Barack Obama's billionaire bashing
In Canada, we face a Seinfeld election. It's about nothing. We should be grateful. The United States does not face immediate elections, but it does have serious problems (from which, of course, we are not immune). The most immediate is that the government is about to max out on its borrowing limit of US$14.3trillion. Raising that limit will require agreement between President Barack Obama's Democrats and the resurgent Republicans, who recently came up with a plan centred on addressing the country's pubic health millstone with more individual choice and market ingenuity.
On Wednesday, the day Canadian leaders were holding their French-language debate so as not to clash with the NHL playoffs, Mr. Obama responded to the GOP plan in time-honoured leftist fashion: by demonizing his opponents and blaming everything on the rich.
In the Canadian debate, Jack Layton suggested that Mr. Harper was a disciple of George W. Bush. Surely better that than the Prime Minister be a disciple of Mr. Obama, who -with his immutable Big Green Government convictions -represents a combination of Mr. Layton and Elizabeth May.
Mr. Obama's plan to reduce U.S. deficits by US$4-trillion over 12 years was short on substance and long on class war. Yet again, the President put his version of post-partisanship on display: Let's do it my way; all else is "petty bickering."
Under Mr. Obama's sketchy scheme, Obamacare's massive problems will be addressed by more bureaucratic oversight and private-sector arm twisting. Apparently there is little "waste" to be cut from government, but lots of fat in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of Mr. Obama's speech was its repeated denigration of "millionaires and billionaires." He suggested that his nation's massive debt problems were largely due to the tax cuts for "the rich" instigated by George W. Bush. To the extent that anybody was for preserving such cuts, suggested Mr. Owe, they were also in favour of neglecting the old, the young, and the sick; they were for crumbling roads and bridges; they were against the idea of America itself.
Mr. Obama strayed into Jon Stewart land when he suggested "Warren Buffett doesn't need another tax cut." Well, no, but then Warren Buffett did receive a hefty present from the government's financial bailouts. Indeed, the sage of Omaha wrote an open letter to "Uncle Sam" thanking him for saving his bacon when it came to his investments in Goldman Sachs and Moody's.
One might wonder where the President gets his class warfare economics. Simple. He gets it from Nobel Prize winning economists such as Joseph Stiglitz.
If you want to read some really unhinged wealth bashing, turn to the May edition of Vanity Fair, where Prof. Stiglitz -guru of Keynesianism, anti-globalization and Gross National Happiness -unleashes an attack headed "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%." There the diehard old lefty wheels out slimy semantics, spurious statistics and mushy moralism to heave at both the filthy rich and his main enemy: free markets.
According to Prof. Stiglitz, members of the top 1% don't "earn" their income, or receive it as a return on their investments. They "take" it by exercising monopoly power, or exploiting preferential tax treatment, or otherwise manipulating the system. These people were entirely responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. Strangely, Prof. Stiglitz makes no mention of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or the Fed and fiat money, or of the massive failures of domestic regulation and international oversight, from the SEC to Basel I and II.
Prof. Stiglitz's claim of massive state underinvestment (due to the greedy rich) is also a bit hard to square with the fact that the U.S. government is spending far more than at any time in history, even allowing for Iraq and Afghanistan. Could it be that the problem is not state underinvestment and mean-spiritedness but malinvestment and perverse redistribution? Certainly the U.S. public school system is a disaster, but Mr. Stiglitz seems to have missed the role of powerful teachers' unions in that sorry state.
He claims that the wealthy are more and more reluctant to spend money on "common needs," but how does that square with the "Giving Pledge" sponsored by Bill Gates (whom Mr. Stiglitz suggests became so rich mainly because of "monopoly or near monopoly") and Mr. Buffett?
According to the Vanity Fair hatchet job, the rich control globalization and promote that "race to the bottom." Hell, they don't even serve in the military! They erode national identity and even could be on the point of promoting Middle Eastern and North African-style uprisings! They simply don't "need to care" about economic security, low taxes for ordinary people, good education or a clean environment.
Display blanket prejudice against any other social group -from gays to Muslims -and you'll rightly be pilloried as an intolerant ignoramus. Suggest that the 99th income percentile are malefactors of great wealth and you'll be invited to the White House.
One of the many things Obamanomics doesn't seem capable of comprehending is that lower tax rates go with higher revenues. That is because it tends toward reflexive, primitive, moralistic zero-sum anti-economics, which sees the economy as a thing rather than as a process, and which cannot conceive of some having more without others having less. It might seem strange that such a view should be promoted by Nobel economists, but not if you realize how far economics has been taken over by those who are Robin Hood moralists first, and economists second.
Meanwhile, we should give thanks for our Seinfeld election.
On Wednesday, the day Canadian leaders were holding their French-language debate so as not to clash with the NHL playoffs, Mr. Obama responded to the GOP plan in time-honoured leftist fashion: by demonizing his opponents and blaming everything on the rich.
In the Canadian debate, Jack Layton suggested that Mr. Harper was a disciple of George W. Bush. Surely better that than the Prime Minister be a disciple of Mr. Obama, who -with his immutable Big Green Government convictions -represents a combination of Mr. Layton and Elizabeth May.
Mr. Obama's plan to reduce U.S. deficits by US$4-trillion over 12 years was short on substance and long on class war. Yet again, the President put his version of post-partisanship on display: Let's do it my way; all else is "petty bickering."
Under Mr. Obama's sketchy scheme, Obamacare's massive problems will be addressed by more bureaucratic oversight and private-sector arm twisting. Apparently there is little "waste" to be cut from government, but lots of fat in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of Mr. Obama's speech was its repeated denigration of "millionaires and billionaires." He suggested that his nation's massive debt problems were largely due to the tax cuts for "the rich" instigated by George W. Bush. To the extent that anybody was for preserving such cuts, suggested Mr. Owe, they were also in favour of neglecting the old, the young, and the sick; they were for crumbling roads and bridges; they were against the idea of America itself.
Mr. Obama strayed into Jon Stewart land when he suggested "Warren Buffett doesn't need another tax cut." Well, no, but then Warren Buffett did receive a hefty present from the government's financial bailouts. Indeed, the sage of Omaha wrote an open letter to "Uncle Sam" thanking him for saving his bacon when it came to his investments in Goldman Sachs and Moody's.
One might wonder where the President gets his class warfare economics. Simple. He gets it from Nobel Prize winning economists such as Joseph Stiglitz.
If you want to read some really unhinged wealth bashing, turn to the May edition of Vanity Fair, where Prof. Stiglitz -guru of Keynesianism, anti-globalization and Gross National Happiness -unleashes an attack headed "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%." There the diehard old lefty wheels out slimy semantics, spurious statistics and mushy moralism to heave at both the filthy rich and his main enemy: free markets.
According to Prof. Stiglitz, members of the top 1% don't "earn" their income, or receive it as a return on their investments. They "take" it by exercising monopoly power, or exploiting preferential tax treatment, or otherwise manipulating the system. These people were entirely responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. Strangely, Prof. Stiglitz makes no mention of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or the Fed and fiat money, or of the massive failures of domestic regulation and international oversight, from the SEC to Basel I and II.
Prof. Stiglitz's claim of massive state underinvestment (due to the greedy rich) is also a bit hard to square with the fact that the U.S. government is spending far more than at any time in history, even allowing for Iraq and Afghanistan. Could it be that the problem is not state underinvestment and mean-spiritedness but malinvestment and perverse redistribution? Certainly the U.S. public school system is a disaster, but Mr. Stiglitz seems to have missed the role of powerful teachers' unions in that sorry state.
He claims that the wealthy are more and more reluctant to spend money on "common needs," but how does that square with the "Giving Pledge" sponsored by Bill Gates (whom Mr. Stiglitz suggests became so rich mainly because of "monopoly or near monopoly") and Mr. Buffett?
According to the Vanity Fair hatchet job, the rich control globalization and promote that "race to the bottom." Hell, they don't even serve in the military! They erode national identity and even could be on the point of promoting Middle Eastern and North African-style uprisings! They simply don't "need to care" about economic security, low taxes for ordinary people, good education or a clean environment.
Display blanket prejudice against any other social group -from gays to Muslims -and you'll rightly be pilloried as an intolerant ignoramus. Suggest that the 99th income percentile are malefactors of great wealth and you'll be invited to the White House.
One of the many things Obamanomics doesn't seem capable of comprehending is that lower tax rates go with higher revenues. That is because it tends toward reflexive, primitive, moralistic zero-sum anti-economics, which sees the economy as a thing rather than as a process, and which cannot conceive of some having more without others having less. It might seem strange that such a view should be promoted by Nobel economists, but not if you realize how far economics has been taken over by those who are Robin Hood moralists first, and economists second.
Meanwhile, we should give thanks for our Seinfeld election.
Putting our political disease on display
Depressed and disappointed. Those are the two words that encapsulate the reaction of many federalist Canadians to the French leaders' debate. Not simply because the three federalist party leaders gave the impression of fish gasping for air, as they struggled to find words in their second language, but because of what the debate says about the Canadian political system, and our country more generally.
Canada's two solitudes are alive and well. If anything, the gulf between English and French Canada has grown wider in the past five years, in terms of priorities, cultural differences and political attitudes. Stephen Harper's resolution identifying Quebec as a "nation" within Canada -which seemed a good idea at the time -has blurred many of the red lines that used to demarcate what federalists could and could not say. Critics of Michael Ignatieff may not like his Wednesday-night declaration that "You can be a Quebecer or a Canadian in the order you prefer." But once the word "nation" is used by a Prime Minister to describe a Canadian province, all bets are off.
As for Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc Québécois leader's arguments in the French debate could be summed up in two sentences: Quebec should be its own country. Until then, please send money.
Money for forestry companies. For R&D. For HST harmonization. And for Montreal's Champlain Bridge -a local issue that the journalists moderating the debate inexplicably took great pains to emphasize (perhaps they themselves are south-shore commuters). How embarrassingly parochial is it that in a national leaders' debate, the issue of a single bridge took up more time than the environment, international trade or other matters of truly national importance?
Stephen Harper, who was impressively calm during the English debate, occasionally faltered on Wednesday night, his voice rising as he betrayed an (admittedly understandable) irritation at the tone of the discussion. Only when the debate moved to the subject of Quebec's place in Canada did Mr. Harper find his feet -stepping into a pointless back and forth between Messrs. Duceppe and Ignatieff to say, in effect, "this is what you get with a minority Parliament."
As in the English debate, Jack Layton started strong but weakened as the night went on. He came out with a few good one-liners and hockey metaphors. But when he started talking about running for Prime Minister, Mr. Duceppe ran him into the boards with a hockey analogy of his own: "[The Bloc] won't form government, [even though] we've always had more players on the ice than you."
Which, sadly, is true: Thanks to the interplay of regionalism and our first-past-the-post electoral system, the BQ has 11 more seats than the NDP -despite having only about half the NDP's overall national vote.
Having been christened the intellectual heir to Pierre Trudeau, Michael Ignatieff once was seen as a figure who might break through in Quebec. But his Wednesday-night lectures about democracy and the allegedly outdated nature of sovereignty were too professorial: The time when Quebecers went in for this sort of faculty-lounge approach to identity politics is long past. (And, in any event, one glance at the map of the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia proves the argument wrong.) What Mr. Ignatieff might have emphasized instead was that a sovereign Quebec would be an economic basket case -which at least would hit Quebec's upwardly mobile, apolitical middle-class voters where it counts. He might also have played tough guy by declaring: If you want to separate so badly, Mr. Duceppe, go take over the Parti Québécois and stop living off political subsidies from English Canada. Wednesday night's debate needed a federalist bad cop. But instead, all we got were three good cops.
Overall, the debate showed what a destructive force the Bloc has become in Canadian politics. For it is not only an obstacle to majority government, as Mr. Harper noted, but also a permanent distraction for any federalist party seeking to discuss the substantive issues that should be at the forefront of debate -rather than federal-provincial nation-envy, or the funding of a single bridge project.
How long this situation can continue before Canadian federalists get well and truly sick of BQ agitation is anyone's guess. But when the moment does come, the result may be that separation is achieved on the initiative of English Canada, not Quebec -and on terms that neither Mr. Duceppe nor his fellow travellers much like. For now, Quebecers treat a vote for the BQ as a cost-free gesture of nationalist solidarity. But if and when their province gets asked to leave confederation, if only to cure the debilitating regionalism that now infects our political culture, the province's BQ voters may come to regret their choice.
Canada's two solitudes are alive and well. If anything, the gulf between English and French Canada has grown wider in the past five years, in terms of priorities, cultural differences and political attitudes. Stephen Harper's resolution identifying Quebec as a "nation" within Canada -which seemed a good idea at the time -has blurred many of the red lines that used to demarcate what federalists could and could not say. Critics of Michael Ignatieff may not like his Wednesday-night declaration that "You can be a Quebecer or a Canadian in the order you prefer." But once the word "nation" is used by a Prime Minister to describe a Canadian province, all bets are off.
As for Gilles Duceppe, the Bloc Québécois leader's arguments in the French debate could be summed up in two sentences: Quebec should be its own country. Until then, please send money.
Money for forestry companies. For R&D. For HST harmonization. And for Montreal's Champlain Bridge -a local issue that the journalists moderating the debate inexplicably took great pains to emphasize (perhaps they themselves are south-shore commuters). How embarrassingly parochial is it that in a national leaders' debate, the issue of a single bridge took up more time than the environment, international trade or other matters of truly national importance?
Stephen Harper, who was impressively calm during the English debate, occasionally faltered on Wednesday night, his voice rising as he betrayed an (admittedly understandable) irritation at the tone of the discussion. Only when the debate moved to the subject of Quebec's place in Canada did Mr. Harper find his feet -stepping into a pointless back and forth between Messrs. Duceppe and Ignatieff to say, in effect, "this is what you get with a minority Parliament."
As in the English debate, Jack Layton started strong but weakened as the night went on. He came out with a few good one-liners and hockey metaphors. But when he started talking about running for Prime Minister, Mr. Duceppe ran him into the boards with a hockey analogy of his own: "[The Bloc] won't form government, [even though] we've always had more players on the ice than you."
Which, sadly, is true: Thanks to the interplay of regionalism and our first-past-the-post electoral system, the BQ has 11 more seats than the NDP -despite having only about half the NDP's overall national vote.
Having been christened the intellectual heir to Pierre Trudeau, Michael Ignatieff once was seen as a figure who might break through in Quebec. But his Wednesday-night lectures about democracy and the allegedly outdated nature of sovereignty were too professorial: The time when Quebecers went in for this sort of faculty-lounge approach to identity politics is long past. (And, in any event, one glance at the map of the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia proves the argument wrong.) What Mr. Ignatieff might have emphasized instead was that a sovereign Quebec would be an economic basket case -which at least would hit Quebec's upwardly mobile, apolitical middle-class voters where it counts. He might also have played tough guy by declaring: If you want to separate so badly, Mr. Duceppe, go take over the Parti Québécois and stop living off political subsidies from English Canada. Wednesday night's debate needed a federalist bad cop. But instead, all we got were three good cops.
Overall, the debate showed what a destructive force the Bloc has become in Canadian politics. For it is not only an obstacle to majority government, as Mr. Harper noted, but also a permanent distraction for any federalist party seeking to discuss the substantive issues that should be at the forefront of debate -rather than federal-provincial nation-envy, or the funding of a single bridge project.
How long this situation can continue before Canadian federalists get well and truly sick of BQ agitation is anyone's guess. But when the moment does come, the result may be that separation is achieved on the initiative of English Canada, not Quebec -and on terms that neither Mr. Duceppe nor his fellow travellers much like. For now, Quebecers treat a vote for the BQ as a cost-free gesture of nationalist solidarity. But if and when their province gets asked to leave confederation, if only to cure the debilitating regionalism that now infects our political culture, the province's BQ voters may come to regret their choice.
Don't ban the burka
National Post · Apr. 13, 2011 | Last Updated: Apr. 13, 2011 3:46 AM ETIn Canada and other Western nations, there has been an active debate in recent years about when and where Muslim women should be required to remove their face-coverings. (These coverings arise in the form of different garments -including burkas, the shapeless headto-toe garment worn by many women in Afghanistan. But for the purpose of this editorial, we will use the word niqab, which is Arabic for "mask.")
Typically, the most strenuous opposition to this form of ultraconservative dress -which is not mandated by mainstream Islamic religious texts, but which has become part of cultural traditions originating in various parts of the greater Middle East -arises in the context of witnesses appearing in court, voters presenting themselves at the ballot box, driver-licence photographs and other contexts in which ordinary citizens must identify themselves before some state functionary.
But this week, France took the anti-face-covering campaign to a new level: A recently enacted law bans face covering in any public area. Violators are subject to a ¤150 fine (though they also have the option of taking citizenship lessons instead). In essence, face-covering has become akin to its opposite, full nudity -something you can do in the privacy of your own home or hotel room, but just about nowhere else. The sentiment behind the French law is understandable: Whatever Islamists and their scattered secular apologists may say, the niqab is a badge of servility. By obscuring the feature that humans have used to identify one another since the dawn of the species -the face -the niqab communicates the message, never far from the surface in backwards, tribalized societies, that women have no individual character, and are merely some patriarch's fire-tending baby-maker. It is a message that is repugnant to any liberal society such as ours, and should be denounced as such.
But in a free society, people must be free to communicate offensive messages, as much in their dress as in their actual speech. If a Muslim woman is free to state -on a blog, in a book or from a podium -the words "I am a social prisoner of my husband, willing to erase my public identity to fulfil the expectations imposed on me by some retrograde interpretation of Islam," then why can this message not be equally communicated, indirectly, by her dress?
A common objection to this is that niqabbed Muslim women do not dress as they do of their own volition; that they are forced to do so by their husbands and families. And so the fabric on their faces is an artifact of domestic abuse, not a mere article of clothing.
But even in such cases -and no doubt, there are many -what good does it do to attack the symptom of abusive domestic relationships. Canadian households in which women live in fear of their husband should be the subject of police investigation, no matter how a woman appears in public. As we see it, a woman who dresses publicly in jeans and T-shirt but is beaten by her husband behind closed doors represents as much a tragedy as a niqab-clad woman who avoids trouble by silently following her tyrannical relatives' wishes.
The move to ban clothing we don't like sets us down a dangerous path -for there are all sorts of other styles that communicate offensive creeds. The baggy trousers and gangland headgear of many young black men, for instance, can be traced to the influence of African-American prison culture. Are we to ban these clothes, as well, on the basis that they celebrate criminality?
This editorial board does not ordinarily take its cues from Post columnists. But in this case, we are persuaded by the views of George Jonas (whose column on the subject appears elsewhere on today's pages). As the libertarian conscience of Canadian conservatism, and a man whose political memory runs deep into the heart of the 20th-century's most authoritarian movements, he has seen illiberal policies marshalled in the service of protecting liberalism many times. Almost always, history shows these reflexes to have been misguided.
In a liberal society, we all enjoy a baseline right to speak, eat and dress as we please -except when the state has some compelling interest in restricting our choices. The burden of proof must always be on the state in such matters. In neither France, nor Canada, has this burden been met.
Typically, the most strenuous opposition to this form of ultraconservative dress -which is not mandated by mainstream Islamic religious texts, but which has become part of cultural traditions originating in various parts of the greater Middle East -arises in the context of witnesses appearing in court, voters presenting themselves at the ballot box, driver-licence photographs and other contexts in which ordinary citizens must identify themselves before some state functionary.
But this week, France took the anti-face-covering campaign to a new level: A recently enacted law bans face covering in any public area. Violators are subject to a ¤150 fine (though they also have the option of taking citizenship lessons instead). In essence, face-covering has become akin to its opposite, full nudity -something you can do in the privacy of your own home or hotel room, but just about nowhere else. The sentiment behind the French law is understandable: Whatever Islamists and their scattered secular apologists may say, the niqab is a badge of servility. By obscuring the feature that humans have used to identify one another since the dawn of the species -the face -the niqab communicates the message, never far from the surface in backwards, tribalized societies, that women have no individual character, and are merely some patriarch's fire-tending baby-maker. It is a message that is repugnant to any liberal society such as ours, and should be denounced as such.
But in a free society, people must be free to communicate offensive messages, as much in their dress as in their actual speech. If a Muslim woman is free to state -on a blog, in a book or from a podium -the words "I am a social prisoner of my husband, willing to erase my public identity to fulfil the expectations imposed on me by some retrograde interpretation of Islam," then why can this message not be equally communicated, indirectly, by her dress?
A common objection to this is that niqabbed Muslim women do not dress as they do of their own volition; that they are forced to do so by their husbands and families. And so the fabric on their faces is an artifact of domestic abuse, not a mere article of clothing.
But even in such cases -and no doubt, there are many -what good does it do to attack the symptom of abusive domestic relationships. Canadian households in which women live in fear of their husband should be the subject of police investigation, no matter how a woman appears in public. As we see it, a woman who dresses publicly in jeans and T-shirt but is beaten by her husband behind closed doors represents as much a tragedy as a niqab-clad woman who avoids trouble by silently following her tyrannical relatives' wishes.
The move to ban clothing we don't like sets us down a dangerous path -for there are all sorts of other styles that communicate offensive creeds. The baggy trousers and gangland headgear of many young black men, for instance, can be traced to the influence of African-American prison culture. Are we to ban these clothes, as well, on the basis that they celebrate criminality?
This editorial board does not ordinarily take its cues from Post columnists. But in this case, we are persuaded by the views of George Jonas (whose column on the subject appears elsewhere on today's pages). As the libertarian conscience of Canadian conservatism, and a man whose political memory runs deep into the heart of the 20th-century's most authoritarian movements, he has seen illiberal policies marshalled in the service of protecting liberalism many times. Almost always, history shows these reflexes to have been misguided.
In a liberal society, we all enjoy a baseline right to speak, eat and dress as we please -except when the state has some compelling interest in restricting our choices. The burden of proof must always be on the state in such matters. In neither France, nor Canada, has this burden been met.
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