It’s not as if the current economic slump came as a surprise to anyone with horse-sense. Those of us who can add two and two and get four have been predicting it for a long time. North Americans have long lived in a bizarre Conservative fantasy world in which “prosperity” and “consumption” have been interchangeable words. Thirty years of Conservative mumbo-jumbo has convinced an entire generation that you magically get rich merely by buying things ― and making things is an unnecessary process, a tiring and inconvenient, low class kind of business that we needn’t dirty our hands with. Now we are in a bloody big mess. As soon as Conservative wackos came into power in the United States, with the Reagan administration, that country started to go into debt. Allowing for inflation, there was practically no national debt until WWII, which cost money to win, then a fairly modest plateau of debt until 1980. Then came the Neo-Conservatives ― the current version of Communists, with the same combination of ideological zealotry, disdain for human rights, quack economic nostrums, doctrines of historical mysticism, predestination and pseudoscience, and the same hatred of freedom as their predecessors. The Neo-Conservatives are in the process of sowing the same seeds of misery and poverty as the Marxists they claim to disdain, but actually mimic. From the most productive economy in human history ― and one which had achieved a great degree of social justice and economic fairness ― the United States has been transformed into a basket case debtor, owing trillions to its new masters, the Communist Party gangsters in Beijing and the Oil gangsters in Riyadh.
The fountainhead of all this idiotic Conservative claptrap is, or course, the United States, but there has never been any shortage of Canadians willing to ape it. Our current government is nothing more than a branch office of Washington’s Politburo. The only thing that saves us from the extreme disaster that Americans face is the fact that we are culturally more cautious, and our Parliamentary institutions do not permit the kind of executive monarchy that has destroyed American democracy. The waves wash over us from the south, and we get wet, but we don’t drown. Fiscally, we are in much better shape, and even the concerted efforts of Conservatives to destroy production and reduce us to being a resource colony again have not succeeded. But we are so intimately tied to the American economy, which buys most of our goods, that we can’t hope to avoid the consequences of an American economic meltdown.
So the first step, of course, is to get rid of Conservatives. Get them out of government, get them out of business, and get them out of our culture. They have nothing to offer us but poverty and savagery. However, once you get rid or the saboteurs and the idiots, you have to sit down and figure out positive steps to deal with the problems they have created. Moral superiority does not constitute reform, and the absence of blame doesn’t imply the presence of skill. Conservatism’s greatest success has been in destroying the intellectual basis of real progress, and it has cultivated an inane and incompetent opposition. In the United States, the situation looks hopeless. Their democratic institutions are in bad shape ― elections for Senate and House have long ceased to be meaningful, and the ruling party has been allowed to rig two presidential elections without being called to account. A country once viewed by the world as a beacon of liberty is now better known for running a concentration camp, and for both practicing and advocating torture. Americans seem to be able to chose only between wimps and bullies. The wimps are too cowardly and incompetent to face up to the bullies, and the bullies make all the rules. Americans are, in a word, fucked. But can we do something to save ourselves from the same fate? I think so. But it will take more than merely electing the opposition. That opposition has to grow up, and it has to make dramatic changes in its attitudes.
We need to make things. All policies aimed at maintaining high levels of consumer consumption, while allowing value-added production to continue to decay, are merely digging our graves deeper for a future funeral. Real economies save, invest in themselves, and make things. Fantasy economies are based on the notion that you can get rich by buying big screen tvs made by somebody else. Every political and macro-economic decision that we make, as a nation, should concentrate on increasing the production of real goods, primarily for the domestic market, with exports always treated as gravy. A market of 33 million people is perfectly adequate to support the domestic manufacture of most goods that we presently import. Only a small minority of manufacturing processes are inherently inefficient on this scale. In most cases, imports are cheaper only because they are manufactured by global gangsters using captive populations of exploited or enslaved labour. Conservative-Communism is constantly trying to convince us that it’s to our advantage to compete with slaves. In order to justify this blatant attack on freedom, they snow us under with slogans about “globalization” and “market forces”, which amount to nothing but the self-evident fact that it’s cheaper to make things with slaves than it is with free people.
We must keep this fundamental truth always before us: A free market exists only where people are free. A free market is exactly what we should be trying to get, but I mean a real one, not the fake one being peddled by Conservatism. A free market can only exist, by definition, in a democracy of free people. There are no exceptions to this rule. When Conservatives talk about “free market” economics in China, or any other dictatorship, they are peddling bullshit. It is as nonsensical and dishonest as when the old Soviet thugs talked about “social justice” or “freedom”. Conservative, globalist economics has no connection whatsoever with free markets, never has, and never will. Their ideology is about slavery, and nothing else.
Therefore, we should make every effort to disengage from trade with dictatorships, confine our international trade to places where people are free, and to substitute local production for importation. This means fighting the global network of dictatorships and transnational corporations that are eroding our freedom.
Next, we must overcome our greatest weakness. Our greatest weakness, unfortunately, has been sold to us as a strength. We are rich in natural resources. Because Canada has always had plenty of minerals, untouched forests, and open space suitable for mono-culture farming, we have always been tempted to live off that bounty, without thinking ahead. Instead of making furniture, we just chop down trees and sell them cheaply to others, who make furniture ― then buy the furniture back at fifty times the price. Instead of making machines, we dig up rocks and sell them cheap to more clever people, who turn them into machines. A resource-based economy is a sucker’s game. This should be self-evident, but it has always been too subtle a concept for our politicians to grasp. When push comes to shove, they always agree to sabotage value-added manufacturing and maximize resource extraction, which, of course, the All Wise outside the country will always urge them to do. We have the soil to grow high quality food for ourselves in abundance, but waste it supplying global mono-crop agribusiness with cheap soybeans, wheat, cattle and pork, from which we earn a pittance, while we rely on those same gangsters to feed us an inferior, low-grade diet, and expose ourselves to potential pandemics.
We should be seizing every opportunity to substitute Canadian production for importation. Why are we importing bookshelves from Sweden? We can’t build bookshelves? Are we fucking morons? In that particular case, we’re not even importing them because they’re cheaper! Swedish labour costs more than Canadian labour. The Swedes pay for better social services than we have, with the money we give them. They can do this because we’re lazy slobs who are too stupid to nail ten pieces of wood together. We deserve to go broke, if we keep that up.
Every product that enters this country should trigger a detailed analysis and report that demands to know why it isn’t being made here. If we import table saws or snowplows or chicken pot pies from abroad, a sample of each should automatically be sent to a Canadian university or technical institute with a demand to know why we aren’t making it. Students and professors should be set the task of figuring out how we can do so, more cheaply, in better quality, or both. And when someone does figure it out, they should be cheered and be-medaled and mobbed by hordes of bankers and venture capitalists trying to set them up in business. Any Canadian company that doesn’t do significant research and development should be regarded as a drag on the system and an embarrassment to Canadian business.
Then, we must reform our banking system. The best procedure would be to break up the five super-banks that dominate us into at least fifty banks, requiring at least five to operate separately in each province. Banks should be forbidden to engage in economic transactions with any regime that is not democratically elected, and should have only limited permission to export Canadian savings. The purpose of our savings is to invest in ourselves. A rational human being sets aside frivolous consumption to save for the purpose of increasing productivity and enterprise. That’s what real free market economics is all about. Our savings should not be thrown away so that we can vegetate on couches, surrounded by imported toys. And they should not be thrown away to subsidize the Swiss finishing schools, ski resorts, and palaces of a global aristocracy.
We must reform our system of taxation. We must always remember this fundamental fact: Since we are a democracy, we are taxing ourselves. It’s our money. Foreign governments have no business telling us how to spend it. The global super-rich have no business telling us how to spend it. It’s ours. Anyone who tries to interfere in our decisions as to how to spend our own money should be firmly, and not necessarily politely, told to fuck off. Not a single cent of our tax money should ever leave this country. There is no legitimate function of tax money that would carry it ouside of the country. As one of the world’s wealthiest nations, there can be no necessity for us to borrow money from outside. If we can’t pay for something ourselves, then we don’t need it. Taxation should pay for things that are best financed collectively, and these things must be chosen with care, because government’s effectiveness depends not on how much it spends, but on how many separate processes it is juggling. A few government services run efficiently and well-funded are worth more to us than a thousand services managed and financed in a half-assed way. We should always seek the lowest level of government possible to handle any task. Nothing should be handled by the federal government that could be better handled by a provincial government, and nothing should be handled by a provincial government that could be better handled by a local government. No level of government should be allowed to sluff off its responsibilities to an inappropriate level, just to create a false impression of economy on its books.
I favour a system of enhanced Federalism. Taxation should not be collected by the Federal Government. It should be collected by Provincial governments, and then each province should remit a certain percentage of its “take” to the Feds in order to pay for whatever has to be done by a federal government. We have chronic problems of regional disparity ― which have become the excuse for a paralyzing system of handouts and transfer payments from a centralized federal bureaucracy. These are designed to freeze the poorer sections of the country into perpetual dependence and subservience. Few people understand the disastrous effects of such transfers. No federal administration will ever use federal tax money, largely collected in the three or four richest provinces, to spend it in such a way as to develop the economies of the poorer provinces. Nobody in Quebec or Ontario wants their tax money to pay for establishing a dairy industry or a textile industry in Maritime provinces that will compete with them, so the money will always be spent in some way that is economically passive, such as propping up worthless coal mines, building useless military bases, or financing dead-end programs that will bounce the money right back to the heartland. That money will never have the opportunity to grow real enterprise in the captive region. Its misdirection will ensure the perpetuation of poverty, and thus increase the demands for yet more transfer payments, in an endless cycle. The solution to this problem is to make each province responsible for collecting taxes, then to require them to remit a portion to Ottawa at a rate set by the relative position of their GDP to that of the other provinces. In other words, if a province is going through hard times, it gets a favourable break in how much money it has to hand over to the Feds. What remains is their money, and can be used to encourage local production according to their own judgment. As they improve their economic performance, they can then take up a more equal burden of federal expenses. The superiority of this method over the byzantine intricacies of our transfer payment system should be obvious. Regional inequalities emerged, not because the poorer provinces are inherently doomed to poverty, but because our banking system is excessively centralized, and we are overdependent on natural resources. Because of a lack of resilient and creative local financing, Nova Scotia, once a powerhouse in ship-building, failed to make the technical and economic transition to modern ship-building at a critical juncture (as Norway did, for example), and since then has steadily slid into economic decline and passivity. The federal system, as it exists, keeps them there. Other poor provinces were stymied or robbed of development in similar ways. We can fix that.
In fact, we can fix a lot of things. But to do that, we have to get rid of the nincompoops we have elected, and put in a bunch who are willing to do something other than just roll over and let the world walk over us. That includes the boneheads in opposition parties as much as it does the ones who currently rule the roost.
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