DAVID ROUND: Thoughts for our Time

We are not in charge. We are being stitched up by a bossy professional class which is metastasizing at the rate of a runaway cancer. Every year there are more laws and regulations telling us what to do and not do. There are not just environmental regulations for farmers and foresters. They are the extra road signs and white lines and cycleways and bus lanes planted everywhere on roads, the physical searches at airports as security men with rubber gloves give us the once over, new regulations about everything, the continual attempts of government agencies to indoctrinate us and tell us what we may and may not think.... The Broadcasting Standards Authority’s bid to ban the description of tikanga as ‘mumbo-jumbo’ is just yet another unsurprising power grab by a handful of overpaid entitled self-righteous bullies.

The last Labour government evidently created 17,000 new public service jobs, and I understand that well less than 2,000 of these have been eliminated by the current government. 15,000 new public service positions, let us say. What contributions have they made to the public weal? Has our well-being increased at all since then? I do not think so. What increase there has been in local body employees, and in the variety of consultants and advisors, lawyers and accountants, human relations people and employment specialists which everyone must now seek that assistance of before they can do absolutely anything?

It is increasingly impossible to do anything without the assistance of a number of highly trained and expensive professional people whose approval is in some way legally required. Even if you were to hire a new employee without professional advice, you would certainly not dismiss one without being very careful to comply with whatever employment law might say. You want to open a business, or just buy or build a house? You will have to deal with the city planners and the building inspectors and the bankers and insurance agents and real estate people and the lawyers and conveyancers. There will be a lot of paper work. The anti-money-laundering laws will require you to prove several times who you are and where your money came from.

I do not believe, incidentally, that the real purpose of the anti-money-laundering laws is to prevent money laundering. Any self-respecting money launderer knows plenty of ways to evade the law. That law’s real purpose is just to watch us, to let us know we are being watched and should do as we are told, and probably to prepare us for an eventual digital currency. Ditto much of airport ‘security’ ~ it is not so much to prevent security incidents in the air as it is to get us used to being pushed around. (There are, after all, no such security checks on smaller flights, and they have not seen any terrorist incidents recently. Surely any concerns we might have had in the aftermath of the Twin Towers falling have long gone the way of our temporary concern about an earlier long ago spate of plane hijackings ~ a spate which disappeared without any need to treat passengers like criminals? Or are we to understand that these security checks are going to be forever?) I suspect that the road speed limits, which are impossible to observe because they now seem to change so frequently, are mainly intended not for traffic safety but to get us used to being very attentive to road signs, and to being fined.....

But I digress. Experience has very clearly taught us that any new or increased national taxes or local rates that are imposed on us now will be frittered away on new staff, new premises, new office furniture, increased salary packages, more reports, discussions with tangata whenua, more meetings about meetings, more legal requirements and new procedures, more consultants and managers, the ‘service industries’....There may be the odd bit of infrastructure, but it will be more important to provide a safe environment for the new staff.....

None of these people do anything useful. They are what John Michael Greer has termed a ‘lenocracy’, a word he invented from the Latin leno, lenonis, a procurer, pimp or pander.

‘The pimp’ he writes, ‘adds no value to the exchanges from which he profits. He doesn’t produce any goods or services himself. He inserts himself into the transaction......and takes a cut of the price in exchange for allowing the transaction to happen.’

We are ruled by a rapidly enlarging class of parasites who perform no useful function and are increasingly impossible to support.

No-one ever likes new taxes, but I suspect that we might be ever so slightly less averse to them if we had any confidence that they were going to be used to make the world a better place. We did believe that once, when our social welfare system was just getting under way, and when we were a very different people ~ with different ideas about a lot of things. We were also then a much more homogeneous nation, where the interests of one were the interests of all ~ or most, anyway. But that was a bad thing, of course, that lack of diversity......Not like now, when we appear to be increasingly at each other’s throats. This is good?

We know perfectly well that any more money taken from us is going to make not the slightest bit of difference in solving any of our rapidly growing challenges and problems. It will just make them worse.

David Round, a sixth generation South Islander and committed conservationist, is an author, a constitutional and Treaty expert, and a former law lecturer at the University of Canterbury.

This post was first published at Breaking Views