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John Robson: Carney, the answer is simple — deregulate everything

In Liberal Canada, no decision is best left to private citizens

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According to Monday’s National Post A1, “Scenarios are all either bad or very, very bad,” which could refer to almost anything and I’d likely agree. But oddly here it’s the economy where, for once, I see a happy outcome. To quote my grad-school bumper sticker, “Deregulate everything.”

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It’s not actually crisis-specific. Long before Adam Smith, David Ricardo then various Austrian and neo-classic economist theorists, it was practically clear that places that left peaceful, honest citizens to manage their own affairs prospered economically, culturally and even militarily, whereas bloated-state societies were stagnant and frequently grotesque. And forgive the pedantic references but our prime minister has a PhD in economics.

John Robson: Carney, the answer is simple — deregulate everything Back to video

Not that it does him much good, or us. I was in grad school so long ago I remember how people laughed when Thatcher, Reagan or Roger Douglas sat down to play. Or howled. But Britain, the US and New Zealand benefitted massively from deregulation and even Canada, more timidly, got gains. It wasn’t enough, but it confirmed the theory.

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So of course we chucked it. For a third of a century, every day in every way the state has gotten bigger and bigger. And with gruesomely disappointing results, from real incomes to social division, it’s full speed behind.

As another Postie, Carson Jerema, just wrote, “There is no great mystery behind why some nations are wealthy and others are not. The policy mix varies very little and is well understood. Countries with lower, neutral tax systems, minimal regulations, the rule of law and openness to international trade and foreign investment are wealthier than countries with higher taxes, more complicated regulations, and which are closed off to the world.”

Including 19th-century Britannia ruling the waves, markets and culture with a “night watchman” state taking under 10 per cent of GDP, then choosing 20th-century socialism and shrinking: ever poorer, seedier and angrier. But is it “well understood”? It seems not.

Back in my salad days I thought the big challenge was understanding good policy. Now that I’m wilted, I think it’s understanding why good policy doesn’t happen. With me in charge you’d get low, flat taxes, sound money, a bonfire of the regulations and big cuts to social programs that reward undesirable conduct, from being unemployable to not saving for retirement. Calvin Coolidge with internet.

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So what do the Liberals do instead? Why? And why do we let them?

Especially with their weird recruiting of Marilyn Gladu it’s clear that their ideology is as hard to articulate as, say, Doug Ford’s. Mark Carney has the slick careerist intellectual’s gift for high-falutin’ references, but as Geoff Russ just wrote in the Post, when he quotes Wilfrid Laurier he totally misses the point, Laurier’s commitment to liberty under law.

Instead, consistent with Trudeau Sr., would-be civil libertarian architect of big, meddlesome, profligate government, we get rhetorically slippery, theory-poor “L’Etat, c’est moi” in which no decision is best left to private citizens within a predictable, impartial framework. Instead it’s all catalyzing the leveraged transformation. Nudge theory with a thesaurus.

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Strangely, Canadians love it. That Post front-page story included “Just 15 per cent of Canadians believe there will be a stronger economy in six months, compared to 27 per cent a month ago.” So the Grits soar in the polls. And Peter Menzies just complained that the media hailed Carney’s Parliamentary majority as “historic” and lauded “what the Liberals have been able to achieve in the past year” while backing and filling with “sometimes ambition does take time, sometimes several election cycles.” So never mind all that silly “move at a speed and scale not seen in generations”… even though they keep chanting it.

Certainly one cannot say Carney has fixed the deficit, immigration, housing, or internal trade barriers. And while he claims to have hit our two per cent of GDP defence target, there are no receipts.

On the other hand, historian Tammy Nemeth argues, Canada increasingly has an “Exemptocracy: a hybrid regime where the outward forms of liberal democracy — elections, statutes, the ‘rules-based order’ — remain intact, while real power operates through the discretionary granting of exemptions, carve-outs, waivers, fast-tracks, and regulatory mercy by the Prime Minister’s Office and its inner circle.” Which puts Carney firmly, if opaquely, on the Third-Worldist side against Western traditions. And our economy in the dumpster.

So call me simplistic. But with every economic indicator heading the wrong way, and knowing the bigger the state gets the more the economy crumbles, shouldn’t we make the state smaller? Instead voters, including Tristin Hopper’s Laurentian Boomers blasted on SSRIs, cheerily accept every weirdness from assisted suicide to massive lockdowns, unapologetic favouritism from corporations to public servants, alienated youth, you name it. But don’t dream of touching dairy quotas. In Canada you cannot deregulate anything, let alone everything.

It’s bleak. But for once there’s a cheery scenario: we smarten up.

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