The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama is in trouble over government health care. The truth is, government health care is in trouble over Barack Obama.

True, some of the president's political troubles stem from the inflated expectations of his supporters. There is a tendency in politics to invest unrealistic hopes in the election of "our guy" as a triumphant vindication of who we are rather than his probable performance in office. (See for instance the boppy 1952 "I Like Ike" ad at www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ml9VZW7V_U where the sun rises again because we've sent Ike to Washington not because of anything we expected he'd do once he got there which, indeed, he largely did not.) But that's a side issue.

The main problem is that there never was a health-care plan. There was simply an assumption, as persistent as it was unrealistic, that government could easily provide more health care for less money, more fairly, than the private sector. What has driven Republicans out of the bipartisan reform effort, while giving so-called "Blue Dog" democrats the cold robbies about the probable political, fiscal and medical results of this reform, is that it was meant to save money yet has been revealed as horribly expensive.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) fired a pair of deadly broadsides in June, first saying the health bill before the Senate Finance Committee would cost an extra $1.6 trillion over a decade, then declaring that rather than the supposed savings in the second decade would be an even steeper increase in spending. Now the naive would ask, if the plan is meant to save money, why is it so much more expensive? The skeptical would ask, what possibly made you think increasing the role of government would save money?

Recently supporters of the administration have turned to a health insurance co-op lack-of-plan as an alternative, or perhaps a supplement, to the government insurance lack-of-plan. The administration denies changing its lack of position. But it doesn't matter. There's no there there either.

Why would there be? Can anyone name one thing government provides more efficiently than the private sector? I concede that there are things the private sector cannot provide, like defence and criminal justice. But there are not as many as people think and they all turn on the familiar triad of free rider, holdout and transaction cost problems.

To say the state must do things like defence and justice is not to suggest that it is likely to do them efficiently. Rather, mankind has long searched for mechanisms like representative democracy, separation of powers, federalism, decentralization, property rights and a vigilant citizenry to prevent it from doing them cruelly and wastefully. But admirable as these devices are, they cannot work as well as consumer sovereignty. They're just necessary where markets can't operate. And there is no reason to think health care fits into that category. So why cling to the expensive disaster of state-run medicine?

Not just here, either. Most Canadian defenders of our system dishonestly insist that the United States has little public health care. But in fiscal year 2009 Medicare and Medicaid, the two largest U.S. federal health programs, accounted for 41 per cent of Washington's $3.1-trillion budget, gobbling up over a trillion and a quarter dollars between them. Worse, before the current debate began, the CBO already warned that without effective cost control the two Ms would consume "13 per cent of GDP in 2040 and 38 per cent of GDP by 2082." Finding ways to make this system enormously more expensive is clearly pointless politically and medically.

A recent MSNBC news story said "a plurality of Americans now oppose a government-run plan." But that's not quite right. It's not a matter of the public turning against a workable plan thanks to rude conservative extremists hijacking town hall meetings. The public is realizing there is, in the proper sense of the word, no plan, just a disposition to spend vast sums while trusting central planning to muddle through.

Try asking any of its defenders why, if the Canada Health Act is such a good idea, we shouldn't adopt a similar Canada Car Act, Canada Software Act or Canada Food Act? They will laugh dismissively, as though your question were deliberately vulgar. But they cannot answer it seriously because everyone instinctively knows the devastating answer given 200 years ago by Thomas Jefferson: "Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread." The same is true of health care. Consider only that the British system, unlike ours, covers dentistry, and they have waiting lists for dentists as well.

That Barack Obama didn't realize this, and made absurd promises based on his lack of realization, is a negative reflection on the man. But the problem that now exists isn't that he wasn't magic. It's that government health care isn't.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Some days the headlines make me think I'm in the wrong business. Like Wednesday when it was reported that Premier Dalton McGuinty had personally appointed the two top executives of eHealth who caused a scandal by doing highly expensive nothing with a bunch of their cronies. Where do I get a job like that?

OK, so they eventually had to resign because they weren't doing anything useful. But that would happen to me too, sooner and without the lavish salary or untendered-contract-to-crony bit first. Let alone the $317,000 severance former eHealth CEO Sarah Kramer pocketed. They don't pay columnists that kind of money to stay and write, let alone to go away.

Actually I know of one exception. Boris Johnson, the overly colourful mayor of London (England), gets a quarter of a million pounds to write a newspaper column, just over $450,000 Canadian, while his day job brings in another £140,000. Unfortunately, I think you have to be mayor as well to pull in that kind of coin which in Ottawa might mean spending most of my term under investigation or on trial and three quarters of a million bucks on my legal defence which, even on Mr. Johnson's salary, doesn't leave that much for groceries.

I should probably also admit that I haven't yet approached my editors to ask whether they'd pay me that lavishly if I somehow deluded voters into entrusting me with the keys to the municipal treasury. They are not as a rule choleric individuals but I fear this suggestion might lead them to step dramatically out of character.

By sickening contrast, when the premier of Ontario raised his own salary from $159,000 to more than $200,000, plus perks, voters had no such reaction. He won't actually get rich that way, of course. That's what the consulting, boards and speaking fees afterward are for, especially if you're shameless. Which reminds me that some Canadian federal government tourism stimulus funds will reportedly be used to bring Bill Clinton to speak at the CNE, adding to the $4.6 million the Ozark Casanova already earned between 2006 and 2008 in Canada. For some reason it comes across as carping when I say he was a bad president as well as a bad man and it is weird to pay to hear him deceive you on both counts. See: "some days I think I'm in the wrong business," above.

On such days, the eHealth jobs aren't really the ones I want. In a pinch I'd take Kramer's $380,000 salary plus $114,000 bonus four months into a job she was botching. But what I really want is to be premier. Talk about a job where you get away with stuff.

Remember how Dalton McGuinty started off promising not to raise taxes, then imposed a health care tax he lied was a premium, promptly flopped his flip when he realized he hadn't checked out the fine print in public sector labour contracts about such premiums, and won the next election. In which he shamelessly blasted his main opponent for supporting sectarian schools to which he sent his own kids and where his wife works and not one drop of his own mud flew back and hit him. Amazing.

As the Globe and Mail reported Wednesday, when the CEO and chairman of eHealth both resigned, Premier McGuinty intoned "The buck stops with me," and declared an end to outrageous untendered contracts. Yet it seems he personally ordered the hiring of Kramer without the usual competitive process, a detail he smoothly omitted when, effortlessly adopting that look of wounded integrity that fits him like an oily second skin, he took charge in the name of the outraged citizens of blah blah blah. (He now denies seeing the warnings senior bureaucrats sent to his office about her not knowing enough to do the job.)

I'm not saying I want to be Dalton McGuinty. Like many successful politicians, he too often reminds me of C.S. Lewis's appalling portrait in That Hideous Strength of John Wither, Deputy Director of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE), who over many years perfected a rhetorical and intellectual style so automatically genial, equivocal, reassuring yet vaguely menacing that his spirit could roam through dark places while his brain and body conducted everyday business in its absence. And I recognize that Mr. McGuinty's job carries drawbacks, like the forced smile as you shake hands with people you despise (including me on more than one occasion but then I had to do it too and my molars still hurt).

Still, I wish I knew how they did it. Imagine being well-paid, fawned over and taken seriously for years without the ghost of a hint of accountability. It just doesn't happen in my job. So tell me, please: How do I get one of those lavish, untendered ones where ducking blame is a key qualification and I can expense a muffin?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Hamas wants to enter a film at the Cannes Film Festival. No prize for guessing its central theme of death-to-you-know-who, or whether men and women had to sit separately at the Gaza première. But will the usual suspects win the Palme d'Or in appeasement by letting the film in and even praising it?

I'm currently making my way through the first volume of Winston Churchill's history of the Second World War, The Gathering Storm, a chilling account of the spineless fatuity of western elites in the face of Hitler's growing aggression. It's so dismal I wondered if I could stand to read this story if I didn't know how, against all odds, it ended well. To test this, I picked up Bruce Bawer's book Surrender, a chilling account of the spineless fatuity of western elites in the face of Islamists' growing aggression. It was frightening and discouraging.

For one thing, given the current state of discussion, I probably need to pre-empt criticism by saying Bawer is gay. He's not your typical backward-right-wing-easy-to-caricature bad person. But he has opened his eyes to Islamists' grotesque hostility to homosexuality (which, he notes, carries the death penalty in five Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia and Iran). And with them wide open, he stares in horror at the bewilderingly obtuse attempts of multiculturalist, gay-friendly, feminist progressives to ignore the scope and toxicity of radical Islam. Consider a poll he cites: 36 per cent of young British Muslims want Muslims who convert to another faith killed. OK, so 64 per cent didn't express this opinion out loud to pollsters. But imagine the reaction if a survey found similar numbers for, say, American Jews or Canadian Christians. Picture the angry headlines, scornful punditry and grovelling by establishment clerics and politicians.

Grovelling. There's the rub. Bawer produces an appalling catalogue of how western elites -- academic, cultural and political -- grovel before Islamist threats and abuse. Like French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who in 2002 said Saladin managed to "liberate" Jerusalem from the Crusaders, as though it had not been in Christian hands for centuries before Muslims seized it by force and then sulked for nine centuries over a failed attempt to get it back the same way. If Raffarin did not know this history, he is an appalling ignoramus. If he did, what possible combination of moral and mental defects can explain his grovelling?

Bawer presents an amazing series of examples, while Churchill, in The Gathering Storm, catalogues his efforts during the 1930s to warn about Britain's weakness and Germany's growing strength, and to challenge the incredibly foolish conventional wisdom. For instance, when the British government surrendered key naval bases to the Irish Republic in 1938, The Times of London blithered that it "releases the Government of ... the onerous and delicate task of defending" those bases "in the event of a war." Of course, it really meant dangerously longer routes for escort vessels protecting convoys from the dreadful U-boat menace. Attempting to combat this tide of soothing fatuity was, Churchill wrote, "like being smothered by a feather bed."

Today there are some sharp bits in the mattress, like agonizingly politically correct human rights tribunals keen to sweep away ancient, western, bourgeois patriarchal liberties like a fair trial at the behest of our jihadist enemies. But it was hard in the 1930s too; Malcolm Muggeridge got fired as a journalist for exposing Stalin's famine and Churchill was kept out of office from 1929 until 1940.

I'm no Churchill or even a Muggeridge. But I appeal to readers to put The Gathering Storm and Surrender side by side and wonder what's the matter with our elites. (Bruce Bawer will also be speaking in Ottawa on Sept. 14 at the invitation of the Free Thinking Film Society.)

Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once called modern liberalism "an extreme mental aberration best described by the Russian saying: that it is like a dog in reverse because it barks at its own folks and wags its tail in front of a stranger." Too harsh? Then ask yourself why so many progressive activists, respectable pundits and left-of-centre politicians are far more upset about Guantanamo Bay than about Saudis executing gays or clitorectomy. Better yet, ask them. It seems disquietingly similar to people calling Churchill a warmonger in the 1930s while ignoring Hitler and praising Stalin.

I grant that as a political program Islamism has a fatal flaw: It can no more govern successfully than Bolshevism or, I expect, Nazism. Over time such regimes would probably, like the U.S.S.R., collapse due to internal contradictions. But look at the dreadful human cost of the Soviet experiment, and of waiting until the last moment to stop Hitler. Why run such risks and pay such prices? Neither caution nor honest error are adequate explanations for what Churchill and Bawer catalogue.

Why, then, this disgusting urge to grovel before those who hate us? The Cannes committee may yet show steel and hurl that Hamas movie back into the filthy abyss. I'm afraid we'll see gold instead, glittering but soft.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Dear Queen Person,

OK, OK, technically I'm meant to call you Your Majesty or Your Highness or something else decorous, humble and traditional possibly including Queen of Canada. But this being the age of self-esteem I just wouldn't feel validated doing that. Despite which I did sort of want to congratulate you for getting a bunch of arrogant pundits to apologize in writing because they didn't see the recession coming. How ever did you do it?

Yes, I read the news stories saying you went to the London School of Economics in the fall and asked "Why did nobody notice it?" What I don't get is how this obvious, mildly phrased query could induce the British Academy to assemble a panel of expert academics, public servants, journalists, politicians to discuss the question. I'm even more flummoxed that the panel resulted in a letter to your Queenship summarizing the discussion, signed by a member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee and an eminent historian, which said "the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis and to head it off, while it had many causes, was principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole" then blamed "wishful thinking combined with hubris."

I realize the letter also offered a variety of excuses and a cloud of defensive rhetoric about people who did predict trouble. But hey, this is 2009. What really counts is that in the end the authors came semi-clean. Getting the chattering classes to admit the obvious is no small feat nowadays.

As I began drafting this note, it crossed my mind that monarchists out there would peddle nonsense about the advantages of that system. They might even babble that when prestige and honour attach to a hereditary office rather than its current occupant it can evoke humility without grovelling in others and elevation without arrogance in the holder, who after all knows that they have the job because of pure luck (maybe not even the good kind; you could discuss with the Prince of Wales whether his life would have been easier if he'd been born Chuck Windsor in Croyden). But I crossed that thought out. I mean, hey, in this day and age?

After all, I'm meant to feel good about myself, right, and humility is a real pain. Like deference and manners and all that rubbish. In fact one thing I really like about democracy is how the politicians always tell me I'm special and should get whatever I want. Granted, they don't always act like it, but I sure like hearing it.

It was quite an achievement to extract this letter for all its failings. It was probably even good for the pundits. J.R.R. Tolkien once said tipping your hat to the squire might be bad for the squire but it was dashed good for you, or words to that effect. Rather pointless advice when we don't even wear hats anymore except backwards where it's hard to grasp the brim. But maybe we could try doffing our ear buds or some such.

Indeed, were we to interrupt the steady stream of technologically advanced overstimulation now giving us attention-deficit issues, we might in the ensuing silence observe something odd. It is possible to yell that pundits are fools, or slam politicians for defining the term "fool" in new and remarkable ways at every occasion. It is possible to write arid treatises on the unforeseeability of the economic future due to the transcomputability of zzzzzz. I've done both. But what is very hard to do is get anywhere by either route.

It's easy to annoy or stupefy people with the right sort of prose. But it's hard to change their ideas. Besides, what Your Queenliness achieved in this business was above all a triumph of manners not of intellect. You made pundits admit a huge, hideous, embarrassing error politely, clearly and humbly. That's weird. In fact it's anachronistic.

There's the rub, isn't it? Everybody knows monarchs are offensive, elitist, undemocratic and, trump in an age of progress, out-of-date. How then can Your Majesty have managed to elicit such a refreshing outburst of good behaviour by raising an eyebrow instead of your voice?

While I'm at it, how do you manage to look so sensible in a world where, to admit the obvious, so many people spend so much time, money and effort looking ridiculous and arrogant including pundits and people with ear buds, fashion models, teenagers, politicians, journalists and so on.

We're so cutting edge and you're so behind the times. It just doesn't make sense. But there it is, and I have to write to you and admit it. In the words of the old deodorant ad, anything less would be uncivilized.

P.S. We're sorry we made fun of your hats.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

'Make next stop Mars, Apollo astronauts say" was Tuesday's headline. Gad, I thought. How time flies. Can it really be 10 years since the 30th anniversary of the discovery that the moon is a dull place not worth visiting?

Mind you, I was a bit dismayed to learn last week that NASA had erased its video footage of the original mission. I mean, of all the people you wouldn't expect to say "Moon schmoon" NASA is right up there with the League of Poetasters. (Since you ask, a poetaster is a mediocre poet, the sort whom moon-June-spoon causes to swoon and who writes country tunes rhyming "night" with "hold me tight" as if it had not been tried and found wanting. Like space exploration.)

Where was I? Ah, yes. The moon landing is one of those hallmarks, the first public event people of a certain generation remember and I am in that generation.

It was a bit of a shock that NASA not only erased the tapes of my youth off some obsolete medium, but as a bulk job in a fit of such absent-mindedness they forgot they'd done it. If I'd been to the moon I'm pretty sure I'd remember it and keep the photos. Even though other than the famous Earthrise shot they're not really worth hauling out and looking at.

Let me not seem utterly prosaic here. I would be somewhat disappointed with human beings if they had not made some sort of effort to poke around up there. But in a further attempt not to seem prosaic let me add that if we had not gone and found nothing it would have left a lot more to the imagination. In my favourite science fiction, C.S. Lewis's Perelandra trilogy, his vision of the Martian canals is as beautiful as his aquatic Venus and both, I assure you, dramatically exceed the reality in every way.

You'd better take my word for it regarding Venus unless dissolving in 900 degree sulphuric acid is on your list of things to do before you die ... like right before. And if anyone does go to Mars they have as much chance of swimming in the canals as Neil Armstrong did of getting served green cheese by the man in the moon.

One proposal that turned up this week was to send a man to Mars even though we could not bring him back. Apparently we could dump supplies periodically and keep taunting him with the prospect of more colonists showing up eventually but that would be about it.

Yeah, sure, supply drops to Mars. What could possibly go wrong? Aside from the mysterious loss of signals, crashes, malfunctions on the surface and everything else that has happened to Mars landers so far except an alien incubating inside you then bursting revoltingly from your belly. The truth is, a trip to Mars strikes me as presenting only dull hazards. The victim's main excitement would be seeing if toenails grow more slowly in lower gravity and anxiously scanning the headlines for impending space program budget cuts.

Try to follow me here: Moon = grey dust, Mars = Red dust. That's space for you. Basically empty. Void. Hence the name. Even renaming it "Dust" would represent PR audacity to dwarf Leif Erikson's "Greenland" branding ploy.

In the first Perelandra book, Out of the Silent Planet, the hero does make one startling "discovery" that is true and, once mentioned, obvious. Between Earth and Mars he realizes space, far from being dark, is in a state of permanent noon because the sun is always shining.

That observation gave me pause. I mean sure, the sun shines on the planets and a good thing too, at least as far as Earth is concerned. We'd look silly and very cold without it. But there's a kind of weird exuberant abundance in ol' Sol pumping out the rays with equal intensity in every direction.

What I'm getting at is that space makes a lavish and exotic setting for the jewel called Earth. But I wouldn't want to live there and it's not a nice place to visit. OK, I'd cheer if someone actually did make the trip and came back saying "Ha ha, we went to Mars, what a dump." But the idea that there's some relevant collective purpose to such travel is silly.

Indeed, in Out of the Silent Planet Lewis's hero takes dead aim at the idea we should colonize space so that once Earth is trashed humans can live a bit longer somewhere else. Like so many visionary schemes, it's an attempt to get rich by piling up counterfeit bills. If billions of individual lives here on Earth don't somehow amount to a worthwhile endeavour, a few million more on some far less attractive and hospitable ball of rock and gas and blazing hot acid is hardly going to do the trick. And if they do, it will have more to do with Lewis's imaginary space than the real one.

So yeah, way to visit the moon. But if you want Mars, I say curl up on a moonlit night and crack open the Perelandra trilogy.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It seems the wise Latina woman is getting canny as well. Barack Obama's U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor just assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that "The task of a judge is not to make the law -- it is to apply the law." Can we run that by Canadian judges?

Uh, no. We don't do that messy vulgar confirmation thing here. It's all arranged behind closed doors, where elite lawyers quietly discuss with other elite lawyers which elite lawyers should be given untrammelled authority to overrule the public, periodically emerging to assure us that the result is commodious and fine. Like our Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin warning us in 2003 not to inject "partisan politics" into the appointment process because we want "individuals who embody the most valuable qualities of impartiality, empathy and wisdom. From where I sit, the current judiciary in Canada meets the highest standards in this respect." Mirror, mirror on the wall...

Sotomayor committed a similar gaffe in a 2001 lecture, saying "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Other such remarks, plus her appeals court record in favour of affirmative action, created worries that she rules on race and gender instead of just the law. But under the American system, public scrutiny has forced her to backpedal.

Of course her repentance may not be entirely sincere. But it is nice that she was obliged to address the subject. Especially because she then felt compelled to endorse without qualification the Republican stand in favour of judicial restraint.

It is a position that, in principle, nearly everyone shares. The famous English statesman and judicial commentator Edward Coke insisted in 1608 that "A good judge does nothing by his own whim, nor by the suggestion of his own will, but pronounces according to statutes and laws." Radical utilitarian Jeremy Bentham wanted judges to swear not "on any occasion to substitute any particular will of my own, to the will of the Legislature, even in such cases, if any, where the provisions of the law may appear to me inexpedient..."

Victorian constitutional expert Albert Venn Dicey said "The duty of a Court, in short, is not to remedy a particular grievance, but to determine whether an alleged grievance is one for which the law supplies a remedy." And Thomas Jefferson issued dyspeptic blasts against activist judges for "ingulfing insidiously" and creating a "despotic branch."

The academic school of "critical legal studies" may say law, like all political economy, is simply a matter of Lenin's "who-whom", a raw power struggle in which every argument is just an excuse (including, presumably, their own). But judges are least likely to admit to this view when they are most obviously acting on it.

Which they far too often are. The U.S. Supreme Court notoriously declared in 1965 that "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations" that let sufficiently enlightened judges give you unlimited sexual freedom; it even turned out the Founding Fathers had put abortion in there without realizing it because they were hicks. And in Canada courts pluck prodigies like gay marriage out of thin air and dare us to object.

Since U.S. courts pioneered such shenanigans you might wonder why American-style hearings are worth the air they're printed on. I offer two reasons. First, what judges are obliged to say during confirmation may influence their subsequent conduct especially if their colleagues remind them of it in private. Second, such hearings let citizens and politicians engage the broad question whether the judiciary is fulfilling its own functions or usurping those of the other branches.

Of course if we held such hearings for our Supreme Court appointees the process might well be subject to the same centralized control as almost everything else MPs do, and thus turn into the usual partisan Punch and Judy show. But I'd prefer an ill-mannered discussion to none at all, especially given the growing power of courts in Canada.

In 2003, praising our appointments process, Chief Justice McLachlin boasted that on our Supreme Court "one can't really identify anybody for political reasons, left, right, or whatever." Especially whatever, since about the only information the public gets is that potential justices belong to a closed elite with very high opinions of themselves and their mandate and, one suspects, correspondingly low opinions of the rest of us.

Still, as a wise Latina woman once remarked, it is the job of judges to enforce law not create it. I'd like to hear it said here too.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Back in 1289, English king Edward I had just two pounds, 13 shillings, eight and a half pence in the bank. But it just goes to show how dumb people were back then. Why, today, the state of Ohio has a rainy day fund that contains fully 89 cents. And Dalton McGuinty just spent a quarter-billion dollars on video games even though Ontario's projected deficit recently surged from $14.1 to $18.5 billion.

Sorry, what am I saying, spent? He called his massive 10-year subsidy to Ubisoft to put a big development studio in Toronto "investing." And you can write the rest of the press release yourself: Bringing high-tech facilities to Toronto will "build a high wage and a high standard of living ... we're building Ontario's economy now and for the future." It is, to be sure, a violation of the free-trade principles we hold so dear when Americans engage in protectionism. But what's a little principle to the high-tech economy of the future?

Of course, when you get careless with principle there is a small matter of interest. Right now it's just 10 cents in every dollar of provincial spending. But give these guys a chance. Back when Bob Rae suddenly ran a $10-billion deficit, Maclean's called a $78-billion Ontario debt "staggering." It's about to roar past $174 billion next year on its way to nearly $210 billion by 2011-12. If that's investing, I'd hate to see borrowing. But don't worry. I will.

Given these numbers I ask again, why did Dalton McGuinty just spend a quarter of a billion dollars on video games? Doesn't he get enough excitement out of spreadsheets? The short answer is that once you start recklessly spending billions you ain't got, what's another $263 million? Heck, Queen's Park spends that much every 21 hours. Whee! Cackle! Whoosh!

The long answer is that Dalton McGuinty has learned nothing except the fine art of spin. Back when Trudeau was cool it was widely believed that governments had greater foresight than the private sector, so they should undertake massive investments for the long-term good of the economy. Very few people now admit to believing such a thing. But they still apparently think it, since when the recession hit governments lost no opportunity to revert to exactly that sort of behaviour, and voters seem happy with it.

It's very frustrating to watch and not just because those IOUs have my name on them (plus yours and everyone else struggling to make ends meet). It's also frustrating because, in the past third of a century or so (I count from the Fraser Institute opening its doors and its mouth in 1975) we who defend free markets have won the battle of ideas. It just hasn't translated into policy.

This hurts. Not only my wallet or my amour-propre, although I do try to keep that nice and shiny. It hurts because I'm convinced that ideas matter, that they are the main driver of historical change. And it revolts me to see them bounce off the enviably pristine, adamantine, impenetrable self-satisfaction of our premier. Especially ideas as fundamental, straightforward and vindicated by experience as those McGuinty insouciantly brushes off between raids on the treasury.

Here's how simple it really is. The company he has lured to Toronto with this walloping subsidy can now lose up to $263 million in the next decade and still make a profit for its employees and shareholders. Of course, McGuinty portrays this company as the surest of sure-fire things and he would know, he's a politician. But if it's so dang sure-fire, it doesn't need a subsidy to make a profit. And if he's somehow mistaken, it doesn't deserve one. After all, someone's got to pay that money on top of the other $113 billion they're planning to spend next year. Because spend and spin is the name of their game.

Last March the McGuinty Liberals were trying to figure out how to spend a $5-billion windfall. Now they're trying to figure out how to spend a $18.5-billion shortfall. Don't worry. They're way smart. They'll do it. They've hiked program spending seven per cent a year since 2001. Unlike medieval kings, they don't have to worry about parliament. Heck, they own parliament.

Incidentally, in the 14th century Edward I's grandson, Edward III, got so broke he had to pawn the crown jewels. But he got them back. I wouldn't count on some Dalton III getting back the car or video game subsidies. Our rulers are way too clever to have assets. All they have is "investments" that, frankly, I'd trade for Ohio's 89 cents.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Apparently Marie Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake." Rather, "Qu'ils mangent les brioches" was a one-insult-fits-all piece of French political folklore pinned to any member of the ruling class who was considered drastically out of touch with the lives of regular folks. Which brings me, of course, to striking workers in Toronto.

Out of touch? The willingness of Toronto municipal employees to bury residents of Canada's largest city in stinky trash during the hottest part of the year if they aren't paid off might seem grimly realistic, especially respecting the concept of "extortion." They clearly understand that their employer cannot go bankrupt in the normal sense, because it can always reach into the pockets of the public and wrench out their cash in the form of taxation, which private firms cannot do unless they somehow persuade the state they are "too big to fail" or something else equally stupid. But the striking workers show little appreciation of "the limits of the possible" or of public patience. And that curious blindness suggests a quite different explanation.

Thomas Sowell, one of whose books neatly phrased the question as Is Reality Optional?, has suggested that beneath partisan and even ideological quarrels lurks a fundamental disagreement as to whether "the limits of the possible" is an important concept or a mean-spirited trick. Some of us consider the world a difficult place in which tradition offers valuable, hard-won lessons about how to keep war, famine and disaster at bay. Others think peace, plenty and harmony are normal and the main source of trouble in the world is deliberate malice on the part of the powerful.

I argue that striking public-sector workers, and their political and intellectual allies, are firmly in the latter camp. They believe that a world of lavish rewards for limited work and belligerent intransigence is well within our reach in every sphere of human activity if only we have the "political will."

In the short run, it seems to be working. Consider the Canada Day story in this newspaper that collective bargaining wage increases in the Ontario public sector were the same in 2008 as 2007 despite the recession, 3.1 per cent on average, while in the private sector they fell from 2.9 to two per cent (below inflation's 2.3 per cent). And according to new Tory leader Tim Hudak, public-sector employment in Ontario has grown 22 per cent since Dalton McGuinty's Liberals were elected in 2003, against just five per cent for the private sector.

The image of plump, rosy-cheeked aristocrats stuffing their faces while the peasants go hungry, and congratulating themselves on their superior moral qualities between mouthfuls of pheasant, springs all too readily to mind here. And not just here. Something big is happening to the welfare state throughout the industrialized democracies.

California is gruesomely broke, while Illinois, Pennsylvania and other states may literally be unable to pay their employees. And in Britain, the Daily Telegraph says: "The state will pay out more in social security benefits than it raises from workers in income tax this year ... by almost £25 billion. Normally, income tax receipts comfortably cover the benefits bill." Yet the British government's obtuse response is to spend more money and hire more public servants, even after the MP expense scandal ignited public rage. It reveals the tragicomic inability of the ruling class, there or here, to alter its behaviour and attitudes in the face of ominous trends blazingly obvious to normal observers.

I must admit that when it comes to the state of public policy in Canada, I have learned not to be optimistic. Canadians put up with obnoxious political rubbish and mistreatment and frequently encourage it by our acquiescence in its intellectual foundations. Even so, I hope and believe public patience is being exhausted by such self-satisfied trough-gobbling given current hard times.

The commoners do appear sulky. For instance on Canada Day, amid the usual bumph about how grand and unknowable Canada is, the Globe and Mail noted that, "Voter turnout in last month's Nova Scotia provincial election dipped to an all-time low." So someone's not too thrilled with the state of public play. Just the citizens, mind you. But the routine appearance of such numbers across Canada, the Anglosphere and western Europe could be mistaken for exactly the sort of warning sign the Ancien Régime should have heeded.

Instead, their arrogant attitude remains: "Qu'ils mangent les poubelles."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]