The dangers of government control

Vincent J. Curtis

4 Nov 21

RE: HSR delays expected as vaccine policy kicks in.  Hamilton Spectator 4 Nov 21.

You don’t hear about it in the Spectator, but the Ottawa Confederation line LRT has been out of service since September 19, following a string of service failures prior to this calamity.  Through a voluntary act of policy, the city-run HSR will offer service interruptions, and the ridership will just have to suck it up.  The cost of the wider economic disruption on the riders has no effect on those making policy choices at the HSR.

Quebec first delayed and cancelled a vaccine mandate on its healthcare workers, because enough of them said no that the government run system would have to shut down many vital services if the province carried through with its threat to fire the non-compliant.  Ontario decided not to impose a vaccine mandate on its healthcare workers, despite pleas from management that they do so, after seeing what happened in Quebec and because next year is an election year in Ontario and the government doesn’t want to screw up the healthcare system any more than it is.

Such is the dangers to the economic life of ordinary people of centralized government control, or socialism.  Socialism is founded on the belief that the top 1 percent ought to make decisions for the remaining 99 percent, even though 99 percent of the world’s knowledge is possessed by the 99 percent of the population who have things decided for them.  In economic terms, price discovery is impossible in a socialist system.  Generally, the top 1 percent are quite comfortable in their choices, and immune from them, as the 400 private jets in Glasgow testify.

If the Spectator editorializes about the inhumanity of optometrists withholding their services, well that’s price discovery in action in a socialist system.  The true cost to human health as a result of extreme exercises of centralized control from COVID have yet to be measured, but are certain to be worse than had the disease simply been allowed to rip.

The skyrocketing costs of housing is due entirely to choices by government concerning making new land available to house a growing population.

Mr. Trudeau breathily told COP26 about the wonders of the carbon tax, which churns money through the government, increasing its power through the benefits and punishments made available.  Not all decisions concerning benefits and punishments will be wise ones, and so government power inevitably will be employed to destroy good things and promote bad things.  And the persons making those decisions suffer no consequences for being wrong or benefit from being right.  The lives of millions are affected by the state of indigestion of an often unnamed and invisible few.

Mackay’s cartoon mocks banks for their alleged “fossil fuel investments” made decades ago, and the results of which supply Ontario and Quebec with transport fuels, and natural gas for home heating and electrical generation.  Luckily, Mackay wasn’t in charge in the days when the climate fear was the coming ice age.

Likewise, the Bank of Canada is supposed to turn attention to global warming risks, and will use its power to force banks to engage in fruitless and worthless speculation about something that is only a solar cycle away from reversal.  The business of banks, taking wise risks and keeping inflation under control and employment near to full, will be forced to spout the progressive line about climate – if the bankers know what’s good for them personally.  That’s called taking your eye off the ball.

The danger of centralized control should be obvious from the fate of the Soviet Union and the current travails in North Korea, - where people are encourage to eat black swans to stave off starvation.  Price discovery is important.  And ordinary people get hurt when they surrender their power of making choices to a centralized bureaucracy.

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