• The myth of public property

Is it “your” rail network? The Auckland rail tracks and stations are being upgraded at present and, due to disruptions, a special timetable has been issued. On the front of this is written “Buses replacing trains while we improve your rail network”. That’s the socialist lie, here comes the libertarian truth…

If a piece of land belongs to you then you should be able to do whatever you like on that land, if that activity does not violate the personal and/or property rights of another person (that’s the ideal, but we live in a socialist state so your property rights are annihilated by the government). If the rail network – the tracks and the associated land – was “your[s]” then you would be free to walk over it, just as you are free to walk over land that you own. But you are not free to walk over the rail network, and if you do you will be fined up to $10,000 plus any amount of compensation that the judge decides you should pay [1]. This shows that it is not “your” rail network, for no sane person would fine you for walking across land that is yours.

If the rail network is not yours then who does it belong to? It belongs to the state, which controls every detail of what happens on that land. Section 50 of the Railways Act proves my point: it says that the Minister responsible may

(a) set out standards and requirements relating to the behaviour of individuals on railways or railway premises, including, without limitation, standards and requirements concerning the conduct of rail personnel, passengers, or other individuals working on or using railways or railway premises:

(b) regulate all traffic and all classes of traffic, and prohibit traffic or a class of traffic, either absolutely or conditionally, on railways:

(c) set out standards and requirements concerning the use of safety equipment by rail personnel, passengers, or other individuals working on or using railways or railway premises. [emphasis added]

This law means that the Minister may, without consulting anyone else, make a rule requiring you to hop on one foot and wear a pink gorilla suit when in a train station or riding in a train. “Your” rail network? I think not. The state has all the powers that only a landowner should have [2], therefore I conclude that the state is the de facto owner.

Here’s another example: in Australia the state requires people to pay for a permit if they’re going to take photographs in a National Park and may use those photographs commercially [3]. Do you still think that National Parks are public property, owned by all?

What’s the agenda behind this?

The agenda is the Socialist/Communist desire to disempower you by taking away your property/property rights. In the Communist Manifest Marx and Engels laid out ten steps for the transition from communism to socialism. Here’s four of those steps:

1) Abolition of property in land [outlawing private ownership of land] and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

3) Abolition of all rights of inheritance [when you die your property is stolen by the state: death taxes are a partial step towards this].

4) Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels [presumably this blog makes me a rebel in the eyes of the state, and you’re reading it so you’re a rebel by association].

6) Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

The Communist Manifest is alive and well today, and it’s policies are enacted all around us.

What’s a better way?

Don’t allow the state to own anything. Make the government your servant, not your master. Only then will you be free, and only then will the state stop lying about it being “your” rail network.

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1. Railways Act S73 & S92

2. If I visit your house you are perfectly entitled to set down conditions of entry, including a requirement that I wear a pink gorilla suit and hop on one foot. That’s part of your property rights; it’s also a great way to avoid having unwelcome guests. Every landowner has conditions of entry: do you willingly let gun-toting burglars enter your home?

3. Source

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• Why does Obama want to eliminate private health insurance via Single Payer/Universal Health Care

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

Barack Obama wants to eliminate private health insurance via his Single Payer/Universal Health Care system. In his own words:

This begs two questions:

1. What does a Single Payer/Universal Health Care system mean for Americans?
2. Why does Barack Obama want to eliminate private health insurance?

1-> What does a Single Payer/Universal Health Care system mean for Americans?

It means death and misery because the government will decide what treatment people will be allowed to have. It will mean having government staff viewing your private medical records. It will mean a reduction in the quality of health care you receive, because the government wants to keep costs down and paltry payments from the government will mean that hospitals will be unable to afford new equipment, new treatments, good staffing levels, and so on (private health care encourages these things because competition encourages hospitals to provide the best possible care, and in a free market system hospitals will supply what patients demand and are willing to pay for). I live in a country where all but a few medical services are “provided” by the state, so I know what universal health means. Also, have a look at this from Bloomberg:

The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what [Tom] Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Keeping doctors informed of the newest medical findings is important, but enforcing uniformity goes too far.

New Penalties

Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)

What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.

The stimulus bill does that, and calls it the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (190-192). The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs. He praises Europeans for being more willing to accept “hopeless diagnoses” and “forgo experimental treatments,” and he chastises Americans for expecting too much from the health-care system.

Daschle’s arrogance is breathtaking: he wants to slow life-saving human creativity and wealth generation in order to reduce costs (something that will be impossible when the government is running the health care system). Imagine if the UK government had done the same thing in 1959, and slowed down car development at a time when cars looked like this:

This is a Ford Prefect 100E from 1959. The heater was an optional extra, the vacuum wipers got slower as you went faster, and 0-60mph took 32 seconds: in my experience these were pretty awful cars. Why would anyone want to slow down human creativity and innovation?

Presumably Daschle is wealthy enough to avoid the effect of his own policies. Presumably he would not like being forced to forgo experimental treatments if he had terminal cancer. Heaven forbid that he should descend from his ivory tower and share a four-bed hospital room with the hoi polloi.

2-> Why does Barack Obama want to eliminate private health insurance?

I believe that Obama is a fundamentalist Marxist, and that eliminating private health insurance is part of his Marxist plan to give the state/himself more power and wealth. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels described the steps for a transition from socialism to communism:

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie [that’s Obama’s desire to tax the wealthy], to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State [Single Payer/Universal Health Care is a step towards this, as are the bailouts where the state ends up owning part of the company], i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear [are] economically insufficient and untenable [e.g. Single Payer/Universal Health Care, TARP – Toxic Asset Recovery Program, cash for clunkers, bailouts of bankrupt companies, etc.], but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax [Obama’s plan to make the wealthy pay more tax].

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State [see above]; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

(Here I have only highlighted those points which pertain to Obama’s health care “reforms”, but in fact much of what is recommended in the Communist Manifesto has been accomplished in the USA and other countries: click here for details)

Remember the Marxist/Communist utopia was a fiction, false advertising to justify immoral acts like Obama’s and those described in the Manifesto.

Summary

• Barack Obama wants to eliminate private health insurance via his Single Payer/Universal Health Care system
• Single Payer/Universal Health Care will mean death, misery, loss of privacy, loss of choice, and all-round inferior health care for Americans
• Single Payer/Universal Health Care will control how doctors treat their patients
• Single Payer/Universal Health Care is intended to slow down human creativity and wealth generation, e.g. new medicines and medical technologies that can save lives
• Barack Obama is following the game plan laid out in the Communist Manifesto

What do you think about Obama’s plan for state-controlled health care and the points that I have raised here?

Hat tip: LRC

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• Reserve Bank interfering with private businesses

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

The NZ Herald is reporting Reserve Bank* governor Allan Bollard as saying

“We have been putting quite a bit of pressure on the banks to ensure they are not treating New Zealand borrowers in an unnecessarily different way – bearing in mind there are some arguments about extra risk here – or running down their balance sheets.”

I know that socialists have trouble with this concept, but these banks are private businesses, and the state should keep it’s big nose out of their affairs.

The article goes on to say

The banks were saying the market had got a lot more difficult, that it was harder to raise funds and riskier, and that that risk had to be passed on to corporate borrowers.

“We think that is true up to a point but it is very important they don’t go beyond that point and are there supporting investment into our recovery,” Bollard said.

The arrogance of this is breath taking: Bollard is saying that banks should be supporting economic recovery. That is something that comes out of the back end of a bull: these banks are private businesses and they have no duty whatsoever when in comes to supporting economic recovery.

Why does the state have this attitude towards banks? Because, as I said in my earlier post, the central banking system that causes world-wide suffering is a Communist policy, and the state considers everyone’s financial affairs to be something that it can manipulate at will. Socialist/Marxist governments only pay lip service to the concept of “private property” so will interfere with private affairs whenever it suits them.

What do you think about the Reserve Bank putting pressure on banks?

For more on central banking see my earlier post Global economic crisis: why are governments bailing out banks?

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*the Reserve Bank is the New Zealand central bank, equivalent to the Federal Reserve in the USA

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Barack Obama’s inauguration: a communist and a terrorist is now the world’s most powerful man

On Kiwiblog David Farrar said

There will be plenty of days to disagree with the policies of President Obama, to complain about the media hype. But for me today is not one of them. Today is a day to celebrate a peaceful transition of office in the most powerful country on Earth, and to celebrate Obama’s achievement in becoming the first African-American President.

Apart from the fact that “African-American” is a nonsensical description rooted in pernicious political correctness, this is not a day to celebrate. This is a day to mourn, a day to mourn the fact that a communist and a terrorist is now the worlds most powerful man, the only man capable of projecting significant military force around the globe. That man may also be a closet Muslim. Whilst increased freedom for black Americans is a good thing, that is a trivilality compared to the evil that lies within Obama, and his colour has been used as a means of getting him into power, a point of difference in marketing terms. In my humble opinion the people behind Obama don’t give a stuff about Obama’s colour beyond the fact that it helps them to get their man into power.

So why do I call Obama a communist and a terrorist?

1) In my earlier post I quoted Obama’s Communist/Socialist/Marxist language:

Barack says “Every child in America is our problem, every child in America is our responsibility. That’s not somebody else’s child, that our child”. Back up the Socialist/Marxist bus Barack, children belong to their parents and no one else: you’re trying to justify State interference in the raising of children. This is your variation on “It takes a village to raise a child”.

2) Trevor Loudon says

It is indisputable that US president-elect Barack Obama, has been groomed and supported by radical Marxists almost his entire life.

It is now well known that three Marxist organisations-Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS)and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have supported Obama’s political career.

It is also common knowledge that Obama has enjoyed close ties to several former members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its terrorist splinter, Weather Underground Organisation (WUO).

What is less well known is that all these strands are linked to one entity, an organisation with documented ties to hostile foreign intelligence services-Washington based “think tank” the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

Trevor has done a lot more research than I and he is generally considered to a reliable source of information. Note three points from the above:

1. Loudon believes that Obama has been groomed – taught – by radical Marxists [Socialists/Communists]
2. Obama has close ties to communist and terrorist groups
3. those groups have links to hostile foreign powers

3) Terrorists are active supporters of Obama. Birds of a feather flock together, and it is human nature to associate with those people who have a similar world view as ourselves. It is reasonable to conclude that, since Obama is close to such people, he shares their ideology. Furthermore, Marxist ideology advocates revolution – a form of terrorism – so their ideologies are in harmony. Democratic Socialism has covered the iron fist of the Marxist armed revolution with a velvet glove, but that iron fist is no less lethal.

Also, if Obama was anti-terrorism he would not associate with terrorists for fear of harming his political career. Politicians always grovel up to those who share their ideology and will vote for them, whilst shunning those who are repulsive to their electoral base.

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I am aware that these are not the strongest arguments I have ever made and I cannot conclusively prove that Obama is a communist and a terrorist. However, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck (#1 above), walks like a duck, and flies with the ducks (#2 & 3 above), then it probably is a duck.

Think of Obama as Helen Clark with more guns and more money then you’ll have the right picture.

What are your thoughts regarding Barack Obama and his ideology?

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Click here for a biblical perspective on Obama.

See also this post about Obama:

The Communists have won the Cold War

Why has government use of floor space increased by 42% in five years?

Gerry Brownlee has stated that government use of floor space in Wellington has increased by 42% in five years, and now bureaucrats occupy 40% of the office space in the wellington Central Business District. David Parker attempts to defend this, but in doing so lets slip that the public sector has grown by 11% since 2002¹.

Why do we have such a huge increase in bureaucrats? This is a philosophy straight from the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx & Engels:

We have seen above that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible. [emphasis added]

Remember that all the Marxist nonsense about the proletariat/working class is just a sales pitch, and history has shown that a communist revolution is all about giving absolute power to the ruling elite.

“Centralising all instruments in the hands of the state” means that the State will steal all private businesses and put them under the control of the ruling elite, because the Marxist agenda is one of power and control. Most Socialists/Communists have by now admitted that this simply doesn’t work², so we have a mixture of capitalism and State-owned instruments of production, e.g. hospitals and education. However, Marxists like Helen Clark do like to increase their dominion and that is why we see such a growth in the public sector.

If you look at the figures below, you will see that 7.6% of the population now works for the public sector, which means that 7.6% of the population is beholden to Helen Clark, and that 7.6% of the population has a vested interest in not rocking the boat. To put it another way, Helen is stealing money from your pay packet and using it to control 7.6% of the population.

However, her lust for power will not be satisfied with the fact that 327,399 people are under her direct control.

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1) Consider these points:

a) Parker said “That’s an increase of 32,445 compared with an increase of 251,700 in the employed labour force.” Is he implying that the bureaurcrats aren’t actually gainfully employed?

b) If 32,445 is an 11% increase in public sector employees then we have 327,399 bureaucrats today, or 7.6% of the population.

c) according to Statistics NZ the population grew by 7.6% from 2001 to 2006, whilst the public sector grew by 11% over a similar period: even the fiction that the public sector needs to grow in proportion to the population doesn’t hold up.

d) if the public sector has grown by 11% and governmental use of Wellington office space has grown by 42% over a similar period, this suggests a bias towards growth in bureaucrats involved in central planning (i.e. they are administering the nanny state), rather than in public sector employees like nurses.

e) it is reasonable to assume that these figure do not include consultants, the use of which has grown by huge amounts (far above 11%, although I do not have the exact figures to hand) according to Ian Wishart.

2) I will not attempt to explain here why the State cannot run a business, but consider this: we’re forever short of public health services, but we’re never short of privately produced toilet rolls. If Helen ever nationalises toilet paper production I’ll be on the next plane out.