DOWN TO THE DOCTOR'S: Sack the buggers

Your weekly prescription of good hard sense from Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath.

At the 2011 Libertarianz Party conference, Wellington Central candidate-to-be Regan Cutting made a brief speech in which he highlighted this pie chart of government spending.

If you look past the three usual suspects, note if you will which branch of government presently has the fourth-highest budget…

As Regan pointed out, more than Police, Justice and Corrections combined - yes, it's the Department of Legalised Theft, the department with the power to go through your bank account, empty your pockets, and to bankrupt more New Zealanders every year than start new businesses.

It is this department of bloodsuckers that accounts for nearly 8% of government spending. Even if you add spending on the NZ Defence Force and Ministry of Defence to that for Police, Justice and Corrections (which collectively comprise almost all the legitimate functions of government) their total still only comes to 8.01% of spending.

Meaning, of course, that virtually all the other 92% should be returned to those from whom it was stolen.
Now, none of this namby-pamby “110 positions based in the capital are to be axed” after-one-Ministry-is-“folded-back” into-the-other nonsense. Libertarianz says any responsible government would immediately get to work on reducing the government's runaway spending by trimming all  the easy stuff, getting rid of all the non-essential departments, starting with a month-long wind down of the following useless state entities:

Department                                               Current Percentage of Govt Spending
Statistics NZ                                                                     0.17
Land Information                                                          0.20
Te Puni Kokiri                                                                  0.26
Ministry for Culture & Heritage                                0.45
Ministry for Science & Innovation                          0.94
Dept of Building & Housing                                         1.22
Ministry for the Environment                                   1.33
Dept of Labour                                                                 1.75
Ministry of Economic Development                      1.94
Total                                                                                    8.09

There you go, 8% of spending - $6.6 billion - gone in the space of one month. Easy. (And to stop the buggers therein whimpering, give them a year-long holiday if you have to; no-one will mourn their absence, and it will still save us money even in the short run with all of them out of our hair.)

And parenthetically, this is what responsible governments do in a recession—and did do, successfully, in every recession until Mr Keynes came along.

And those other government departments listed in the pie chart above? Well, they could literally abolished overnight—gone by lunchtime. Or if any were doing anything at all commercial (fat chance) privatised within four weeks.

This would, of course just be the start of massive tax cuts, a freeing up of the economy and an end to the rampant and out-of-control spending made fashionable most recently by those partners in fiscal recklessness Bill English and Michael Cullen.

We haven't even started on the Ministries/Departments/Offices of 'Yoof' Development,  Ethnic Affairs, Archives, National Library, Tourism, Pacific Island Affairs, Women's Affairs, Consumer Affairs,etc. I'm guessing these could be wound down or denationalised over 3 months, to give them some time to sort out their own affairs.

The Result? Billions of dollars back in taxpayers' pockets, thousands back in your own pocket—and businesses free to run their own affairs without a bullying paper-shuffler hanging around their neck.

Because your “refund” actually belongs to you anyway, and you should have a choice about the destination of your dollars. Politicians shouldn't be able to bully you and tell you where it must be spent. You have the right to make that choice, because it's your goddamn money, right?

Only one political party respects that right, and Regan Cutting will be representing it in the coming election, in the Wellington Central electorate. Good on you, Regan.

And, on an unrelated topic, a salute to my elder son Andrew 'Bloodbath' McGrath (as he was promoted on the event programme) who retained his undefeated status over five rounds of full-rules kickboxing at the Lower Hutt Town Hall last Saturday night. Way to go, Andrew!

See you next week!
Doc McGrath