Fiscal Crunch for ON

See the dark clouds gathering?
Earlier this week I critiqued the Throne Speech the Ontario Government cobbled together to make things sound positive for the coming session of the Provincial Legislature. Yesterday the Provincial Minister of Finance had a more sober take on the new Liberal spending season ahead. He said: "As all Ontarians know, continuing to borrow without curbing spending is simply not sustainable." Someone must have whispered in his ear that a German Bond auction (6 Bn Euros) FAILED earlier in the day. Of course the Liberals have been the ones that are spending with borrowed money as if it's going out of style. The Euro, could be going out of style, and its that risk that the Ontario Liberals will no doubt blame for the province's woes when they are compelled to present a budget in the new year. It is fiscal crunch time.
Terence Corcoran (National Post) compares Ontario's looming problems with the Eurozone crisis, in this column today.    

Death Panels and breast cancer

The Canadian Task Force on Preventative Health Care recommends that women aged 40 to 49 NEED NOT bother getting a routine mammogram. For women aged 50 to 74 they recommend routine screening with mammography every 2 to 3 years.
The Task Force study relied on data from mammograms, some of it 30 years old. Things have changed in 30 years. The pictures (left) show mammograms of the same normal breast, taken two different ways using modern digital (left-sde) and 20 to 30 year old film-based (right-side) mammography. You don't need to be an expert to see that the modern digital picture provides a much clearer image where an expert is more likely to find a suspicious area. Much of the Task force data is based older, less accurate, film-based technology. Don't believe me? Listen to Dr. Martin J. Yaffe interviewed on CBC Radio's The Current here. Click the "Listen Pop-up" where Dr. Yaffe can be heard from 2:12 to 12:39. He is fairly adamant that this recommendation by the Task Force is flawed, and he does not shirk from the question that this may be related to cost considerations rather than the best interests of women.
An article (The Department of Health and Human Services' Death Panel) in an American publication, Forbes Magazine, says it best for the United States:
"If the government succeeds in dominating health care, as it’s now on its way to doing, we can expect more of these weird and lethal findings. The focus will be on rationing and saving money. What we need in health care is more free enterprise, not Soviet-style controls."
Of course here in Canada, and Ontario in particular, the government already dominates the health care system, and rationing and triage are the way things are done. So imagine having a discussion with a physician that has read and accepted this Task Force report, which, as Dr. Yaffe suggests is flawed. The physician will reassure her 40 to 49 year old female patients, that there is nothing to be concerned about, and of course the patients may accept that assurance.
There is an element of coercion here on the part of the physician. Implicit to the physician's advice is the incentive to ration care and save costs which may be a motivation of the Task Force. Rather, the incentive should to offer patients the best choices available so they may act in their own best interests. Choice is imperative.
The simple question I have, is why is it illegal in Ontario to have a supplementary private health care system that patients may use, or not, to allay their particular health concerns? Why not give people the choice?
         

Speech from the Throne 11/22/11

Doesn't that sound highfalutin? Well, in a Westminster style Democracy, like Canada's, it's not. It is what routinely happens at the start of every new sitting of Parliament, Federally or Provincially. Today it was Ontario's turn, the 40th Session of Parliament, and the speech was delivered by the Queen's Representative (hence Throne) here in Ontario, the Lieutenant Governor.
The speech itself is written by the governing party, in this instance the McGuinty Liberals. They probably consider themselves middle-of-the-road politically. Of course in every Western Democracy, that means statist, that is, the state is the beginning, the end, and the middle of all problems and solutions. That unfortunately is the way they think and so do many of our citizens.
I take my new role as Leader of the Ontario Libertarians, seriously enough to respond to any major Ontario Government announcements, and a Throne speech sets the tone and the goals of the new Parliament, so, it is important.
Below is a heavily edited version (under 5 minutes) of the speech, written highlights can be seen here. But give a listen, then read my response underneath.

In the Throne speech delivered today, while the McGuinty Liberals are acknowledging the global financial crisis, their actions are woefully inadequate as a means of averting the same fate. As if totally disconnected from the market turmoil in all of the Western democracies, the McGuinty government’s plan pretends that Ontario is immune to such problems. In Europe and in America, governments have grown to the point where they are outspending the productive abilities of their own citizenry. The excessive deficits and accumulating debts are now jeopardizing the credit ratings of these countries while impacting the wealth and well being of their citizens.

Unfortunately for Ontario, it is following in the same path. Since McGuinty has taken power in 2003, Ontario's government has grown much faster than its economy. Government spending has doubled and so has the provincial debt, resulting in Ontario becoming a “have not” province. Those facts are intimately linked - cause and effect.

In a recent speech, Dalton McGuinty suggested that Ontario would weather the economic storm with a strong stable plan; this was repeated in the speech from the Throne today. It’s as if the government now realizes that the provincial payroll has ballooned out of their control, so they now intend to reduce the Ontario public service by five per cent by March 2012, and a further two per cent by 2014. Add to that another $200-million in workforce reductions at the 630 government agencies, and they claim this will be sufficient to attack the massive $250-billion debt. That is pathetic, and does not even begin to address the problem.

Despite the newfound appreciation for budget restraint, the government is forging ahead with the expensive and unnecessary introduction of full day kindergarten and a reduction of college and university tuition by 30 per cent for families earning less than $160,000 per year. This amounts to a subsidy and job security for the teacher’s unions. Supporting the education sector is moreover highly questionable, given the teacher’s union’s active support during this past election campaign.

In the Speech from the Throne, the government insists that it will find improved efficiencies to encourage greater productivity without ever explaining how this can be done. In fact, the government undermines any possibility of this happening by treating the government monopolies of Healthcare and Education as sacrosanct, and never to be touched by the evil practices of competition, so widely and profitably used in every other sector of our economy.

No, the McGuinty Liberals have co-opted the wealth of hard working families and transferred it to government because think they know better how to spend the money of those families. Certainly, those families may prefer to make their own decisions about how best to spend their wealth if they had a choice.


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Atlas Shrugged Part One: a review....

"The film is magnificent," according to Stefan Molyneux as seen in his latest blog post here. I can't think of a better endorsement, so I bought it. I bought in good faith with the hope that this production group finishes the three parts.

The DVD is available at Amazon.ca or here.

Here is Stefan's review:

Getting to the real source of the problem...

Civic officials are attempting to close down "Occupy" movement sites in cities all over North America. In Canada and northern US cities, winter is closing in. The occupiers will be faced with serious challenges from nature AND civic officials very soon.
For me, the problem with the OWS movement is its ambiguity. I can't wholeheartedly support a movement that really has not defined itself. If OWS "leaders" (are there any?) actually came out and said they want the link between crony capitalists and big government broken, well I might listen. If they actually pointed to big government, union-government monopolies, government-business monopolies, and unsustainable entitlement programs as problems, then I might listen. But they don't. Their message is muddled and could be capsulized as "We don't know what we want, and we won't leave until we get it." That was a suggestion on a talk radio show I was listening to, unfortunately it works for this protest.

If the OWS movement is unable to pinpoint the problem or articulate a solution, that does not mean it hasn't been done. In fact it has been done several times over the years, but without much fanfare and none of the drama that roving bands of protestors offer to the media.
The video below is an example, and shows Russell D. Roberts, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In October of 2009, in the midst of the TARP and financial crisis, Roberts gave testimony to a US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The testimony was articulate, pointed and for me and others, hit the nail squarely on the head. The testimony was also promptly ignored.
Professor Roberts has blogs here and here. His testimony is what OWS should be using as its mantra and its reason for being. Instead, OWS organizers brainwash their followers by having them repeat inanities in a way reminiscent of cult behaviour. Superimposing the "Hive mind" over the individual thinker. That sort of collective action makes me suspicious, always.
If you have not heard Prof. Robert's testimony you are in for a treat, if you have, its a treat to hear it again. Its needs to be shared widely.

COP 17 or cop out.

Last August there was news that an old theory had been resurrected to explain global warming. You will remember the story out of CERN, that cosmic rays may have an effect on warming, greater than the dreaded CO2, such was the evidence presented.
That posting, plus others, frequently prompt comments from other bloggers, and readers informing me of my heretical position in view of the scientific consensus. No one is more righteous, or more fervent in their belief, than a religious zealot. So I feel comfortable in comparing AGW belief and religion, and that does not even include the question of evidence in either case.
Of course not all who believe that global warming has occurred, and is occurring, are religious zealots. I agree that warming has and is occurring (I'm not a zealot, just a skeptic), I also agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas (so are H2O and methane). I just don't believe its an issue we can or should try to control, nor do I think it will ever be a problem, at least not in the Al Gore doom and gloom scenario. As I have stated before, the scientists are gung-ho for AGW research and grants, because they need the money, plain and simple, and governments want the power and control.
In the last few months their have been some interesting developments on the AGW front. The Koch Brothers, rich American libertarians (of all people), funded a study called BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature), which discovered that the earth has been warming, shocking I know, and the continental glaciers around my house have retreated, too! The warmists are thrilled, because this BEST project, could mean the end of climate change skepticism or as they prefer, denial. I don't think so. In fact there are many questions that remain unanswered and the whole thing has been questioned.
Then there was the case of the delinquent teenager, or rather the new book that compares delinquent teenagers to "climate experts." This book by the Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise, adds gasoline to the firestorm created by "climategate." Imagine having the power to affect multi-billion dollar government programs based on "peer-reviewed" data compiled by activist graduate students. That is part of the claim in Ms. Laframboise' book as explained here.
At the end of November, the IPCC meets again to save the world, this time in Durban South Africa. Will it be another Cancun, I hope?  Will people realize that climate science resembles pseudoscience in its ability to predict doom, or as Matt Ridley eloquently stated: "we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed." Who is Matt Ridley? He is a zoologist who recently delivered a lecture for the Angus Millar Lecture 2011, on Scientific Heresy. The lecture dissects the difference between science and pseudoscience (well worth the read). Ridley provides six lessons which he uses to attack the establishment view on AGW. He concludes: "I’ve spent a lot of time on climate, but it could have been dietary fat, or nature and nurture. My argument is that like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience even – perhaps especially – in the hands of elite experts and especially when predicting the future and when there’s lavish funding at stake." I couldn't agree more, as for COP17, we should cop out.

 

The Fatal Conceit

A new website has got me thinking again, about why I do this blog, and why I believe, two apparently very different topics, are so intertwined. The idea that links politics and religion together for me, is called "spontaneous order." One of my fellow bloggers is far more learned than I on the topic, you can find him at Interdisciplinary World down there to the right on my blog list. I've written about this before, and you will see why it comes up again.
Spontaneous order is essentially order that seems to arise out of chaos. Why? Because there are unseen "rules or laws" that create the order. The rules were not made up by anyone, they are just characteristics of the nature of matter and energy, the way the universe works. Humans have discovered a lot of these rules with a tool called science. There are many subdivisions of science now, and we know a lot of the rules.
One of the book covers seen above, is Darwin's Origin of Species. Its in this book that he outlines what he thinks are the rules that govern speciation in nature which he calls natural selection. Natural selection is part of the mechanism of Evolution. Of course Evolution conflicts with a great many religious beliefs which brings me back to the first paragraph, and part of the reason for this blog. Generally I tolerate religious belief because it can be compartmentalized sufficiently so as to not interfere with other people's actions. When it starts to interfere, becoming "pushy" and smothering, I push back. One of the positive results of the new world of "political correctness" that we now inhabit, is that people realize that their particular religion is not necessarily everyone's. So my own children did not sing "yes Jesus loves me" in "public" school, like I once did. Chalk one up for freedom from religion.
Darwin did not know about the genetic reasons for evolution, he did not know about shifting allele frequencies or anything at that level of complexity or below, so he really did not discover the "rules," he inferred the rules. We are still discovering all the rules in biology. The important thing for me, is that the rules are discoverable, not mystical, not under the control of a deity. No deity is required, evolution is spontaneous and orderly.
The other book cover, Hayek's book, is related. If you look up spontaneous order, you will see written that many classical liberals (that's politics folks), like Hayek, believe that markets are governed most efficiently without being governed. The rules that govern markets and human behaviour - the science of economics - work best spontaneously without the tinkering of an intelligent designer.
In evolution, the idea of an intelligent designer is common among religious folk, the undiscoverable, unseen, and unknowable deity, is the designer. In economics, because it is a science peculiar to humans (and no other creatures on Earth), many believe there needs to be a designer, a tinkerer, someone to make it more efficient, because people are smart. Right? Unfortunately this is where the conflict occurs. Economics cannot be compartmentalized, in fact it pervades every aspect of one's life in a civil society. Instead of being left to a deity, economics has become by default the purview of government. My children are not free to interact with others in a spontaneous economic order as they should, they, and all of us are manipulated. We all sing to the tune "the government is here for the common good." The disagreement is whose common good? That is what Hayek's Fatal Conceit is about, people who think they know better.
The video below comes from a new website: Libertarianism. It references spontaneous order, and its delivered by an excellent writer David Boaz. If you need a refresher or a new insight, watch.        

  

  

Untying the knot that strangles economic freedom

SURPRISE! The Federal Conservative Party's pipe-dream promise of cutting Canada's deficit (never mind the debt) by 2014, has just stumbled into objective reality. The financial chaos in the rest of the world is beating at our door.

That (photo) Saturday Night Live skit (Nov. 5, 2011), referencing the Greek financial turmoil, joked that "Dionysus (god of the grape harvest, ritual madness and ecstasy...) has the spending part down cold, but saving … not so much." Time to call in "Klaus, the German god of prudence and austerity."

The cradle of democracy is in trouble. Exposed for all to see, are the unintended consequences of the political entanglements that were created for the common good. It seems manipulating for the common good, is really not so good after all. (go ahead, try and sell that idea)

Prime Minister Harper, is fresh from the latest G20, where noises were made that G20 members should 'kick in some cash' (yes, that's us folks) to help out our Greek friends. 'Hey buddy, can you spare a dime' (or else). Now Finance Minister Flaherty, says that promises made just last June will be altered. Quelle surprise!

The Greek gods have inspired my friend Gene Balfour to cook up a policy proposal for Ontario that suggests practical steps to untie the knot created by big government. Gene suggests that it is excessive regulation that creates and expands the need for public sector jobs, which increases the payroll, which impacts government spending, which affects the deficit, and adds to the debt. Do you remember what happened to the old lady that swallowed a fly? It's a bit like that, but not funny. Here is Gene's proposal.   

Winning!

Sorry to mislead, this post has nothing to do with the actor and party animal Charlie Sheen. However, in March of 2011, Sheen redefined the term "winning" to give it a more ironic twist. The usual meaning: "the act of a person or thing that wins" (without tiger blood etc.), applies here. Sure, money would have been most welcomed as a winning, but, in this case it's a political win, unusual enough for me.
On the weekend, the Ontario Libertarians had a convention where they chose me as the party leader, and I'm grateful for that; but my family, well, some misgivings there.
A political party Convention such as we had, would ordinarily get wide press coverage (there was local coverage). But, we are not a large group, though we are growing. Its pretty clear to me why we are growing, and why more people want the party to have more influence and impact.
We are the only real alternative to the "big government" statist political parties. Their failures at governing (or over-governing), are becoming visible each and every day, to all but the most collectivist minded people.
Just a few months ago, I had no intention of seeking the leadership of this party, it had not even crossed my mind. But as we drew closer to the provincial election on Oct. 6, 2011, I realized that it was possible to reach our stated goal of 60-plus candidates across the province. In fact, 74 people had come forth and completed some level of paperwork toward candidacy by early September. Ultimately, only 51 people jumped through all the hoops, still twice the number we had fielded in the previous election; impressive enough. The missing ingredient may have been leadership, like the inspirational coach that urges the team on to victory, that may be all that was required for the final push to 74.
Canadian libertarian parties have a sad history of invisible leaders. In the last Federal election (May 2, 2011) the Federal Libertarian leader was AWOL, he didn't even run; he disappeared not long after his leadership election. So, just a paltry 23 candidates represented the party in that election. The Ontario leader for the past 15 years was more visible, but not all an activist, so appeared absent. Of course the cloak of invisibility is sewn by the media, but it's the leaders themselves that provide the thread and the fabric.
Don't get me wrong, leadership alone is not sufficient for attention and success. Look at our scions the Freedom Party. Their leader was quiet visible in the media (to me anyway), especially television. He is articulate and presents himself as a reasonable alternative, and they had 56 candidates in the last election, yet received only half of our total vote count. So leadership, while important, isn't sufficient. It was supremely important however, for the NDP Federally in May, with media help and hype. That just tells me the message needs to be agreeable to the media.....too bad.
My political awakening these last three years, has shown me that political parties in Canada are remarkably flimsy things, I don't think most people know that. When I ran as a candidate over the last three years, newspaper reporters would ask me where my campaign headquarters were, and who my manager was. Surprise, surprise, my home and me.
Parties can be in government with a huge majority then literally disappear after and election (Kim Campbell in 1993 lost 167 seats). The Federal Progressive Conservatives are now gone from the scene, though Brian Mulroney had a huge majority once. Politics is a risky business. Sometimes you may need that Adonis DNA to survive.
   

Greek salad days are over....

It has been over a year now since I first wrote about a sovereign debt and currency crisis. The best part of that post, is the YouTube video that is associated with it: Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis. The video goes over the cause of the US mortgage and housing crisis that culminated in the Great Recession, and the aftermath that Americans are still coping with.
Banks and bankers, Wall Street and the corporations were blamed for that financial crisis, and are still being blamed thanks to the recent Occupy Wall Street movements around the world. Of course its true, they deserve blame but it is only part of the truth. The video clearly points to the real culprits as being the US (and other) government's attempts to prevent a severe recession after 9/11 by increasing liquidity, or in English, making it easier to get a loan, buy a house etc.
It worked, it really did get easy to get a loan or mortgage, so easy that people that should not have qualified for loans/mortgages got them anyway. And of course those shaky loans were "packaged" together, and with the help of colluding ratings agencies, the loans were treated as Triple A guaranteed secure investments to obtain an income stream. The packaged loans came to be known as Asset-Backed-Commercial-Paper, and the rest is now history.
But of course the crisis did not get resolved, it just got magnified and compounded as the video suggests, with huge bailouts, socialized bailouts. These corporate bailouts mostly, were so large (like TARP), that the US incurred new huge debt. Many countries already had such high debt and future liability from entitlements, that their solvency was already in jeopardy. Europe seemed to be rife with those countries that have come to be known as PIIGS. Greece is the "G" in PIIGS and it looks like it has real problems.
So here we are. Greece has so much debt, it has trouble meeting its obligations to payoff loans. As a member of the Eurozone, a Greek default would create a Lehman-like collapse for Europe, damage the Euro, and likely bankrupt some large banks that hold the debt. The Eurozone leaders met last week, and the crisis was resolved! Yippee! Stock markets were euphoric until yesterday, when the Greek President announced that there will be a referendum to accept or reject the terms of the Eurozone bailout, I think. The wording of the referendum is still in doubt, because the Greek government may not last until the end of the week. A parliamentary non-confidence vote could scuttle the whole deal, hell, the referendum could scuttle the whole deal. What is the deal? Basically the Greek debt will be "forgiven" to a degree. That means the debt holders will not get all their money back, like in a bankruptcy and Eurozone partners will cover some of Greece' payments and of course increase their own debt (lets not worry about that now.....).
But what about the referendum, what are the options Greek voters have? Greece looks like it is now stuck between the proverbial rock, and hard place. Should their be a referendum? That timely question was kicked around by two good writers at the National Post. In favour of a referendum: Terence Corcoran, against is Peter Foster.