I had intended to grumble about the electricity being off for 8 days. But I'm so happy that it's back on in time for Christmas that I want to thank the people who fixed it.

The folks who were running this interesting machine across the road were able to operate it continuously for the entire time.

Indeed, every day for the last 6 weeks.

Go private sector.

This construction was approved by the local city council, who are following through on their planning strategy entitled "Sardines for Kenmore".

Go public sector.

Mike.

I was fortunate this year to spend most of the summer in Canada. While there, I reflected on the differences between Canadians and Americans. I concluded that there are two.

First, Canadians spend time reflecting on the differences between Canadians and Americans.

The general storyline in Canada is a celebration of the essential selflessness of the people reflected in a government running an objective portfolio of compassionate domestic and foreign policies. There’s some truth to this, although it’s not clear what came first, the liberal government or the liberal people. Over the last 40 years the liberal establishment in Canada has used vast sums of taxpayer dollars to weave the liberal agenda seamlessly into Canadian patriotism. The true genius of this has been to create a climate of contempt toward patriotism in America while promoting it domestically.

Americans do not spend time reflecting on the differences between Canadians and Americans. For Canadians, this is further evidence that Americans are indeed unsophisticated and selfish. Americans, on the other hand, view this as…

Americans do not spend time reflecting on the differences between Canadians and Americans.

The second difference is that Canadians, on the whole, feel more guilt than Americans.

Reflect on that irony for a moment.

Among other things, Canadians feel guilty about throwing away plastic, buying gasoline, being healthy and not being poor. They have a large government apparatus to replace guilt with high taxes and lots of rules. It’s not clear which came first, the guilt or the large government apparatus. Actually, I don’t know if they really feel guilt, only that the government uses guilt to advance their agenda (to have a large government apparatus, primarily), and that it works.

When I first came to America, I expected to encounter a large, chronic underclass of hopeless, helpless poor. I had been taught that this was always the inevitable consequence of not having a large government apparatus to correct poverty. What I actually found was that while the idle poor were better off in Canada, where they would receive money and houses for free, the working poor were both more affluent and curiously optimistic about the future. It took me a while to figure out that a large and healthy economy, free from excessive taxes and regulation had the side effect of creating jobs, opportunity, and making a very large number of increasingly higher quality good and services available at increasingly lower prices. And that these things were good for the poor.

As any reader of this blog knows, people wanting to restrict freedom generally don’t use the language of creating a large government apparatus to further restrict freedom. The general storyline is one of America’s unique failures to protect a group of the oppressed or unfortunate against some other presumably privileged group. You can generally take it as a given that when guilt and negative comparisons to other countries are combined, some freedom is in the balance.

I just finished reading an article in the Seattle paper entitled Motherhood Movement Picking up Momentum. The basic plot is one of America’s unique failure to protect a group of oppressed or unfortunate against some other privileged group. It includes a reference to a study from Harvard (!) that concludes that that the United States is one of only four countries among 168 studied by Harvard researchers that doesn't have paid leave for new mothers and that mothers fare far better in other industrial nations.

Who could be against motherhood? Or apple pie for that matter.

But this isn’t really about motherhood. Like public child care, it’s about restricting choice. It works like this: a large government apparatus collects taxes. It then spends those taxes on your behalf. In the context of child care, higher taxes compel more parents into the work force, where they are unable to provide direct care. Fortunately care can be provided by a large government apparatus, which they are financially compelled to use.

While I wouldn’t argue with the facts of the Harvard (!) study, I find the notion that America is not close to the top in terms of a great place to be a mother, father or a child just doesn’t pass the common sense test. By global standards it’s safe, clean, modern, rich and free. That’s certainly been my experience and I’m grateful.

Mike.

Perhaps such a thing exists: a Global Warming Hype-O-Meter. I envision this as a graph of the key indicators of disaster, plotted over time. Interesting indicators might be the predicted rate of temperature rise, glacier melt and ocean rise, the year when the irreversible knee in the curve will occur and the magnitude of predicted climate and species impact.

I haven’t looked at the data, but it feels to me like we’re in about year four of a bidding war for the most extreme predications.

The reason such a meter is important is that it definitely appears that greenhouse gases are increasing and the earth is warming. The industrial trajectory of China and India over the next 10 years likely means the rate of rise of these gas will increase. There might be a serious environmental problem brewing.

The problem is that  without the meter to tell you when the hype is on the decline, the information you can get about global warming just isn’t serious. The current collection of anti-capitalists, big government intellectuals and back to nature types have a really bad track record for correctly predicting the next human induced environmental catastrophe (see: “mass starvation”, “ice age”, “energy crisis”). The only thing they consistently agree on is that some freedoms need to be sacrificed, now, to save the planet at some point in the future.

During a conversation I had with my daughter about the differences between a monarchy, communism and democracy, she piped up and told me that she understood communism. She described an experience during the first day of school in grade 4. Apparently the teacher asked that all the students bring all of their pencils up to a central location in the classroom. Throughout the year, as people needed a new pencil, they should go to the jar and take one. We talked a little bit about why the teacher might do this, and about fairness to individuals Vs. fairness to a group and about the teacher’s power to command such a thing.

Then we talked about how she felt about this. She told me a story about how she and mommy had gone shopping for those pencils, and how much she liked them, and how she felt sad to give them up to the jar. Then she grumbled a little bit about some of the students’ level of pencil responsibly throughout the year and how she watched lots of pencils be destroyed or disappear.

I have no way to know the degree to which the pencil plan was simply a pragmatic approach to making sure there was no time lost in the teaching day due to forgetfulness as opposed to conscious or unconscious indoctrination.

I hope it was successful at the former, because I’m sure it failed at the latter.

Mike.

It’s not that often that you get a good clear look at the freedom destroying effects of the nanny state. There are two reasons for this. Freedom is destroyed slowly, via the continuous creation of rules, licenses, training, certifications, inspections, taxes and bureaucracies. But more importantly, this process is expert in selling itself in the language of fairness, compassion, protection, cooperation and problem solving.

Who could be against that?

In Canada, it’s generally pointless to comment on government waste. By the time the 10 year old federal gun registry was scrapped, the cost had ballooned from a budgeted  2 million to well over a billion ($1,000,000,000) dollars. A gun registry is a list of guns and owners. There are about 30 million people in Canada. If your agenda was to create a program with the explicit goal of spending lots of money for absolutely no results, it would be hard to top this.

Massive waste, even though it is broadly visible, doesn’t generate an outcry. Canada is funded by exporting natural resources. A curious quality of these industries is that they tend to create a few individuals and organizations with a continuous and massive inflow of wealth. It might be argued in this environment that high tax rates and the resultant government bureaucracies are responsible for the creation of a modern, peaceful and open state with a thriving middle class as opposed to say, a Saudi Arabia style monarchy. The net effect of this is that for the majority, government really does seem free. Clearly wasting other people money, especially the rich, is broadly supported.

I’m less convinced that there is broad support for the freedom destroying machine that is a side effect of government problem solving. Canada is one of 3 countries in the world, including North Korea and Cuba, where it is against the law to charge money for heath care. This program was in its infancy when I was a boy, and my first awareness of it was watching my grandfather, Dr. Paul Webster, lose his practice and his livelihood. The ophthalmologists were more politically savvy, and had successfully excluded optometrists from the new universal government funding for eye care. This of course, was described in the language of quality and equality, as opposed to simple greed.

Like most Canadians, for the next 20 years, I remained a huge supporter of nationalized health care. It struck me as barbaric that a country with as much wealth as Canada would allow anyone the indignity  and suffering of disease without heath care.

I still feel this way.

When the programs were put in place, I suspect the older generation didn’t have especially high expectations that death could be denied with science, and the bulk of the population was young and healthy. It wasn’t until I moved to America that a 6 week wait to see a doctor seemed in any way out of the ordinary.

You don’t hear much about problem solving from the heath care system in Canada these days. The folks in charge are primarily focused on the problem of keeping their high paying jobs and pensions while running a system that is basically doomed. They’re in a tough spot. The overall level of personal wealth in Canada has risen substantially as has the gap between the rich and the poor. Medical science has advanced and become more expensive. And the population has become older and sicker. Since trying to provide care at the level affordable to the rich would bankrupt the system, the government is in the business of rationing care to the entire population.  

Using some formula.

Developed by experts.

With life and death in the balance.

The current crisis is that, in defiance of the law, private care is simply setting up shop and betting that the government won’t want to be seen as being in the freedom destroying business by shutting them down. The government of British Colombia scored a recent victory against an illegal private clinic by agreeing to allow them to submit a bill to the province in exchange for not collecting money from patents. The government is not interested in taking some of the pressure off the public system by allowing private care because they know the importance of having everyone believe that 6 months for an MRI and 2 years for a new hip is normal.

Ironically, this freedom destroying action this is being described in terms of “choice”.  

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20061201/bc_clinic_061201/20061202?hub=Health

Mike.