Gods of the Copybook Headings

Assorted Links: May 5, 2008

"The Angry Metis"

Why do people threaten to kill or harm Darcey?  I suspect it's because they've never met the man.  He is of slight build, moderate height and about 2% body fat, the rest of him is muscle and steel.  So are his friends.  Just not a smart idea.

I'm not sure what to say about the deluge of Sikh trolls coming onto this site and using their race as some sort of argument for advancing terrorism but I'm getting a little tired of it. Actually - I'm getting a little irritated. In white man's terms it means I'm furious and I'm doing everything I can do to control myself. You friggin idiots just pissed off a Metis who has always been fair.

Idiots in their multicultural ghettos with their heads up their multicultural enclave ghetto asses paying no attention to how their actions reflect on the rest of us or affect the rest of us need a good old time ass kicking or need a good old time airline ticket back to their precious old country  - I'm willing to provide either one.

One more threatening anonymous phonecall, one more threatening email, one more shit comment and I'll bring in a shitstorm of Metis hunters who are not as nice as me - from coast to coast.

We are the cockroaches of society and we are the original Canadians.

When you don't threaten to kill him he prefers a hug to a handshake and always offers to buy you a drink.  Just not a smart bunch these punks.  When my parents arrived in this country they were told to leave their old quarrels in the old country.  Why, again, did we stop telling immigrants this? 

The Era of Big Government

Still not over.  Not even close.

The welfare state should have peaked in the 70's, writes Business Edge's D'Arcy Jenish. However, it continues to grow. Today 3.3 million work in the public sector in Canada, more than 10 percent of the population. Technology, which allows businesses to do more with less people, failed to make the government any smaller. And, even if programs don't work anymore, they often still continue. The Fraser Institute has more on this topic here.

What on earth are all these people doing?  I ask merely for information.  Nearly a fifth of the workforce of the country works for the state.  In a country where Prime Minister Stephen Harper is considered a "far right-wing" conservative, this is only to be expected.

Falling Behind

Apropos of nothing, really, we follow a piece on the vast expansion of the public sector with news that Rogers is bringing the iPhone to Canada, one year after its release in the United States.  I'm sure the delay is the result of a terrible misunderstanding, and has nothing to do with regulatory approval or a legally enforced cable and telephone duopoly.

The hugely popular iPhone is coming to Canada.

Telecom giant Rogers announced Tuesday that it has brokered a deal with Apple to sell the high-tech smartphone north of the border later this year.

"We're thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada," said company president Ted Rogers in a statement. "We can't tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned."

The phone allows users to listen to voice messages in the order they prefer; to select numbers by touch screen; and to watch movies in high resolution. It currently sells in the United States for between US$400 and $500.

The news came on the heels of a strong few months for Rogers, which doubled its first-quarter profits this year, reporting net earnings of $344 million. During the same period a year earlier it made $170 million.

Fun With Numbers

The pretzel logic of the equalization system reaches its climax; the richest province in the country is soon to be a "have not."

Ontario will soon be a have-not province, and is poised to start collecting equalization payments in two years, economists at Toronto-Dominion Bank say.

Ontario's economy is struggling to deal with the compounding effects of high energy costs, a strong loonie, and now a U.S. downturn, the economists note in a paper published Tuesday morning. But it's the rising prosperity of the energy-rich provinces, and not Ontario's actions, that have turned Ontario into a have-not, their paper argues.

“The change in Ontario's equalization status is essentially a story of soaring commodity prices,” say Derek Burleton, director of economic studies, and Don Drummond, chief economist. “There is much more at play here than just Ontario's economy.”

They calculate that Ontario would be eligible to receive $400-million in federal equalization transfers in the 2010-2011 fiscal year, and $1.3-billion in fiscal 2011-2012.

But Mr. Drummond is skeptical about whether Ontario would actually ever see any equalization money, even if it does qualify.

He notes that in the 1970s, Ontario was eligible for payments, and actually received some money, as energy prices soared. But support for Ontario was not politically acceptable, and so Ottawa changed the equalization formula, and retroactively clawed back Ontario's payments.

Leaving aside the envy laden terms "have" and "have not," which could have been lifted from the supposedly unrealistic dialog of an Ayn Rand villain, the equalization formula works as follows:

Equalization payments are based on a formula that calculates the difference between the per capita revenue yield that a particular province would obtain using average tax rates and the national average per capita revenue yield at average tax rates. The current formula considers five major revenue sources (see below). The objective of the program is to ensure that all provinces have access to per capita revenues equal to the potential average of all ten provinces. The formula is based solely on revenues and does not consider the cost of providing services or the expenditure need of the provinces.

In other words its not people that "have" or "have not," its governments.  Each of the provincial governments must have a per capita revenue base equal to the Canadian average, if the average goes up sufficiently, because Alberta is enjoying another oil boom, then Ontario, which is roughly speaking standing still, becomes "have not."  The system provides a perverse incentive to poorer provincial governments to expand government services beyond what is required by the needs of their people, instead to as far as other provinces can afford to subsidize them.  There is no incentive to become self supporting or to rationalize government administration.  It is a program that effectively traps much of the country into welfare dependency.

Cool Conservatism

If you're wondering what Russ Kuykendall (aka Burkean Canuck) has been up to since abandoning his blog, check out this month's installment of the Interim, featuring an obituary on WFB.

Buckley wasn’t always right, er, correct. He opposed the civil rights movement. Buckley seemed unable to distinguish between the radicalism of Elijah Mohamed and Malcolm X and the peaceful, though militant, movement led by the black Baptist preacher Martin Luther King, Jr. Although undoubtedly conversant in the Christian doctrine of the “IMAGO DEI,” Buckley supported white Southern Dixiecrats’ adherence to Southern tradition and privilege over King’s aspirations for all Americans. Buckley also opposed George Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Norman Podhoretz’s characterization of the invasion and occupation of Iraq as an installment in “World War IV.”

There were other contradictions. Bill Buckley was a devout Catholic devoted to playing the music of the Lutheran Bach on his harpsichord and who inhabited the upper reaches of a Manhattan high society created by generations of Upper East Side WASPs. He disavowed physical exercise, but was an expert sailor who navigated Atlantic crossings three times. Buckley was a mid-Atlantic “Americanist” who married a West Coast Canadian socialite, his beloved Patricia. Buckley took a formerly dour, cranky conservatism and mounted a charm offensive with a wry sense of humour and mischievous turns of phrase populated by some of the English language’s most obscure vocabulary. He gave it a better wardrobe. Ronald Reagan’s easy ways and expansiveness were the California version of Buckley’s mid-Atlantic sophistication and winsomeness. Buckley made conservatism “cool!”

While I obviously disagree with Burkean's characterization of Rand's belief's as "radical individualism," at least in the pejorative sense implied, the central point of the article is dead on:  WFB made conservatism fun and attractive.

"Deserve Neither and Lose Both"

Lorne Gunter on the impracticality of video surveillance:

Cameras aren't even all that good at helping prosecutors convict criminals after the fact. In Britain, where there are nearly five-million security cameras — almost as many as in the rest of the world combined — the Home Office admits that in 80% of cases where camera evidence is available, it is of too poor quality even to be accepted by the courts, much less have any impact on the outcome of a trial.

A test of cameras in the Berlin subway two years ago convinced the German government to suspend plans to install them throughout the subway system. Of thousands of criminal incidents committed on the monitored lines, video footage was available in only 78 cases. In only a third of those was the footage of usable quality, and in most of those the crime was minor, such as turnstile jumping.

In the 1990s, New York City made great strides in cleaning up its subway system and streets. But it did so by putting more officers on platforms and trains. Police can see what cameras cannot, and they can respond immediately, rather than waiting to be summoned by those monitoring cameras.

Cameras are a sop, a symbolic reaction that merely enables timid politicians to say, "Look. See? We're doing something."

And, or course, they subject law-abiding citizens to scrutiny by the government when they have given the government no probable cause to warrant such watching.

Cameras are expensive and intrusive and, worst of all, ineffective.

The point about visual quality in court cases is a weak one.  Why not spend billions more upgrading the technology?  It makes little difference if you try to create a panopticon society, only to refuse to punish actual criminals.  As Sir Robert Peel, the father of modern policing, among many other things, observed in established the London police force, fighting crimes requires a combination of tough but fair sentencing matched with an effective system of detection and apprehension.  If you can't catch them, and won't punish them, it makes little sense in taking digital photos of what the Victorians called the criminal classes. 

Assorted Links: April 21, 2008

"Rudyard Kipling unburdened"

Roger Kimball in April's New Criterion:

Today, I suspect, Kipling is regarded chiefly as that most anodyne of literary practitioners: a children’s author, creator of the boy Mowgli, Kaa the python, and Shere Khan the Tiger, the genial-looking, pipe-puffing genius who wrote Kim and populated the imaginations of boys and girls with the sultry weather of the Raj, explained how the elephant got its trunk, and decorated it all with fastidious (little) poems that rhymed and scanned. Kipling was picturesque. He was born in romantic-sounding Bombay, and he got his precocious literary start in India after a decade of schooling in England. (His parents chose “Rudyard,” by the way, after a lake in Staffordshire where they courted.) If his stories are exotic, even scary at times, they are nonetheless wholesome or at least susceptible to Disneyfication.

How different it once was. Around the turn of the last century, at the apogee of Kipling’s fame, Mark Twain wrote that he was “the only living person not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark, the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail but always travels first-class by cable.” In Kipling, the zeitgeist briefly found its impresario. For a time, his authority was as much political as literary. Kipling gave speeches advocating British supremacy in India and South Africa. He opposed the suffragettes and home rule for Ireland. He could be downright strident. It was Kipling, one of his biographers speculates, who popularized the metonymy “Huns” (actually, he insisted on “huns” with a small “h”) for “Germans,” a subject on which he grew increasingly ferocious. By 1915, Kipling was insisting that there were “only two divisions in the world … human beings and Germans.” Kipling consistently refused state honors (a knighthood, the Order of Merit, the post of poet laureate) but by the late 1890s he was the undisputed if unofficial laureate—but also, which is sometimes forgotten, the Jeremiah—of Imperial Britain.

Which is another reason why I've never found Kipling uncouth, I thought Imperial Britain was a very good thing.  Warts and all.  The deeper reason why Kipling annoys most modern liberals is touched upon by Kimball later on in the piece:

The key word is “civilization.” Kipling was above all the laureate not of Empire, but of civilization, especially civilization under siege. Henry James once sniffed that there was only one strain absent in Kipling: that of “the civilized man.” It’s a frequent refrain. But in a deeper sense, Kipling was about almost nothing else—not the civilization of elegant drawing rooms, but something more primeval and without which those drawing rooms would soon be smashed and occupied by weeds. Kipling, Evelyn Waugh wrote toward the end of his life, “believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.” Kipling endeavored to man those defenses partly through his political oratory, but more importantly through a literary corpus that taught the explicit lessons and the implicit rhythms of emotional continence and restraint.

Poets, by nature, are a pretty ethereal lot.  Romanticism only confirmed this impression, both in the general public and within the "profession" itself.  Kipling, with his rhythmic precision and earthy topics - can we imagine Coleridge writing paeans to businessmen, soldiers and engineers? - violated the impression and seemed therefore unpoetical as well as uncouth and impolitic.  He was the poet who belonged on earth.

Barbara Hall - Intellectual Thug

Having failed to regain political power, the former Toronto mayor has been appointed head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.  She has gotten off to a roaring start, making an audacious bid to expand the powers of her office and the commission.  Ezra Levant, a famous victim of these commissions, gives the story the mainstream media is ignoring:

Which brings us to Barbara Hall, the awful new boss of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. She's the one who issued the guilty verdict against Maclean's magazine, without going through the trouble of having a trial of the matter. And, according to this interview with the National Post's Joseph Brean, she's just getting warmed up.

"I would say that for a province as large and as diverse as Ontario, to have 2,500 formal complaints a year, that that's a very low level," the activist lawyer and former mayor of Toronto said. In the long term she would like to see human rights complaints decrease, but in the interim they "may have to spike."

People aren't unhappy enough in Czarina Hall's Ontario. She will change that.

...she stood firmly by her position that media have a responsibility to put their writings through a "human rights filter" before publication, and said the commission is keen to call out those who do not, jurisdiction be damned.

What this cretin is implicitly, for now, asking for is the power of review over ever bit of journalistic writing in the country.  A "human rights filter" would probably mean a human rights "adviser" approved, if not actually selected by the commission, telling editors what can or cannot be published, much as a lawyer might advise on issues of libel and defamation.  The point is not whether the commission exercises direct control, for Hall's purposes self censorship is cheaper and less obviously interventionist, it's that these commissions, by the implicit threat of force, have the ability to shape the climate of opinion. 

This is done, of course, under the holy rubric that if we don't think unpleasant thoughts, unpleasant things won't happen.  Years ago when Hall was mayor of Toronto she, or one of her underlings, banned from Nathan Phillips square, the city's main public square in front of city hall, the music group Bare Naked Ladies.  This was before the Toronto based group achieved international stardom and many awards.  Ms Hall, or the underling, believed that the group's name was offensive to women.  This humourless puritanism made Hall look like a fool and the group, rightly, refused an apology.  Imagine such a creature having influence over the media of this country, which is already deep in the grips of political correctness.

Correction:  It seems that June Rowlands, not Barbara Hall, banned the Bare Naked Ladies.  So difficult to tell these statists apart...

How Darwin Killed the Jews

This piece in NRO is both obscene and preposterous.

There’s already been a volley of advance attacks on a new film’s suggestion of a link between Darwinism and Nazi ideology. The movie is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opening this weekend, a cheeky documentary that is not primarily about evolutionism in prewar Germany. Reviewers in Time, Scientific American, Variety, Fox News, and elsewhere have denounced the filmmakers for suggesting that Hitlerism without the contribution of Darwinism would be hard to imagine.

This movie is, in fact, about the professional ostracism visited today on American scientists who doubt that undirected natural selection can fully explain life’s development. They are academics at places like the Smithsonian Institution, Iowa State University, and Baylor University. Droll comic-actor Ben Stein stars, interviewing the researchers.

But for about ten minutes, Expelled touches on Darwinism’s historical social costs, notably the unintended contribution to Nazi racial theories. That part packs an emotional wallop. It also happens to be based on impeccable scholarship.

The Darwin-Hitler connection is no recent discovery. In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.”

Like Hitler, Charles Darwin saw natural processes as setting moral standards. It’s all in The Descent of Man, where he explains that, had we evolved differently, we would have different moral ideas. On a particularly delicate moral topic, for example, he wrote: “We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.”

In the same book, he compared the evolution of people to the breeding of animals and drew a chilling conclusion regarding what he saw as the undesirable consequences of allowing the unfit to breed:

“Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” In this desacralized picture of existence, to speak of life as possessing any kind of holiness is to introduce an alien note.

Without God we are all murderers?  Unless man is the end product of some divinely ordained processes then men, it seems, will no longer regard human life as sacred?  I don't try to tag modern Christianity with the atrocities of the Inquisition, the persecution of the Jews, toleration of slavery by many Christian sects and the various crimes committed in the name of God.  This is because it is grossly unfair to compare modern Christians with the mystic thugs and witch doctors who have assumed that name in the past.  It is just as unfair to argue that because science seeks natural explanations it leads to a devaluation of human life. 

What does lead, and has through out history, to a denial of the sanctity of human life is a rejection of individualism and man's physical nature.  The slaughters engaged in lightly because God would know his own.  The burnings at the stake to destroy the flesh and purify the soul.  The murderous creed of the Nazis, the Communists and the Fascists had at it's center collectivism and its own form of mysticism, albeit in secular garb.  Whether it was the pseudo-science of eugenics, or the pseudo-economic jargon of the Marxists preaching the dialectic process - something even more logically absurd than the Trinity - fanaticism is fanaticism.  A modern age seeks modern rationalizations and facades, the essential madness remains the same. 

What's a Trillion?

C.D. Howe, mid-twentieth century Canadian liberalism's technocrat par excellent, never said "What's a million?"  This was one of Dief's bits of oratorical legerdemain, taking an off hand remark C.D. had made in the Commons, about how a government spending billions in wartime was bound to lose track of an odd million or two.  It was the sort of thing, however, that Pierre Trudeau should have said, it summed up the fiscal profligacy of his reign perfectly.  This stands in sharp contrast to the Liberalism of Howe and his two nominal political masters, Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent, men who consistently balanced, or nearly balanced, their peace time budgets. 

Until Trudeau the Liberal Party was a byword for fiscal prudence and economical restraint.  The early Trudeau years followed in this pattern until about 1975.  Usually the blame for the spree that followed, for which my generation will be paying for long into the future, goes to the informal 1972-74 coalition between the Trudeau Liberals and the NDP.  There is an element of truth to this but the binge continued long after Trudeau won his second majority.  The link that failed was John Turner.  Sensing that the philosopher king wasn't resigning anytime soon, and likely to leave one hell of mess after he left office, Turner quit his post as Minister of Finance and went off to practice corporate law on Bay Street. 

Popular imagination has Turner as something of Red Grit, due to his opposition to Free Trade, nothing could be further from the truth.  He stood fair square in the King-St. Laurent tradition of fiscally prudent social democracy, he was a Blue Liberal in short. He was also the last major figure in cabinet capable of seriously opposing Trudeau's plans, with his own base of support and different ideas.  As I have said before in this space, if John Turner was not the right man for 1984 or 1988, he or Robert Winters was the right man in 1968.  Conservatives often bemoan how Trudeau lead the nation to fiscal ruin. Don't blame Trudeau completely, that's too neat and historically unfair.  There were better, or at least less worse, politicians available in the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet Canadians kept voting for Trudeau.  Lorne Gunter on the Red Madness of that Age:

Of course, the finest minds inside the federal bureaucracy had told the Trudeau government to spend without concern for the consequences. It was what the Liberals wanted to hear in the mid-'70s, just as it was what bureaucrats wanted to tell them. Both loved the idea of radically expanded government, especially if they didn't have to charge taxpayers the full cost.

Throughout the late '60s and early '70s, university economics professors, politicians and policymakers were seized by two complementary ideas: There was no limit to the problems governments could solve given enough money to spend on social programs, and there was no reason government shouldn't borrow all the money it needed.

The dominant fiscal theory was that so long as governments paid the annual interest on any money they owed, inflation would whittle the principal down to meaninglessness. All their social-program dreams would cost them was the debt-servicing costs, which would take up a smaller percentage of annual budgets than paying the full cost for the programs up front. After 10 or 20 years, the principal would have been reduced by inflation to a fraction of its original face value. Paying it back would then involve a mere hiccup on the government's ledgers.

That might have worked if the borrowing had gone on for only a year or two. But after the 1974 edition, Canada went another 21 years without a balanced budget.

The validation of deficit spending to fund the growth of government was Canada's biggest public policy mistake. Not only did it ramp up our national debt to frightening proportions -- for which we are still paying the consequences in over-high taxes and slowed economic growth -- it also addicted Canadians to the idea that every time they have a problem, Ottawa will rush to their rescue with a cheque.

Milton Friedman got it half right when he said that inflation was essentially a monetary phenomenon.  Fundamentally inflation is the product of immorality.  In Faust Goethe, scarcely an expert on economics, has Meph play a prank on a very greedy little kingdom, promising boomtimes if only they would adopt a paper fiat currency.  Meph, it should be noted, was in disguise.  Our modern Canadian Mephs, ensconced deeply within the Federal Public Service and armed with PhDs from the finest schools, made the same offer to men perfectly willing to listen, a socialist (Trudeau) and opportunistic lackey (Chretien).  Notice, beneath the economic nomenclature, the wickedness of this phrase:

The dominant fiscal theory was that so long as governments paid the annual interest on any money they owed, inflation would whittle the principal down to meaninglessness.

Government debt is a pledge, people loan the state money to be repaid at a certain date and rate of interest.  To contract a debt knowing its real value will decrease in time, while the other party does not, is an act of fraud.  To use the power of the state to reduce the real value of the currency is a form of theft and an obvious abuse of power and authority.  I won't speculate on what kind of education Chretien received, but we all know Trudeau went to one of the finest Jesuit schools in North America.  Surely the Ten Commandments were taught and surely, being so apt a pupil, committed to memory by Trudeau.  One does not do good works by engaging in theft and dishonesty, the Jesuits would have mentioned that at some point too.

"Death by Blogging"

You may rest assured, dear readers, that Publius, with his blistering one post per week publishing rate, will not be dropping dead from exhaustion anytime soon.  Slate on the NYT making up a trend.

The symptoms of toxic blogging, Richtel informs the concerned reader, include "sleep disorders," "exhaustion," and—heads I win, tails you lose—"weight loss or gain." The number affected is "unclear," but "surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands." Richtel, a salaried employee at the Times, is particularly flummoxed that bloggers are often paid based on how much they write and whether anyone reads them. He likens this to a "sales commission," a comparison that evokes Alec Baldwin chalking "ALWAYS BE CLOSING" onto a blackboard in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross. ("First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado*. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.") A less lurid but more accurate comparison would be to freelance writing, an occupation I've held from time to time. It is not, I promise you, a hazardous occupation, unless you report from a war zone.

Which reminds me, I need to give Brutus a copy of Glengarry, Glenn Ross for his birthday.  ABB - Always be Blogging.  Hits are for posters.

"I feel sorry for the 48."

On the canonization of Mrs Thatcher.

Mr Blair said he could not, as his press aide Alistair Campbell once put it, "do God" or stress the role of religion while in Number 10 because he might be "considered weird" and that "in our culture it would have led to a whole series of suppositions, none of which are very helpful to the practicing politician". This misses the point. Either he held these principles strongly or he didn't. To set them to one side while prime minister for the sake of a quiet life and then to invite plaudits for parading them afterwards is the opposite of what Margaret Thatcher did. She could not care less if she was considered weird, or was out of step with the prevailing orthodoxy if she felt she was right.

In fact she relished it. I remember attending a Commonwealth summit many years ago when the issue of sanctions against apartheid South Africa was causing huge ructions in the organisation. Almost all the Commonwealth was in favour of sanctions; Mrs Thatcher alone took the position that sanctions would harm ordinary South Africans. She was working assiduously behind the scenes to persuade the regime in South Africa to dismantle apartheid and to secure the release of Nelson Mandela, and felt that Commonwealth grandstanding was making that more difficult.

After issuing her own communique opposing sanctions, she was asked at the final press conference what it felt like to be the only leader of 49 member states out on a limb, and replied: "I feel sorry for the 48."

The YouGov poll credits the Thatcher years with forcing Labour to give up socialism by moving the country permanently away from excessive respect for the power of the state towards a preference for the free market. But whereas the Left has had to accept that the state cannot any longer own the means of production, it seeks instead to interfere in our lives in so many other ways, from telling us what to eat, when to play (witness Messrs Balls and Burnham making chumps of themselves in a playground last week), how to spend our own money, where our children can go to school, what sort of medical treatment we should have and, coming soon, when and how we should register our identity on a database before being issued with an ID number.

We have moved from a command economy to a controlled existence because the Left, as Lady Thatcher recognised, simply does not understand the concept of individual choice and freedom, even if it has had to adopt the language to survive. Worst of all, it manages to exercise its centralised control in a hamfisted, inefficient way that wastes our time and pours our money down the drain. It should do less but make a far better job of what it must do.

In short, we need a non-economic brand of Thatcherism.  This was always implicit in her reforms, but she was so busy fixing the economic mess of socialism "with a human face," that she didn't have enough time to fix or stop the creeping nanny statism.

Unionized Blackmail in the Imperial Capital

There is nothing that quite so puts other Canadians to sleep as news about Toronto.  The Imperial Capital is well enough known for its smugness and provinciality, a trait somewhat common to all big cities.  The "X-factor" which "the Largest City in Canada" adds to the equation is its desperate eagerness to be something else.  It must be better than other Canadian cities for it aspires to that ultimate ambition, to be American.  Long ago it aspired to be British, more British than Britain could possible have been.  The British Empire collapsed - a fact noticed by Torontonians around 1968 - so the second handers looked elsewhere.  New York, it's psychic model, sees itself as a city apart, not wholly American but some idealized America, that mere other Americans might aspire or envy but can never be.  It's contempt for "flyover country" is of a feudal lord over his serfs.  Toronto's contempt for the Rest of Canada of a middle class house wife for her working class relatives.  This attitude, which pervades every aspect of the city's being and is in many ways a crucial part of Torontoness, is so perfectly off putting.  On and on she goes about her new dress, how expensive and how it was on sale too, utterly oblivious that its in last year's colour and cut.

Patience is asked of the gentle reader then.  The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), the capital's state controlled public transit monopoly, is faced with a crippling strike.  The union is grieved, as unions often are, that the management, here the city fathers and the odd mother, wish that newer employees make less than their more established co-workers.  A manifest injustice!  Indeed.  As noted in a post a few weeks back fare collectors - glorified cashiers - command a starting salary of about $54,000 per year, several times the market rate for their services.  In the hopes of staving off municipal bankruptcy Mayor David Miller, a confirmed socialist, and his almost as left-wing ally TTC chairman Adam Giambrone, are trying to dim down the lavish pay and benefits.  The head of the union, Bob Kinnear noted that:

"...[w]e regret that this step is necessary and we do not delude ourselves that the public will be on our side. But our alternative is to continue to accept second class treatment in what the mayor says is a world class city."

"We can no longer accept second-class status as public sector workers in Toronto," Kinnear told the media conference in Richmond Hill this morning. "The Mayor has said that this contract is a time for fairness and we take him at his word. It's time to stop treating TTC workers worse than City of Toronto workers when it comes to job injuries, benefits and pensions."

Mr. Kinnear said that TTC operators make less in wages and benefits than in neighbouring municipalities. "Driving a streetcar on Queen Street in Toronto takes a lot more skill than driving a bus on Queen Street in Brampton. A TTC subway operator now makes less than a Mississauga bus operator. Is that fair?"

The angels weep.  Perhaps it is unfair that subway operators in Toronto make less than a Mississauga bus operator, then again it is a subway.  Does Mr Kinnear wish his subway operators to earn a premium for never getting lost?  It does take more skill to drive a bus in downtown Toronto than in whatever passes for a business district in Brampton, a suburb whose sole distinction is having given to Ontario the figure of Bill Davis.  Yet how is this a justification for a salary increase?  On what basis is a Brampton bus driver paid?  For decades public sector employees have fought a race to the top.  One bunch would obtain a wage increase, a fact used by other PS unions to argue for an increase for their members.  This cycle is seen in the private sector too, with one important caveat: productivity.  In layman's terms: You can't make more than you make.  If you create so much wealth, you cannot be paid more than that, otherwise someone else needs to foot the difference.

Mr. Davis, Brampton Billy as he was once known, gave public sector employees the right to strike, the most expensive "civil liberty" in this province's history.  Mr. Davis was fond of saying that the buck stopped with him, even if he never got around to explaining exactly how the buck was being stopped and at what price to the taxpayers.  The buck has now stopped at David Miller's desk - the current Premier, a Norman Bates look-alike with Bill Davis pretensions , is of course evading the issue.  The Mayor is to be applauded for not immediately caving into union demands.  Possessing a well known sense of drama, Mr. Miller is perhaps waiting for Sunday morning, the union's deadline, to cave in. 

The TTC, for those who dwell in the land beyond Steeles, is not simply the public transit system of Toronto, it is the city's respiratory system.  1.5 millions of the city's 2.5 million residents use it everyday.  There is no alternative for most.  A week long strike would literally slow the economic growth of the entire country.  Knowing this the unions knows the strike will last, if it comes, a day or two, and then either they will give or be forced back to work by the province as an "essential service."  This is kabuki theater without the grace and elegance imparted by the Japanese.  The solution?  Let time run back.  The TTC was created in 1921 by the city government purchasing several private transit companies, companies that had served the city well for over seventy years, on the grounds of aiding the common good.  A state owned transit system would be cheaper and more efficient than a private sector system, so the argument went.  The new entity almost immediately hiked rates and cut service.  It is a tradition it carries down to this day, as bits of roof fall onto subway tracks and fare collectors collect sky-high salaries with their tokens.

Our Honoured Dead

However dark the cultural wars appear in the Elder Dominion, we may take bleak solace that other parts of the Commonwealth have fared worse. One of these places, we are grieved to note, is Mother England herself. After nearly a half century of increasing jacobin tendencies (note I say jacobin not jacobite) many of Her Majesty's Loyal Canadian subjects (though since 1947 we are technically "citizens," that hateful republican word) feared for the soul of Our Lady of the Snows, as Kipling called her. Our recent efforts in Afghanistan have put paid to these fears. Our leaders are weak but "...the blood a hero sire hath spent, still nerves a hero son." The people themselves have not been lacking. As this article in the Daily Mirror notes, the returning bodies of the fallen are meet with honour guards of citizens and soldiers. A portion of one of Toronto's main highways has been renamed the "Highway of Heroes," which is a touch bland and sentimental but expresses a genuine wish among Canadians to honour our soldiers. This same honour is not being shown in Thames Valley.

The spectacle was so striking that the highway, part of which was known as the Queen Elizabeth Way, has now been renamed the Highway of Heroes. Since then, every body travelling along the Highway of Heroes has been greeted by hundreds of ordinary Canadians who often wait for hours in the bitter Ontario winter to show their respect and support. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Legere, Provost Marshal for the 1st Canadian Air Division Headquarters, wrote of one such journey in a letter to a Toronto newspaper. He said: "Although words cannot possibly do justice to this heart-wrenching experience, I thought it important for you to be aware of the overwhelming – and I mean overwhelming – support provided by law enforcement, fire services, ambulance services and, indeed, the public at large, for this very solemn occasion. "I could not believe my eyes as we made the solemn journey from Trenton to the coroner's office in Toronto. Every on-ramp had a police vehicle blocking traffic, with members standing by the vehicles saluting. Entire police detachments stood along the route, saluting in front of their vehicles. "

[...]

Highways for Heroes have been designated in other Canadian cities and many people pay their respects when a fallen soldier returns. Police escorts are the norm. The spectacle contrasts strongly with the progress of a British cortege which The Mail on Sunday was given special permission to follow earlier this month. Lieutenant John Thornton, 22, and Marine David Marsh, 23, both of 40 Commando Royal Marines, were killed in a vehicle explosion while patrolling in Helmand Province. Their two black hearses and an empty spare hearse accompanying them were initially escorted by Wiltshire Police. The cortege first passed through the village of Wootton Bassett where locals, forewarned by the RAF base, gather at the war memorial to pay their respects.

But for much of the rest of the trip to Oxford – where the bodies undergo post mortems before being returned to their families – the hearses are on their own, led only by an undertaker's car. They were cut up by impatient motorists at roundabouts, stuck in traffic and generally ignored by the public, their significance lost because of a lack of the gravitas that a police escort would provide.

The problem has arisen because the Wiltshire Constabulary escort – normally three motorcycle outriders and two patrol cars which stop other traffic along the route – has to "peel off" at the Oxfordshire border where the Thames Valley force area begins. The corteges then have to fend for themselves on Oxford's notorious ring road. Inspector Mark Levitt of Wiltshire Police has taken up the matter with Thames Valley

[...]

But Thames Valley Police defended their failure to provide an escort. They say that even before April last year, when RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire rather than Lyneham was used for repatriating war dead, the force provided escorts only if there was an "operational need", such as large numbers of vehicles, families or people involved. Assistant Chief Constable Brian Langston claimed that "most of the time" escorts were not required or requested.

"I've spoken to my counterpart at Wiltshire Police and I understand they provide escorts because of the people involved at the Wootton Bassett events. We try to provide what people say are their priorities, and so far that's been to focus on community safety rather than ceremonial roles."

The fertile imagination of Dante Alighieri would falter in devising an appropriate punishment for this bureaucratic entity. "Ceremonial roles," does he imagine he's escorting the President of Bulgaria for a bit of hunting in Berkshire? How bereft of spirit does a man have to become, not merely to dishonour the men who defend his realm, but to imagine that the ceremonial is not vital to life, to life as men. The Thames Valley police are notoriously incompetent at maintaining "community safety," and the great increase in crime in Britain in recent decades stems, in part, from these utilitarian tendencies. Communities that honour the good and right, that perform ceremonies to remind the people of their allegiances and values, are ones that tend to keep themselves safe.

Assorted Links: April 5, 2008

Remembering WFB

On the occasion of his memorial service this Friday.

The Magnanimous Man

He knew that as an interpreter of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Gettysburg Address, I was concerned with subjects far more consequential than any treaty with the Soviet Union. At bottom, the disagreements concerning the American political tradition were disagreements concerning the nature of the human soul. And it did not take any argument to convince Bill Buckley that, when you came to the human soul, you did not fool around. Bill never forgot that my first book was on Aristotle and Aquinas.

[...]

One final note. In 1974 my younger son — the same who had driven Bill from Riverside to Claremont — graduated from Yale. To see him through, we had scraped the bottom of the family barrel until there was no bottom to the barrel. We simply had no money to go to the graduation. How Bill found out about this, I have no idea. But his check for one thousand dollars arrived, with instructions to go to the graduation, and later to stop at his New York home for dinner! I cannot begin to express how moving the experience was to attend my son’s graduation from Yale, thirty five years after my own.

All At Sea

In those non-refrigerated, pre-microwave days, a lot of our food came in tins. These were stored below the floorboards in the ship’s bilges. The bilges invariably filled with oily seawater, causing the labels to decompose. As a result, we never knew what, exactly, we’d be having for dinner on any given night. If we were lucky, Dinty Moore beef stew. If not, we might well dine exclusively on Harvard beets and creamed corn. Some tins contained crêpes suzette. My father, not a cook himself, loved to douse them in copious amounts of Grand Marnier. At the climactic moment, he would drop a match into the skillet, causing a Hiroshima of flame to lick the cabin top. Again, my mother’s voice was heard: “Bill, why are you trying to set fire to the boat?”

Some afternoons, my father might say, “Shall we have lobster tonight?” He’d steer for the nearest lobster pot. As a child, I found this thrilling beyond belief, for it was established lore that a Maine lobsterman could legally shoot you on sight if he caught you plundering his livelihood.

After laborious heavings on the line, the trap would come up, suddenly alive with frantic, jackknifing lobsters. The trick was getting them out without having them clamp down on your fingers. My father would then put two bottles of whisky into the lobster pot as payment. I always wondered what the lobsterman thought upon bringing up his trap to find two fifths of Johnnie Walker Black inside. Did he scratch his head and say, “Reckon Mr. Buckley’s back”?

A Founding Father

At about age 13 I became mesmerized by Bill Buckley’s column in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. His intellect and good humor literally created my desire to learn. But in my first year of college I flunked Speech 101 (I refused to outline). At age 20 I told my dad the worst news he could hear: “I’m quitting school.” Having come through the Great Depression, he believed that without a college degree I had no chance of getting a good job.

“I want to be like Bill Buckley,” I told him. “I want to be able to sit around and write and think.”

My dad, perhaps the most brilliant man I ever knew intimately, gave me a two-hour lecture on how hard and time-consuming achievement is: “When you see someone’s output but don’t see what goes into it, you can make the mistake of assuming it comes easy to them, especially those who are great at what they do. They make it look so easy you think you can do it, too.” My dad was right about that.

Disturber of the Peace

It is one of Jane Austen’s universally acknowledged truths that Bill Buckley developed a fusionist conservatism by uniting libertarians, traditionalists, and foreign-policy hawks around the common standard of anti-Communism. There is truth in that, but it is not the whole truth. And it is certainly not how people saw it at the time. The new conservatism of WFB, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, et al. was thought by many to be an exotic European import, Burkean in a Lockean liberal society, and romantically opposed to the kind of historical change that Americans naturally embraced.

In 1957 Samuel Huntington, provoked by this new conservatism, wrote an important article in the American Political Science Review in which he defined conservatism as the system of ideas that was employed to defend established institutions whenever they came under fundamental attack. “When the foundations of society are threatened,” he wrote, “the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and the desirability of the existing ones.”

[...]

Bill knew that if conservatism had any future, it had to be a hard political movement as well as a soft intellectual one. It also had to have appeal to people other than NR subscribers. And it had to succeed — or at least be protected from failure. So WFB launched a serious bid for the New York mayoralty disguised as a lark.

The New Criterion on WFB

As Scruton stresses, this removal is not an abrogation but rather a triumph of politics, a triumph threatened wherever the preferments of individual freedom are besieged by collectivist zeal. Bill Buckley touched and improved countless lives. He created and nurtured a score of important institutions. He was part of the tonic that revitalized the appetite for ordered liberty and helped defeat one of the most monstrous tyrannies in history. It speaks less to the irony than to the amplitude of Bill’s vision that he undertook these initiatives not to further a political agenda but to rescue us from one.

The Cell Phone at 35

One of the things that Bill Buckley made possible was the cell phone.  You jest, surely Publius.  He was a history major, not an engineer.  Well, dear friends, you engineers need us history majors from time to time.  It's the history majors that remind people that:

...there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate freely on the men who issue licenses — on the politicians. They recognize, therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient getting and spending.

It took the genius of a group of engineers to create the cell phone and the intellectual genius of men like WFB to maintain a political environment allowing such men to operate. 

On his way to a New York City news conference on April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper just couldn't help himself.

The then-project manager at Motorola was proud of what his crew of engineers and developers had managed to create and felt the need to brag about the accomplishment.

At the corner of 56th Street and Lexington Avenue, Cooper took the wrapping off the first cellular phone ever created and placed the world's first cellphone call to his rival, Joel Engel, then head of Bell Labs research department (which has since been acquired by AT&T Inc.) to inform Engel of the upcoming announcement.

He then walked into the news conference to tell the rest of the world.

While he had dreams of seeing a cellphone in everyone's hands, even Cooper could not have imagined the impact the creation would have on society.

The C-Word

A Conservative cabinet minister, in a moment of eccentricity or weakness, we hope, has uttered the most dreaded word in the vocabulary of English speaking Canadians:  Constitution.

Meech Lake, "the night of the long knives," Charlottetown, so-called unilateral patriation of the constitution, the 1995 referendum squeaker - have the Conservatives forgotten all the searing, gut-wrenching anxiety and turmoil of those events in Canadian history? Or, worse, are they cavalier enough to resurrect, for partisan electoral purposes, all the risks that inevitably pop up whenever the phrase "Quebec and the constitution" rears its ugly head?

Neither, we hope, and so we want to believe that there's really nothing to a recent story, in another newspaper, saying that Stephen Harper's government has been suggesting to the Quebec government that it might soon be time to re-open the constitution to address Quebec's "historical demands." The necessary pre-condition, reportedly, would be a Conservative majority government.

One reason not to take this business to seriously is that it came not from Harper but from Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn, who said it would be nice to give a broader context to the notion of Quebecers as "a nation" - to, in Blackburn's phrase, "put some meat on it."

Having dispensed with monarchy the Americans, needful as all men are for sacred things, deified their constitution and the men who made it.  We agree, as we often do, with Gladstone's opinion that the efforts of Madison, Hamilton and Jefferson were "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."  To have raised the Fathers of the American Republic to such a great height is well deserved, but the elevation was product not only of their genius but of the desire to build a national myth.  Every nations needs a founding and founders, luckily the Romulus and Remus of America were real and great.  Canada has always lacked so powerful a founding myth, or more accurately we have developed several myths only to see them compete and undercut each other. 

Beyond and beneath the convoluted legal rhetoric over the division of powers, provincial and languages rights lies the essence of our constitutional debates, the symbolic nature of a document that failed to serve its spiritual purpose.  The British North America Act - renamed in 1982 the Constitution Act (1867) under the Jacobin conceits of late Trudeaupia - was indeed a curiously flawed document in how it poorly defined the respective powers of the two senior levels of government, leading to interminable jurisdictional turf wars.  This was, historically, an accident.  The BNA Act was essentially written by two men in a hotel room, one of whom had too much to drink.  The identity of the drinker is well enough known, Sir John A Macdonald, the brilliant, if too pragmatic, impresario of Confederation and our first PM. 

The second gentleman is less well known, the inscrutable Oliver Mowatt.  One of Canada's leading lawyers at the time Mowatt was also the right-hand man of George Brown,  head of the Liberal Party and the dominant political force in what became the province of Ontario.  As Brown was a journalist by occupation and had little legal background, it was Mowatt who represented the Liberal Party as legal expert.  Macdonald's Quebec allies, Alexander Galt and D'Arcy McGee were not lawyers and left the legal work to John A.  George Etienne Cartier, the then French Canadian chef, was more a gentleman than a jurist and preferred to deal with patronage issues.  This left Macdonald and Mowatt as the legal fathers of the document.  Both men despised each other, the latter having at one point been apprenticed to the former, and were working at cross purposes. 

Mowatt believed in a decentralized federation, Macdonald wanted a constitutional arrangement as close as politically possibly to a British style unitary state.  Macdonald won the initial battle, drafting about half of the BNA's articles, but Mowatt won the war.  After leaving federal politics Mowatt served as Premier of Ontario for 23 years, spending most of that time waging a legal battle to expand provincial rights.  This legal to and fro laid out the precedents by which Canada has largely been governed since.  The wrangling of the 1970s and 1980s had less to do with real disagreements over jurisdictional authority, than awkward and halting attempts to appease the wounded pride of the French Canadians, without rendering Canada a mere geographic expression.  Faced with the unedifying prospect of once again singing, in the style of the nuns in The Sound of Music, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Quebec?" the Prime Minister has backed away from constitution talk.  Perhaps he dimly remembers the last Conservative Prime Minister who did so, and the young policy wonk from Calgary, by way of Leaside, who helped overthrow him.

The Metis Mullah Speaks

We here at the Gods listen:

Qasira Shaheen, Robina Butt and Shugufta Iftikhar have recently filed Human Rights complaints against Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy and so far their efforts have resulted in either physical assaults or a little firebomb party at their place. Syed Soharwardy has brushed off the allegations of abuse by proclaiming that "We are Sufi, they are Wahabbi" and so therefore one must assume that he feels they are less then he is because of their beliefs even though he continues to claim in public statements that he represents all Muslims. The media should take note of that before they run up to kiss his pointy shoes and get his views on the next honour killing and quote him as the founder of Muslims against Terror and make him representative of the entire community. Syed Soharwardy has never been one to  complain about being called a radical which is just fine in my books as I can poke at him all I want as long as I stick to the truth and I think he has given up on me. I am my own Imam Syed and there is a reason for it.

Liberal party cheerleader Warren Kinsella stated in his book titled the Web of Hate that "The ARA [Anti-Racist Action]  is a collection of Trotskyites, Marxists and other left-wingers who insist that force should be used to deal with fascist groups." but in recent events denounces only one side even though both groups are equally despicable. The leader of this past weekends anti-fascist and 'peace' party Jason Devine even used talking points from the pro-violence plagued ARA Toronto faction while talking to the media. I have pointed this out in previous articles and my reward has been to be called a fascist by said person and have been accused of being a member of the neo-Nazi website community Stormfront.

Having met both Darcy and Warren Kinsella, let me say that my money is on Darcy if this gets ugly....

Sir Ralph

"For God's sake, speak English."

France's ambassador to Canada was in Calgary on Wednesday night to present Klein with the Legion of Honour for his role in nurturing ties between Alberta and France, which invests in the province's oilsands.

"The Ralph Klein years have been happy years for the relation and partnership between Alberta and France," said Ambassador Daniel Jouanneau in naming Klein a chevalier, or knight, of the order.

Created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, the award is France's highest honour. Klein joins the ranks of Queen Elizabeth II, U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and comedian Jerry Lewis.

"C'est un grand plaisir. Merci, merci. Thank you. Enough of my Diefenbaker French," Klein said to laughter from the audience.

The former premier told CBC News the award recognizes his commitment to French culture in Alberta: "The reason is I enjoy the French community. My uncle was French …. He had a son and a daughter.

"Their names were Romeo and Juliet — totally French — and they spoke French all the time, and I was so mad at them for speaking French that I used to say, 'For God's sake, speak English.'

"And of course, they would continue to speak French just to annoy me," he chuckled

"This is like receiving the Order of Canada — only from a foreign country," said Klein.

Whether many Albertans will admit it publicly, they miss this guy.

Audits Are Racism

Auditors are bigots.

Canada's largest native organization is accusing Conservatives of spreading falsehoods about aboriginals as Ottawa steps up audits of reserves and vows to publicize its findings.

The Assembly of First Nations issued a terse statement yesterday criticizing a new Indian Affairs policy that begins July 1. Under the policy, all transfers to band and tribal councils will contain a clause allowing the department to audit the money later to determine whether it was well spent.

According to the AFN, the announcement from Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl "plays on the false impression that has been spread about first nations and accountability. Those who believe the myths might like the idea that 'something is finally being done,' but they would be wrong again."

In the spirit of the Liberals' controversial First Nations Governance Act, which was abandoned in 2003 after fierce AFN opposition, the audits will also report on whether bands have appropriate management, financial and administrative controls.

There are times when I wonder, honestly, whether the most humane thing is just to scrap the Indian Act and stop all funding to aboriginal reserves immediately.  However wrenching the cutting off of funds, it would end the welfare traps that these reserves have become.  Is cold hard indifference really worse than a compassion so corrupt it resists the merest scrutiny?

The Mob Killed Sonny Bono?

It did seem just a little too convenient that an experienced skier would fly right into a tree, didn't it?

Ted Gunderson, now a private investigator, has told the US Globe tabloid that Bono, who served as mayor of Palm Springs for four years, did not die after hitting a tree on a Nevada ski slope in January 1998 as everyone believed.

"It's nonsense for anyone to now try to suggest that Bono died after crashing into a tree. There's zero evidence in this autopsy report... to show such an accident happened. Instead, there's powerful proof he was assassinated.

"This was an evil plot that was carried out to almost perfection by ruthless assassins," Mr Gunderson told the paper.

The former agent, who has been researching Bono's accident for the past decade, said top officials linked to an international drug and weapons ring feared the singer-turned-politician was about to expose their crimes - so they had him killed on the slopes.

Bono, an experienced skiier, was ambushed on the slopes by hired hitmen, who beat him to death and then staged a tree collision, Mr Gunderson said.

From hippiedom to hitmen, the sad trajectory of a minor Sixties icon.

The Empire Buys Back

Tata to buy Jaguar and Land Rover.

India's Tata Group, in fact, wants to take off Ford's hands not only Jaguar but Land Rover, the British matron of sport utility vehicles in which Queen Elizabeth II has been known to flog through the gardens behind Windsor Castle.

The importance of one of India's muscular conglomerates riding to the rescue of British legends -- and paying as much as $2 billion to do so -- isn't lost on either side of the ex-empire.

The Tata deal, which could be sealed next week, "has made us all proud," said Debashis Chakraborty, a government official in Kolkata, the onetime capital of the British Raj.

Neither Indians nor Brits have failed to appreciate the historical ironies involved. In Britain, though, the reaction has been more mixed, with optimism that Tata Chief Executive Ratan Tata will be able to help restore the brand to its former glory spiked with faint regret that it took an Indian giant to do the job.

"I think Sir William Lyons would be turning in his grave, quite frankly," said Barrie Birkin, a longtime Jaguar owner from Matlock, in the Derbyshire Dales, referring to the legendary co-founder of the company who presided over the marque's preeminence in world motor sports and luxury car design through 1972.

Given the rapid decay of British cultural values in Britain, the Indian elite is probably more British - in the best sense of the word - than most Britishers.  This century will be dominated by India and China.  We know that the Chinese don't know cricket.  From this we should understand that one of the central goals of Anglo-American foreign policy over the next thirty years is to prepare and support India to assume its role as the dominant English speaking power of this century.  There is always the possibility that the neo-Madarins governing China will lose power or reform themselves into liberal democrats.  Just as likely is that a powerful strain of nationalism will re-assert itself, transforming the PRC into a modern version of Wilhelmine Germany.  A strong India is not merely a good thing, but a vital thing for the survival of basic western values.

"Mugabe: I will quit, as long as I do not face prosecution"

Like Che cowering before the Bolivian Army in 1967.

Robert Mugabe's aides have told Zimbabwe's opposition leaders that he is prepared to give up power in return for guarantees, including immunity from prosecution for past crimes.

But the aides have warned that if the Movement for Democratic Change does not agree then Mugabe is threatening to declare emergency rule and force another presidential election in 90 days, according to senior opposition sources.

The opposition said the MDC leadership is in direct talks with the highest levels of the army but it is treating the approach with caution because they are distrustful of the individuals involved and calling for direct contact with the president, fearing delaying tactics.

Those fears were reinforced last night when at one point Zimbabwe's election commission abruptly halted the release of official results from the Saturday's election for "logistical reasons" and the police raided opposition offices.

I don't recall Ian Smith asking for immunity.  Then again he was a gentleman and not a megalomaniac thug.

He Still Annoys Us

A mash note to Pierre Trudeau.

It takes incredible charm to win the trust of a younger generation, and far more charm to marry a member of that younger generation - Trudeau, 52, wed Margaret Sinclair, 22, in 1971 - without being classified as a pervert. To my parents and others, that marriage only confirmed their belief that Trudeau was one of their own.

But if that generational feat was impressive, what about Trudeau's resonance with my generation, we who spent his entire political career playing in sandboxes and eating snow and ignoring Parliament unless forced to tour its buildings?

We begin slowly, lest example breed.  It does not take incredible charm to win the trust of the young, as many perverts can attest.  It requires only accepting their young conceits as a new form of wisdom.  Youth desperately seeks adult validation, despite outwardly rejecting it.  Any old man who tells them that they are right, especially when that old man is the Prime Minister of Canada, is bound to become their hero. 

The theory behind Trudeau's bilingualism policy was brilliantly simple: Canadians would surely understand each other culturally if they literally understood what the other was saying. If everyone knew everyone else's language, the very idea of an "other" would no longer exist.

Which has turned out brilliantly of course, two referendums and forty years later we're just as divided.  A generation of gushing anglos sent their children off to La Belle Province to learn French and Canadien customs, only to be ignored by the natives.  Benign contempt was something the Francophones could appreciate, listening to groveling mea culpas for the sins of Wolfe was simply annoying. 

This same politics of inclusion is central to some of Trudeau's other major legacies. As justice minister, he persuaded government officials to stop hanging out in Canadians' bedrooms, clearing the Criminal Code of laws against homosexuality and legalizing abortion in some cases. In his final years as prime minister, he established the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

As a kid, and one prodigiously talented at spending time in my own world, I was clueless about the significance of these moves, and probably about the very existence of them. But later on, I marveled at Trudeau's pursuit of social change.

[...]

Even Trudeau's condescending and controversial gestures have an endearing, and enduring, quality. Chumming around with Fidel Castro, pirouetting behind the queen and sliding down banisters in Buckingham Palace, throwing snowballs at a statue of Stalin in Moscow, wearing sandals in the House of Commons.

"Oh, Trudeau, you scoundrel," my parents and their friends seemed to say as they chortled and reminisced, "we can't stay mad at you."

Except of course for the people of Alberta, who revile his memory, or the millions of Canadians then harmed by his disastrous economic policies, or the millions now who worry about the social impact of official multiculturalism.

The strange result of Trudeau's enduring appeal is that I can't stay mad, either, even though I was too young to get properly mad in the first place. His charisma is such that I feel like I was there - even though, at the time, I wasn't paying attention.

This is how the Old Canada, for all its vices - mostly dull ones too - was lost, by gushing perpetual adolescents who saw a kindred spirit.

The Last Joke

Speaking of Seventies' hits that out stayed their welcome.

The Royal Canadian Air Farce, one of Canada's longest-running comedy troupes, will be grounded after next season, CBC announced on Tuesday.

The venerable weekly sketch comedy TV show, known for its topical mix of political and social satire, will produce nine regular episodes in the fall before ending with its traditional New Year's Eve gala special.

"It's just time," original cast member and producer Don Ferguson told CBC News on Tuesday afternoon.

"We've done pretty much everything we wanted to do. The ratings are still good. I want to be in charge of my own exit."

Ferguson also said he didn't consider what day had been chosen for the announcement.

"I didn't even realize it was April 1 that we were doing this, that it was going to come out…. It's not a joke, but it's a great date for us to announce it. April Fool's Day, why not?"

The secret to the show's long run, he added, was keeping the audience the main priority.

"We've only ever worried about [each] week's show and how the audience is going to respond to it," Ferguson said.

"If we can make real, living, breathing Canadians laugh about what's going on in Canada and the world and life in general, it's a great gig."

Go back to any episode of Air Farce from the 1970s or early 1980s, and replace the word "Trudeau" with "Harper" and you'll have the script for last week's show. 

Your Tax Dollars At Work

The poor sap didn't know what was going to hit him.  Candido Barreiro is one of 388 employees of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) who made more that $100,000 last year.  Mr. Barreiro's job?  Fare collector.  He sits in a subway booth selling tokens and collecting tickets, tokens and cash fares.  No heavy lifting is required, no education beyond high school - many collectors are drop outs - and a collector is protected from the public by a thick glass shield.  The base salary is $54,000, which even in Toronto is a good salary.  Mr Barreiro nearly doubled his yearly income by working an incredible 1,000 hours of overtime, averaging about 12 hours a day, assuming 250 working days a year.  When journalists from the Toronto Sun, the city's tabloid paper, showed up to interview and photograph Mr Barreiro he was very obliging, in turn the Sun placed the 46 year old fare collector on the front page of today's paper. 

It never dawned on Mr Barreiro that the good people of Toronto would be miffed, to say the very least, that a fare collector, however industrious, should make more than many executives at large companies.  However needful a fare collector there is not the slightest reason he or she should make more than a bricklayer, an accountant, many lawyers and executives who work twelve hour days in high stress jobs. 

Mr Barreiro is no villain here, he works within a system and his work ethic is to be commended.  It is the system that should be damned.  When Mike Harris' government promised enormous cost savings from municipal amalgamation a decade ago, they were not being wildly optimistic merely, if we may use the phrase, common sensical.  Less government means less overhead, less overhead means less expense.  Copybook stuff really.  Their flawed assumption, however, laid in assuming that costs would otherwise remain the same.  What went wrong?  Mike Harris, bureaucrat-buster par excellent misunderstood the bureaucratic-politico mentality. 

Before amalgamation each of Metro Toronto's municipalities had independent public services, save the police, fire services and ambulances which were financed jointly.  The wage rates in each of these municipalities varied widely.  In Mel Lastman's North York these wages were comparative low, i.e. near market rates for similar services.  In the city of Toronto itself the rates were usually far higher, a result of the council's leftward slant.  Post-amalgamation the public services unions demanded harmonization of wages and benefits across the new united city.  Being unions, they meant, and got, harmonization upwards.  Thus the lowly paid serfs of North York were raised to Toronto standards.  This, at least as much as downloading of social services by the province, created Toronto's current fiscal crisis.  Next time Mayor David Miller asks for a tax increase, or expanded taxing powers, pleading poverty all the while, keep Mr. Barreiro in mind.  Just a hardworking joe making a mint off the taxes of other, poorer, hardworking joes.

It Usually Begins With Whittaker Chambers

[It's a long one boys and girls - Publius]

Amidst the general mourning of the death of William F Buckley, founding editor of National Review, there were some voices of dissent.  This was not, surprisingly, from the statists of the Left, who Buckley had spent a life time skewering with his iridescent wit.  Even Newsweek paid a respectful homage, though predicting a conservative crack-up in the near term - just as the Democratic Party was beginning its vicious civil war on class, race and gender lines.  The loudest attacks on the late man's career came from Objectivists, in particular Robert Tracinski and Harry Binswanger.  These were not polite disagreements about WFB tactics, strategy or basic beliefs, they were dramatic attacks.  Take Harry Binswanger's piece in Capitalism Magazine:

William F. Buckley, Jr. is finally dead. Buckley was the man who initiated and sustained the movement to bring religion into the conservative movement. His first book was "God and Man at Yale," which I haven't read or looked at, but which is said to have criticized Yale education for being both leftist and anti-religious.

[...]

Buckley, more than anyone else, is responsible for subverting the "conservative movement," turning it into its current, depraved status as the anti-reason, anti-man, welfare-statist "religious right." The world is well rid of him.

Robert Tracinski, a syndicated columnist and editor of TIA Daily (an e-mail newsletter of which I am a paying subscriber), was somewhat more tactful:

Tricked by Buckley and his fusionists into outsourcing moral questions to the guardians of religious tradition, the right has never been able to properly develop the moral case for rational self-interest--which means that they never developed the moral case for the profit motive, property rights, and the free market. Many on the right are implicitly sympathetic to capitalism; they sense its virtues, but thanks to "fusionism," they are unable to articulate them. And this means that they have never been able to turn the defense of free markets into a moral crusade.

Even worse, the "fusionists" turned away the one intellectual who could have helped them do so. In the 1950s and 60s, Buckley's National Review made a special (and scurrilously dishonest) effort to purge the right of Ayn Rand and her intellectual movement, because her atheism threatened the fusionist agenda--even though she was the most powerful advocate for the morality of capitalism.

[...]

The lesson of the 2008 primary is that intellectuals on the right need to liberate themselves from William F. Buckley's legacy. They need to devote much more time and attention to the secular moral case for liberty and capitalism--which would finally allow them to stand on their own two feet ideologically, without feeling the need to be "fused" to a religious movement that has shown itself incapable of offering a foundation for these ideals.

Are we speaking here of the same man who, upon his death a month ago, even many of his enemies conceded was an architect of the successful conclusion of the Cold War?  From whence does this Objectivist contempt flow?  Tracinski does a pretty good job summarizing Buckley's role as a public intellectual and the basic argument against NR's approach:

The idea that was supposed to hold up this conservative "big tent" was the theory of "fusionism." Buckley didn't originate fusionism (it was articulated by Frank Meyer), but the idea was vigorously promoted by National Review. Fusionism was the idea that the three wings of conservatism could not only find common cause but could cobble themselves together into a semi-integrated ideology. The theory was that the religionists would defend traditional American values, which would provide cultural support for the ideals of limited government and American patriotism.

This ideological coalition first found expression with the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, which failed to win the presidency but succeeded in launching a political movement.

[...]

So it would be churlish to say that the fusionist agenda was a political failure or that the conservative coalition was only "temporary"; something that shapes American politics for nearly half a century is hardly temporary. Fusionism lasted because it tapped into a much longer American tradition going back to Alexis de Tocqueville in the early 19th century and arguably all the way back to the Founding Fathers, though they would not have embraced it in Buckley's traditionalist form: the idea of a connection between religious belief and the advocacy of liberty.

Fusionism is unstable because its basic premise--that the moral foundation of free markets and Americanism can be left to the religious traditionalists--is false. For five decades, under Buckley's influence, conservatives have ceded to the religious right the job of providing the moral fire to sustain their movement. But they are discovering that the religionists do not have a strong moral commitment to free markets. In fact, the religious right seems to be working on its own version of "fusion"--with the religious left.

Wednesday's Washington Post provided the latest example: a column by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson on the shift to the left among evangelical Christians, who "respond to a message of social justice and community values, not only to a message of rugged individualism and unrestricted markets." Gerson insists that "Christianity indicts oppressive government--but also the soul-destroying excesses that sometimes come in free markets and consumerism." So much for traditional religious values serving as the basis for advocacy of capitalism.

The reason for this shift toward the religious left is that religion cannot support the real basis for capitalism and a strong American national defense: a morality of rational self-interest.

To put it all another way, how do you reconcile the morality of the Sermon on the Mount with the economics of Adam Smith? Or to borrow from Tertullion, what does Edinburgh (or Silicon Valley) have to do with Jerusalem?  As with so much of Western though we return to the scriptures, in particular the Gospel of Matthew 5:3-12.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

Obviously there is no single interpretation to these lines; history is replete with examples of Christianity being invoked to defend capitalism, absolute monarchy, fascism, socialism, slavery and abolitionism and countless more systems and positions.  Whatever that itinerant Jewish carpenter turned prophet really meant, or even said, is lost to history.  It was the opinion of no less a figure than Thomas Jefferson that Jesus was actually a Jewish freedom fighter and ethicist, the mystical elements of his life story being added in by later writers.  Whatever the truth, Jefferson's certainly being more plausible than the explanations confounding the laws of physics, Christianity has been since Constantine the default philosophy of the West.  Whatever else has come and passed, it has so far remained, adjusting and reforming itself to circumstances.  Since it is the one set of beliefs that virtually all Western men have been exposed to, and until comparatively recently few have seriously dissented from, it is only natural that newer movements would seek to invoke its support, however tenuous the links. 

The socio-economic system which emerged in the latter decades of the 17th century in Britain and the Netherlands, what today is called capitalism or market economics, posed a new challenge to Christian thought.  For the first time a substantial percentage of the population was engaged in commercial activities.  While peasants of previous centuries had often brought their goods to a town or village market, trade was a marginal aspect in their lives.  Unlike the bourgeoisie who lived by profit and loss, the peasant was seen as merely attempting to survive, not trying to become rich.  Late Medieval Italy and Renaissance Italy had confronted similar social changes, foreshadowing many of the proposed solutions of the Enlightenment, but the Italian project, having collapsed due to a lack of political unity, was finally destroyed by Spanish tyranny in the early sixteenth century.  As Italy did not completely recover economically or culturally until the 20th century, and Europe was shortly after the Spanish conquest divided by the Reformation, the Italian precedents did not fully carryover to her northern cousins. 

British and Dutch thinkers confronted the new phenomenon of a genuinely commercial society, where the accumulation of wealth was a central goal of daily life, with a hint from their Italian forerunners.  The Scholastics had argued that profit, rather than being a minor sin, a violation of the principle of Christian charity, was in fact just compensation for risk.  This invaluable economic insight provided a moral basis, however tenuous, for a commercial society.  The northern Protestants took this principle further arguing that the charging of interest, something which the late Medieval Italian church had increasingly tolerated despite official condemnation, was legally and morally permissible.  In both cases these were conditional on interest and profit not being "excessive."  Should they fall into, or approach, this moral gray zone then the state should intervene, setting maximum interest rates, which British and Canadian law did so until quite recently, or control prices to limit profits, an attitude which has never left us.

Much of the 18th and 19th century saw thinkers and legislators try to make their peace with capitalism; essentially with its implicit governing principle: selfishness.  As Adam Smith, capitalism's first great theorist and defender, observed:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter II).

How does one reconcile this with Matthew?  Not simply with the argument that "you cannot serve God and mammon," but more importantly with the principle of Christian charity?  How does one justify an inherently selfish system with a religion whose ethical foundation is altruism? The Victorians, ever ingenious, did in fact come up with a compromise.  The free market was the product of divine law; tariffs, wage and price controls and high taxes defied providential will.  One of the leading exponents of this market friendly approach was Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847), one of the leading evangelical thinkers of the era.  As David W Bebbington explains in his excellent work, William Ewart Gladstone: Faith & Politics in Victorian Britain:

Providence watches over human affairs, bringing good out of evil, order out of chaos.  The universe was designed by its Creator for the welfare of human beings so long as they did not abuse their trust.  Government regulation of trade constituted interference with the ways of providence.  It amounted to human laws infringing the sphere of divine laws.  The right policy was for the state to abandon as far as possible such restrictions as Corn Laws and customs duties.  Chalmers held that there should be no compulsory poor laws [welfare] either.  Charitable relief should be a voluntary affair, binding together the rich and the poor in mutual affection. The pinch of poverty would be a spur to able-bodied to work for a living.  Self-help was not only a maxim of prudence:  it was the wisdom of the Creator (pg. 93).

This view, accepted by Gladstone and many classical liberals of the era, has not become completely extinct in the century and a half since. While researching this post I came across this well written article (from 2003) at an evangelical website:

Many Christians support, on moral grounds, the prescription drug benefit for the elderly that Congress and the President are about to enact. They believe that Christ's call to help the poor and the needy extends beyond the realm of individual action to the state, and that the government has a moral imperative to provide for the poor. Some more liberal Christian groups, such as the National Council of Churches, seek to use the power of government to "end poverty." They believe that Christ's love can be expressed through government social programs, and that Christians should morally support welfare and entitlement programs that benefit the poor.

No matter how well meaning these Christians are, however, they fundamentally misunderstand the nature and purpose of Christian charity. They fail to appreciate that Christ's kingdom is not political or of this world, that good works must stem from faith and love of God, and that an important purpose of charity is a witness to non-believers. Additionally, American anti-poverty programs are based on the un-biblical notion of entitlement. Government programs do not further the kingdom of Christ, and Christians should not mistakenly believe that Jesus' call for individual acts of charity extends to the government.

[...]

Furthermore, the bible explicitly repudiates the notion that Christians have a duty to help the poor under all circumstances. Charity is a gift, not an entitlement, and only the deserving should receive it. Those who can help themselves, but choose not to, should not receive assistance that will only allow them to indulge in their laziness. Paul expresses this clearly when he writes that

We command you, brothers, to keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching you received from us … we gave you this rule: "If a man will not work, he shall not eat." We hear that some among you are idle … such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the bread they eat. (2 Thessalonians 3: 6-12)

Paul clearly states that Christians must work to earn their daily bread, that they should not abuse the generosity of others if they are capable of providing for themselves. Even Paul, who had every right to claim assistance from his fellow believers as he spread God's word, did not. Anyone who is capable of providing for himself ought to do so, and has no "right" to receive charitable aid from others. Bush's prescription drug benefit, for example, will be available to all seniors, regardless of their income or ability to provide for themselves. Any moral justification for providing "entitlement" payments must come from a source outside the bible, for the Christian doctrine of charity is irreconcilable with the notion of an entitlement to aid under all circumstances.

If the majority of Christians could come around to this view, as the majority of Victorian Christians did, the frontiers of the state would roll back in a few years.  Stephen Harper would be thrown out of office by the second coming of George Brown or Alexander Mackenzie, indeed Chalmers, like Brown, was a Free Kirk Presbyterian [Editor's note: why do the Scots keep creeping into these posts?].  It would seem, then, that Christianity can provide a defense of capitalism and that it can gain widespread political acceptance.  Gladstone was four times Prime Minister and easily the most influential British Prime Minister of the second half of the 19th century, his very name a byword for British liberty and prosperity.  At the height of his influence in the 1860s and 1870s he was known simply as the People's William, a hero among the working and middle classes for his tax cuts (he came close to abolishing the income tax) and meritocratic policies.  Nor was Gladstone a theocrat with a free market bent, he disestablished the Anglican Church in Ireland (i.e. separated church from state) in one of his first acts as Prime Minister.  He also supported the right of Charles Bradlaugh, an atheist, to sit in the House of Commons, support which cost Gladstone much popularity.

In this light William F Buckley seems less a witch-doctor and more the reviver of Gladstonian style classical liberalism.  It cannot be said that Buckley "initiated and sustained the movement to bring religion into the conservative movement," there was no conservative movement to speak of before him, only a handful of isolated individuals, widely dismissed as eccentrics.  Nor did WFB invent or pioneer the practice of "fusionism," the current conservative coalition of the religious, pro-free-marketers, and foreign policy hawks describes the Liberal Party Gladstone lead. 

As a matter of historical record, Gladstone was more comfortable with the pious and pro-free market elements in the party than with the hawks, who followed in the mold of Palmerston.  The possibility, held out by both Tracinski and Binswanger, of Ayn Rand becoming the intellectual leader of the American conservative is also, sadly, absurd.  There was no way that an atheist was going to be acceptable to anything like a wide intellectual base in mid-century America.  The issue in late 1950s, when NR was emerging as a potent cultural force and Atlas Shrugged climbing the best-seller lists, was not whether to have a conservative (i.e. pro-freedom) movement with religious or atheistical first principles, it was whether to have a conservative movement at all.  Had William F Buckley and Whittaker Chambers not read Ayn Rand out of the conservative movement, someone else would have.  It was simply too early for Rand's ideas to have had much of an impact.  Those who might not have read Rand, because of WFB and Chambers criticisms, were not the type of readers that she either needed or wanted. 

This does not mean that Binswanger and Tracinski's essential criticisms are incorrect, though I do believe they are misapplied in their assessment of WFB.  To most conservatives, even those who are not among the pious, the argument that allying intellectually with Christianity will lead to disaster seems ridiculous.  The career of William F Buckley Jr. seems to have put paid to that notion.  The career of William Gladstone and the century since his death, however, shows the wisdom of Tracinski's argument.  Beginning as an comparatively statist politician, opposing the free market, the separation of church and state and even the abolition of slavery, Gladstone, under the influence of intellectuals like Chalmers and his political godfather Sir Robert Peel, spent his first decade in politics moving toward freedom.  From careful study of contemporary events from his parliamentary and ministerial perches, he began to see that Christianity was indeed compatible with individual liberty, indeed a belief in Christianity seemed to even demand a belief in freedom. 

Though an Anglican, his oratorical style and energy was clearly influenced by evangelicalism.  He wrote and spoke with the technical expertise of an economist and public policy analyst, though he rose to prominence not because of his extraordinary erudition and intelligence, but because of his moral conviction.  He argued for human liberty not because it would allow men to produce more widgets, more cheaply, but because it was a moral right for men to be free.  The spirit of an Old Testament prophet in the Age of Smith and Ricardo.  Like Buckley, Gladstone was enormously successful, both intellectually and politically.  Near the end, however, he began to express doubts about the future of the Liberal Party which he lead and had helped, albeit reluctantly at first, found in the late 1850s. 

In a letter to Lord Acton, another of the period's leading liberal lights, he noted grimly that the new liberalism's "pet idea is what they call construction, that is to say, taking into the hands of the State the business of the individual man."  In the last decade of his political life, the 1890s, he saw, in the figures of Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George, two future Prime Ministers, that the new liberalism would evolve into the very antithesis of liberalism.  It was a trend the Grand Old Man could simply not understand.  Having spent most of his political life expanding the scope of human liberty, against the machinations of the statist Tories, he now found his own party going toward socialism. 

Many of the new liberals were secularists, products of the post-Darwinian era, dismissing first Genesis and then the remainder of the Bible and its teachings as myth.  Gladstone, the free market Christian statesmen, seemed anachronistic on both counts.  Yet many argued that Christianity called for socialism, that Christian charity demanded coercive action by the state for the greater good.  Individual rights were dismissed or downplayed as excuses for selfish behavior.  Woodrow Wilson, a mostly secular and American version of this trend, argued that society should be more concerned with human than with property rights.  Why weren't property rights also human rights?  If the right of property interfered with Christian charity, as they defined it, because it prevented the levying of an income tax or erecting a welfare state, it was the right of property that had to go. 

Between the old Gladstonian approach and New Liberalism, it was the latter that held the moral high ground.  Capitalism, however efficient, was based on selfishness.  Even if it did help the poor more than previous systems, it was less moral because its implicit basis was selfishness.  The word selfishness, is, of course, a muddle, perhaps what Ayn Rand would have called a package deal.  It encompasses both the pursuit of positive goals, earning a living, starting a business, raising a family and being happy, as well as negative values like theft and murder when they seemed to suit an individual's interest.  There has always been a hazy line between good and bad "selfishness," and its very ambiguity has been exploited by statists and collectivists for centuries.  It was the major loop hole that allowed the classical liberal project to fail, that brought man to the bloodiest of all human eras.

The Progressives, as they were known in North America, and their brethren in Europe the socialists, dropped most of the elements of Chr