Beggar Businessman is there any difference

More non-news crap

Bruce Watt Photography owner/manager Dave Edmonds said beggars were continuing to put people off coming to shops in The Square.

"The council needs to grow some balls and do something about it."

These stupid sexist words were picked up by our so-called newspaper the Manawatu Standard and splashed across its front page…talk about non-news or false news becoming the norm.

The local council is spending thousands of dollars to debate how to get tough on beggars yet again…oh dear me…the bravery of our Councillor’s is beyond belief. Can you picture beggars fighting back against the absolutely stupid opinions of a bunch of news seeking councillors?

Are Councillors expecting the beggars all 14 of them to hold a rally in the Square? And will the female Councillors ‘grow some balls’ as requested by business man Dave Edmonds?

The Mayor naturally leapt straight into combat mode by adopting a Donald Trump style of ‘I’ve got balls’ to express his rather childlike view on the issue. Is the next step to call beggars ‘Terrorists’, with a capital T, and deport them elsewhere. The Manawatu Standard published this strangely worded paragraph supposedly uttered by the Mayor Grant Smith.

"This small amount of so-called beggars are really holding city residents, businesses and visitors to ransom,"

Have we lost all sense of balance and humanity, this item of non-news suggests that beggars beg to make money…gee whiz what’s new about that. Don’t most businesses to exactly that? How many businesses has the Mayor suggested should be closed down when they rip off the public with shoddy goods or misleading offers to make money?

For Dave Edmonds to suggest that beggars are keeping thousands of eager customers out of his business is simply rubbish…it’s the prices he charges that decides his customer ratio. These days photos are taken with I phones not expensive overpriced cameras.

Read these words by our strange Mr Edmonds to the Manawatu Standard who was foolish enough to publish them without comment:

Edmonds said a bylaw making it an offence to beg was needed.

"Some people say it's about human rights and you can't do that, but the police are not interested unless it's a criminal act."

He said all the social workers had done was "talk to them, get them a feed, and then they come back. It's a lifestyle choice".

If that’s a life style choice, is it not equally true that Edmonds remaining in a business that is in great decline not also a life style choice?

It would seem that Edmonds wants tax or rate payers support to allow him to make outrages’ [in some cases] profits as a part of his life style [business] choice.

His statement about the police not acting because begging is not a criminal offence is correct, and of course the police can’t arrest business owners / operators that over-charge or add huge mark-ups on the goods they sell to an often unsuspecting public. That would be interfering in the ‘market place’ and that is not allowed unless your business is begging. 

Edmonds is very childlike regarding police behaviour.

The Edmonds style of individual in the business community are a dime a dozen, they want the public to pay the enforcement costs while they make their profit, a sort of a socialise the costs while maximizing and privatising individuals profit…there is nothing new in that typical behaviour.

In fact when you think about it, it’s what beggars do because they too live in a market driven world where dog eats dog and damn the rest.

The Palmerston City Council along with other councils needs to approach the beggar problem [if it actually exists] with the human aspects in mind, rather than a Donald Trump tweet style approach.

After all the council supported the building of the Plaza complex which led directly to the decline of public availability to a tiny declining photographic business that is being hugely affected by new technology and a piss poor location these days.  

Reference: http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/90230893/hard-core-of-beggars-holding-city-to-ransom

Here is a long but very insightful feedback on this subject from a W/C guest blogger:

 

Peter,

 

I read all of the piece. I agree it’s a pretty bad state of affairs when people see it as an imperative to sit on the side of streets begging. I wonder about their backgrounds and how many of them are really in genuine heed. I admit there will be some, but I believe a fair majority will be in the category of cadging a few dollars to support a drug habit or something. You are right in your view that retail businesses are a refined form of beggars, not that they would ever class themselves as such. For me, totally reliant on my pension I am not really in a position where I can afford hand outs to anyone. most times when I venture out on the streets, I do so armed only with my trusty Super Gold Card to get me from A to B by bus. I very rarely have cash in my pocket, and rely on a debit card or credit card for shop purchases.  So much for the earlier offence of ‘having no visible means of support’.

 

That makes it awkward to help anyone out, who is begging on the street. Beggars as you suggest do come in many forms. As an Internet user I find we are constantly urged to give a dollar to this or that supposedly worthy cause. I belonged to a local branch of a political support group. At a recent meeting we had the hard word put on our small group by the deputy leader, that because it is election year we should be making every endeavour to help the party by way of donations to their cause. I thought about it for a time before interrogating Google to look at the salaries applicable to that particular party, only to find the total salary bill for the members alone was in excess of $2 million, that did not include the support staff of the party who also share in the beneficence of the Public Purse. I took it upon myself to write to the person in question and air my view that the majority of people forming the committee were pensioners who found difficulty in making ends meet and not really in any position to donate anything. To help him with his dilemma, I suggested his party institute a form of tithing of all its members to raise the funding they thought they required, worse than that I even suggested the tithing could be on a sliding scale according to the salaries of the people in question with leader’s and deputy leader’s, tithes proportionately more than the ordinary members and support staff. That was close on a month ago! I can truly say my letterbox has seen absolutely NO evidence of any vehement argument expressing an opposing view. When you consider the salary for an ordinary back bencher is approaching a quarter million dollars you begin to get an appreciation of the riches to be gained by this group of professional beggars who infest the corridors of power. When you see a fool like Kreyp sitting on a salary of somewhere in the vicinity of $400,000, which will no doubt be transferred to his incompetent successor you begin to get some idea of the scale of largesse being dished out to the entire bunch of incompetents who without their reliance on the public purse could find themselves sitting on road sides begging for public support, albeit on a greatly reduced scale.

 

In contrast to increasing the Retirement Age for the population. It would be entirely appropriate for us, the hoi polloi, to look to imposing a compulsory retirement age on the useless time servers in the parliament. This could be set at five years maximum after which they would become compulsorily stood down, with no chance of re-election ever, to make way for some other useless seat warmer. A regular rotation of them, with the addition of compulsory production  and publication of curricula vitae, open to effective scrutiny in every case. We, the Mug Voters would have an opportunity to see just what we might be getting before we cast our votes.

 

Is it any wonder that in excess of a million of us refuse to exercise our democratic rights to choose our parliamentary ‘leaders’ from the out and out dross presenting themselves as candidates? Instead  of it being a case of being too lazy to get out and vote, I believe it to be more of a protest at the numbers of complete incompetents with no other qualification than a well exercised ‘Gift of the Gab’, presuming they have the necessary qualifications to be our representatives, in government.

 

Peter G