“Subsidising” Hobbit enterprise? Sounds like a great deal. [Update 2]

Labour leader Phil Goff isn’t dumb. He just thinks you’re stupid.

He and his lieutenants have been out in force today saying the unions were caught in “a trap” set by Warner Brothers to negotiate a better deal from the New Zealand Government—a deal, he says, that could net them “a subsidy” of several million dollars.

This, I’m afraid, is simply spin masquerading as substance.

First of all, if there were any “trap” into which local unions fell, it was one set by Australian Simon Whipp to help make New Zealand film-making more expensive. Since Warners were all set to film here before Whipp orchestrated a worldwide ban (set to film on the basis of the conditions and exchange rates already in place) all Warners have done now is take advantage of the disruption to see if they can negotiate something better.

And why wouldn’t they?

But what they’re negotiating isn’t a “subsidy,” it’s a tax break.  To describe a tax break as a “subsidy” is no more honest than to call what a burglar leaves behind a “gift.” 

It’s been objected that it makes no sense to offer tax breaks to get companies doing business here because there’ll be no revenue gain to the New Zealand Government.  Anyone saying this is more dumb than they look.  If companies come here and pay no tax at all every single person in New Zealand will still be richer by to the extent of the capital they do invest here, and by the jobs and wealth they create. And the extent they’re not stolen from by the tax man is the greater extent to which they’ll actually be able to create new wealth.

The objection to that I heard voiced this afternoon is that if Warners, or other foreign companies get a big tax break like this, then pretty soon every company thinking about working here will be wanting them.

And why wouldn’t they? Hell, even the numb nuts who object to any tax breaks being offered at all at least recognise it will make the company more profitable.

But since the reason everyone will be wanting them is because it will make them that much more productive (especially if they can re-invest here without fear or new impositions by the grey ones) I don’t see the problem.  Instead, I see potential.

What I suggest is that the New Zealand Government actually embrace this idea. Recognise that every company would like to be free of such restrictions, and embrace the idea for everyone, not just for Warners.

Use this as a kick-start for something real.

Start small. Start perhaps by declaring Enterprise Zones wherever Warners work—let’s start with Miramar and Matamata and anywhere else starting with ‘M’ in between—and announce that whatever tax breaks Warners get, and let’s whatever we do make them generous, that same deal would apply to anyone else working there, whether foreigners, NZers or anyone arriving from Mars.

Pretty soon, everyone working in those Enterprise Zones will be as rich as Croesus, and eager to work and re-invest here. (Well, everybody but the tax accountants in Matamata and Miramar, who will have to move away to seek work elsewhere.)  And everybody else in New Zealand will be able to reap the benefits of that greater wealth creation, to the extent of the much greater capital that can be re-invested here to create even more wealth.

How could anyone possibly object?

Hell, it worked for China.

UPDATE 1: You see, it solves so many political problems.

No-one can claim that the Prime Minister is offering special favours to a foreign company. What he’s doing is offering general relief for any company of whatever origin who wants to take advantage of these Zones to be Enterprising.

And while Helen Kelly objects that NZ would “lose sovereignty” if it accedes to demands from a foreign company to “trash” the employment law that protects NZ workers, it might perhaps be pointed out to her that if these Special Economic Zones were to be set up (with, perhaps, a nomenclatural tip of the hat to the Chinese success story) then no New Zealand worker would be forced to work there—all the rest of New Zealand, with all its present employment restrictions, will still be open to them.

New Zealand workers, however, being no dumber than any others, will realise very quickly one which side of their bread their employment protection is buttered, and by whom, and would undoubtedly begin stampeding very rapidly towards these Zones in search of work.

And who could blame them?

Except for Helen and her ilk who, to remain true to her principles, would have to stand astride their path yelling stop. Which would put all the naysayers like Helen quite evidently on the side opposed to workers making themselves better off.

Which is to say, in the same position as she is now, only more clearly.

UPDATE 2: Here’s some other of the sort of rubbish these Enterprise Zones can nix.  Let’s get Chuck into Miramar damn quick:

Hat tip Stephen Hicks.

FRIDAY MORNING RAMBLE: ‘Warner’s Shrugged’

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
A week of belief, ad a week of incredulity.
A week when Phil Goff nailed his new colours to the mast—new colours first painted more convincingly by Winston Peters.
It was a week in which unions in New Zealand chose to flex their muscles in an orchestrated way, and at the same time New Zealanders began to see (perhaps for the first time) how little unionists really care about those they claim to protect—and just how naked their hatred is for NZ’s tall poppies.
A week in which protestors in France, who in 1789 protested for the Right to Work, took to the streets in 2010 for the right to be paid not to.
In which German Chancellor Angela Merkel stood athwart the multicultural train yelling “Halt!”
In which more than a million US homes were threatened with foreclosure.
In which Te Reo was declared (not for the first time) dead.
A week in which it was confirmed that prices in New Zealand are taking off, and the economy isn’t.
In which the New Zealand govt was revealed as being better at fudging figures than fixing them.
It’s another week, and here’s another Ramble around it.

• Warners Shrugged? “US film studio Warner Bros has confirmed it is still considering locations countries other than New Zealand in which to film The Hobbit movies.
      “In a statement issued on Friday morning, the studio said the actions of unions has caused it substantial disruption and damage and forced it to for the first time to consider other filming locations.
      “The statement says that reports that the boycott of The Hobbit was lifted by unions a number of days ago and that Warner Brothers asked to delay this announcement are false.”
   Warners confirms considering alternative Hobbit locations – RADIO NZ
• Watch the walk of shame on Thursday night by Robyn Malcolm and Helen Kelly, with silent Australian Simon Whipp, behind whose campaign to destroy the NZ film industry they unaccountably united. (A video that, almost incidentally, gives the lie to Helen Kelly’s talk of  “lynch mobs” and “ugliness” outside the Equity meeting.)
   Lynch mob o’ the day – DIM POST
• Filibustering by Labour MPs was all that stopped the freeing of students  from the shackles of their compulsory unions this week. But it only delayed it for another fortnight…
  f s – v erbv ae
• Thank goodness it isn’t any of these entities who run the country. Fact is, it’s people like this who do.
  Meet our 2010 Entrepreneur of the Year Category Winners – ERNST & YOUNG
    NZI Business: Entrepreneur of the Year finalists – TVNZ [VIDEO]
  Xxx Xxxx named Entrepreneur of the Year – STUFF
• The value of invention: 60% of Apple sales from products that did not even exist three years ago.  See:
  60% of Apple sales from products that did not exist three years ago – NBR
• They don’t just run the country. They move the world.
  Apple and Standard Oil: Paragons of productive virtue – Tom Bowden, VOICES OF REASON
• Should govts encourage entrepreneurship? Or just keep the hell out of the way.
  Entrepreneurship, individualism, and collectivism – STEPHEN HICKS
• The world’s first billion-dollar home has just been completed, and greens “couldn’t be more appalled.” It’s said that the height of the building was determined by the client going up in one of his helicopters until he saw a view he liked. :-)
  World’s Largest and Most Expensive Family Home Completed - INHABIT
• You don’t need to build a billion-dollar home to piss off an environmentalist. If you’re careful, you can do it with every email.
  Please consider the environment before printing – MOTELLA
• Banning lightbulbs? A pair of German entrepreneurs has figured out a way to get around these dumb regulations.
  That’s not a lightbulb, it’s a heatball – THE VOLUNTEER
• "With the news that the Afghanistan Government is in secret talks with the Taliban to end almost 10 years of war it seems like it is time to find out what went wrong."
  Let's Forget – UNCOMMON SENSE
• It was a war to bring “democracy” to Iraq? One which empowered real enemies.
  Iraq’s Awakening re-awakens pro-jihadist. Shocking. – Elan Journo, VOICES OF REASON
• “Let’s Roll!” was once a motto of resistance to Islamist attackers. Now, however …
  Let’s Not Roll: The Islamic Memorial in Pennsylvania – Ed Cline, RULE OF REASON
• While over the border they’re rampaging for the right to be paid not to work, in Germany Chancellor  Angela Merkel is calling a halt to the multicultural project.  But does she really understand what she upholds as an alternative?  Doesn’t she see the false dichotomy between the "secular humanism" and the adoption of "Judeo-Christian values" she espouses?
  Multiculturalism, Judeo-Christian Values, and the Broken Clock – PAUL McKEEVER
• “Somebody eventually had to say it,” says Thomas Sowell, “and German chancellor Angela Merkel deserves credit for being the one who had the courage to say it out loud. Multiculturalism has utterly failed.”
  Breaking the 'multiculturalism cult' – Thomas Sowell, DALLAS NEWS
• Multiculturalism is bad, but immigration is not, says Sowell. “There was a reason why employers in the middle of the 19th century had signs that said, ‘No Irish need apply’ — and why employers in the middle of the 20th century no longer had such signs. It was not that employers had changed. The Irish had.”
  The Multicultural Cult – Thomas Sowell
• From the archives…
   ...Multiculturalism and the Self-Liquidation of Europe – Robert Tracinski , CAPITALISM MAGAZINE (2005)

Found on Twitter:
“It's pretty lucky we didn't put up that Wellywood sign...”
     - montereynewtown, HT yeastieboys

• Czech president Vaclav Klaus wants the International Monetary Fund (IMF) 'dismantled or restructured': "I am convinced the IMF should be dismantled or radically restructured as soon as possible," he said at a conference in Prague, calling the fund "a barbaric relic from the Keynesian and fixed-exchange rate era" and "yet another manifestation of a mistaken and dangerous global governance mindset which, to my great regret, has been getting more and more support in the intellectual and political circles these days.” [HT Objective Standard]
  Czech president wants IMF 'dismantled or restructured' – NEWS.MSN.COM
• “In the land of his birth, John Maynard Keynes’s view that deficit spending is crucial to avoiding a long recession has lately been willfully ignored.” Hat tip to Capitalism, who comments, “Keynes: on the ash heap of history, where he belongs!!!”
  Cuts in Britain Ignore Views of Keynes – NY TIMES
• The above article from The New York Times on the end of Keynesian economics in Europe is quite worth the read, says Australian Steven Kates.  “There is a major shift in the world of macroeconomics before us. The practice of macroeconomic policy has changed before our eyes. Our textbooks are complete junk to the extent that they continue to peddle this Keynesian idiocy.
      “The article itself, obviously written by someone raised on this dying orthodoxy, merely notes what can no longer be doubted. Public spending as a cure for recession does not work. These deficits have made things only worse. Getting our fiscal house in order as the necessary condition for recovery is finally being embraced.
      “As a totally related matter, the front page story in the AFR is headlined, “China rate rise rattles markets.” Even in China, with all of its financial resources, there is now a clear need to reverse the spending programs that have been indulged in since the end of 2008…”
  The Dying World of Keynesian Economics – CATALLAXY FILES
• “In the financial markets, a lot rides on the word of a company's top executives. If a CEO tells a lie, a lot of shareholders can get hurt. Two researchers have studied earnings calls and think they know how to gauge senior executives' truthfulness.” [HT Stephen Hicks]
  How Can You Tell When A CEO Is Lying? - NPR
• "There tends to be lots of excitement when gold costs more made-up dollars. But a broader perspective suggests that gold is much more undervalued that the current price level and its advance might indicate."
  Gold is Undervalued – KRAZY ECONOMY
• Nothing like switching around the "inflation” index when price inflation is taking off.
  Statisticians attack UK Treasury plan to switch inflation measure – GUARDIAN
• It’s not like they don’t know what’s a’coming…
  Art Cashin On The Coming Hyperinflation – COBDEN CENTRE

"All limitations are self-imposed”
Art and inspiration from Inspirationz (Read more here)

• Will the Tea Parties or a reformed GOP be able to champion limited government and fiscal responsibility, without also importing the religious right’s so-called “social values”?  In other words, is faith necessary for defending natural rights, or is reason sufficient?
  Values and the Defense of Freedom  - Amit Ghate, PAJAMAZ MEDIA
• “In a recent Christian Science Monitor editorial, Vladimir Shlapentokh suggests that the popularity of Ayn Rand among Tea Partiers should ‘concern all Americans’ and recommends that Tea Partiers distance themselves from the 20th-century philosopher and novelist. Why?”
  Should Tea Partiers Abandon or Embrace Ayn Rand? - OBJECTIVE STANDARD
• “What if a president took a different direction and sought popularity by expanding rather than reducing liberty? There is a model here they could follow, but it is not one you have thought of. It is Franklin D. Roosevelt. He repealed Prohibition!”
  The Real Reason for FDR’s Popularity – Mark Thornton, MISES DAILY
• Now this is cool. Subscribe to Oliver Sacks’ YouTube Channel, and you can hear insights on how the brain works from one of the best neurophysiologists on the speaking circuit.  Learn, for example, how music can help Alzheimers…
  Oliver Sacks MD's Channel – YOU TUBE
• How to make the most of your time on screen, if you do get a chance to be an extra. Here’s Hollywood film extra Hrundi V. Bakshi, played by Peter Sellers, making the absolute most of his limited screen time with some freestyle improvised trumpeting. [HT Small Dead Animals]
  

• Ele Ludemann reckons you have to go see Miranda Harcourt’s new play, finishing this week in Christchurch. Harcourt is part of one of NZ’s few acting dynasties, and it sounds like this was one not to have missed.  Bugger. [Warning: Contains spoilers]
  Biography of My Skin – HOME PADDOCK
• Pregnant? Take a drink. It's good for both of you.
  "Bottoms Up" Pregnant Women- HOW STUFF WORKS
• The steep decline of Deborah Coddington continues with this confused piece of slop.
  Would it be OK if God was a Capitalist, then? - PUNDIT
• “Never underestimate the Power of a great story,” says Stephen Fry …

• Here’s something some New Atheists need to read.
  “The Mystical Ethics of the New Atheists” - by Alan Germani, OBJECTIVE STANDARD
• Sam Harris? He’s good, but …
  Not a Revolutionary – GUS VAN HORN
• What to you do one of your children lies?  Rational Jenn reckons it’s important not to let even little lies go by without comment.
  Handling Lying – RATIONAL JENN
• "How much do genes matter when it comes to making a family?"
  Family – Amy Mossoff, THE LITTLE THINGS
• Did Ayn Rand have something against children? Well, did she?
  Did Ayn Rand have something against children? – AYN RAND QUESTIONS
• Speak up. Pass the word. Become an activist by letting friends know about the Atlas Shrugged Video Contest. Share all the details by sending them to http://www.AtlasShrugged.com/contest. They could win up to $5,000 in prizes or an Apple iPad pre-loaded with the writings of Ayn Rand.  Cool. :-)
  Atlas Shrugged Video Contest

Things are bad? Save what you can…

Here’s Howling Wolf

It’s Dizzy Gillespie’s Birthday! So turn this one up to eleven!  Ow!!

And finally, here’s a rare (and strange) duet with Diz and Louis Armstrong. [HT Jazz on the Tube]

More to come later,
Check back soon…

The Hobbit: An obituary for a film industry [update 2]

It looks like Australian union MEAA has been using the New Zealand actors union to shut down the competition of the New Zealand film industry, using The Hobbit as bait. And Helen Kelly and the local union were dumb enough to play along.

Australian Simon Whipp, head of the MEAA, seemed to reason that NZ rates were lower than Australian rates, which was pushing films and post-production that “should” have been done in Australia over the Tasman to NZ. Simon didn’t like that, so he chose this big budget movie to rattle the cage. (What better time to roll your flag up the pole than when the budget is there to pay for it.)

But why did Helen Kelly and the local Actors Equity Union go along with this plan to make us move the film industry back to Australia? Because they saw themselves as part of some international power play, presumably. They wanted to “feel the power.” Whatever reason you want to pick, all they showed the world however is how dumb and self-destructive they are, essentially munting what could have become a billion-dollar industry in this tiny country.  As Russell Brown says in laying out the Anatomy of a Shambles,

If production of the Hobbit does indeed go to Ireland, there will be an extraordinary irony: the industrial relations environment around the film will be benign because Irish Equity did what New Zealand Actors' Equity would have done had it been even minimally competent.

The result of all this it not just no more Hobbit in NZ. It’s that Simon Whipp and NZ Actors Equity have between them destroyed an entire industry.  Make no mistake, says the Dim Post,

this is a PR disaster for the union movement – whatever the reality, its going to look to the public as if they’ve bought about the destruction of a multi-billion dollar industry that was the source of great national pride, and although the instigator was an Australian union they were facilitated by the president of the CTU who went out of her way to insert herself into the dispute.

Thanks Helen, Robyn and Jennifer. I'm sure all the sound techs, prop builders, make-up people guys, and all the other thousands of people affected are real proud of you.

UPDATE 1:  IMPERATOR FISH: “Thanks Sir Peter, and All The Best”:

If the Hobbit films move offshore that may well be regarded by [Australian union] MEAA as a victory.

UPDATE 2:  MARK HUBBARD: “Hobbit: One ring from an Aussie union has stuffed them all.”

A film technician's placard on the protest against the actors union (an Australian union) says it all.
        'Thirty years to build an industry, one union boycott to destroy it.'

Related Posts at NOT PC:

• Lights, Camera, Strike!
• Cue Card Libertarianism: Unions

Lights, camera, strike! [update]

Strikes by teachers. Strikes by actors. Strike, strike, strike.

With strikes and union activism everywhere, politicians meddling in sport, and morons like Bernard Hickey imploring us to embrace the economic mercantilism of Fortress New Zealand, you could be forgiven for thinking Rob Muldoon was alive, well, and flourishing in places other than just the virtual “other-world” of Twitter.

In Muldoon’s day, it would have been striking boilermakers and Cook Strait stewards. Strikes by actors are a new, and much more media-friendly thing. But their basic premises are still the same:

1. the erroneous idea that workers own their job;
2. the advancement of one group of workers at the expense of all others;
3. the placing of the union’s interests above even that of its members…

Let’s consider these in turn.

Employees own their labour services, but they don't own their jobs.  They’re certainly entitled to withdraw their services, but nothing in justice gives them the right to exclude others from replacing them.  There is no right, in justice, that gives one group of employees the right to exclude others—especially not by force.

The extent to which industrial unions have been granted legal powers to forcibly exclude others from replacing their services, however—to run pickets shutting down companies and film projects by forcibly excluding supplies, customers and replacement labour—is the extent to which governments have given unions power beyond right to damage the welfare of everyone, including their own members.

William Thompson, a colleague of Robert Owen and a founder of so-called “scientific socialism” observed that the union’s “excluding system depended on mere force and would not allow other workers to come into the market at any price…”

It matters not [he said in1827] whether that force…be the gift of law or whether it be assumed by the tradesmen in spite of the law: it is equally mere force.
    Gains [of the unionised few] were always at the expense of the equal right
of the industrious to acquire skill and to exchange their labour where and how
they may.

No wonder unions like the Australian Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) have launched a naked power grab using the power beyond right that legal favour grants them, to use that power and and expand it across the Tasman—oblivious to the damage they will deliver to the whole NZ film industry and everyone in it, including the actors they’re courting, especially if Jackson’s new film The Hobbit heads to Eastern Europe as he says it might.

No wonder unions like the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) want to use the power beyond right to grandstand on a party political issue—using children and their own unionised members as their political pawns.

The teachers union and the actors union have different aims. In the case of the teachers union, what they’re after is 4% and a chance to bash Anne Tolley.   In the case of the actors union, an Australian union seeking access here, what they’re after is power and publicity. In neither case are the welfare either of actors or teachers (or students) their primary concern.

At a time when jobs are scarce, money is short and everyone is having to tighten their belt, what both should get is what their premises  deserve.

Because as economist William Hutt argued, the extent to which these unions and every other are successful in their successful in their demands and destructive in their means of achieving them, they harm every other group in society.

As they almost always do.

UPDATE: At least NZ’s unionists aren’t throwing molotov cocktails. In Europe, however…

Union-backed workers rocked Europe this week with intermittently violent protests in Greece, Ireland, Belgium, Poland, Portugal and others. In Spain, a nationwide strike disrupted air travel, regional shipping and municipal services. Doctors at state-run hospitals walked off the job in Greece and subway lines shut down. Supermarkets reported shortages of basic goods.
    To call many of the increasingly regular demonstrations protests is generous. In Dublin, the gates to Ireland’s parliament were blocked yesterday by a demonstrator in a cement truck. In Barcelona, police cars were torched. And in Athens, a mob opposing cuts to government spending firebombed a bank in May, killing three people, including a pregnant woman.
    What makes these frightening scenes so unnerving is that they’re not occurring in third-world dictatorships, but in advanced economies within many of Europe’s largest cities. We’re used to seeing violent street clashes in Lebanon. But Belgium?
The conflicts are the inevitable consequences of entitlement spending and a society geared towards the “common good," not individual rights. Turns out the much-heralded “safety net” isn’t safe at all: When bureaucrats decide how long you work, what type of benefits you receive and which industries or sectors receive privileged treatment, the economy quickly turns into mob rule.

Read more: “Mobs in Europe, Records in Brazil”