LOOKING AHEAD - TO MORE CHAOS

I can’t get off my soapbox. I can promise myself and my readers that I will seek a more positive path; that I will share topics that are of positive benefits to all, especially the slowly and inevitably aging among us. I totter. I teeter. I waver. I cannot abandon my liberal roots, even though I have long since abandoned my membership in a party that espouses liberal causes but is mired in an ideological straightjacket. Enough philosophizing.

I noticed, with a mixture of alarm and amusement, that the Fed decided it had to raise the rate it charges banks to borrow money. They hiked it a whole QUARTER OF ONE PERCENT! Twenty-five basis points. So, instead of Goldman Sachs being able to borrow at one half of one percent to “invest” the money not only in “safe” investments like Treasuries, which yield around 3%, but to venture once again into all the minefields that nearly brought the economy down. But that’s all old hat.

You may understand my own mindset a little more by reading the response I sent to David Plouffe. During the presidential elections, I was one of millions pulling for Obama so I got on their “mailing” (pronounced “give money”) list. The latest news release told me how Obama was going to help homeowners save themselves. I wrote this back:
“It matters little to you what any Canadian has to say. You will always be at an ideological disadvantage. Bound as so much of American politics seems to be, to the primacy of the market system, no deviation can be tolerated. However "liberal" you will presume to be, you cannot make change without changing. "Stimulus," within the American frame of reference always means something like tax breaks. You do not understand the utter futility of the idea that only the private sector creates jobs. The private sector creates jobs when it is in their profitable best interest to do so. For that I can't blame them. So, to offer tax credits is meaningless. Employers will hire only if they need to, otherwise hiring more is old-fashioned "featherbedding." The government must be the employer of last resort. There are projects that private capital won't go into because they lack the profit profile. Those projects are uniquely the government's. You can offer all the tax credits you want, but as long as oil and coal remain cheaper, no one will build alternate energy sources. It is only one example of ventures where the costs are high and the profits are small. Only government can do it. The notion of "public enterprise" so horrifies you that you shrink away from anything that looks like "socialism." You are following the Bush policy of privatizing tens of thousands of jobs that should have been done by the military by giving them to private contractors.
I am beyond disappointed that the system cannot truly make any fundamental changes in the American mindset. You have flunked out on health care for all the reasons shown above.”

Perhaps I should have added that in Canada, despite protests to the contrary, we live in a liberal democracy. Government does not shy away from participation in enterprise. Our aerospace industry owes its success to government participation e.g. Bombardier, Pratt-Whitney. Our Finance Minister, as right-leaning as you can get, intrudes on the private sector by slowing down real estate speculation. Money is given directly to public enterprise like municipal transit systems. I could go on and on.

What makes Canada is great is that no government can spoil it, although Mike Harris tried his hardest in Ontario. We genuinely understand what government can do, should do, and must do. Americans simply don’t get it.