"Libertarians" is an anagram of "rats rain bile"

I used to have some sympathy with libertarians. I thought we might stand shoulder-to-shoulder against state intrusion into private lives. We agree that laws are made for the people, that the role of government should be limited.

But I didn't allow for one thing: the libertarian movement is governed by fundamentalists, who rule with an ironically iron fist. "Pragmatism" is a dirty word to them, along with "compromise" and "consensus". You can see the fruits of this wingnuttery over at the excellent Libertarianz blog, Not PC.

Most recently, these loons have been ranting about local governments' tendency to blow ratepayers' money on stupid pet projects. The current local government minister, Rodney "Quasimodo" Hide, wants councils to hold a binding referendum before they do any such thing - itself as dumb an idea as I've heard in a month of by-election politics. But, fume the wingnuts, "just because a majority votes to attack the wallets of a minority, it still doesn’t make it right".

(That, of course, is an all-purpose argument against any taxation of any kind anywhere ever. It'd make sense coming from an avowed anarchist, but from people who pretend to be joining in the democratic process, it seems a little odd.)

The loons have their own prescription to curb local government extravagance. "Anything here you'd object to?", they ask, listing their 12-point reform plan.

Well, since you ask...

• Eliminate the ability of non-ratepayers to vote in all local body elections;
• Reintroduce non-resident ratepayer vote;
W00t, just what our neighbourhood needs - a new disenfranchised underclass! Seriously, isn't that what we've all been craving since 1867 - reintroduce the wealth qualification to vote?


• An immediate and permanent cap on the ratings levels of councils at existing monetary levels;
Seems libertarians are not immune to the visceral appeal of the "myth of stability".


• Require that the 25% of councils each year that tax ratepayers at the highest level per ratepayer be required to reduce rates to the level of the lowest council;
Why only those councils? Surely all councils should be required to reduce rates to the lowest level. Because obviously the best way to decide a local area's needs is to assume they're the same as those of a completely unrelated area.
Seems now you're not so much the spiritual descendents of the Dissenters as the spiritual descendents of Roderick Spode.


• Require the abolition of all general rates differentials (e.g. higher rates for commercial properties vs. residential), with the current lowest general rating category applying across the board;
• Eliminate targeted rates in favour of direct user charges;
Oh sure, because Ayn Rand forbid a democratic body of some sort should be able to influence the economic flavour or form of an area. That's just distorting the free market, right?


• Eliminate local authority petrol and diesel tax;
Erm - what? Of all the things you've listed, this is the closest yet to a truly voluntary tax. You don't have to fill up your car in the council area - after all, the whole point of a car is that it's - well - mobile.


• Immediately prohibit all councils entering into any new commercial or non-commercial venture of any kind, and require that all existing trading activities of councils (including roads) be transferred to Local Authority Trading Enterprises;
Yeah, because nothing guarantees "efficiency" better than setting up a whole new body every time you want to hold a raffle.


• Prohibit ratepayer funding for any activities of any Local Authority Trading Enterprise;
Does this come back to the general opposition to any kind of taxes at all? I just wish you'd come out and say so honestly, then we can have that debate on its own merits.


• Prohibit new council borrowing. Existing debt repayments will only be able to be made from existing revenue sources, including privatisation;
What "existing revenue sources"? If councils aren't allowed to trade, and they're not allowed to tax, then what exactly are they supposed to do with their existing debt? Go into liquidation?


• Prohibit councils making bylaws that interfere with individual freedoms and private property rights;
So let's get this straight... If I don't want my neighbour to build a 15-storey block on his section, I should damn' well have the guts to drum up my own militia and remove him by force, not run whining to some kind of "local authority"? Yeah, that's a country I want to live in.


• Require that all councils when acting under their statutory obligations under the Resource Management Act, fully respect all private property rights;
Translation: when enforcing the law of the land, make sure you don't stop me from doing whatever the hell I want.

The World's Smallest Political Quiz, which you guys link to, correctly pegs me as a liberal, leaning towards the libertarian cause. But I'm here to tell you, if this is your idea of sensible policy making, I'll side with big-government statists against you any day of the week.

Soylent chicken

Just when I'm once again trying to defend British restaurant cuisine, this story had to break. Seems that some food manufacturers inject processed pork or beef proteins into chicken sold to restaurants, to increase the water content and therefore the weight.

British Jews, Hindus and Muslims are upset, and understandably so.


Dutch chicken

What I can't quite understand is why no other country seems to be taking much notice. The fraud is perpetrated by Dutch, German and Spanish manufacturers - do these companies sell chicken only to Britain? The European Commission has been bought off, and won't support banning the addition of mammal protein to poultry; but surely the Muslim communities in places like France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands should be just as indignant? And yet, as far as I can make out from Google, those countries' media have yet to mention the story.

I'm not a member of any of these religious groups, but even so I feel a shudder of revulsion at the idea of "denatured mammalian protein" added to chicken. (They say it's beef or pork, but how can they be sure it's not rat, or human for that matter? Would it matter more if it were?)

It's hard to refute the argument that cheap chicken means processed, factory-made chicken - just check the price of "free-range, organic" chicken meat in your local supermarket. But which is more important: cheap food, or truth in labelling?

Contempt of court

Since you're not in New Zealand, you've probably never heard of David Bain. He's very big just now.

Depending who you listen to, Bain is either the unluckiest man in the country, or a mass murderer. Both terms in their most literal meaning. There is no middle ground.

The facts as we know them: at 7:09 on the morning of 20 June 1994, David Bain - then aged 22 - called the police, from his home in Dunedin, to report that his family were all dead. Police arrived to find that his mother, father, two younger sisters and young brother had been killed with a hunting rifle. Most of the victims were still in their rooms, but the father, Robin, who slept in a caravan in the garden, was in the lounge.

Beyond that point, the facts get more murky. If you want to know the ins and outs of the evidence you can Google it for yourself; suffice it to say here that the Bains were not a happy family. Incest, bullying and fear seem to have been the prevailing ethics. The crown says that David killed his own family before going out on his paper round to establish an alibi. The defence says that Robin killed the family, then shot himself and, deliberately or not, framed David.

In May/June 1995, David Bain was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. Over the next ten years, he steadily protested his innocence, and bits of evidence slowly dripped out that tended to support him. In 2007, the Privy Council ruled that evidence was strong enough to justify at least a retrial.

Right now, the jury is deliberating that retrial. Since they're sequestered - isolated from the media - it seems we're finally allowed to say out loud whether we think he dunnit or not.

Me, I'm not going to take advantage of that license. There's twelve people in Christchurch who have sat through three months of this stuff full-time. They know more about it than I do. I've done jury service; it's nothing if not intensive: for the duration of the trial, you really get to concentrate.

And yet, lots of ordinary people feel qualified to second-guess the jury.

It doesn't help that anyone with a decent professional job isn't expected to do jury service; they will invariably plead that they're too "indispensible" to give up their time. (The alternative is to face uncomfortable questions from their boss as to why they're not indispensible. To say nothing of a significant loss of income.) So it follows - to those people, at least - that juries are staffed exclusively by housewives, dossers, students and sundry other losers.

And believing that, who can trust them?

I really don't care much about the Bain case. But in general, on the whole, I'm for law. And I think that for the law to fulfil its primary purpose - to protect us all from vigilantes - it would be a great step forward if jury service were made compulsory: universal and unexcusable.

Update: It's taken the jury about a day to decide that Bain is not guilty, apparently. The judge told them to come to a unanimous verdict, and that's it. Evidently they don't think the prosecution did enough to prove its case.

Pacific survivalism

Just when we'd pretty much forgotten about swine flu, the government is urging us to panic - sorry, I should have spelled that "prepare" - all over again. "Swine flu will hit us hard", apparently.

As vague, existential threats go, swine flu is pretty mild. All we're supposed to do is stock up on preserved foods ("three to five days") and paracetemol. The idea being that nobody should have to die just because they can't get to the shops for a few days.

I like this kind of fearmongering. The prescribed precautions are cheap, and not too hard. More importantly, they scale: everyone can do this, without actually causing the end of civilisation as we know it. Contrast that with full-blown survivalism, which traditionally involves lots of land plus a robust attitude to trespassers.

In New Zealand, most of us can imagine electricity, and water, failing. We can imagine police, medical and fire services not being available. We can imagine a world with no food in the shops and no petrol in the pumps, at least temporarily. What we really can't imagine is the world of the traditional demented survivalist fantasy: where civilisation breaks down, and we have to stand alone against armed gangs and crazed marauders.

This kind of scenario always assumes that the protagonist stands alone. And hey, it could happen. I'm no more immune to heroic fantasy than the next guy. But it could also be a self-fulfilling fantasy. For me, when that disaster strikes, I'd rather be working with my neighbours than against them.

Scandal obscura

Once again, New Zealand's government is racked by scandal. And once again, I can't help but feel there's something missing.

Richard Worth, interior minister, resigned this morning. He is also being investigated by the police, although it's not entirely clear that the two events are connected. But the strangest thing is the Prime Minister's position. Says John Key: "If he hadn't resigned, I would have sacked him. [...] His conduct does not befit a minister. I will not have him in my Cabinet. I have lost confidence in him as a minister."

Strong stuff. As far as I can make out, Worth is Mostly Harmless. Key has previously defended him from accusations and insinuations ranging from abusing his position to promote a company in which he had an interest, to visiting a crime victim when he was acquainted with their attacker, to "acting inappropriately" towards women, a charge so vague it's meaningless.

But now he's being investigated by the police, and the PM has hurled him overboard, and is now paddling as fast as he can to put clear blue water between them.

So what's Worth done to deserve this treatment?



Nobody's saying. The police won't say, which is right and proper. Worth says it's "for personal reasons", which implies that he's quite confident of his ability to do his job from jail if necessary, but thinks it might cut into his family time. Key says "He advised me of some private matters in respect of which he felt it appropriate that he should resign as a minister" - but he won't say what those "private matters" are.

Which is just plain stupid.

When the worst dirt you could previously dig up on the man was that he once visited a stranger in hospital, but now, out of a clear blue sky, he's committed an offence so heinous that you're prepared to hurl him into the ravine and set fire to the rope - really, it behoves you to tell us what that offence was.

Addendum: Some facts have leaked out now. "Leaked" being the operative word - Worth himself, and the PM, are still doing their speak-no-evil act. But apparently it involves an Auckland-based businesswoman and "offers of political positions [on boards] with the underlying sense that Dr Worth was interested in the woman, shall I say, romantically."

That quote comes from the leader of the opposition, so it's far from authoritative... but if the government won't make its own announcements, we have to go by what we do get.

Celebrity v talent

It's been a bad couple of weeks in reality TV. Well, arguably it's been a bad ten years, but the last fortnight or so has given us two big-time, internationally-reported upsets.

First there was American Idol. Searching Google News for 'American Idol upset' gives 1,167 results in the past month. The front runner lost in the final vote, and at least 1,167 journalists worldwide have written about how surprised they are.

Then came Susan Boyle's breakdown on Britain's Got Talent. Ms Boyle blows Adam Lambert clean out of the media, with a phenomenal 29.846 news mentions worldwide in the past month. (Numbers correct at time of writing, but likely to go up for the next week or so.)

Were these results fair? Did partisans engage in dirty tricks? How much of the vote reflected telegenic cuteness, rather than actual talent? Were the votes actually counted, or did the organisers just make up the totals? Did people vote more than once? (In fact, Idol actively encourages this.)

Who cares?

Talent shows have nothing to do with talent. Look at Kelly Clarkson, first winner of American Idol: the girl has about as much talent as it takes most of us to cook our own dinner; she's a pedestrian singer and an atrocious songwriter, penning lyrics that would shame a '50s teenybopper. She's not famous because people buy her records; people buy her records because she's famous. Because she won American Idol.

That's what these shows are about. Not finding talent, but creating celebrity.

See, the problem with really talented people is that they have better things to do than bare their lives to fan magazines. Practising, rehearsing, reading, learning, dreaming, planning... being talented is a lot of work. But celebrities, now - if your sales depend on your fame, rather than vice-versa, then there is literally nothing more important to your career than keeping your face in the public eye. So instead of "entertainment journalists" having to chase and stalk and court and flatter them, these McCelebrities can be relied on to pretty much throw themselves in front of any camera they can find.

The spinning of greed

This can't be good. The Musicians' Union is taking issue with the British National Party raising money by selling albums on its website.

For the benefit of my non-British readers: the BNP is a nasty organisation, unabashedly xenophobic and racist. British musicians are mostly, to a greater or lesser degree, bleeding-heart lefties. It's hardly surprising that the musicians take exception to their music being used to finance their enemies.

But apparently they can't stop it. Some idiot sold the publication rights to their songs, and now the BNP's merchandising arm, Excalibur, is putting them on compilation albums.

I'm reminded of Krusty the Klown: "They drove a dump truck of money up to my house! What was I supposed to do? I'm not made of stone!"

You sold the rights, losers. You could've negotiated contracts that left you in control of how your music could be sold and by whom - but that wouldn't have paid so well, would it?

So look at it this way. You made money by selling rights that the BNP is now exploiting. There's nothing to stop you now spending that money to campaign against the BNP. Unless, of course, you've already spent it keeping your teenagers in Ferraris, in which case that was your decision and I hope it went well for you.

You've also got two things the BNP doesn't have: talent, and a fan base. If you can't convert that into more solid votes than the less-than-5% the BNP routinely scoops, you're not trying.

But that's not what the Musicians' Union wants. What it wants is yet another extension to copyright law that would give musicians control over their own music, even if they've already sold it.

That's "moral rights", and in fact they already exist in British copyright law. Musicians have the right to object to "derogatory treatment" of their work, and if they really cared, they could try to make an argument that selling songs under a BNP-affiliated brand name amounted to "derogatory treatment". The courts may or may not support that interpretation, but we won't know until someone tries.

What the Musicians' Union seems to have in mind, however, is more. More rights to be given retroactively to artists who seem to be suffering from "seller's remorse". The Musicians' Union has a long track record of asking for contracts to be unilaterally rewritten in their favour. Last year it was extended copyright terms for sound recordings -- an argument for which there is no coherent case either economically or morally. This year, apparently, it's back to "control".

Let's not allow the BNP case to become a wedge whereby yet more rights get taken away from us, the consumers. Let the musicians use the rights they have, before complaining about those they haven't.

Bankers of the world could learn from the musicians. Here are wealthy people who have actually won public support for campaigns that amount to no more than "we deserve more money!" See, it can be done...