The saga of the Australian Tax Office persecution of Paul Hogan and other ‘high profile’ people continues. For a number of years the Australian government has been persecuting Paul Hogan as a means of keeping you, the taxpayer compliant. It is ‘psychological warfare’ of sorts. Like the 'shock and awe' psychological warfare doctrine that the US government adopted in Iraq. That's right, you are at war with the ATO, and you don't know it. Its your interest versus theirs.
The strategy of the tax office is to keep you paying tax by burdening you with fear. Yep, its no different from the Nazis. Their strategy is equally as immoral, they just hide behind this thin veil of legitimacy called 'democracy'. People erroneously think democracy is about protecting rights. It is not. It is about 'stability' as the standard of value. Democracy has no capacity to protect your rights because even if it gives you 'token' political rights, your right to 'exist' means little if you have scant or 'token' property rights. The reason why you don't have economic rights is because world governments cannot extort wealth from you if you (i.e. Tax expropriation) if you had them. So don't expect any UN charter to protect those.
The intent of the government was to make an example out of Paul Hogan. What if he wins? He would have proved that only the rich have rights...and what right is that...the same right to extort wealth from powerless taxpayers. If the ATO attacked everyone who didn’t pay it would cost a lot, and make the tax system less efficient, as well as highlight the extent of non-compliance. Instead, they persecution high profile people like Paul Hogan and Wesley Snipes to make an example of a well-resourced taxpayer. The right strategy is for people like Paul Hogan to join with other high-profile people to change the system. Maybe he can join with Wesley Snipes, the mining industry (which has loads of money and hate new taxes) tycoons like Andrew Forrest and geez, what about all those billionaires in the USA. They aren't all liberals.
In a series of blogs we have defended Paul Hogan,
We have highlighted the persecution that he and others have been subjected to, but I suggest he is making a grave mistake in his latest plans. It was announced in the press today that Paul Hogan is going to sue the Australia Tax Office for its denigration of his character. There are several problems with this:
1. The Australian taxpayers are as much victims of the system as he is, so his efforts to recoup money from the ATO are merely Hogan persecuting Australians. His loss of income is no more tragic than the 30% people are forced to pay every year. He probably pays a lot less...lucky for him....he probably uses less services than us, and anyway, I don't want my persecution to be justification or some moral claim upon him.
2. Paul Hogan has the greater capacity to fight the tax office because of his reputation and wealth, and yet he has only taken an unprincipled, ‘narrow’ self-interest perspective. He could have conveyed a 'moral argument' during his conflict with the tax office; notwithstanding that he is probably not a very convincing one. But if you are going to be persecuted, its in your interests to educate yourself. Otherwise you are not very convincing, and you are destined to get ripped off by a lot of lawyers....who the law serves far better than any other. Middlemen fare the best in this system.
How is personal liberty served by Paul Hogan suing the ATO? It is not. The public have as much reason to call ‘foul’ from the government, which is a tyranny of sorts, its just that they don’t have his means to fight, nor a team of lawyers to whom he can outsource this fight. Why? Because the government has the 'unlimited' resources of the taxpayer at its disposal. The reality is that Hogan should use his resources to repudiate the ‘system of government’ and not to blunder public resources, which are actually taxpayer resources misappropriated and squandered by the government.
He ought to be fighting in the High Court for the right to recover damages from the ‘executive’ government, i.e. the minister in charge, the Tax Commissioner, who are ultimately responsible for execution of the law, if not the political parties who oversaw the enactment of the laws. Not the Australian people, who really have no ‘effective’ representation. Democracy is a tyranny which empowers ‘unaccountable people’, who cannot even be considered representatives because there is no ‘conditionality’ to their functional capacity. i.e. I don’t vote, but if I did, I would not renounce my support for an MP I helped elect. Our constitution is seriously flawed. It needs to be tested in the High Court.
I might add that I suspect that Hogan’s lawyers contrived this plan to sue the government. This system greatly enriches lawyers. It has no interest in improving the system. It loves the expansion of statutory law because its arbitrary and lacks and context like common law. i.e. They want statutory law because it’s impossible to interpret since it’s so contradictory, so it entails the ambiguities, loopholes, that they savour.
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Author
Andrew Sheldon
