Oh great. Now we're supposed to stand there and gawk while courts give us legal incest. The intolerable alternative would be self-government plus moral clarity.

Citizen Editorial Pages Editor Leonard Stern wrote two weeks ago that "A few years ago it would have been unlikely to hear conversations in Canada about the decriminalization of incest. Now we find them on morning radio. What happened? Same-sex marriage happened. I supported same-sex marriage, and still do." Stern then asked: " ... polygamy among consenting adults? There is no constitutional basis on which to make it illegal. The revulsion against incest is even more pronounced than that against polygamy, but unfortunately the same principles of autonomy and freedom apply."

He admitted to sharing that revulsion but "I just don't see how in a secular democracy we can insist" that incest be illegal.

Now, let's see. In the first place, we can insist on it by an act of the legislature. In 1999 Canada's justice minister told us it was a waste of time for Parliament to pass a Reform motion affirming the traditional definition of marriage because no one wanted to change it. In fact it was a waste of time because when a lower court foisted gay marriage on us five years later, MPs had neither the will nor, they claimed, the power to intervene. But Parliament has the power if citizens can summon the will.

For that we must address moral as well as institutional questions.

In his incest piece, Stern made the surprising assertion that "The gay rights movement, during the fight for same-sex marriage, shut down talk about slippery slopes."

I agree that it tried, with the connivance of liberal-minded journalists. But I did not know any group of activists had the right to shut down free expression here. Certainly when the Citizen endorsed gay marriage, I wrote a dissenting column at the editor's invitation that talked of slippery slopes.

The one that concerned me most was not sexual or behavioural. I said the whole argument about gay marriage was taking place on unsound intellectual foundations because marriage as a legal institution is not about love or about sex. It is, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, "a friendship recognized by the police," and unless you know why, you can't say anything coherent about it. So I ended that column with a line from C.S. Lewis: "Beware: Those who call for nonsense will find that it comes." And it has.

Stern admits that his "moral intuition is that incest is a grotesquerie and should be illegal even if participants are consenting adults". But having said "If you are repulsed by sex between two men or women, that's your problem ... the state has no business pronouncing on what consenting adults do in their bedrooms," he suggests that his revulsion at incest is his problem.

It's not. His problem is that he denies the possibility of moral reasoning. As McGill university ethicist Margaret Somerville just wrote in the Globe and Mail, "Those making the case for legalization reject the idea that incestuous conduct might be inherently morally wrong. Rather, moral relativism governs ... Ethics becomes nothing more than personal preferences."

Disliking this position, she tried to construct a biological argument against it. But if it's just our genes talking, why should we listen?

She wound up saying "Even some people who advocate decriminalizing incest admit to a 'yuck factor' response to it ... We need to listen to our moral intuitions ..." True, but we need to do more than listen. We need to reason about them.

There are things that are Wrong with a capital W just as there are things that are Right with a capital R. Normally the law only forbids things that are wrong because they involve force or fraud, and leave us to work out our salvation in fear and trembling on the other stuff. But once in a while we declare some behaviour such an affront to human dignity that we will not permit it even with consent. For instance cannibalism.

Our binding duty to defend human dignity is why we care about genocide and even why we have criminal law.

Doubtless it is inconvenient and tasteless to be ripped off or murdered. But we don't forbid force and fraud because they are yucky.

We forbid them because intuition and logic reveal the absolute truth that they are wrong.

So is incest. You know it, I know it and Leonard Stern knows it. I don't know where he gets the idea that we are a secular democracy. Our Constitution calls us a Constitutional monarchy under God. But either way it's very simple what we can do.

Prohibit incest through an act of Parliament because we know it's wrong, and invoke the notwithstanding clause if need be. What kind of society in terminal decay would find that statement perverse or incoherent?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Would you like tea with that tax revolt? It sounds sweet to me.

A lot of Americans like theirs that way too. Tea and tax revolts, I mean. Wednesday saw tax-day "Tea Parties" across the United States protesting the way Barack Obama and his Democratic party are determined to spend other people's money they don't even have, on things they didn't mention in the election, until everyone is rich or busted.

We dropped in on one such festivity on our way back from North Carolina.

They sure do things differently there.

Why, they even still have those gas pump handle doo-hickies you flick over so you can fill your tank without cramping your palm.

Of course their pumps, like ours, shut off once the tank is full so there's no danger of a spill or explosion. So why can't we be trusted with them? No one has ever said. We just can't. And we put up with it.

I don't mean to spit tobacco juice on liberals' shoes here. Well, a bit. As you may have guessed, I love the robustness of American political culture.

Like Virginia licence plates with the official slogan "Fight terrorism." Admittedly, a state official explained, it's just one of 200 slogans Virginians can choose from (and some folks are so dull they had plain licence plates anyway). But what a place, first, where a significant number of people do drive around with that salty motto and second, where they get 200 choices instead of a mandatory "Ontario: Yours to discover."

Another sign of a different culture, and I mean that most sincerely, was the one on the way to a North Carolina aquarium saying "Inmates Working."

There was also a notice in the aquarium "Please do not walk, mosey, saunter, stroll" on or otherwise trample their plants. And trucks with patriotic and religious slogans. And a coastal church advertised with "Your place to seek the Son." These folks wouldn't put up with "Je me souviens." Whereas you get the feeling that if we were in their shoes, we'd hand the place back to George III and apologize.

Speaking of George III, one guy at the Scranton protest we visited had an American flag with a Union Jack (minus the Irish cross) in place of the stars. When I asked he informed me, which I should have known, that it was the first "Grand Union" flag flown by George Washington and by John Paul Jones on the first American flagship, which I did know was the USS Alfred.

I won't claim the rally was huge. But there were about 300 folks, which isn't bad for a shrinking coal town of 74,000. And contrary to liberal stereotypes, these folks knew their stuff, carried politically literate signs and listened with polite attention to the speaker who wanted to repeal the 16th Amendment.

The 16th Amendment expressly authorized the federal government to collect an income tax.

I have mixed feelings about the 16th. It was, intentionally, done to permit dramatic lowering of tariffs, which I favour. On the other hand, tariff revenue could never have funded the growth of government in the 20th century, which I'm against.

Either way, what really impresses me is that Americans debated a national income tax, passed legislation, then held a national vote (well, a nationwide series of state votes) before taking this momentous step. Whereas in Canada we just went gosh, you want my money? Sure. J'acquiesce.

It's easy to say Americans are lucky, with symbols like the Boston Tea Party around which to rally. But here as so often, people largely make their own luck. The 1773 Party was triggered by the British reducing the duty on tea imports to America. But they did it without consulting colonial legislatures and the colonists' rights were not for sale.

Americans have kept themselves lucky by remembering that freedom is not free. And if that puzzles foreigners, the Americans don't care. Incidentally a certain newspaper ran the headline "U.S. navy opts for patience in pirate standoff" one day before the U.S. navy opted for dead pirates, which was actually my preference too.

I also like 70 mph speed limits. Mind you, it's hard to drive that fast with licence plates saying "Je m'excuse." But lest I seem unpatriotic, Canadians inherited the same libertarian British tradition as the 13 colonies, and we too could name warships for Alfred the Great of Wessex if we felt like it.

A British member of the European parliament recently made himself a folk hero by telling his prime minister bluntly "you have run out of our money."

So why not us?

We too could mosey, saunter or stroll on down to the town square and, instead of lifting our pinkies at tea parties, raise our voices and lower our taxes.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

[First appeared on Mercatornet.com] Stop the presses? Can it be? Compared to the suddenly very possible demise of newspaper titans including the New York Times, the fate of the “unsinkable” Titanic a century ago seems mildly odd, the collapse of General Motors merely a bit strange. It’s going to leave a gap in the American national conversation. But we’ll all survive fairly easily.

It’s weird to see this fate overtake the daily press, an institution that once seemed as much a part of American life as the neighbourhood barber shop. Twentieth century fiction and commentary alike could not imagine urban life without daily mass circulation newspapers, or those newspapers without the authoritative, massive, eternal flagships every reporter and editor envied. Now paper after paper folds up or seeks bankruptcy protection, and even the mighty Times is reduced to swearing it really honestly won’t go bankrupt... next month.

The economic difficulties of newspapers are not all that surprising. It is true that they have not been in a long slow decline like most of the “rust belt” industries that defined American economic might from the turn of the century into the 1960s. Newspapers were not slowly ground down by foreign competitors figuring out mass production while compulsory unionization drove up costs and drove out innovation. Instead, they were suddenly blindsided by the Internet.

It’s not that anyone solved the problem of how to make money giving something away free online. Instead, online searches and email took away newspapers’ ability to do exactly that the old-fashioned way. In their old, apparently unsinkable business model, subscription and newsstand prices never even attempted to cover production costs. Instead, they attracted readers with cheap papers, and then advertisers paid them to deliver their messages to those readers. And unfortunately the Internet made it possible for buyers and sellers to find one another faster and more reliably, and revenue from classified and retail advertising collapsed with catastrophic rapidity.

Thus far newspapers have my sympathy, and not only because they have been a major source of my income for the past dozen years. I didn’t see this terrible problem coming a decade ago either. But the other major problem now afflicting newspapers was entirely self-inflicted and I did see that one coming. It was content: what they covered and, even more, the way they covered it. The newspaper industry as a whole took on a particular tone of smug bias that now prevents it from adapting to changed circumstances in the only way I think is realistic.

There were exceptions, of course, but the typical newspaper and especially the typical elite newspaper deserve exactly the reproach my distinctly unconventional colleague David Warren delivered last May. “In my view... The idea of the news sheet remains essentially sound... People still want something to read that is portable and companionable and requires no technological savvy whatever. But those who can read want something ... intrinsically lively, informative, interesting, and even reliable and trustworthy and aesthetically satisfying.” Instead of which, especially as they came to recruit mostly from journalism schools, newspapers became the preserve of a narrow liberal elite “who think and sound like sociology majors, and express themselves in a jargon stream of pompous, preachy, preening, vaguely leftist and reptilian drivel.”

The only way newspapers can survive in the digital era is to exploit the negative tendency of the Internet to overload us with information of dubious quality. They must become trusted gatekeepers, sites to which you subscribe even for things you could get free elsewhere because they collect it all in one place in an intelligent and fair-minded way and save you hours of precious time for a few dollars a week. And nobody now trusts them to do so but the sorts of liberals who, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s apt jibe, go on endlessly about other points of view but are always amazed to find that there are other points of view. There aren’t enough such people to sustain the industry on reader rather than advertiser revenue.

Take The New York Times ... please. On questions of factual accuracy, and weight with the chattering classes in liberal epochs, it had some real claim to be the American newspaper of record. And it deserves credit for broadening its pages by inventing the Op Ed page (a seemingly timeless feature, it actually began in the “grey lady” in 1970). But the Times took a reliably and offensively biased liberal position from time out of mind without even realizing it.

In the 1920s it assured its readers Hitler had been tamed. In the early 1930s it published Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning lies denying Stalin’s famines. Its crusade against the Vietnam war culminated with the notorious headline “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, A Better Life” from Phnom Penh, Cambodia on April 30, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge took the city and began their genocide.

In 1983 the Times sonorously informed its readers that “the stench of failure” hung over the Reagan White House. And on and on. In a master-stroke of clueless pomposity, every four years the editorial board stroked its collective long grey beard before pronouncing that on this occasion they considered the Democratic candidate for president superior... 14 straight times and counting.

I do think the collapse of a national press is bad for a nation. Love them or hate them, a few generally recognized leading publications created a shared framework for a national conversation in which virtually every informed person knew many of the same facts and was reacting to the same thoughtful presentations of those facts.

The development of technology from the dawn of the microchip era was bound to fragment this conversation to some extent. Even cable television reduced the shared cultural experience of audiences in the industrial democracies in the 20th century, hearing the same handful of major radio shows then watching the same handful of entertainment and news programs. You don’t have to think it could have been prevented to see some drawbacks to the shattering of this common focus and the development of a sort of national and international ADD.

The Internet does take Chesterton’s warning about the parochialism of big cities to new heights; with millions of blogs to choose from we can easily avoid information overload by focusing only on those sources that confirm everything we already think in exactly the tone we find most congenial. Newspapers could make money combating that tendency, if they hadn’t long ago succumbed to the temptation to perform it for one elite point of view only.

They will be missed for what they might have done. But not, sadly, for what they chose to do instead while they still had a choice.

Hey, kids, an adult here. Got something to say. No, no, don't go rolling your eyes at me. Actually, I know you won't. You're all so darn clean-cut. Not LOL here. Really. I just read in a newspaper (that strange papery thing over there that doesn't go "tweet") how sociologist Reginald Bibby says you're all sober, industrious, get along with your folks and plan to have good jobs, stable marriages and a passel of kids. Makes me wonder why we all bothered to be so decadent. Honestly, it's like the 1950s out there.

Actually, I'm delighted that you have these aspirations. Beats planning to hang out and get hammered. Still, I realize maybe there's a couple of things we ought to have mentioned while you were growing up that we kind of didn't. Especially one of those ugly four-letter words: work. W-o-r-k.

I know what you're thinking. We work all the time. Mom and Dad scramble out of bed, rush you off to daycare, fly to our offices, eat at our desks, check our BlackBerrys during dinner, slam you into bed and rush back to our e-mail.

But remember what Seneca said: "a delight in bustling about is not industry -- it is only the restless energy of a hunted mind."

Work properly understood is the systematic and determined application of your energies to things that really matter. And we didn't take the time to explain it for a couple of reasons.

First, we were so busy. Second, we really, really wanted you to feel good about yourselves because ... um ... why was that? Oh yeah, because we insist on feeling good about ourselves. It's a human right. Fulfilment. We have a right to be fulfilled or, more exactly, to feel fulfilled. If you feel fulfilled it's the same as being fulfilled, right?

Besides, who wants to be all judgmental and evaluate people by what they do? So we started by giving marks for effort and ended up giving marks to make you feel fulfilled.

I gather it worked. Another study said a third of college students expect a B just for showing up and 40 per cent for doing the readings. Which I find a bit odd since, as a university teacher myself, I don't take attendance in my lectures. I have no way of knowing whether you did the reading except if you show familiarity with it on your written work.

Aaaaargh. There's that word again. Which brings me to something I feel kinda bad about, but should probably get out anyway.

The main reason we didn't explain about work is it would have taken work -- work to explain it and then to live up to it.

Starting with the work of raising you. I mean, you're cute and all, but remember what I said earlier about fulfillment. I needed a career to feel fulfilled, so you sorta had to go to daycare. Which looked nice, they had friendly staff and pretty toys and you got socialized with a room full of anxious toddlers which, uh ...

Point is, I realize our lifestyle cut into our time for meaningful discussions. And left a big tax burden. Sorry about that. But not very. It doesn't seem to have hurt much. We did insist that daycare foster your sense of personal worth. And it looks like it did.

After all, that Bibby survey says you're optimistic. You want fulfilling jobs with good pay and stable marriages and big families and what's more you all seem to expect to get them without ... urk ... say, this is awkward, isn't it?

Look, I'm not saying I want you to be depressed. It's just that optimism is a psychological state and given the facts of human existence a fatuous one. What you should be is hopeful, which is a theological virtue.

Oh, we forgot to explain that word, too, didn't we? Virtue. We relied on psychology and didn't exactly dwell on morality. It could have led to awkward questions.

Like why so few adults around you are in first marriages. And, since many of you expect to cohabit then get married for life, did we mention that people who cohabit are more likely to divorce if they marry? I know it sounds weird to people who are used to the concept of "test driving," but the problem is that cohabiting is just fun until it's not and you split whereas marriage takes ... you know.

To make marriage work you have to put the other person first. Which is all fine and good with wine and roses and candlelight, but a bit harder with too little sleep and job pressure and a nagging feeling that you're not so much fulfilled as harried.

Mind you, good luck raising kids if you can't put others first. You'll probably end up plunking them into a daycare.

Anyway, I'm glad you're feeling so perky. Hope this little chat didn't get you down. Wish we'd made time earlier. Oh well. Gotta go.

[First appeared in the Ottawa Citizen]

One of the small joys of my job, and by joys I mean "things that keep me from being driven insane by political idiocy," is consuming the rich buffet of press releases I get via the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

I devour the self-satisfied prose, indignant focus on trivia, specialized language of partisan drivel and the fact that unlike mine, politicians' computers apparently don't have elementary grammar and spell-checking capabilities. But I most enjoy the way everything is dunked in crème de sublime conviction that they are in control as well as in charge. Of anything.

Here, taste this March 31 release from the Canada Revenue Agency and the Minister of National Revenue. The appetizer is the headline "The Canada Revenue Agency succeeds in reducing the Paperwork Burden for Businesses", with the chefs congratulating themselves for something that in a normal restaurant you'd wait for customers to thank you for.

Next, savour the phrase some flack put into the minister's mouth that "Canadian businesses are a vital part of local, provincial and national economies" which I guess was cooked up to feed pro-business sentiment but tastes both bland and greasy. They whip this vacuity up on short order in large amounts, yet make it look effortless.

Finally the entrée, the claim that "the CRA has identified over 8,000 obsolete or non-essential information obligations imposed on business. The elimination of these obligations, when implemented, will reduce the paperwork burden on business by 24.2 percent." That extra decimal place gives me a special frisson. Not "about a quarter" or even "24 percent" but "24.2 percent".

Wow.

Such precision.

Such attention to detail. We're lucky to have that kind of government. It's a vital part of local, provincial and national rhetorical overload.

Or not, since obviously they haven't measured exactly how burdensome various regulations are. How could they even know how time-consuming these rules are, let alone what other vexations they impose and in what amounts? CRA staff can't sit in every small businessperson's office or kitchen and monitor their blood pressure as they fill out forms.

I like how the headline said the CRA had succeeded whereas here the text only says it will succeed. But I love the precision of the estimate, particularly that delicious point two per cent. That's because my deepest satisfaction in a meal of this sort is the pungent, lingering aroma of certainty not only that scientific management is the answer to public policy problems, but that our governments are currently engaged in it.

As with that crust on crème brulée, I am intrigued by the consistency with which they get this surface on everything they do.

Take Dalton McGuinty ... please. How can he be so invariably untroubled by any suspicion that he might not be able to manage your affairs for you better than you can manage them yourself? Right down to the free programmable Internet-accessible thermostat the province recently offered me, with fine print admitting they might occasionally reset it for me without warning, though only when they felt like it.

It doesn't matter what evidence of ineptitude floods in, like massive churn in the federal public service or Wednesday's Citizen report that 10 per cent of Ontario's core public service hauls in over a hundred grand a year. Finance Minister Dwight Duncan sneered that the latter was nothing to the salaries paid to U.S. financiers and besides many small Ontario firms depend on the trade of well-heeled bureaucrats to survive. It would be irrelevant to ask whose taxes he thinks fund those plump salaries.

What really matters is that neither federal nor provincial governments have any real handle on their own staffing, yet blithely tell us where to smoke, what to drive, what to think, when to exercise and in their spare time fiddle with our thermostats.

The illusion of control is so widespread that hardly a week passes without calls for a "national strategy" for something or other, as though massive centralized bureaucratic political initiatives had been proven by recent experience to work at all, let alone better than decentralized private voluntary ones.

(Why, here's a March 19 call for a "national injury prevention strategy for youth in sport"; let them implement such a thing, and next they'll be boasting of a 24.2-per-cent reduction in preventable youth sport injuries).

And hardly a day passes without a press release stating indignantly that the government "must" do something when it's obvious that it doesn't have to do it, probably shouldn't attempt it and very possibly couldn't do it if it tried.

So taste, taste. Savour the exquisite flavour.

Just don't swallow any of it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It seems to me that prosperity is just around the corner. Happy times will be here again. Uh, unless that's just Herbert Hoover with a ghastly forced smile on his face.

Since such smiles are the typical attire of the prognosticator I usually stick to predicting the past. But we study history to illuminate the present, so let me throw my head into the ring and explain my qualified optimism.

I think we are going through a massive shakeout. All sorts of things that weren't working and couldn't work are being exposed. What Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" is upon us and while it's regrettably blowing close to gale force, the destruction of failed arrangements is essential to the creation of successful ones.

Remember, the U.S. "subprime" market didn't become unsustainable last fall. That's when we discovered it was unsustainable and stopped it destroying wealth. Likewise, the financial downturn also didn't make North American automakers unprofitable. It simply drove home that they had long ago ceased to be a rational use of labour and capital. The faster we liquidate counterproductive arrangements the better off we are, by definition.

If this advice seems harsh or unfeeling my short answer is that the worse our economic prospects the more important it is not to waste our dwindling resources on things that destroy value. But my long answer is that things may not be nearly as bad as they seem.

First, let me revisit this notion of gale force creative destruction. I realize it's hard for people who've lost their jobs. It always is. But really, when you look out your window or go to the mall do you see catastrophe? Just because politicians keep saying it's a crisis (and I've said it too) doesn't mean it is one.

Of course we may just be enjoying the false spring of March 1930 and in three years people may be selling apples in the streets. But I think it's far more probable that we're getting a lot of things right at the moment and governments are, as usual, getting them wrong.

What the financial contraction has revealed is that massive improvements in efficiency have rendered a lot of old ways of doing business obsolete and brought storied old firms crashing down, too often onto a soft bed of tax money.

But those same improvements in efficiency are causing a huge upsurge in economic vitality, one that traditional measurements such as GDP can't capture.

I'm no gaga technophile; I'm barely reconciled to fire. But let me especially mention new dedicated "social networking" online systems like Ning (www.ning.com). These things make it far easier to conduct social, economic and charitable activity, and that's hugely wealth enhancing because it cuts costs dramatically. I won't give you an elaborate sales pitch partly because I'm not paid to and partly because I don't have to. But I'm on this bandwagon and you should be too.

I admit I still don't understand the business model of getting rich by giving stuff away online. But when my brain stem panics about us all making a living taking in one another's websites, I remind myself that the switch from manufacturing to services caused alarm as did the switch from farming to manufacturing. Heck, nomads probably said you can't run an economy on people watching plants grow, you gotta go find stuff.

Here's why it will all be OK: When new technologies reduce the effort required to do things, everything gets cheaper.

Remember, in the early days of the microchip there was much talk of a "productivity paradox" as big investments in information technology seemed to reduce growth. Actually we were measuring it wrong. GDP likes effort, not wealth, and gains in efficiency reduce effort. (For more on this topic see my recent article on Mercatornet.com.)

Faced with a decline in GDP, governments are tempted to "save the economy." But the economy isn't a thing you can go tinker with, nor is a "failing industry."

So they actually give money they haven't earned to firms that have proved they can't earn it, which destroys wealth instead of preserving it.

It isn't surprising that governments respond to creative destruction by stifling the creativity to increase the destruction, given their chronic fixation on the visible and short-term over the subtle and long-term.

But it is dangerous.

I actually hope the modern bloated state will be among the things whose failings will be exposed by this bout of creative destruction.

But we must be vigilant against the proven capacity of governments to mess things up with tax hikes, protectionism and frantic misguided subsidies.

Otherwise we'll all end up with sickly smiles again.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

As the financial crisis becomes a general economic crisis it seems that GDP is going out the window. I certainly hope so. No, I’m not some Luddite hoping the economy collapses and we all end up in caves eating wholesome grass and breathing brisk fresh air. I’m hoping we’ll stop using GDP and “the economy” interchangeably and stop now.

Perhaps I sound eccentric. Sure, GDP isn’t perfect, but it’s a pretty good measure of the economy and we need one, right? Wrong. I don’t know if we even need a good measure of the economy. But if we don’t have one, we harm ourselves by thinking we do.

GDP is not the way to measure economic activity. It’s a way, designed by certain people for certain purposes a long time ago, and those purposes were fatally flawed. I don’t want to get so technical that I lose not just readers but also my own way. But what GDP measures, fairly accurately but for Keynesian purposes and in Keynesian ways, is how hard we work commercially to create wealth. It is, effectively, a commercial labour theory of value, and thus worthless.

In an economy where nothing much changes, it would be reasonable to use GDP as a proxy for “how we’re doing economically”. Whatever the failings of GDP, they would remain constant relative to the actual creation of wealth so if GDP went up total wealth probably would too. But a defining characteristic of modern economies is that lots of things change constantly. And when they do, the defects of GDP become overpowering. Which is especially misleading at precisely those times, like the present, when we are urgently trying to determine how much things are changing and how.

Let me illustrate a few really major holes in GDP. These are not technical problems that can be patched with yet more cleverness but defects in the concept. GDP actually measures what Keynesians wanted to measure quite well. It’s just that, to quote John Rhys-Davies’ character in Raiders of the Lost Ark, “they’re digging in the wrong place.”

Speaking of digging, if I start growing my own tomatoes it may be good for my soul, my health and the environment. But if it also saves me money, if I increase my spending on fertilizer, pruning forks, gloves and so on less than I cut my spending on commercial tomatoes, GDP will drop. What is that a measure of?

Environmentalists have long complained that GDP fails to account for environmental damage. Most of them got the technical problem dead wrong; GDP only misses the harm done by pollution because property rights to air and water are not assigned so damaging them is free to individuals. That we could fix, to the horror of these same environmentalists, by privatizing them, so that I could sue anyone dumping sludge into the lake in front of my cottage as readily as if they’d put it on my lawn.

To see where the greens almost tripped over a major issue, take back my library book. Please. It’s overdue. But I digress. If I read a book from the library instead of buying it, I don’t spend the purchase price, paper and glue for an extra copy are not bought by the publisher, it is not shipped (or is sent within Ottawa instead of to it), bookstore employees don’t get paid and so on. From the point of view of GDP, it’s a dead loss and I am an antisocial wretch. But why? I’ve reduced my environmental footprint, saved money, and helped strengthen an important “civil society” institution especially useful to the poor. Yet GDP cannot like a library book.

Because GDP measures commercial effort, anything that increases efficiency registers as a loss. And again, this is no mere correctible technical defect. John Maynard Keynes really believed it would be good for the economy if the government buried old bank notes in bottles and then people went and dug them up. So does GDP... provided, of course, that buriers and diggers-up are paid wages.

GDP can reconcile itself to increased efficiency, with a non-trivial delay, if I go out and spend the money I save on library books or home-grown tomatoes. But as the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted in its 1993 Annual Report, “By far, the largest omission in measured GNP is leisure”. If increased efficiency lets us spend more time with the kids, help the needy, improve our minds or cultivate a hobby, it’s bad for “the economy”. And if everything gets easier, which is another way of saying “if there’s technological progress,” GDP makes growth look slower precisely because it’s faster. Indeed, if manna were to rain down from heaven for any length of time, GDP would fall drastically, prompting calls for government stimulus packages or perhaps a “war on manna.”

GDP is either blind to qualitative change or hostile to it, clearly a major defect in a modern economy. Which is why I save for last the example that the GDP of China was larger than that of Britain until the late 19th century. Yet any fool (even one with a PhD) can see that Britons could muster far more wealth in 1880, individually, for social purposes and in pursuit of political ends. Britain was colonizing China, not the other way around.

The bewilderment or enmity that GDP exhibits toward efficiency is especially dangerous in times of tumultuous change. It produces bad measurements and bad reasoning that combine to generate bad policy. We may well be living through a massive liquidation of unsound institutions and bad habits. Yet an Ottawa Citizen story early in March bore the telling secondary headline “GDP snapshot shows we are learning to save again — not the prescription for restarting the economy”. The story admitted that Canadians were rational to spend less given recent shocks to their net worth. I would add that such conduct is both prudent and dignified given the absurd recent tendency of people to live beyond their means in societies wealthy beyond the dreams of Bourbon kings. Yet in the funhouse mirror of GDP, it becomes an obstacle to “restarting the economy” which isn’t even a machine that could have “stopped” anyway.

If you must have numbers, ydon’t tinker with things like the UN Human Development Index. It measures only life expectancy, time spent in school and per capita income. You wouldn’t write an obituary based on those three measures, praising the man who spent six decades at graduate school over the one who laid down his life for a friend. So don’t use it to categorize a country.

You might be better off using unemployment adjusted for labor market participation, or total profits. But you might not. I said near the beginning that we might not want a number that measures “the economy.” Milton Friedman often described visiting Hong Kong in 1963, praising Financial Secretary John Cowperthwaite’s laissez-faire policies and asking why he didn’t collect data to publicize their success, and Cowperthwaite replying that if he collected numbers people could insist that something be done about them while now they could only look out the window and see that business was booming.

In retirement, Cowperthwaite advised poor countries to abolish their offices of national statistics. In that spirit, I liked the impressionistic measure cited in 2004 by the CEO of Wal-Mart, that so-called “displaced merchandise,” that is, things people put into their shopping baskets then take back out and leave elsewhere in the store, is a really good indicator that consumers are hurting. But whatever you do, don’t measure GDP and then demand that the government do something about it. Especially not now.

No sir. Open the window, look around, and while you’re there, chuck GDP out through it.

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

Back in 1866, opposing a bill to reform Britain's parliament, Benjamin Disraeli said while it was important to adapt to circumstances, "the original scheme of the Plantagenets may always guide us." Such a remark would get him laughed off Parliament Hill today if anyone could even figure out what he was talking about. Maybe it shouldn't.

For one thing, just one year later Canada acquired a Constitution "similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom," written by men on both sides of the Atlantic who talked and thought that way. So if you agree that our political system doesn't now work the way the picture on the box suggests, it might be worth going back and rereading the instructions.

We could start with another criticism of the 1866 reform bill, by one Robert Lowe, who said that the key question in an electoral system was not the person or riding "that obtains the power of sending Members to Parliament, but that Parliament itself in which those members are to sit" and that to talk of giving the vote to people "because we think them deserving ... is in my opinion to mistake the means for the end."

This proposition comes across today not as wrong but as heretical.

But why?

Most of us would not accept the claim in Edward Bellamy's best-selling 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward that a man should have an equal share in the economic system "because he is a man." Yet that is exactly our view of politics, as if it were more important to vote than to eat.

I am not suggesting that we let the government go around taking away individual people's right to vote. But to avoid some pitfalls of the current system and resist bogus reform proposals, we do need to open our minds to other ways of understanding the nature of voting than the one we now take for granted. Like Disraeli's 1866 argument that MPs "do not represent an indiscriminate multitude, but a body of men endowed with privileges which they enjoy, but also intrusted with duties which they must perform."

Privileges? Duties? What's this stuff? It may be startling but it was no chance utterance. Disraeli frequently spoke of popular privileges and explicitly contrasted them with the democratic rights he supposed to exist in America, for instance also asserting in 1866 that "this House should remain a House of Commons, and not become a House of the People, the House of a mere indiscriminate multitude, devoid of any definite character, and not responsible to society, and having no duties and no privileges under the Constitution."

Humour me while I explain how this line of reasoning might apply to proposals to adopt a system of proportional representation. We often hear that "PR" would give us a Parliament more reflective of Canadian society. The proposition is debatable on technical grounds, since certain personality types will be more attracted to politics under any system. But it is also more fundamentally debatable, because surely our first concern is to get a Parliament that acts fairly and wisely.

That a Parliament broadly reflective of the populace is likely to be more fair-minded than one composed of aspiring politicians I think quite reasonable. And while such a body is likely to be lacking in some of the technical skills required to legislate wisely, legislatures full of politicians frequently exhibit similar infirmities.

What really worries me is that PR is likely to produce a Parliament that has grave difficulty acting at all and only manages to legislate on the basis of vulgar political expediency. The need to assemble coalitions after rather than before an election, and between parties rather than within them, is fatal to the coherent development of a legislative program. And it makes it harder to experiment with dramatic changes of policy direction when circumstances change.

If voting is a right, allowing me to validate my being and admire myself in the mirror of politics, this objection is irrelevant.

But if Robert Lowe is right that the point is to return Parliaments well-suited to the task of legislating, including holding the executive branch to account, then PR is irrelevant, because it answers the wrong question.

The right question is how we get back to regarding voting as a privilege that carries a social duty to cast intelligent, responsible, public-spirited ballots, not a right allowing us to howl, grab or preen.

Yes, it goes against the temper of the times. But is there not at least superficial plausibility to the claim that the "fairer" our electoral methods have become, in our terms, the shabbier the resulting politics?

If we do not miss Gladstone, Disraeli or Robert Lowe today, it is essentially because we never heard of them. It's no laughing matter.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]