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.