Bad boys and girls

I heard Geoffrey Palmer, ever the old school prefect, on RNZ (via wifi radio) last night talking earnestly about how people drank too much and how there needed to be steps to address it. The Law Commission is arguing for a higher drinking age, for higher taxes on alcohol and shorter opening hours. A bit like keeping the whole class behind after school because a few kids did something wrong. The NZ Herald reports further on this.

Will de Cleene correctly slams this, as raising the drinking age makes alcohol MORE of a forbidden fruit than it is, and all the measures combined just raise the black market opportunities, including increased theft of alcohol.

Yes, some people commit crimes when they are drunk - that is a matter for the criminal justice system. Yes there is legitimate concern about people who drink so much they barely function or act in ways dangerous to themselves and others. However, that isn't because alcohol is available, it is cultural and particular to certain individuals.

You might ask yourself why so many people want to escape reality. Could it be because far too many people talk as if something isn't what it is? Could it be because so many live lives of quiet desperation and intoxication is an escape from them loathing reality?

UPDATE: Blair Mulholland puts it rather succinctly "Why should the government stop restricting alcohol sales? Because alcohol is fun. Because people enjoy it, most of the time responsibly. Because I like it and want to buy it. That should really be all the argument anybody ever needs."

South Africa rewards scoundrels and thieves

According to the BBC the South African election seems to have granted the ANC the two-thirds majority needed to amend the Constitution - again. On the bright side, it appears to be a relatively free and fair vote. On the downside, it shows just well the ANC has branded itself as the only political party that can do good for the black majority, and how it has branded the Opposition Democratic Alliance as racist (it is anything but), and the Thabo Mbeki breakaway (though he is not standing) party COPE as a wasted vote.

The ANC has gone from being a rebel terrorist movement (which brutally treated those within its ranks who did not follow the party line - shades of Zanu-PF) to being a dominant party in a liberal democracy. However it is one where the executive dominates the legislature, almost treating it as a formality, and where the President treats the Constitutional Court with contempt.

In South Africa, the separation of ruling party from state, executive from legislature, and judiciary from executive, legislature and party is highly blurred. However, this is far too complex for many South Africans to follow. It is also something the state owned and controlled broadcast media largely ignores - the SABC is by and large the mouthpiece of the ANC.

Zuma's past is known - there is ample evidence of him having extremely questionable financial dealings, he treated his rape trial with an appalling misogynistic attitude. He said he prevented AIDS by having a shower, and he is quite the polygamist (4 wives and 3 fiancees), as well as being homophobic.

None of this bodes well for any substantive change in South Africa. The main beneficiaries of ANC rule have been ANC rulers, now including the convicted fraudster and promoter of murder (necklacing) Winnie Mandela. ANC MPs have remarkable levels of wealth and so called "black empowerment positive discrimination" appears to have benefited relatives and friends of ANC MPs and high ranking officials, and their businesses, not the tragically poor underclass - who remain largely as they were.

So where now for the state with the second highest murder rate and highest HIV infection rate in the world? It wont become Zimbabwe - yet - the economy is far better run, and liberal democracy hasn't been quashed, it just has a playing field rather tilted in one direction.

What should Zuma do? Well I'll leave that to the Economist of last week:

He should state unequivocally that he will not propose a law to render the head of state immune from criminal prosecution. He needs to resist the temptation to elevate some of his dodgier friends to high judicial posts. Parliament needs more bite to nip the heels of the executive; the present system of election by party lists shrivels the independence of members and needs reform. To curb cronyism, all MPs, ministers and board members of state-funded institutions should register their and their families’ assets. He should also keep the sound Trevor Manuel as finance minister. Finally, Mr Zuma should ask his government to revise, perhaps even phase out, the policy of “black economic empowerment”. This may have been necessary 15 years ago to put a chunk of the economy into black hands. But its main beneficiaries now are a coterie of ANC-linked people, not the poor masses.

Time to cut the VUWSA off at the knees

Yes I believe in Voltaire's maxim - if Jasmine Fremantle wants to burn a flag at Anzac Day, then she should have the legal right to do so. If she wants to damn those who saved New Zealand from Japanese imperialist occupation, who helped save Western Europe from Nazism and Fascism, who helped deter the Red Army from rolling across the Iron Curtain, who helped roll back the Korean People's Army and "Chinese People's Volunteers" from making all of Korea Kim Il Sung's slave state, who helped prevent Malaysia from being an outpost of Communist slavery, who helped push back Saddam Hussein from occupying Kuwait - she can.

It is one of the freedoms defended and fought for by those who died in wars that they would rather not have had to fight.

However, if those forced by law to belong to an organisation that expresses these views opposes her, they should say so to.

Wherever the VUWSA Executive is on ANZAC Day should be confronted head on by those, who silently, tell them to go fuck themselves. Go contemplate how New Zealand would be had the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere been running for a few years - go contemplate how an OE in the UK would have been under the jackboot of the Third Reich. In fact go to fucking North Korea and enjoy the free speech there.

Meanwhile, if the government ever needed a stronger reason to abolish compulsory student union membership, it has it now.

The VUWSA can be a tinpot club for Marxist apologists for appeasement and letting fascist and communist imperialist forces impose tyranny on the world.

However, why the hell should anyone be forced to join it?

So go on - burn your flag - but enjoy the free speech of the others watching you, taunting you and telling you what childish ungrateful fools you are. I have yet to see anyone commemorating ANZAC Day glorifying war - but I've seen enough immature little "heroes" taking for granted the freedom that men and women fought for, which make any privileged little leftwing student look like a cowardly little nobody.

Oh and students? Time to demand your student fees back, to protest the university and really tell the VUWSA what you think, while it's time for a Bill to roll through Parliament.

High taxes don't win votes or attract winners

Not when you've run deficits and borrowed the country into the ground.

The Daily Telegraph reports a massive swing to the Conservatives in the latest Yougov poll.

45% Conservative
27% Labour
18% Liberal Democrats

David Cameron has a 56% approval rating, vs Gordon Brown with a 69% disapproval rating. Not that the Tories have earnt it, they are just very lucky they didn't win the 2005 election.

Expect Labour to get a pounding in the forthcoming MEP elections for the European Parliament and the selection of local body elections that are run at the same time.

Meanwhile, the FT reports the new 50% tax rate will drive talent from the City of London.

The head of one City institution with a strong private client business fumed, “What are they trying to do, drive all the high-earners out of London?”

New York must be rubbing its hands with glee, and ready to welcome an influx of talent in a year's time.

Of course the knuckle dragging tracksuit wearing "werking peeepill" will think it's fair - and as a result the Tories are not promising to remove the new tax. Oh well, let the UK get what it votes for - and watch the talent leave.

Be nice if the left were honest

Idiot Savant's two clangers this week:

1). How fair is it to increase taxes on those who don't actually cost the state money? The UK is introducing a new 50% tax rate on earnings over £150,000, he says New Zealand could "do the same" by introducing a 45% rate on earnings over NZ$100,000. Wait a second, did you see that? NZ$100,000 is only £38,000. The new tax rate in the UK is cutting in at NZ$393,000, which in NZ would mean very few taxpayers indeed, because NZ is a low wage (and largely low cost of living) country.

He says "This move would not be contractionary, because the rich tend to stick their money in the bank (or in a housing bubble) rather than spending it." Really? Not term deposits or buying shares or investing in businesses or buying high end consumer goods or travel? What nonsense, where does he get this?

"it will help balance the books while helping to reduce the inequality which is fundamentally harmful to everyone in our society" he says. Why does that inequality exist? Oh yes is it because some people are more successful and entrepreneurial than others, or maybe because a lot of people come out of state schools barely literate, get paid to breed or be lazy, and get sold a philosophy that people get rich unfairly, or that someone owes them a living?

Higher tax rates and this attitude about "equality" sells the philosophy that people who are richer owe everyone else, through the state, more of their income than those who are fiscal failures in life. The real unfairness is the vast underclass of people who spend their lives from unearnt income off the hard work and risks taken by others, ungrateful, expecting more every year, and voting to thieve more from those who pay to keep them alive.

2.) Seeing Sweden as a great example to New Zealand, forgetting of course that its education system is based on vouchers, based on ANYONE being able to set up a school, including private businesses to run them for PROFIT, and parents being able to send their children to any of them, with their tax money flowing to their chosen school.

In other words ACT policy, and far more liberal and competitive than the centrally planned, bureaucratic system he often clamours for.

He ignores criticism of the Swedish health system for chronic waiting lists. A Swedish study in 2004 reports that 77 out of 5,800 heart surgery patients died on the waiting list.

For a bouquet though, he was dead right regarding Damian Green, the Conservative MP who had his office raided and was arrested because he received leaked information that embarrassed the Labour government. The UK Labour government is beyond a joke, is tired, stinking and should go as soon as possible. My only question is whether I'll go before I get a chance to vote the bastards out.