Government makes you stupid.

Government makes you stupid. I can prove it. Let me explain with this illustration.

Currently the New Zealand government, now being run by conservatives after the much-deserved defeat of Helen Clark is doing what conservatives love to do—prove they are tough on crime. I’m not opposed to being tough on crime but the typical conservative is stupidly tough on crime. Let me give an example of how stupid hurts when it comes to being tough on crime.

Now and then some monster kidnaps a child. So conservatives argue that kidnappers should be executed. That doesn’t stop snatching children anymore than it stops murders. Both will continue. But it will mean that the penalty for the two is pretty much the same. If a child snatcher kills the child the penalty can’t get any worse. They won’t execute him twice and if they did, he wouldn’t care. On the other hand, a dead child can’t testify against you. So the benefits, to the kidnapper, increase if he kills the child. That sort of measure would give the kidnapper every reason to kill his victim. Sometimes increasing the penalty does more harm than good.

Fighting crime doesn’t require knee-jerk reactions that sound good with voters. I would suspect that there is an inverse relationship between popular positions and positions that work.

The National Party government came up with the idea of banning “gang symbols”. Apparently this will reduce crime somehow. Exactly how it is supposed to do that doesn’t come immediately to mind. But it sounds like these conservatives a “doing something” and politicians are infected with the belief that “doing something,” no matter how absurd, destructive, counter-productive, is better than not “doing something”.

Let us note that this immediately regulates freedom of expression. Symbols are made criminal. I don’t think that is a good idea. It is a clear violation of rights. Let us also note that symbol wearing itself is a victimless crime. Sure, the gangs themselves might be violent. But the mere act of wearing a gang symbol is not the violation of the rights of any other person. Like all rights, you are free to do this provided you used your own property. So, if an employer asked you to remove a symbol that you were wearing, while at work, it is his right to do so. Restaurants should be free to tell people with said symbols they are not welcome. But it plainly is not a concern of the government’s.
I’m not sure why gangs, which are not worried about the penalties for killing one another, will suddenly become fearful of the symbol law. And from what I can see of New Zealand’s sentencing policies for violent offenders, they have little to fear at all from incarceration. Clearly New Zealand is too lenient when it comes to real crimes. But inventing fake crimes, like a ban on certain symbols, is not the answer to the defects in the Kiwi criminal justice system. On the contrary, it will only make matters worse.


I have yet to see the actual legislation so perhaps they manage to define gang symbols in such a way as to be absolutely precise. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to wear that symbol? If my elderly aunt happen to like the symbol for some reason, and were to walk around with it on, while visiting our Kiwi friends, apparently she would be a criminal. Under what definition of crime? Certainly it is not a crime in the sense of violating another’s rights. It is only a crime because some silly politicians concocted this nonsense law. Personally, if I knew what the symbol was, and were I in New Zealand, I’d wear said symbol in front of parliamentarians and urge them to have me arrested for it.

This brings me to the real disappointing aspect of this silly legislation. The relatively decent ACT Party recently was asked by National to form part of the government. They stupidly agreed to do that. I guess they were tired of the opposition benches and honestly believed they could do some good by accepting. As part of the government, that means National can put pressure on ACT to abandon principles and abandon them they have.

In its previous incarnation ACT opposed this bill. ACT Party leader Rodney Hide accurately depicted the legislation as an attack on freedom of speech and something unlikely to do any good. Mr Hide and his party now voted for the same legislation. The reason was simple. One of the ACT MPs is a conservative who likes to be tough on crime. To get the support of the hardcore anti-crime lobby Hide gave this man a list position high enough to get him into parliament. From what I can see the guy is a first-class jerk. As part of that ACT has proposed a badly thought-out piece of legislation modeled on the three-strikes-you’re-out laws in the US.

National told ACT that unless they caved on the gang symbols legislation then National will kill the three-strikes-you’re-out legislation of act. In other words, ACT traded a vote for really bad legislation so that National would vote for mildly bad legislation. National gets what they want. ACT gets what they want. Freedom gets shafted in the process.

One of the last measures of the evil Labour government in New Zealand was a monstrous piece of legislation, which regulated every single way a person could support a candidate. It made virtually all campaigning illegal unless it was reported to the state and followed all sorts of procedures. One absurd example of it was when Rodney Hide was charged with the violating the law. His crime was wearing a suit jacket that had the ACT party logo and slogan above the breast pocket. Please note that the jacket was not illegal because of the awful yellow color but merely because of the patch on the front.

The patch was deemed a campaign advertisement. As such the jacket had to have the name and home address of the person authorizing the jacket printed on it. And the cost of the patch had to be reported to the government. Of course, people found the idea that even a patch on a jacket was being regulated to be absurd and an attack on freedom of speech. Clearly the measure Labour passed was a desperate one meant to try and hobble the opposition going into an election. And that law is now gone under the new government. It was so obviously a bad law that even Labour, who wrote it, voted against it.

But really, what is the difference between Labour making Hide’s patch illegal because it was a political patch and National wanting to make a “gang patch” illegal? The wearing of patches does not violate rights. Hide knew that when it came to patch on his ugly, urine colored jacket. I suspect he knows it now. But he sold out on the principle because National pressured him. It’s a shame really. As I have long said: everyone is more libertarian in the opposition than in power. That is, I fear, also true of libertarians. Rodney’s patch was a free speech issue. Now that the jacket is on the other guy, however, it appears to be something else.

I also find this measure odd in that it really gives gangs a lot of power. The real legislation of banning a gang symbol is not in the hands of lawmakers. In this case, it is in the hands of criminals. A “symbol” becomes a “gang symbol” when a gang says it is. If they were to adopt a black skull on a red background then it becomes a “gang symbol.” So, it is the gangs who decide which symbols become illegal. Strictly speaking they could make any symbol a crime by adopting it for themselves.

So let us saw we have two rival gangs in town. The one gang decides to adopt the cross as their symbol while the other retaliates with the Star of David. Now, we have violent criminals with crosses and stars of David on their leather jackets. Under the logic of this absurd legislation those symbol would become “gang symbols” and would be open to prosecution.

To comply with the normal principles of the rule of law it would then be illegal for anyone to wear those symbols, not just gang members. Apparently a couple of elderly grannies, on the way to Mass, with a rosary in their hands, could then be arrested as gang members for carrying a “gang symbol” in public. And if you think about it, the cross certainly is a symbol of violence. It was a means of execution and not a pretty one mind you. Of course, through out history people have been burned to death with this symbol pushed against their lips. And the racist Klan burns crosses on people’s lawns and use it as a symbol of their hate.

I’m not advocating this sort of legislation. I’m trying to show how stupid it is. If a Kiwi gang adopts a cross as their symbol then exactly how would one ban that?

Politics is an ugly business. There are good people who try hard. I think Rodney Hide is one of them. But sure as shit even someone as good as Rodney can be pressured to do what he knows is wrong just to play the game called politics.

And while the government is wasting time legislating “gang symbols” the problem of real crime is not being addressed at all. I am astonished that governments, everywhere, manage to concentrate on inconsequentials while constantly neglecting their core functions. Regulating patches doesn’t protect life, liberty or property. And every minute spent on that is a minute diverted from real measures to protect people from real crimes (that is crimes that violate life, liberty or property). If anything, we’ll have the police and courts spending time pursuing prosecutions over a patch. Meanwhile robberies continue, rapes continue, murders continue, child abuse continues. Why can’t politicians ever get their priorities right.

My thesis was that government makes you stupid. Previously Rodney Hide got his position on this legislation correct. His retort to it was principled and intelligent. But then he was in the opposition and not in government. Now Rodney Hide is in government and, on the very same issue, he gets it very wrong. Government apparently made him stupid. It caused him to forget his principles. Long term that is deadly for the a minor party. Mr Hide may have disliked the opposition benches but his party's reason for being disappears when he acts this way. Those who approve of his abandoning previous principles are likely to want to vote for National anyway. And those who don't approve are now less likely to vote for ACT.

I note that when Guido Westerwelle refused to take his Federal Democratic Party (similar to ACT) into Angela Merkel's "Grand Coalition" government support for the FDP jumped dramatically. While in New Zealand, minor parties that join government tend to lose their identity and soon lose their support. As I said, government can make you stupid.

Good news from the election, down under that is.

Did you hear the good news about the election?

Okay, I’m not talking about the U.S. election which, as far as I can see, was pretty much bad news straight down the line. I’m talking about the New Zealand election where the results were relatively good.

First, we need to discuss the problems that the Kiwis faced. Prime Minister Helen Clark was a horrific individual with a very stern, very authoritarian streak who craved political power. While she was rather far to the Left herself her overriding principle was to seek power. And she was petty and vindictive.

People were becoming sick unto death of her. She resorted to all sorts of desperate measures in order to stay in office. In the last election she formed an alliance with the most bigoted moron in Kiwi politics, Winston Peters, just to secure his support. Peters is anti-immigrant, antigay, anti-civil liberties, anti-free market and anti-free trade -- he is Pat Buchanan on steroids.

One of Clark’s brilliant ideas, this time around, was a muddled piece of legislation which was meant to prevent anyone from spending money to oppose her in the election. It’s requirements were so strict as to basically censor opposition to Clark. Meanwhile her government used state funds in massive measures to campaign for Labour without officially doing so. It was the most authoritarian anti-free speech pieces of legislation passed anywhere in the last year. The law is so absurd that Act Party leader Rodney Hide was informed that he broke the law by wearing a jacket with his party logo on it!

Clark knew she was trouble when she passed the law, which is why she did it. Anything for power is her motto.

Her alliance with the odious Peters came to bite her in the ass. Peters, it turned out, was not just a moronic bigot and national socialist but also dishonest and corrupt. Peters had secret trusts set up which were getting massive amounts of cash from wealthy donors especially those with interests in fields related to his ministerial portfolio. Peters got caught with his hands in the cookie jar and then just blatantly lied repeatedly over the evidence. Even though Peters was a minister in Clark’s government she ignored the scandal.

If she disciplined him Peters would withdraw support and she could lose office two weeks earlier. For the sake of holding office a few weeks longer she simply accepted his corrupt practices as the norm. For what amounted to just a few extra days in office Clark stayed kissy-face with Peters. Clark is incapable of admitting errors and the result was that Peters dragged her down.

As expected Helen Clark was defeated by a substantial margin. The unfortunate news is that the opposition National Party is lead by John Key, a man without principles. In the last election National was lead by Don Brash, a good and decent man with classical liberal values. Brash led the party from 20 points behind into a statistical tie with Labour. His reward for rejuvenating the party was to be stabbed in the back by Key. Clark’s Labour Party spread rumors about Brash’s marital life to destroy him, some Religious-Right types helped in the smear, and Key took advantage of the attack to grab power for himself. Key has run what amounts to a Labour-lite campaign. Like Clark, Key is not worried about principles as much as power.

But New Zealand has a mixed member parliamentary system. And the structure of that is such that no one party can ever really control everything. It is forced to seek partners in government. With 122 members of Parliament a party needs the support of 62 MPs in order to govern. Even with Labour being decimated at the polls National only secured 59 seats. Early on it had made a deal with United Future, run by the chameleon Peter Dunne, who supported Labour in the last government. But United Future and Peter Dunne are one in the same -- the party has no other representative. This left National one seat short of a government.

This basically means that National has to deal with the classical liberals in the Act Party. Act Party leader Rodney Hide is a principled politician, which makes him a rarity. He took the leadership just prior to the last election which made his a particular target of smear campaigns from Winston Peters -- smear jobs where the hallmark of a Peters election campaign. And the media was united against Hide telling voters that Act was finished and wouldn’t win any seats.

Hide continually told the media that his own polls showed he was going to win the Epsom seat but the media dismissed his claims. Hide, however, showed them that his polls were accurate and media polls just so much rubbish. Hide easily won the seat and brought a second MP into parliament as well.

This year Hide repeated his win but by a bigger margin. His second in command, Heather Roy, was expected to join him and it was hoped that a third Act MP would join the fold. That third candidate was Sir Roger Douglas, the former Labour minister who led the reforms of the 1980s that took New Zealand from being a bankrupt socialist state to becoming a world-class economy. But many pundits didn’t think Act could pull it off and bring Douglas back into parliament.

But one thing the pundits seem to forget is that Rodney Hide can do far more than they think he can. Under Hide’s leadership Act did bring Douglas back into parliament. And, as gravy, Act elected two other MPs as well. With five MPs, National has to pay attention to Act and has to get some backbone as well. So it appears that Hide will be offered a ministerial position -- and it appears that Minister of Education is a high probability. Hide is a proponent of school choice so we shall see.

More importantly it appears that National may have to offer a second portfolio to Act. But Key has said he won’t work with Sir Roger. That was part of Key’s campaign to placate the Left who were furious that Douglas, an old time Labour politician, realized that Left-wing policies had bankrupted his country. Douglas abandoned Left-wing plans in favor of free market policies, not because he understood free market principles but because socialism doesn’t work. That was considered a betrayal by the ideologues in Labour and Douglas has been anathema to them since.

However, the somewhat Left wing Maori Party also secured five seats. Formed mainly by exLabour MPs this racially based party also won five seats in parliament. And it wouldn’t surprise me if Key doesn’t offer them a portfolio as well. Because Key’s one principle is to have no principles this makes sense. He knows that Act does have principles and he doesn’t want that. But he has to offer them something. But as insurance he can bring in the Left-of-center Maori Party. With their five seats he would have a comfortable nine seat majority and he could ignore any free market ideas that come from Act. Alas, there is no one more anxious to sell-out free markets than conservatives and I suspect John Key will be no exception.

The election of Key is nothing to get too excited about. But the defeat of Helen Clark is to be relished. And there should be nothing but joy from real liberals that Winston Peters and his nationalistic socialist party were defeated soundly. All New Zealand First MPs lost their seats and it is unlikely they will ever win them back. With Rodney Hide in government there is some likelihood that a few good reforms will be made but Key and his party will resist any such efforts.

Meanwhile the comedic Libertarianz Party limped along pretty much as usual. However, few parties are as delusional as the Libz, who are not libertarian in the usual sense of the word, but actually are an Objectivist party dominated by a war-hawk crazy who recently called for literally lynching Obama. In the last election the Libz came in 15th place, out of 19 parties. This election they dropped to 16th place and barely broke 1,000 votes nation-wide. There first time out they managed 5,000. So the party lost 80% of its support, yet is crowing that this election was a massive step forward for them. That whole fantasy is based on the fact that the party got 130 more votes this year than it did in the last election. No surprise there, smaller parties in general did better this year because the race wasn’t as tight as it was three years ago. But 0.0005% of the vote is hardly anything to crow about.

If libertarian ideas continue to make an impact on Kiwi politics it will be because of the efforts of Rodney Hide and revived Act Party. If they don’t it will because of the efforts of John Key and his National Party colleagues. But for now the most dangerous road blocks to expanding liberty in New Zealand -- Helen Clark and Winston Peters -- are now fast fading memories. And that is something to cheer about.

Photos: Helen Clark. Lower left, Rodney Hide.

Just blame the moon.

Just in case you think that American politics has a monopoly on clowns be assured this is far from the case. Politicians the world over are a species unto themselves -- unfortunately they are not an endangered species. But we can always hope.

New Zealand’s Labour government is pretty absurd. Lead by the vicious Helen Clark this government has more than a touch of nastiness and authoritarianism to it. No doubt in previous life Clark had some experience in the SS or the Stasi. Now New Zealand still remains one of the most economically free countries in the world. And their social liberties are damn good in my opinion -- especially when compared to the sad state of affairs in the United States.

Where Clark and he co-criminals are particularly venomous are in matters having to do with staying in power. They are a desperate lot and they will do whatever it takes, no matter how dishonest, corrupt or despicable to stay in power. For instance they recently “reformed” the election code and basically have forbidden private individuals from expressing public opinions about the Clark regime. Technically speaking these people are still free to speak but they must register with the government, report on what they spend, publicize their home address when they do speak out, etc. And the financial restrictions are so onerous that any organized group would find it difficult to do more than publish one newspaper ad critical of the Clark regime.

In other words they have done their level best to stamp out free speech when it comes to dissent against Clark and her fellow Stasi members. This was pushed through parliament with the help of an unsavory much of miscreants. The Green Party scuttled all pretences at supporting civil liberties in order to prop up Clark on this matter. Still that wasn’t enough. The supposedly Right-wing Christian United Future party supported the bill. But Clark bought them out by offering party leader, Peter Dunne, a seat in the cabinet. Dunne can’t refuse anything that makes himself look important and principles take a distant second to promoting Dunne.

And the worst of the lot is a vile and dishonest politician named Winston Peters. Peters and Clark worked out some deals after Clark nearly lost the last election. Peters got what he wants, which is mainly high salaries for himself, and Clark got Peters to prop up Labour. They bent the rules so far that Clark made Peters the Foreign Minister yet claims he is not part of the cabinet. This highly unusual arrangement allows Peters to travel the world at taxpayer’s expense and make a fool of himself in multiple nations. This is quite a step up for someone used to making a fool of himself in just one country.

But the most recent asinine example of the intellectual types that run Labour came when Justice minister, Annette King, tried to explain away rising youth crime rates under the Labour government.

The tiny nation of 4 million was recently shocked when there were 10 murders in one month. This is about double the normal rate. Now whether this is part of a trend or a mere blip on the screen is not the issue. What is the issue is the lunacy, quite literally, that struck the Minister. She blamed the killings on the “full moon” and a “hot summer”. But then Labour’s friends in the Green Party got tricked into voicing support for banning the dangerous chemical dihydrogen monoxide or H2O. So apparently the Kiwi Left is particularly susceptible to crazy theories.

For the record there is no correlation between full moons and crime. Early studies that thought there were didn’t take into account that the period studied had the full moons falling frequently on weekends. And crimes do go up on weekends. When they factored that into account the spike disappeared. Study after study has failed to find any lunar effect on crime rates. In fact, we aren’t finding evidence that the moon really has any impact on human behavour at all.

The word “lunatic” was originally coined by our superstitious ancestors who believed the moon did change human behavour. Today we apply it to people who are just crazy. New Zealand’s Justice minister qualifies as a lunatic. However, given the moral tenor of the rest of the vermin on the 10th floor of the Beehive (NZ’s parliamentary office building) she may be the least repulsive of the lot.

New Zealand's nationalized care spends more, cares less.

New Zealand has one of the pioneering nationalized health services in the world. But, as with all nationalized systems, they ration health care out. There is no other option. Free health care for all is an illusion.

New Zealand uses the standard form of rationing: queues. You can have health care if you can afford to wait for it. If your problem kills you before you get to the front of line that improves the waiting time statistics. Lots of Kiwi voters were unhappy with the growing wait periods. And, in the last election, the ruling Labour government was in deep trouble.

A massive spend-up on programs, along with hundreds of thousands in illegal campaign spending, kept Labour in office but barely.

One of the parts of the massive spend-up was an extra $4.5 billion was on health care. But, Heather Roy, health spokesman for the ACT Party, says that a report from the Treasury department shows that the extra spending has lead to no extra health care!

She quotes a Treasury report, “increased staff numbers have not led to higher outputs.” So, why is that? If the health services can’t handle the care required, and you increase staffing, shouldn’t the number of patients treated also increase? You would think so. But, it really depends on who you hire, and what they do.

Roy noted that while some of the extra $4.5 billion was spent on staff it didn’t pay for “doctors and nurses”. Instead, “the new staff has largely been made up of pen-pushers -- staffing levels at the Ministry of Health’s head office has increased by around 40 percent under this government...”

So, the extra staffing covered management and file shufflers, but not more health care. The government now has more people filing more pieces of paper, but no extra medical care. In fact, with the expansion of clerical staff, the nationalized system, in New Zealand, now has more staff members than hospital beds. As Roy put it, “if every single bureaucrat in the health system fell seriously ill today, there wouldn’t be enough beds to treat them all -- let along anyone else.”

Because the waiting lists were getting embarrassingly long the Labour government came up with an idea to solve the problem. They ordered the district health boards to kick people off the waiting lists. Roy says a document leaked from the Waitemata DHB showed they had been threatened with a $3 million penalty if they didn’t remove 800 people from their waiting lists. They were told to send the patients, waiting for care, back to their physicians instead, even though the physicians were the ones who sent them for specialist care in the first place.

Of course, if Michael Moore made a film on the nationalized system in New Zealand, it would only show empty waiting rooms and pretend none of this was happening. He wouldn't tell people the waiting rooms were empty because the patients were sent back to their physicians so they could start the process all over again.