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COMMENTARY
October 10, 2007
Statistics
It is election day in the Province of Ontario. On Saturday I told you I would be voting perversely for my local NDP candidate (the most likely to defeat the Liberal). But since, I've decided to return my ballot. Or at least, try to do so.When Canada was more like a democracy, and before people even dreamed about nonsense like “MMP,” one could return one's ballot, and the returning officer would know what to do. He'd take down your name on the returned ballot list. In theory at least, if there was a plurality of returned ballots in a riding, the election would be obviated, and a new one called in which none of the previous candidates were allowed to run again. These days, I can count on my vote turning up, erroneously, in the “spoiled ballot” column. But that is for something else -- for people who can't hit a square with a pencil from a distance of six inches. On statistics more generally, I am embarrassed to discover that I wrote something indefensible in a recent column (Sept. 26). Mark Beddis, an astute reader in Vancouver, kindly drew my attention to it: “In your piece about government interference in our personal lives, you rightly stated that there are few areas where government is actually useful, and one example you gave was the gathering of national statistics. I was reminded of Sir John Cowperthwaite, one of the great unknown heroes of the 20th century who, as Hong Kong's Financial Secretary in the post-war years, more or less singlehandedly created the conditions for Hong Kong's immense prosperity and, by that example, the elevation from impoverishment of millions of people around the world. He refused to gather statistics about the economy on the grounds that whatever data this yielded would only give grounds for more government interference.” I found this correction galling because the late Scotsman, Cowperthwaite, is among my own “libertarian” heroes. I myself once wrote an admiring review of his accomplishments; and had heard his praises directly from the lips of the sainted Milton Friedman. Cowperthwaite was not a sophisticated “monetarist,” but a classical free-trader from the school of Adam Smith. He weathered a banking crisis and an exchange reserve crisis (neither of his making) without any conspicuous action. He held Hong Kong's top rate of taxation down to 15 per cent. He allowed no tariffs nor subsidies whatever. He never ran a deficit. He slashed any red tape he could find; and was an utter miser in funding the former Crown Colony's welfare, health, and education services. Result: in the decade of his financial administration, through the 1960s, Hong Kong rose from colonial backwater to international economic power, and from Third World to First World environmental conditions, while lifting virtually all of her poorest inhabitants out of their squalour. And this was done while absorbing huge numbers of penniless refugees from Red China, in the very shadow of the murderous Cultural Revolution. Ludwig Erhard is another such hero of mine. Though later the West German chancellor, it was as the “bi-zonal economic director” of the proto-Bundesrepublik in June, 1948, that he made his mark. He chose a weekend when his British and American masters were on holiday, to abolish ALL of the price, production, and currency controls they had introduced. By doing this he went well beyond his authority. He got away with it, however, by staring everyone down. And it was that radical free-market act, and several less dramatic acts like it, that created the conditions for a postwar "economic miracle." Germany rose from the ashes, while Britain, the nominal victor in the war, slumped under the perverted socialist policies of Clement Attlee, and the cowardly Conservative ministries that followed. It wasn't until Margaret Thatcher "did an Erhard" on British price and exchange controls, that Britain began to rebound, more than a generation later. By which time Germany had reinvented herself as a welfare state, and was therefore sinking again. We could go on with today's history lesson, but I am quickly running out of space. So to the point: I am not a libertarian, except in economic policy; I am a Catholic in the main. I'd leave businessmen to business, and other areas of enterprise to other actors. In particular, I think welfare, health, and education are the province not of government but of the family; and that public charity is the domain of spiritual institutions. We used to speak of “Church and State” as the twin pillars of national order. Today, the power of the State exceeds the power of the Church in a ratio of, say, 100-to-1. All I would modestly propose, is to reduce the power of the State by about 90 percent, and increase the power of the Church about 10 times, until they are balanced and approximately equal, at a much smaller aggregate size.rn David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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