This decade's attack on prosperity: the Emissions Tax Scam

With all the hooping and hollering over Winston Peters, it's vitally important you don't overlook the reason Helen Clark is keeping Winston on the leash -- ie., his pledged support for Labour's Emissions Tax Scam.

It's vitally important because the Emissions Tax Scam is this decade's Resource Management Act, with everything that implies.

I've said before that National's Resource Management Act is the greatest attack on New Zealanders' property rights since the war, and it is. First introduced to parliament nineteen years ago, any honest New Zealander who's encountered it can only weep for what it's destroyed: the freedom to act as of right on one's own land.

We've had to endure National's Resource Management Act now for a decade-and-a-half, under two governments who've done nothing to mitigate the misery it's causing. And for a decade now, we've been waiting for the implications of National signing up to the Kyoto Protocol to hit home -- and now with the Emissions Tax Scam (a version of which both big parties are promising), it's really and truly about to.

The Emissions Tax Scam is the bastard child of Kyoto that will tie the prosperity of this and subsequent generations down to the level desired by the likes of Russel Norman, Mike Ward and Nick Smith. It might not yet be very high on your list of loathsome things, but like the RMA it will steadily creep up as its stultifying effects on your wallet and well-being become fully apparent over time.

The Emissions Trading Scheme, to give it its 'proper' name, is a type of 'cap and trade' scheme -- as I've tried to explain before, 'cap and trade' gives politicians and bureaucrats near-absolute control over what Lenin used to call the commanding heights of production, giving them power to limit producers that they haven't had since Brezhnev was a lad. Not only that, it gives them the power to force producers to redistribute profits from those who've earned them to those who can't. From each according to their production ability; to each according to their need for cash.
And it does this all to the loud applause of the world's markets! Using the market to introduce world socialism. What could be more ingenious?

For a decade now, I've been warning that when you marry the RMA to the Kyoto Protocol and its own bastard children, the issue of that incestuous union will be a destructive anti-industrial runt. Here's what I said in 1988 in the midst of Auckland's power crisis:

New warnings today that Auckland’s current power crisis is only a dry run for worse to come. Future restrictions on industry arising from ‘The Green Dream Team’ will dwarf our current problems... The Dream Team’s two players are the Resource Management Act and the Kyoto Protocol: The RMA we know about by now; the Protocol, signed by Simon Upton earlier this year, came out of a Government talk-fest in Kyoto, Japan, and extracts promises that governments of wealthy, industrial nations will ‘work towards the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions’ - the inescapable by-product of the burning of fossil fuels. Stripped of its worthy glow this means nothing less than a promise for the reduction of industry!
The greenies’ anti-development crusade reached its climax in this country with the RMA, an act making the future construction of necessary infrastructure (like power stations and hydro dams) virtually impossible. The anti-energy crusade has reached its climax with the Kyoto Protocol, promising measures to strangle our existing infrastructure (like power stations and industrial plants). The current power crisis offers a precursor of what life will be like as a result of these measures - together, these bureaucratic monsters will act like a calicivirus on industry, and on all who depend on industry for their survival; which means all of us...
The environmentalists’ false claims for disasters that never happen will be dwarfed by the disasters that will occur if we continue to blindly accept their rantings. You think that the loss of power to our industrial capital for nine weeks is bad news? Just wait until the Dream Team kicks in - you ain’t seen nothing yet!

No, you ain't. You want to throttle NZ industry? You got it. You want to shackle wealth creation and tie it to the whims of anti-industrial zealots? You got it. Between them, the introduction of the Green Dream Team's dream couple to New Zealand's law books represent the greatest legal attack on New Zealand prosperity ever.

And you lot are about to go and vote for the pricks who will do it. As a particularly astute commenter pointed out last year:

[The Emissions Trading Scheme] will fail to achieve its stated aims, but it will succeed in diverting resources to ineffective and non-productive uses. People will be impoverished and will suffer. If you are tight on money now, just wait. You are in for a rough life.