May 2002
by Barry Stagg
Here rides the same donkey that carried the servants of many a statist regime. All animal by committee: mammon driven, pragmatic careerism before the trite post-modern phrases were coined and patented to describe what is only servility for profit. All writ so long ago and as recently as a minute or two ago when the skirt and the shirt opened the door and genuflected to the commissar shirt/skirt /whatever with the hands on the public's purse.
A little insight into a command economy comes from seeing who prospers and how on the fringes of such an economy. Newfoundland is the edge that this piece inspects. There are many other sides and edges, fringes and extremities to this brand of repressed commerce here in Canada, in the U.S. and most so in the stultified smugdoms of Europe. The characteristics are similar because the prosperous few, to profanely co-opt Noam Chomsky's leftist coin, illustrate the prescience of Friedrich Hayek's The Road To Serfdom and his chapter titled 'Why The Worst Get On Top'. Those who are spiritually inclined to be indifferent to how and why they make a living are the most suitable for jobs that involve profiteering out of regulating the unnecessary and the absurd. In Newfoundland, the worst are a brigade of servants who meld the worst characteristics of television's music video hucksters and colonial office civil servants from the old country. The happy hunting ground is a capital city hooked in to the fiscal cashline from Ottawa and the communications/media/advertising playground that is the regulated TV industry out of Toronto.
In all of this is the stuff of an artificial Potemkin Village economy, characterized elsewhere as a virtual suburbia, wrapped around a particularly deflated resource fishing economy poisoned and pillaged by regulation. The same Potemkins define St. John's prosperity by their own exclusive ability to access and maintain the same over-indulged, central-planned, salaried security that enabled the ignorant and the indifferent to barter and waste the great Grand Banks fishery in the fifty short years since the Ottawa crowd got their hands on the regulation of Newfoundland fishing.
Newfoundland cannot afford to carry a burdensome elite that is not grounded in any discernible market and which has not risen out of the mingling and bargaining of a free economy nor can it sustain a groupthink that is seemingly based on a perverse sense of endurance-seeking to outlast every wave of attack on their privileged hothouse by the common folk and the free press.
Memorandum to the anointed: Regulation is not an industry. Counselling is not an industry. Marketing is not an industry. Entertainment is a service not an industry. Spending taxpayers money on salaries, travel, press releases and lobbying are acts of cannibalistic destruction- an anti-industry. Civil servants on the golf course in St. John's linked with their brothers and sisters putting out in Ottawa are the facilitators for a rent-seeking process that fakes industry.The reality is that pseudo-entrepreneurs fall over each others' cell phones, high heels and briefcases in the race to get a piece of the command economy franchised exclusively to them.
What is the difference between the obsequiousness for profit displayed by the rent seekers of
Canada and those working the grossly expensive hotels of Dubai so ably revealed by Theodore
Dalrymple in his piece, 'Travel: Gulf de Luxe' in the May 6 edition of National Review? This
is Dalrymple's analysis, from which I have appropriated the title for this breathless, if not timeless
piece:
"The staff of the Burj [obscenely expensive Dubai hotel] are drawn from the graceful young
people of every nation in need or desire of a tax-free income and a bit of adventure: and one
realizes, as one watches them deal with the unimaginably rich, that obsequiousness carried so far
ceases to be a defect of character or an imposition, but an almost sensuous pleasure, as well as an
implicit form of satire"
Overall: In Canada, like the United States, a profiteering management elite is prepared to pretend the process of regulatory life we live under is a philosophy to be worshipped when the reality is that regulatory process is generic and not to be honoured except in the land of the devout collectivists-typically Stalinists. Honour to process is the realm of statists once the devotion extends beyond the democratic essentials of the rule of law, its free and independent judiciary and a freely elected parliament based on universal suffrage. Process that replaces productivity is the station manned by petty bureaucrats elevated artificially, privately and publicly, to priest and deacon status.