• Cellphones aren’t allowed while driving, you naughty children

The police state has slain another freedom: now talking on a hand held cellphone whilst driving is illegal [1]. This is from the NZ Herald:

For frontline road police such as Sergeant Ashley Gore, the ban on using hand-held phones while driving could not have come soon enough.

“We have been waiting for the cellphone ban to come in because we have seen a lot of bad driving and so many near-misses,”

Naturally the policeman and the NZ Herald trumpet the party line, whilst ignoring the fact that talking on a hands free phone while driving is about as dangerous as talking on a hand held one.

The NZ Herald goes on to say

Even before the ban, police were able to charge motorists caught driving erratically while on the phone with careless use of a motor vehicle.

Great, so now if you drive erratically whilst talking on a hand held cellphone you can be prosecuted for two offences instead of just one [2]. That’s like having state executions where they shoot people twice in the head despite the fact that once would suffice.

The cop’s statement typifies the attitude of those people who rule this country:

We have been waiting for the cellphone ban to come in because we have seen a lot of bad driving and so many near-misses

The key phrase there is “near misses”. Most of the time people manage to talk on a cellphone without causing any problems, but the state punishes the majority in order to ‘protect’ them from the minority [3]. Again and again our masters see something that causes occasional problems and they decide that it must be made illegal in order to maintain social order and justify their parasitic careers. It Is Important To Be Seen To Be Doing Something is their motto. It’s the same with the anti-smacking law: a tiny minority of people beat their children to a pulp so giving a swat on the rump steak was made illegal for everyone [4].

Here’s a better way. Talking on a cellphone while driving doesn’t violate the non-aggression axiom, so make it legal. At the same time, bring in restorative justice so that those who damage person and/or property as a result of driving whilst talking on a cellphone bear the full cost of the consequences of their actions, including medical care for the injured [5]. At present the cost of medical care for the injured is borne by every taxpayer, so offenders are shielded from the consequences of their actions. When people see what the potential cost of driving whilst talking on a cellphone is – far, far greater than a $80 fine – the sensible ones will stop the practice. The foolish ones will continue their habits no matter what system is in place, but at least with my plan they will receive a huge and just self-inflicted punishment rather than a paltry $80 fine from the state.

Making people bear the full cost of the consequences of their actions is a fair and just way of reducing the dangerous practice of driving whilst talking on a cellphone. It is also consistent with the laws of nature: when a child puts his hand on a hot stove the pain teaches him to stay away from hot stoves.

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Related posts:

The NZ Herald delivers state propaganda

What is a “social contract”?

Referendum on anti-smacking law: John Key gives the finger

1. Arguably it’s not a slaying of a freedom, but rather a removal of a permission. Experience shows that any ‘freedom’ we have only exists because the state allows it to exist. If you have trouble believing this, consider the fact that the state can take your house and property at any time, it can take your children if abuse is even suspected, it can force medical treatment upon you and your children, it controls what you put into your body, and it can take as much of your money as it wants to. New Zealanders have no legal means with which to to control the government, therefore the government is the de facto absolute ruler over them. You are a vassal, a pawn controlled by the state.

2. You can also be prosecuted if the phone is not ’secured in a mounting fixed to the vehicle’. That’s right, you can’t put the phone on the seat beside you and use a hands free kit. For the full details see clause 23 here (PDF 96KB). The plain-English version (it’s as close to plain English as a bureaucrat can get) is here.

3. Who needs enemies when they have friends like that? The ban on using cellphones whilst driving is fundamentally a violation of property rights, i.e. it violates your right to do whatever you like with your property unless you violate the non-aggression axiom in the process. Think about it: Nanny State (Big Brother’s sister) is sitting in the back seat of your car and telling you that you cannot pick up the cellphone that you own.

4. That was one of the publicly stated motivations for the anti-smacking law. Here’s my version: our masters believe that smacking is wrong so they force everyone to parent as they do. This action arises from their conviction that every child is the dominion of that state not the dominion of their parents (as shown by the fact that parents must get permission from the state before they can home school their children). See footnote 1.

5. If someone is killed the offender should provide for that person’s dependents, providing what the deceased would have otherwise provided. At present every taxpayer bears the cost of providing for the dependents (via the welfare system) and therefore the offender is shielded from the consequences of his actions.

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• A new way of monitoring heart failure

The NZ Herald has an interesting article about a new way of monitoring people who have congestive heart failure.

Basically a set of scales and a blood pressure monitor are wirelessly connected to a cellphone: that’s the Bluetooth mentioned in the article, which sends data between gadgets via radio waves. The cellphone then sends the data to the hospital each day. If people forget to take their readings the hospital is supposed to chase them up.

One of the symptoms of heart failure is fluid accumulation in the body. People are supposed to weigh themselves daily and phone the hospital if they gain more than 2 kg overnight. Of course people do forget to weigh themselves, and the hospital won’t know if they’ve forgotten. A sudden worsening of congestive heart failure often leads to hospitalisation and/or death, but close monitoring and a rapid response to problems reduces the likelihood of these outcomes. That’s why this system has people weighing themselves.

Most people with heart failure are elderly, and it will be necessary to make the gadgets user-friendly and reliable in order to overcome unfamiliarity with and resistance to technology. Those patients who aren’t able to manage this form of self-monitoring are likely to have carers who can do it for them.

No system is foolproof (at the patient end or the staff end), but this looks like a simple and effective way of improving the management this condition.

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• Garth George thinks that John Key is wonderful

Garth George’s column this week has the nauseating title “We Should All Salute Our Wonderful PM“, and it goes downhill from there. It’s what is known as a hagiography, a biography of a saint.

Go and fetch a bucket, then read this extract:

He is a man of the people, as yet unspoiled by the poisonous atmosphere of power politics, and in spite of his position and spectacular wealth remains one of us.

He is every bit at home in the company of a class of primary schoolkids as he is with the man and woman in the street, or in the company of the world’s high and mighty. He is amiable, engaging, good-natured, highly intelligent, humorous and, most of all, unaffected.

Now for a dose of reality. Recently we had a referendum where 87.4% of a representative sample of the population showed their opposition to the anti-smacking law. As I said in my earlier post, John Key’s response was thus:

I don’t care how amiable, engaging, good-natured, highly intelligent, humorous and unaffected John Key appears to be: what I do care about are his actions, and his actions show that he is not a man of the people. His actions show that he is a man who wants to rule the people.

Sociopaths are some of the most dangerous people around, and they can be engaging, good-natured, unaffected, and humorous when they want to be – that’s part of what makes them so dangerous. I’m not saying that John Key is a sociopath, but I am saying don’t judge a book by its cover.

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• Bill English wants to change property tax laws

The NZ Herald is reporting that Bill English, Minister of Finance Fraud wants to change property tax laws (translation: the government wants to steal more money). The article says in part…

[English said] “We haven’t had those put to us yet, but I think the evidence that investment patterns in New Zealand could be more productive I think is pretty strong.”
[...]
Those advocating change argue that investment is being funnelled into unproductive parts of the economy, such as investment properties. [Is anyone other than the government saying this? Beware of unsubstantiated statements like this one]

What arrogant nonsense. People only funnel money into “unproductive parts of the economy” when the government forces them to: if people make a poor investment their diminishing wealth tells them that they’ve done so and they quit. That’s one of the signals that people receive in a free market.

What’s really happening here is that the state doesn’t like people putting money into investment properties, so it’s going to slap on extra taxes and make that part of the economy ”unproductive”. That is how the state interferes with the free market and fouls up the signals.

If we had a true free market (i.e. zero state interference) we’d know which parts of the economy were truly unproductive: they’d be the parts that everyone was pulling their money out of. Snap quiz: how many people would throw money at the government if they didn’t have to?

It’s more than a bit rich when the government, the parasite that sucks away more than 45% of your wealth, starts blathering on about unproductive parts of the economy. Pot, meet Kettle.

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• John Key Wants an emissions trading scheme (ETS)

The comments button is at the bottom right of this post.

This is from the NZ Herald:

Prime Minister John Key said today the Government was “now effectively in negotiation”.

“There’s an ETS on the books, it’s a very expensive one under Labour, it would mean that quite a number of business in our view would close down. There would be a high price for consumers to pay.

“We want to amend that. Our preferred option is an ETS,”

So, according to Key, an ETS is a good thing if he thinks that it is affordable.

I find the notion of an emissions trading scheme quite bizarre: the government wants to create a tradable commodity out of thin air, based on the false premise of anthropogenic (man-created) climate change. Who wins out of this? The state of course, because there will be GST on every trade. Also, the International Monetary Fund has admitted that carbon trading is a tax and will take money away from wealthy countries, giving it to poor ones.

I say that there should be no Emissions Taxation Scam.

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