Apolitical Staples

Well since Andrew Coyne is a conservative spinner himself, he would certainly recognize a fellow practitioner, that’s for sure.

I am very happy that we have an Andrew Coyne to logically and factually refute the hysterical, emotional and unsubstantiated claims of the uber-left and other do-gooders who just love to use Other Peoples’ Money for their socialist nanny state.

Of course, uber-left now includes the Liberals in addition to the regular wingnuts … Marxist-Leninists and NDP. (grin) Interestingly enough, I haven’t figured out where May is going to position the Greens. The left is getting very crowded, and soon they will have to put a tax on parties entering that space, to discourage take-up.

The tax will be collected by David Miller, Toronto’s NDP/Socialist mayor.

Sinister Greg, you think Coyne is a spinner ? I suspect you do not read him very often.

Coyne is most certainly a conservative, no argument there. When the Conservative Party does something he disagrees with, he is very quick to take them to task, often savagely. Coyne is an insightful writer and a strong analyst - his arguments are very logical and solid. He is hardly a spinner.

If you want to understand what a spinner is, read Cherniak’s blog.

I think this is a significant battle front that will be fought between the Conservatives and the rest of the progressives (ROTP). It will be packaged by the ROTP as the Just Society the sequel.

ROTP is hung up on inequality. Inequality in a biological sense is a virtue but Marx turned it into a vice. People nor cultures are not equal nor should they be . Unfortunately the same people that champion the diversity of multi-culti want us to all be equal and the same.. that’s double think.

The spread between Eddy Shack’s salary and the Leafs today is a massive spread. Likewise with all wages and it will get wider because not all hockey players are equally talented.

It’s this very inequality which allows an investor class to form and entrepreneurs to bring innovation and productively improvements to the table. The degree to which the ROTP are successful in creating equality in incomes will be offset by declines in productivity and all the boats will go down together.

This argument would not matter so much if we were in pre-NFATA days and forcing the Prairies to buy Massey Ferguson tractors from Toronto. But we’re in a globally connected borderless economy and we have to get on with even more aggressive tax cuts with a view to keeping the middle class strong and in the Conservative, capitalist tent. The extra gains from that can be used to alleviate the causes of poverty and those down on their luck.

With income statistics, it can be a largely pick your favourite outcome affair often. You can side with a Coyne anaylsis claiming that GDP per capita is up. Or you can take a look at a CCPA report outlining how much more than wealthy have increased vs working class, and middle class incomes.

Its far more trickier to say what is more true than the other, especially with everyone’s own ideological biases. Coyne is not a spinner, but he is a conservative. I would aspect the same well researched left-wing analysis refuting a conservative study from Jim Stanford for example. Think Tank or academic analysis is not scientific truth often, and is open to plenty of intrepertation, regardless of ideology.

Surely no-one is arguing in favour of equality of income!? That would completely dispense with work, education, innovation, intellect. No matter what one did - whether the surgeon or the computer engineer or the clerk at the dime store who uses that computer and whose cancer was cured by that surgeon - they’d all get the same income?

Do you know the only type of society that has such equality of outcome (which is what equality of income means)? The most primitive hunter-gatherer society. They plant no crops, have no animals and rely only on hunting what’s there and gathering what’s there. They can support about 30 people in such a group. Thirty. Not thirty million.

Nothing on this planet is equal. Equality stops everything dead. Nothing moves. Once you lift the dike and get the water in one side of the bowl equal to the water in the other side - there’s no more movement.

The problem with the notion of equality and inequality (apart from its dispensing with work, skill, merit, education) is that anyone who promotes equality of outcome betrays a profound ignorance of life. Life requires inequality.

A tree cannot consume all the nutrients and water and produce an outcome equal to that input. It has to STORE some nutrients in a different time frame than its current ‘now’ time. It has to STORE this in its trunk and its seeds, to enable it to continue into FUTURE time.

A society is similar. It has to build up an unequal amount of goods/money/capital, more than its current consumption. This surplus enables it to build that productive infrastructure of long term systems (industries, schools, highways) rather akin to the tree trunk. These are long term outputs. Then, a society has to store surplus to invest into long term cognitive systems (akin to the seeds of the tree). These enable it to invest in research -which can take decades to develop - to enable the society to continue, to expand, to adapt in the future.

So, the society must deliberately reject a lifestyle built around equality of incomes and promote inequality. This moves the lifestyle out of one capable only of daily consumption and provides it with a future-oriented capacity. A few in the society can produce enough surplus so that this surplus can be invested in the long term infrastructure and the future.

Canada hasn’t developed this investor class. How has it survived? It has leeched off the investor classes of other societies, primarily that of the US. The US has a strong investor class, who provide not only a tax basis for the use of capital development, but also, invest themselves in the country’s research and development (Rockerfeller Fdt,Ford, and millions of dollars in charitable foundations). Canada and its focus on ‘equality’ and its high taxes has prevented the dev’t of an investor class. We’ve relied on the US for technological innovation, scientific developments, and industrial establishment.

Isn’t it about time Canada grew up, got its own investor class and stopped leeching off others?

ET “Canada hasn’t developed this investor class. How has it survived? It has leeched off the investor classes of other societies, primarily that of the US.”

Exactly. Paradoxically the Jack Laytons who despise the USA won’t create an environment for Canada to develop its own investor class because they are still fighting the imaginary class wars of Marx. The idea is to grow the economic pie and not to worry about equality as long as everyone gets more pie. Even Belinda’s high school education taught her that. So why can’t the pundits at the Red Star and CBC get it?

Your direct linking of biology plus the laws of nature to capitalism and the need to store value are very insightful. You make it seem so obvious that I’d expect the pundits in the Red Star to soon be writing about storing for the future instead of redistributing equalization payments for the now ..maybe not.

GDP is a highly doubtful number, since it is so highly manipulated by government in order to portray their activities in a favorable light. As is the government-published CPI.

If you insist on making this kind of analysis you need hard numbers, such as average take-home earnings after tax, and a more accurate measurement of inflation - such as one which does not depend on government drones selecting the “basket of goods”, or better yet which is based on the true nature of inflation which is the increase in the supply of money and not simply the fluctuation of prices.

In any case, one’s standard of living is subjective and it is very difficult to put a dollar figure on happiness. Some things should be quite clear however: the greater the number of people depending on government taxes and expenditure and the greater the number of dollars taxed and spent by government, the poorer and more unhappy your country will be overall, in the long term. This is because of the inherently coercive nature of tax collection, the wasteful and corrupt ways in which humans by their ingrained nature tend to treat money which they did not earn, and above all because of the accumulation of malinvestments, crippling debt and devalued currency which are the inevitable result of continuous growth of government. Initial periods of happiness accompanying government expansion, which are almost always based on debt and as-yet unperceived inflation, such during as the salad days of Trudeau The First, do not count. Every socialist revolution has its honeymoon.

Concerned Torontonian

What I mean is that Coyne has an agenda (a small c conservative one). He uses his column to spin things in a way that advances that agenda. His allegiance is to that agenda rather than a particular party, as you rightly point out.

Any study of social and environmental issues released these days is suspect since objectivity doesn’t bring in the big dollars for more studies.

Objectivity will get you fired.