Can we think about the niqab issue a bit? The answer may be no. We may be either unwilling or unable to make sense of the matter. But as stupidity is undignified let's give it a try.

On Monday a Globe and Mail columnist snootily pronounced Quebec's niqab debate "just more proof, if it were needed, that minority rights should never be left to government". Who does she think should protect them? Corporations? Newts? Space aliens? It is hard to talk sense in such an environment but I am determined to try.

My starting point is that cultural habits matter. I realize this contention is itself controversial. Some people, including me, say culture is a set of working tools.

And when we encounter a widespread habit, we ask what this particular tool is for and how well it works. Others say cultural habits do not matter, that superficial differences in the ways we do things have no more bearing on what we do, who we are or what we're like than the colour we happen to paint our house.

To these people the basic analogy is the belief, popular in my youth, that Eskimos rubbed noses instead of kissing. I do not believe they did any such thing even before they became Inuit (illustrating, incidentally, that multiculturalists do not believe what they say, since their response to a cultural habit of using inappropriate ethnic terms is anything but tolerant).

No doubt many things are superficial. Two men holding hands in Ottawa are likely to be gay whereas in Saudi Arabia they are just good friends. But not all cultural differences are trivial; if two men in Saudi Arabia were thought to be gay they would face lynching or execution.

Given that grisly reality, some multiculturalists give the nihilistic response that while cultures clearly do differ we are in no position to pass judgment on how others conduct their affairs. To which I retort that if you can't see that clitorectomies are horribly wrong you are a dim-witted accessory to evil.

So before we continue, please take a pencil and paper and make a list of all the people who cover their faces in interactions with others.

I get the Ku Klux Klan, holdup men, terrorists and riot instigators. Notice anything about this list? Right. All of them are denying the humanity of those with whom they interact. The purpose of covering the face is not remotely comparable to the purpose of covering the hair. It is to establish a gulf across which normal moral links do not bind us.

It is not immediately obvious to me whether the niqab is designed to deny my humanity, hers or both. But I am equally unwilling to tolerate any of these. And by that I do mean I want it banned.

To begin with, on practical grounds, governments not only can, but must, require people to identify themselves in a wide variety of settings. Even a speeding ticket requires the officer to verify the person behind the wheel is who they claim to be. And to demand the state furnish a female police officer lest a man's gaze should soil a woman is to require my government to sanction an invidious separation between the sexes.

As to non-state interactions, I would normally insist the state has no business regulating dress unless it impairs a legitimate state function, is obscene or is so odd as to be either threatening or dangerously distracting to motorists (the legal offense of "stunting"). But hiding your face, unless you're a mascot or playing some other immediately identifiable role, isn't like wearing a turban or a hijab. It's dehumanizing, on purpose.

If I were free to respond by refusing to sell to, hire, or speak to a person who scorned to let me see their face I might be willing to leave the matter there. But the nanny state has raised the stakes. Under modern law, to shun a person is to invite a human rights complaint, so we either ban the niqab or ban any display of distaste for it. I say ban the niqab.

If that sounds unfair, tell me what the niqab is for. Why would you cover not only a woman's face but even her hands? Is it so other tribes cannot tell if she's young and worth abducting? If so, I tell you bluntly we don't steal women here. Nor do we mutilate their genitals, marry three at once (pending the next zany court ruling), kill them for having boyfriends, wed them before they're adults or make them go around with bags on their heads.

So never mind a haughty "This is my culture" with an unspoken "you dirty kafir" after it. Tell me: Why the niqab? Is it because she will be defiled by my gaze, or because I will?

I warn you in advance I'm not accepting either answer. But I defy you to produce another.

And if you demand that we accommodate behaviour you're not even willing to explain, my answer is No.

In this country we employ reason. And despite what you may sometimes see in newspapers, we would be ashamed not to.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

When a bunch of people gathered in Montreal last weekend to figure out what Canadian political liberalism is, it presented a paradox. You'd only go if you knew you were a liberal. But if you don't know what liberalism is, how can you tell you are one?

I'm not criticizing the conference. It was thoroughly justified, politically and intellectually, by the maxim that if you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up somewhere else. I just think Liberals should also ponder the deeper point that if you don't know who you are, it might be somebody else there in the mirror.

Whoever it is, it's not a classical liberal. But I don't want any libertarians shouting "Stop thief" respecting the label. It will distract us from discussing what liberalism is, why its program has changed since Victoria ruled India, and what nevertheless lies at its core.

I submit that the essence of liberalism is liberation. Liberation from specific restraints in specific circumstances, certainly. But a more general endorsement of Rousseau's "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains."

And liberalism in this country has another traditional quality that, while less central, is very important to the current project. Unlike their colleagues in many countries, Canadian Liberals have consistently fought the socialists politically and intellectual because, ironically, of a favourite saying of socialist icon Tommy Douglas: "The trouble with socialists is that they let their bleeding hearts go to their bloody heads."

In my view the rebirth of Canadian liberalism must start here, with the hard heads. Back in 2005, a famous Canadian-born Harvard professor sternly reminded the federal Liberal biennial convention that Liberals know how to say "No." I say that means no to special interests, to voters, and to their own bad ideas, wrong impulses or mistaken paths. Especially as you must be tough-minded about where you've been to see where you should be going.

Here's where you've been. First, 19th century classical liberals identified Rousseau's chains with feudal restraints on economic freedom. Politically they succeeded in removing most barriers to freedom of contract but it didn't work out metaphysically even if it did make us all much richer.

Early 20th-century interventionist liberals then decided the main chain was material want. Politically they succeeded in creating massive social programs but that didn't work out metaphysically and it's not doing well fiscally either.

Finally, late 20th-century social liberals decided, on the analogy of the civil rights movement, that the chains keeping us from authentic freedom were primarily those of social exclusion. Now if you liberals are comfortable with the prissy tone and coercive apparatus of political correctness, I have nothing more to say to you except you clearly don't know how to say no to dangerous foolishness.

So before we continue, gaze hard into the mirror and ask how the person looking back at you feels about Ann Coulter being silenced at the University of Ottawa.

I grant that she's obnoxious. But if you believe a university can be dedicated to the pursuit of truth and at the same time create a "safe space" where no militant progressive ever hears a discouraging word, with unruly crowds as the enforcement mechanism, you have no use for ideas anyway.

Otherwise, let's revisit Rousseau's "chain" issue. I presume none of you now think that dramatically reducing state intervention might knock off mankind's fetters. But are you tough-minded enough to admit that the current welfare state is holding us back from creative policy, and blighting lives, by costing too much and delivering too little?

Remember, in your glory days Liberals didn't break the bank in pursuit of social justice. Instead you fended off the NDP with fiscal prudence and the Conservatives with compassion. (And if you can truly get spending under control while the Tories wallow in red ink, you will once again consign those hapless chumps to the political wilderness the way you used to.)

What, then, of social justice? Well, if big social programs are working badly at excessive cost, you need to do a much better job of identifying specific social "choke points" keeping people from fulfilling their potential, and slashing what doesn't work. Pension reform obviously commands your attention. But so does education reform, health care reform, welfare reform and smaller, smarter economic intervention.

I'm not saying it will be easy. I'm not even saying it's possible.

I personally endorse Aleksandr Herzen's tart retort to Rousseau's dream of transforming human existence: "Fish were born to fly, yet everywhere they swim." But that's a topic for a conference on Canadian Conservative political thought.

Speaking of paradoxes.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Barack Obama won a dramatic, unexpected political victory on health care this week. Even in partisan terms it might be wise to withhold congratulations until November 2. But here's the question I want to ask: When's the last time a major government program did what it was supposed to do, or cost what it was supposed to cost?

I concede that it's a political triumph. The president got a bill passed that looked doomed and emerged looking more like a leader. And I won't quibble that his vaunted non-partisanship came down to a House of Representatives vote in which not one single Republican supported his health-care bill. We have political parties because people disagree on fundamental issues, and it is as undesirable for politicians to deprive voters of important choices by ganging up on us as it is unlikely, given their propensity to squabble. But it doesn't much matter.

What matters is the policy question: Why do we think this bill will work the way it's meant to? I am constantly amazed at the way the American and Canadian chattering classes plow ahead with one government initiative after another on the assumption that it will, if enacted, perform as advertised. Why do we think that?

Here the tendency of journalists to put their liberal partisanship ahead of their professional duties is a significant obstacle to clarity.

"Obama signs historic health-care legislation," they gush. "Barack Obama was able to make history ... a milestone that will change the face and character of this country ... assures him of a legacy".

This rush to judgment is unseemly and unhelpful.

In a revealing lead sentence in Tuesday's Globe and Mail, John Ibbitson wrote "Canadians love to disparage America's privately funded health care, just as conservative Americans love to slag Canada's public system." Shoving aside his casual assumption that all Canadians love to disparage America's system, while only conservative Americans slag ours, what can he mean by saying the United States has a "privately funded" system? Is it really a secret that more than half of every health care dollar in the United States comes from one level of government or another, and only 12 cents from patients?

His article continued: "But beyond all the name calling, this much is true: Congress dedicated the better part of a year in search of a way to 'bend the curve' on health-care costs. In Canada, however, the curve keeps climbing, because politicians would rather not talk about it."

Once again his assumption is that because Americans talked about containing costs, and passed a bill that promises to do so, the result is assured or at least likely. I beg to differ.

While star-struck journalists were hailing this bill as on a par with civil rights, social security or Medicare, I was researching the latter and found this nasty tidbit: When created in 1965, Medicare was projected to cost $3.2 billion dollars a year. But it cost $4.2 billion its first year, $7.1 billion by 1970 and $18 billion by 1975 with its sibling Medicaid costing as much again. By 1989 the two combined were costing $76 billion and by 2004, $606 billion. So much for cost projections.

As for effectiveness, it was precisely the catastrophic failure of these brilliant landmarks that made Obamacare so urgent in the minds of liberal politicians and reporters. And this is no fluke; as far as I can see big government social programs invariably cost way more than they were meant to and deliver way less.

Can you name one, here or in the United States, with which progressives are now happy? Can you tell me one significant social problem that was solved by a government program? And yet rhetorical outrage at the inadequacy of existing measures is invariably accompanied by unguarded praise for the next big thing. Why? Do we never learn?

If Obamacare should prove as expensive and ineffective as its predecessors I would argue that it's a bad thing even if it makes the president look good and lets his party hold both Houses of Congress in November. It's also distinctly possible that the whole thing is unconstitutional; at least 14 states have filed suit against the bill on the grounds that no one can locate the passage in the United States Constitution that authorizes the federal government to require individuals to purchase health insurance.

If American courts turn out not to share the journalistic contempt for "Tea Party" activists as gun-slinging bigots, it will serve only to revitalize the limited government movement. And while such an outcome would constitute a historic development and a legacy for Barack Obama, it wouldn't quite fit the narrative on this week's front pages.

Let's not summon the stone masons to the Washington Mall just yet.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It seems the Obama administration has finally found itself the sort of mishandled foreign policy problem without which no agonizing political tailspin is complete, a dispute with Israel over housing in East Jerusalem that comforts their enemies, alarms their friends and annoys voters. Now it only remains to be seen how cluelessly they will thrash their way through it. You can't get into a crisis like the one that erupted during Vice-President Joe Biden's visit last Tuesday without some preparatory blunders, particularly intellectual. And President Obama and his advisers started with a howler that, being tiresomely familiar, offered no hope of a creative exit when it failed again.

They assumed everyone in the Middle East wants peace except, perhaps, their own beleaguered democratic ally, and everyone but their ally is behaving suitably. So they pressured Israel for concessions that could only be read on the other side as feeble-minded weakness, an approach the Israelis have sensibly long since discarded.

The White House also set its sights too high in this troubled region. American presidents habitually crave a Middle Eastern peace breakthrough as their crowning foreign policy triumph. And maybe Mr. Obama wants another Nobel Peace Prize. But there is no Middle East peace process so he can't move it along by being so transparently great.

He seems not to have read the relevant history, another key ingredient in a diplomatic disaster. Ever since the 1920s, Jews/Israelis and western powers have been offering compromise settlements, every one of which the brilliant Arab leadership has contemptuously rejected. After a period of developments unfavourable to the Arab position, sometimes gradual and sometimes militarily spectacular, they have been offered another compromise which they have again waved off with belligerent disgust.

The Arab political class may uneasily sense, after 90 years or so, that each compromise offer is less attractive than the one before. But they can't seem to grasp that their position keeps deteriorating because they are neither willing to settle for what is now available nor able to improve their situation between bouts of negotiation, and this pattern is likely to continue. But it is; whatever Israel builds on is probably off the negotiating table next time, and as long as no real talks take place the building will continue.

So what does Barack Obama bring to all this? Perhaps the objection that the construction is on disputed territory. But as George Jonas wrote in Wednesday's National Post: "Every inch of Israel is disputed. That's what the Middle East conflict is about." Does the Obama administration grasp this point? And do they, in any case, really think they can take over Israeli housing policy? If they don't know that Washington has been objecting to such housing construction since 1967 in vain, they must be bigger fools even than they seem.

Of course as soon as the White House started yelling at Israel, the Palestinians went into stone-throwing mode. But that causes Israelis to become more intransigent and makes persistent American pressure on Israel seem either naive or malicious. If the Americans did not see this coming, they must be bigger fools even than they seem. But if they did, what's their plan for managing the short-term spat with Israel? As a leading Republican commented of Woodrow Wilson's feckless blundering into the First World War, in diplomacy you must not "shake your fist at a man and then shake your finger at him."

At first Israel's ambassador to Washington appeared to have blundered in calling the dispute "a crisis of historic proportions." He now denies the remarks, but it may have been a clever trap. For the Americans to endorse his words meant admitting they had somehow blown up their relationship with Israel over nothing. But to deny it was to back down, which they did. "I don't buy that," said Hillary Clinton. "We have an absolute commitment to Israel's security." Then the administration shook its finger, cancelling a visit by a Mideast envoy the Israelis probably didn't want to hear demand unilateral concessions from them anyway.

This combination of ill-preparedness and fatuous illusion is about as efficient a way of blundering into foreign policy disaster as the copious inventiveness of man has discovered at any point in history. And it works great domestically too.

Back in January I expressed surprise at "how badly Barack Obama is doing, in polls and by proxy in elections ... without yet having a major foreign policy disaster." Now he seems to have found one, tailor-made to alienate a vast slice of Middle America by appearing disloyal to friends, spineless in the face of aggression, and laughably confused.

How dumb can they get? Stay tuned; these guys are good.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Dalton McGuinty has solved our health care problems again. How many times is that?

This time the idea is to replace global budgets for hospitals with a "Health Based Allocation Model" (H-BAM) that will apparently send money to hospitals serving growing and aging populations and also, as the Globe and Mail reports, give hospitals "additional money based on how cost-effectively they treat patients." Hey, efficiency. Why didn't I think of that?

This is a definite case of "If I could walk like that, I wouldn't have to work for a living." If the Ontario government knew how to direct funds to hospitals that treat patients cost-effectively, do you not think they would have done it before now?

Actually it's "If I could stagger like that" because when Ontario health minister Deb Matthews tried to explain the throne speech proposal that "for more and more services -- money will follow the patient," it went badly.

"We know," she told reporters, "that rural hospitals, hospitals in smaller communities will (still) need the global budget because of the nature of the care they provide, but in some of the larger hospital budgets, as we transition to more patient-based payments, we're going to be able to drive those efficiencies." You go, girl. Drive those efficiencies. Uh, where's the steering wheel?

Don't ask George Smitherman, who's now threatening to do for Toronto what he did for health care in Ontario as minister from 2003-2008 (earning the moniker "Furious George" not "Effective George," you'll note).

And don't ask Matthews, whose muddled interview with Steve Madely on CFRA can be found at www.cfra.com/chum_audio/Deb_Matthews_Mar09.mp3

In fact, don't ask anyone in the political health business. I am astounded to find it's now 11 years since I responded to a federal minister's glassy-eyed declaration that, gosh, he'd like some way to measure health-care outcomes.

I reminded him of the Soviet experience. "Without prices," I wrote on February 19, 1999 "planners are reduced to setting two basic kinds of targets: quantitative and qualitative. In the first, they tell the factory 'Make as many nails as possible' or 'Make at least this many nails' and it does, but the nails are feeble pins. In the second, they say 'Make the sturdiest nails you can' or 'Make nails at least this big' and the factory makes one 60-foot-long nail. When they set window quotas by weight, they got panes of glass too thick to see through. When they switched to quotas in square feet, they got windows so thin they shattered if lifted."

Any questions?

Well, how about: Did they ever find a way to measure outcomes? (No.) Are they about to? (No.) Does anyone remember or care about that initiative? (No.) If you can't measure outcomes, how are you going to direct money to cost-efficient hospitals? (Um duh dawk.) Say, aren't you currently trying to switch doctors from fee-for-service to global budgeting? (What? Are we?)

There is no reason to believe any of these questions were ever raised in the inner councils of the Ontario government, where the solution to major difficulties is to ignore them or, when cornered, make patently untrue statements in a tone of sober responsibility. Consider the throne speech claim that "In Ontario, no one who gets sick is turned away." Then what's a waiting list? Or what about being stashed in a hospital corridor and turned away from treatment happening elsewhere in the building?

It is impossible to tell whether McGuinty knows such soothing sentiments to be false or even recalls what that term means. But the style is mentally poisonous.

Consider his post-throne speech comment to reporters about the gaping $24.7-billion deficit: "We don't want to compromise our future by moving to balance the budget too quickly." Who on Earth, or beyond the asteroid belt, worried that the Premier might balance the budget too quickly, or believed he had any clue how to do so if that malevolent impulse somehow seized him? What honour, or value, is there left in pouring out oily reassurances on false issues, while dodging the crucial question whether he knows his arm from a tree branch about managing large, complex, ruinously expensive government programs?

When George Smitherman was health minister, I got to tell him the old Soviet joke about what would happen if the Soviet Union invaded the Sahara ("For 25 years, nothing; then a sand shortage"). He was not amused. I'm finding it less funny since the throne speech confessed "20 years ago, 32 cents of every dollar spent on government programs were spent on health care. Today, it is 46 cents. In 12 years, it could be 70 cents."

It will be even less funny in 12 years when some slick politician announces with obtuse delight that efficiency is the 70-cent solution. And gets re-elected.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The supposed consensus on global warming has melted like a Himalayan glacier in an IPCC report. Scientists are admitting error and apologizing. So what's with the rearguard action by journalists?

We could be burning the last newspaper for warmth and they'd still be warning us about global warming. But now the scientists are admitting they bungled their research and misspoke themselves, don't the reporters and opinion writers on whom so many rely to keep informed also owe the public an apology?

Last month Phil Jones, the University of East Anglia director of climate research who concedes he inexplicably wrote "some very awful e-mails," admitted to the BBC that it may have been hotter during the "Medieval Warm Period" than it is today and there has been no "statistically significant" warming in the last 15 years. I'm not entirely sure why these admissions are noteworthy; after all, trying to hide the Medieval Warm Period is a bit like trying to hide that big hot yellow thing in the sky.

Science, we are constantly told, relies on solid facts, not the rubbish scattered all over the blogosphere. So presumably climate scientists all knew there was no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years and just didn't tell us. As for the Medieval Warm Period, well, we've known for centuries that the Vikings farmed Greenland back then. So why didn't all these scientists object to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) infamous 2001 "hockey stick" graph flatlining temperature over the past 1,000 years?

Inquiring minds want to know: The New York Times admitted this Wednesday that "Grudgingly, many climate scientists are beginning to engage critics, admit mistakes and open up their data" and said scientists "are learning a little humility and trying to make sure they avoid crossing a line into policy advocacy."

Unlike the press. That same New York Times story promptly assured us the public "uproar threatens to undermine decades of work" and that "Some of the most serious allegations against Dr. Jones ... and other researchers have been debunked." And it described the IPCC's critics as "citing several relatively minor errors in its most recent report."

The Associated Press, likewise, claims the IPCC is seeking outside review of its methods because "Critics have found a few unsettling errors, including projections of retreats in Himalayan glaciers, in the thousands of pages of the reports. Scientists say the problems are minor ..."

Hockey stick? What hockey stick? This is not science. It's not even journalism. It is now seven years since two Canadian researchers, Stephen MacIntyre and Ross McKitrick, demolished the "hockey stick" graph, forcing NASA to redo its homework and put Al Gore in the deep freeze because, as Lorne Gunter wrote more than two years ago, "The hottest year since 1880 becomes 1934 instead of 1998, which is now just second; 1921 is third. Four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade ... The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards."

How can reporters assigned to write about the IPCC's credibility problem fail to Google "IPCC hockey stick"? It's called "research." For that matter, why did journalists tell us the IPCC was an "international panel of climate scientists" (New York Times editorial board) when that organization's own website says it's "comprised of government delegations"?

And shouldn't a few opinion writers also be considering an apology on grounds both of content and tone, such as the Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson, who wrote on February 3, 2007 that "There will remain denials about the IPCC report from the fringe ... just as there are those who believe the Earth is flat." And his newspaper's editorial board, which said the same day: "Global-warming skeptics and deniers now find themselves in the company of creationists, flat-Earthers and those who dispute the scientific consensus that HIV is the cause of AIDS."

A week later John Baird, then federal environment minister, assured both David Suzuki and Elizabeth May "I'm not a member of the Flat Earth Society." I'm not so daft as to expect him to apologize for channelling goofy journalism. But what of my Citizen colleague who claimed on November 20, 2007 that the IPCC's "first three reports this year have demolished the credibility of the last of the climate-change skeptics"? Or Toronto talk show host John Moore last October in the National Post: "Time is running out for the global warming deniers"?

We've seen some very awful columns and news stories and I think those who wrote them owe all of us an apology. Then they can do an online search for "medieval warm period."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With a federal budget due Thursday I must harp on government fiscal irresponsibility. Wait a minute. This isn't a harp. It's a pitchfork. Where have you led us?

The Citizen assured us it'll be steady-as-she-sinks for the feds, with "no new spending measures or tax cuts beyond what the Harper government has announced already in its plan to stimulate the economy, says a senior government official." The newspaper reported that the government official's comments "appear to douse speculation the Conservatives are transitioning to a period of serious belt tightening" -- that, despite Treasury Board president Stockwell Day's hints that the government would identify specific programs to be cut, "there will be no absolute spending cuts in the budget" (according, again, to that senior government official.)

Gosh, was that just rube bait?

For added horror, I read this solemn guff in parallel with Benjamin Franklin's mid-18th-century Poor Richard's Almanack maxims. Back then, people were so weird they believed in right and wrong and humility and other age-of-whale-oil barbarities like frugality. Who today would say, "If you'd be wealthy, think of saving, more than of getting: The Indies have not made Spain rich, because her Outgoes equal her Incomes." To be fair, our governments don't seem to be thinking of doing either.

Of course we'll be assured Thursday that in a few years, when the ship of state stops leaking red ink, they'll batten the hatches, trim the sails and get things back in balance. So here's Franklin: "To-morrow you'll reform, you always cry;/ In what far country does this morrow lie?"

Not Europe, that's for sure. It's old news that the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) have ghastly financial problems. But sophisticates have assumed countries like Germany and Britain would bail them out.

Guess again. Germany's deficit is way above the EU's alleged limit. And last week the Daily Telegraph reported: "In surprise news which sent the pound sliding on Thursday, official figures showed that the "British) Government borrowed £4.3 billion last month. It was the first time since 1993 that the public finances had gone into the red in January -- a month in which tax revenues usually push the Exchequer into the black," so Britain's deficit could exceed "even the Chancellor's forecast of a record £178 billion."

I especially like the fact no one saw it coming; in Britain, as here, finance ministers reliably give you 10 highly technical reasons why their predictions can't go wrong and, a month later, 10 equally brainy excuses why they did. As Franklin warned, "There are no fools so troublesome as those that have wit."

Big trouble is coming here. U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates just blasted America's European NATO allies for military feebleness. He's glad they've stopped attacking each other, as are we all. But he called the "demilitarization of Europe -- where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it ... an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace" because it might be "a temptation to miscalculation and aggression" by bad guys.

Europe's democracies have had this problem for ages, hence the unpleasantness over Hitler a few generations back. Bread and circuses leave little for legions. But who is he to talk?

Last week, foreigners dumped a record $53 billion of U.S. government debt, topping April 2009's $44.5 billion, led by geopolitical rival China tossing $34.2 billion. As the Associated Press observed, "The reductions in holdings, if they continue, could force the government to make higher interest payments at a time that it is running record federal deficits." So hear Franklin again, "He that would have a short Lent, let him borrow money to be repaid at Easter."

Mr. Gates' government is running larger deficits than at any time since the Second World War while spending less of GDP on defence than at any time since Pearl Harbor. Such recklessness threatens America's capacity to carry the strategic burden that Europe and Canada have shrugged off. But all Barack Obama and Congress can think of is to spend more, on health, job creation, housing subsidies (again) and anything else with votes in it.

As Franklin said, "Experience keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other." Remember the deficits of the 1980s and early 1990s? And remember when you were a teenager and wanted to do some dumb thing all your friends were doing and your mother asked if they were all jumping off a cliff would you? Apparently if you're a finance minister the answer is yes.

So excuse my harping on this fiscal crisis engulfing Western civilization. It beats singing about responsibility while plucking a pitchfork.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Can our financial problems really be so bad Jim Flaherty can help? The thought inspires panic.

So do the statistics. Apparently Canadian families took recent hard times as the ideal opportunity to make their own situation dramatically worse in the belief that ... that ... OK, what was the belief? Will someone tell me?

I'll tell you the stats, courtesy of the Vanier Institute on the Family. The average Canadian family's debt rose to $96,100 in 2009, setting a record debt-to-income ratio of 145 per cent. "Faster, Higher, Stronger" is the Olympic motto, not a debt strategy, people. The Institute study sociologized that "some 1.3 million households could have a vulnerable or dangerously high debt service load by 2011."

At the risk of speaking plainly about an important topic, I'd like to quote noted social commentator J.R. "Johnny" Cash: "The county will haul my belongings away, 'cuz I'm busted." Indeed, the Vanier study quoted a recent Canadian Payroll Association study that "59 per cent of Canadian employees report that they would have trouble making ends meet if their pay cheque was delayed by even one week."

I beg to differ. You're having trouble now. Hence the 50 per cent increase in the number of people three months or more behind on their mortgages last year, and 40 percent in those that far behind on their credit cards. And for what?

What is it everyone needs so badly they're putting their future and Canada's in hideous peril? Remember, these are families averaging $66,275 a year and convinced money will buy them happiness if only they can get, or even rent, a bit more.

Our ancestors had candles and homemade clothes and somehow found satisfaction in life. Fifty years ago they had one car running on low-test gas and a black and white TV and when they were bored they read a book. Today we have two incomes, special low-calorie energy drinks and Facebook and Google Buzz and Twitter and MySpace and YouTube and more than 100,000 iPhone apps and we're desperately convinced the next one will transform us into genuinely radiant beings.

A recent MSNBC story asked if we were getting gadget fatigue. I hope so. If the parade of dazzling breakthroughs we've endured in the last 60 years hasn't given us things worth having, it never will. And if not gadget fatigue, how about debt fatigue? Just how atrocious does your balance sheet have to look before you don't need energy drinks because you're completely jittery from swallowing all that red ink?

Heck, you're making me jittery because I just know what's going to happen here. People will ruin their own finances, then insist on a public bailout. And they'll get it, too, even though so many people are going to be so broke that plundering the rest of us won't yield enough booty. We really seem to trust politicians' prudence more than our own. We're that doomed.

People are now cheering because Finance Minister Jim Flaherty slapped tighter controls on mortgages to save us from our own recklessness. So who's going to save us from his? He's running a $55.9 billion deficit on projected revenue of $216.6 billion. Forget a 145 per cent debt-to-income ratio. The feds are already at 236 per cent and his idea of prudence is to pump it up by 25 percentage points a year. And he says you're too stupid to go into the bank by yourself.

Of course he claims his mortgage crackdown "will not affect the ability of a Canadian family to buy a house. It will affect those who are speculating." But he knows his real problem is that someone deliberately lowered the cost of borrowing to stimulate the economy by getting people to buy things they can't afford, including houses. Who was it again? Oh yeah, his government. Dang.

In a blog post the Citizen's Leonard Stern cited the libertarian argument that people's stupid borrowing is their own fault and admitted "Flaherty is trying to legislate virtue," but said "The transaction between a borrower and a lender ceases to be a purely private one when public money is needed to bail out the lender when the borrower walks away." It's not "needed," it's just inevitable, as politicians troll for votes by socializing risk: You get the nice house and taxpayers get the bill if you can't pay.

As usual, politicians created the crisis. But the bigger problem is cultural and we have to fix it by being less greedy. You may not want to imitate my great grandfather's drawer of "bits of string too short to be saved." But they were all paid for. And my father was a tenured university professor whose office desk, to the end of his days, was a door sitting on two filing cabinets. Also fully paid for.

What are you buying on the installment plan? Misery, ruin and bankruptcy all round, with a side of pandering political pontification.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]