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.
Monday, February 18, 2019
Friday, February 15, 2019
How do they know the right number of nurses?
Leading up to the 2018 Ontario provincial election the Liberal Party hosted an online discussion forum to gather election ideas. I eagerly engaged in dozens of discussions. Here is an exerpt from one of the top rated ideas. On reading it I am struck by how persistently the idea creator avoids my main point - that central planning void the planning of millions of citizens and violates their rights, thus is both immoral and impractical. As I say near the end, people today cannot even conceive of what a free society would look like.
Idea creator:
Increased NURSE TO PATIENT RATIO FROM 5:1 to 3:1 while returning the 100 residency doctor spots cut this year. My Grandfather DR Alan Brown ran Sick Kids for 40 years cutting the infant mortality rate in half by insisting the Premier pasteurized milk BUT also insisted that patients received care SAFE ratios mean patients leave without complications, with minimal pain and alive His Doctors provided the procedures, however ever nurses sustained lives . NOW burn out, complications, pain and often times additional operations or staph infections occur due to impossible ratios hitting 7: 1 during evenings.
Me:
How can anyone tell what the "right" ratio is when the market signals for such a decision are almost erased by the creation of a monopoly? This idea would seem to indicate a massive increase in nurses and thus a massive increase in spending. Is this the best use of all this money? Would other spending have a better impact on patient outcomes and experiences? This type of problem is endemic when the valuable information gained from a price system is eliminated. I pity the hapless hospital administrators working under such conditions.
It's interesting to note that dentists seem to have no trouble identifying the best number of hygienists and administrators to hire and that in health care areas where there is no government monopoly that innovation is much faster, that prices move steadily lower per unit of value delivered and that there are no wait lists where patients suffer obediently waiting for attention.
Idea creator:
Ratios have always been an accurate measurement of need only limited by resources ( budget dollars) in exactly the same way that retail staffing is measured right down to the day/week/month/hr of year for maximum productivity sales per 4hr period to cash register transactions. Health care cutbacks to hospitals dictate budget and nursing doctor wage dollars available. The reduction of 100 resident doctors in 2016 increased wait times in both ER and on call resident doctor care.
Off-Site medical care such as your dentist or GP , OB GYN, Psychiatrist are still stand alone operation with appointments pre arranged and managed accordingly . This is completely different than a hospital's operation as you can not pre-arrange a car accident, heart attack, stroke , fall ( fracture/break), unknowns and the time required to deal with each.
Me:
I certainly appreciate that reducing doctors increases wait times and reduces quality of service. The problem I would identify here is a disconnection between supply and demand caused by a monopoly.
What I am saying is that the multitude of price signals that efficiently coordinate everything in a free market (such as retail staffing) are truncated or eliminated under a state-run monopoly, so mountains of valuable information are not allowed to work their way into the system to manage and prioritize everything. In a free market there is no such thing as budget cutbacks by bureaucrats since it is customers' decisions that decide where money is allocated, not bureaucrats. When competition is allowed it drives suppliers to leap into opportunities demanded by customers. When competition is outlawed the task falls to bureaucrats who are disconnected from the law of supply and demand and thus are challenged with making decisions with little or no information.
I appreciate the difference between a hospital and especially its emergency room and regular medical practices such as a dentist. Please understand that what I see as the most fundamental problem in Ontario health care is the fact that such an important and valuable service has been largely removed from the normal market signals, feedback mechanisms and motivations provided by a free market. It is now captured by a bureaucracy that can never have the right information to do the job as best possible and driven by political concerns that are far removed from the healthy win-win doctor-patient relationship that prevails when government gets out of the way. What do we think will happen when government controls the schools, the hospitals, the compensation arrangements, the services allowed, the procedures to be followed and even the gambling casinos used to raise funds to support such a broken system? If we didn't have such a crazy quilt of controls, who could imagine such a thing could ever be created - and why would anyone want it to be?
Idea creator:
National health care is a gift compared to the two tiered US system . Demographics dictates supply and demand . What constructive plan would you propose to 1) fund our health care system 2) provide the requires professionals to meet the needs not being met? I have provided a proposal to my MPP friend now tabled as a motion to spend 360 million to community services and our mental health care system to reduce the 12,000 children and youth on lengthy wait lists. ( as an example) this week.
Me:
I certainly made no mention of the US system, almost half of which is fully government controlled and the rest of which suffers under massive government intrusion and distortions.
I propose a system where the market is allowed to operate in a normal, healthy, moral and efficient way; where doctors and patients make agreements without coercion; where market demand and the price system drive professionals into the specific fields, specialties and locations in demand by consumers; where innovation, experimentation, competition and imagination are left free to flourishing and create value; where no one is allowed to enslave others to their whims and wishes; where insurance is offered in all the diversity and creativity possible to free thinking people, where coercion is forbidden and consent is required. I propose a system proper for homo sapiens, man, the rational being.
Idea creator:
In other words. No you have no plan.
Me:
That is not at all true. Saying I have no plan for nursing care in Ontario is like saying I have no plan for my supercomputer mobile phone, my car that my parents would have never imagined fifty years ago or my groceries that are available in wonderful abundance from all over the world at very affordable prices - I can buy fresh strawberries in December for goodness sake!. In a free market all the items I trade for are available in abundance at a relatively cheap price and their diversity and quality steadily improves per dollar spent while the portion of my income needed to pay for them steadily declines. Only under a system such as socialism is there a central plan for any economic exchange of values.
For example, in the USSR they produced shoes through central planning but had no idea how many to produce, how much to sell them for, what sizes and what types were preferred by consumers, so the shoes were of poor and stagnant quality because there was no multitude of price signals to coordinate the production of shoes with all the inputs required and with all other goods produced, workers had no incentive to innovate or create because their pay bore no relationship to value created and there was universal dissatisfaction with all aspects of production and consumption. The black market flourished to meet the actual wishes of consumers, but it was illegal and suppressed by the state. In Ontario, while we retain a large portion of the free market so many parts of our health care can be integrated properly into the economy, major portions are disconnected and prevent people from thinking rationally about how to optimize their role in the economy, thus we are partly similar to Soviet production and coordination problems.
In Ontario major portions of health care are essentially illegal if performed outside government controls and the rest of health care is heavily regulated by government and thus stunted. Do you remember when a business tried to bring private MRI machines into Ontario to solve the shortage created by government central planning, and the government said they would stop the machines from coming in using guards and guns at the border, that they would never allow privately run MRIs? Is that a moral position? Is it practical? In Ottawa I am about to pay for my daughter to drive five kilometers into Gatineau to get a cervical MRI to rule out factors in chronic pain, where it can be booked in just a few days, is cheap considering the value provided, and she will walk out with a CD of the scan. No months-long waiting list, no hassles. This is how the entire health care system should be run.
To say Ontario has a plan for health care can only mean that we have a central plan and that the ideas, imaginations and reasoning of millions of us are being prevented from operating properly. No, I do not have a plan for health care in Ontario because I am not a central planner with the power of omniscience to replace the thinking of millions of my fellow citizens. Rather, I advocate for a system that sets them free to think, plan, decide and act freely so they can create the best system possible with the knowledge of humanity at any given time and constantly adapt. The fact that Ontario has a plan and that you think you or I can ever have a plan is the root problem with health care in Ontario.
Idea creator:
So OHIP ( plan) as I mentioned needs funding change and /or additional funding to provide the correct nursing ratios. i don't have time to read your replies.
Me:
I am trying to point out that putting used band-aids on a compound fracture is not a path to good health for the patient. Something radically different is needed: a return to the principles on which the Liberal party and Canada was founded, the principles of individual rights and freedoms and a government to protect them, not damage them. I believe we have moved so far from these principles most of us cannot even conceive of what a free country even looks like and have been trained to recoil in horror when actual freedom is proposed. Scary, isn't it.
Idea creator:
1)"Something radically different" is not a plan 2) It was the NDP to first start Provincial health care in canada History of Canada's Public Health Care. The Saskatchewan Government, led by leader Tommy Douglas, introduces the first provincial hospital insurance program In Canada. 3) Canada is the freest country in the world and most diverse and inclusive. 4) Not scary in the least.
Idea creator:
Increased NURSE TO PATIENT RATIO FROM 5:1 to 3:1 while returning the 100 residency doctor spots cut this year. My Grandfather DR Alan Brown ran Sick Kids for 40 years cutting the infant mortality rate in half by insisting the Premier pasteurized milk BUT also insisted that patients received care SAFE ratios mean patients leave without complications, with minimal pain and alive His Doctors provided the procedures, however ever nurses sustained lives . NOW burn out, complications, pain and often times additional operations or staph infections occur due to impossible ratios hitting 7: 1 during evenings.
Me:
How can anyone tell what the "right" ratio is when the market signals for such a decision are almost erased by the creation of a monopoly? This idea would seem to indicate a massive increase in nurses and thus a massive increase in spending. Is this the best use of all this money? Would other spending have a better impact on patient outcomes and experiences? This type of problem is endemic when the valuable information gained from a price system is eliminated. I pity the hapless hospital administrators working under such conditions.
It's interesting to note that dentists seem to have no trouble identifying the best number of hygienists and administrators to hire and that in health care areas where there is no government monopoly that innovation is much faster, that prices move steadily lower per unit of value delivered and that there are no wait lists where patients suffer obediently waiting for attention.
Idea creator:
Ratios have always been an accurate measurement of need only limited by resources ( budget dollars) in exactly the same way that retail staffing is measured right down to the day/week/month/hr of year for maximum productivity sales per 4hr period to cash register transactions. Health care cutbacks to hospitals dictate budget and nursing doctor wage dollars available. The reduction of 100 resident doctors in 2016 increased wait times in both ER and on call resident doctor care.
Off-Site medical care such as your dentist or GP , OB GYN, Psychiatrist are still stand alone operation with appointments pre arranged and managed accordingly . This is completely different than a hospital's operation as you can not pre-arrange a car accident, heart attack, stroke , fall ( fracture/break), unknowns and the time required to deal with each.
Me:
I certainly appreciate that reducing doctors increases wait times and reduces quality of service. The problem I would identify here is a disconnection between supply and demand caused by a monopoly.
What I am saying is that the multitude of price signals that efficiently coordinate everything in a free market (such as retail staffing) are truncated or eliminated under a state-run monopoly, so mountains of valuable information are not allowed to work their way into the system to manage and prioritize everything. In a free market there is no such thing as budget cutbacks by bureaucrats since it is customers' decisions that decide where money is allocated, not bureaucrats. When competition is allowed it drives suppliers to leap into opportunities demanded by customers. When competition is outlawed the task falls to bureaucrats who are disconnected from the law of supply and demand and thus are challenged with making decisions with little or no information.
I appreciate the difference between a hospital and especially its emergency room and regular medical practices such as a dentist. Please understand that what I see as the most fundamental problem in Ontario health care is the fact that such an important and valuable service has been largely removed from the normal market signals, feedback mechanisms and motivations provided by a free market. It is now captured by a bureaucracy that can never have the right information to do the job as best possible and driven by political concerns that are far removed from the healthy win-win doctor-patient relationship that prevails when government gets out of the way. What do we think will happen when government controls the schools, the hospitals, the compensation arrangements, the services allowed, the procedures to be followed and even the gambling casinos used to raise funds to support such a broken system? If we didn't have such a crazy quilt of controls, who could imagine such a thing could ever be created - and why would anyone want it to be?
Idea creator:
National health care is a gift compared to the two tiered US system . Demographics dictates supply and demand . What constructive plan would you propose to 1) fund our health care system 2) provide the requires professionals to meet the needs not being met? I have provided a proposal to my MPP friend now tabled as a motion to spend 360 million to community services and our mental health care system to reduce the 12,000 children and youth on lengthy wait lists. ( as an example) this week.
Me:
I certainly made no mention of the US system, almost half of which is fully government controlled and the rest of which suffers under massive government intrusion and distortions.
I propose a system where the market is allowed to operate in a normal, healthy, moral and efficient way; where doctors and patients make agreements without coercion; where market demand and the price system drive professionals into the specific fields, specialties and locations in demand by consumers; where innovation, experimentation, competition and imagination are left free to flourishing and create value; where no one is allowed to enslave others to their whims and wishes; where insurance is offered in all the diversity and creativity possible to free thinking people, where coercion is forbidden and consent is required. I propose a system proper for homo sapiens, man, the rational being.
Idea creator:
In other words. No you have no plan.
Me:
That is not at all true. Saying I have no plan for nursing care in Ontario is like saying I have no plan for my supercomputer mobile phone, my car that my parents would have never imagined fifty years ago or my groceries that are available in wonderful abundance from all over the world at very affordable prices - I can buy fresh strawberries in December for goodness sake!. In a free market all the items I trade for are available in abundance at a relatively cheap price and their diversity and quality steadily improves per dollar spent while the portion of my income needed to pay for them steadily declines. Only under a system such as socialism is there a central plan for any economic exchange of values.
For example, in the USSR they produced shoes through central planning but had no idea how many to produce, how much to sell them for, what sizes and what types were preferred by consumers, so the shoes were of poor and stagnant quality because there was no multitude of price signals to coordinate the production of shoes with all the inputs required and with all other goods produced, workers had no incentive to innovate or create because their pay bore no relationship to value created and there was universal dissatisfaction with all aspects of production and consumption. The black market flourished to meet the actual wishes of consumers, but it was illegal and suppressed by the state. In Ontario, while we retain a large portion of the free market so many parts of our health care can be integrated properly into the economy, major portions are disconnected and prevent people from thinking rationally about how to optimize their role in the economy, thus we are partly similar to Soviet production and coordination problems.
In Ontario major portions of health care are essentially illegal if performed outside government controls and the rest of health care is heavily regulated by government and thus stunted. Do you remember when a business tried to bring private MRI machines into Ontario to solve the shortage created by government central planning, and the government said they would stop the machines from coming in using guards and guns at the border, that they would never allow privately run MRIs? Is that a moral position? Is it practical? In Ottawa I am about to pay for my daughter to drive five kilometers into Gatineau to get a cervical MRI to rule out factors in chronic pain, where it can be booked in just a few days, is cheap considering the value provided, and she will walk out with a CD of the scan. No months-long waiting list, no hassles. This is how the entire health care system should be run.
To say Ontario has a plan for health care can only mean that we have a central plan and that the ideas, imaginations and reasoning of millions of us are being prevented from operating properly. No, I do not have a plan for health care in Ontario because I am not a central planner with the power of omniscience to replace the thinking of millions of my fellow citizens. Rather, I advocate for a system that sets them free to think, plan, decide and act freely so they can create the best system possible with the knowledge of humanity at any given time and constantly adapt. The fact that Ontario has a plan and that you think you or I can ever have a plan is the root problem with health care in Ontario.
Idea creator:
So OHIP ( plan) as I mentioned needs funding change and /or additional funding to provide the correct nursing ratios. i don't have time to read your replies.
Me:
I am trying to point out that putting used band-aids on a compound fracture is not a path to good health for the patient. Something radically different is needed: a return to the principles on which the Liberal party and Canada was founded, the principles of individual rights and freedoms and a government to protect them, not damage them. I believe we have moved so far from these principles most of us cannot even conceive of what a free country even looks like and have been trained to recoil in horror when actual freedom is proposed. Scary, isn't it.
Idea creator:
1)"Something radically different" is not a plan 2) It was the NDP to first start Provincial health care in canada History of Canada's Public Health Care. The Saskatchewan Government, led by leader Tommy Douglas, introduces the first provincial hospital insurance program In Canada. 3) Canada is the freest country in the world and most diverse and inclusive. 4) Not scary in the least.
Friday, January 25, 2019
Propaganda in a politician's calendar
MPP for Ottawa-Vanier Mona Fortier distributed a small calendar to her riding this week - the riding I live in. Each page has a photo of her and a short caption. While I could have tackled several of them, I chose August because I know the subject very well and I wrote her the following letter.
*********************************************
Dear Mme Fortier,
I was motivated to write you when I read through your calendar that arrived in my mailbox this week and saw that August contained a number of scientific and economic errors of fact and reasoning. I expect a staffer wrote this for you and I see your academic background is in sociology and business rather than science, but you should be aware of such errors to avoid reputational damage.
The most serious error I see is that the text refers to a price on pollution while never stating what pollutant is being priced, yet from the further context can only be carbon dioxide, an odorless, colourless gas present in only a trace amount (a concentration of (0.00041) in our atmosphere that is nonetheless essential for the flourishing of all plant an animal life forms on Earth - in other words for the very survival of every single one of your constituents. Carbon dioxide is the very food of all plants and all animals, and most notably humans depend completely on plant life for our metabolism and energy for our bodies. Carbon dioxide is most definitely not a pollutant but rather is a giver of life and this incorrect identification is leading to growing errors in government policy. Ottawa University and Carleton University have a few professors who are well known for their expertise in geology and climate who frequently speak and write about this fundamental error which has been known to scientists for a long time.
Carbon dioxide has been chosen by a number of pressure groups seeking political power over human productive activity in their attempt to return us to a pre-industrial civilization. To be human means to be a reasoning being who re-shapes the ingredients of nature to improve our lives. In the ideology of opponents of energy-creating processes that produce carbon dioxide, it is not human flourishing and progress that is the standard of value. Instead, they value raw nature, untouched by humanity. In other words, theirs is an anti-human standard of value, thus profoundly immoral.
Another scientific error is made when the text refers to wildfires, flooding, droughts and extreme heat. In fact, research shows no evidence to connect atmospheric carbon dioxide with any of these - you can read this in the reports of the IPCC, where the science reports state there has not been an increase in the incidence of extreme weather events. In fact, such events appear to have declined in the last century and the gradual warming we have seen lowers the difference between night and day temperatures, making the naturally dangerous climate a little more stable and safe. More importantly, Global death rates from extreme weather events declined by 98 percent since the 1920s, while economic damages corrected for population growth and wealth have not increased. Human deaths are 50 times lower than they used to be - fifty times - thanks to the abundant, reliable energy from carbon fuels that enable us to protect our property from floods, build homes safe from storms and transport people and food in emergencies like natural disasters.
The short text goes on to make a fundamental economic error. Today, 85% of the energy used by humanity is provided by the abundant, cheap, reliable dense and portable carbon-based sources such as natural gas and coal and most of the rest is from very reliable nuclear and highly dependable hydro. About 4% is from intermittent, unreliable sources like wind and solar photovoltaic. By targeting carbon dioxide as a pollutant and taxing its production, government is ostracizing the essential technology that underlies all our other technologies - energy. The energy that frees us from back-breaking labour, provides an incredibly abundant and diverse food supply right down the street at Loblaws on Rideau St., the energy that powers the construction, heating and lighting and life-promoting machinery and technology at the Montfort Hospital and Elizabeth Bruyere Hospital, that has built and maintains all our schools, our homes, our offices, our roads and enables us to travel safely and comfortably in little protected bubbles of steel, plastic and heating and air conditioning known as cars. By taxing the production of carbon dioxide a government is directly attacking almost all productive human activity and such a policy reflects an anti-human standard of value. A balanced approach would be to look at all the advantages and disadvantages of industrial processes that emit carbon dioxide using human flourishing as the standard of value. After doing such an analysis (and it has been done in great detail) a reasonable person will see that the advantages of these processes outweigh the disadvantages by a very wide margin.
A further economic error is made when the text states that 90% of the taxes raised will go directly to families. The use of the term "families" here is logically incorrect. Families are not a unit of living beings, merely small groups of individual Canadians connected by marriage or genes. All Canadians are in families and are individual human beings. The taxation of carbon dioxide will necessarily tax individual Canadians (the only type of Canadian there is) and return what is left after the costs of administration to individual Canadians, not to families. I this context, the use of the term families is both incorrect and appears designed to mislead Canadians.
Yet another economic error is made at the end of the text when it is stated that a family of four will be paid more than the increased energy costs they will pay. Since a tax on carbon dioxide production by Canadians will be paid by individual Canadians, in aggregate it is impossible to pay them more than is taken from them. Since the claim is made that 90% will get more than they paid, the only possible rational conclusion is that a 10% minority of Canadians will see a large amount of their earnings seized in order to give these earnings to a 90% majority of people who did not earn them. Such a policy is a moral travesty - taking values from the minority who produced them to give the majority who did not or will not produce them. This is truly an inversion of justice and runs counter to the usual stance our current federal government takes on minorities.
This is much longer than I expected it to be. Your calendar text for August had only six sentences but those six were so full of errors it would take a book to provide the background information, facts, findings and rationale to fully explain and correct the errors. Fortunately, there are many such books written by scientists, scholars and economists. I hope my little attempt at clarity will prompt you to more carefully scrutinize information that comes out with your name on it as I hope your intention is to avoid being associated with information based on error and unreason and resulting in injustice and anti-human policies. I'd be happy to provide in-depth information on any subject I have referenced.
*********************************************
Dear Mme Fortier,
I was motivated to write you when I read through your calendar that arrived in my mailbox this week and saw that August contained a number of scientific and economic errors of fact and reasoning. I expect a staffer wrote this for you and I see your academic background is in sociology and business rather than science, but you should be aware of such errors to avoid reputational damage.
The most serious error I see is that the text refers to a price on pollution while never stating what pollutant is being priced, yet from the further context can only be carbon dioxide, an odorless, colourless gas present in only a trace amount (a concentration of (0.00041) in our atmosphere that is nonetheless essential for the flourishing of all plant an animal life forms on Earth - in other words for the very survival of every single one of your constituents. Carbon dioxide is the very food of all plants and all animals, and most notably humans depend completely on plant life for our metabolism and energy for our bodies. Carbon dioxide is most definitely not a pollutant but rather is a giver of life and this incorrect identification is leading to growing errors in government policy. Ottawa University and Carleton University have a few professors who are well known for their expertise in geology and climate who frequently speak and write about this fundamental error which has been known to scientists for a long time.
Another scientific error is made when the text refers to wildfires, flooding, droughts and extreme heat. In fact, research shows no evidence to connect atmospheric carbon dioxide with any of these - you can read this in the reports of the IPCC, where the science reports state there has not been an increase in the incidence of extreme weather events. In fact, such events appear to have declined in the last century and the gradual warming we have seen lowers the difference between night and day temperatures, making the naturally dangerous climate a little more stable and safe. More importantly, Global death rates from extreme weather events declined by 98 percent since the 1920s, while economic damages corrected for population growth and wealth have not increased. Human deaths are 50 times lower than they used to be - fifty times - thanks to the abundant, reliable energy from carbon fuels that enable us to protect our property from floods, build homes safe from storms and transport people and food in emergencies like natural disasters.
The short text goes on to make a fundamental economic error. Today, 85% of the energy used by humanity is provided by the abundant, cheap, reliable dense and portable carbon-based sources such as natural gas and coal and most of the rest is from very reliable nuclear and highly dependable hydro. About 4% is from intermittent, unreliable sources like wind and solar photovoltaic. By targeting carbon dioxide as a pollutant and taxing its production, government is ostracizing the essential technology that underlies all our other technologies - energy. The energy that frees us from back-breaking labour, provides an incredibly abundant and diverse food supply right down the street at Loblaws on Rideau St., the energy that powers the construction, heating and lighting and life-promoting machinery and technology at the Montfort Hospital and Elizabeth Bruyere Hospital, that has built and maintains all our schools, our homes, our offices, our roads and enables us to travel safely and comfortably in little protected bubbles of steel, plastic and heating and air conditioning known as cars. By taxing the production of carbon dioxide a government is directly attacking almost all productive human activity and such a policy reflects an anti-human standard of value. A balanced approach would be to look at all the advantages and disadvantages of industrial processes that emit carbon dioxide using human flourishing as the standard of value. After doing such an analysis (and it has been done in great detail) a reasonable person will see that the advantages of these processes outweigh the disadvantages by a very wide margin.
A further economic error is made when the text states that 90% of the taxes raised will go directly to families. The use of the term "families" here is logically incorrect. Families are not a unit of living beings, merely small groups of individual Canadians connected by marriage or genes. All Canadians are in families and are individual human beings. The taxation of carbon dioxide will necessarily tax individual Canadians (the only type of Canadian there is) and return what is left after the costs of administration to individual Canadians, not to families. I this context, the use of the term families is both incorrect and appears designed to mislead Canadians.
Yet another economic error is made at the end of the text when it is stated that a family of four will be paid more than the increased energy costs they will pay. Since a tax on carbon dioxide production by Canadians will be paid by individual Canadians, in aggregate it is impossible to pay them more than is taken from them. Since the claim is made that 90% will get more than they paid, the only possible rational conclusion is that a 10% minority of Canadians will see a large amount of their earnings seized in order to give these earnings to a 90% majority of people who did not earn them. Such a policy is a moral travesty - taking values from the minority who produced them to give the majority who did not or will not produce them. This is truly an inversion of justice and runs counter to the usual stance our current federal government takes on minorities.
This is much longer than I expected it to be. Your calendar text for August had only six sentences but those six were so full of errors it would take a book to provide the background information, facts, findings and rationale to fully explain and correct the errors. Fortunately, there are many such books written by scientists, scholars and economists. I hope my little attempt at clarity will prompt you to more carefully scrutinize information that comes out with your name on it as I hope your intention is to avoid being associated with information based on error and unreason and resulting in injustice and anti-human policies. I'd be happy to provide in-depth information on any subject I have referenced.
Sunday, December 16, 2018
On the wonders of plastics
I'd like to offer another perspective on plastic - a constructive one - to contrast with that of Eric Schiller in the December 2018 edition of Image. If I wanted to thoroughly explain all the ways the inventors and entrepreneurs and businessmen who have brought us plastic have improved our lives I would need a collection of books to do so.
From the plastics that make up much of the computer I am typing this letter on, to the wireless router in another room, the shielding on the cable that connects my house to the world wide web, my ability to exchange ideas with the whole world would be impossible without plastics.
Plastics are widely used in medicine to make surgeries better and safer, to keep hospitals cleaner, to make sure medicines from the pharmacy are safer, and as above, to enable to vast network of knowledge and communications used in modern medicine. Our health depends on plastics.
Our food supply is greatly enhanced through the use of plastics in agricultural equipment, in the processes of harvesting, processing, shipping, and packaging of foods to keep them safe, fresh, cheap and convenient. I just had a glass of milk and a slice of toast with margarine and honey made from bread I made yesterday in my breadmaker. A substantial part of the breadmaker is plastic, my margarine and honey was safely sold to me in a plastic container, I kept my bread in a super-handy plastic ziploc bag, my glass of milk was safely and cheaply delivered in a plastic bag made with maybe a tablespoon of plastic and was kept cool and safe in a fridge made with lots of plastic.
It is easy to take for granted the hundred or thousand plastic items all around my house that improve my life every day. Plastics improve my clothes, transportation, education, climate, comfort, food, entertainment, safety and everything else these days. What a wonderful, human, life-promoting, innovative, adaptable, material! I an indebted to the great businesses that make this possible.
It is a myth that there are "vast ocean islands of plastic." Such areas naturally occur due to the mechanics of ocean circulation, but the plastic density there is more like flecks of pepper in your soup rather than an island. If there was an actual island then clever businesses could take a boat over there and collect it for large profits - and this would be good, but the fact is this is not possible.
Mr. Schiller says plastic bottles end up in the environment, as if the materials they are made from did not originate in the environment. The environment is not suffering since it is not a conscious being. In fact, my environment has been improving from the day I was born due to continuing advances in technology by entrepreneurs and industrialists. When societies rise from their primitive, collectivist, pre-industrial state to a more free, wealthier, life-promoting, more capitalist one, there are by-products of industrialization that may be identified as pollution by those in more advanced societies because we have already passed the top of the inverted-U shape normally found during development. As a society produces more wealth, pollution rises yet quality of life rises fast. Once a certain level of wealth is achieved people can afford to take greater care and pollution falls. This is a basic economic principle.
From the plastics that make up much of the computer I am typing this letter on, to the wireless router in another room, the shielding on the cable that connects my house to the world wide web, my ability to exchange ideas with the whole world would be impossible without plastics.
Plastics are widely used in medicine to make surgeries better and safer, to keep hospitals cleaner, to make sure medicines from the pharmacy are safer, and as above, to enable to vast network of knowledge and communications used in modern medicine. Our health depends on plastics.
Our food supply is greatly enhanced through the use of plastics in agricultural equipment, in the processes of harvesting, processing, shipping, and packaging of foods to keep them safe, fresh, cheap and convenient. I just had a glass of milk and a slice of toast with margarine and honey made from bread I made yesterday in my breadmaker. A substantial part of the breadmaker is plastic, my margarine and honey was safely sold to me in a plastic container, I kept my bread in a super-handy plastic ziploc bag, my glass of milk was safely and cheaply delivered in a plastic bag made with maybe a tablespoon of plastic and was kept cool and safe in a fridge made with lots of plastic.
It is easy to take for granted the hundred or thousand plastic items all around my house that improve my life every day. Plastics improve my clothes, transportation, education, climate, comfort, food, entertainment, safety and everything else these days. What a wonderful, human, life-promoting, innovative, adaptable, material! I an indebted to the great businesses that make this possible.
It is a myth that there are "vast ocean islands of plastic." Such areas naturally occur due to the mechanics of ocean circulation, but the plastic density there is more like flecks of pepper in your soup rather than an island. If there was an actual island then clever businesses could take a boat over there and collect it for large profits - and this would be good, but the fact is this is not possible.
Mr. Schiller says plastic bottles end up in the environment, as if the materials they are made from did not originate in the environment. The environment is not suffering since it is not a conscious being. In fact, my environment has been improving from the day I was born due to continuing advances in technology by entrepreneurs and industrialists. When societies rise from their primitive, collectivist, pre-industrial state to a more free, wealthier, life-promoting, more capitalist one, there are by-products of industrialization that may be identified as pollution by those in more advanced societies because we have already passed the top of the inverted-U shape normally found during development. As a society produces more wealth, pollution rises yet quality of life rises fast. Once a certain level of wealth is achieved people can afford to take greater care and pollution falls. This is a basic economic principle.
A call for the elimination of plastic bottles through political means is a move towards dictatorship. When I, a living, thinking, reasoning and relatively free human being have decided to buy water in a safe, portable and inexpensive plastic bottle, by what right does anyone else forbid me to do so? Who is to decide if the bottle is needed if not the individual buying it? You? What if I refuse to follow your command? By making this a political issue you are asking for the power of the gun (the only power politics provides) to be used against me and/or those who so helpfully produced it and sold it to me. Is this the right way for reasoning beings to live - taking away water bottles from fellow human beings at gunpoint? If you wish to deal with me as a human being, use reason, education and persuasion to show me a way that I can see is better for my life and don't threaten me with government-enforced bans.
Sunday, October 28, 2018
Modern farming? October 26th 2018 Ottawa Citizen page 2 article
Modern farming? I'd say it is more like milking the taxpayer and hydro ratepayers. Given that conventional reliable, safe, abundant and dense energy sources like hydro, nuclear, coal and natural gas can produce electricity for about 5 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour, paying the Heinzles 20 cents for biodigester electricity and 70 cents for solar photovoltaic electricity means other Ontarians are being forced to subsidize the lifestyle and income of the Heinzles and that lower income Ontarians, who pay the greatest fraction of their incomes for energy, are made to suffer the most to produce income for the "farmers".
While the article does not break down the more than $2M cost the Heinzles incurred to install solar and biodigester technologies, nor does it state their full income from solar, we can make a fair estimate from what is provided: $240,000 per year from biogas and $84,000 from solar. Given that the biogas is priced at up to four times and solar up to 14 times the cost of regular reliable forms of energy, if the Heinzles were paid a true market price they would be earning as little as $60,000 from biogas and $6,000 from solar per year. Thus, on a $2M investment they would be paid $66,000 which means a 3.3% rate of return on capital, before considering ongoing maintenance and operating costs - just over the rate of inflation. After operating costs the business would likely earn a return lower than inflation - a negative real return.
No rational investor would take such large risks for such a poor return and the fact that the Ontario Liberal government did just that shows how bad they were at managing Ontario's finances.
While the article does not break down the more than $2M cost the Heinzles incurred to install solar and biodigester technologies, nor does it state their full income from solar, we can make a fair estimate from what is provided: $240,000 per year from biogas and $84,000 from solar. Given that the biogas is priced at up to four times and solar up to 14 times the cost of regular reliable forms of energy, if the Heinzles were paid a true market price they would be earning as little as $60,000 from biogas and $6,000 from solar per year. Thus, on a $2M investment they would be paid $66,000 which means a 3.3% rate of return on capital, before considering ongoing maintenance and operating costs - just over the rate of inflation. After operating costs the business would likely earn a return lower than inflation - a negative real return.
No rational investor would take such large risks for such a poor return and the fact that the Ontario Liberal government did just that shows how bad they were at managing Ontario's finances.
Thursday, September 20, 2018
The Ontario government wants to hear ideas
In September 2018 the newly elected Ontario government surveyed the public regarding areas of priority for government action. Part of the questionnaire asked for up to three ideas that will improve the delivery of programs and services. The idea must:
Here are my ideas as submitted.
Sector: economic development. Government is the agency of force in society and should only act when force is required. Any other action can only serve to distort, override and negate the choice citizens have already made or want to make - it cannot be otherwise. All such interventions make society poorer, less free and slow progress. All forms of subsidies, incentives, grants, programs, agencies and the like should be dismantled in an orderly fashion with a clear explanation of why they have no place in a free society and state the benefits of stopping such interference. It must be based on a clear an unambiguous moral principle so it can withstand the inevitable outrage and attacks by leftists. Such actions would eliminate a great amount of government spending while also liberating millions of Ontarians to follow their own ideas instead of those chosen by a handful of ineffective bureaucrats.
Sector: resources and environment. Aside from laws related to the protection of individual rights in the resources and environmental domain, provincial government should withdraw from all interventions, including programs, subsidies, incentives, campaigns, etc. If government will properly protect rights and stop violating them, Ontarians can use their minds to pursue their own reasoning and develop resources through win-win transactions. In the environmental arena, all that is needed is for government to protect our property rights - to not have our water, land and air polluted in a way that is demonstrably harmful to human life and to set levels that are realistic in the context of an industrial society and do not impair human progress.
Sector: Heath. Health care is so monopolized and stifled by government control and monopoly power that it creates a shortage of supply, excess demand, long waiting lists and an inflexible industry. Health is much too important for human flourishing to have it so dominated by the agency of force in society. Doctors cannot innovate in service delivery. Hospitals cannot prioritize and innovate. Patients have no idea of the true cost of anything and the vital price signals generated by a population of millions, each acting according to their own values and priorities, are destroyed and cripple the system. In health areas where there is little or no government control, progress is rapid, efficiencies are steadily improved, innovation flourishes and providers compete for the attention of customers. Look at dentists, chiropractors and other professionals that spring up in an endless supply to meet all conceivable demand.For the sake of all our futures, Ontario must begin to de-control health care and return the decision-making power to individual citizens. The current massive interference in the health care decisions of Ontarians is patently immoral, impractical, dysfunctional and has no place in a free society.
- not ask for funding for a specific individual, group, organization, company and/or business
- be within scope of the Ontario government to deliver (please check to make sure your idea is not the responsibility of a municipal government or the federal government)
- follow our terms of use – your idea will not be considered if it violates our terms
- be feasible, practical and affordable for us to implement in the short term
- be sustainable and provide long-term benefits.
Here are my ideas as submitted.
Sector: economic development. Government is the agency of force in society and should only act when force is required. Any other action can only serve to distort, override and negate the choice citizens have already made or want to make - it cannot be otherwise. All such interventions make society poorer, less free and slow progress. All forms of subsidies, incentives, grants, programs, agencies and the like should be dismantled in an orderly fashion with a clear explanation of why they have no place in a free society and state the benefits of stopping such interference. It must be based on a clear an unambiguous moral principle so it can withstand the inevitable outrage and attacks by leftists. Such actions would eliminate a great amount of government spending while also liberating millions of Ontarians to follow their own ideas instead of those chosen by a handful of ineffective bureaucrats.
Sector: resources and environment. Aside from laws related to the protection of individual rights in the resources and environmental domain, provincial government should withdraw from all interventions, including programs, subsidies, incentives, campaigns, etc. If government will properly protect rights and stop violating them, Ontarians can use their minds to pursue their own reasoning and develop resources through win-win transactions. In the environmental arena, all that is needed is for government to protect our property rights - to not have our water, land and air polluted in a way that is demonstrably harmful to human life and to set levels that are realistic in the context of an industrial society and do not impair human progress.
Sector: Heath. Health care is so monopolized and stifled by government control and monopoly power that it creates a shortage of supply, excess demand, long waiting lists and an inflexible industry. Health is much too important for human flourishing to have it so dominated by the agency of force in society. Doctors cannot innovate in service delivery. Hospitals cannot prioritize and innovate. Patients have no idea of the true cost of anything and the vital price signals generated by a population of millions, each acting according to their own values and priorities, are destroyed and cripple the system. In health areas where there is little or no government control, progress is rapid, efficiencies are steadily improved, innovation flourishes and providers compete for the attention of customers. Look at dentists, chiropractors and other professionals that spring up in an endless supply to meet all conceivable demand.For the sake of all our futures, Ontario must begin to de-control health care and return the decision-making power to individual citizens. The current massive interference in the health care decisions of Ontarians is patently immoral, impractical, dysfunctional and has no place in a free society.
Thursday, June 21, 2018
A commentary on the Sandy Hill election debate, May 2018
In response to "Do we call that a debate?" in the June-July print edition of Image, and as the Ottawa-Vanier riding candidate for the Freedom Party of Ontario I have several comments.
The article starts off by applauding the technical organization of the debate but incorrectly says that only three candidates showed up. In fact, only four candidates were invited - the Freedom Party was not. I registered as a candidate about a week after the election campaign started and then immediately contacted the debate organizers. They had already determined who would be invited and did not wish to have other participants. While I expressed my reasons why I thought my participation would provide positions very different from all the others, they politely declined and since I totally respect their rights to hold a peaceful event, invite whoever they wish and their freedom to exclude any people or opinions from their event, I attended the event as a spectator only. I found the discussion uniform and a sad comment on the state of our culture.
I was invited and did participate in a debate in Beacon Hill and at Samuel Genest High School (in French and for students only). In these I consciously avoided attacking the individual representatives of the other parties (who I believe to be mostly good but misguided) and the often awful platforms they held and instead made statements demonstrating the correct principles of a civil society, pointed out the moral and economic flaws of several existing widely adopted and even popular policies and explained why all my answers to questions were unified and consistent with those correct principles.
The PC, Liberal, NDP and Green parties do not share my respect for individual rights, as demonstrated clearly by their long standing actions in government and their election platforms that restrict many freedoms and infringe many rights of Ontario citizens. Ontario has been sliding into greater government power, more central command of our economic activity and a progressive violation of our human rights for many decades, accelerating in recent years. This is a predictable pattern as the errors and damages caused by central planning and the elimination of millions of minds from decisions compounds on itself. When a government makes a rule, one relating to wage controls for example, it deliberately prevents people from rational consideration of all options, blocks freedom to negotiate and find agreement and replaces it by the opinions, wishes and whims of whatever group holds the reins of political power. It says "obey me or face the wrath of the people with guns I have in my control." It is precisely this type of power that inevitably must corrupt those who hold it, even relatively benignly.
The article refers to the three speakers as inhabiting the same part of the political spectrum. In fact, even the absent PC party (which sometimes makes statements sounding like it values true freedom) has more ideas in common with the other three than it does with the Freedom Party. Whereas all four of them agree on fundamental socialist principles and differ only in degree or style of implementation, the Freedom Party holds completely to the principles required for a sustainable, peaceful and stable society of rational and free people - one where the purpose of government is to clearly define and strongly protect your rights to life, liberty and property and takes no action except for these purposes. We believe government is essential for a civil society but in contrast to the four parties mentioned we believe it violates its most sacred trust when it uses force to override the will of a citizen acting in the peaceful pursuit of his or her goals in life. In start contrast to the others, we believe that all economic and other exchange of values is properly done only by the consent of both parties.
I see the big three as the parties of Kathleen Horvath, Doug Wynne and Andrea Ford. I dare you to find an area where they differ on a matter of fundamental principle. I particularly note that the explicit policy of the other parties is to use physical force and the threat of it to sacrifice the rights, reasoning, choice and thus important parts of the lives of some citizens in order to supposedly benefit others. Of the three speakers present, the NDP candidate was the most strident and explicit about this - speaking eloquently with the passion of a consistent follower of Marx and Kant. The world is already full of examples of the human and societal terminus of these ideas and it has always been destruction. Unfortunately, these are the dominant ideas in our culture today and unless radical changes are made, we will see a continuation of cultural decline.
David McGruer
Sandy Hill
Ottawa-Vanier Freedom Party of Ontario Candidate
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
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.
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.
Friday, April 13, 2018
James Hansen advocates fighting climate change by suing everyone in sight, including ourselves
As thousands of government representatives prepared to jet to Germany for the COP23 climate conference in the fall of 2017, the volume and stridence of proclamations from the leaders of the climate change alarmist movement rose quickly.
Former NASA scientist James Hansen was quoted several times in a Nov. 7, 2017 National Geographic interview, in which he recommended suing the world’s biggest oil, coal and gas, and cement companies for damages resulting from climate change. He says 100 companies have been the source of more than 70 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The article tells us “An enormous amount of money is urgently needed to dramatically slash emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), take existing CO2 out of the atmosphere, and for countries to cope with the impacts of climate change, Hansen argues. And that money should come from the companies that profited most from burning fossil fuels, Hansen will tell world leaders Tuesday in Bonn, Germany, at the annual United Nations climate negotiations.”
Later, the article says “Hansen is involved in a 2015 lawsuit against the U.S. federal government, brought by 21 kids under the age of 21, including his own granddaughter. The case argues that the government’s failure to curb CO2 emissions has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property.”
If Hansen’s assertions are correct and all our lives are damaged by greenhouse gas emissions, then suing those who harm us might be one way to reduce the harm. But are his assertions true? How do we know? One good way to examine the validity of a statement is to follow it to its logical end and see if it makes sense. Let’s examine two aspects of Hansen’s assertions: that we have all been harmed by CO2 emissions and that suing big companies is a solution.
According to Hansen, all our lives should be much worse off because of greenhouse gas emissions and their supposed causal effect of increasing global temperature. We should have powerful measurable evidence of harm to humanity. Reality contradicts Hansen since by all objective measures our lives have become safer, longer, healthier and richer as humanity has created more energy from fossil fuels. As Indur Goklany says in Humanity Unbound - How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity “From 1750 to 2009, global life expectancy more than doubled, global population increased 8-fold, and incomes increased 11-fold. How did this happen? While there were many factors tracing their roots to the renaissance and enlightenment, the rapid industrialization of the West was made possible and supercharged by the discovery and exploitation of industrial scale energy production - energy that powers all other industries. As Goklany states, even today when other energy sources like hydro, nuclear, solar and wind have been discovered and industrialized, “...fossil fuels provide 80 percent of mankind’s energy and 60 percent of its food and clothing.” Clearly, civilization depends on fossil fuel energy and is likely to do so for quite some time.
But has our environment become more dangerous as we exploit this energy? Not at all, points out Goklany, in fact “Global death rates from extreme weather events declined by 98 percent since the 1920s, while economic damages corrected for population growth and wealth have not increased.”
What about Hansen’s assertion we should sue the very companies that have provided the energy and structure that powers the modern world? What would it mean to sue them? Who owns these companies? Well, in brief - we all do. The shares of these publicly traded companies are owned in our individual investment accounts, our group investment plans, our pension plans and the pension plans of our governments. Perhaps hundreds of millions of people own a part of companies like Exxon.
Following the lawsuit process to the end would mean suing ourselves and our neighbors and friends, our employers and our governments, even our children and our parents. Hansen would be suing his granddaughter and she him at the same time they would both be suing the companies that built and power their schools, hospital, roads, homes, and cell phones. They would be suing the creators of the internet and the content that rides on it like that produced by Disney, the artists who travel between cities for productions like Disney on ice, the builders of the ice rinks and power companies who enable the existence of ice rinks in the desert. Hansen would be suing all of human civilization and almost everyone alive today except the few primitives who remain isolated from modern society. In short, it would mean everyone attacking everyone at the same time. To borrow a term from the current movie scene, it would be Ragnarok! Hansen’s call to sue the top 100 producers of CO2 emissions is nothing less than a call for the end of civilization and the virtual elimination of humanity, his granddaughter included.
One of the many things Hansen does not understand is that companies are not people, they are owned by people - many people. The companies have not been the ones profiting from industrial scale energy production, people are. Not just those who own the company, but all those who are customers of the company or customers of their customers. It is the daily choices of all the people in the economic chain of activity that have directed money and profits towards those big companies, and it can be taken away at any time if consumer preferences shift. This is a much more powerful (and what’s more it is a fully moral) method of tuning and improving the marketplace for energy. Whereas the free market price mechanism provides an elegant and infinitely adaptable solution to potential economic challenges like the effects of climate change, Hansen would use a club and rock to smash our biggest and best energy producers to impose his radical personal views on the rest of us. I hope his granddaughter does not grow up to ever see the world in the state that Hansen’s ideas would take us.
If Hansen’s assertions are correct and all our lives are damaged by greenhouse gas emissions, then suing those who harm us might be one way to reduce the harm. But are his assertions true? How do we know? One good way to examine the validity of a statement is to follow it to its logical end and see if it makes sense. Let’s examine two aspects of Hansen’s assertions: that we have all been harmed by CO2 emissions and that suing big companies is a solution.
According to Hansen, all our lives should be much worse off because of greenhouse gas emissions and their supposed causal effect of increasing global temperature. We should have powerful measurable evidence of harm to humanity. Reality contradicts Hansen since by all objective measures our lives have become safer, longer, healthier and richer as humanity has created more energy from fossil fuels. As Indur Goklany says in Humanity Unbound - How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity “From 1750 to 2009, global life expectancy more than doubled, global population increased 8-fold, and incomes increased 11-fold. How did this happen? While there were many factors tracing their roots to the renaissance and enlightenment, the rapid industrialization of the West was made possible and supercharged by the discovery and exploitation of industrial scale energy production - energy that powers all other industries. As Goklany states, even today when other energy sources like hydro, nuclear, solar and wind have been discovered and industrialized, “...fossil fuels provide 80 percent of mankind’s energy and 60 percent of its food and clothing.” Clearly, civilization depends on fossil fuel energy and is likely to do so for quite some time.
But has our environment become more dangerous as we exploit this energy? Not at all, points out Goklany, in fact “Global death rates from extreme weather events declined by 98 percent since the 1920s, while economic damages corrected for population growth and wealth have not increased.”
What about Hansen’s assertion we should sue the very companies that have provided the energy and structure that powers the modern world? What would it mean to sue them? Who owns these companies? Well, in brief - we all do. The shares of these publicly traded companies are owned in our individual investment accounts, our group investment plans, our pension plans and the pension plans of our governments. Perhaps hundreds of millions of people own a part of companies like Exxon.
Following the lawsuit process to the end would mean suing ourselves and our neighbors and friends, our employers and our governments, even our children and our parents. Hansen would be suing his granddaughter and she him at the same time they would both be suing the companies that built and power their schools, hospital, roads, homes, and cell phones. They would be suing the creators of the internet and the content that rides on it like that produced by Disney, the artists who travel between cities for productions like Disney on ice, the builders of the ice rinks and power companies who enable the existence of ice rinks in the desert. Hansen would be suing all of human civilization and almost everyone alive today except the few primitives who remain isolated from modern society. In short, it would mean everyone attacking everyone at the same time. To borrow a term from the current movie scene, it would be Ragnarok! Hansen’s call to sue the top 100 producers of CO2 emissions is nothing less than a call for the end of civilization and the virtual elimination of humanity, his granddaughter included.
One of the many things Hansen does not understand is that companies are not people, they are owned by people - many people. The companies have not been the ones profiting from industrial scale energy production, people are. Not just those who own the company, but all those who are customers of the company or customers of their customers. It is the daily choices of all the people in the economic chain of activity that have directed money and profits towards those big companies, and it can be taken away at any time if consumer preferences shift. This is a much more powerful (and what’s more it is a fully moral) method of tuning and improving the marketplace for energy. Whereas the free market price mechanism provides an elegant and infinitely adaptable solution to potential economic challenges like the effects of climate change, Hansen would use a club and rock to smash our biggest and best energy producers to impose his radical personal views on the rest of us. I hope his granddaughter does not grow up to ever see the world in the state that Hansen’s ideas would take us.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
Corporations, Inequality and Amazon
I wrote this as a comment on an Ontario Liberal Party discussion platform leading to the 2018 Ontario election. I don't know how long the link will survive, so I am pasting the text of the posted idea and earlier comments below my text.
My long comment, responding to Jenny and to the main idea:
It is a mistake to think corporate tax is not paid by individuals - only individuals pay tax. Sometimes they pay directly and sometimes through their legal entities such as corporations, partnerships and trusts. The government taxes corporations as a way to hide the tax from immediate view by citizens and is totally counterproductive. All the assets and all the profits of a corporation are engaged 100% of the time in creating value for citizens and when you tax something you get less of it. By taxing business production you get less production and society has a lower standard of living.
The fact that 10% of Canadian already pay 55% of the taxes is not irrelevant to this issue. In many and likely most cases, the most productive people are shareholders of a corporation and thus pay both personal and corporate income taxes already.
The idea's assertion that income inequality is bad and that corporations are totally about greed is a travesty. To better understand this, consider how you become one of the rich people in society. Let's say you come up with an idea to make life better for others - to keep things super simple, say you invent a better vegetable peeler. You must invest your brain power in creating the initial idea, building prototypes, testing them, researching manufacturing and distribution. You must make sure you are not running afoul of the thousands of regulations the province has that restrict trade. You must search for and hire staff to help you get things rolling. You must learn how to deal with the intricacies of trade barriers between countries and also their internal trade barriers such as those between provinces. You must finance the equipment, marketing and inventory of the business and pay staff while the product is being brought to market; you take significant financial risks and might lose it all.
Now assume you start to have sales, but it may take many months or even years to recover what you have invested, with no guarantees at all that you will do so. All along the way your staff have been paid and have been happy to work for that level of pay, or else they would rationally work elsewhere. No one forced them to work for you and they took no risks except those inherent in working for a small business. Every day in the early life of the company the staff worked, they were making a profit for themselves while the business founder was not. They decided they were better off, that their lives were being improved, that they received more value through their pay than the time they dedicated to the work.
Now let's say the business starts to become profitable. How? Only because enough customers have decided that their lives will be better off for buying your veggie peeler than by holding onto the few dollars it costs them. Their lives are improved in a small measure, and the business owner and all employees are also better off. Trade is a win-win transaction when it is freely chosen - it must be, by definition. If only a modest number of people agree that their lives are improved by buying your peeler.
Now to the meat: how do you become rich? A really large number of people must agree that their lives are improved by trading their dollars for your peeler. Millions of people must agree that you are creating value for them. Not only that, you are competing against all other peelers made by all other companies, plus once your peeler hits the market it will give other people ideas about how to compete with you. To build a successful business you must not only achieve excellence, you must maintain it indefinitely or else another will earn the market share you once had.
Consider Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, apparently the wealthiest man in the world today. His business idea has become so loved by his customers and the company has so many millions of customers that his net worth (mostly Amazon shares that could lose 100% of their value if the company fails to maintain excellence) is over $100 billion dollars. Did his wealth come at the expense of others? Did he take their piece of the so-called "income pie"? Did he achieve this by forcing people to work for him at pay lower than they chose? No. No. NO! Amazon employees all work there because they have identified Amazon as a place they want to work and have accepted the pay offered. Many employees have likely become millionaires through ownership of shares in the business. Amazon customers are better off - why else would they shop through Amazon? Thousands of other businesses sell through the Amazon platform. Many other businesses sell services to Amazon. Jeff Bezos is fabulously wealthy because he has revolutionized a portion of the marketplace and created value for hundreds of millions of people and growing. All those people have chosen to trade a small amount of their value for that provided by Bezos and his company - and they can take away everything Amazon has and all its employees and all its share value, just by changing their minds about whether Amazon is creating value in their lives.
The fact that income inequality rises when Jeff Bezos creates incredible value for millions of people all over the world is an outcome to be celebrated, lauded and recognized as a great moral achievement, not just an economic one. Morality is our guidelines for surviving and thriving, and the creation of a new mountain of wealth in society is the pinnacle of morality successfully applied to improve human lives. Bezos is not Bernie Madoff - he has not stolen or defrauded anyone - that is the mindset of those who see wealth as a pie to be divided. Bezos has designed, tested, baked and continues to bake new and undreamed of pies that are beloved by hordes of his fellow men. To frame it another way, Bezos' wealth has been voted to him and bestowed upon him through consumer choices as recognition by his fellow men of the value he creates.
Yes, Bezos disrupts the economy, but to improve it, not to denigrate it.
Yes, this is a right and left issue. On the right stand people who wish to be free to choose their own path in life, to be free of coercion by others or their government. On the left stand those who are against individual rights, against human freedom, against reason and the human mind, against win-win trade and for the use of force to make others do their bidding. On the left stand people with guns pointed at citizens. On the right stand people who defend the right of citizens to choose. Which side acts as a bully?
My first, short comment:
This idea is so full of errors and contradictions entire books would be needed to fully address it. A basic course in economics and finance would be a start.
Who creates, operates, finances and owns the businesses, the corporations excoriated above? Who pays the corporate taxes? Who pays individual taxes? Who earns the profits of businesses and uses them to invest in greater future production or to improve their lives? Canadians, Ontarians, taxpayers - they are synonymous. With the most productive 10% among us already paying 55% of income taxes, is that enough? Not for everyone, apparently.
Comment from Jenny:
Hi, David, the 10% paying 55% of income taxes is irrelevant. The idea was the low corporate tax; it is not that the head of the corporate is paying low personal income tax.
My long comment, responding to Jenny and to the main idea:
It is a mistake to think corporate tax is not paid by individuals - only individuals pay tax. Sometimes they pay directly and sometimes through their legal entities such as corporations, partnerships and trusts. The government taxes corporations as a way to hide the tax from immediate view by citizens and is totally counterproductive. All the assets and all the profits of a corporation are engaged 100% of the time in creating value for citizens and when you tax something you get less of it. By taxing business production you get less production and society has a lower standard of living.
The fact that 10% of Canadian already pay 55% of the taxes is not irrelevant to this issue. In many and likely most cases, the most productive people are shareholders of a corporation and thus pay both personal and corporate income taxes already.
The idea's assertion that income inequality is bad and that corporations are totally about greed is a travesty. To better understand this, consider how you become one of the rich people in society. Let's say you come up with an idea to make life better for others - to keep things super simple, say you invent a better vegetable peeler. You must invest your brain power in creating the initial idea, building prototypes, testing them, researching manufacturing and distribution. You must make sure you are not running afoul of the thousands of regulations the province has that restrict trade. You must search for and hire staff to help you get things rolling. You must learn how to deal with the intricacies of trade barriers between countries and also their internal trade barriers such as those between provinces. You must finance the equipment, marketing and inventory of the business and pay staff while the product is being brought to market; you take significant financial risks and might lose it all.
Now assume you start to have sales, but it may take many months or even years to recover what you have invested, with no guarantees at all that you will do so. All along the way your staff have been paid and have been happy to work for that level of pay, or else they would rationally work elsewhere. No one forced them to work for you and they took no risks except those inherent in working for a small business. Every day in the early life of the company the staff worked, they were making a profit for themselves while the business founder was not. They decided they were better off, that their lives were being improved, that they received more value through their pay than the time they dedicated to the work.
Now let's say the business starts to become profitable. How? Only because enough customers have decided that their lives will be better off for buying your veggie peeler than by holding onto the few dollars it costs them. Their lives are improved in a small measure, and the business owner and all employees are also better off. Trade is a win-win transaction when it is freely chosen - it must be, by definition. If only a modest number of people agree that their lives are improved by buying your peeler.
Now to the meat: how do you become rich? A really large number of people must agree that their lives are improved by trading their dollars for your peeler. Millions of people must agree that you are creating value for them. Not only that, you are competing against all other peelers made by all other companies, plus once your peeler hits the market it will give other people ideas about how to compete with you. To build a successful business you must not only achieve excellence, you must maintain it indefinitely or else another will earn the market share you once had.
Consider Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, apparently the wealthiest man in the world today. His business idea has become so loved by his customers and the company has so many millions of customers that his net worth (mostly Amazon shares that could lose 100% of their value if the company fails to maintain excellence) is over $100 billion dollars. Did his wealth come at the expense of others? Did he take their piece of the so-called "income pie"? Did he achieve this by forcing people to work for him at pay lower than they chose? No. No. NO! Amazon employees all work there because they have identified Amazon as a place they want to work and have accepted the pay offered. Many employees have likely become millionaires through ownership of shares in the business. Amazon customers are better off - why else would they shop through Amazon? Thousands of other businesses sell through the Amazon platform. Many other businesses sell services to Amazon. Jeff Bezos is fabulously wealthy because he has revolutionized a portion of the marketplace and created value for hundreds of millions of people and growing. All those people have chosen to trade a small amount of their value for that provided by Bezos and his company - and they can take away everything Amazon has and all its employees and all its share value, just by changing their minds about whether Amazon is creating value in their lives.
The fact that income inequality rises when Jeff Bezos creates incredible value for millions of people all over the world is an outcome to be celebrated, lauded and recognized as a great moral achievement, not just an economic one. Morality is our guidelines for surviving and thriving, and the creation of a new mountain of wealth in society is the pinnacle of morality successfully applied to improve human lives. Bezos is not Bernie Madoff - he has not stolen or defrauded anyone - that is the mindset of those who see wealth as a pie to be divided. Bezos has designed, tested, baked and continues to bake new and undreamed of pies that are beloved by hordes of his fellow men. To frame it another way, Bezos' wealth has been voted to him and bestowed upon him through consumer choices as recognition by his fellow men of the value he creates.
Yes, Bezos disrupts the economy, but to improve it, not to denigrate it.
Yes, this is a right and left issue. On the right stand people who wish to be free to choose their own path in life, to be free of coercion by others or their government. On the left stand those who are against individual rights, against human freedom, against reason and the human mind, against win-win trade and for the use of force to make others do their bidding. On the left stand people with guns pointed at citizens. On the right stand people who defend the right of citizens to choose. Which side acts as a bully?
My first, short comment:
This idea is so full of errors and contradictions entire books would be needed to fully address it. A basic course in economics and finance would be a start.
Who creates, operates, finances and owns the businesses, the corporations excoriated above? Who pays the corporate taxes? Who pays individual taxes? Who earns the profits of businesses and uses them to invest in greater future production or to improve their lives? Canadians, Ontarians, taxpayers - they are synonymous. With the most productive 10% among us already paying 55% of income taxes, is that enough? Not for everyone, apparently.
Comment from Jenny:
Hi, David, the 10% paying 55% of income taxes is irrelevant. The idea was the low corporate tax; it is not that the head of the corporate is paying low personal income tax.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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