Category Archives: Freedom

Albert J Nock and the Atrophy of Charity and Self-Reliance

When the Bible says “Charity never faileth…” its talking about the virtue of always being charitible, not that there wont ever be derths of Charity. History is filled with deeds and ages of inhumanity.
It ought to be obvious that true charity and compusory taxation are not the same thing.
One gives in liberty from a heart felt love of humanity and a self imposed moral obligation to help his neigbour when they are in need, while the other is obliged to give ‘welfare’ via Government coersion… and not from the heart at all.
Social welfare is not Christian charity. Welfare via coersion is actually an alternitive Anti-Christian system of ‘false alms’. Many Christians foolishly mistake Lefty communism for true Christian charity.


“The process of converting social power into State power may perhaps be seen at its simplest in cases where the State’s intervention is directly competitive.” A Nock.

A Face book conversation I am currently having reminded me of a great political thinker… Albert J. Nock

The conversation was started when a fellow face booker posted an article that The Super City Council was considering making Auckland Ratepayers fork out for the building of a dry dock for the benefit of the super Rich mega yachts.
He lamented this expense…
Quote:
“Instead of the city propping up unprofitable business adventures, there are plenty of other projects crying out for funds that have no appeal to private enterprise but will be of direct benefit to all – or groups – of ratepayers. Just the other day came a story that Auckland’s 777 community sports fields are closed more than 20 per cent of the time – more in winter when most needed – because of poor drainage.”

He believes that would be misguided values and a gross injustice to use Ratepays money to build a dry dock for the wealthy and Better spent by government upon Drainage for a community sports ground.
This may sound like a good proposition to many yet I think he is making a serious mistake, which is to assume it is a good thing for the Government to be involved in things ‘which Free enterprise has interest yet will be a direct benefit to all”. He is assuming that unless the Government steps up… things like the poor drainage of a sports field would never be resolved.

This is when Albert J Nock and his book Our Enemy, the State sprang to mind.

Our Enemy, the State

Concuring with this mans first point that it would indeed be a travesty for the state to build dry docks for the wealthy… and then moved strait to the point he made in respect to …’other beneficial projects that have no appeal to free enterprise’

“May I suggest it is neither just or necessary to use political coercion to make these ‘Non attractive yet socially benificial projects’ a reality either.”

I offered up my Libertarian alternative…

“There is the mechanism of the voluntary association/ society by which the spirit of charity and social wellbeing is voluntarily organized in non-profit organizations. It is via these mechanisms that people may show their Humanitarianism without recourse to Political coercion or using the ‘filthy lucre’ of money Politicians have extorted from the people via Rates and taxes. B y leaving all such ‘projects’ to the voluntary sector and forbidding the Councils or Government from getting involved in such things we can rope in Government Medaling and better control their expenditure. This way we restrict their powers and spheres of operations to their proper duties, and set up the dynamics of society by which Non-political solutions to problems and needs are both understood and may prosper.

Albert J Nock wrote on this important subject and showed that The more social responsibilities the state takes control of, the more the Self-reliant Social spirit of the community atrophies , and so becomes less able to fend for itself, and more dependent upon the state.
This is the Process by which the people are rendered irresponsible and gullible worshippers of Nanny State because they assume all life’s problems have political solutions.

We Libertarians seek to reverse this process and thereby increase society’s ability to look after itself in freedom, and reduce dependence and the costs, and spheres of operation of the state.
It is a society in which voluntary associations flourish, and Government expenses bureaucracy are kept to a minimum.

The Christian fellowship is a voluntary association.
It ought never to be used as an excuse for political impostions of private ‘values’
It preaches voluntary embraced values, voluntary action, voluntary charity, thus functions propery without political coersion.
Christian virtue, self reliance, and Liberty are in harmony.

“Thus the State “turns every contingency into a resource” for accumulating power in itself, always at the expense of social power; and with this it develops a habit of acquiescence in the people. New generations appear, each temperamentally adjusted – or as I believe our American glossary now has it, “conditioned” – to new increments of State power, and they tend to take the process of continuous accumulation as quite in order. All the State’s institutional voices unite in confirming this tendency; they unite in exhibiting the progressive conversion of social power into State power as something not only quite in order, but even as wholesome and necessary for the public good.”
A Nock. Our Enemy, the State

The State, always instinctively “turning every contingency into a resource” for accelerating the conversion of social power into State power, was quick to take advantage of this state of mind. All that was needed to organize these unfortunates into an invaluable political property was to declare the doctrine that the State owes all its citizens a living; and this was accordingly done. It immediately precipitated an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, an enormous resource for strengthening the State at the expense of society…”
A Nock. Our Enemy, the State

Problem?

A couple of days ago, columnist Joe Bennett concluded his column in The Press by telling us

I’m going to spend the afternoon finding out how I’ve chosen to enjoy myself.

You’re about to find out that you’ve chosen to read on to see what on earth Joe Bennett was talking about. Here’s the start of his column.

But first an apology. A month or so back a gentleman emailed me about something I’d said on the radio. He wrote, and I quote, “free will is a childish delusion”.

“Scoff,” I wrote back. “Pooh pooh. I have free will. My free will is writing this email. Without free will we are automata.”

Since then, however, I have been on a wee journey and I would like to retract my scoff and pooh pooh. But I have forgotten the gentleman’s name and deleted his email.

So if you’re reading this, sir, sorry. You were right. I was wrong.

The change of mind followed last week’s column about the mutiny of the body.

In response I got several emails directing me to some neuroscientific research. It seems that neuroscientists have been nibbling at the idea of free will for years without telling me.

For example they attached electrodes to people’s skulls and then asked the people to click a computer mouse at a moment of their choosing. The boffins found that when people decided to click the mouse, their brain had already begun the physical process of clicking. In other words, the decision to click had been made before the people realised they’d made it. The click was already going to happen.

There were numerous similar experiments. They all suggested that when we think we decide to do something of our own free will, our consciousness is merely catching up with a decision that we have already made. We are rationalising after the fact.

We are deluding ourselves into thinking we are in conscious control of our actions. It’s a nice, consoling delusion, but a delusion none the less.

Problem? Well, yes! If we have no free will, we have no moral responsibility for our actions.

No free will means that Christianity is a nonsense.

No free will means that Objectivism is a false religion.

No free will means that “not my problem” doesn’t cut it.

I’ve known of the experimental results to which Bennett refers for the past 15 years or so, ever since I read Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. 15 years later, I still have no rejoinder.

Dennett takes us to a very high mountain and shows us all the sciences of naturalism and their splendour. “Everything you want … you can have,” says Dennett.

Lost Plot. World Press Freedom Day.

Apparently tomorrow is ‘World Press Freedom Day’.
Forgive me for not swooning with the reverence as might be assumed to be customary for Liberty lovers on such an occasion, yet please don’t mistake my lack of enthusiasm as an indication that I harbour a distaste for such an important vanguard of freedom and justice as a Free press is supposed to represent, because that’s not so. The Ideal of a Free Press is noble indeed.

The reason I’m about to rain on this parade is because like that other assumed vanguard of freedom which a free press is supposed to champion (Democracy), there are other vital factors at play which are pre-requisites upon which these ‘Vanguards’ are co-dependent if they are to function properly and without which they are rendered no vanguard at all, but become the tools of deception and oppression.
They become ‘Wolves in sheep’s clothing’ … merely feigning the roles of instruments of justice and liberty but are in reality no such thing.

Being a Gadfly, it is both my nature and my duty to now raise my pointy finger, and ask out loud …
“What Good is a free press if it *thinks and acts* like it’s attached to the Propaganda office of the Government?”

I raise this question because for the Free Press to actually be the vanguard of Justice, Liberty, and democracy requires it to be stationed by Independent thinkers whom are wise in the ways of Freedom, are zealous of the principles that underpin Individual rights and liberties, and have a good grasp of the Nature of Political power and its inclination to Grow at the expense of personal freedom, and to encroach into spheres that ought to be strictly kept free of political interventions. Only then can the ‘Free Press’ vigilantly keep watch, and be ready raise the alarm when Government crosses the line.

I ask “How are Journalists supposed to raise the alarm against Bad laws, corruption and abuse of power if they have been brainwashed by a corrupt government into thinking its activities are not corrupt or abuses of Power… because they have been trained to believe such evils are instead ‘Good’?

When tyranny goes on the war path, instead of raising the alarm, the politically compromised press applauds! … and busy themselves as an army of voluntary Spin doctors selling the tyranny to the gullible public, much to the Glee of the Demagogues who instead for facing the wrath of an informed public may continue to act the part of Piety, benevolence, and Patriotism, though in reality they are unscrupulous, malevolent traitors.

Let me now declare that this is the sorry state that currently prevails within our Nations Free Press!
Can you now understand why I’m not ‘excited’ about tomorrows ‘World Free Press Day’?
How, you may wonder, did the press of New Zealand, and other western countries contract this leprosy?

Let me declare that it is a Congenital disease the spawn of which was seeded 200 years ago with the growth of the ideology of Materialism which has slowly but steadily displaced the ideology which underpins the belief in God given Rights and Liberties, and a strictly limited state.
It has taken generations of decay… of creeping socialism…. Of incremental usurpations and encroachments by an ever expanding Leviathan… yet has reached its acute stage today because the Governments of the West have usurped control of the sphere of Education, and thus have the power to directly programme the minds of our nations children and young people, and thus socially engineer a childishly submissive society which now assumes there are no sphere of activity that ought to lie outside the realms of political intervention, and believes that all life’s problems have political solutions.

*And the Nations Journalists are trained and receive their credentials directly from such the state*
We Libertarians call it Nanny State.

There it is I said it! By controlling the education system the Government has been able to castrate the Free press, and directly program the masses into a herd of docile sheeple whom are so ‘institutionalised’, that like long term Jail birds facing the an end of their imprisonment …the idea that they may one day have to take care of themselves paralyzes them with dread!

The Social engineers have succeeded in creating a Nation of voluntary slaves, whom have surrendered all their rights, and their dignity, for the sake of being supplied stale bread, told what to do, believe, and think, and for the security of a Jail cell.

Few reading these words will concur with them. Many will laugh and assert that I am delusional… ‘an extremist’, not knowing their conclusion is a symptom of the disease. Those whom reject my remedy… that the state ought to be removed from control of the education system, as a matter of Principle, and urgency (thereby cutting off this means of social manipulation) prove themselves to be incapable of conceiving the benefits of living in a society in which education has been liberated from Political control. My detractors harbour all sorts of wild ‘nightmare’ scenarios of Chaos and disorder should Education be removed from the clutches of Government… all pure fantasy… all figments of twisted imaginations generated in the minds of institutionalised inmates.

This terror of Removing the State from Education is today shared by most of the Journalists and editors whom populate the nations so-called ‘Free Press’.
This is why they voluntarily work uphold the status quo *as if they were on the government Payroll*, churning out Pro-Government Press by the kilometre.

Thus when Independent outsiders (Like myself and other Libertarians) try to enter the Democratic Ring and present challenges to the way things are being done we are ignored. Thus the so-called Free-press fails in the moral duty of their profession to inform the public of these alternative views and arguments so that they can make an informed choice at election time… and so democracy is again perverted… to the benefit of the powers that be.
The ‘Free Press act in cahoots with the corrupt powers mongers of the status Quo… and being completely left out of the political dialogues that attend elections and the important issues of the day… Challengers to the Status quo don’t stand a hope in hell of getting elected … any press they manage to swing usually belittles them as ‘whacos’, etc.

I speak from first hand experience in these matters having stood for a dozen or more Elections, both at National Level and for City Council.
I have presented the best arguments and principles, which in a ‘better’society that actually had a Press corp that actually did its Job properly would in themselves have attracted the attention of savvy professional Journalists with the capacity to analyze the political debate, and understand their value in respect to the democratic process.

Time has proven my arguments to be true, and had Hamilton city actually elected me I would have saved the ratepayers hundreds of millions of Dollars.
Had I been elected to Parliament, among other things I would have been in a position to help Don Brash put an end to Treaty separatism, and the apartheid electoral system.
Yet the Press ( Waikato Times) treated me like I was ‘a nobody’… and because of this ‘black out’, the people of Hamilton didn’t even know what I represented on their ballots. ( I exclude the small independent weekly ‘Hamilton News’ from my condemnations as they served Hamilton well by printing many articles I penned, and I salute them.)

There are countless other Evils caused directly by our Nanny states control over the education of our Nation, including the broad acceptance currently enjoyed by the doctrines and institutions of Waitangi Racism and apartheid, yet they are separate issues. In the Late 1800 Herbert Spencer wrote a Book called ‘The Man vs The State’ in which he addressed the evils that would befall nations which were foolish enough to allow their Governments to usurp control of the Education system… and it has all come to pass!
I have hereby achieved what I set out to do tonight… which was not simply to bleat about me personally being ignored by the press, but to expose the moral corruption of New Zealand’s socalled ‘Free Press’ and highlight one of the chief reasons The labour and National Parties are so entrenched. I want to throw down the challenge to any Jurnos or Editors reading this post to start fulfilling the Moral obligations of their Profession. Start Publishing *Real* Criticisms of the status Quo. Start including ‘Outsiders’ in the Political issues and debates. That is what a ‘Free Press’ ought to be.
Tim Wikiriwhi.

Update: Here is a link to another piece I wrote on this same subject

Conspiracy of Silence.

… And Justice For All

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Reed Robinson is joining Tim and me as co-blogger here at Eternal Vigilance. Welcome, Reed!

It also gives me great pleasure to post … And Justice For All, the title track from Metallica’s 1988 album of the same name. The title of the album is taken from the United States Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I don’t know whether or not taking the Pledge of Allegiance counts as swearing, but please don’t swear (and please don’t mention the Black album, either, it’s an abomination – unless you’re talking about the Black album by Christian artist Prince).

The Crisis.

Thomas Payne

December 23, 1776

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God. …

Great American. War of Independence.
Tom Paine.

We are the Dead

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though
poppies grow
In Flanders fields

I’m Painfully too Sexy for My Shirt.

I recently got a 12 mth Rego sticker for my bike. It cost me $530.00. (@$%%^! #%^&&^%$!)
I dont ride it everyday.
This bike is my Prozac. A Drug free release from the wallow of Bullshit that is my life,…Its liberating and a thrill, yet of course ‘The Man/ The Machine/ Mammon’ rapes my pocket for the privilege.
Because I only ride it once a month, that means 530/12= $44.00 per ride…just for registration! before fuel!!! and the biggest component of that goes to ACC.
That is a ^&*&^^%R$ Rip off!
ACC Sux Dogs Balls!
@#$%^&^&&* Rapist Socilaist State!


Viktor Safonkin


My 2010 Triumph Bonneville America.

Sticking it to the Man! Planting Liberty.


Smugglers. Vasily Hudiakov.

Just flouted the Easter Trading Laws. Went down to Oderings Plant nurseries and bought up large on trees for our yard. Its a worthy cause, and perfect time to plant.
So get out there and support your local Civil disobedient Free-Marketeers!
To the Revolution!
http://www.oderings.co.nz/

Department of Labour reminds retailers of Easter Trading law
In the run-up to Easter the Department of Labour is advising retailers to ensure they are familiar with the law that restricts shops from trading on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

That law – the Shop Trading Hours Act Repeal Act 1990 – specifies three-and-a-half days each year on which most New Zealand retailers must close – Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday and until 1pm on Anzac Day.

The Department’s Deputy Secretary Craig Armitage says: “The Act sets out exemptions from shop trading restrictions for a limited number of retailers. All others must close on the restricted days. The Department encourages retailers to contact it prior to Easter if they are uncertain whether they are able to open on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.”

The Act allows certain types of shops to remain open on restricted days. These are shops whose main purpose is to provide essential supplies in quantities which people in the area or travelling through may need, shops providing food ready to eat, souvenir and duty free shops, pharmacies, and shops in premises where there are bona fide shows or exhibitions.

Shops in locations covered by area exemptions issued by the former Shop Trading Hours Commission, under the previous law, may also trade on restricted days. The Department of Labour cannot make or change area exemptions or redefine the boundaries of these areas – there are no provisions to do that under the shop trading legislation.

If a business does not clearly fit into one of the exempted categories, it is an offence to open and trade during any time the law restricts trading. The owner or occupier of the shop may be prosecuted and fined up to $1000.”

http://www.dol.govt.nz/News/Media/2009/easter-trading.asp

MMP Review

In the 2011 Referendum on the Voting System, held in conjunction with the General Election on 26 November, the majority of voters chose to keep MMP as New Zealand’s voting system.

This triggered an independent review of MMP, conducted by the Electoral Commission, in which all of us can have our say on any changes we’d like to see made to the way MMP works.

TODAY (5 April) is the deadline for submissions for those wanting to present in person to the Commission. Submissions must be lodged with the Commission by midnight on 5 April.

You can make a quick submission. Or you can make a full submission. To make a quick submission, all you have to write is, e.g.,

I believe that to achieve better representation the MMP threshold should be lowered to 2.5%.

Let’s give freedom-friendly parties such as the ALCP and the Libz a better chance next time. And dissuade people from committing “the ends justify the means” atrocities such as “strategically voting” for John Banks to get Don Brash into Parliament.

In the words of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ

What you are about to do, do quickly (John 13:27)

Okay, so that was quoted totally out of context. Never mind. Just SUBMIT! DO IT NOW!