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.
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 column I say the state has escaped from control by citizens and we need to strap it back down. It’s time to tackle the infamous “root causes” of bad government in Canada and reclaim our heritage of liberty by cleaning house constitutionally.
My friend Tom Harris is inviting people to attend a conference sponsored by his International Climate Science Coalition and others in Paris at the same time as the big UN affair. Even if you don't find yourself in Paris this coming week, it's well worth pondering the questions Tom and his colleagues are asking about the orthodox view. Most fundamentally, the ICSC and others ask for proper evidence on these three points:
- Recent climate change is unusual in comparison with historical records;
- Human emissions of carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gases' are dangerously impacting climate;
- Computer-based models are reliable indicators of future climate.
If the consensus is as solid as alarmists claim, it should be easy to provide. If they can't or won't provide it, something very unscientific is going on here.
In my latest National Post column I talk about how odd it is that instead of Canadians mistrusting government, we now allow it to mistrust us. It doesn’t believe we can shop by ourselves, ride a bicycle or get in a boat safely, defend ourselves, speak freely without speech codes or build a deck without rules about the height of our railings. And instead of insisting that we know what we’re doing, too often we let it tell us what to do. In doing so we are losing our heritage. Servile incompetence is not a Canadian value. This country was built by self-reliant people who kept their governments in check, and it’s high time we went back to that arrangement.
In an excruciatingly studied effort to show more passion on the campaign trail, Jeb Bush says he would have killed baby Hitler given the chance. Apparently the question is a thing these days thanks to New York Magazine, and Bush's response was a mild obscenity (wow, such authenticity) followed by "yeah, I would!" Phooey. If I might refer you to my Sept. 28 post on the apparent opportunity of Henry Tandey, VC, to shoot a wounded Hitler on September 28 1918, it's absurd to suppose that anyone could have known a corporal in the trenches of World War I would have turned into a successful genocidal warmongering maniac politician in the 1930s. It's not even a category into which that young soldier could fall.
As for the notion that you could identify a baby who would later certainly do great evil if you didn't slaughter it in its infant innocence, that you could determine scientifically its necessarily malignant influence on history and preemptively exterminate it with a clean conscience, let's leave that for Minority Report and stick with the fairly elementary fact that killing babies is wrong.
So is appeasing dictators, but that's a story for another decade.
As for politicians faking passion, it's always a sorry sight.
The Canada Post Corporation just delivered a problem right to Justin Trudeau’s door. But there’s also an opportunity inside the package.
The problem is that Canada Post has suspended plans to move from home delivery to community mailboxes in much of urban Canada, daring Trudeau to follow through on his pledge to reconsider and by implication reverse the change. The opportunity is that he can really rethink mail delivery in Canada instead of surging cheerfully back to the future.
Early in the election, Trudeau hid behind the all-purpose objection of inadequate consultation and promised a moratorium on community mailboxes pending comprehensive review, which could mean anything, or nothing, and take forever if necessary. By platform time the Liberals went further, promising “We will save home mail delivery. We will stop Stephen Harper’s plan to end door-to-door mail delivery in Canada and undertake a new review of Canada Post.”
The reflexive personalization and demonization of “Stephen Harper’s plan” was an unfortunate nasty undercurrent in an allegedly sunny campaign. But it’s also completely beside the point in this case. Canada Post is a Crown Corporation supposedly insulated from “political” interference, so it wasn’t Harper’s plan in the first place. It was a reaction to losing business relentlessly thanks to that darn Internet.
Brigitte comments, with respect to that Maclean's article, that "The Tories put the 'Royal' back in the name of our navy. Too bad they didn't do anything about the 'Navy' part."