DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: Hubbard, Hickey & Hillbillies [updated]

Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath ransacks the newspapers for stories and headlines on issues affecting our freedom.

This week:  Hubbard, Hickey & Hillbillies

1. “Taxpayer may prop up South Canterbury” – Yes, South Canterbury Finance may shortly be nationalised, using the money you were thinking of using on home improvements, debt repayment and educating your children, to prop up a company doing well until the jackboots came through the door.
    May as well go the whole hog and just rebrand it South Wellington Finance.
    Soon, this private company, built up over many years by the hard work of Mr Hubbard and his employees, will be run instead by bureaucrats and politicians -– many of whom would have difficulty running a cake stall, and none of whom would dare put their own money at risk. (If they have any they’ve earned honestly.) They now want to play the businessman with Mr Hubbard’s money. And, shortly, yours too.
    Allan Hubbard, the founder and chairman of SCF, who never missed paying shareholders their dividend, is being blackmailed by the government to hand over ownership of the company in return, it’s reported, for not facing any charges “that may arise” from a Serious Fraud Office investigation.
    The SFO have had two months to dig up dirt on Mr Hubbard, an 81 year old man with a gammy kidney. Where is this dirt? In the absence of even any mud, it looks they’ve gone instead for extracting a confession.
    If the SFO have a genuine legal stick with which to beat Mr Hubbard, let them produce it, instead of this cowardly threat to grind Mr Hubbard down using the legal system and an endless supply of stolen (taxpayer) money. Our money is being used to persecute a successful and apparently honest businessman, and that’s disgusting.
    If Allan Hubbard’s assets can be taken in this way by John Key’s government, is anyone in this country secure in their property and assets?
   And yes, that question is rhetorical.

2. “Bernard Hickey: The problem with compulsory Kiwisaver” – Bernard Hickey—a cheerleader, by the way, for the doing over of Mr Hubbard—insists by inference that no-one in New Zealand should be able to invest overseas. Is Jim Anderton a big fan of yours by any chance, Bernard? Should people living in the North Island be allowed to invest in South Island industries?
    Bernard doesn’t have a problem with New Zealanders being forced to “invest” their money in KiwiSaver schemes rather than being able to pay personal debt off with it, which is what any sensible person would consider doing. Bernard has now firmly jumped the shark and joined the grey ones. He has no problem at all with the coercion (just see how he’s been cheerleading the evisceration of Alan Hubbard) because what really burns poor Mr Hickey is those pesky superannuation fund managers shipping money out to places like China and other parts of Asia, where it might yield a higher return. The bastards.
    Instead of encouraging an environment in which they might wish to keep their money, instead he calls for the opposite—a place in which government takes the big stick to savers to force them to invest where others wouldn’t voluntarily.
    Bernard would no doubt have approved of a labour exchange facility run by the German government in the 1940s – a sort of temping agency that provided workers for the local armament factories. Nothing like keeping investment local, is there, Bernard! They didn’t ship these workers out to Vichy France or other German-occupied territories for the benefit of foreigners. No sir; they kept their staff close to home, where they could be of benefit to the local community. Think global, act local, eh, Bernard?
    Still, the bureaucrat in charge was a little concerned about his ability to accommodate all the state servants employed there; some of them may have found the quarters a bit cramped.

3. “Sentence for rustling sheep a joke says farmer” – Two Hawkes Bay hillbillies who stole sheep from a farmer have been sentenced to be put up in warm accommodation and fed at our expense for ten months. The other was sentenced to four months on his couch watching Sky TV, only having to get off his arse for about five hours a week to do “Community Work.” As an afterthought, the judge ordered them to pay compensation to the farmers from whom they stole.
    I guess the farmers should really count themselves lucky. Because if the thieves had happened to be employees of the farmers, the Employment Court would probably have found that because they hadn’t been given two verbal and one written warnings not to steal the sheep, and had not gone to mediation and had twenty-four sessions of counselling at the farmers’ expense, the thieves would have been entitled to a massive payout for hurt feelings and emotional harm backdated to 1987, as well as their jobs back.  (Just one small example of why superannuation fund managers can get a higher return in places elsewhere.)
    The lawyer who represented the three vermin caught stealing, one Eric Foster, claims invading a rural property on which a farmer and his family are living and stealing the means by which that family feed themselves is not as bad as burgling the farmer’s house. Eric, if your moral disorientation is representative of others in your “profession”, is it any wonder lawyers have such a bad name? (How many lawyers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Three. One to climb the ladder. One to shake it. And one to sue the ladder company).
    It is only a matter of time before a bit of rural justice is visited upon those who choose to violate the sanctity of private property. Apparently, the police don’t like people defending themselves with firearms; it’s better that people get murdered on their farms. But from what I hear, electric fences are real handy for extracting information from cockroaches who arrive uninvited in the middle of the night!

“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny - when the government
fear the people, there is liberty.”
- attributed to Thomas Jefferson

UPDATE:  Mark Hubbard (no relation) comments on what the nationalisation-or-bust deal the SFO has now “offered” Alan Hubbard:

A government that begins an investigation—on, for all we know, trumped-up charges—then says, “Oh, we'll drop the investigation, but, in return for this you have to hand us your business empire.” That level of corruption—and what else is that?—is just one tiny step away from outright totalitarianism whereby the State simply takes an individual's property without first bothering to even invent the trumped up charges.”