Popular vulgarian journalist Andrea Vance has written this:
Liberty Scott
Blogging on liberty, capitalism, reason, international affairs and foreign policy, from a distinctly libertarian and objectivist perspective
07 July 2025
Who likes swinging the wrecking ball?
04 July 2025
Does Dame Anne Salmond really want to debate the Regulatory Standards Bill?
Dame Anne Salmond is upset at the use of pejoratives to describe some opponents of the Regulatory Standards Bill. I can understand not liking the use of terms that are explicitly or implicitly abusive, as it is hardly helpful. She doesn't like being called "Victim of the Day" by David Seymour, although his piece on her was not personal. I struggle to see why an article that largely is about rebutting her original piece is initiating "an online campaign of intimidation" as she claims. Indeed the comments responding to Seymour's post have plenty criticising him as well as supporting him. She may think I am part of a campaign of intimidation, but she claims debate is fine, so let's have that. She has a wide platform as a public figure, so, as with other critics like Metiria Turei and Willie Jackson (past and present MPs), engaging publicly on an issue means people will support and oppose.
Let’s remember this is an academic that once wrote that unless you can read the original language any text is written in, you are not entitled to have an opinion on it. She talks of wanting to “silence” critics but is adept at finding reasons to tell those she criticises effectively that they are not entitled to express an opinion on Te Tiriti. This is someone who claims the Regulatory Standards Bill expresses a “contempt for liberal democracy” who expresses contempt for people commenting on Te Tiriti if they are not sufficiently fluent in Te Reo.
Her criticism of the Regulatory Standards Bill strongly infers that those advocating it don’t believe in “public goals and values” (she means the public goals and values she supports). She opposes it because it lacks a strong democratic mandate, on the basis that most voters didn’t vote for ACT. Has she ever said the same about Bills advanced by the Greens or Te Pati Maori?
She opposes the principles focusing on individual rights and private property, which at least she’s explicit about. I’d argue that opposing such principles is “dangerous” in itself, and is the source of much of the harm seen today. What is fundamentally wrong with respecting people’s autonomy over their bodies and property, and having a society based on that? (leaving aside how inconsistent ACT is in defending this - which is fair criticism. ACT is no libertarian party, and never has been).
She claims that having an ideological oversight over the legislative and regulatory activities of all government agencies is a “naked power grab”. Power for whom? The Regulatory Standards Board has no power to do anything other than to report, as it would be up to the elected government of the day to respond to it, or ignore it. What is she really afraid of, that the governments she supports would be asked to justify why they are overriding individual rights and property rights to implement policies she supports?
If individual rights and property rights are so “dangerous” then she should have no fear whatsoever of a government she supports implementing the policies she supports saying “individual rights are secondary to us banning, compelling or taxing people for this “public purpose””. Sunlight showing the very clear trade-offs between individual rights and the politics of collectivists.
It takes nothing away from the Executive or Parliament, it is not a constitution upholding those rights and being able to veto policies that degrade them (if only!).
However, Salmond’s real view on this is that it is sinister, because she doesn’t think ACT has honest intent (because she opposes the reform of the pay equity legislation applied retrospectively). That’s not playing the ball, that’s playing the man. She thinks ACT wants to undermine liberal democracy, which is a serious accusation. Bear in mind she claims the Government is waging a "war on women".
Is this the rhetoric of someone who wants fact based debate, or someone happy to jump in, boots and all, into the world of political pejoratives?
She claims on LinkedIn that (the Regulatory Standards Bill) "rhetoric used to support this bill talks about ‘equality,’ ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom, ’trying to force indigenous and other New Zealanders to abide by libertarian understandings of these words – thus stripping them of their rights and freedoms"
Really? How does anyone "force" anyone else to abide by the meaning of any word? How does this even make sense?
She says there are not enough checks and balances on executive power but claims this Bill will be an example of this, even though it can only come into power by being passed by a majority in Parliament. It can of course be repealed likewise. This is simply wrong.
The “worst” effect she claims is that the bill “attempts to tie the hands of the state in regulating private activities or initiatives that create public harm”. This isn’t actually what is in the Bill, but an interpretation. Lot of people claim “public harm” from activities that generate private benefit, ranging from what people consume or do with their bodies through to businesses they engage in with consenting adults. =Of course, the Bill simply states as a principle that legislation should not take, impair property unless fair compensation is given for that. =All the Bill requires is that this be reported on, and then Parliament decides whether to do so, or not.
Then she talks about the "accumulation" of wealth and power by the “few” at the “expense of the many”, which is political agitprop. Of course, globally she is one of the “few” as are most people in New Zealand, who have incomes and wealth exceeding that of the majority of the global population. She continues with rhetoric of “over-emphasis on private property and individual rights”. She thinks that is what happens in the US, a country with eminent domain over private property to enable private development (an egregious violation of property rights), a country with a long litany of laws against individual freedom ranging from what one can ingest into one’s body, through to the endless need for permits to undertake mundane trading activities.
Salmond appears not to have read the Bill. If she has, she hasn't understood it. Maybe she simply imputes sinister intent to ACT, by claiming it is all "doublespeak"?
It's easy to see why David Seymour would get frustrated, with rhetoric of that of Marxist student activists. This Bill does not attack the “fundamental rights of New Zealanders” as Salmond claims and puts up zero evidence for. What it would do is subject the policies she supports to the scrutiny as to why individual rights and property rights should be reduced to achieve the objectives she may be in supportive of. Governments could then ignore that or respect it.
Why is that controversial, unless you think it doesn't really matter if individual freedom and private property rights are eroded for "the common good"?
18 June 2025
Ending Iran's nuclear programme is a must, defeating the Islamic Republic is the ideal
You'd have to be an Islamist, an anti-Western tankie or a moron to not wish the fall of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The 1979 revolution was anti-humanist, anti-reason and implemented a regime that - if it were led by fundamentalist Christians - would be called far-right and fascist. It's a theocracy, with law determined by its single interpretation of the one religion, with little tolerance for other religions let alone atheism. It is a tightly controlled democracy, with choice between a preset selection of Islamist candidates. There is little freedom of speech, nobody can campaign for the end of the Islamist regime. Media is entirely controlled by the state. Women are second class citizens, with the morality police controlling what they wear in public, because the men of the Islamic Republic can't be trusted to control their libidos, their hands and their penises if they see a women's head and hair. Of course it's fairly obvious how difficult it is to be openly LGBT in the Islamic Republic.
By any measure the entire Western self-styled "liberal" left would loathe and despise the regime. On top of its fascism, it has long had a nuclear programme which has been enriching uranium beyond that needed for civilian use. It is pursuing nuclear weapons, notwithstanding like north Korea before it, the claims it is not doing so. Its economy is, in part, built on extracting fossil fuels.
However, the Islamic Republic does have several positive points - from the hard-left point of view - it has always called for "Death to Israel" and "Death to America", which reflect the deeply held feelings of anti-Zionists and anti-capitalists the world over. To express this, Iran has funded, armed and trained its proxies such as Hamas and Hezbollah. It has engaged in Iraq and Syria, although of course it was wrecklessly attacked by Saddam Hussein's Iraq with Soviet and US endorsement in 1980 and was undoubtedly the victim in that horrendous conflict.
Today, Iran has been a strong supporter and arms Russia, in support of its aggression against Ukraine. Iran mistakenly shot down Ukrainian flight PS752 in 2020, (but then the US mistakenly shot down Iran Air flight IR655 in 1988).
The consequences of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons is potentially catastrophic for Israel, but also may provide access to its proxies for such technology. Iran philosophically is antithetical to the values of open, tolerant secular liberal democracies.
Israel's action against Iran, if it can end its nuclear programme, will help make the Middle East and the world a more peaceful place. If it can result in the fall of the regime, it will be all the better for the people of Iran and for promoting peace for Israel/Palestine, Lebanon and the Middle East more generally.
Israel has done it before. In 1981 it destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, as Saddam Hussein's first attempt to develop a nuclear weapons' programme. This bought a great deal of time, and potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives. At that time it was condemned by the UN Security Council, including the US, but it was morally entirely justified.
The only negative to Israel's action is if it fails, if it emboldens the regime further if it is not overthrown, and Iran's allies provide it with more support to develop WMDs. This is why it is important for the US to help it finish the job.
Those claiming moral equivalence between the liberal democratic open Israel, that is not a theocracy, that allows public protests, free press and does not seek "death" to any other countries, and the Islamic Republic of Iran are either morons or despicably evil. The people of Iran deserve better than the calcified misogynistic theocracy in Tehran, and no such regime should feel free to develop nuclear weapons.
There is a pragmatic argument as to whether Israel's actions could prove counter-productive, but that is not an argument against disarming Iran. Those who protest or are openly in support of the Islamic Republic of Iran are actual far-right fascists, and should be called out for it. As Germany's Chancellor Friedrich Merz said, Israel is doing the West's "dirty work for us". Let us hope it works.
And yes, to those who say whatever succeeds the Islamic Republic might be worse, there is always that risk. One poll indicated that the vast majority want an end to the Islamic Republic, and although the previous regime was far from a liberal democratic one (the Shah was violent to opponents), it did provide a framework for women to be more equal citizens. Bear in mind the protests that erupted in 2022 after the death in custody of a young woman arrested for wearing a hijab improperly.
To come back locally. I wonder if one, just one, journalist in NZ might ask any of the hard-left party leaders - Swarbrick, Davidson, Waititi or Ngarewa-Packer, whether they think it would be good if Iran's regime fell over or even....just even, if it would be good if Iran had nuclear weapons.
I doubt any journalists would have the courage to do so, or if any did, the answers would be at best evasive at worst a repulsive eructation of moral equivalency.
If ever there is a display of values by politicians it is how they apply their own values to people abroad.
18 May 2025
Pay Equity is a fundamentally flawed concept
No rational person would argue that people should be paid differently because of characteristics that have no bearing on their capability and willingness to undertake a particular job. It's rational to be "sex-blind" so to speak, because most employers want employees with the requisite skills, experience, capability and willingness to work, as well as trustworthiness, to do the job. There are a few exceptions to the rule that men and women should, everything else being equal, be paid similarly, for example, historically the porn industry pays women a lot more, although their "working lives" may be shorter than men. Does that mean that bureaucrats should investigate and seek to correct this?
Leaving aside that distraction, given RNZ - like most taxpayer funded broadcasters across the world - just swallows the philosophy of "pay equity" as fact, because its unconscious bias is in favour of critical constructivism (which is a more sophisticated way of describing what is commonly called "woke"), I thought it was worth reading its sources for supporting the view that "pay equity" is a problem that needs a complex bureaucratic solution to fix.
As to be expected, RNZ found plenty of "howls of outrage" and of course nothing beats the now much more famous Andrea Vance, who is now one of the country's best known and paid vulgarians. Those who are outraged undoubtedly think that there is some great injustice being perpetrated which can be fixed by the state either making taxpayers or making employers take money away from elsewhere to make pay "fairer".
RNZ looked to an article by Hayden Donnell on the Spinoff (Donnell is an RNZ reporter) and an article in The Conversation written by three academics (two of whom are sociologists and one in HR management).
Both demonstrate the fundamental flaws in the argument about pay equity. They assert that it is possible to fairly and reasonable assess different jobs based on "comparable levels of skill and training" and "similar amounts of responsibility" which should therefore mean that those jobs should be paid similarly.
Donnell said:
Though it’s been highlighted in government comms, the librarians’ claim didn’t just look at fisheries officers. It also compared their pay and conditions to property surveyors, teacher aides, customs officers, corrections officers, parking compliance officers, and administration staff. That analysis was carried out using a government-issued assessment tool Te Orowaru, which provides a lengthy set of criteria to help claimants compare work responsibilities in seemingly disparate fields.
Think a bit more about that. A tool, accepted by the public sector, seeks to analyse bureaucratically how jobs ought to be compared with one another. It is central planning par excellence which appears to have nothing to do with what is always a key factor in pay in the private sector (you know, the part of the economy that actually generates wealth the part of which is taken for the public sector to tell it what to do) - demand.
In the private sector, employers generally pay whatever it takes to attract employees and retain them. The employer works out how much net income the employee will generate, through sales, productivity or savings in administration, and pays accordingly. Employers will pay what they need to get the people they want. That's an assessment of a number of factors, but most of all it is around productivity, competence and trustworthiness. Levels of skill and training may inform that but aren't decisive. Level of responsibility is a factor, but by far the most important point is whether the persons wanted might not stay in the job, which is a matter for them. Jobs that involve unconventional hours, working away from home, uncomfortable situations of all kinds, will require more pay. Most private employers are small, so are not price setters (unlike the state which, given it has the power of coercion to force people to pay for it, is a price setter), and while some private sector employees are unionised, ultimately the decision to hire and pay is a matter for those who take the risk with setting up businesses in the first place.
The pay equity problem is that academics, bureaucrats and leftwing politicians treat the issue as something fundamentally flawed in capitalism, that employers, including government departments, have paid women historically less than men. The Conversation article claims:
pay equity seeks to make visible and fix the deep, structural inequalities that have historically seen women’s work undervalued compared to men’s work. It’s about ensuring jobs that are different but of equal value are paid similarly, as a way to achieve gender equality.
Equal value to whom? Two people in exactly similar jobs with different employers may be paid differently because of factors that the academics and bureaucrats (let alone the politicians who create legal mandates for this) have little visibility of. The person in the lower paid job may prefer the employer, who may be more flexible around working hours, and may have colleagues who are more enjoyable to work with, and there may be many other "soft" factors that no bureaucrat could identify. Anything from location of employment, to management style, to the working environment. The diversity (a word commonly used but ignored in the case of capitalism) of conditions is almost infinite, but none of this analysis takes this into account.
Is it unfair if someone in a job they chose is paid less than someone else in another job they chose?
The academics claim "Pay equity is about addressing both the objective and subjective elements contributing to that gap". Really? How can they possibly know what those are?
The cost to taxpayers (undoubtedly seen as predominantly men) is dismissed as being "high" but "bearable" apparently (not that taxpayers have any choice), but it is the last statement of that article which is revealing about how bereft of serious critical thinking there is in talk about "pay equity":
Finally, focusing exclusively on reducing fiscal cost risks other costs rising instead. Women who are paid less than they should be will struggle to put food on the table, pay back student loans, get onto the property ladder, contribute to Kiwisaver and afford their retirement.
Without pay equity, in other words, there is less economic activity in general.
Where do these people think the money comes from to raise a small number of womens' pay? It isn't from a magic money tree, it comes from other people who engage in economic activity. The people who do pay for food, pay their student loans, buy property and save for their retirement. Most the talk of pay equity is about transfers from taxpayers to people paid by the state, and as with all talks of collectivised pay it bears zero relationship to the actual performance and productivity of those being paid.
It goes further than this, because the advocates of pay equity have lobbied for pay "transparency" requiring employers to publish what they pay their employees (employee privacy is apparently not important). Why not also lobby for the value of all contracts in the private sector to be transparent, why not tell everyone what everyone is paid for everything? The idea that consenting adults might want their business with other consenting adults around money to be private is an anathema to wannabe central planners who see opposition to their cause as being "resistance to changing or challenging the status quo, benefiting already privileged and advantaged groups", as if it is all a zero sum game. Hints of Marxism of the bourgeoisie vs. the proletariat. Anyone opposing Marxism is automatically defending the bourgeoisie.
As with so many theories in the space of post-modernist critical theory, extraordinarily complicated analysis is surprising reductive and overly simplistic. The complexity of a modern economy of millions of actors, making many millions of decisions, based on endlessly diverse factors is beyond the capability of the best intentioned bureaucrats, academics and politicians to understand. The simplistic reductive fallacy and the conceit (Hayek's Fatal Conceit highlighted this issue) to think that officials can decide what people should be paid, rather that it being about what it takes to attract the right people to a job in particular circumstances, is the fundamental error.
There may be pay equity issues across many different characteristics that, on the face of it, look unfair. Do short people get paid less? Do overweight people get paid less? Do relatively good looking people get paid more and get more job interviews? Do blondes, especially blonde women get neglected for promotions due to stereotypes? All of this may be true, and there are bound to be more cases. For fairness should the state collect data on all of these factors and engage in complex bureaucratic processes to ensure people of "oppressed" characteristics are paid equally?
Politicians on the left are particularly attracted to the power and capacity of the state to "fix" things. The problem is, as the Soviet Union and the significant list of examples that followed have proven, it is impossible to centrally plan an economy and society in a way that is remotely as productive or indeed fair as a relatively free, open, market economy of people largely left to co-operate, compete and work.
Most people think their work is "undervalued" and want more pay. Most people who own businesses think their products and services are undervalued and want more pay. The path to more people being paid more is not through generating complex regulatory frameworks, managed by public servants, designed by management consultants. It's by enabling people to innovate, to create, produce, hire people to support this, and to let people trade.
Central planning and control of pay might give an illusion of fairness, but when the reason salaries are low is because NZ's GDP per capita is amongst the lowest in the OECD, so that employers can't afford to pay what is paid in Australia, the United States, Europe or Singapore, then it's a delusion.
11 March 2025
Feeding "our" children
The debate about the compulsorily funded school lunch programme is being characterised by opponents of the government, as one of mean-hearted people unwilling to feed "our" children.
Advocates of the school lunch programme claim:
- There are children going to school without breakfast and without lunches, and they will perform worse at school than had they been fed... this is true, but not just for the reasons advocates of state feeding of children claim.
- Simply providing food for the children who are in need (and whose parents can't or wont pay for it) is bad, because it makes those children feel singled out because of the
negligence of their parents/guardians unlike that ofchildren who would not get such meals. this is likely to be true, but neglect to note that is likely to be the case more generally anyway.
- If "we" can't feed "our" children, then what are "our" priorities anyway?