Apolitical Staples

Coyne truly is the best voice there is on this issue. He blows everybody else from both sides out of the water with sensible, informed arguments instead of emotional crap.

Good point about Zimbabwe. In other words, it is not the voting system which determines whether your country will be stable and peaceful or whether it will slide into bankruptcy and civil war. A country is doomed whenever the government has the mandate to institute large-scale legalized theft and redistribution of property.

Good point about Zimbabwe. In other words, it is not the voting system which determines whether your country will be stable and peaceful or whether it will slide into bankruptcy and civil war. A country is doomed whenever the government has sufficient power to institute large-scale legalized theft and redistribution of property.

The louder the democratic voice you give the people, the broader the mandate assumed by the government, and the easier it will be for them to pillage and destroy. A government which has a weak mandate will be far less bold about “helping” people because the people cannot be construed to have asked (or consented) to be helped. This is why so many African countries slid into poverty and chaos after they became democracies. As heinous as they were, the old colonial regimes had no mandate to institute the kind of economy-killing, genocide-provoking, redistributionist government boondoggles which came afterwards. Those can only come about when there is very broad political participation. (It is no coincidence that many of those made-in-government disasters are conceived and helped along by foreign democracies. They were after all given a broad mandate to “help” the third world.)

When you examine the overall philosophy of your own government and then study the policies which are animated by this philosophy (heavy taxes, strict regulation, positive rights, professional victimhood, perpetual government-promoted crises, inflation), it is clear that Canada differs from Mugabeland only in the haste with which the wagon is being pushed toward the cliff.

To our political wienerdog contingent, the difficult part is figuring out how to put more hands on the tailboard. But that’s not the problem. The real question is, why did you put your lives and property all into the same wagon in the first place?