BLOG, MARCH 26, 2008
It would have been nice if Terrence Corcoran had pointed out in response to the polemic of Michael Bliss that the 1930’s Great Depression was proven by Milton Friedman to have been the result of governments. The Federal Reserve did not pump enough liquidity into the markets quick enough to stop the Depression from turning into what it did turn into, a massive economic turn-down the like of which we won’t see in the next few years. We’re not even close to the numbers that the Great Depression saw. Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize for Economics proving that the Great Depression and the worst excesses of the Great Depression were the result of government stupidity and not the free markets.
No matter how much trouble free markets are having right now, it would change the fact that they are still essentially the best system. They may be bad in many ways, but they’re the best of the worst. Much like democracy is the best of the worst form of government as Churchill put it. Those realities won’t be changed by this panic, nay, titter.
*****
The Eight Flags speech is one that is delivered when you’re in really bad trouble over patriotic issues. Look at what’s behind the speaking on the stage.
The Napoleon Complex is the tendency of the left wing to idolize thug dictators who propose or perpetrate or achieve things that are liberal or progressive or socialist.
*****
Reynolds must have been drinking the Tories’ free whiskey in opposing the Dan McTeague amendment on the basis of Royal Recommendation. Neil Reynolds has bought into the Kool-Ade of the linear economic enthusiasts who think that every time there is a tax cut, which is what a deduction is, that we lose money. Well, how do we know we’re going to lose money. Maybe there will be universities or schools out there that will get more money than they would have if it wasn’t for the deduction. After all, someone has to pay for that tuition. Often it is subsidized. Maybe the result in the long term for more children being college-educated will be beneficial for the country. We know that almost certainly everyone who studies this says it’s true. The money not spent on education goes somewhere else like investments, savings, a car for the kid to take to university, who know? Those things, too, are a benefit to the economy. Therefore, that money comes back to the government in the form of revenues from other activities. I thought Neil Reynolds knew this.
Then there’s the travesty of comparing a bunch of ward-heeling Upper Canada Family Compact politicians passing personal laws for the own benefit, as Lord Durham noted in 1839, by spending money on their own friends and not using Royal Recommendation, to trying to bring in a law to make it less expensive for people to send their kids to college. How disgraceful to compare those two things. Reynolds has also bought into the idea that government should always dominate the agenda. When is this system going to be changed? The finger of suspicion now points against at the Liberals who not only cooperate in the rough of the Tories whenever they get the chance, even to subvert their own MP’s proposal, but clearly along with the rest of the parties (except for the Bloc, who could never form a government) who would like to have the rules closure and government domination of the agenda and exclusion of private members’ efforts that have been developed since Trudeau came into office for themselves when they finally back to power, which will come one day. It’s just sad.
I thought as a Conservative it was an important idea that a Member of Parliament should have freedom, be able to talk and propose and vote freely rather than being dominated by government. Do you want to go back to the day of the Chrétien/Martin majorities? Is that what we really want? I’m bewildered that he thinks that stopping the McTeague bill is defending our constitutional conventions. It’s absurd. Private members are acting on Royal Recommendation as well as anyone else in the House. They all act for the Queen. I wonder what Difenbaker would think of Mr. Reynolds Trudeaupian concept that MPs are nobodies and that Parliament is a place where government proposes and disposes regardless of what the MPs want. Should it be that when the MPs have the temerity to say no, even when the government’s in a minorty, that that government can threaten an election? Mr. Harper has abused that constitution convention. Something has to be done to change that so it becomes a matter of constitutional edict that cannot be changed by anything less than a Charter-like amendment that an MP should be able to propose amendments and changes without the threat of an election. In any case, I thought when a government brings in a budget we have a committee for all sorts of amendments to be hashed out on all sorts of aspects of the budget. Almost never does the Royal Recommendation come out of Parliament looking exactly the same way it did when it went in. Except in the most whipped majority times, which also included Diefenbaker and Mulroney’s governments. This is a truly Canadian problem that Mr. Reynolds has identified in a way that I don’t think he udnerstood.
As for those who think that Royal Recommendation protected and defended us from the vicissitudes of political corruption and banality, remember that nearly every major scandal in Canadian history took place after Royal Recommendation was reinstituted.
I know another tradition of Parliament. It’s called oversight. That’s what Parliament is supposed to do. Will Mr. Reynolds campaigns vigorously for the reinstitution of that power?
*****
The more green you have, the greener you are. Time for us all to get a grip. Denis Arcand thinks we’re heading into a new Dark Age and yet every statistic, economic production up, wealth up, starvation low, poverty low, trade up and freer, epidemics down, mortality going down… Things are better than they have ever been in this history of the world. I doubt people before the last Dark Age saw it coming.