Dion gets it wrong on real freedom
NEIL REYNOLDS
From Friday's Globe and Mail
OTTAWA — It wasn't exactly what he said. It was the way he said it. In a video clip on his campaign website, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion explains why he is a Liberal -- because, he says, "equality of opportunity does not exist with the free market."
The assertion is correct. But why specify "the free market" as the spoiler? In what alternative kind of market does equal opportunity flourish? In the unfree market? No. Mr. Dion vigorously repudiates unfree markets. "We do not want a communistic or totalitarian society," he says. "We want freedom and equality at the same time." Note Mr. Dion's quick resort to utopian absolutes. Freedom and equality. At the same time. Expressed in this alarming fashion, Mr. Dion flees peace, order and good government -- into the embrace of two-thirds of the French revolution.
Equality of opportunity, however roughly defined, is legitimate -- indeed indispensable -- democratic ideology. Equality itself isn't. Equality is the stuff of gulags and guillotines. Mr. Dion should know and appreciate the difference. Democracy itself has contributed much to greater equality of opportunity in the past century. Free markets have contributed more. Economist Michael Cox and writer Richard Alm cite a few of these contributions in Myths of Rich and Poor, an inspiring report card on economic opportunity at the turn of the millennium.
Would you rather be a millionaire living a century ago, they ask, or a regular, ordinary person now? "A nineteenth-century millionaire couldn't grab a cold drink from the refrigerator," they observe. "He couldn't hop into a smooth-riding automobile for a trip to the mountains or the seashore. He couldn't call up news, music, movies and sporting events. He couldn't jet north to Toronto, south to Cancun, east to Boston or west to San Francisco in just a few hours. He couldn't transmit documents anywhere on Earth in seconds.
"He couldn't escape the summer heat into air-conditioned comfort. He couldn't check into a hospital for a coronary bypass to cure a failing heart, get a shot of penicillin to ward off an infection or even take an aspirin to relieve a headache." Aspirin didn't reach the market until 1915.
The point here is not simply that free markets have transformed the lives of regular, ordinary people. It is also that they have transformed the lives of the poor. Mr. Cox and Mr. Alm: "By the standards of 1971, many of today's poor families might be considered members of the middle class." More than 300,000 poor American families (with incomes less than $20,000 U.S. a year) live in homes worth more than $300,000.
How can people remain poor and yet possess most of the trappings of middle-class life? By increased purchasing power. Among households living below the poverty line in the U.S., the cost of essentials (shelter, food, clothing) had fallen by 2000 to 37 per cent of all consumption, compared with 52 per cent in 1980, 57 per cent in 1950 and 75 per cent in 1920.
Statistics Canada has calculated that Canada's poor require a comparable, shrinking percentage of incomes for essential purchases: 35 per cent. And Canadian economist Christopher Sarlo, in Poverty in Canada, found himself "astonished" by the possessions of many poor families -- the dishwashers, the colour TV sets, the personal computers. Most of Canada's poor, he found, were either students, elderly people, whose savings do not count as incomes, and single-parent families. Mathematical principles dictate that roughly 20 per cent of families will always be deemed poor, at least in relative terms, in poverty analysis. In any real-life sense, however, the poor are getting richer in free-market economies. In It's Getting Better All the Time, published in 2000, U.S. economists Stephen Moore and the late, legendary Julian Simon asserted that, at the end of the 20th century, poor people had a standard of living higher than that of all but the very richest people at the start of the century.
Most poor people do get government assistance, of course. It's fair to ask how much this assistance contributes to the increased opportunities in their lives. It's equally fair to ask how much government policies cost them. Do they profit more from social programs, funded by taxes, than they pay for the consequences of slow economic growth caused by taxes and tariffs?
Mr. Dion is a champion of supply-management agriculture, which increases the cost of essential foods to the poor and which simultaneously denies equality of opportunity to subsistence farmers, the really poor of the world's poor. In his quest for equality, Mr. Dion demonstrates that some people are more equal than others. He appears unaware of the discrimination.
What kinds of equality does Mr. Dion want? One hesitates to ask. Though he is an academic, celebrated as a rigorous thinker, he occasionally exhibits a certain exuberant and adolescent self-assurance that, however charming, hints of dogmatic bully boy. From his cryptic manifesto, Mr. Dion appears to think that he can make freedom function as his servant, and perhaps, given the difficulty of the task, as his slave. Sorry, Citizen Stéphane. They tried that. It didn't work.
nreynolds@xplornet.com
