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COMMENTARY
July 22, 2009
Labels everywhere
As anyone who has bought groceries will know, there are elaborate labelling requirements for food in this country, as for most other goods. And as anyone who has travelled abroad may have noticed, Canada is not unique in this regard.Like our money, the labels are inflationary: constantly growing in quantity, while shrinking in unit value. Or like our taxes, their extent is hidden from us in plain view. That is because we get in the habit of looking around the labels, as around the taxes; of not seeing or hearing what is indefinitely repeated; of anticipating what can only increase. A package of cigarettes is now half covered by government health warnings alone, but the purchaser hardly cares, he is only looking for the little patch at the bottom with the brand name. It is really no different on this tin of Canada choice whole white potatoes I have before me just now. Between the panel of "Nutrition Facts" on one side of the tin, and standardized prep instructions and ingredients on the other, the wrapper is already half gone. Language requirements leave the capitalists to make their pitch on one-quarter of their own label, to be repeated in the other national language at precisely equal size. Our "progressive" masters think labelling is important. This is because they think we are stupid, and need to be told, for instance, that a jar of peanut butter has been produced in a factory where peanuts may have been processed; or that neither you nor your children should drink that bottle of stove cleaner. Indeed: were it not for big brother, we would have to keep our wits about us. Backward-looking mystical Catholic Tory that I am, I consider generic labelling to be the work of the devil, designed to mask the particularity of things, and to subvert wakeful attention. Safety requirements are especially inflationary, and thus predatory. The labels confer a false security, and meanwhile our propensity to kill or injure ourselves regardless, often enough in extremely stupid ways -- or even novel ones when put to the challenge -- provides the nanny state with an ever-broadening ground for new labelling and safety requirements. I made a desultory remark on political labels in this space last week. They perform the same function as generic labelling on food packages. I was agreeing with the leftists who argue that the labels "left" and "right" may no longer have meaning (since anything that can be labelled "right" is thereby ruled out of discussion). I recommended the immediate replacement of these terms with the more vivid and instructive "martian" and "earthling," respectively, as a preparatory measure for getting rid of the former instead of the latter. On Monday, Michael Polowin contributed a useful piece to these pages in which he called himself a "liberal," in defiance of those who say he is "slightly to the right of Attila the Hun." Now, before going a horsehoof farther, let me remind the unthinking reader that Attila was, for all his personal virtues and vices, decidedly a man of the left: a statist and an extreme regulator. So were both Genghis and Kublai Khan, incidentally, and in their various historical contexts, usurping Chinese emperors from Qin Shi Tuang to Mao-Tse Tung, the more innovative Egyptian pharaohs, Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, Otto von Bismarck, and Benito Mussolini (thought we'd give Hitler a rest today): a gallery of typical leftist and statist control freaks, who all made their trains run on time. Polowin reminds us that the term "liberal" was traditionally associated with "individual freedom, the right to personal property, personal responsibility, freedom of speech, and occasionally, state action in the interest of the individual." Indeed: all desiderata with which I was raised by consciously liberal parents, who might have added the irreducible requirements of chastity, and the need to fight Communists in places like Vietnam. My own reactionary right-wing Toryism still includes all these liberal ideals. They are, as Polowin observes, the precise opposite of the "group rights" and nanny statism now routinely imposed by card-carrying Liberals such as the man he calls "King Dalton" of Ontario. He makes an error in associating tyranny with monarchy, however -- an error into which he and many have been led by the same fake-liberal propaganda that associates the great leftists of history with the extreme right. In reality, "leftism" is all about vanguards seizing and extending their power; "rightism" about managing inherited power wisely. Monarchs and aristocrats may be reasonably associated with the "right." But we should remember that those whose power was inherited have tended, throughout history, to rule lightly, with decorative courts instead of faceless, intrusive, Kafkaesque bureaucracies. And being individuals themselves, they have been far likelier to grant their subjects attention and respect as individual human beings. Only a few ever swung to the left. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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