Canada has done everything David Rakoff, Sarah McNally and Melissa Auf der Maur want—not least in their own fields. It taxes convenience-store clerks to subsidize books and writing and publishing and that wonderful “national conversation about literature like a big book club” in which everyone’s membership dues are automatically deducted from your bank account whether you go to the meetings or not. And still Mr. Rakoff and Ms. McNally and Ms. Auf der Maur leave. They applaud the creation of a “just” and “equitable” society, and then, like almost all the members of the Order of Canada you’ve actually heard of, they move out. Despite commending the virtues of a social “safety net” for you and everyone else, they personally can only fulfill their potential somewhere else, without one. Usually in a country beginning with “Great” and ending in “Satan.”
But let’s nudge it on a bit from Colby Cosh—beyond the “funny creative people,” beyond Canada. A few weeks ago, Charles Murray gave a speech in Washington on “the European model.” Please, no Carla Bruni gags. Mr. Murray is a very sober political scientist, and he eschewed such time-honoured jests.
Nonetheless, it was an arresting address, beginning with this diagnosis of “the European model’s” principal defect: “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Murray. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs”—or novelists or musicians. As Murray sees it, government social policy is intended to take “some of the trouble out of things”—getting sick, having a kid, holding down a job, taking care of elderly parents. But, when government takes too much of the trouble out of things, it makes it impossible to lead a satisfying life. “Trouble”—responsibility, choices, consequences—is intimately tied to human dignity. And thus the human dignity in working hard, raising a family and withstanding the vicissitudes of life has been devalued. And society is just a matter of passing the time.
When government prioritizes security, it does so at the cost of satisfaction. The “funny creative people,” repellent as they often are, are a good early indicator: in such a society, as Murray says, “the concept of greatness is irritating and threatening.” Where is the great European art? I don’t mean the Renaissance, but just the occasional glimmer of a movie scene as lively as France and Italy’s a couple of generations back. In a sense, it becomes impossible: if you take, say, a 19th-century social novel, a girl goes to a ball and accepts a dance from a certain man, and her life changes forever. There are choices and consequences. But, if the government makes all the choices and absolves you of all the consequences, what’s to write about? When life is drained of life, what art can you make of it?
For me, health care is a moral issue, and even a spiritual one. Not just because I don’t want to be in the bathroom 12 times a night for three years. But because conceding the bureaucracy’s jurisdiction over your urinary tract is a near parodic example of what Colby Cosh calls a culture of “risk-averseness” and “deference to authority,” part of the remorseless surrender of individual liberty to government security across this last half-century. It’s not about the state of your health, but about the health of your state.
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