January 2004
by Barry Stagg
The goal in our society, call it a post-modern goal if you insist on using that hackneyed term, is to eliminate the tilt, to make the same rules apply to all. That means keeping the plagues of ethnic and racial bigotry away but also means stopping the statist practice of identity regulation and group preferences. If gender, aboriginal ancestry or ethnic origins are marshalled to obtain unfair advantage, then the field is tilted and statism finds itself in the business of fostering and perpetuating group conflict. One set of rules for all is the democratic and civilized ideal to pursue. Other plans are variants on the theme of basic unfairness. Idealism must not be buried or perversely distorted by the turbulence of group complaints.
Government has a public responsibility that is axiomatic but often
goes not only unstated but unheeded. The public obligation is to
recognize the role of the state in regulating law and order and to
also accept that this regulatory role is limited. When a laudable
goal, racial equality for instance, is acted upon by government in
the form of statutes and rules, the goal must not become pretence
for intense and largely futile micro-management. American
conservative writer Thomas Sowell put it this way in his 1999 book
'The Quest For Cosmic Justice':
"In politics, the great non
sequitur of our time is that (1) things are not right and that (2)
the government should make them right. Where right all too often
means cosmic justice, trying to set things right means writing a
blank check for a never-ending expansion of government
power".
To the insights of Thomas Sowell should be added the cautionary
words of another perceptive American, Tom Wolfe, who dissected San
Francisco's poverty program bureaucracy and its clientele in his
famous 1970 essay, 'Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers'. This paragraph
aptly capsulizes the nonsense then engendering in California and
now common place here, there and everywhere in the U.S. and
Canada:
"To get your organization in the poverty program, you had to get
recognized by some official agency, and to get recognized you had
to do some mau-mauing in most cases. Once you got recognized then
you had the bureaucrats working fulltime for you , drawing up the
statistics and prospectuses, knocking on the right doors, and
making the applications for the "funding', the money that was
available from the government, the foundations , or the
churches."
This brings the compass around to the matter of Newfoundland and its presence in the middle of a government quagmire characteristic of the long term application of the above noted tactics. Domestic mercantilism or, perhaps retail federalism, are titles to give to the practices of regional economic development programs and transfer payments from Ottawa to the poorer provinces. The problem is that these things create economically dependent enclaves.
Government re-distribution of money creates an impotent hinterland producing a modest but persistent huddle of shoppers. Incomes, though low and government oriented, generate retail business which in turn creates the dubious illusion of a stable private sector economy. The economic convenience of such long term policy is in itself a pathology where taking the economic path of least resistance produces a stultified and reactionary economic ghetto, dependent on handouts variously labelled as Employment Insurance, subsidies, transfer payments or development grants.
That is why Newfoundland and Labrador, as a province, must develop and take, for the short term, unfair advantage of its resources in the sense of breaking away from any fiscal conventions that call for, in effect, reparations for prior federal transfer payments. Thus, in an exercise in duplicity and hypocrisy, worthy of the highest levels of government, this writer is calling upon the province's government to violate one of the rules of fundamental fairness, all in order to break away from the poverty cycle now entrenched. The end justifies the means in this instance and in itself speaks to the need for pragmatic flexibility in governing, as compared to dogmatic application of rules that are little more than economic spasms.
If oil and gas and nickel are able to profit Newfoundland business and government then hurray for that and a resounding no to the payment of de facto reparations through replacement of transfer payments by new local tax money on a dollar for dollar basis. To do otherwise is to perpetuate a depressed and undeveloped provincial economy and its unfortunate private apparition , the indentured shopper.
Indentured shoppers, in a deliberate reference to the feudal state of sharecropping, are the result of our own production of a coldwater version of Thomas Sowell's pejorative: The Quest For Cosmic Justice.
The concept is not really a nuanced one but needs a little elaboration to illustrate its simplicity. Because the incomes in the land of the transfer payment are mostly government generated, it is easy to miss the indentured aspect of the picture. Unemployment program recipients, (E.I.) and the civil service work force are together economically dominant, comprising a plurality of the income earners and tied to government, in effect indentured, by the simple fact that there is, realistically, no alternate local employer. It is either receive income from government on these terms or leave the province.
In this sense, the typical political militancy of relatively influential public servants and their unions can be taken as expressions of reactionary economic self-interest. Belligerent battles with government are, in plain terms, all about preservation of the privilege wrought by decades of federal transfer payments that subsidize or underwrite the salaries of such as the members of the teachers' union. From the profound distillations of Thomas Sowell and Tom Wolfe to the prosaic statements of the obvious made here, the problem is one of ideals overcome by banal self interest.
In closing, consider the matchless poetry of T.S.Eliot:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow.
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