Libtard, Part 2
In Libtard part 1, we took a look at tradition and the established order and now it’s time to shine a light on the whole concept of social justice and how we pay for it.
It seems an odd problem for a world that is awash with money, but there you go, it is nonetheless a problem.
So, let’s not be too suspenseful - the simple answer is we pay for it through our progressive income tax system, the most equitable tool we have for generating the money we need to support the common good. Sorry, but paying taxes is not a bad thing to do.
Still, like many simple answers, this one really isn’t simple at all. Jobs and functioning businesses are essential to the tax base. Business people are important, and government needs to play an active role in promoting a strong business and industrial base.
People cannot pay taxes if they are not working and without tax revenues there is no funding for the common social good. Of course, it is also important that those businesses and the people who manage them also pay their fair share, but, as we have seen from the Panama and Paradise Papers, far too many of them don’t.
It’s time for our governments to help them find their moral compasses. But that is an aside.
We have no shortage of examples of how to mess up an economy - Venezuela provides a prime example. The country was largely agrarian until oil was discovered there during World War I.
As far as I can determine, everything in the country went more or less downhill from then until now.
Disaster was born on a storm of corruption, political instability, coups d’états and a socialist president who thought that handing out refrigerators was a key to success. It wasn’t.
Neither was oil the promised manna that successive governments thought it would be. Oh, they had short periods of plenty when the price of oil was high, but they squandered every opportunity for progress that those brief interludes offered them. Consequently, today Venezuela is still a mess and her citizens suffer terribly.
South Korea, on the other hand, has no oil and a meagre supply of natural resources.
After their devastating civil war, the country that emerged from U.S., post-war administration, was extremely poor and, like Venezuela, largely agrarian.
Unlike Venezuela, however, the South Korean government had no interest in handing out refrigerators to make people happy and instead they focused on education. They wanted a strong, highly educated workforce and they got it.
The government was also actively involved in building a strong manufacturing and technically advanced economic base.
This was not a laissez-faire government by any stretch of the imagination - they were involved. The result today is a country that ranks as one of the wealthiest in the world.
Make no mistake, South Korea is far from perfect and they have their fair share of corruption, scandals and (if a 2017 OECD report is accurate) some serious environmental challenges. Nothing is easy when humans are involved, but compared to Venezuela there is no contest, even with the threat of South Korea’s lunatic brother to the north.
Why then, if South Korea can build itself into a manufacturing and tech giant, can’t Canada? Canada sits on trillions of dollars’ worth of natural resources, we have plenty of energy and a highly educated citizenry, so what’s the problem?
Why isn’t our manufacturing sector competitive? Maybe we, especially in Western Canada, are cursed with a bit of the “Paradox of Plenty”, a concept discussed by Terry L. Karl in his 1997 book, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil booms and Petro States?
In many ways resources are easy - they make us lazy and we don’t develop competitive muscle.
There is a rather ominous maxim I heard somewhere, “A country that builds nothing is nothing,” and, according to a 2017, RBC analysis, Canada’s manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has been in steady decline since 1965.
In a November 2016 piece in Canadian Business, Kevin Carmichael suggested: “It appears Canada suffered from a lack of champions; companies and entrepreneurs with the combination of guts and capital to make it in a tougher global economy.”
He went on to note that despite the fact that Canadian factories are operating at production capacities considerably higher than their American counterparts, Canadian manufacturers are not expanding to meet demand.
At the same time, he notes, the quality of Canadian jobs has been in steady decline for over twenty years. We are moving backward.
South Korea built itself by making the best of what they had. Canada obviously is not doing the same. We need to focus on a long game, to evaluate our strengths and the characteristics of our landscape, both physical and human that give us an edge in an ever more competitive world.
We need a foundation that results in improving job quality instead of eroding it.
Ultimately, our common social good depends on the income we generate through our taxes, which in turn depend on high paying, stable jobs (for the most part union), not just for some, but for the population at large.
Government’s job is to make sure that happens and I don’t think any of them have been doing a particularly good job of that rather challenging task.