CALL AND RESPONSE

December 2002

by Barry Stagg

Ruminations on Romanow's Command Economics

Robert Samuelson writing in the National Post on November 27, 2002 said "Life after major wars is not like life before then". He went on to say that "[Major wars] change....the political, economic and psychological landscape". From this insight,Canada in 2002 can be conceived as a function of Canada post-1945 and the end of the Second World War. Canada and its stay-at-home elites had run the country and its prodigious war effort in a command economy style comparable to Roosevelt's America. Canada quickly retreated to a passive international role after 1945, unlike the U.S. which, quite naturally, assumed the ultra-active role of the dominate world power, locked in cold war confrontation with the Stalinist Soviet Union.

However, Canada's retreat from the world military theatre left the residual command economy apparatus to thrive and enlarge in neutralist circumstances where its impact on citizens was to curtail democracy and insert governance where none had been. In comparison, the U.S. continued to expand government but its booming and ever expanding economy dwarfed the considerable increase in bureaucratic structure. In short, the surviving U.S. command economy, although significant, was subordinated to the powerful economic engines of private American companies.

Canada in 2002 has had 57 years of subordinating its own private commence and industry to the needs and motivations of a command economy and its internal government classes. This has produced elites who hover in both the public and private sectors, segueing back and forth but always inside the national command economy bubble. This central planning monstrosity is disassociated from the crises that normally beget command economies in a functioning democracy. The war is over but the commanders' conveniences and artifices survive.

How does this continuity of process affect the contemporary Canadian economy and our resulting national society? In many ways it has produced a ponderous gravity where efforts to carry out simple economic tasks, for example pay for a doctor's appointment, have become complicated acts fraught with intimations of statutory illegality and moral depravity. Medicare has become a secular cult, a Canadian religion with a litany based on anti-capitalism and statist exultation.

Regulation in Canada is a pervasive fact of life, so much so that certain supposed entrepreneurs find the most profitable ground to be the exploitation of government regulated and licensed activity-the arena of rent-seeking and defacto state commerce. The communications and media industries, television, telephones and radio,in particular, are sources of great monopolistic profiting by those able to secure exclusivity of licence from governments. It is no surprise that banking and transportation (airlines and railroads) are Canadian commercial powerhouses, backed as they are by government exclusivity and the imprimatur of necessity, a classic command economy practice.

Canada is now metaphorically comparable to the stay-at-home farmer who coerces his many sons and daughters into staying and ploughing with horse and plough while his neighbours across the border let their children drift to the booming cities to prosper while combines, tractors and trucks modernize their farms into major industrial behemoths.Canada is a less extreme example of the corrosive effect of long-term command economics, the likes of which we have seen disintegrate in Eastern Europe in the post-Gorbachev era.

Canada now has state-raised, state-dependent elites who will argue that the American virtues of capitalism, free enterprise, military readiness, limited government and individual freedom are really pathologies that more advanced, sophisticated societies (like their own) seek to eliminate. This careens dangerously close to the theocratic irrationalism of many Islamic despots who revel in the cornucopia of American production: weapons, machinery and consumer goods, while repudiating the very social and economic structures that enabled such magnificent creativity. Think of Saudi Arabia.

We in Canada see the scolding classes indict the U.S.A. for being a warmongering, wasteful nation while the sanctimonious scolders prosper in jobs and institutions, the perpetuation of which is only possible due to American military and economic hegemony and its consequent sheltering of an insular non-military Canada and its effete ruling classes.

Roy Romanow has supplied the doctrinaire tablet by which Canadian medicine can continue to be a Soviet-styled collective.Someone has to tell him that the war is over.


Back to the 2002 Index
Back to The Boswarlos Review
Home Plate