Apolitical Staples

Darfur…

If only, Greg. If only.

Thanks for the help,,

I like peanut and jelly time better though.. :)

Which “Canadian values” do want to see exported abroad? The values of socialism, where the government assumes all control over people’s lives? The values of democracy in which the primary goal seems to be for electorally concentrated grievance-groupies to vote themselves a greater and greater share of other people’s money? And all of the political and bureaucratic corruption that goes with it?

In the last few decades neither Canadians nor anyone else have a particularly good record of exporting values and creating new, mini, social-democratic utopiae in their own images. In fact I would say that they’re “0-fer”.

The Suez Crisis which allegedly proved the benefit of peacekeeping was a pretty minor achievement in the scheme of things, and in any case didn’t export any “values” - as far as I know its only purpose was to allow the British and French to withdraw their troops from a region in which they had no right to be in the first place, without having the Egyptian Army take potshots at them.

Golan Heights - has settled nothing and again has nothing to do with any Canadian values that I can deduce, except perhaps, “it is better not to shoot other people or get shot”. Israel is still a socialist democracy (who can defend themselves), Syria is still a socialist tyranny, and Lebanon is still, well, Lebanon.

Cyprus - no resolution, no values shared.

Haiti - the same. If any nation could possibly be “saved” or “reconstructed” in the image of its would-be foreign Nanny State helpers, after all these years and billions of dollars you’d expect Haiti to be an island paradise by now. Something tells me however that Haiti is still a shite-hole because of all that foreign Nanny-State intervention, and not in spite of it.

Bosnia-Herzegovina - again we see the Canadian value of “don’t shoot each other” being implemented (at great expense), but the fact remains that all of the combatant nations (and would-be nations) in this war already had the same socialist democratic values as the countries who intervened. Except they like shooting each other.

Serbia-Kosovo - same old, same old, with probably even less chance that the good ol’ Canadian values of “not shooting each other” will take root before the intervening countries get fed up and leave.

Africa - numerous missions - still basket cases.

So if Canada and all its socialist-democratic buddies are basically 0-fer in the last 50 years, in countries everywhere from Europe to the Middle East to Africa, then exactly what is it that people find so uplifting about Harper’s speech? What miraculous and uplifting results do you expect to happen in Afghanistan or Sudan, which have not been achieved in many far less remote and far more civilized countries?

Actually I do feel a little bit uplifted. I can feel the money being uplifted from my wallet to spend on more and more military missions and corrupt aid programs to more and more countries with less and less chance of any meaningful results being achieved.

The best way to improve the lives of people in those countries is to set a good example of freedom and prosperity, and allow your own citizens to trade freely with their citizens.

The value I was speaking of, which is hardly a Canadian value, is the one where we stand idly by as people are not hacked to death by gov’t armed militias. But you knew that.

Values and the military force are odd bedfellows. When we resort to using military force, as is the case now, it not a demonstration of values at work. Rather, it is the opposite – a failure of the politics of values.

Peacekeeping could be value based as it essentially is about the restraint of military force. The case now is different as Canadians are armed and shooting people. It shows that negotiation and moral arguments have failed (or been abandoned). The fact is that values can not be asserted by force. Of course, community building activities together with rhetoric about national values may serve military objectives, but we need not confuse assertion of values with military actions. Resorting to military force is political chemotherapy - certainly not a cure to a political problem, certainly not an expression of our political strength internationally.

Personally, I am proud that Canada has the maturity to support its own military force. It is a recognition that sometimes we unfortunately have to face situations where our supposed moral superiority is not relevant. Perhaps this is one of those situations - or perhaps it is not.

I hate when people get hacked to death too. But obviously Canada can barely make a dent in all of the world’s hacking fights, and when you look at all of the expensive, failed or dubiously successful anti-hacking missions of the last 50 years, it doesn’t look like a very effective use of taxpayer money.

The problem is that it is one thing to try to insert Canadian soldiers in between a bunch of government goons and the citizens they are trying to kill. It is another thing to actually replace the bad government which sent out the goons in the first place. In fact it’s impossible for a bunch of foreigners to change a government in a country, unless they BECOME the new government, and run it like a colony. But as you’re probably aware, I am quite unhappy with the way my own government works in here Canada, so why would I trust them to build and maintain a government in umpteen foreign countries? Even if I thought they could do it without turning those countries back into chaos, I know for a fact that the only way that Canadians know to run a country is to (a) extract the maximum possible amount of cash from the dwindling number of hardworking and successful individuals and companies; (b) redistribute the money to a large and growing number of lazy and unsuccessful individuals and companies.

It is no coincidence that the period of Canada’s history in which Canadian politicians have established a welfare state domestically, is exactly the same period in which they have sought to intervene in dozens of other nations, ultimately with no other purpose than to (1) save a couple of thousand people from being shot or hacked to death in the short term; (2) either establish a new, welfare-state government in the country in place of the old government; or if that fails, (3) skulk out of the country as soon as it appears politically expedient to do so; and (4) make empty, platitudinous speeches about how all of these ineffective, doomed, tax-money lollapaloozas are an indispensable demonstration of Canadian “values” and “morality”.

Morality begins at home, and the best way to teach morality is to set a good example. If you really think that Canadians as a whole are extremely moral and generous, then leave the money in the pockets of the people who earned it and each of them decide for themselves whether and how to support people in foreign countries. To force money out of Canadians’ hands in order to save people in Darfur is really just another way of saying that you don’t think that Canadians are moral and generous and you don’t trust them to do the right thing.

I am all for the free market but the free market will do nothing to save lives in Darfur.

The free market is the only thing which will save lives in Darfur.

The militia are paid to kill farmers by the government, apparently because the government want to get its hands on resources location on the farmers’ land. The government can pay the militia because it has lots of money and property compared to what ordinary people have. The only way that governments get lots of money and property is by removing it from the free market, i.e. through taxation, expropriation and many other forms of theft.

The only real differences between Sudan and Canada are that the standard of living is relatively higher, and the people being killed by their government die at a relatively advanced age, on waiting lists for treatment at government hospitals, instead of being cut down by horsemen.

And make no mistake: if a bunch of farmers in, say, Saskatchewan decided that they didn’t want the government to expropriate and/or excessively tax their mineral rights (which amounts to the same thing as expropriation), and they decided to protect their property with their lives, they too would be cut down by the horsemen, and they would be just as brutally dead as any farmer in Sudan. But that’s not how we do things in Canada. Here, we pay off the victims of government theft by giving them lots of welfare, i.e. we pay them off partly with the proceeds of the government theft, and partly with borrowed money. The money is borrowed by governments under the premise that they will pay back the bondholders with future theft of its citizens’ children and grandchildren. But it’s all an unsustainable pyramid scheme because the more you intervene in the economy to seize and redistribute wealth, the less real wealth will be produced (because the citizens are demotivated), which causes even more present and future theft to be undertaken, which reduces the wealth more …

That is how the lack of a free market kills people. We would help the people of Sudan get it right a lot sooner if we would mind our own business and demonstrate how freedom is a better path to wealth than theft. Non-free-market interventions are highly unlikely to solve problems which are fundamentally due to the lack of a free market.