An amusing item from the latest Landowner magazine on how government works... or tries to.

Another strange item from my "at last we can begin to live" files: a story in today's National Post says a new GMO potato has been approved for use in Canada that "is less likely to bruise or turn brown when cut." A solution to which, again, I search in vain for the problem. I'm not convinced that all the criticisms made of GMOs are entirely rational. But I do think that when we're messing with nature for reasons as trivial as this one we're risking trouble for nothing.

To be fair the story says the "Innate" potato has less asparagine, and that this "amino acid found in many starchy foods produces acrylamide, suspected to be a human carcinogen" when you cook potatoes above 120 C which many people probably do. But honestly, whose life was really rendered less fulfilling because potatoes turn brown when cut or produce trivial quantities of something "suspected to be a human carcinogen" when cooked?

In the entire history of mankind, how many lives have been lost because of the difference between the quantity of asparagine in a natural potato and the quantity in an Innate potato?

Either we're using science for such trivial purposes because we've run out of real problems that can be solved through science, as could arguably also be happening with the latest breathless improvements in smartphones, or because we don't know what real problems are.

So again, don't run screaming into the woods, or out of the fields, because of this new GMO potato. It won't eat Etobicoke. But it also won't solve any problem that matters.

In my latest National Post commentary I rebuke the Senate Standing Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology for a buzzword bingo anti-obesity foray into the brave “new” world of coercing us at the supermarket and the dinner table for our own good, by people as unlikely to know what is good for us as you could find.

In my latest Rebel piece, I discuss how J.P. Morgan and Elbert Gary pretty much buried American free enterprise by creating the behemoth U.S. Steel. At least, that's what they tell us. In fact, steel markets remained competitive to this day... even though government charged in, declaring that it had to rescue us. https://youtu.be/MFaJQiRUCr4

In my latest National Post commentary I urge Liberal Finance Minister Bill Morneau to have his Advisory Council on Economic Growth to concentrate on removing government barriers to growth.

Here’s an intriguing opening for common sense to invade politics. Billionaire Charles Koch, a major bogeyman of the left, has just written a thoughtful Washington Post piece on how he agrees with Bernie Sanders, fast-rising bogeyman of the right, that tax loopholes for the rich are bad. Can I just say I’ve been making the same point for years? In this country the political left and right seem equally devoted to these backdoor handouts and it’s time they both got smart like Koch and Sanders.

It might seem odd to hear this major financier of right-wing Republicans endorse the criticism of that socialist about “a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the least advantaged” and agree with Sanders that “we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness” in which “many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field.”

But Koch goes further.

“Democrats and Republicans have too often favored policies and regulations that pick winners and losers,” he writes. “This helps perpetuate a cycle of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty in the United States.” And furthermore, “it’s not enough to say that government alone is to blame. Large portions of the business community have actively pushed for these policies.”

Exactly. If you build it they will come. A state in the business of handing out sums of money that boggle the mind, including by Koch’s reckoning “$1.5 trillion in exemptions and special-interest carve-outs” in the tax code alone, may mantle itself in rhetoric about compassion and the less fortunate. But it’s the well-connected, confidently alert to opportunities and accustomed to privileged treatment, who will know how to cash in, including quietly persuading lawmakers to create new handouts for them and their buddies.

I strongly urge you to read this eyebrow-raising piece, in which Koch even says that his own businesses do not ask prospective employees about prior criminal convictions because of the unfair way drug laws burden the poor and marginalized. Because as he says, Koch is no socialist. Rather, he firmly opposes Sanders’ desire for more government, saying “This is what built so many barriers to opportunity in the first place.” But he’s not looking for a fight.

Instead he’s hoping that if left and right can see eye to eye on the loophole issue, perhaps it’s one area where a major injustice can be corrected in a genuinely constructive way.

I know, it’s a long shot. But it’s worth a try. Even here in Canada, where not a sparrow flutters by without someone offering it a subsidy.

In my latest National Post commentary I urge the federal Liberals to recognize that deficits are bad for the economy and for government finances and to reject the Harper legacy of running them to “stimulate” the economy. (NB “While deficit spending may have a beneficial short-term impact” was an editorial insertion and I do not agree that it is a possibility.)

In my latest National Post commentary I warn the federal Liberals not to mishandle the problems of Alberta and Bombardier respectively in ways that remind us of Brian Mulroney’s disastrous 1986 decision to shift the CF-18 maintenance contract from Winnipeg to Montreal.