Joanna Pennyfeather
I often explain that the best political system is one built on high trust and just laws that respect freedom. New Zealand, and the West in general, used to embody exactly that. It was the foundation upon which Western civilisation was built.
However, if the laws in a high trust society turn bad, the end result can eventually become unbearable and spiral out of control. The modern West still runs on high trust, but the laws themselves have turned bad. And high trust combined with bad laws is a very real threat to human liberty.
If a country is filled with bad laws, we are far better off – from a freedom perspective – if society in general is made up of low trust individuals. In such places, the laws might be bad, but few take them seriously enough to obey them. There are always ways around it.
When people think of political corruption, their minds often turn to the developing world: to a Latin American nation where politicians are in bed with organised crime, where votes are bought, opponents occasionally disappear and the line between the government and the underworld blurs. It is a system built on bribes and backroom deals, where the powerful enrich themselves and the ordinary citizen expects little in return.
And yet, for all its corruption, there is one thing that stands out: the state largely leaves you alone.
You pay your taxes, or not, depending on your circumstances, and the bureaucracy appears briefly before fading again into the background. The police are not omnipresent. The government does not constantly tell you what to say, how to think or what is ‘acceptable’ to believe. It takes your money and, in exchange, gives you something priceless in the modern world: indifference.
To paraphrase Will Rogers, we are thankful we’re not getting all the government we pay for.
Contrast this with New Zealand, or indeed much of the Western world. Here, the government is not content to merely take your money. It insists on taking your conscience too. It presents itself as benevolent, as wise and as the collective parent of a wayward citizenry. It tells you what is safe to say, which opinions are too dangerous to hold, which products to buy, which habits to form and what you must sacrifice ‘for the greater good’.
Murray Rothbard once drew a sharp distinction between the criminal and the state:
The highwayman takes solely your money, demanding it at gunpoint, and then lets you go your way. But the state demands your money and then insists on regulating the rest of your life while mocking you for being ungrateful.
That, in essence, is the difference. The corrupt government in the developing world steals, lies and occasionally kills to maintain its power, but it rarely pretends to be your saviour. It does not claim moral authority over your soul.
The Western government, by contrast, tells you it loves you as it tightens the leash around your neck.
C S Lewis warned of this kind of tyranny decades ago:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive... those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
That is the defining feature of our age. Not open corruption, but moralised control. And it is expanding, quietly but relentlessly, into every sphere of life.
Let’s look at some examples, that end up reaching into all parts of your life.
First of all, we have New Zealand’s proposed ban on social media for those under 16. It is being sold as a measure to ‘protect the children’. But beneath the surface lies something far darker: the quiet establishment of a digital identity system, where everyone is required to provide ID to access the internet itself. Under such a system, every search, every comment, every click becomes traceable, monitored and recorded.
The state, which once only taxed your income, will soon observe every aspect of your digital life. The stated intention may be safety, but the outcome is surveillance.
The same logic is being applied to money. Across Europe, and inevitably in New Zealand, central banks are moving toward digital currencies (CBDCs) that promise ‘efficiency’, ‘security’, and ‘modernisation’. But what they also promise is total control. A digital currency allows the state to see, and control, every purchase you make. What you buy, where you travel, what causes you support, it can all be tracked, flagged and restricted at the touch of a button.
Once your money is programmable, your commercial freedom is conditional.
And then as a final example, there is the ever expanding reach of ‘climate legislation’. Again, the justification sounds noble: to save the planet. But in practice, it functions as another lever of control, determining where you are allowed to go and in what manner, what you can eat, how you heat your home and so on. Meanwhile, the very people writing these rules continue to fly private jets to climate conferences and dine on expensive meats at elite receptions.
Never have the words of H L Mencken been more true,
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
In short, there’s a perfect word for this system, a system that reaches into every corner of your existence, from your speech to how you spend your private life, and justifies itself all as being ‘for your own good’.
That word is totalitarianism.
Third-world nations are, of course, not immune from these bad ideas and it varies greatly between third-world countries. There are people there, oftentimes influenced by international interests, all too eager to import the same digital controls, the same moral certainties and the same bureaucratic power structures.
But for now, and again depending on where you go, corruption, disorganisation and inefficiency ironically act as a buffer. The machinery of control has not yet been fully built. And in the gaps of that dysfunction still remains a rough and imperfect freedom.
And imperfect freedom is still the greatest gift mankind can possess and one that always remains worth defending.
