Zoran Rakovic: While You Were Watching the Rich List, They Took Your Nest Egg

While headlines rage about New Zealand's ultra-wealthy, it’s the prudent mum-and-dad investors who’ll bear the tax burden. This article exposes how media narratives mask the true targets of wealth taxes.

It is a strange yet predictable feature of media culture that whenever the country sneezes, the headlines ask why the rich aren’t coughing. The latest round of this ritual arrived in the form of a piece in RNZ, highlighting how New Zealand’s rich listers have allegedly ascended past the $100 billion mark while everyone else suffers through the fog of inflation and economic stagnation. The implication is clear: the rich are cheating gravity while the rest drown in molasses. Cue outrage, cue envy, cue calls for more taxes on "wealth" – as if the solution to economic sclerosis is to punish anyone with accumulated capital. But if you look carefully, the noose is not being tied around the necks of the ultra-wealthy. It is being quietly and expertly fastened around yours.

The average Kiwi saver, the mum-and-dad with a mortgage, a retirement plan, a modest rental, or a few thousand in KiwiSaver, is the real target. Why? Because you're local. You're visible. You're accessible. The billionaire is a mirage: a moving target with legal armour and international jurisdiction. But you, dear citizen, are the low-hanging fruit. And the media is helping prepare the orchard.

Thomas Sowell warned us about this. The rhetoric of fairness, he wrote, is often detached from results. It creates an illusion that policy is being aimed at the powerful, while the actual consequences land squarely on the prudent. "What is history but the story of how politicians have created moral justification for transferring wealth from the prudent to the imprudent," Sowell might have added, if he lived here. Because that is exactly what is happening. The wealth tax that cannot reach Zuckerberg will reach your KiwiSaver. The capital gains tax that cannot breach the Cayman Islands will land on your family bach. The inflation that billionaires hedge against with hard assets and debt-financed portfolios will slowly drain your savings account.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a word for this kind of system: one without skin in the game. He would tell you that whenever risk is borne by those who did not create it, and benefits are reaped by those who engineered it, you have an inverted moral order. And this order always needs a moral cover. In New Zealand, that cover is provided by press releases masquerading as journalism. The anger is misdirected. The incentives are perverse. The rich-lister does not suffer under wealth tax proposals; he restructures, migrates, or simply redefines the nature of his assets. Meanwhile, the salaried engineer who bought a second home for retirement security gets slammed as a "land-banker." The nurse who diligently contributed to her superannuation gets slapped with means-testing and bracket creep.

Friedrich Hayek warned that when the apparatus of the state attempts to engineer fairness through coercion, it always ends in perverse redistribution. Not to the poor, but from the productive to the politically useful. "A society that does not recognise limits on the scope of coercion will produce a tyranny of good intentions," Hayek wrote. And what could be more tyrannically well-intentioned than a headline suggesting that someone else’s savings are a moral crime?

James Buchanan's public choice theory laid this bare. Politicians and bureaucrats do not act from the ether of idealism. They act like everyone else: to secure benefits and avoid costs. When it is politically risky to go after real wealth, they go after symbolic wealth. The yacht owner with lawyers escapes, but the retiree farmer with a paid-off Toyota becomes the face of inequality. And thus tax policy becomes theatre. Buchanan would have said: follow the incentives, not the slogans.

Meanwhile, Joseph Schumpeter noted that capitalism contains within it the seeds of its own vilification. The bourgeois class—the savers, planners, builders, those who delay gratification—are resented by the very intellectuals and media commentators who rely on their taxes. "Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets," Schumpeter said. And we are watching that trial on the six o’clock news.

The irony is delicious and sickening. The average Kiwi mum and dad, who spent thirty years grinding out a mortgage, paying school fees, and quietly investing in their future, now finds themselves in the crosshairs of a public discourse that paints them as hoarders of capital and enemies of fairness. But they are the reason this country is not bankrupt. They are the ones who maintain infrastructure with their tax compliance, who don’t take more than they give, who invest in future generations. And yet they are the ones being softened up for the blow.

Michael Sandel might argue that we have created a moral narrative that confuses merit with luck, and vice versa. We look at inherited wealth and see injustice, but we look at middle-class thrift and somehow conflate it with privilege. And this opens the door to policies that slap the diligent along with the decadent. Sandel's warning is not about fairness in outcomes, but fairness in judgment. Once you confuse the two, your tax code becomes a moral disaster.

Wilhelm Röpke, who championed the dignity of small property holders and community-oriented economics, would be aghast. He would tell you that a humane economy does not punish those who play by the rules. And yet here we are, in a system that applauds handouts while taxing hand-uppers. We reward speculation with bailouts, and prudence with capital controls. The spiritual core of the middle class—its trust in the future, its habit of delayed consumption, its orientation to legacy—is being dismantled in the name of justice.

You are not the villain. You are the plan. You are the budget line that balances the ledger between fantasy and reality. Every time the media cries about inequality without context, without structural understanding, and without distinguishing between the productive and the extractive, it is contributing to the slow demolition of your freedom. And they do it with a straight face, as if they are lifting the veil on injustice, when really they are handing the hammer to the bureaucrat.

This is not a call for libertarian anarchy. It is a call for moral clarity. If fairness is the goal, then policies should target extractive behaviour, not productive savings. If redistribution is necessary, then let it begin with those who lobby for it while shielding themselves from its reach. But if we are to stay sane in a system tilted toward headlines over truth, we must at least learn to see the rope being tied.

So, to the prudent mum and dad: do not be distracted. Do not fall for the envy-bait. The real battle is not against billionaires you will never meet. It is to protect the nest egg you built, inch by inch, with decisions the media never covered. Keep your eye on the taxation ball. Watch for inflation, capital gains thresholds, bracket creep, and redefinitions of "wealth." These are not headlines; they are levers. And they are being pulled with increasing aggression.

Taleb says to beware the charlatan who tells you what you want to hear, while quietly charging your account. The rich will be fine. The headlines are not about them. They are about you.

In the end, let the message be simple: stay prudent. Stay sceptical. And stay ready to vote not for slogans, but for sovereignty over your own sweat-earned future. Because it is not the rich who are being hunted. It is the diligent. And if they go, there is no country left to save.

Zoran Rakovic is a structural engineer with nearly 30 years of experience, who has helped design and strengthen buildings across New Zealand—particularly in Christchurch’s earthquake recovery - while balancing life as a dad, granddad, and outdoor enthusiast. This article was sourced from his BLOG.