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    Eye-Opening Dispatches From Vietnam

    By
    Kenelm Tonkin
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    After three long years of covid lockdown-induced solitary confinement, a loyal Liberty Itch subscriber cut loose, left Australia for South-East Asia and found herself in Vietnam.

    Animated by what she saw, I started to receive her much-welcomed dispatches about daily life there.

    Now, if you read any 1960s and 1970s history, you know Vietnam is communist. But what my friend’s streetscape dispatches reveal is that daily life is anything but centrally-controlled. In fact, what she witnessed felt more like the hustle and bustle of enterprise or, as our intrepid adventurer pithily described …

    “official communism, sure,
    yet with a je ne sais quoi libertarian, freewheeling spirit,
    small-scale capitalist at every turn.”

    I’ll step out of the way. These are her words …

    There are no rules, Kenelm. It’s fend for yourself. Even these communists realise capitalism is the way to go. Free markets and small business. It feels like what I imagine 1880s London or 1980s Hong Kong to be. Free. Laissez faire. Taxes are low. 5%+ for residents. 20% flat tax for foreigners. The communists simply don’t have the money for bureaucrats. They’ve taken themselves out of the game and let people live their own lives.

    There’s genuine economic development here. It’s booming.

    There is little of government here to save you. You save yourself or drown, which isn’t an option.

    So, family is very important. Your family takes care of you in your old age, not the government. You know, like we used to do in Australia.

    Prices are so low.

    Petrol is a mere 37 cents a litre. No fuel excise. Can you imagine?

    Food is cheap.

    At the end of a long, hard day, cocktails are $2.50.

    Road rules? The only rule here appears to be there are no rules, almost anarchy. Yet it works. A loose framework exists where thousands stop on a red light. But only when it suits them. Lanes on the road? Only use those if you absolutely must.  It’s better to weave right, left, and even preferrable to pit your life against a semi-trailer coming from the opposite direction, because you absolutely must overtake the vehicle in front of you.

    Pedestrian crossings? A mere piffle, an abstract idea where someone thought stripes of white paint were to beautify the road. The pedestrian who stands at one end expecting the traffic to stop for her, hah! She is the pedestrian who never returns home alive. As one local said to our observer, “If you don’t move, you’ll die. You need to move. Not too fast. Not too slow” … to which I replied, “Oh, you mean the Goldilocks effect”. The harrowed local muttered “Who is Goldilocks?” under his breath. Big tip! It’s best to wait for a small gap in the traffic. Walk whilst praying to God the entire time that He will see you safely to the other side.  

    Footpaths? You know, for human feet? A figment of an idea, I tell you. They are just another lane for bikes to scoot down in the gridlocked peak hour traffic. Footpaths are places to park, to open your front gate, to wheel your dolly-trolly, to sell your wares for the day. All day and every day.  The pedestrians are after-thoughts.

    Did I mention $3 Singapore Slings?

    There aren’t suffocating regulations about, say, straws. Yes, you can get a decent plastic straw in Vietnam!

    Communism, lurking in the background somewhere, OK. But the streetscape looks what I imagine laissez faire to be. It’s a rambunctious, rollicking, throbbing freedom, not that poor imitation back home. It’s every man for himself. As the saying goes, “It’s the quick or the dead” around here. Maybe that’s because the communists simply can’t make central planning work to feed people. Maybe they gave up that aspiration long ago. Everyday people her feed themselves and their families through good old-fashioned free trade.

    This is what Australia is competing with! Enterprising, self-reliant people. Low prices. There’s a lot of manufacturing being exported. They value add. It’s not a big quarry like other economies we’re familiar with!

    The West is on the precipice of losing something incredibly precious. 

    In comparison to Vietnam,
    we need to wrap society in cotton wool
    and legislate for every possible scenario that might make us sick, kill or injure us.

    We’ve left the realm of common sense, we’re stifled and soft-pruned by a socialist bubble bath. Individuals can no longer assess risk with any degree of rationality. Individuals are increasingly absolved of all self-responsibility and that power is being placed into the hands of faceless bureaucrats and legislators who make decisions on our behalf. It’s not needed. It’s not in our best interests. Vietnam proves it.

    Remind my fellow Liberty Itch subscribers, as I often remind my friends, none of us are getting off this planet alive! We need to take back our autonomy, before it’s too late.

    To all of which, I can only say to my friend, hear hear!

    Why 26 January Matters

    By
    Lionel Orellana
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    0
    gfd

    I put it to you that the story of Henry Kable and Susannah Holmes is reason enough to celebrate Australia Day on 26 January.

    Henry and Susannah arrived in Australia, an unmarried couple of convicts with an infant son, on 26 January 1788. They sailed on board of the Friendship as part of the First Fleet. Both had been sentenced to death for burglary some years before in Norfolk, England. They met and started their relationship in jail where Susannah gave birth to their first son. Their sentences were commuted to transportation to the Americas but the destination was later changed to the newly proposed colony of New South Wales.

    After the long voyage, as the ships unpacked onto the shore, Henry and Susannah received but a few of their scarce personal belongings. Somewhere along the way, their luggage had gone missing.

    By July 1788, the first case of civil law in Australian history was being heard in a court. Even more remarkably, the Kables, now married, were awarded £15 in compensation. In England, and just about everywhere else in the world, convicted felons didn’t enjoy such rights and all their possessions were simply ceded to the state.

    The Kable court case was not a fluke. It was a direct consequence of the thoughtful planning of Lord Sydney, Thomas Townsend who, as Home Secretary just months before the First Fleet set sail, rejected the idea of using martial law in the penal colony as it was originally intended.

    Lord Sydney, Thomas Townsend, after whom Australian city Sydney is named

    Lord Sydney was not about to send hundreds of prisoners to a remote gulag but instead had a vision for a free society based on
    separation of powers, property rights and the rule of law.

    He entrusted Governor Captain Arthur Phillip with the task of implementing his vision on the ground. It was Governor Phillip who responded to the complaint by our convicted couple Henry and Susannah Kable about their missing luggage.

    The broader challenge for Phillip was enormous. Putting Lord Sydney’s seemingly fanciful ideals into practice was no easy feat. After all, it took thousands of years for these ideas to develop and mature. It was only during The Enlightenment period that they were framed in a way that could be adopted as the basis of government.

    Captain and later Admiral Arthur Phillip, 1st Governor of New South Wales

    It is a childish characterisation of human history to pretend that we could have arrived at our modern understanding of universal rights with a sudden stroke of virtue.

    Arthur Phillip himself believed that Aboriginal people had the same rights as everyone else.

    Chances are, put in that same position, you wouldn’t have. In any other time in history, you would have had slaves if you could. If you think you are simply better than that, then you understand very little about the human condition.

    We take the ideas of individual property rights and an impartial rule of law to enforce them for granted today but they are not the natural way of things. These ideas had to be envisioned, explained, understood, misunderstood, questioned, tried, rejected and envisioned again. It took brave and critical thinkers like Sydney and Phillip to set them into motion.

    A free society for all, with all its flaws and contradictions, was part of the fabric of Australia from the very first moments of the Nation.

    That is what arrived in Australia, together with Henry Kable, Susannah Holmes and Arthur Phillip, one 26th of January 1788.

    FREEDOM! The Daughter of Davos Resigns.

    By
    Kenelm Tonkin
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    Two extraordinary things happened yesterday.

    First, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced her resignation effective, at the latest, early in February 2023. (Yes, New Zealanders need to endure her for a few weeks more!)

    Second, I put out this short tweet yesterday together with a video of the Prime Minister, and it went viral. In a mere 180 minutes, it was seen by 67,400 people and was still swishing around the globe as I wrote this. After 8 hours, 165,000+!

    You have to ask ‘WHY?’

    https://twitter.com/KenelmTonkin/status/1615875921638219778?s=20

    Jacinda Ardern set a couple of records. She was the youngest female prime minister ever in 2017. Further, she gave birth whilst in office.

    Of course, neither of these have anything to do with political achievement.

    To be fair, we can probably agree that Jacinda Ardern is expressive.

    Some went so far as to say she showed great empathy.

    I think it more accurate to say any apparent empathy was self-consciously dispensed and exclusively to beneficiaries of her bias.

    Any praise for expressiveness and empathy needs much closer scrutiny. It’s what she expresses that so confounds civil libertarians like you and me. And, if you don’t mind me expressing myself here dear reader, she showed a distinct lack of empathy for many during covid lockdowns, victims of which are generations not yet born as you’ll see. So read on.

    Instead, what we observed was a smiling socialist, a Daughter of Davos, instinct over intellect, all feeling and no financial finesse. In short, she was a classical liberal’s nightmare.

    Just look at the legacy she leaves after six reckless years in office:

    • Frequent meddling with the free market. The results: distortions in housing prices and a generation of first home buyers shut-out of their ownership aspirations;
    • A backlash against over-zealous covid restrictions and loss of personal freedoms, including creating a medical-apartheid defined by vaccination-status. See the video tweet above;
    • Conscientious objectors and the vaccine-hesitant were shunned socially, denied mobility, prevented from earning a living and targeted by government in ways the Stasi would have relished in Soviet-era East Germany;
    • Consequential increasing crime rates in the island nation;
    • Inflation sitting at 7.2%;
    • Food prices spiking 8.3% compared with the same time a year earlier;
    • Successive interest rate increases from New Zealand’s central bank;
    • A monstrous public debt! When she took office, the public debt was approximately $60 billion USD. Projections are that, based on all data currently available reflecting the decisions of her government, that the national debt will balloon to $151 billion USD by 2027. If the figure proves higher or lower than that, it will be the result of her successor’s policies, but you can see the economic vandalism on her watch. Put it this way, she led a government which racked-up triple the debt of all previous New Zealand governments combined. She went way over the credit card limit and left someone else to pick up the bill. Funny, right?;
    • For a country with a population the size of Boston, it will take three generations at least to bring that debt to heel. We are talking inter-generational theft which will crush Zoomer Kiwis’ standard of living, their children and their grandchildren. That is to say, on the day after you, I and Jacinda Ardern meet our Lord and Maker, New Zealanders will be dealing with the Ardern Economic Catastrophe for another two generations thereafter;
    • Many of them will flee New Zealand and hollow this beautiful jewel of the South Pacific. They have been emigrating anyway, mainly to Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States;
    • A strategic flirtation with the Chinese Communist Party. Her Labour Party has long shunned our liberal democratic ally, America. It was a natural progression from that to openly calling for greater integration with the communists, a weak-kneed strategy in favour of firebrand authoritarianism with a chequebook over the cleansing-balm of liberty;
    • Consistent with that predisposition towards authoritarianism, civil liberties in New Zealand were shattered under her Governments. Emergency powers poised to be invoked again at any time are left in place;
    • Chinese Communist Party infiltration of New Zealand consulates and banks;
    • She openly lied about the efficacy of covid vaccines. “If you take the vaccine, you’ll still get covid but you won’t get sick and you won’t die” was a claim she made during the height of an hysteria of her own making, and contradicted by the science and the manufacturer. Don’t believe me? Watch this …

      https://twitter.com/KenelmTonkin/status/1616211090882592768?s=20


    • More government restrictions on the access and use of water;
    • Crushing regulations on agricultural emissions;
    • Further shifting of the goal posts with hate speech laws without any safeguards as to who adjudicates what ‘hate speech’ actually is.

    The adulation and applause had faded about a year ago. The shadowy World Economic Forum’s simping seemed impossibly distant now. Jacinda Ardern had to face the people of New Zealand imminently and the prospects weren’t promising.

    With polling numbers in decline and the sparkle now tarnished, the Prime Minister did what all faithful authoritarians and central-planners do when their number is up. She spoke sweetly, smiled nervously, then scurried to the nearest exit hoping that the rule of law she undermined holds firm for her.

    I was shocked my tweet went viral. I shouldn’t have been. Countless everyday people across the West, people like you and I, have had a gutful.

    The Daughter of Davos was a symbol of all that has gone wrong over the last 3 years. So of course you cheered her departure.

    I don’t think we’ll have to wait long before she re-emerges with an ostentatious job title and global brief somewhere in the world. “Poverty Ambassador-At-Large, World Economic Forum”, on $820,000 per annum, Davos chalet and chauffeur the obligatory perks on top sounds about right.

    And when that happens, you and I can both smile knowingly that at least here she won’t have harmed anyone further. On her departure from the Land of the Long White Cloud, she will increase the average IQ of New Zealand, and not decrease that of the World Economic Forum.

    Pardon me if I shed not a solitary tear.

    Mr. Adams and his ‘RWNJ’ Slur against an Icon

    By
    Kenelm Tonkin
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    0

    Federation University’s Verity Archer discovered a letter written in 1975 by Sir Donald Bradman, the greatest cricket batsman ever to play with an unparalleled average of 99.94, to newly elected Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser.

    The 1975 federal election was undoubtedly a fiercely contested battle. Emotions were high. As any citizen was and is entitled to do, Bradman took a side and wrote:

    “A marvellous victory in which your personal conduct and dignity stood out against the background of arrogance and propaganda indulged in by your opponents.”

    Bradman next makes a prediction, which you would have to say history shows to be prescient:

    “Now you may have to travel a long and difficult road along which your enemies will seek to destroy you.”

    Cricket was a sport for amateurs in The Don’s day. Big money had not yet influenced the sport. Players therefore had to develop a career independent their sporting masters. They were tough men on long, self-funded tours, most unlike some knee-bending virtue-signalers and sandpaper betting-agency grubs you are more familiar with from more recent periods. In Sir Donald’s case, he was an accomplished and successful stockbroker in his own right with an advanced understanding of the regulatory framework of his time. Writing about regulations on capital, Bradman consequently wrote:

    “What the people need are clearly defined rules which they can read and understand so that they can get on with their affairs.”

    Seems fair enough. Sounds like Financial Disclosure Statement (FDS) rules decades later. He then adds:

    “The public must be re-educated to believe that private enterprise is entitled to rewards as long as it obeys fair and reasonable rules laid down by government. Maybe you can influence leaders of the press to a better understanding of this necessity of presentation.”

    There are four points in that paragraph:

    1. Belief in private enterprise. This is straightforward enough of an idea. It’s the basis of our Western, capitalist liberal democracy;
    2. Gaining the rewards of its initiative. Yes. Private enterprise offers goods and services to the public in return for a profit. This is basic economics. Got it;
    3. Some fair and reasonable rules. Well, let’s not have any rules if possible but, if we must, light-touch and easy-the-understand, sure;
    4. Explain this to the media. Not a bad idea for a government to share with the press the direction it would like to take the country. All good.

    What’s to disagree with here?

    Yet, out come the socialists and 1975 ancient historians with an axe to grind:

    Broadcaster Phillip Adams wrote, “Sad. Lost letter from Bradman to Fraser after Whitlam’s dismissal reveals ‘the Don’ to be a RWNJ.”

    Phillip Adams @PhillipAdams_1

    Sad. Lost letter from Bradman to Fraser after Whitlam’s dismissal reveals ‘the Don’ to be a RWNJ9:59 PM ∙ Dec 25, 20222,112Likes259Retweets

    Unaccustomed to shorthand slurs from journalists, I had to find what RWNJ meant: right-wing nut-job, apparently.

    To some boomer-era, battle-axe activists-come-journalists, supporting free-enterprise, light-touch regulation and transparency with the media is radical. Apparently these positions are extreme, wild enough to be branded a right-wing nut-job!

    At what point in Australian progress did free enterprise become a dirty word?

    Or can we say Mr. Adams is the radical one for slandering a long-deceased Australian sporting icon because he believed in free enterprise.

    Or …

    … maybe, just maybe, Mr. Adams has another axe to grind. Perhaps he just hates supporters of Malcolm Fraser over the Political Crisis of 1975.

    All Liberty Itch says in response is:

    • Mr. Fraser won in a record landslide still not bettered today. Mr. Adams is surely not saying the vast majority of Australians including Sir Donald were RWNJs, is he?
    • Mr. Fraser’s successor, Bob Hawke, thought highly enough of Mr. Fraser to appoint him to the Eminent Persons Group to tackle racism in Apartheid-era South Africa. Mr. Adams is surely not saying Bob Hawke was a right-wing nut-job as well for supporting Mr. Fraser, is he?

    Like you, dear reader, I was taught never to speak ill of the dead.

    It seems Mr. Adams wasn’t.

    Long after Mr. Adams meets the Lord, free enterprise and Western liberal democracy will prevail.

    I do hope though that the practice of throwing mud at men long dead and unable to defend their reputations will cease, for Mr. Adams’ sake you understand, dear reader.

    For Mr. Adams’ sake.

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