Letters by a modern St. Ferdinand III about cults

Without delving into military, foreign affairs, social problems, moral issues, and much needed political reform, the Canadian economic foundation has many weaknesses that will put pressure and cause a standard of living decline if not addressed. Canadians and their political masters, must reconsider the proper function of government and what taxes should be use for. Currently in Canada taxes are used to fund all programs, of all shapes and sizes, to satisfy all claimants. This is the obverse of what statesman and smart money managers would do. Intelligent analysis would invert the current arrangement and ask; ‘What programs should government manage [at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels] to fulfill constitutional duties including the commitments to social welfare, economic dynamism, and respect for private property rights.’

Indeed the fundamental question in Canada and elsewhere which is never asked is ‘What is the mission of Canada and the nature of the state-market relationship?’ This value laden question is never asked because Canada’s elite supplies its citizens with the wrong answer, which unfortunately has become embedded in the country’s consciousness and its legislative and constitutional process, namely; ‘Private freedoms and economics are subservient to the State’s interest’.

The problem with this answer and the Canadian political structure is that the vision preached by Government in Canada and Europe is social peace, not individual liberty. This is the fundamental flaw in Canadiana. Canadians need to reassess and ask themselves what the main function is of government and this must be done within a philosophically emotive framework. Such main ideals that have galvanized human history are the precepts of freedom, liberty, and respect for rights. These truths must be at the core of any well functioning nation state’s philosophy. In Canada the philosophical ideal is big government, socialized health care, social peace and apathetic harmony. The poverty of these ideals which are centered on entrenched statism, and socialism, is empirically clear for all to read. Mankind’s journey is littered with the detritus of destructive centralization – from ancient Mesopotamia to the Soviet empire. There is an immorality in socialism that has animated history and is open for all to view.

The history of Western development is different, unique and precious. It is predicated on Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian values and mores. The Jews and Christians were firm in their high regard for the absolute protection of private property. Individual responsibility to care for one self and one’s family as well as aid the greater society is endemic throughout both religious frameworks. The Greeks were the first to emancipate man, grant private property rights, encourage limited but involved democratic processes, and foster a sense of community and spirit that would allow the Greeks for instance to wipe out an Oriental, despotic, centralized Persian empire, in which the citizen was not a free man but another valueless chattel. Freedom, private property, voting and love of inquiry, rational discovery and intellectual exchange never did animate the Oriental mind. The battles of Marthon, Salamis, Platea and Guagamela illustrate the economic and military productivity of smaller, more democratic and more freedom loving societies and the superiority of the Western creed.

Fundamentally this ideal of freedom is centered first and foremost on the economic law that the state must respect the creation, rent, and ownership of private property in all its forms. The basis of our modern private property ideal is the Judeo-Christian creed of ‘thou shall not steal’. In Canada private rights and property appropriation damages are far too high stagnating economic growth, lowering income and living standards and causing the erection of parasitical government agencies to manage industry sectors, foreign investment, competition, and foisting untold industry regulatory standards upon businesses. It costs Canadians $110 billion per annum to fund such unproductive and anti-orthodox liberal behavior. The ancient creed of thou shall not steal, in the secular age of Canadian post modern relativism, is dead.

This economic drain is further compounded by high taxation and government ownership of the economy. The two are directly linked. The more you allow government to meddle and tax, the more government will observe, regulate and ‘advise’. Limiting government control of Canada’s economy which is at 43 % of direct GDP ownership is mandatory. This figure ignores regulatory costs, deficit spending, crown corporations and off balance items. Such items could add another 8-12 % of GDP to government control. The limiting of the distorting effect of government mismanagement is mandatory in a globalizing environment of time and spatial compression.

All taxes in Canada, normalized for state-provincial differences and rates, are higher than in the USA. In Canada families pay out 50 % of gross income on average to government versus 35 % in the USA, and business rates in Canada normalizing for all fees and taxes is at 32 % vs. 22 % [going to 25 %] in the USA . This significant competitive disadvantage is alarming. Canada is a small country [most of which is uninhabitable and sparsely settled], with a dispersed population and regional groupings with a variegated historical experience. Historically there have been two ways to bind such diverse peoples together – enforced Orientalism or ‘Enlightened culturalism’.

The most dangerous and corrupt idea is the ‘Orientalist’ proposition. This entails centralized control, maniacal devotion to the state, massive bureaucracies, the absence of words or ideas to express ‘freedom’, ‘citizen’, ‘demos’, ‘polis’ or any constructs which can express enlightenment ideals. Orientalism is found in all ancient middle-eastern empires, in the Ottoman empire, in the Tsarism and Communism of Russia, in the rice and water based societies of ancient Asia, and amongst the Aztecs and Incas and pre-modern societies of North and South America and Africa. Orientalism in its modern form can be seen in fanatical Islam and the coercive empire of Putin’s Russia. If not reformed such empires will collapse or become irrelevant.

Western enlightenment is totally different than Orientalism. Inquiry, rationalism, enthusiasm, energy, the will to overcome odds, obstacles, and solve the insoluble has animated the Western from the days of Neolithic European society to the modern era. The revolutionary ideas of experimentation, individual responsibility, moral imperatives, equality of opportunity and a distaste for ritualism, dogma, devotion to authority for authority’s sake, is emblematic of Western restlessness and its search for higher meaning, money, profit, and greater comforts. Freedom of economic opportunity across class, race, and ‘caste’ is a unique and history altering Western innovation. Westerners might not have invented all of mankind’s most important tools, but they were certainly the ones to adapt, create, build and deploy the implements of the modern world. This is not to state that other cultures are less intelligent or physically inferior, but these cultures never gave their members the capacity or expansive mental energies to create the modern world. Even China, the nascent Asian giant, is basing its future East-Asian power hegemony on Western methods and very selective capitalism.

What does this mean for contemporaries in the post-modern world of relativity and ‘nothing-matters all is equal’. It is necessary to reconnect our polity back to Canada’s and the West’s past and understand how the West created its world. This is necessary in an era beset by ever increasing government control and mounting taxation. Globalisation was supposed to ‘wipe out’ the nation state. Thus far in the modern version of time and spatial compression [other eras far predate our own experience of globalism], government is taxing and spending at unprecedented levels. Even in the USA, a historically ambivalent free trading state, the left-liberals, along with big government activists and ‘caring’ Conservatives are increasing governmental power.

This offers Canada and other smaller nations an opportunity. If Canada had enough courage to reject the EU and interventionist US model and embark on serious fundamental philosophical and economic reform it could leapfrog the USA. Ireland and other smaller states have demonstrated what can occur once government, taxes and assorted nonsense are cut. Canada with Bush and his ‘big government’ Conservatism in reign, can not only reduce taxes, government size and regulation but recalibrate its social program funding. By so doing it would free up enough resources and monies to build a proper military, reduce social welfare and regional payments, reduce its debt and unfunded liabilities and create a society based on freedom choice as well as the compassionate desire to aid, help and care for those that really need such aid.

It comes down to a moral and philosophical choice and the key question must be asked, ‘What is the mission of Canada and the nature of the state-market relationship?’ From what I see on the political spectrum no-one is discussing this.

Conservatives need to get angry, to get smart, to get energetic and to preach their values and why such ideals will triumph and turn a socialist country into a world leader.