Equality is a consensual hallucination (and I do not consent)

A casual reader might mistake me for a dope smoking gay rights activist or a cop hating social justice warrior – but they have not read the fine print. Libertarians may share some common ground with the progressive left on such things as same sex marriage - but for different reasons as I shall explain.

 

The left these days is all about equality, which I guess goes back to their roots as representatives of the working class striving for equality with the middle class. Or the women struggling to be equal to men, or the blackfellas to white fellows.

My sophisticated libertarian position on equality is that it is, in fact, bullshit.

Equality – really? In what way are you equal to me, or even want to be? Why the hell would I want to be equal to you even if I thought that was possible. I have $10,000 in the bank and you have you have $20,000 does that mean you must give away half your savings to be equal to me, or do I have to sell my car to be equal to you? Or maybe you should give me five grand to make us even.

Should I look like you, or should you look like me, or do we have facial surgery to both look like Che Guevara? Should my wife put on some weight or should yours lose a couple of kilos? I have two kids how many you got? Do we need to trade them away too? Mine are different colours though – so should we spray tan one of yours?

If we should all be educated to the same degree - do I have to go back and finish school or should you whip your kids out in Year 10?

Perhaps you mean the minorities? Equality for the blackfellas, the transsexuals, the migrants? I have met many and none of them have expressed an interest in being me - and I don't blame them.

All Australians are equal in the eyes of the law. All can vote. All can access an range of government services to make our lives easier. Health care an education are free for all. We live in a famously peaceful and secular society. So what the hell is it you really want?

What you want is exceptionalism.

You want aboriginals, gays, muslims and others to be different and to be treated as different so you can insist they are marginalised when they should be equal to the majority.

To achieve equality for the exceptional ones you now demand inclusivity. Having insisted that the peg is square, now you want to hammer it into a round hole.

And to do this you need force. You need discriminatory laws to discourage discrimination. You need commissions, agencies, tribunals and cops. You need a big government with a big bloody hammer constantly bashing away at those pegs.

All the while equality is but a consensual hallucination – we have it when we agree that we have it. But we will never agree, will we? No one ever says righto chaps were all equal lets go out and and have a fucking good time, do they?

No. They will fight for rights that don't exist, exclude the included, minoritise minorities or even majorities (women).

During my time in The People's Republic of China I saw a lot of people forced to be equal – they were uniformly cold, poor and pissed off about it. Now many of them are wealthy due to the fact that the government caved in on equality and let them be individuals. Now they might just take over the world.

I support same-sex marriage on the basis of freedom and fairness rather than inclusivity and equality. I don't want the government to be kind enough to include gay people in the Marriage Act - I would rather the government butt out of marriage entirely as it is none of their god-damn business.

Failing that, gay people should be treated fairly by the law - not to make gay people equal to straight people but because as Australian people we are all young and free.

The Marriage Act does exclude not anyone by way of their sexual orientation - it excludes us all. I am not free to marry another man if I choose to do so and my sister isn't free to marry a woman. Whether we wish to do so, or not, is irrelevant.

Their are no gay rights at stake here – just our natural ability to do what we want without interference from church, government or anyone else who wants to to tell us what to do in our personal lives.

So remember u r free (and equality be damned)

Cry havok and let slip the dogs of the Potato Marketing Corporation

“...eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government." - Andrew Jackson, 1837.

 

A guy rang me recently looking for employment as a security guard. When I offered him a spot at the annual Nimbin Mardi Grass he promptly declined and told me he was “disgusted by homosexuality”. I laughed and told him it wasn't the Gay Mardi Gras but Mardi Grass as in cannabis, pot, weed etc. There was a long pause followed by a “No way”. He hung up the phone and never forwarded his resume - I guess having decided I was doing the work of the devil and trying to lead him astray.
 
You might go to Nimbin Mardi Grass expecting a libertarian paradise of free love, hash cookies and laughter but no – you will instead find a Police Open Day with the many faces of law enforcement on display – riot police, licensing police, mounted police, drug detection dogs, random breath tests, drug tests and many more flavours of cop all intent on making life as miserable as possible for festival goers. And it works – the event has been in steady decline since the police crashed the party about seven years ago . And cannabis is still illegal.

On my return to the normal world I find there is a new sheriff in the tourist resort town of Byron Bay promising to “clean up Byron” which is cop for for “shut down the night-life in Byron Bay”. Short of stature and chewing gum constantly - he was last seen photographing the cheery crowd of young people outside the Great Northern Hotel on a Saturday night while commenting darkly that “this was no good”. God help us.

Meanwhile in light of recent homicidal attacks on innocent people by various flavours of dick-headed loser in Australia and around the world – politicians and pundits are talking censorship again. Frustrated by their inability to to combat the message of evil they turn their attention to the medium - inferring that some of that evil has rubbed off on it.

Perhaps the time has come to censor the Internet, they gravely intone, and al-Jazeera while we are at it.

While the Prime Minister claims to not understand how a terrorist can be given parole when he knows well the answer - the terrorist in question wasn't one, as he had never actually carried out an act of terror. Turnbull knows this – he was once a lawyer.

As the law-mongers talk minimum sentences and Federal control over State parole boards, the State of NSW hands out M4 assault rifles to riot police and gives all police a licence to kill criminals before they are a threat to others. Both will come in handy next year in Nimbin, or at schoolies in November.

And in Western Australia, a man faces the Supreme Court for the heinous crime of growing too many potatoes.

With no bill of rights to constrain them, Australian politicians will make whatever laws they can get away with to be tough on crime - as being tough on crime, or at least appearing to be, is crucial to winning the next election and keeping their jobs.

With every new law, regardless of its merits, the police and other bureaucrats become more powerful and can intrude further into our lives. We constantly hear of Police being given new powers – we never hear of old ones being taken away.

Instead we hear the sound of our rights being chipped away. For the only right we have in this country is to do that which is not prohibited by laws.

So be suspicious of all new laws, I say. Be suspicious as you would of a lawyer who cannot comprehend the law, a riot cop with an M4, or a man in black from the Potato Marketing Corporation.

And the disgusted security guard I mentioned earlier? Be not suspicious of him. He understands liberty and exercises his freedom to choose where he works and who he works for. His right to be disgusted and express such disgust for anyone, anything and anytime.

He remembers he is free – help keep him that way.

Two small steps to freedom (and perchance to happiness )

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

that all men are created equal;

that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;

that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Thomas Jefferson

I would love to tell you that freedom equals happiness but I cannot.

The author of the fine words above sought not to either. But he did say that happiness could be achieved by being free to pursue it - though of the outcome one can never be certain.

So often we exercise our freedom of choice by choosing to be miserable. We bend to the will of others not because we are compelled to, but because we choose to. We employ our freedom of speech to say nothing, and our freedom of association to be alone.

All the while others may exercise their freedom to attack our way of life, to police our thoughts, to exclude us from the political arena and to make us question our relevance and worth in society. They demand laws that criminalise our choice of lifestyle and marginalise our forms of expression.

Freedom does not equal happiness.

What I can tell you is what got me started on the road to happiness. It is what I call the two stages of acceptance. Make of it what you will, but it works for me.

The first stage of acceptance is the acceptance of you. You are who you are and can never be anyone else or anything else, other than a corpse. You have total control over what you do but not over whether or not you are you. You are stuck being you for the rest of your life. Hopefully you are happy being you. Ideally you love being you. But when you look in the mirror there you are, regardless of how you feel about you. So you might as well get on with it and make the best of being you. Be a wiser, faster, fitter, stronger, funnier you. Be the best you that you can be. Or not (that's up to you).

The second stage of acceptance is that everyone else in the world is not you. As most of the people on this earth don't know you exist and never will they do not want to be you. Because they are not you they do not and will not ever think like you do. Or look like you or behave like you do. Concern yourself with them no more than you wish them to be concerned with you. You will never be able to make them like you, nor be like you. So stop trying to force yourself upon them.

My father is 80 years old and has never been a happy person. It was only quite recently that he accepted himself and became at least more contented than he has ever been. Leaving the behind the anger that comes from the fierce envy of others and the suffering that comes from desire to be someone better than himself - he is almost free.

But the second stage has so far eluded him.

Why? - he asks me constantly. Why do they do they think that way? How could they believe that? Why do they vote for them?

The answer is always the same and needs no elaboration. It's because they're not you, father. They are not you.

He hears me and he believes me and it silences him for a while but it does not last. Some small part of him holds out and I suspect will do so until he is no more. But that's him. He is not me.

In accepting ourselves and others we can be free of the need to govern the lives of others and concern ourselves only with governing of ourselves. To be the captains our own ships, to master our own fates without the interference of others seeking to re-make us in their image.

Remember you are free to be happy (or not, it's up to you)

Freedom vs market interventionists, scalperbots and Adele

Serial market pest Senator Nick Xenophon is at it again. Poker machines again? No it's ticket scalping prompted by Australian politicians' bi-partisan love for Adele and the fact that a ticket to see her recent show cost as much as $5000. 

Put simply - this is because only a small number of tickets are available to the public and the bulk of those seem to be snapped up by scalpers who go on to sell them for huge profits via the internet. 
 

This is an example of supply and demand economics - when demand outstrips supply prices go up. As profiteers move in prices go up some more. This has been a feature of the free market economy for some time now and is well understood by Year 10 students everywhere.

However, this being 2017, scalpers are thought to be unfairly aided by software 'bots' which are conveniently taking the heat for the situation.

Being a federal Senator and a market sceptic Nick's solution is, of course, market intervention through federal legislation. Firstly by following the US which last year passed the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act and banned these digital daleks.

Ticket bots are basically hacker's tools that can be downloaded from the internet. Banning them would be like banning a virus, or outlawing hacking. Or banning crime.

There is so far no evidence that this legislation has affected ticket prices. No one has been charged let alone convicted under the Act.

Nick has his own ideas though none of them could be described as bright. Such as allowing tickets to be re-sold only when where a ticket holder has a legitimate reason to do so and dis-allowing tickets to be resold for more than 10 per cent profit. Really, Nick? Do you really think such nonsense could be made law?

If it could - we would end up with is a taxpayer funded Fair Ticket Pricing Commission. The Federal Police will need a Ticket Scalping Strike Force with offices in every state. Teams of hackers would be employed by the government to fight the scalperbots in cyberspace. All paid for by you and me. Would it affect ticket prices ? Unlikely. But even if it did, you and I would be subsidising concert goers to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. 

Luckily for us all - Nick Xenophon speaks softly and carries a small stick – for he is just a Senator and cannot put forward a bill to Parliament. He can only put forward a motion which is a statement that other Senators can agree or disagree upon, and that's it. Such motions carry as much weight as the belligerent utterances of a drunk as he slides off his barstool to the ragged cheers of rival barflies.

Xenophon is, and always was, a cheap populist hack.

Politicians commonly branded as populists, like Trump and Hanson, actually have ideas about society and government – big, weird ideas that make them saviours to some and devils to others. Nick Xenophon is a true populist in that he keeps to the centre to please as many voters as possible and kindly offers to legislate against anything that might vex them.

But those who seek to make laws purely to increase their popularity are the enemies of liberty. Every law they make takes away our freedom. And as we only have the right to do what is not prohibited by laws – our rights are taken away too.

Government interventions into the energy market have stuffed it up, particularly for those in Nick's home state of South Australia. Nick's solution – more interventions to stuff up the old stuffed up interventions.

To do this he waved his little stick at a weak government and took tax reform hostage to force his interventions upon us. Tax reform meaning - the lowering of our taxes. His little stick just got a little bigger.

So don't encourage him. Don't vote for him. Don't fall for his populist bullshit.

Remember you are free.

More on the complex issue of ticket scalping to come. In the meantime check out,

 

http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/a-ticket-scalper-explains-the-rip-off/8344484

Associations vs Commissions (Pink Ladies vs pinko ladies)

Having put the free and fair bullet into Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, it's time to take aim at the reason why 18C became so contentious in the first place which is the controversy surrounding the recent actions of the Human Rights Commission.

The HRC is a government agency that works independently of government (to be sure). It mostly investigates complaints and prepares reports to give to the Attorney General. It's basically a human rights ombudsmen.

Unlike laws, human rights are not proscribed, they are consensual hallucination. You cannot be prosecuted by the HRC or anyone else for breaching a person's human rights because you don't specifically have any. You need to have broken a criminal or civil law to be prosecuted by anyone.

The HRC mostly concerns itself with discrimination and the federal acts which might make it unlawful - which is nice. My problem with it is that it is $22 million dollars a year worth of nice. $16 million of that being salaries. Nice work if you can get it.

Well someone's got to do it, you might say – and yes other folks do it too. In my state the Anti-Discrimination Board of NSW spends another $4.5 million per year of our cash doing it – and each Australian state has a similar organisation that mirrors the federal one. And then there is the Legal Aid NSW Human Rights Committee (which keeps it's budget to itself).

At least $60 million dollars are thought to be directly spent each year on human rights monitoring agencies in this country, that is to say this figure does not include funding for NGO's. So $1.2 million per week spent on listening to folks complaining is money well spent?

I have nothing against human rights or the lawyers who make them their business. I can live with political bias from HRC President Gillian Triggs, even the questionable ethics and poor judgement that have marked her tenure. She is only human and there is no doubt she is better qualified to do the job than I am.

I just don't want to pay her $418,000 salary.

Because by paying the salaries of various Human Rights Commissioners I become an accessory to their bias, to their poor judgement and dishonesty. I am complicit in their failure to uphold free speech and treat others fairly. By all means be social justice warriors. Damn the government and signal your virtues - I don't care as long as I am not funding your folly. In fact, I don't want to fund HRC at all.

Maybe you do. And that's fine too. So you pay for it. 

How? By abolishing the Commission and replacing it with an Association. A non- government not for profit no-nonsense organisation devoted to all the same stuff. Funded by you. Or not.

If it is so damn important that we be constantly monitored and reported on in case we discriminate against someone then good men and women will rise to the challenge and answer the call to arms and get the job done for free. Don't believe me?

For more than 26 years, Refugee Legal has been providing free legal advice and casework services for asylum seekers, refugees and disadvantaged migrants in the community and in immigration detention across Australia.

Since 2014, as those arriving in Australia without visas are unable to access legal aid unless considered "exceptionally vulnerable", so Refugee Legal has relied on philanthropic grants and donations to fund their services. Migration agents, law students, paralegals and corporate lawyers from a dozen firms work at their clinic free of charge to directly assist more than 12,000 people last year.

Then there is the Human Rights Law Centre, Liberty Victoria, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, Amnesty International and others. Associations not commissions. Citizens serving a public cause. Getting the job done and not a six-figure salary in sight.

Admirable, yes - but does this sound fair to you? Public servants making their fortunes in the discrimination industry while the private sector works for free?

I'm a public servant too - I work part-time in a regional hospital in NSW. For the last few months we have had a serious shortage of the IV pumps that regulate the drip that goes into a patients arm. They cost about $500 each and we urgently need half a dozen more.

Meanwhile, Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane is so under-worked that he has called for Australians to complain to the Commission about a cartoon. For this we pay him $340,000 per year. If Tim was to instead work part time for 3 days per week and we reduced his salary accordingly - that $136,000 would get us three nurses for a year, or 272 pumps.

 

And Tim would have $204,000 per year and 2 whole days each week to devote to the welfare of the community - perhaps as a volunteer for Refugee Legal. Or the Volunteer Fire Fighters Association, Surf Life Saving NSW or his local Hospital Auxiliary (formerly known as the Pink Ladies). 

Keep the state agencies if you must – at least we know where the money will be spent and we know that Legal Aid persecutes no-one and actually does something other than write reports.

But the federal Human Rights Commission should go – or rather, we should set it free.

Remember you, also, are free.

Police ain't got no gun (you don't have to run)

Be glad that you are free
Free to change your mind
Free to go most anywhere, anytime

No I didn't write those words it was Prince Nelson Rogers formerly the artist formerly known as Prince from the double album 1999 - which was the most exciting thing that happened to my world in1982 (I was still at school). And yes, these lyrics from “Free” were the inspiration for my blog's title.
 
Prince's enthusiastic endorsement of promiscuity, his sexual ambiguity, his flamboyant fashion sense gave him the appearance of a libertine rather than libertarian. But his libertarian credentials were there all along.
 
Soldiers are a marching, they're writing brand new laws
Will we all fight together for the most important cause?
Will we all fight for the right to be free?
 
These simple words are exactly what I'm writing about 35 years later. Maybe society doesn't change as much as we think it has. Maybe I just never grew up.
 
Libertarians are not anarchists. We don't oppose laws or law making. We just believe that lawmaking should be restricted to protecting citizens and our property rather than forcing us to go along with a socio-political or religious agenda.
 
The most exciting track on that fine album for 15 year old me was D.M.S.R or Dance Music Sex Romance – all of which I was looking forward to in this thing called life.
 
I say everybody - screw the masses
We only want to have some fun
I say do whatever you want - wear lingerie to a restaurant
Police ain't got no gun, you don't have to run
 
The last line baffled me a bit - police in America definitely had guns and were willing to use them. What I believe he was saying was simple libertarian creed. As it is not illegal to wear lingerie to a restaurant, the police cannot take action against you so you have nothing to fear from the law.
 
These days it is not unusual to see young women in lingerie on the streets come Saturday night in summer. Lo and behold – no one arrests them or shoots them. So why not in 1982? What were we afraid of?
 
Well sexual assault for a start. Indecent assault at the very least.
 
Prior to the Crimes (Sexual Assault) Amendment Act of 1981 these offences did not exist in NSW. There was only rape – narrowly defined as a forcible penile penetration of a vagina. To get a conviction for rape there needed to be evidence of violence and it certainly helped if the attacker was a stranger and the victim a virgin. The rapist was best protected by the law - not the victim.
 
Since then, NSW legislation has criminalised most sexually abusive behaviours - not limited to penetrative sexual acts between female victims and male offenders. 
Non-penetrative offences were criminalised as indecent assault. Men, women, children and transgenders are now protected by comprehensive sexual assault laws.
 
But it didn't have to go this way. There are many countries in the world where the law dictates what women should wear in public so as not to provoke sexual urges in men. Blaming women for crimes committed against them was common in Australia at that time and still persists today.

So in my wild erratic fancy I would like to think that that Prince had a hand in all this. That his words resonated with someone other than a dance crazy adolescent with big hair. That when the choice came to either criminalise what women wore in public, or criminalise the behaviour that prevented them from doing so, our lawmakers chose the latter. 
 
They remembered that we are free. Don't ever let them forget.

More on bigots (and your right to be a moron)

While checking facts for my previous post regarding our right to be bigots, I came across this truly terrifying statement, in the once great Sydney Morning Herald, by a Professor Andrew Lynch, a director at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at the University of NSW.

“Brandis presents his case as one of inviolable principle, yet we need only reflect on the circumstances of the notorious Bolt case to appreciate why free speech might justifiably be ceded to other interests. The reality is that some voices are louder than others in our democracy.”

Bullshit.

It's not principle – it is the law that is inviolable and Brandis did not invent it. And did you really just state your opposition to free speech because you don't agree with Andrew Bolt? Doesn't that make you a bigot? And since I don't agree with you and and you write for the Herald while I'm just a lowly blogger your voice is louder than mine so I guess I should be able to shut you down? (you twit).

He went on to burble “Law is an instrument through which a community's values and rights may be given effect.”

Bullshit.

This is Australia and the only right we have is to do what is not prohibited by law. When you make a law you take away our rights. How can our rights be “given effect” by taking them away? (You twit).

As for community values – do you really believe Australia is a single communal entity sharing identical values? If so – you need to get out more.

OK so this guy is a lawyer and probably doesn't believe this bullshit either. His client, the left leaning SMH, is paying him to come up with a legal argument to make George Brandis and the government look like dicks. This is politics, not law.

And here lies the danger to our freedom, folks. Politicised media pandering to an audience on the Left or the Right to prop up their falling readership. Politicians and their lackeys who will shut down free speech to win a political argument. Who will make laws not for the people but to help themselves get re-elected. They will glibly tell you that they are protecting your rights while casually taking them away - forever and a day.

These people are the enemies of liberty – treat them as such.

And remember you are free.