Friday 16 April 2021

These things are all legal but they're wrong

 Politics is full of glaring loopholes. Some, you will see, are obviously wrong, others are based on the problem/reaction/solution formula, where you would believe they were wrong unless they were offered as an alleged solution to something worse. Of course when that something worse doesn't happen they always claim it's because of the solution, even though it will always be impossible to know either way, much like the local criminals offer to look after your car so it doesn't get stolen or your business so it doesn't burn down. After nothing happens to it they claim it was because of the insurance you paid, although what they actually meant is if you don't pay them then they'll steal your car or burn down your business.


1) Offshore taxation. This is a totally legal loophole. It means in many countries any firm nominally located in a tax haven pays barely any tax wherever it does business. We all know the main culprits and it can easily be changed by taxing business on where it is done, not where it is based.

2) Phoenix companies. It is possible to own a limited company, go broke, not pay any of your liabilities, and then buy back the company in another name and start up the next day or so with the same assets and no debts. There has never been a single politician who challenged this ancient loophole in the law.

3) Energy rationing. Our first solution to an imagined problem. If using energy to heat, travel and manufacture using cheap and reliable fuel emits a poison then it is banned, as with the Clean Air Act requiring coal plants and the like to scrub their emissions before they left the chimneys, and ended smog. But if it emits CO2, which is known as essential to all life on earth through the carbon cycle, and is treated in the same way as it is alleged CO2 causes not just warming but this warming is overall bad for life on earth, then as stated in the Kyoto Protocol, you must reduce energy usage.

If there was a plentiful and constant alternative fuel we would have done so already and changed to use it, but there isn't. Instead the British government wants us to lower our radiators by 10C to around 10C. That is the average temperature on a winter's day, and basically unless it's almost freezing it is the same as not having any heating on at all. They will make this happen partly through banning gas boilers and partly through smart meters which can regulate how much energy you use.

Surely forcing people to restrict their heating, which we know is bad for your health as there is a physical optimum temperature and minimum temperature for indoors, and that is what everyone sets their heating at. People are already dying of cold in winter as the green taxes mean they can't afford enough heating, so people are dying in their thousands every year already for something not even expected to happen till around 2050 at the most liberal estimates.

4) Travel restrictions. This is the twin of energy rationing, as restricting car and plane travel are for the same purported reasons as above, and previously only something done automatically in totalitarian regimes. Banning certain vehicles from cities even though they all pass their MoT tests suggests either the strict MoT emissions tests are useless, or they are actually sufficient so the additional bans are pointless. Both can't be true at the same time.

On top of vehicle restrictions, which include banning all cars except electric by 2050, blocking roads makes no sense unless they are death traps. All others provide access to buildings and through traffic and will mean emergency vehicles and deliveries are made almost impossible to access. Add some speed humps and chicanes and you will combine many more deaths a year from ambulances who have to drive slowly and will not reach victims in time, or get victims to hospital in time, with accidents from people trying to avoid traffic forced onto the wrong side of the road by chicanes. Vehicles are not  designed to be dropped vertically very often besides off-roaders, and this can happen a hundred times a day now in many suburban areas, and councils have special funds for vehicles damaged by hitting one underneath. Bad drivers will always cause accidents as they are ignorant, and putting bumps on the road will ruin journeys for the huge majority of safe drivers and will do little or nothing to prevent bad drivers causing havoc.

5) Hunting animals. If you're not going to eat it, don't kill it. If you do, then be quite prepared to be killed by an animal yourself, it's the same thing as what you're doing.

6) Live animal exports. These should be kept to a minimum, killing the animals where they originate and then freezing the meat for export. Many have no food or water and die on the journeys which can be for thousands of miles.

I'm sure there are plenty more similar examples which I would like to hear about if so, but these are all examples where either fraud or harm is legalised, with or without a plausible but baseless excuse. Mankind will not evolve until its worst elements such as these are tamed.


Sources:

Offshore tax havens

Phoenix companies

Kyoto Protocol

Turning down heating

Deaths from cold through high bills

Cars to be banned from cities

Road humps cause around 500 deaths a year

Live animal exports


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