Climate of injustice

 A response to a letter in The Low Down, Sept 14-20, 2022 titled "Together for climate justice"

I am responding to the seemingly endless demands by the La Peche Coalition for a Green New Deal to forcefully implement policies to combat the gas of life - carbon dioxide. It is sad to read so many letters based on ignorance of science, economics and most of all a proper ethical framework.

For over 20 years I have closely followed the evolution of scientific knowledge about our climate by reading many books written by eminent scientists and subject-matter experts and keeping an eye on many of the thousands of studies connected to the Earth's climate. Long ago I could tell from a broad review of the literature that climate alarmism was based on distortions, bad statistical and scientific methodology, and most of all bad ideology. The premise that the Earth is a delicate nurturer best left untouched by man's activities is contrary to the nature of human life, which is to apply reason to the challenges of survival in a naturally dangerous and deficient environment. Humans thrive only by reshaping and improving our world. I have come across thousands of studies and many basic facts of reality that directly contradict the idea that there is any kind of climate crisis and anyone who does a broad reading of the literature would easily find the same. I encourage readers to see for themselves, perhaps starting with the recent book "Fossil Future" that provides an irrefutable case and moving on from there for those who want more technical information.

Economically, fossil fuel energy presently makes up more than 80% of the world energy supply and is always the best and preferred way for poor countries to solve their problems of starvation, disease and suffering. Three billion people have less energy than a typical refrigerator and have a massive need for more energy. Alarmists almost always ignore the massive benefits of fossil fuel energy and focus only on the manageable side-effects, like focusing only on vaccine side-effects and ignoring the benefits. Wind and solar may have a small role to play in generating electricity but due to their intermittent, dilute and unreliable nature they are spectacularly unsuited for economical grid-scale power, plus require massive mining projects mostly in third world countries and dictatorships, leading to horrible pollution problems. A call to end fossil fuel energy is a call for the continuation of uman suffering for the billions of people who do not yet enjoy our level of energy capability and te mass murder of those who would lose the life-giving energy from fossil fuels we now enjoy. 

Politically, a call for a green new deal is a call for fascism, as few populations will voluntarily choose societal suicide for very long. Witness the dramatic policy reversal in the UK when it became clear that mass suffering would quickly result from the loss of reliable, cheap energy. If all state coercion and subsidies was removed from the energy market and humans were free to produce and trade, I know there would be almost no wind and solar infrastructure built and human progress would leap forward.

Ethically, the right framework is one of respect for human rights: your right to peacefully pursue your own values and to keep the product of your work. It is unethical to lie about the state of scientific knowledge in an effort to achieve power over the lives of others, unethical to call for the destruction of a safe, cheap and reliable energy system that sustains the lives of billions of people with no viable replacement in hand, unethical to cry for the use of political force against billions of innocent people trying to live in peace. The right ethical path is one towards an objective assessment of reality, the recognition of the ability of individuals to think for themselves and to produce values to trade with others and a government whose function is to protect our rights and never violate them. We have a long way to go but a move in the right direction would be a good start. It begins with every individual thinking.

A response to "The horrible possibility of a sixth extinction event"

When my news feed delivered an article titled "The horrible possibility of a sixth extinction event" written by a man who is stated to have spent the last few years writing a book on climate change I took a peek and then because the article was so heavy on politics and projections while being short on science and reason I was moved to write a short rebuttal.

At the bottom of the article there is a list of 22 references but they are almost all links to political bodies, political documents or opinion pieces. Not one of them is a link to an observation of meaningful observations of reality in the full context. I will quote from the article and provide well-known scientific data such as you can find in the scientific literature or textbooks for each to illustrate just how far from reality are the claims made in the article and presumably the author's book.

Statement 1. "Everyone is aware of the fires and floods and dire predictions for the future."

Rebuttal 1. Awareness of news does not mean it is a fact. Since we have access to news about everywhere and everything all the time it is easy to mis-perceive reality without objective measurements to put information into context and make it knowledge. The study below clearly shows a large decrease in North American wildfires since the industrial revolution. This is due to factors such as better land management, fire detection and suppression technologies, all powered by abundant affordable and scalable fossil fuel energy.

The same goes for drought, by the way, with a steady decline over recent decades due to technologies like irrigation, fertilizers, weather forecasting and the like.

When it comes to floods, I presume the author refers to floods caused by sea level rise. In this case, like the others I will touch on, the full context includes looking at the historical record rather than models projecting doom. The graph that follows shows sea level over the last 24,000 years and highlights the effect of the end of the last glaciation that led to a sea level increase of 120 meters as most of the ice sheets covering land melted. The last few thousand years include a very gradual and steady rise, although this varies significantly depending on where the measurement is made. Tectonic plates move and collide steadily and some land masses are still rebounding from the mass of ice that pushed them down for millennia. Thanks to abundant machine energy humans can modify their shorelines and even raise buildings and cities if needed. With sea level changing slowly and steadily we have plenty of time to adapt to local changes. People in the Netherlands have managed to live below sea level for centuries and more people than ever before are choosing to build and live at the edge of the oceans.

Statement 2. The extinction of all living things is pretty well guaranteed unless our species starts acting now.

Rebuttal 2. There is literally no scientific data to support this statement and not even the biased IPCC science report makes any such assertion. In contrast, all measures of pollution and environmental damage decrease once a society reaches a sufficient level of wealth and this phenomenon is known as an Environmental Kuznets Curve. Seventy five years ago cities in the western world that were filled with air and water pollution are now far cleaner and safer and this occurs wherever freedom is allowed to grow and energy production flourishes.

Statement 3. Nature has always produced Co2 and methane, and it stored it through natural processes. This production and storage cycle was carefully balanced until we humans came along.

Rebuttal 3. This statement anthropomorphizes nature by using the word "carefully." Yes, there are many factors in balance in nature but nature, both living and inanimate is also constantly in change. Not only it is well established that the greenhouse effect of CO2 is a logarithmic one with further amounts having an ever-diminishing effect since a saturation point for the absorption of specific wavelengths is reached, the future effect of increasing Co2 is calculated to be about 0.5C. The graph that follows shows the geological history of Earth over the last 60 million years and CO2 has almost always been much, much higher than today and we can see that the correlation between CO2 and temperature is negligible. When CO2 is higher plant life flourishes and thus so does animal life. The graph shows the present CO2 level is close to a record low while there are periods of much higher CO2 and lower temperature. Over the shorter time scale of the last six hundred thousand years, Antarctic and Greenland ice core studies show that warming occurs first and CO2 level follows with an average lag of 600 years. 

Statement 4. News reports of wildfires, floods, hurricanes, droughts, melting ice fields, deaths by hyperthermia and killer pollution have become the new normal. 

Rebuttal 5. While it is true that news reports of natural disasters are the new normal, this is because we have so much more news, not because people are dying at a greater rate. In fact, it is just the opposite - and dramatically so. Deaths from extreme weather events have declined over the last hundred years - not by a factor of two or five, not even by a factor of ten, but by a factor of fifty - a 98% drop in deaths. This is due to our machine power that enables us to build resilient infrastructure, warm us of coming weather events, mobilize resources to support people at risk and rescue those in imminent danger. Deaths from cold are more than five times greater than those from heat, so a slight warming has saved lives. 

Statement 5. Once past the tipping point, global warming will keep on increasing beyond control. The eventual destruction of the Earth’s ecological systems will then eliminate the Earth’s supply of breathable air and potable water, and critically reduce habitable lands.

Rebuttal 5. There is no evidence for such a tipping point, it is pure and arbitrary speculation. Since CO2 in the atmosphere has been many times higher and no runaway warming occurred and since as pointed out above the potential impact of further CO2 is so small, this assertion is simply fear-mongering.

Statement 6. The August 2021 IPCC report stated, “Many changes due to past and future greenhouse gas emissions are irreversible for centuries to millennia, especially changes in the ocean, ice sheets and global sea level.” 

Rebuttal 6. There is no science to support this. This is a political statement and not a scientific one. For example, the graph below shows satellite data for the Antarctic since the start of the satellite era and it shows no change. Sea level was discussed above.

Statement 7. Can the human species become extinct? Why not? 

Rebuttal 7. The first question is a rhetorical statement since humanity's survival is not guaranteed by nature but rather is a constant struggle against a naturally dangerous environment. The second question is a matter of mastering machine energy, since with enough energy humanity can colonize the Moon, Mars and other planetary bodies and build starships that would enable us to leave our solar system. Heavier than air flight was invented just a short time ago (when my grandmother was born) and in just a few of my grandmother's lifespans we have advanced our knowledge and machine power more than in all of prior human history. Today a SpaceX ship is close to launch that is two thousand times cheaper to operate than NASA's best effort. 

Conclusion: for every assertion of danger or doom in the article it is easy to find hard evidence of the contrary or else the statement can be seen as lacking evidence - to be an arbitrary assertion. Since the statements are so consistently wrong, we must conclude there is a strong bias present in the writer's mind. If the statements were only partly wrong or were wrong in different directions then at least we could say there has been an honest effort to discover the truth. 

Energy is life. Energy is progress. Energy is the future of human flourishing. With energy mastery all is possible. In the name of all that is good about human life we need the freedom to explore all sources of energy, to experiment, to fail, discover new methods and applications. Today, fossil fuel energy powers 80% of all humanity's energy needs and those needs are growing fast, as is fossil fuel energy. Fossil fuels provide safe, dense, flexible, industrial scale energy that powers all other industries. Nuclear energy of some type is the most likely successor but has been criminalized by pressure from environmental advocacy groups since its discovery and is unsuitable in many applications. No other substitute for fossil fuels is know today.

All proposals to stop energy progress in the name of the weather, climate or pollution ignore all the fantastic advantages of energy capabilities. Such forecasts of doom are always based on hypotheses that have been proven false or upon models that have failed to predict real-world measurements. For humanity to flourish we require thinking that is firmly rooted in observations of reality, that are objective instead of subjective or arbitrary. 

Lower business taxes are the moral and practical choice

Imagine a hockey game where every time you scored two goals one was taken from you (like a 50% tax rate) and given to your opponent! How hard would you work in that game? The Valley Voices column of December 9 is replete with ethical and economic errors, so for the moment I will use just one and let the reader consider that if the starting point is bad the rest of the column likely follows suit. The writer’s opening sentence labels the idea that lowering corporate taxes is a good thing as a fairy tale, so let’s evaluate this statement to see if the writer’s standard of value is human flourishing.

Why do you create a business? In order to live: to bring an idea that creates human values into reality to support and improve your life. You might have an idea that many people will value your ideas about food, housing, transportation, communication, health or entertainment, for example, so you set about creating a business to manifest your ideas. You set up a supply chain, production, marketing, sales, distribution and service - often these are just you in every role at first. You must set a price higher than your cost inputs so that you are creating net value, otherwise your business dies and no one’s life is supported. If you have enough customers who find your product is worth more to them than the money they pay you (price) then your business survives. The level of your profit is a pure function of how much value you are creating, as decided by the agreements between you and your customers. All such trade is win-win by its very definition, the most moral form of trade.

If you are able to create enough value to thrive, gradually you may hire others to divide the work and enable specialization and division of labour. You offer to pay your job candidates what you consider to be enough to attract the skilled people you want to hire. If they agree with your offer and are hired you are each making a profitable trade. Your pursuit of life goals creates job opportunities for others to bring their value creation ideas into reality to support their life goals. 

I can see five things you can do with each dollar of profit earned by your business. First, you may opt to build a cash reserve to protect your business during the inevitable hard times. This cash is on deposit at a bank, where it is immediately put to work through lending to meet the life goals of others. Second, you may pay down business debt to lower the risk to your business and again the bank will immediately lend this out to others. Third, you may invest in growing your business, thus creating even more win-win trade. Fourth, you may invest in other value-creating businesses by acquiring all or part of them. Finally, you may pay a dividend to the business owner(s) and the owner (maybe just you) will then either save it, pay down debt, make other investments or spend it through trade with other value-creators. All these choices are both moral and productive.

Corporate tax is the forcible taking of value from you as the business owner (what is seen), your employees (less money available for payroll - unseen pay and hiring that never happens), your suppliers (unseen purchases that never happen) and your customers (higher prices than otherwise). Such takings necessarily discourage all business activity, investment, hiring and growth; punishing the life-supporting creation of human values through production and trade. If this were not true then ever-higher taxes would create rising prosperity, punishing success would lead to even greater success and the type of hockey game described above would be popular.

In a free society when you build great wealth it can only be through great value creation. Some businesses that have grown during the current pandemic have been rewarded for creating great value during a difficult time. They have provided the goods and services most wanted by us just when we want them and at a price we are eager to pay. How much worse would this time be for millions of us without the incredibly fast and affordable supply chain created by Amazon? Many businesses and lives have been damaged and destroyed by the irrational dictates of our central planners, dictates that prevent us from thinking for ourselves and supporting our own lives by creating human values. Other businesses have of course benefitted from these dictates, but they are not to be condemned - the dictators are responsible.

The lower the business tax rate the more human reasoning, value creation and productive achievement can be achieved. To the small degree any type of taxation is needed it is better placed on the consumption of values than on their creation. To maximize human flourishing the most moral and practical business tax rate is zero percent.

A pre-election proposal to cover hearing aids under government health plans

Here is another of the online discussions hosted by the Liberal Party of Ontario leading up to the 2018 election. This was rated fourth overall by participants. Again, many participants are unable to see how a political system freedom works and keep insisting that the use of force against some citizens for the supposed benefit of others is justifiable.

Cover cost of hearing aids

Hearing Aid cost are in the thousands of dollars and its considered a disability. I am only 34 years old and have genetic hearing loss. I am the manager of a long term care facility and I'm well educated but i cant afford new hearing aids and i know hundreds just like me. Soon it will prevent me from working and instead of being a contributing citizen that i can be, ill be living on disability money which i dont want. I didnt cause this hearing loss. I dont want it but i cant fix it and the one thing that can make it a little better managed cost thousands of dollars. It should be covered becuse its a health issue and it minimizes the ability to contribute to society, causes depression and enormous other cost that will be much more than the cost of the aids. Please consider. Thank you.

1. Comment

   Kiara (@kiarasexton) 1 year ago

   I have a family member who needs special advanced hearing aids that cost a few thousand dollars. This is prohibitively expensive and she loses a great deal of sleep over this cost. It breaks my heart how much stress it causes her, because without them, she is without access to community services, interaction with family and friends, and entertainment. Life shuts down quickly without these things. I believe hearing aids should be funded by the health care system. For those who need them, they are critical.

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2. Comment

   Lloyd Le Blanc (@lloyd.le.blanc) 1 year ago

   Actually the problem is how the current program is administered.
   The Ontario Government currently pay $500.00 for each hearing aid.
   The problem is that this is paid to the hearing aid provider company.They then can charge whatever they want on top of that as they are already assured that much profit .When you go in for a test they have you sign a " waiver " that directs the government money to them.Saw a report that it cost $ 65.00 to make a hearing aid.
   At Costco the money goes to the patient and you should check their prices and no I do not work for them.

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      Community Member (Idea Submitter)1 year ago

      @lloyd.le.blanc You are right! THis $1000 towards two hearing aids do not even help. I had 2 hearing aids made in alberta for a certain amount. Here, very similar ones are about $1800 more for 2 so whats the use of the $1000 covered? Its just added on the top of the cost and the consumer pays the same amount no matter what. poorly planned. Just makes the companies rich and patients poor.

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3. Comment

   John Delbert Hamilton (@johndelberthamilton) 1 year ago

   Yes cost of hearing aids need to be covered under OHIP 100% , all models.

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      Community Member (Idea Submitter)1 year ago

      @johndelberthamilton Absolutely!!

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4. Comment

   You 1 year ago

   Not a good idea. When people claim their need constitutes a command over other people's lives a society of dog eat dog is created and the best lobbyists divide the loot. Competiting for control over other people's money by claiming greater need is called socialism, and it has destroyed societies to the degree it has been implemented. It sets neighbor against neighbor and fuels envy and hatred. 
   
   Hearing aids exist because innovators were free to create, sell, profit, reinvest and improve their products, all competing for the preference of consumers. If you want to kill a product and stop innovation in it's tracks, get government to control it. Today's hearing aids are a hundred times better than those of a few decades ago and get better and cost less and less per functionality delivered. 
   
   Price differences between provinces must be because government has interfered in the market, else competition would drive prices to a similar level very quickly. When a product can be made profitably it attracts capital and competition, which then drives prices down and quality up until the rate of profit normalizes. Only the power of the state can block this process. For the sake of ll who want better hearing aids, we must insist that government not interfere in our marketplace.

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5. Comment

   Lloyd Le Blanc (@lloyd.le.blanc) 1 year ago

   Helping each other is not socialism.This should come naturally to all and not ,as by example the so called " American dream which in my opinion is dog eat dog in an attempt to acquire as much "stuff" as possible by stepping on whoever you have to.This attitude seems to have seeped into Canadian society and that is not what I and many others want.
   
   This discussion is not about market economy.It's about the flawed support payment system at the Ontario government level and it is an easy fix.Give the money to the individual needing and buying the hearing aid after which they can go shopping for the best price.Today's hearing aids are now all digital and the basic difference in them is minimal.Just bells & whistles.I spent 30 years in the commercial radio business and a hearing aid has the same technology.

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      James Dekker (@dprime) 1 year ago

      @lloyd.le.blanc but people are being forced to help others. That's socialism. When people donate money, that's giving of free will. There is a huge difference. Removing the overhead of all the administration costs is a much better solution. So much money is wasted on bureaucracy and administration. Ask Haiti how many houses the Red Cross built for them. Most of the money went to administration fees, which doesn't help anyone. A better solution would be to find people in need and support them personally rather then the wasted money from taxes.
      I believe that David McGruer's point was that government is not necessarily the best solution to the problem. But that the government has caused an inflated cost to medical health.
      Maybe a better solution would be a tax deduction. Which is already incorporated into our taxes.

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6. Comment

   James Dekker (@dprime) 1 year ago (Last edited by James Dekker 1 year ago)

   I agree those with disabilities need financial help. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't ODSP pay for dental and medical on top of the monthly support? There is also the Trillium Health for lower income families. http://health.gov.on.ca/en/pro/programs/drugs/funded_drug/fund_trillium.aspx Maybe the problem is the lack of information provided to people? And maybe some updates to dollar amounts for the Trillium Health needs to change with the minimum wage inflation.

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   1. Comment

      Lloyd Le Blanc (@lloyd.le.blanc) 1 year ago

      @dprime Wrong link as this Trillium health is an american group based in Rochester NY ????

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      James Dekker (@dprime) 1 year ago

      @lloyd.le.blanc fixed thanks 

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7. Comment

   Al (@fishinlad) 1 year ago

   I disagree with the notion that competition will drive prices to a more affordable level. There are significant barriers to entry into this industry. There is insufficient competition. I'm certainly not suggesting that there is any price fixing going on, but current prices are outrageous. I am currently pricing hearing aids for both my wife and myself. Our total cost will be in the low five figures. We can afford the outlay, but I am well aware that many others cannot. Loss of hearing can be a dangerous situation and I support this suggestion.

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      You 1 year ago

      @fishinlad Competition in every field drives prices lower. Just look at how vastly superior today's hearing aids are compared to just ten or twenty years ago. Dollar for dollar, you get so much more today than ever before. Central controls make things expensive. Freedom makes them cheap.

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      Lloyd Le Blanc (@lloyd.le.blanc) 1 year ago

      @davemcgruer The issue is not a discussion on the free market or competition.The issue is to make over priced hearing aids price competitive.Hearing aids have always been over priced.I worked in the radio communication industry and a hearing aid is a very basic transceiver.With the advent of computer chips that improved every aspect of hearing aids and making them very efficient and small.You would think that this would have reduced costs.No instead they have gone up.One of the reasons for this is the lack of competition at the retail or dispensing point.In Ontario the Government gives $ 500.00 per hearing aid to anyone who gets a hearing aid.However when you go to a clinic and they have you sign a form, that few read, you are authorizing them to collect the $ 500.00 per aid for themselves.Th pricing has nothing to do with the cost of the technology as the estimated cost of making a hearing aid is $ 65.00 and they charge thousands.So whatever they charge the patient add $ 500.00 per hearing aid to the clinic's profit.Check the prices at Costco, that are comparatively low and the patient ( customer) gets the Government money.

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      Al (@fishinlad) 1 year ago

      @davemcgruer I don't disagree that complete freedom tends to lower prices to the point that a "normal" rate of return is earned by all firms in the industry. In the hearing aid industry there are six major producers. This is an oligopolistic marketplace with significant barriers to entry. So freedom in the marketplace is not complete and in cases like this prices tend to be higher than they would be if the market was truly competitive and the six major players earn "extraordinary" profits as a result. I am not suggesting that there is any price collusion between the firms but, simply put, they are under insufficient competitive pressure to drive prices lower and government intervention (as distasteful as this may sound to some) is one way to regulate profits for the benefit of the society. Many simply cannot afford these high costs and the sense of hearing is fundamental to survival--hearing loss is dangerous. In monopoly and oligopoly situations firms have pricing power and they use it--I would too!

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      You 1 year ago

      @fishinlad The proper response when profit margins are high is to enter into competition with the existing producers and undercut them. This is the market process that normalizes profits back to the average. Using the force of the state to attack businesses is not a moral response as it entrenches the oligopoly you reference, discourages competition and innovation and punishes the most successful producers. If government subsidies distort the market - as the must do - the correct response is to get subsidies withdrawn. If Costco is a better place to buy the devices then people may choose to go there, which will then force others to lower their prices and innovate to compete. There is not a single thing special or unique to the hearing aid business that mandates the intervention of government force, since no one's rights are being violated if the market is free.

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      Al (@fishinlad) 1 year ago

      @davemcgruer Good morning David: When profits in an industry are extraordinary, that attracts new competition. When there are significant barriers to entry (capital costs, legal, patents, technical knowledge, dominant existing firms, etc.) as may exist in the hearing aid industry, insurance, banking and others competition will not reach levels of competition that will drive prices to optimum levels (ie. levels that would allow a "normal" rate of return. There is insurance fraud out there--some from policyholders and some from insurance companies. Oligopolistic behaviour distorts competitive forces that would be generated by the "animal spirits" in a competitive environment. The market is not free--oligopoly firms see to that. The proper response, indeed the moral response is effective government intervention as is done with regulated monopolies and with regulated oligopolies. Monopsony vs monopoly--a single seller has pricing power and a single buyer can deal with it. Government is not all bad and the free market is not all good. We have to be thoughtful about situations like human hearing and the affordability of it. Anyway David, I enjoy your views, I am a free enterpriser too, scratch out my living that way, but I also see a need for intervention in critical areas when dominant firms make life difficult for people who cannot afford critical needs.

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   6. Comment

      You 1 year ago

      @fishinlad You bring up many issues, thank you for providing some thoughtful ones worthy of more discussion. Far too many of the ideas and comments here are relatively superficial and involve an arbitrary taking of money from some people to give to others. I'll try to address a few key points. 
      
      Barriers to entry are a natural part of an advancing society. Before all the wonderful technologies we have, there were virtually no markets and thus few barriers. Legal barriers should only exist to protect objective rights such as intellectual property. Patents exist to protect intellectual property and without patents there would be far less innovation and human progress - they are an objectively vital part of modern human civilization. Technical knowledge is not a barrier since essentially all the knowledge of humanity is available at our beck and call, thanks to patents, intellectual property law and more specifically laws that protect individual rights including property of all sorts. A dominant existing firm is not a barrier because if a firm is dominant then it has proven to provide the greatest value to consumers - created the greatest value in society - else it would not be dominant.
      
      It is important to realize that the existing firms are under constant pressure from all sides, both within existing product lines and from without. For example, Apple could decide to enter the market at any time and might quickly dominate, so other firms must be on their toes not only to existing competitors but all possible competitors. Just to maintain a strong market share requires constant thinking and innovation.Just imagine you are an existing hearing aid company and you decide to close your research and development department to make more money by reducing costs. How long would it take before you not only lost market share but drained all your capital and were out of business? Perhaps a few years? If you tried, you could come up with a dozen mechanisms of the free market that make such a decision extremely unlikely and cause instead the company to constantly strive for improved products and services. 
      
      Government is not all bad, I never said that. Government is essential for a free society, to define and protect the rights of its citizens. When it strays beyond that it has begun to infringe or even violate the rights of its citizens, and this is where is becomes a bad force in society. A monopoly by force can never be a good in society, and this is what is meant by regulated monopolies. In fact, there is no such thing as a real monopoly except by government force. Yes, there may be a dominant player, even up to 95% market share, but as I have shown there is the constant threat of new competitors fro all sides, including substitution for existing solutions, just as streaming services have totally overturned the long established oligopoly in television and prompted massive innovation just to survive as a going business concern. Imagine if government had regulated the internet as a public utility from its birth - we would still be hearing the beeping and buzzing noises of a modem as tiny little bits of data crawled slowly through copper lines.
      
      In contrast, freedom is an unalloyed good - not that all outcomes will be perfect or even optimal for all people, but rather that freedom provides the proper moral framework for human beings and the very best possibility of social, cultural and technological advancements. If a freely acting person violates the rights of another, we absolutely need government to adjudicate and punish as justice requires.

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8. Comment

   Gordon Crann (@gordon) 1 year ago

   The major producers of hearing aids have huge profit margins due mainly to insufficient competition. The high initial capital cost to purchase a high-quality hearing aid is made worse through the high ongoing cost of hearing aid batteries. There are affordable, high-quality hearing aids with solar-rechargeable batteries being designed and produced by deaf people themselves through the internationally-award winning social enterprise Solar Ear, for further information see its website: http://solarear.com.br/
   
   The Ontario Government should be encouraging the development of a Solar Ear, social enterprise affiliate providing jobs to deaf people in Ontario - not further subsidizing the huge profit margins of the producers of overpriced hearing aids. A Solar Ear, social enterprise affiliate located in Ontario would be able to serve the deaf market not only in Ontario, but in all of Central and Eastern Canada plus the Eastern USA, thereby providing affordable, high quality hearing aids to our deaf community, as well as jobs for our deaf people, and an increase in economic development and trade for Ontario.

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      You 1 year ago

      @gordon I'm happy to hear of all initiatives to develop improved technology in hearing aids. I applaud the collaboration of deaf people to create a new business model that may end up with a strong market share. That is competition. Anyone and everyone should be free to put their best effort into the competition for consumer choices. For those who complain of a lack of competition we must ask "who is preventing the competition?" In all cases, it will come back to regulation and government. Sure, there are obstacles to competing with a large, successful company, but these are natural, healthy, organic and constantly under challenge from all sides. In a free market no company is safe from competitive forces as even a small company with great innovation can capture a large product market share for a while, until more competition makes then irrelevant too. Since we do not have a free market it can be hard to conceive, but it is the right direction to move towards in Ontario.

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9. Comment

   Don Bunsen (@doctorb) 1 year ago

   I fail to understand why hearing aids are so expensive in the first place - there must be a way of bringing the cost down and having this brought under the public sector instead of private clinics selling them.

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      You 1 year ago

      @doctorb Doing what you suggest and socializing hearing aid production would cause them to stagnate and tend to make their production more expensive, not less. Who says they are expensive A hearing aid today that you can buy for a thousand bucks would have cost a million or in truth would not have been available for any price on Earth just twenty years ago. It is thanks to the innovation made possible by reinvesting profits that steady improvement is made possible in any product, including hearing aids. There is nothing about hearing aids that makes them exempt from the laws of economics.

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      Don Bunsen (@doctorb) 1 year ago

      @davemcgruer - most hearing aids are marketed to all of north america if not to a world wide market - but we see with drug prices and drug companies that governments can essentially buy in bulk and a lot of the cost is not in manufacturing but in the marketing and distribution and the middle men - i mean, just look at the technology in cell phones and how little it actually costs to manufacture them.