Spitballing

Serious For All Of Twenty-Four Hours

Apparently Labour revenue guru, David Clark was just making things up as he went along when he pronounced that a Labour government would ban the country from using Facebook, unless it paid more tax in New Zealand.  It took only twenty-four hours for the Labour leader to put out that particular fire.  Labour and Cunliffe (who did not rule it out for twenty-four hours) and Clark now have more scorched earth on their collective face than burns from a P-lab explosion. 

This from 3News:

Banning Facebook was an extreme suggestion from Labour Party MP David Clark - and it took party leader David Cunliffe just 24 hours to shut it down.  Mr Cunliffe has now ruled it out completely, but ridicule from the Government still came hard and fast.

But here is the point.  Banning Facebook was not an extreme suggestion, at least not to the statist mindset of the New Zealand's left.  Impractical and impossible to implement to be sure.  Covered with envious bile, naturally.  But the lust to control the lives of citizens is as natural and reasonable to the statist mindset as breathing the fecund air of their back room cabals. 

Here is another example of the genre--this time from David Parker, Labour's shadow finance minister, via Hansard:

Hon DAVID PARKER: … Neither do we think it is fair that some of the multinationals plunder the New Zealand economy—like Google, like Apple, like Facebook—take hundreds of millions of dollars out of the New Zealand economy, compete with New Zealand – based companies, and pay virtually no tax. 

Note the emotive rubbish here.  We poor sooks in New Zealand are sitting like primitive idiots, powerless, whilst Google, et al.  plunder us.  That's theft with menace, folks.  Look at all those poor countrymen whipped into line outside the Apple shop, being forced to by smart phones, lest Apple shoot their mothers and children. 

And these companies are said to be actually competing with New Zealand.  Parker, who hails from the deep, deep South must know of a secret, hillbilly silicon valley high up somewhere up in the Mackenzie Basin, bustling with high tech companies competing with Google and Apple. To be sure, no-one north of the Bombay Hill has ever heard of it.  But there you go. 

Mr Parker goes on to tell us that big international money is not going to impress him.  This chap is not for turning.

We in the Labour Party are willing to move on that, but the Government is not because once again it is preferring the interests of the wealthy. It is not willing to take on the multinationals, despite the fact that there is a glaring unfairness there, that they should pay their fair share of tax too, which they do not, and that there are mechanisms that could be used.

Oh, let's go whole hog.  What about Toyota and Mitsubishi and Hyundai?  They take mega-millions out of New Zealand (that is, they sell lots of vehicles here) and they are not paying nearly enough tax.  But here is an idea, Mr Parker.  Why not slap tariffs on these goods and services on all these furrin companies?  That will do the trick.  We are sure that will be one of the "mechanisms" that you have in mind.

But here the deceit and the legerdemain becomes evident.  This harrumping about filthy rich, multi-national companies might play to the visceral ruminations of socialists.  But what is really under attack here is the ordinary kiwi, the despised rube, who will end up paying more for goods and services, and thereby forced into a lower standard of living, as a result of Labour's ante-diluvian proposals.  Welcome to the world of visceral ignorant socialist envy, feeding off the lives of oppressed, downtrodden citizens.  The real workers' paradise of the socialist.

Hat Tip: Kiwiblog