no matter how strong the alpha is, it’s extremely difficult to beat two other healthy, fit males if those two males have sufficient solidarity to work together as a unit. Over the recent ten or so million years, our ancestors evolved to adapt to this brutal calculus. This instinct manifests as a rudimentary sense of justice, which provokes righteous anger if it is violated, such as by a greedy or tyrannical alpha that doesn’t share.

We have inherited similar sentiments from our common ancestor with the other apes, and they have expressed themselves as the multifarious political machinations that humans have contrived over the millennia. The ultimate intent behind all of this manoeuvering is the genetic imperative to get the maximum amount of pussy, which is essentially a question of getting the maximum amount of resources, this being primarily what attracts the females of sexually reproducing species.

Key to understanding anarcho-homicidalism is understanding the eternal truth of this equation.

The amount of pay that a worker gets in 2018 A.D. is the result of a negotiation. The negotiation reflects the amount of relative leverage that the worker has compared to the employer. For the most part, this is a question of the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. For thousands of years, it was understood that if the employer class offered the workers a deal that was so poor that they could not maintain their own basic dignity, as King John had done, this was effectively an attempt to enslave, and in such a case the workers would have the right to kill that enslaver.

This changed about 50 years ago, with the 1968 Revolution. Ever since that tumultuous year, which marked that the Great Pendulum had definitely swung back from the right that caused World War II to the left, Westerners have been conditioned to be nice. All of the problems of the Great Wars, we were told, stemmed from human nastiness. Now we have to be nice, nice, nice – all the time!

At the same time that the human masses were decoupled from their natural instincts to sometimes be nasty in defence of their basic interests, wages decoupled from productivity (as can be clearly seen from the graph at the top of this essay). Every member of the ruling class, in particular economists and politicians, will tell you that this is a coincidence. But the anarcho-homicidalist knows that it is no coincidence.

Basically, we’ve become so domesticated that not only have we lost the desire to kill our enslavers, which was the one thing holding our half of the bargain in place, but we’ve forgotten that it’s even a legitimate option. Because we’re no longer willing to kill, we’ve lost all of our negotiating leverage. In the age of nice, employers can simply play the working masses off against each other in a race to the bottom, knowing full well that there’s no tipping point at which they will feel too humiliated and revolt.

As a natural consequence, wages have plummeted.

Worst of all, we’re getting nicer and nicer, as most of us are now so powerfully conditioned against violence by a merciless school system that we resemble Alex from A Clockwork Orange after his exposure to the Ludovico technique. The very thought of rebellion is terrifying to a population no longer allowed to write ‘faggot’ on FaceBook, and where protesting the wrong religion will get you beaten to death in prison. One can therefore expect that our negotiating position will continue to weaken.

This is where the philosophy of anarcho-homicidalism becomes necessary: to restore the lost half of the negotiating equation. Those who consider themselves fit to rule need to learn, once again, to fear those who they presume to command. Because, no matter what your ruler says, it’s always, always, always permissible to kill someone trying to enslave you.

Anyone who is incapable of understanding this is already a slave!

This essay is an excerpt from The Anarcho-Homicidalist Manifesto, written by Viktor Hellman and due for release by VJM Publishing in the autumn of 2019.