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COMMENTARY
May 30, 2009
Highway robbery
The figure of $1.4 million, for the amount of the taxpayers' money that will be spent on saving each job at General Motors and Chrysler, has now appeared in the media. I have no idea whether it is accurate; more fundamentally, no idea how anyone could arrive at a plausible final reckoning, at the bottom of a sheet of wildly expensive variables.What began as a $4-billion bailout, and was defended at that level by a prime minister who wrote and reasoned so eloquently against corporate bailouts when he was running the National Citizens Coalition, has blossomed within weeks into a $13.5-billion bailout. But once again, the taxpayers who must cover this -- plus far more in compound interest, since the money must be borrowed -- have and will have no way of knowing the total. Government bailouts are unlimited, more or less by definition. For were a government to say, "You may have $13.5 billion, but after you've blown that in, you're on your own," it might as well say, "You may have zero." Once the principle of fiscal accountability is abandoned, it is abandoned. The political calculation is straightforward. The money is really going to save the seats of a few local MPs, at a cost of so many billion per seat for the next election. The joke is if they lose them anyway, we still have to pay. Another joke is that if they spent a tiny fraction of those billions, in an equally conspicuous way, on "personal expenses," the MPs in question would be the political equivalent of dead meat. And yet, the benefit to the economy for each dollar spent would be about the same. The assumption is that Canadians, generally, are too stupid to care about this spending, outside the immediate neighbourhoods of Oshawa, Brampton, Windsor. Or more precisely: too stupid to find a way to do something about it. And since there is no political party in Ottawa that would not have done exactly the same, under the same circumstances, this political calculation looks reasonably sound. This is what we pay for not having a genuinely conservative party in Parliament. For even if such a party were not in power, its existence as an alternative would put pressure on the governing spendthrift party to watch out. Having a Conservative party that is really a liberal party leaves us no choice but to vote for the actual Liberal party, when we have scores to settle with them. Or alternatively, we sit on our hands at the next election. I should think that will be the reason Stephen Harper goes down: because a large and increasing number of basically conservative people think he has sold us out. And, unlike basically liberal people, we are prepared to let moral bankrupts fail, just as we were prepared to let such fiscal bankrupts fail, as General Motors and Chrysler. Yet oddly enough, the Conservative party may not even learn from the experience. This is because basically conservative people are so utterly disenfranchised, not only among the political classes but in the courts, the schools, the bureaucracies, and the media, as to be invisible. Twelve thousand of us could assemble on the lawn of Parliament to make a point about, say, unrestricted abortion, and it would be hardly even reported. It follows that a Conservative government could go down, and not even know what hit it. Very few Canadians make as much as GM and Chrysler workers, or have pension plans as generous. Many of us don't have pension plans at all, beyond the chump change offered by our Nanny State. The autoworkers' plan is around $2 billion in the hole. It goes without saying that at least $2 billion of the bailout will go, directly or indirectly, to rescuing it. That the government must deny this use of our money also goes without saying. But the plan will be rescued; and the person who thinks it will happen by a spontaneous miracle is naïve. One of the proofs that Canadians are indeed rather stupid, is that we will stand for this sort of thing: that people who themselves face penury in old age, will agree to have their pockets picked to cover $70-an-hour auto-workers. And then actually vote at the next election for the politicians who robbed them. (For not all Canadians are basically conservative.) Alas, until some conservatives take over the Conservative party, Canadians will be in no position to prove me wrong. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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