On the other hand, there’s Canada. Here’s Stephen Harper, campaigning in Ajax, Ontario yesterday.
Friends, the GTA doesn’t need higher taxes. The GTA doesn’t need a carbon tax. And the GTA doesn’t want this country to go back to deficits. Instead, it needs the kind of prudent investments our government is making to help the economy grow.
Investments like the bridge on Sandy Beach Road south of Parkham Crescent in Pickering.
Investments like a new passport office here in Ajax.
Investments like the federal Gas Tax Fund, that by 2010 will have invested over 800 million dollars in the GTA.
And then, in case anyone didn’t get the hint,
Friends, our government is delivering for the GTA. But there’s more to be done. And we need a strong team of Conservative MPs from the GTA in Ottawa to make it happen.
You need Conservative MPs to make what happen? To ensure that “more” is done in the way of “delivering” for the GTA. Want more passport offices and bridges? Vote Conservative.
This is the Prime Minister of Canada talking, you understand. The candidates for President of the United States debate the shape of the financial system and whether it is strategically wiser to focus on Iraq or Afghanistan. The Prime Minister of Canada — a Conservative Prime Minister — devotes himself to delivering passport offices to Ajax.
This is what is left of conservatism in Canada. This is what our politics have become, or reverted to — trawling for votes with hooks baited with other people’s money, like any 1940s ward-heeler. It’s the same old game, telling voters in every riding that they can make off at the expense of all the others, that the LIberals played for years. Only I remember a time when there was a party, and a leader, that said they’d put a stop to it.
MORE: Honestly, has there ever been a campaign as vapid as the Conservatives are running? I’ve no idea whether they’ll ever favour us with a platform, but if so it will be a ridiculously thin volume, full of microscopic silly-clever baubles (cracking down on flavoured cigarettes, banning text-message fees) or clever-silly policiettes that, however well they may test with the focus groups, fly in the face of either sense or evidence (cutting the diesel tax, jailing 14-year-olds).
I can understand why the Tories would not be anxious to make too many promises: after the pile of broken pledges they have racked up, up to and including the election call, who would believe them? And doing nothing is certainly a better alternative than the raft of pointless busywork the Liberals have on offer, to say nothing of the NDP’s giddy spendathon. But it is a bit much for the Tories to attempt to rebrand what would appear to be near-total policy inertia as “stability.” (And don’t tell me they can’t do more because there’s nothing left in the till. Balanced budgets are supposed to be the norm. Yes, without a surplus to draw down, any tax cuts would have to be financed with spending cuts. Cutting spending rom the all-time record high levels to which the Tories have pushed it would not seem too much to ask — or at least, that’s what Conservatives used to believe.)
When they are not pandering or flip-flopping, they’re launching the crudest sorts of attacks on their opponents: accusing Dion of “cheering” for a recession, for example, as earlier they had labeled critics of their Afghanistan policy “pro-Taliban.” (It’s not the attacks I mind so much — it’s the obviousness. Somewhere it is written that Canadian politics must always be conducted at the dumbest possible level, with arguments that would get you laughed out of any respectable bar-room brawl. Every day I read the press releases from the war rooms — they don’t even try to persuade. There’s no sense, and no shame: opponents’ statements are ripped wildly out of context, subjected to the most plainly tendentious interpretations, in a way that any normal person would realize can only be to their own discredit.)
Again, I don’t want to say the Conservatives are the only guilty party. They well remember the attacks they endured in the past from the Liberals (and endure: the canard that Jim Flaherty was “attacking Ontario” for suggesting its tax rates are too high comes to mind). Clearly, the Tories learned from their example, the same lesson the Liberals will absorb from their defeat: we just weren’t cynical and empty enough.
So Canadian politics sinks, election after election, ever deeper into the mire.
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I agree with Geiseric. When politicians are responsible for something – your kids’ education, your job, your retirement savings, your health care, technology investment, or whatever – they will ALWAYS make decisions based on political concerns. Hardly ever will they make the decision based on what’s good for you, and they will NEVER decide based on what is best for you in the long term. They are looking after THEIR long term interests. The extreme scale and complexity of the policies which they formulate is the means by which they are able to trick people into not rebelling against their self-interested confidence scams. By turning little problems into huge national and international problems they intimidate ordinary people into thinking that they couldn’t cope with it on their own.
It is not a moral or intellectual shortcoming of politicians that they work this way. Their morals and intellect are about average. The problem is that since the political class enjoys a monopoly power over whatever they do in government, they have nearly complete freedom to tilt the system in their own benefit.
Private producers and service providers would also be motivated to act in their own interests instead of in his customers’ interests, but not enjoying a monopoly (unless of course the government *gives* them monopoly power), these private entities cannot rip off or exploit the people they deal with. If they did, they would be quickly dumped, fired, sued and replaced.
But when firing or replacing a public entity you have to wait four years for an election, in which case the issues will be so many and so complex that voting down any particular scam is impossible. That is why you still have a GST, sponsorship program, gn registry, a pointless war in Afstan, etc. And it is why you are about to get Kyoto-inspired carbon reductions rammed down your throat, despite voting in the party which claimed to be against it.
oompus: Microsoft disagrees with your thesis. It took government and legal action to impede that monopoly enough that other entities were given some chance to continue, and that’s an industry with almost zero barriers to entry.
A monopoly is an incredibly powerful thing. It doesn’t die just because some little upstart comes up and tries to give consumers a fair price. Economies of scale can allow the monopoly to operate more cheaply than any competition, and after wiping out two or three upstarts, the market usually concludes it’s not worth trying, leaving the monopoly free to exploit all it wants.
The microsoft near-monopoly exists because of government intervention in the form of intellectual property laws. These exist for the purpose of allowing governments to award and maintain monopolies. They are a device for controlling markets. Even if you could make a case for the existence of intellectual property in natural law, which is bunk, the fact is that once government intervenes it is the litigants with the highest-paid lawyers and lobbyists who will rule the day, not the ones with the best claim on precedence or originality.
The U.S. courts did not impede MS in any way. They settled for a “punishment” in which MS donated million$ of their stuff to government schools, the purpose of which was to grow their market share even more.
If a true monopoly did ever exist, i.e. if it came into being without any help from someone’s police force and army, it would not last long. While large companies have economies of scale, they quickly become deaf to the needs of individual customers. Their products become monolithic, bloated compromises which do nothing particularly well. The organization can no longer feel or respond to the real needs of the market.
This inevitable failure of large, monopolistic companies is what creates the opportunity for smaller, more nimble, more humble and less greedy companies to take over market share.
Anyone who has bought MS Vista knows exactly what I am talking about.
“I agree with Geiseric. When politicians are responsible for something – your kids’ education, your job, your retirement savings, your health care, technology investment, or whatever – they will ALWAYS make decisions based on political concerns…”
But I’m not talking about in general. I’ve been running the financials on the two plans and the Conservative’s Turning the Corner has oil wealth written all over it. Every trip through the books turns up something new.
for instance, today I finally noticed the stated efficiency-based targets are bogus. The moment sector growth falls off 1.5% per annum the absolute targets snap like a twig.
Its designed to fail and the first to the winner’s circle will be the companies with the brains and the capital to snap up the Technology Fund credits while they’re going for a quarter on the dollar putting them in for over $40B waiting for the credit market to heat up. Talk about a disincentive to success.
Dear Mr. Coyne,
Whenever Stephen Harper steps down as leader of the Conservative Party…
(and for the record, I hope thats not anytime soon. Because, unlike you, I still hold onto some hope that given a majority, Harper will show some sort of vision, something substansive that excites me again. Here me out.. My real hope is that after a year of a majority, he decides he will step down as leader before the next election. This would FINALLY get him out of constant election mode and allow him think about some legacy project’s. Maybe like repealing gag laws and funding political parties, doing something about section 13, cutting spending, and getting away from agricultural supply management, I could go on and on… I know im reaching here but it could happen. but whether it does or not…)
will you please run to replace him as Conservative leader? You already have my vote. You are the most intellegent and refreshing voice in Canada today.
Sort of like Stephen Harper used to be…
oompus: I realize that’s the libertarian playbook and you’ve obviously bought into it enough that you don’t want the cognitive dissonance, but the facts of Microsoft’s history are completely opposite of what you suggest. MS achieved it’s monopoly by having reasonable products combined with zero ethics. Their rise to a monopoly had them on the defending end of IP law far more often than they used it, they just had a solid legal team to protect them, and no shame about using any trick in the book to hamper any sort of competition that might arise. It was only once they achieved monopoly status and the public started looking at their tactics more closely (such as the European courts examination of their media player bundling tactics) that they eased off on that and some competition started to rise.
But, your paragraph about a true monopoly is wishful thinking, not fact. Yeah, I’m sure we all hope that a monopoly will get lazy and complacent and just allow competition to arise without trying to crush it, but there’s nothing that guarantees that.