by PAUL COLLITS – POLITICIANS are flushing taxpayers’ hard-earned money down the toilet without blinking an eye – all to get their friends and themselves filthy rich.
In the US, they have recently spent $8m to study the effect of flavored cigarettes on bisexuals and lesbians.
- Surely we should know what’s going on with our taxes.
- Yet they have rigged it so that we don’t know.
- And dissidents are silenced – for our protection!
Such idiocy is also rife in Australia. Why in God’s name are we even paying taxes?
Many, many decades ago, I worked for a Liberal Senator. That was in the old Parliament House, the so-called wedding cake. Happy times.
WONDERFUL
We had close office neighbours. One was the great Michael Baume, who still, in his 90s, writes a business column for The Spectator. We have had some wonderful reunions.
In those days, Michael headed up the Coalition’s Waste Watch Committee. He had some fun with some of the then Government’s more bizarre funding projects that decidedly didn’t pass the pub test.
One was an $11,000 study of the need for a female surf board, since women had “a lower centre of gravity”.
We all thought that was a pretty weird thing to be doing at taxpayers’ expense.
This US$8m cigarettes scam was done by the University of North Carolina. Michael Baume’s case study was $11,000.
Allowing for inflation, the US$8m scam still looks pretty grim.
Trump’s magnificent DOGE initiative is only beginning to uncover the level of corrupt behaviour of the administrative State over several generations of both Democrat and Republican rule.
USAID is currently in the frame, but there is no reason to stop there. Funding Black Lives Matter? Of course!
The constant dripping of USAID corruption is set to continue and might well be a global teaching moment. The Trump revolution is working this way.
The US$8m story coincided with a missive from Brian Marlow of the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance: “Labor is using your taxes to fund radical gender treatments.”
Under massive public pressure, Health Minister Mark Butler has been forced to call for a review of the so-called “standards of care” for gender treatments.
But here’s the truth – the review will take three years.
That means three more years of taxpayer-funded gender transitions, including for vulnerable children.
Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are not legitimate solutions to gender confusion.
There is a certain shared theme between the North Carolina “study” and the Australian Government’s slithering.
Spot the ideology. “Using your money” is an important element here. Who the hell gets to decide these things?
So much of government spending these days is the result of decisions far removed from voters – and hidden from taxpayers.
SLIPPERY
The slippery revolution in government spending delivered the community grants scam. Remember the dreary Senator Bridget McKenzie and her gun club spending?
Pork barrelling is corruption.
Remember Gladys? She and her deputy John Barilaro actually tried to defend it. They all do it!
Well, deary, that’s just the point. You are all doing it.
The quiet emergence of “grants” was something never consented to by we-the-governed. It allows governments to “steer” spending to preferred targets, typically to their electoral advantage without taxpayers knowing anything about it.
Such grants perpetuate a corrupt system. They avoid parliamentary scrutiny and are run by agenda-driven bureaucrats. All we can say, pathetically, is – we never agreed to any of this.
The grants are often (individually) pissy amounts of corrupt spending. But they add up and they tell a story of our contemporary governance.
Then there are the biggies. The endless wars, COVID billions and climate trillions.
The renewables scam, the child care scam, the outsourcings scams. Think Centrelink – thanks, John Howard – and, of course the NDIS.
Think also of the student visa mass immigration scam. As George Christensen has exposed in forensic detail.
Outsourcing has a lot to answer for. Many Right-of-centre types totally fell for the privatisation play, back in the ludicrously naive 80s. This was a goon show.
Scottish economist Adam Smith knew all about the tricks of businesses. The word “scam” probably wasn’t a thing in the late 1770s.
But Smith knew what mini-corporates would get up to, then. Now we all paying for it. Taxpayers are paying for gazillions of programs that no one signed up for.
The silly pranks exposed by Michael Baume in the 1980s were simply Government Rorts v1.0.
Now it is big business – core business. It lubricates the entire operation of government as politicians declare war on taxpayers. It’s that obvious and we simply keep paying their way.
We should have seen this coming.
The postwar American political scientists, David Truman and colleagues, came up with the interest group theory of democratic politics.
Build coalitions of support, keep them happy and gain and stay in power. By keeping them happy, he meant buying them off. Ker-ching.
Worst of all, by giving them a formal place at the government table, we got Corporatism 101.
There are several standard plays by the administrative State that simply beg for tax avoidance:
- Solving problems that do not actually exist, like COVID and climate change;
- Spending our money on things we find morally abhorrent, like abortion clinics and end-of-life drugs or funneling aid money to terrorists or indoctrinating youngsters;
- Doing things for which there is no mandate, or worse, for which there is an anti-mandate, like mass immigration;
- Funding foreign military engagements just because America asked us to and for which there is no Australian dog in the fight;
- Spending money on schemes for which there is no scientific basis, like green hydrogen;
- Setting up public bodies like the Climate Authority and the eSafety Commissioner;
- Using our money so that half the population can go to university, many of whom have no business being there;
- Subsidising ideology, like child care.
This is merely scratching the surface, of course.
Why is the entire US establishment so scared of RFK Jr, Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard? Because they are about exposing the game and, yes, calling it to account.
The whole American government system is a Ponzi scheme.
US senators and congressmen are (mostly) only there at the whim of their funding puppeteers. They all collaborate in log rolling, in taking bribes from Big Pharma and big everything else, performing democratic theatre, rigging elections, doing deals with the executive branch, keeping secrets and paying off those who threaten to expose the scam.
ABSENT
The filthy mess is defended as too big to fail. Democracy is, hilariously, absent. Joe Biden’s four years in office merely provides one case study in system failure.
Just look at the incomes of outgoing US presidents to draw your own conclusions. If corrupt politicians actually ended up doing the will of the people, you might be tempted to forgive them. But they don’t, and we shouldn’t.
Any half-arsed dill with his wits about him must now be wondering … err, why I am paying taxes to support this crap? I don’t agree with any of it.
Which brings us back to Pol Sci 101 and the Boston Tea Party. Those guys thought they had an issue with “no taxation without representation”.
King George III had nothing on the 21st century scammers that we’ve elected. They ignore voters and spend our money on things we abhor. Or, worse, they spend our money on things that we don’t even know about.
Why, then, should we pay tax?
It is hard to pinpoint when it all went to shit. Back in the day, we had a sense that we voted in governments and that we had some control over them, taxpayer wise.
Then democratically elected governments decided that they, not we, were in charge – that they had the right to spend our money on anything they decided.
We lost control when the UniParty emerged. It transpired that both political Parties recognised their shared interests in big State power sharing.
The foundational principle of political obligation is that the people consent to being “represented”.
What does that even mean now? It surely means that, at least, we know what is going on. Yet they have rigged it so we don’t know.
Now dissidents are silenced – for our protection!
The recently passed “hate speech laws” will seal the deal. That was a clever move. The powers that be are good at swindling us. Tyranny is slithered in on our watch. A fascist package wrapped up in the message of fighting anti-Semitism. Clever stuff.
One of the recent signs of hope was the UK Brexit referendum result.
In Australia, the 2023 referendum on the Aboriginal Voice was another.
Events since in both the UK and Australia have shown that these seeming breakthrough moments were illusory. They meant nothing!
The establishment simply pivoted and nothing has changed. When will the penny drop that even expressing clear democratic preferences means zip to the establishment?
TAXES
If anyone can find an argument for continuing to pay taxes to support corrupt administrations which crush our rights and spend our money on their unsupported whims, large and small, I would like to hear it.
One can only wonder what it will take to awaken the masses. No one likes being scammed.
The Trump revolution and the creation of DOGE seems to have struck a chord.
Even Peter Dutton has noticed it. Hopefully DOGe will be the gift that keeps on giving.
This is our best chance at getting out of the endless cycle of corruption, industry capture of bureaucracies, hidden deals, mates’ rates and crony socialism.
It might even be that Michael Baume’s 1980s strategy of exposing the ludicrous nature of government folly, and the use of humour, might still have its place, after all.
Women’s surfboards, flavoured cigarettes and bisexuals and lesbians?
People might eventually say, WTF? It is one thing to recognise that we are now living under tyranny. But why are we paying for this? Disobeying evil regimes is a moral obligation.
Two questions. How do we decide when a regime becomes evil? I think we are there already.
And second, what are the methods of resistance, when all semblance of legal redress and electoral relief are blocked? When governments can be elected with only a third of the primary vote, totally without a mandate, then proceed to impose laws on the people that no one consented to?
That smells like the end of the social contract to me.
Remember this. They cannot do any of it without our money? PC
