No genuine conservative objection to being stolen from twice

I was struck this morning when reading Home Paddock's 'Quotes of the Week'  just how pathetic our local conservatives are. Here's several of them on the doubly-stolen money that is a capital gains tax:

Damien Grant's primary worry is that if too many people leave, the calculations may not work out:

Labour is proposing to raise $1.3b annually with a capital gains tax to pay for free doctor visits. It is assuming patterns of property sales remain unchanged and GPs will be willing to see the influx of new patients at the same rate they currently receive.
    Te Pāti Māori wants a 48% rate of income tax, along with a wealth tax and assume zero economic reaction by high income earners who make money by responding to incentives. The Opportunity Party anticipates no one will leave the country as a result of its land tax and the Greens are praying there isn’t anyone worth more than $10 million who will read their tax policy.
    In each case these policies will cause the economy to constrict. Jobs will be lost. Firms will close. The productive will leave the country and capital will relocate offshore.

Mike Hosking is similar if pithier, worried about "a capital gains tax that, so far, will produce exactly nothing given housing is flat. And even if it wasn’t, it takes years to fire up." It's all about efficiency, you see. His only concern with Hitler's programme would be the size of the gas bill.

Oliver Hartwich, meanwhile, calls his own position on a capital gains taxes "nuanced" (a word that's always a sure sign that some kind of intellectual larceny is about to break out). "I think they could work in theory," he says, contradicting his erstwhile allies. His "main objection," he says, is simply "about the way it is calculated, the exemptions involved and the earmarking of the revenue."

Talk about selling the farm at a loss.

The odious Simon Bridges doubles down on the disastrous abandonment of any principle at all beyond what the state might extract if it were to be more efficient. "I don’t in principle oppose a capital gains tax entirely," says a National leader who's never in any case seen a political principle he couldn't do without. A capital gains tax, he suggests anyway, is something "we arguably need."

And Liam Hehir, in pointing out differences between the Red Team and his Blueish Team seems to have forgotten that his beloved National Party has already given the game away by introducing its own capital gains tax (dubbed the brightline test) after which the only argument now is about spread and duration. And efficiency.

Is it any wonder Ayn Rand called these excuses for intellectuals "intellectually bankrupt": futile, impotent and, culturally, dead, she called them. Accurately.

 They have nothing to offer and can achieve nothing. They can only help to destroy intellectual standards, to disintegrate thought, to discredit capitalism, and to accelerate this country's uncontested collapse into despair and dictatorship.

Ironically, it's Nicola Willis who's left to remind us that it's real people being cleaned out here. Under Labour’s proposal, she reminds us, 'a small business owner who owns the property they operate from would face a Capital Gains Tax when they sell up. 

That might include a dairy owner who owns a small shop in Hamilton. ... It could also include a couple who own a small motel in Timaru.

But where is the principled argument against this double-theft? The argument that producers must rightly be free to keep the results of their own labour? That the iniquity is not about this tax or that levy, but about the iniquitous imposition of tax at all.

The moral is the practical "Every dollar collected through a capital gains tax is a dollar stolen twice; once from your labour, again from your thrift." All other things come from that.

The conservative looks only at those "other things."

Or just gives away the game altogether.

“Housing is one of the largest ways things are going wrong for young people. And people blame that on capitalism…”

“Housing is one of the largest ways things are going wrong for young people. And people blame that on capitalism, because that's the status quo. But, in fact, housing is one of the sectors of our economy that is least exposed to the free market."

~ Emma Camp, from the pilot episode for Breaking Containment ‘Is Gen Z Okay?’

Thomas Sowell seems to have read the TOP manifesto

 

“It would be hard to think of a more ridiculous way to make decisions than to transfer those decisions to third parties who pay no price for being wrong. Yet that is what at least half of the bright ideas of the political left amount to.” 

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 2011 'Random Thoughts' [collected in the Thomas Sowell Reader]

"The modern grocery store is a marvel that we take for granted..."

While the humble supermarket gets a bad press from every political direction, Emma Camp reckons "the modern grocery store is a marvel that we take for granted..."

"AI is a bad term. It's not artificial intelligence."

"The name is wrong. It's not artificial intelligence. It's not intelligence. Intelligence would involve consciousness. Well, if it's a machine, it's not conscious.

"I think people have lost the plot. They've lost it in the power of computing. The thing is that computers have got so powerful that they've lost the thread of what they're doing. But I think consciousness is something different. It's not computational. 

"People are so hypnotised. The trouble is that AI is a bad term. It means 'artificial intelligence.' Now intelligence in my view is conscious. That's what intelligence is about. .. call it Artificial Cleverness. How about that: AC, not AI. 

"You can see the difference when you have mathematics students. Some of them understand what they're doing. Some are just clever. They can repeat what they've learned. They know how to do it very cleverly. They can calculate very well, but they don't necessarily understand what they're doing."

~ physicist Roger Penrose from a recent interview 

"The concept of cultural relativism is a suicide pact."

"The concept of cultural relativism is a suicide pact. The moment you say who are we to judge? When looking at genital mutilation, or the execution of homosexuals, you have surrendered your own civilisation. We have a duty to judge, and we have a duty to condemn."

~ Masih Alinejad, (widely misattributed to Christopher Hitchens)

Ten brutally honest predictions about the future of AI [updated]

Observing that enthusiasm for so-called AI is diminishing by the day--a recent survey suggests 86% of the public distrusts AI--that tech "experts" over-promise again and again, and that most predictions about the technology have been proven dead wrong ("you could get more reliable information by consulting tarot cards or a Ouija board"), cultural commentator Ted Gioia jumps in to give in his own "ten brutally honest predictions about the future of AI."

The first is about where the tech might find a home. Because in the creative world, where it's been desperately oversold, despite all the hype it's seen increasingly as "the microwave meal version of culture."

Food is the useful analogy here. When frozen dinners and microwave meals were introduced, many consumers embraced them as the tech-driven foods of the future. But over time, the public figured out that more tech isn’t always better when it comes to food.

The same will happen with AI music, AI writing, AI art, and all the rest. Like the microwave meal, it will be cheap and easy. But anyone with discernment and taste will prefer handcrafted alternatives.

The slop is just too obviously slop.

Which brings him to money, which is where, here reckons, "the AI crisis will intensify the most" -- and mostly because there will still still be too little coming in to justify all squillions of capital spending ...

The cash getting invested in bots is beyond anything ever seen before in the history of capitalism—already $3.7 trillion has been spent, and the outlay is growing by another trillion per year.

This investment will never generate an adequate return. It can’t. The numbers just don’t add up.

Let me make a comparison. For less than that amount, Silicon Valley could have acquired every movie studio, every video game company, every major record label, and all the big publishers in the world—and still have plenty of cash left over.

So do you think the average person will pay more for AI each month than for all that entertainment? Is AI really worth that much? Not at all—at best, the true believers will pay roughly the same amount as a single Netflix subscription. But the market cap of Netflix is a tiny percent of total AI expenditures. So the mismatch between the level invested and the resulting demand is unprecedented. ...

This is an easy prediction to make. Get ready for write-offs and financial ugliness of the most extreme kind. It’s hard-baked into the business plans, and keeping the mess in the oven for longer won’t make it taste any better.

Why so little revenue? Because it's so increasingly unpopular.

Silicon Valley has consistently underestimated how much people hate AI. ... The public is shifting from passive grumbling to active resistance.

This is a problem even billionaires in their bunkers can’t ignore. They thought that the right response was to push harder. But they thought wrong.

They are still living in denial, but that won’t last for much longer. The public is getting more fierce, and the hyperscalers’ cash resources—which once seemed almost infinite—are dwindling. Silicon Valley has the weaker hand here, and nobody believes its bluffs anymore.

So what happens next? Read all ten brutally honest predictions on the future of these large learning models. 

“After months of keeping voters waiting, Te Pāti Māori has finally shown its hand. Unfortunately, it is reaching straight for taxpayers’ wallets.”

“Te Pāti Māori has spent most of the year seemingly allergic to policy, and after all that time this is what they have come up with: five new taxes.

“Apparently one or two new taxes were not ambitious enough. Te Pāti Māori wants to tax income, wealth, businesses and investment harder, then use the proceeds to fund an even bigger state.

“After months of keeping voters waiting, Te Pāti Māori has finally shown its hand. Unfortunately, it is reaching straight for taxpayers’ wallets.”

~ Tory Relf from her press release 'After A Year Without Policy, Te Pāti Māori Delivers A Tax Grab'

"Leisure, far from being laziness, is often the most active and engaged part of our lives."

"The ancient Greeks’ word for work simply translates as “not leisure”. ... for the Greeks, only has meaning in relation to leisure. There is no way to make sense of labour without rest. This is because work, for the Greeks, has leisure as its purpose. Doing work without the promise of leisure is simply running around in circles with no end in mind—it’s incomprehensible.

"If leisure is not just laziness, what is it? [German philosopher Josef] Pieper defines leisure as the things that we do for their own sake. We don’t need a reason to sit on the porch on a warm morning and appreciate the sunrise. We don’t need a reason to spend time with friends and family. These things are simply worthwhile for their own sake.

"Leisure, far from being laziness, is often the most active and engaged part of our lives. Things like working for our communities or engaging in personal projects are often the places where we are most active. Leisure doesn’t mean doing nothing—it just means doing something for no particular reward.

"We might think of work and leisure as opposites. However, complements seems to be a better term. These are not opposed ideas. Instead, each perfects the other. When we understand the value of leisure and what things are really worthwhile for their own sake, we can finally understand what it is that makes work worthwhile."

~ Patrick Cavanaugh Koroly from his post 'What is True Leisure? How does work find its meaning in leisure?'

"What, exactly, is chiropractic, and what would happen if its claims were subjected to serious scrutiny?"

"[I]mprovement after treatment is not always improvement caused by treatment, since much of it arrives with time and attention. ...

"[C]hiropractic [is] not one profession but many: true believers, entrepreneurs, technicians, philosophers, clinicians ... [but w]hat, exactly, [is] chiropractic, and what would happen if its claims were subjected to serious scrutiny? ...

"During the 1980s and 1990s chiropractic researchers launched clinical trials, comparative-effectiveness studies, and collaborations with universities and medical centres.

"Then, the larger, better-designed studies made the clinical picture go soft. Patients improved—sometimes substantially—but the improvement proved stubbornly hard to pin on [chiropractic] manipulation. Natural history, spontaneous recovery, reassurance, exercise, attention, expectancy, and plain contextual healing kept blurring the causal thresholds. Manipulation generally performed about as well as any other conservative care including placebo, and when superior, it closely tracked the false positive rate expected under null hypothesis significance testing. In fact, to this day you will see chiropractic research conclusions proudly assert that manipulation is no less effective than other treatments for low back pain, including controls—a damnation by faint self-praise. ...

"Look closer, though, and the chiropractic 'arm' was not manipulation but, in reality, the effect of repeated visits, education, exercise, reassurance, coaching, ergonomic advice, self-management support, and the whole atmosphere of attentive care. Patients improved; the contribution of [chiropractic] manipulation itself stayed unknown. And when mechanistic studies looked for the distinctive physiological signature—balance, postural sway, neuromuscular response—the effects were weak, inconsistent, or absent. The anticipated effects of chiropractic refused to show up.

"The strongest test arrived recently. In a trial published online in late 2025, a team led by Gert Bronfort reported on a thousand patients ... Over a year, [chiropractic] manipulation by itself was statistically indistinguishable from ordinary medical care on pain and disability—half a century of hope for the adjustment, tested cleanly at last, returning null. ...

"Chiropractic research is alive and well in Denmark, New Zealand, and a handful of other centres, often more rigorous than anything the reform years produced. But the results of more research will not make spinal manipulation more acceptable. It cannot rescue a treatment this marginal; it will only measure it more precisely. ...

"But a literature that will not resolve after enough well-powered attempts is not unfinished. It is null."

~ J. Michael Menke from his post 'An Insider’s Look at What Happened When Chiropractic Was Evaluated Scientifically, and Why No One Remembers'

"More money is not the answer."

"[T]wo salient facts:

• At April 1, 2025, a sole parent with two or more children received on average $1,110 weekly; a couple with two or more children, $1,255 net. 
• In the year to the June 2025 quarter, median weekly income from wages and salaries was $1,380 gross or $1,111 after tax. ...

"There are already a quarter million children living in benefit-dependent homes ... where, the ‘experts’ tell us, it’s a struggle to provide essentials like food and clothing. ...

"More money is not the answer."

~ Lindsay Mitchell from her post 'Bigger benefits won't help children'

"Asset recycling...'

"Selling assets the state does not need, and investing the proceeds in new infrastructure, is called asset recycling, as opposed to selling to repay debt. ... The Crown has no particular reason to own farms, and every reason to want hospitals that work. ...

"I was in Sydney when New South Wales started asset recycling, but the idea appeared sensible yet politically bold and risky. It required political leadership, and New South Wales was lucky to have it. ...

"New South Wales pressed ahead against every warning of political suicide and was rewarded with re-election and a transformed state. New Zealand could write a similar success story. It only needs leaders willing to start."

~ Oliver Hartwich from his post 'New Zealand needs asset recycling to fund its infrastructure future'

"The Bill’s rhetorical appeal rests on the idea that it targets under-16s. Its mechanism does not."

"The Bill’s rhetorical appeal rests on the idea that it targets under-16s. Its mechanism does not.

"To reliably prevent a 15-year-old from holding an account, a platform must satisfy itself about the age of every account-holder — which in practice means age-assuring the entire adult population as well.

"Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster made the point bluntly when the policy was first floated. Keeping under-16s out means ... everyone will have to demonstrate they are not under sixteen, including you.

"This is the paradox the Bill never resolves, and it is not a drafting quibble but the whole problem. ... "[L]iberal societies are meant to presume adults free unless there is an overwhelming reason to constrain them, not to demand identification as the price of entry to the public square.
The Bill’s privacy safeguards, though real, do not answer this."

~ David Harvey from his post 'A Law That the People It Targets Can Defeat With a Felt-Tip Pen'

"People in Iran know they will have to bring down the regime themselves. All they ask is that the west doesn’t throw the regime a lifeline."

“The [Iranian] regime [massacred] up to 40,000 in just two days in January. Since then, an execution spree has killed hundreds, many hung from cranes in public squares. Still more remain on death row. ...

"The Iranian people’s struggle is one of the great democratic and human rights movements of our age. Yet it barely registers within progressive politics in Britain [or here in NZ].

"Part of the problem is that debate on Iran has become trapped in arguments about Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and military intervention. Those are legitimate debates, but they cannot become the only ones. ...

"The Islamic Republic is not simply another authoritarian government. It has spent decades exporting instability throughout the Middle East, supporting proxy terrorist groups and developing nuclear weapons that threaten regional security. It has become an increasingly important military partner of Russia, supplying the drones used against civilians in Ukraine. ...

"For many Iranians, the recent weakening of the Islamic Republic represents the first genuine opportunity in decades to challenge a regime that has ruled through repression, fear and violence. Inside Iran, the choice is no longer between reformers and hardliners. Instead, the conflict appears to be between a society demanding freedom and democracy and a state determined to preserve itself, at any price. ...

"When Donald Trump launched military action in February he urged Iranians to seize control of their destiny and overthrow the regime. The decision to break decades of western appeasement gave hope. Since then the on-off deal making has left many Iranians worried and confused. People in Iran know they will have to bring down the regime themselves. All they ask is that the west doesn’t throw the regime a lifeline."

~ Justin Forsyth from his op-ed 'The oppressed Iranian people are not asking for much – just our support'

"The Green Party’s supermarket policy is a textbook example of how modern ideological movements drift toward retroactive punishment."

Chloe Swarbrick: 'Yes, I alone will decide how much profit you will make. Or not.'

"One of the most valuable inheritances from Roman law is the prohibition on retroactive legislation; the principle that what is lawful today cannot be declared unlawful tomorrow and punished after the fact. Civilisation depends on this. Without it, citizens cannot plan, cannot trust the law, and cannot defend themselves against the State. The rule of law collapses into rule by law — law as a weapon. ...

"The Green Party’s supermarket policy is a textbook example of how modern ideological movements drift toward retroactive punishment. Their proposal to penalise 'excessive profit' or 'price gouging' sounds simple until you ask the only question that matters: excessive according to what standard?

"So far, no standard exists.

"Chlöe Swarbrick has been unable to articulate: 

• how “excessive profit” would be defined, 
• what baseline would be used, 
• whether the metric would be tied to past behaviour, 
• or how businesses could know in advance whether they were compliant.

"Without a clear, objective, forward‑looking definition, the policy becomes retroactive by default. It allows the State to declare, after the fact, that last year’s lawful profit was actually this year’s unlawful 'gouging.' That is not regulation; it is ex post facto punishment disguised as economic justice.

"This is precisely the danger Roman jurists warned about. Law must be knowable before action, not invented after action."

~ Colinxy from his post 'Retroactive Law: When the Past Becomes Illegal'

Markets are people too

[Hat tip Being Objectivist]

Krasnov is a criminal

 

"While Trump makes love to Kim Jong Un and betrays U.S. ally South Korea, North Korean ballistic missiles are slamming into Kyiv. 

"Trump blocks Ukraine from buying or making missile interceptors for Patriot air defence systems, helping the Russian/North Korean attacks get through."

~ Michael McKay [cartoon by "KT"]

Government Failure

“When government engages in a losing venture, it gets doubled in size. But in a market system, if somebody engages in a losing venture, he has to go out of business.”

~ Milton Friedman

"Postmodernism has created a generation of semi-psychotic, semi-neurotic, ignorant, and hostile whim-worshippers."

Philosopher Stephen Hicks writes on the long reach of postmodern philosophy, its insistence on the social construction of reality, and its practical results in the Arday tragedy. 

If influential philosophers teach that “reality” is merely a social construct, then what happens to us in the next, taught generation? We focus primarily on the social — on doing whatever we can to construct social reality according to our wills. We focus on what everyone is thinking and feeling and saying, and “real” reality becomes less significant, even irrelevant, to our psychology. And whenever “reality” is being obstinate — “facts” intrude upon us — that just means we have not been social-constructing hard enough. ...

Phrased neutrally: After first-generation (1960s-1980s) postmodernism’s anti-realism, social subjectivism, and conflict collectivism, the second generation (1980s-2000s) applied the high philosophical theory to their teaching (and non-teaching) in history, law, journalism, education, and politics. We (2000s-2020s) are [now seeing] the third-generation result.

Phrased uncharitably: Postmodernism created a generation of semi-psychotic, semi-neurotic, ignorant, and hostile whim-worshippers.

"What's far worse than the Arday tragedy is the philosophical state of higher education that erodes all of this."

"[W]omen, men, of all backgrounds discover, invent and create in ways that uplift themselves and others, thousands, millions ... applying reason, thought, research, enquiry and philosophy to humanity, the world and the universe. ...

"[W]hat's far worse than the Arday tragedy is the philosophical state of higher education that erodes all of this."

~ Liberty Scott from his post 'The real tragedy of the Jason Arday story'

"Your needs don't automatically become claims on somebody else's effort"

"Capitalism says inequality can exist, but your needs don't automatically become claims on somebody else's effort. You produce, trade, improve yourself, or persuade others to help voluntarily. 

"Socialism teaches the opposite moral lesson: need itself creates an entitlement and someone else's success creates the corresponding obligation. Follow that premise far enough and failure never teaches self-reliance, it merely produces another person to blame and another demand to make."

~ Rock Chartrand

Wealth taxes

"Defenders of a billionaire tax need to show that government officials would better allocate the relevant resources than billionaire entrepreneurs themselves," says Chris Freiman, "but I’ve yet to see any of them make that case."

Discuss.

"Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree, not to listen and not to support one's own antagonists." But not to ban them.

 

"[T]he substantive issues of the case [are] whether four blog posts Bradbury made on his site, 'The Daily Blog,' about O’Brien breached the Harmful Digital Communications Act. ... The details of the posts can still not be publicised. ... She [O'Brien] said she had never sought to 'prevent Martyn Bradbury from criticising my politics, opinions, or public work'."

~ STUFF: '‘Not a free speech absolutist’: FSU board member Ani O’Brien defends using legal action to take on high-profile blogger'

"Freedom of speech means freedom from interference, suppression or punitive action by the government—and nothing else. ... Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree, not to listen and not to support one's own antagonists. [But not to have them banned.]"

“It's a curious post-modernist trend for laws to be created not to protect rights based on well-worn principles of individual rights and freedoms … but to 'prevent harm' - to have laws to sanitise life so that 'everyone' is protected."

~ Liberty Scott from his post' Harmful Digital Communications Act indeed'

"Q: What do you think of libel and slander laws?

"A: They are appropriate laws because the freedom of ideas does not permit you to lie about a particular person. Under the older interpretation of the courts, truth was your defense. If you knew something defamatory about some person, but it was true, then you have the right to say it. But today you can practically say anything, so long as your supposedly not motivated by malice. ... There are some standards, but they're not very clear, not very practical.

"This type of law is strictly to protect individuals; it has nothing to do with ideas. It is an issue of 'did you or did you not lie about some person and cause him damage'."

~ Ayn Rand from Ayn Rand Answers 

“New Zealand MPs are so keen to be seen to be 'doing something' about cyber-bullying that they are about to pass a poor piece of law that will do something terrible. If the  Harmful Digital Communications Bill passes, MPs who feel sad because of a media story can have the publisher [or blogger] jailed.” 

~ composite quote from 2015 from No Right Turn and Tim Watkin 

“[Given] that defamation would [otherwise] have applied ... [o]ne wonders whether the point of the [Harmful Digital Communications] Bill, in the view of some MPs, was to silence critics.”

~ Eric Crampton from his 2015 post 'Harmful Digital Communications and chilling effects'

Poverty

"I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."

~ Benjamin Franklin from his 1766 essay "On the Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor"