The cancer stories you never hear

This story makes me think of the heroes among us who work, mostly quietly, to overcome the bureaucracies of government and the endlessly tangled health care outcomes created by the thousands of controls imposed by government and their regulators, and then by the companies and professionals subject to those regulations. It seems that no matter where you live these days, the remnants of individual rights and freedoms are being eroded and the barriers between patient and medical professionals are growing.

Who among us has not witnessed a family member or friend do battle with health care bureaucracies to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it? Time is money. Time is life. Precious individual lifetimes and lives are being sacrificed to the idea that collectivist/altruist fantasies of health care are better than a system where the people with the power are the patient and the medical professional. A system that protects individual rights and never violates them. A system known as freedom and which has been branded as capitalism.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-cancer-stories-you-never-hear

A tragedy of the commons

In discussion with a Facebook friend we ventured into talking about communities where restrictive covenants are used to define specific property rights. My friend posted a link to a definition of the "tragedy of the commons" and my response follows.

So.. tragedy of the commons. I know the concept. I see this as a serious problem only for societies that do not have clear property rights. When there is property that "no one owns but everyone owns", i.e. state-owned property, there is no way to allocate resources, to determine priorities, to objectively resolve disputes, to coordinate economic activities.

The reference you provided refers to demand overwhelming supply. In a free market this is impossible except in the very short term because free people can expand the supply of any given resource. To many people this is counter-intuitive because they see resources as finite, as mere physical objects, when in fact resources are everything in reality that man's mind can conceive. Every single thing we see as a resource today has existed for millions of years - the difference is that humanity did not have the reasoning ability, the knowledge and the social structures of freedom and capitalism to realize the potential of these resources. Let me provide a few examples.

Until the minds of men were able to discover and exploit the principles of chemistry, that dark, gunky, toxic soil that was a blight for farming was worse than useless but today has become the most abundant, most economical, most life-supporting energy source yet discovered - oil and other fossil fuels.

Until the minds of men discovered certain principles of chemistry and physics, there was no such thing as steel, aluminum and a multitude of alloys that today support the structure of our homes, our offices, our factories, our bridges, cars, trains and planes.

Until the minds of men discovered and exploited certain principles of biology, the perpetual state of almost all mankind was starvation and malnutrition but today our supply of food has expanded so far obesity has become a problem in many advanced nations and risks becoming so for even poorer nations in just a few decades. I think most people would rather have the challenges of obesity than starvation.

Thanks to enlightenment thinkers, industrialists in relatively free countries discovered ways to mass produce goods and services in such vast quantities that supply not only exceeded what their contemporary populations could use, but can now provide supply for a vastly increased population with little difficulty.

Supply is not a function of a limited view of resources but rather one of human imagination and freedom. If one specific physical resource appears to be in short supply, a free economy sees its price rise, which then attracts additional attention from producers, who then work to discover new ways of producing or alternatives that may even make the earlier ways entirely obsolete. The energy field is a classic example. In the early part of this century there was a hue and cry about "peak oil" and forecasts of doom. Oil prices rose rapidly. Alternatives were sought and so quickly discovered and implemented that the USA, which was previously a huge oil importer, now is an exporter. If government and anti-human activists had seen this coming they would have had a decent shot at preventing such progress and this is evidenced by their strident opposition to shale oil, horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, oil pipelines, oil tankers, oil trains, and even the production of oil and other fossil fuel sources - they oppose every single economic source of energy. This advance happened so fast they were caught flat-footed. Today, the supply of oil and other fossil fuel energy is greater than at any time in human history, not because the raw material was not available, but because human minds had not yet identified it and found ways to make it a resource.

And what's next after fossil fuels? Likely fusion, which requires raw materials that are incredibly abundant and is a process that produces nothing humanity considers a pollutant. The potential supply of energy from fusion is so vast it is easily a thousand times more than that of fossil fuels, and we have centuries of supply of fossil fuels remaining. From a time less than two hundred years ago when whales were being killed for their oil to today when we can see unlimited energy resources in front of our noses, the raw materials found in nature did not change one iota. What changed was that men were largely left free to make the best use of the resources they had currently discovered and this enabled them to discover even more resources. it was not environmental activists who saved the whales but the geologists and engineers and venture capitalists who launched the age of oil that did so.

Now back to the tragedy of the commons. Imagine what would have happened if all property was owned by the state instead of by individual people and the voluntary relationship groups they form such as partnerships and corporations. Do you think we would have ever advanced to the stage of having industrial scale steel, aluminum, oil or anything else? Not a chance.These great leaps forward always occur in the more free society, where there is a degree of respect for the individual human being, where citizens have property rights and a government protects these rights, including intellectual property rights. While a country founded upon enlightenment principles leaped further forward than any country in all of history in just a hundred years from its founding, a multitude of other countries that remained collectivist, tribalist, fascist and otherwise did not protect the individual and his mind remained mired in primitive squalor.

The same is true today. What country, when it was relatively free for a while was formerly one of the wealthiest but now has in just a couple of decades fallen so low that all of the pets, all of the animals in the cities and even the zoo animals have been eaten by its people while formerly middle class citizens forage through garbage in search of food? Which country has the world's greatest known supply of oil, yet thanks to a true tragedy of the commons is pathologically unable to produce enough energy even for its own citizens to live as rational human beings and has gas prices at about $10 Cdn per liter? Which country once exported food all around its area and just a short time later depends on international aid to delay mass starvation? What country has an inflation rate of about thirteen thousand percent (80% per month) and and has seen GDP shrink by about 16% in the last year? What triggered this horrendous change? Was it the adoption of freedom, the protection of individual rights, the implementation of free trade, free markets, the limiting of the role of government to rights protection and the removal of rights-violating regulation - that is to say was it capitalism?

Or was it the antithesis of capitalism, meaning collectivism: the elevation of so-called group rights above the individual; the destruction of free association including the right to form corporations and seek economic production; the attack on objective law that protected citizens from those who would violate their rights, especially the state; the attempt to equalize all people's situations in defiance of their individual differences; the reversal of the proper role of the state from the protector of the right of citizens to pursue their own reasoned decisions to the agency that dictates how citizens must behave, organize their productive activities and even think? Did this country suffer from an excess of freedom and capitalism or the near total destruction of these?

Did socialism ride to the rescue of this formerly partially capitalist and wealthy country and make all its citizens happy, healthy and equally wealthy? Well, on the side of wealth they are in the process of becoming equal all right - equally poor, equally starving, equally desperate to escape the death-trap of socialism. And yet, do you think these same people, once they have thrown off the first layer of socialist shackles will advocate for ma truly free country, for pure freedom and capitalism, for a state that has as its sole duty the protection of individual rights? Not unless they have the intellectual and moral tools to do so - meaning they almost certainly will not. Rather, they will swing back towards enough freedom to improve their lives for a while and then again will lean towards statism and the cycle will continue.

Oh, and in case it wasn't evident, the country in question is Venezuela and it is currently in the grasp of a true tragedy of the commons.

The Canadian government attacks the values of its own citizens

I wrote this to an Ottawa area MP when I learned of an upcoming "consultation" phone call.

I am writing to you as a financial advisor who lived in Orleans for a number of years when I first built my business and who has many clients living in Orleans to this day.  I urge and implore you to push the government to stop all action towards implementing the published proposed tax increases as they could be the most damaging tax increases in our lifetime so far.

When I learned of the proposed changes, my jaw dropped and I felt very angry too.  As a financial advisor for the last 24 years I have gained a very good knowledge of many parts of the Canadian income tax system, particularly individual income tax, as I am a registered eFiler and prepare about 130 returns per year for my clients. Over the years I have done over 2,000 tax returns. In addition, a crucial part of financial advice is understanding how income tax reduces the value of investments made by clients, thus reducing the wealth of Canada forever, and helping clients understand and plan to keep their tax burden to a legal minimum through proper planning.

I think it is crucial for you to clearly understand what it means when a person earns income. It means he has created something of value that another person is willing to exchange his own values for. Money is simply the medium of exchange – the underlying value represent a piece of each person’s life, their energy, their intellect, their physical effort, their personal property, their values. In a country that truly protects the rights of individuals, productive ability is celebrated, not punished. Individuals with prodigious ability to create value must be free to do so and the value they create should not be attacked by their own government. If a man can build a business and create value of $200,000 more than the cost inputs, then this is only possible because the people he trades with agreed that he had created this value – that is to say they willingly traded their own values in exchange and only because they thought they were better off for having traded.  If a man can produce excess value of $2 million then he has created much more benefit to his fellow members of society than the man who created $200,000 of value. Should the man who creates greater value be punished for it? Should his productive ability be stifled? Should his ability to allocate capital that is used to create even more value be impaired? Is it moral for him to have a greater portion of his production stripped from him by force the harder he works? This is exactly the regressive tax system we have today.

For many years I taught a financial planning seminar series for adults through the Ottawa Catholic School Board and in the class focused on income tax I listed thirteen different examples of situations where the tax system claws back income, over and above the basic income tax, leading to sometimes severe punishment for earning more income. I used an example drawn from my real life experience doing a client tax return, where a single parent earning $30,000 faced a 70% effective tax and clawback rate. This is not the only example, the system is riddled with complicated buttons and levers pulled by a series of governments over time.  I’m sad to say this has only become worse since the last Federal election and the punishment for daring to produce more value for fellow citizens has risen.

Consider the possible things a business can do with its earnings. Remember that dollar are simply place-holders for actual economic values such as tools, equipment, buildings, vehicles, clothing and all the other goods and services produced by people to improve their lives. First, it can hold them in a bank account and in this case the cash then is available for the bank to lend to others who may need capital to pursue their own goals in life. Second, the business may spend it on maintaining operations or invest in growing its productive capacity and in this case it also produces value. It may pay salaries or dividends to owners of the business, enabling them to pursue their personal values and improve their lives. The business may hold retained earnings and invest in other businesses, either small private businesses or larger, more liquid and secure businesses; again in both cases serving to maintain and increase the production of human values. All the actions a business may take with its earnings are positive, unless the business is not run well enough to be competitive and profitable and thus closes.

This is economics 101, but it is not well understood by many people, including Canadian elected officials of the last century. When production is taxed, the whole chain of wealth creation in society is slowed down, retarded, held back. Don’t forget, wealth is simply the values chosen by people, values such as homes, cars, communications, schools, hospitals, scientific discoveries, etc. Forcibly taking greater amounts away from those who are better at producing values - no matter what is done with it, no matter how well intentioned the takers may say they are, no matter their justifications - can only impair human progress. Taking ever-higher percentages from people as their productive abilities increase is an even greater harm to the producers and to society. Below is a table from my class slides, showing that a dollar doubled ten times is worth $1,024 but when taxed at 46% is only worth $75. In one case, society has $1,024 of homes, schools, hospitals, etc. and in the other it has only $75 of these. Which society has the greater health of citizens, greater education, greater communications, safer houses and cars, more ability to care for the small fraction of truly incapable individuals?

Note that when I referred to helping clients pay a minimum of tax, “minimum” does not by any means mean low or nil, as many of my clients pay far more than a fair share of tax already. The fact is that the people who are the most productive already pay taxes at a rate far greater than their fair share. As the table below shows, just 10% of our population pays 41% of taxes, four times their fair share. Even worse, the most productive 1% of our people are already forced to pay, despite spending vast amounts on tax and legal and financial advice, 24 times their per capita share of taxes. Twenty four times! Each of them carries on their backs twenty four fellow citizens, weighing down their ability to produce values, to improve civilization, to advance human knowledge, to improve the lives of those they trade with, to innovate, to hire people to help them in their productive efforts. Just imagine the progress that would be unleashed if the greatest producers among us were truly freed to use all their abilities to their fullest!

Actually, you don’t need to imagine it. Until the recognition of individual rights along with proper governments to protect them in the late 1700’s, the natural state of humanity through all history was poverty. Suddenly, an explosion of knowledge and production raised the quality of human life by more in 200 years than in the thousands of years prior.  Countries that adopted the principles of freedom have uniformly flourished beyond the imagination of 18^th century Kings. Canada was one of these.  Even today, wherever and to the degree the right to life, liberty and property are cherished in law and in the culture, progress and flourishing occur. To the degree a country violates these three great rights by the force of central controls, regulations and taxation, human life suffers – witness Venezuela in recent years. 

Alas, Canadians have forgotten the philosophical roots of the enlightenment and are unaware of the causes of the industrial revolution and the great advances they see around them. They are moving away from expanding freedom and towards, and even accelerating towards, collectivism, socialism, statism and fascism, which are all essentially the same. The current proposals to raise taxes on private corporations represent a significant slide towards Venezuela and misery and suffering. Notice how there has been NO discussion of the possibility that some people are being taxed too much and their burden should be lowered to create a more level playing field. The only discussion by the Government is to increase taxes on some people to a level paid by some other people - people the government thinks it can persuade to vote for them to continue punishing high producers. The tall flowers are being cut down again. The logical progression of this is to cut a level lower and lower until all are equal in their suffering and the Marxist ideal is achieved, a la Venezuela, where you cannot find a dog, cat or bird in the city because the people have killed them all for food – even zoo animals.

The consequences of implementing this tax proposal will not be unintended, but fully intended. The government has been told, warned, notified of the pending damage to society. The assumptions behind the proposal are severely flawed in both moral and economic terms, so to seek ideas in a “consultation” on how to minimize unintended consequences is to entirely and deliberately miss the point. The proposal represents a willful and wanton destruction of real, tangible and deeply moral values like homes, food, education and health so cherished by so many Canadians. Instead of attacking our most productive people, isn’t it time Canada started to encourage them to ever greater heights and encouraged all others to emulate their success and help them in building an even wealthier society? Our entrepreneurs, business people and high producers should be our greatest role models, not the object of scorn, derision, insults and attacks via the force of taxation. While there is so, so much more than could be said on this, I will close with a quote from one of the great thinkers in the field of human freedom and progress.

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.  You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.  You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. - Abraham Lincoln

I look forward to your thoughtful response to my letter.

The Pope is wrong to urge shifting of wealth to the poor

On May 10 Pope Francis was reported to have called for "government to redistribute wealth and benefits to the poor in a new spirit of generosity to help curb "the economy of exclusion" that is happening today." The Editorial Board of the Toronto Star demonstrate they are as economically illiterate as the Pope, when they make positive statements about the Pope's position.  I will make just a few points to illustrate this.

Generosity is the willingness to give to others and as such must be of a voluntary nature. It is not being generous when one is acting under coercion or threat.  Thus, the Pope contradicts himself when he says that government should be redistributing from those who have money to those who do not. His moral implication is that the use of force against innocent citizens is a moral role of government - if they do not voluntarily give enough to others to meet some arbitrary amount deemed as enough, then they must be forced against their will to give until someone else, presumably the Pope in this case, decides it is enough.

This morality is what philosopher Ayn Rand calls the morality of self-sacrifice, known as altruism. In an essay in her book "Philosophy, Who Needs It" Rand states "What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good."

In an interview Rand said "But you must remember that religion is an early form of philosophy, that the first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values, were made by religion, before men graduated or developed enough to have philosophy. And, as philosophies, some religions have very valuable moral points. They may have a good influence or proper principles to inculcate, but in a very contradictory context and, on a very—how should I say it?—dangerous or malevolent base: on the ground of faith."

Another of the Pope's contradictions is clear in his statement that a more equal form of economic progress can be had through " the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state , as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society."  Not only does this statement reiterate the notion that citizens are mere vessels of the will of the state and do not have a right to their own life, liberty and property, but it creates an artificial and improper separation between private individuals and so-called "civil society".  The implication is that when acting alone in furtherance of their own life and goals individuals are not part of "civil society" and that they are only moral when they are acting collectively to coerce others.  This is the recipe for totalitarian dictatorship such as the Church held over citizens for a thousand years during the dark ages.

So an all-out attack on individual rights, human progress and economic freedom (capitalism) is Pope Francis' first formal writing as newly elected Pope. While he has given some signs of relaxing a few of the more severe tenets of the Catholic Church, this Pope is clearly little different from the long line that has come before him and he should be criticized for his denial of basic human rights.

We shouldn't care about the cost of a stadium

(This was first written in April 2009)

There is much to get excited about in Ottawa these days.  Two major projects have been proposed that would be huge attractions for area residents, increase the national and global profile of Ottawa, provide structures and sites we can be proud of and draw tourism from all over.  With such glowing words you would think I am in favour of City, Provincial and Federal funding to support these initiatives, but I see a better way.

Whenever governments provide funding for a project they are spending money they have first taken by force from you through myriad taxes and fees.  The rationale for taking your money is that politicians and bureaucrats know best how to spend your hard earned money.  Presumably you are too dumb to choose what you will buy, where you will go, how you will get there, what you will eat, where and how you will work, how to care for the health and education of yourself and your family and so on.  Because taxes on productive work and business are so high, many businesses are near impossible to run without getting some of the money back through government grants, loans, investments etc.  This creates a cycle of punishment and dependency.

Consider the case of Lansdowne Park.  The facility and land are City-owned.  The asset has been crumbling for a long time because it is not owned by anyone with true business accountability to the customer.  It is an example of the tragedy of the commons, where something owned by everyone but no one in particular suffers from neglect and various interest groups fight for political control of it.  In the end it is under-productive.  The consequence is the government continues to pour your money into the declining asset until it is time to go back to the start and spend much larger amounts of your money on reconstruction.  Between the consumer and the project is a huge gap.  The project attempts to operate outside the real economy and inside the imaginary world of government’s “higher knowledge and purpose”.

Contrast this with Scotiabank Place.  The facility and land are owned by a business.  Before investing in the venture the business must take careful account of economic reality, meaning assessing the willingness and ability of the customer to buy the product.  Costs must be scrupulously controlled.  Prices must reflect the consumer market at all times.  The value of the asset must be maintained as efficiently as possible.  All this is done as a standard and crucial part of business analysis and operation.  If the business cannot be run at a profit it fails and is sold to another business that thinks it can make it work.  With a low enough purchase price they likely can.  This is an example of how a free market reallocates capital to those who are best able to manage it, directed by the inexorable power of you, in your role as a self-interested consumer.

If government would get out of the way of the businessmen behind the current proposals we would surely have both facilities well run for decades with no risk to the citizens of Ottawa, Ontario or Canada.  Entrepreneurs willing to stake their reputations, experience and capital would take all the risks and enjoy whatever rewards consumers choose to give them.  Government would sell assets it owns at market price, not charge any taxes or fees except those services the facility management buys from government agencies (water, electricity etc.) and pledge not to impose any such penalties in the future.  With the huge cost of government removed from the project, entrepreneurs could raise more capital on their own and remove all risk from government and citizens.  In fact, this is how business was once done in Canada, as is proper for a country that was once almost fully free.  With obstacles such as the crushing weight of the nanny state, City councilors who could not build or run a project like these in a million years and who spend most of their time trying to run your life, it is no wonder the pace of progress on such things is often slower than rust on my car.

I don’t want to be forced to care at all about the cost of a stadium facility because it is properly the responsibility of business people, not politicians and voters.

Teaching socialism in our schools

In the fall of 2009 as another school year started I flipped through the textbook used in Civics at my daughter’s high school in Orleans then decided to take a second look to see what is being taught about rights and government.  I have long known our public schools, being creations of a collectivist entity, have a strong bias towards socialism, yet I was surprised and at times almost ill with the actual content of the text and its direct contradiction of Canadian legal foundations.

It started at the very beginning, with the title of the textbook (which I translate from French): “Responsibility, democracy and engagement”.  In a section titled “What are the challenges of life in a collective?” students are told government is the vehicle used to take care of our most complex needs such as transportation, health care, defense of our rights and freedoms, epidemics, famines and ecological disasters.  It points out that it is difficult to satisfy the needs of all members of the society because what is good for one is not necessarily good for others, so conflicts occur.  It invokes environmental and anti-poverty organizations as examples of what makes up “civil society”.  It claims that in a democracy all individuals should feel responsible towards other members of the community.  The principle of majority rule is discussed as the most equitable way of making rules and settling disputes, even if the minority disagrees. Students are told that if they live in a society that provides “free” health care and other services then they have a responsibility to pay taxes to fund the system and use their abilities for the benefit of the collective. 

A full rebuttal would take a book, so I will briefly consider the notion of responsibility to others and the collective.  In no way can responsibilities be held as a primary in a man’s life.  It is the nature of man that to be alive he must survive, that his reasoning mind is his primary tool for survival and that to use his mind he must be free to act and able to keep what he produces.  Thus, the term “inalienable rights” is used to describe the rights to life, liberty and property.  If he is born with responsibilities he is not free but is a type of serf or slave.  If he wishes to live in a society, expect that his rights will be respected and exchange mutually beneficial production with others, then he must respect their individual rights.  Responsibilities can be created by voluntary consent through a mutually satisfactory agreement.  Responsibilities cannot morally be forced on an individual since that violates his right to liberty.

Simply because the majority around him votes to implement policies on transportation, health care, education, or ecology using the force of government does not morally bind a child or adult to these policies since it is wrong to use force against an innocent individual.  The conflicts the Civics textbook refers to are conflicts inevitably arising when laws are not objective and don’t fully protect individual rights, instead allowing innumerable pressure groups to use government force to create improper laws.  These laws force individuals to conform to the wishes of those controlling government and specify punishments for violations.  For example, laws that force innocent business owners to make signs in a particular language violate the freedom of the individual to make his own choices in life so long as he does not violate the rights of others.  Laws forcing doctors to work for the state and prohibiting a patient from contracting with any doctor of his choosing clearly violate the right to freedom of the doctor and the patient.  Laws forcing some people to pay for the living expenses of others are immoral.  Those who claim the right to make such laws are claiming the right to violate the rights of others.  In such a system there are no objective rights or laws and the system is driven by pressure-group politics, with the largest number ruling over the minorities – and the smallest minority is the individual.

A society that does not make the protection of individual rights its highest law cannot truly be called a free society.  Groups and society do not exist as separate entities without individuals, thus there can be no such objective concept as group rights, racial rights, collective rights or any rights that are not agreed to by mutual consent of all the individuals involved.  The Civics textbook I refer to is wrong at its very foundation and is teaching young minds to be subservient to the collective.  It belongs in the realm of the infamous Borg from Star Trek lore, a race that represents the worst horror for man: to have his mind, born free, submerged in the collective.

Athletes Shrugged

The state-run broadcaster reported today some incredible news.  In a protest against government interference in their right to freely train and compete, the best winter sports athletes in the world discreetly gathered in British Columbia to hold a competition based on the principles of individual rights.   Athletes called the event the first free competition in over a hundred years.

Downhill ski racer Francisco d’Anconia was interviewed just after he completed the fastest run of the day to take the gold medal.  “I grew tired of participating in events where the prime directive was ‘from each according to his ability to each according to his needs’ and I was forced to give up my spot on the podium to athletes of much lesser ability, poor conditioning and no dedication” said d’Anconia.  “This is the first event in living memory where I was allowed to compete without state officials handicapping my performance so others could have a turn winning.  Today, the outcome was decided objectively by individual ability alone.” 

“It’s not fair!”complained would-be downhill skier James Taggart, who did not participate in the event, to the competition board.  “Just because Francisco has such enormous talent does not give him the right to take first place.  I’m going to take this case to the equalization of athletic rights tribunal and make them take away his medal.  Just imagine if success was only based on individual ability, training and hard work- why it would leave no chance for the rest of us who want to win too” he sneered.

Over in the hockey arena the captain of the team seemingly destined for gold, John Galt, was heard to say “the great athletes of the world are tired of living under the punishing rules set by state bureaucrats who are themselves incapable achieving what these athletes can do.  We realized that principles we had followed all our lives were contrary to man’s nature and have shrugged off the burden of carrying our fellow men on our backs.  We will no longer train with such intensity and dedication for the purpose of placing the less competent on the podium.  We will allow success and failure to be determined by a free market for athletic skill.”

Multiple medal-winner in long track speed skating, former American Dagny Taggart, supported Galt’s position.  “Under a socialized athletic education and health care program I was unable to work with the instructors I wished to hire or find the best trainers and therapists.  I was paying such high taxes for the state-run monopolies I could not afford to also pay for a school of my choice or obtain the fast, affordable and flexible access to health care available in free countries, so my training suffered.  Since I moved to a country where teachers can work as they choose, competing for the best students, and medical professionals are able to choose their own business models, my performance has improved quickly.  Before, I was forced into public training programs where equal opportunity was the rule and when I was injured I had to wait in line to see doctors and therapists who were forced to provide ‘equal’ treatment for people who simply did not take care of themselves.

The outspoken cross-country skier Hank Reardon, who was once taken to court for daring to claim he had a right to earn and keep any medals he won in open competition, declared he wanted to see an end to the massive subsidy programs for sports teams.  “The notion that any particular team is too big to fail is ludicrous!” said Reardon.  If a hockey team has signed contracts giving away the future of the business to its players and the fans are unwilling to buy enough tickets at the prices required to keep the team solvent, then the team must be allowed to close.  If willing new owners can revive the business and operate it without losing money they are free to do so, but this idea of taking money by force from the remaining successful teams that made rational choices and paying those running an irrational business model is sheer lunacy and will only lead to greater problems down the road” said Reardon.  “I trust individuals to choose the ticket prices they are willing to pay and support the team of their own liking.  They have the right to choose their path in life.  Government interference only distorts the entire sports industry!”

Sports Directorate Minister Wesley Mouch criticized d’Anconia, Taggart, Galt, Reardon and the rest of the competitors at this ‘unsanctioned’ event.  “These people have no right to hold their own events and allow a free market for sports ability to determine their winners” he complained.  “They are ignoring the collective principles that hold our society together.  This disproven theory that individual freedom is a good thing will surely fail soon.  People can’t be just allowed to succeed or fail based on arbitrary measures such as ability or intelligence – it’s not sustainable.  Why, these so-called athletes operate as if everyone else did not have the same right to win if they want to.  Everyone knows that NEED is the highest moral standard and that if someone needs to win a gold medal and others must be held back to enable this, then that is the right thing.”

When asked about the comments by Mr. Mouch, John Galt declared “the greatest athletes in the world gathered here have taken a vow.  They have each said ‘I swear by my life and my love of it, never again to sacrifice my training and competitive spirit for the sake of another, and never to allow another to sacrifice his abilities for me.’  In order to live, man must be free to think, act on his ideas and hold onto the product of his efforts.  These are the principles of this event, which we are calling the Reality Games.

Not so good counsel from prominent Canadians

In today's Ottawa Citizen page A3 there was a full-page spread with advice "prominent" Canadians have for Prime Minister Harper Counsel from prominent Canadians.  Apparently Postmedia News did not think to consult anyone other than socialists since all seven of the interviewees provided only recommendations to increase the invasiveness of government in our lives. 

The head of the Canadian Medical Association applauded the current health care monopoly, as if physicians left free to practice their profession without government force could not built better practices, and patients left free to choose their health care could not do better than legions of bureaucrats.  He erred when he said "for tha last century, medicare has been an important contributor to our country's economy, productivity and quality of life."  Maybe he does not realize that the government only took control of a large part of health care a few decades ago and that ever since then cost of health care and its availability to citizens has been decreasing. 

A professor of climate modelling says Harper should consult past politicians and all the socialists who were not elected to lead the government when formulating environmental policy.  He conveniently ignores the fact that all climate models have failed to predict the actual climate going forward.  Anyone willing to torture the equations hard enough can build a model to replicate past data.  However, when models have been tested in the unknown future data they have been spectacularly wrong.  Consider that every single model used in the IPCC reports of the past has predicted steeply rising temperatures but the actual satellite data has shown level to decreasing tempteratures.  The modelers have ignored the proper effect of clouds in modulating temperature and failed to account for solar output cycles. By avoiding the two most important variables in climate cycles, no wonder the models based on atmospheric carbon dioxide have been so far off base.

A doctoral student in sociology advises the Prime minister to remain true to the values on which this country was founded.  Apparently she thinks those values include major portions of the communist manifesto instead of individual rights and freedoms as documented in the Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, Constitution Act, the Canadian Bill of Rights etc. 

The vice-president of CARP provides mostly a prescription for more government intervention but does have the one reference to individual freedom in the whole page: the elimination of a mandatory retirement age.

A playwright says that a majority government mandate does not mean Harper is actually allowed to change anything important, as if the hundreds of thousands of controls over our lives put in place over the last hundred years cannot be removed without another vote.  He wants Harper to leave Canada in its original condition, ignoring that when Canada was founded, individuals were responsible for their own lives, accountable for not violating the rights of others and largely left to make their own way in life as they saw fit, without a massive central government to tell them how to build their house, grow their food, travel, work, live and die.  In fact, in many ways the original Canada is the opposite of the one we have today.  We still have a great country, but this is despite the pervasive force used by government, not because of it.

The mayor of Calgary wants billions of dollars for "cities", meaning for another layer of state controls.  One level of government is to tax citizens and give the money to another layer of government.  How's that for freedom and accountability?

The leader of an advocacy group makes nice-sounding but meaningless suggestions for "growing inequality", "listening to the Canadians who did not vote for him" and "finding a common path forward".

Not one of these prominent people made reference to the right of individuals to peacefully purse their own happiness in life, free of interference from the state.  Except for the reference to removing mandatory retirement, none of them spoke about removing the giant burden of government from the backs of citizens who simply wish to make their own way in life.  Further, they only tended to make fatal errors in knowledge of the history of Canada and the freedoms our Country was founded upon - the freedoms responsible for the great scientific, technological and economic progress that comes when individual rights are protected instead of suppressed. 

Maybe it is time we tried capitalism for a change, instead of socialism or the mixed economy.  Unfortunately, the prominent Canadians chosen by Postmedia News wouldn't even recognize capitalism if it was laid out on the table in front of them, so there is no help there!