Rugby World Cup public transport success story

Large numbers of people arrived for the Rugby World Cup with nary a problem using some public transport. They were using the commercially driven public transport, that doesn’t need subsidies to operate or to reinvest in capital. It has vibrant competition and a wide range of services. It’s called aviation.

The airline industry has had a few years to plan for the Rugby World Cup and has managed admirably. Air New Zealand delayed retiring aircraft it would have sold, in order to provide more services on routes between the main centres, displacing turbo-prop aircraft to provide some more to provincial centres. It is also using mothballed Boeing 747s for two additional services to London via LA when it ends. It had increased services on its London-Hong Kong-Auckland route. Qantas has done similar keeping aircraft it was to retire to provide additional services for the Rugby World Cup. Other airlines have increased the size of aircraft flying to and from New Zealand.

You can’t pretend the airline industry is in a healthy state. Qantas is undertaking a substantial restructuring of its international services to stem huge losses, and Air NZ is undertaking a thorough review of long haul services given its own losses. Yet they and their competitors all are able to deliver people internationally (and the pair domestically) at a time of peak demand. The corollary of it is that at certain times on certain routes air fares are high, but then so is demand and people prepared to pay get seats, they get a generally consistent level of service. The airports too, all run on a commercial basis, handle the crowds with little fuss.

Contrast that to a mega local authority co-ordinating a rail service that it owns, sub-contracted to a management company on tracks owned by the state.

Finger pointing all round given it is the silly season (election), as the railevangelists blame the Government – because it isn’t completely craven to their endless demands for other people’s money to gold-plate a service that costs more in subsidies than it generates in fare revenue.

The Government blames the council that IT set up running on a network that IT owns. For years the ARC complained that it didn’t have enough control or authority over transport in Auckland, that there were too many agencies. Now it is the Auckland Council contracting Kiwirail, both government bodies. The railevangelists protest that a fortune of your money (well your children’s, they would borrow now and make you pay later) should have been spent years ago building a gold-plated system that would work like clockwork and handle peaks (don’t talk about the subsidies to run them – because we’ll just manufacture figures to claim roads are worse), ignoring that the current socialist administration has spent a fortune to electrify the network (but it doesn’t happen overnight) to meet their dreams. The socialist administration chooses to impose a benign martial law over the Auckland waterfront and blame the Council it set up, cravenly following almost the entire model it inherited from a Helengrad inspired Royal Commission.

Should this not all demonstrate how the incentives to perform for government are so abysmal compared to commercial organisations? Even partially government owned companies like Air New Zealand and Auckland Airport are models of efficiency compared to Auckland’s quaint little commuter railway.

It’s worth noting that there is plenty of public transport in New Zealand that operates efficiently, commercially, without taxpayer subsidy (the Air NZ bailout was unnecessary and the fault of government intervention in the first place) and handles peaks and troughs quite adequately. It also has very high capital requirements, is exposed to extremely volatile changes in input prices (aviation fuel) and exchange rates (affecting costs of capital and fuel, as well as demand). It’s called the airline industry.

On a more modest scale, the entire intercity bus operation also operates efficiently, commercially and without taxpayer subsidy, meeting the needs of tourists and people without cars, with little fuss and no state planning (and also maintains individually unprofitable services because they contribute to the network, such as Napier-Gisborne). The movement planners who are obsessed with using other people’s money to prop up the modes they like, but to take from the ones they don’t, who want to tell landowners to build higher densities because they think it is “good for them and society”, ignore all of that. For it would appear than when governments stop planning so obsessively how people get about, businesses and their customers rather remarkably, seem to manage quite well.

And if you think cities are different, ask yourself why freight seems to move with little effort in cities, the only problem it faces is when bottlenecks of infrastructure or poor pricing mean that the government owned networks stop functioning efficiently.

Vileness appeared today

It had to happen.  The London Metropolitan Police has today protected about 100 protestors who in Grosvenor Square - the location of the US Embassy to the UK - held placards proclaiming "Islam will dominate the world", calling for an Islamic Caliphate for the UK and the US and celebrating that Afghanistan is a graveyard of US soldiers.  They deliberately broke the minute of silence held to commemorate the dead and are now celebrating the same on their website.  They burnt the US flag.

Their website makes it bold:

This is a war between ideologies, namely between those who stand on the side of Islam and those who stand on the side of democracy and freedom. In the West they use different terminologies, they call it a war between freedom and terrorism, it is strange though that all the "terrorists" are Muslim and all those Muslims have as there ideology Islam.

The claim is that the US has lost the ideological war.  They are worshippers of a death cult of slavery and depravity, they openly despise freedom, openly believe laws cannot be created except in the shadow of their misogynistic violent death cult.   They use the freedom of the West to fight against it,

It is worth noting that two groups counter-protested.  A group of Muslims appeared holding placards saying "Muslims against Extremism", "Keep the Silence" and "If you want Sharia, Move to Saudi".  Good for them.  The more British Muslims confront the Islamists the more it will be accepted that the majority of them live in the UK because of freedom, not to destroy it.   According to the Daily Mail one said "If the moderate Muslims all came out and spoke out, that would defeat them..I am proud to be British. I love my country. All these people are doing is breaking Britain apart."

Another group comprised the English Defence League, a group commonly described as fascist/far right, which is largely a bunch of working class men who are loudly and usually rather bluntly against Islamism.  The Police moved them so that the Islamist misogynists could have their protests.  For all of their faults, the EDL is at least NOT against the freedoms and secularism of modern Britain.  Indeed, treating them as being as bad as the Islamists will simply encourage recruitment.

What's most telling is that today, of all days, those who would destroy our way of life were allowed to be unspeakably disgusting and vile.  It makes a profound mockery of so called "human rights" laws that don't allow people to express offensive views based on race, sex, religion and sexuality, when people who hold those very views, are protected by the state to express them.

Now I would not stop people expressing those views, but would also not stop others counter-protesting, and would not move peaceful citizens on to let people protest.   Islamists sought to protest outside the US Embassy, knowing how inflammatory and offensive it would be, and got state protection to do so.  Would anyone who dared go to Muslim majority parts of Britain expect the same protection if they wanted to protest for a secular state, freedom and equal rights for women?

Why should the UK's 50p tax rate be cut?

Gordon Brown introduced the 50% top tax rate in the UK close to the end of his term as Prime Minister.  It cuts in at an income of £150,000, and the excuse was to help the public finances, the real reason was to tap the envy and class hatred of his voting base - the people who hate success, who wish they could earn that sort of money, or rather be given it.   The Daily Mail reported that the Institute of Fiscal Studies has said the 50p tax rate may not have raised any extra money because of the incentive it created to rearrange income sources and investment to avoid it. 

There are plenty of good reasons to scrap it, primarily because it is one of the highest top tax rates in Europe.  The UK already has the highest corporate tax rate in Europe.  The main problem it creates is being a disincentive to entrepreneurs staying in the UK and investing here.  What great incentive is there to taking risks in the UK if you face losing more than half of your income (including "National Insurance", which is another income tax) to the state?

Of course as Harry Phibbs at the Daily Mail says:

There will be plenty who will shout about fat cats and bashing the rich. The merchants of envy will always have a crude populist appeal.

It sends a message that Britain isn't a friendly place for making a lot of money.  Yet it is obvious that there is only one reason why it likely wont happen - the class envy that somehow people on higher incomes "aren't paying their fair share".  

Allister Heath of City AM points out some real facts to show that, unlike the distorted image spread by the Labour Party, trade unions and leftist media, the truth is that the British government is dependent on the "Atlas" of high earners.   The idea that the "rich" have never had it so good, is proven as nonsense.

1% of income tax payers reach into the 50% tax rate, in that they earn over £150,000 a year.   Many of them are not paying more on most of their income (as the tax rate is marginal), but together than 1% pay 27.7% of the income tax in the UK.   The equivalent top 1% of taxpayers in 1982 paid only 11% of all income tax, by 2000 they were paying 21.3% - so much for the Tories being the party of the "rich".

14,000 people in the UK earn more than £1 million a year.  They together pay £14.2 billion in income tax.  They pay almost as much income tax as the 13.9 million people who earn less than £20,000 a year. 

In other words 14,000 pay as much in income tax alone to pay the entire Home Office budget, which covers Police, prisons and the entire criminal justice system.

The top 1% of earners together pay enough income tax and national insurance to cover half of the NHS budget, but the legions of worshippers of that religion (the UK's largest) are hardly grateful for that.

Heath concludes:

All sections of society already pay far too much tax. A wealth tax would be a moral and economic disaster, double or triple taxing income and making a mockery of property rights. We need growth and jobs, not hate and punitive taxation. It is time to halt the war on wealth.

Indeed, the disgusting lie that somehow everyone on higher incomes is some banker who made a lot of money out of bankrupting the economy should be confronted.  I heard it again this morning on the BBC.  The UK's budget deficit (heaven help those who don't know their deficits from their debts) is NOT caused by "bailing out the bankers" because not a penny has been spent on bailing on banks this year, and the proportion of public debt attributable to that is less than 10%.

The long term goal of UK fiscal policy should be to reduce the overall tax burden.  The 50p rate should go, but concurrent with that, in part to placate the envious, but also to contribute to the reduction in tax, the first £10,000 everyone earns should be income tax free.  I mean everyone, not clawed back from higher income earners by lowering thresholds, but make so everyone knows that the first £10k a year is their own money.   Workers, students, employers, entrepreneurs, the retired, everyone.

The only moral argument ever put for the 50p rate is to claim the "rich" should "pay their share", yet with 1% of taxpayers paying over a quarter of all income tax, means they do far far more than that.

Yes some have high earnings because of luck and inheritance, but many more do so because of the career path they chose, the businesses they set up, the investments they made and besides all of that, it is their money.  If you haven't stolen or defrauded people, then you are morally entitled to the fruit of your efforts.  

As the Adam Smith Institute says of tax avoiders:

" Rather than harass such people, we should give them a medal for public service, in pointing out just how stupid our tax laws are... It's time to make tax simple and certain. And to ensure that our tax officials are public servants, not public inquisitors."

Part of that is to lower taxes across the board, whilst abolishing complicated rebates and exemptions, whilst putting a serious effort into cutting spending.   Nothing else will give the British economy a chance to be more than anaemic whilst the Eurozone looks to become the world's biggest welfare state economy, and the US remains addicted to borrowing from China to spend its way to depression.

9.11 some thoughts ten years on

The Western world today offers unrivalled freedom and opportunities for humanity.  It may have a small number of naysayers who use its freedom (and capitalism) to damn it, condemn it and criticise it (rarely offering alternatives), but people from all over the world strive to live there, to learn there and do business there.  The wealthy from Africa, the Arab World, Asia and Russia all flock to the West to do their shopping, to have a good time and to buy healthcare for their families and education for the children, even if they return to maintain and profit from the corrupt autocracies that facilitated their opportunities.

9/11 was an attack on modernity.  The philosophy of Al Qaeda, and indeed that of all Islamists is rooted in a rejected of globalisation and capitalism, one reason why retaliation gets such lukewarm responses from the far left in the West (those who moved on from appeasement of the USSR to eco-socialism).  However, it is far more than that.  It is a fundamental rejection of the enlightenment, of political and civil freedoms, of feminism, of secularism and religious tolerance.  It is the embrace of a stone age patriarchal theocracy that no more embraces the secularist leftists of the West any more than the Christian conservatives, or the libertarian capitalists.  It used the tools of modernity to attack it.

Some apologists of Al Qaeda claim it wouldn't have attacked the US if the US had no military presence in the Middle East, or if Israel was destroyed (and presumably replaced by an anti-semitic Islamist theocracy).  However, its interest is not in peaceful co-existence, its interest in peace is seen in how barbarically it treats girls and women - breeding chattels undeserving of education.  It is beyond disgraceful that so many leftwing feminists turn a blind eye to the brutality of Islamist attitudes and treatment of women, for they fear having conservatives, capitalists and true liberals as allies - so adolescently knee jerk they still are.

Peaceful people were murdered by Al Qaeda.  People who took flights and worked on flights, people who worked at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and neighbouring buildings.   Some died instantly, some knew they were going to die, some jumped, some were crushed.   For those who attacked, they were meant to die, their lives were a means to an end.  For that is the collectivist philosophy - that human beings and lives are meaningless, unless they are categorised, pigeon-holed and treated as such.   It was enough that they lived or worked in the USA - a legitimate target.

If my career had been a little different, it could have included me, or people who I know. 

So 9/11 for me is always a day of some reflection - that there are people ready to destroy modernity, civilisation and freedom, for their twisted, backwards, bigoted, totalitarian view of how people should live their lives.  That history did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that there remains people who don't think that human beings have the right to live their own lives, or to think for themselves.

Meanwhile, the freedom and capitalism the West allows also allows conspiracy theorists and deniers to continue to claim that it was a self-inflicted attack by the US, or carried out by Israel.  Whatever it takes to demean and defame the West, feeding the irrational frenzy of hatred, racism, religious insanity that infects much of the Muslim world.  Such people should be treated with the same disdain and irreverence as Holocaust deniers, Moon Landing deniers and flat earthers.  They are a step below those who think it was the USA getting its just desserts, which of course is legitimate if you too think human beings are but a means to an end.  If you think terrorism - blowing up bodies of innocent civilians - is ok, then 9/11 can be justified.  If you express sadness and remorse, but then go "but", you are justifying it, you're expressing the view that it could have been prevented if only someone else had done something that would have meant the perpetrators wouldn't have bothered to murder.   A bit like "it's sad he hits you, but...".    On this day, such people should be ignored, for they are not just wrong, but in appalling bad taste and a combination of stupid and evil.  Nothing can justify such mass murder.  Not even the echoes of vileness from those who have said "not enough bankers died".

As long as there are people willing to do violence to inflict their religious preferences on others, free people cannot rest to confront them and defend themselves and civilisation from their barbarism.  It is as destructive and evil as Nazism, as Marxism-Leninism, as all forms of eliminationist authoritarianism.   On 9/11 they extended from their own vile little fiefdoms of totalitarianism (Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia) into the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Bear in mind that they wouldn't have thought twice had you been there too.

For today we are all Americans.

Is Margaret Mutu's view of racism that unusual?

I first encountered the Critical Race Theory view of racism, that Margaret Mutu has so eloquently expressed, at university. It is part of a wider set of beliefs and philosophy that includes identity politics, race consciousness and Marxist social class analysis that abandons treating people as individuals, and focuses entirely on what they are, not who they are and what they do.

In other words, you can’t possibly claim that Professor Margaret Mutu, a senior academic at a university, is capable of uttering a phrase that is racially discriminatory and degrading, not because of what she says, but because of her subjectively determined (by her) racial background. She is, according to her “world view” (you can have as many as you like, they are all valid – except ones she disagrees with), less empowered than a minimum wage Caucasian labourer. You see, she sees people according to the colour of their skin (and a bit more than that, because “race” is more about “ethno-national identity”) not the content of their character.

When I questioned the notion that someone “who identifies as” Maori heritage “cannot be racist”, I was patronized and it was explained it was she has “less power” than me, despite us both being students at the same level in the same university (and the female Maori student having parents of professional university educated backgrounds, unlike my Glaswegian parents who left school at 15). 

You see, nothing else mattered but race, it apparently spoke more than just who your ancestors were - it defined your social standing, access to money and influence and life opportunities - except of course, that it really didn't.  However, reality is disturbingly complicated to subjectivists.

This extreme radical view of race, power and politics could have simply been confined to the corners of universities where the likes of Mutu could express their views, and have them robustly questioned, if they hadn’t permeated so successfully into the minds of graduates in the 1970s and 1980s, and so the New Zealand political and bureaucratic body politic. Of course, affirmative action isn’t racist, for anyone of Maori (or Pacific Island) background is inherently disadvantaged, and anyone who isn’t is already, by implication “lucky”. Blank out the white, Chinese or Indian kid who is the first in her family to go to university, the family on low incomes working hard to give their kids a fair go Blank out the daughter of two lawyers who I encountered getting a public sector scholarship to complete her legal education, because she was Maori. 

It isn’t about individuals, it is about the “system”. It is a philosophy that has been cultivated at universities throughout the country, in Maori Studies departments, Politics departments and even Law Faculties. It is why when Don Brash calls for “one law for all”, he is deemed to be racist. The very notion of equality before the law denies the view that there is inherent persistent racism everywhere, because Maori are not the dominant race.

It doesn’t matter that government isn’t based on race, it doesn’t matter that laws exist to protect individuals without regard for race, or that taxes and handouts are distributed on a similar basis. See Mutu can say most white immigrants are white supremacists, and it’s ok - but don’t you dare stereotype Maori, otherwise you are being oppressive –unless you are Maori, in which case either you’re having a laugh, or you’re “not really Maori”, but a traitor.

You see race based views of the world are indeed very black and white. You’re either with the structuralist, identity politics view, or you’re racist.   Why else would you reject it?  Like Mao, you either were with the Cultural Revolution, or you were a capitalist roader out to exploit the masses, who was worth less than a dog.

It’s tempting to invoke Godwin’s law, you can do so yourself. When you think of all people and their relationships with others in terms of race, you find lots of allies. Robert Mugabe is the obvious one, but you might add Slobodan Milosevic, Daniel Milan, Robert Kajuga. All people who thought about race, all people who put aside thinking about individual deeds and backgrounds.

However, in New Zealand you might add Hone Harawira. Indeed, the entire Mana Party would hold this view that Maori cannot be racist. By its mere existence, so would the Maori Party. It doesn’t think it is racist to be a political movement inspired to advance one “ethnic group”. That should be obvious.

Yet the same views are easy to ascribe to the Green Party. It carries with it the same neo-Marxist, power based identity politics view that pigeon-holes people based on race, sex and sexuality. Maori lesbians automatically have less power than Chinese heterosexual men. 

You see an objective definition of racism is to act to discriminate against someone purely on the basis of race. It isn’t based upon what race a person is who is saying “x are criminals” or “y are lazy” or “z are mostly fascists”. It is based upon what is said.

The 20th century is littered with the corpses and blood of millions who were killed not because of what they did, but because of what category of people they were deemed to be. Whether it be race, religion, sectarian group, profession, education level, family background or class. The pain and loss of this is incalculable, the waste of talent, creativity, joy and intelligence is inconceivable. 

The only way forward for any civilisation is to reject the history of treating human beings according to what psychologically made up (for this is all they are) group they belong to, and treat them as individuals and judge them by deeds and words, not classify them like farm animals. Mutu does the latter, how many more of our politicians are of her ilk?

For all of the flurry about how Margaret Mutu says she can’t be racist, she can largely be ignored except for her living off of the taxpayer. What shouldn’t be ignored is how many people standing for Parliament share her view? Does the Green Party believe Margaret Mutu was being racist? Does the Maori Party believe it? Does the Mana Party believe it? Does the Labour Party believe it?