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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:06:03
The Trouble with Canada | William Gairdner and Stefan Molyneux
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Alright, so this is William Gerdner, who decided to drop by to promote, and I'll put the graphic up.
The Trouble with Canada Still, which is a fairly extensively revised, if not completely rewritten, update to a book that came out in 1990 that was...
More revolutionary than evolutionary, I think.
And some amazing, amazing arguments, incredibly surprising statistics about Canada, which we'll get into in a sec.
I'm always curious, though, about the genesis of people's ideas.
I mean, to call you a contrarian is probably an understatement, at least back in 1990 that was pretty much unheard of, except for people who were very, very old who may have remembered the way that Canada was before.
Do you think there was anything specific in your upbringing or your background that moved you more towards this way of looking at things, which I think is a fairly correct way of looking at things, relative to everybody else?
Well, I think if I look back myself, I'd say it happened slowly.
As I mentioned in the first part of the book, I voted for Pierre Trudeau when he first ran for power.
It takes a brave man to admit that.
That's shocking honesty.
At the time, I guess, I don't know, Richard Nixon was going through the Watergate stuff and all that.
Everybody figured they had a thief for a president, and I was at school in the U.S. at the time.
Going to university there.
And, of course, I was proud of him.
Boy, we've got this educated, well-spoken fellow who speaks two or more languages, rose in his lapel, the whole thing.
And aren't we superior and all that?
I was completely apolitical.
I went for a PhD in literature and philosophy and not in politics, and I wasn't interested at all in political life.
But as things went forward, I got more and more interested in ideological theories.
And believe it or not, that came out of my interest in literary criticism.
Because at the time, philosophy was heading towards dry, logical studies.
And it just put me to sleep.
And I was more interested in life and experience and, you know, how things actually work.
And that led me towards thinking about ideological systems.
In fact, the first book I wrote was called The Critical Wager.
The subtitle is a mouthful, but the subtitle was Essays in Criticism and the Architecture of Ideology.
Nice. Evocative. Evocative.
Very evocative. Now, why architecture?
Because I began to feel that all human beings go through life with a kind of, well, creating a kind of mental building in their heads.
And everything they see and they do, they kind of bring into their building, and they deal with it in there.
By building, I mean the building of ideas.
So then I began to say to myself, what is an ideology, however sophisticated or basic?
And the conclusion I came to, and this was kind of my definition in that book, was an ideology is an autonomous system of interdependent ideas.
By autonomous, I mean it can stand alone.
Because it's built like a building of interdependent ideas.
They all relate or hook together.
It's kind of like those children's games, you know, like Duplo, Lego, those kind of games where they put things together.
You can build away from it, but you have to be firm on the base or it's going to fall down.
Yeah, and you can't use pieces from a different kind of system because they don't work.
And the key, anyway, for my interest at the time was the question, what holds these buildings together, whether real buildings or Or mental buildings, ideological buildings.
And the conclusion I came to, it was always a foundation stone.
A couple of ideas which were used as foundations for these buildings.
People don't often admit their foundational ideas.
Or may not be aware of them. May not be aware of them.
Or they assume them. Or they don't want them attacked.
So they don't kind of show them, you know?
But if you can find the foundational ideas, the whole building will crumble.
Or they're not proud of them.
There's a terrible thing in ethics where people, it's a sort of pragmatism gone wild, where people love the effects of a certain program or ideology, but they don't want to look at the root causes, right?
And so statism is one of those, right?
Where a lot of people like the effects, whether it's just a better pension or healthcare for the poor or whatever.
Everything free. Everything free, but they don't want to look at the coercion that is initiated to get all of this in motion.
Sorry, go ahead. No, it's okay.
But I mean, if you look at things like the Marxist ideological system, you find out it's built on so-called dialectical materialism.
But once you pull the rug out from under that notion, the whole thing collapses.
They cannot proceed with their arguments and their excuses for coercion.
Well, and Marxism, as you point out, is very similar to socialism in that it points to externalities as the root cause of human behavior, economic conditions or classes or something like that, whereas the Judeo-Christian History, or you could say the Greek or Roman history, is individual responsibility.
Yes, of course, our environment has an effect on us, but it does not determine who we are.
In fact, you could say that's the key to human moral agency.
It's what I call internal freedom.
That sense that even though we may be in jail and have all our liberty gone, we're still free as moral agents.
We can count to ten a hundred times.
We can pace the floor and add it up to a marathon.
Even more interesting, we can actually betray some of our fellow criminals, if we wish, by saying this or that to the authorities.
In other words, we have all kinds of freedom.
Well, I think it could be argued that Socrates died one of the freest men in Athens because he was free within his own mind and accepted his punishment, so to speak.
Let's get to some of the facts.
And I actually wanted to shore up some of these facts, which I think are – I'm sure a lot of people feel they're overrepresented.
I think they're a little underrepresented.
Let's start with this. Tax is so high.
From the 45 years – I remember when you talked to the Libertarian Party, I was waiting for some completely mind-bending number.
The number that came out is smaller.
I think it could be argued that it's larger.
So 1961 to 2007, food goes up 505%.
Clothing, 455.
Consumer price index, 610.
Shelter, 1,063.
Cash income, 1,023.
Increase in taxation was 1,704.
Now, I assume that that's just direct taxation.
That's not counting all of the deferred liability rates.
No, it's probably a...
I think it's a summary of all the taxes that hit an individual in this country.
But not counting deficit...
No, not counting on funded liabilities and so on.
If you go that far, then you're into...
Well, you know, I had a very intelligent fellow last week actually asked me, you know, what's the difference between a deficit and a debt?
I said, well, a debt is just accumulative deficits.
The government goes over budget one year, that's a figure, like a hundred million, whatever.
If they go under over budget...
$100 million the next year, then it's added to that and you get a $200 million debt and so on.
So he sort of understood that then.
And if you look at Canada's situation 20 years ago when this book first came out, Canada's federal debt alone was approaching $500 billion.
Now, these are the kind of numbers people don't really grasp.
Like, what is a billion angling?
You know, people try to make a graphic by saying, well, you know, if you pile one coat can on top of the other, etc., it'll go around the moon eight times, that sort of thing, you know.
But it really is, these are astronomical sums.
And Canada actually tried to do a little better.
I would say, I don't attribute it to my first edition.
Entirely. But who knows?
I think it did have an effect in the sense that it embarrassed our public authorities who finally saw it kind of in one place between two covers for the first time.
Right. And being put about all over the nation on media.
Gee, what are we doing, you know?
So from 1990 forward, they actually made some progress, mostly liberal prime ministers, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.
Really did a good job managing budgets and reducing spending.
And without any catastrophes.
No. Because everything is always talked about.
If we cut anything, they always say, we've eliminated the fat, we're just cutting bone now.
It's not true. There's so much fat to get through before the bone.
soaring over 600 billion now.
And the even bigger picture, if you go back historically, is that from Confederation in 1867 until the Trudeau, Pearson-Trudeau axis, as I call it, which is mid-60s, right?
I like that, because axis of the year old words.
It's all well played. The modern liberal access.
Before that, when we used the word liberal, we thought of people who were freedom fighters and anti-statists and all that.
Of course, in the post-war period, about in the 60s, we started seeing these so-called modern liberals.
They're not really liberals at all. They're socialists by any other name.
Coming into power.
And really what happened was there's a chart in the first chapter of the book which shows you see almost a flat line in terms of federal debt from 1867 to 1967, 100 years of almost zero debt.
In fact, there was about $16 billion.
By the time Trudeau came to power.
But only 14 years later, when he left power, just try to figure this out, there were almost 200 billion in federal debt from one man in 14 years.
I had a calculation done for this book which asked the question, how much interest have Canadians forked over to handle the Trudeau debt since they left power, which was 41 years ago, comes to over a trillion dollars.
Over a trillion dollars. On that amount alone, see?
Well, then Mulroney came into power.
He did better than Trudeau, but not much better.
He was a big spender. And then we had Kretchen and Martin, who pushed it down a bit.
And I think because of this deficit stimulus spending fright, which everybody's had, Harper is becoming a big spender.
Which, you know, you wouldn't expect from conservative prime ministers, but...
Well, he's following the Bush tradition of saying government is the problem and then going hog wild on spending.
And also, to be fair to Stephen Harper, whom I happen to know, he's got his hands in handcuffs and he's not entirely free to govern the way he would like to.
So when he gets pressure on him of all kinds, from the left in particular, I think his reaction is, well, I'm going to have to do some stimulus spending because otherwise I'm out of here.
The other argument, I think, to make for the taxes being higher is inflation and bracket creep.
I remember the details when I first came to Canada in 1977 as a kid.
I was very keen on the price of candy.
It was an important thing to me. It was ten cents to buy.
Right after Halloween, not so much.
But it was 10 cents to buy a candy bar in 1977.
And I believe it was within 10 years it had gone up to a dollar.
There was just staggering amounts of inflation.
Of course, this was back in the day when you could print money and people didn't quite make that connection between printing money and the subsequent inflation, right?
And of course, then inflation drives up the interest rate, which means they have to pay even more on the national debt.
And there was a time, I think, where 30 to 40 percent The federal budget was going on just interest for the national debt.
In 1993, Canada actually borrowed $38 billion to pay $38 billion in interest.
And try that as a private individual.
I mean, that's a Ponzi scheme, right?
No, no. So now we're getting to, I think, the moral nexus of my complaint about debt in Canada is that the $600 billion is bad enough.
But if you add up all public debt in Canada, you know, provincial, federal, municipal, crown corporations, etc., etc., etc., And then you add unfunded liabilities to that.
You come to about $2.4 trillion.
And if you divide that by each man, woman, and child, I mean babies like yours, very young, it comes to $150,000.
You're going to make her cry. She's going to wake up.
My future! Right.
Well, this is the big question.
That comes to $152,000 each.
I mean, which is, to me, whether it's 75 or 100, it's functionally unpayable.
I mean, it's functionally, it's not going to be paid.
There's just no way. Then we're going to end up, as I say, you know, if a business or a family goes bankrupt, they have to shut the doors.
If a country goes bankrupt, it's only a figure of speech.
They go bankrupt with the doors open, meaning they basically plunder from future generations.
And I think that Canadians...
Ought to come to grips and face the fact that we are living immorally in terms of our current consumption.
We are asking future generations, we're asking unborn citizens who aren't even here yet, and therefore cannot defend themselves against our appetites to pay for our current consumption.
There's something very, very wrong about that.
Our own, my father, his father, I mean, they always say, if you have to borrow, fine, but you better have a plan to pay it off.
You know, not like now, where we're saying, oh, you know, we'll let the next generation pay it off.
That's not right. It is absolutely completely immoral.
I mean, the idea of no taxation without representation is bad enough, but the unborn have no say in the matter whatsoever.
And, of course...
There should be surpluses, right, in preparation for the baby boomers retiring and the increased costs of healthcare and so on, but to run deficits and massive debts prior to that is a complete recipe for disaster.
Right. So that's basically the opening feature of this book, where I argue that all the Western democracies are out of control, and Canada is one of them.
What do you mean out of control? I say, well, we simply cannot stop our political masters from spending in our names.
Now, this presents a dilemma for us because if democracy, I put it in quotes because there are all kinds of democracies, ours is one of them, and we can talk later about what kind that is, but at any rate, the theory of modern, all modern democracies is that sovereignty flows upward from the people to the masters whom we are supposed to be able to control.
Well, it's true, if you'll excuse my language, that one of the great glories of modern democracies is that we can throw the bastards out.
And I think that's a reality and a privilege which is incredibly significant that we can do that.
However, when all you have to choose between is parties, say in Canada's case, three parties, who are more or less presenting the same kinds of platform, more spending, more spending, it doesn't matter if you throw them out.
There's nobody else that you can choose unless you actually drop everything you're doing and run for power yourself in.
Well, the argument runs, of course, is where do you get the money to run for office?
You get the money to run for office from special interest groups in return for spending down the road.
And so, in a sense, the only people you get to choose from are people who are already bought and paid for by some form of special interest group that they're kind of beholden to, much more so than they are the average voter.
You said it better than I did.
And the fact of the matter is that this points to a structural...
And we see it happening in Europe where they're crumbling, basically.
I don't know where the European Union is going, but I don't think it's going to a very good place.
You can't just keep bailing out your members.
They were foolish to go to a single currency in the first place because it basically muted the differences between these various economies, which are huge.
Well, it's like you have 12 bleeding people in the ER, but one's bleeding a lot more.
So you take the blood from the other people and give it to the guys.
But that's a no-win situation that's going to run out.
Or you take the blood from the healthy one and make him bleed.
Well, but there are healthy economies.
There's no government in the EU that's running a surplus.
They're all running deficits.
So then, the citizens, we Canadians and all citizens of the modern democracies, ought to be standing up and saying, come on, we have to control this.
How are we going to do that?
I do have some suggestions in the last chapter of my book.
I'll just mention one of them now because we're talking about controlling spending.
I think we need what I call a fiscal guillotine.
That would be something like this.
Any party that stands for election and produces a budget and then produces a deficit two years running must go to election.
And to me, that would be some kind of control that the people would have over the government.
The government would say, obviously, we don't dare to run a deficit.
We just don't dare. They might throw us out.
And so they don't run a deficit.
At least that would be some kind of power, people power.
Right. Just to jump back a little bit, because the genesis of these problems, as you say, was the 60s, where this incredible geyser of gold, in a sense, opened up in Canada.
And when you run the kind of staggering deficit that Trudeau's openly and avowedly socialist agenda hit the country with...
To a lot of people, and very few people are economically educated to the point, like if you press them on the matter, they'll say, well, yeah, I guess the government doesn't have any money to take, but they don't really think about it that way.
It's sort of like daddy with magic money when you're about five years old.
I thought you had a very interesting argument about the role of French versus, in a sense, Anglo-Saxon philosophy in the generation of these sorts of ideas.
Could you talk about that a little bit more?
Because that kind of root, in a sense, you can't really fix the problem until you really know where it came from.
I think that distinction was very important in the book.
And the first chapter kind of focuses on that for this reason.
First of all, I have to clarify for the people who like to attack me in saying that I speak French fluently, I read complicated philosophical texts in French, I enjoy that, and I love French food and culture, and it has nothing to do with that.
What the term, the French idea versus, say, the English idea, what it refers to is the propensity of French intellectuals over the years, probably starting with Descartes.
And this whole business of the, you know, the hegemony of reason and all this kind of thing.
And then moving onwards to Saint-Simon and other, and Comte, and Rousseau, of course, and other French theorists, this is the idea that you could end up with some kind of planned, perfect society.
Okay, how far back do we go?
Why do human beings think That they can create a planned and perfect society.
And why, in the process of doing so, do they start thinking about other human beings, specifically their enemies, as disposable?
A fodder for that idea.
You know, guillotine them, hang them, shoot them, whatever.
And this arguing that, in fact, it's worth it, in the long run, because we'll all be in a heaven on earth.
You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right?
All that kind of stuff. Except the eggs are always somebody else's, and the omelet never comes.
Right. So the long and short of it is, I argue that when Canada was founded in the 1840s to 18, mid-1860s period, that was when we kind of created what we call responsible government.
It was almost a Canadian idea that, you know, this notion that, hey, you're sending governors over here from England and they're responsible to you over there.
You're part of them over there, not to us.
We need them to be responsible to our own assemblies here.
And so we got responsible government, and then we formalized it in the British North America Act in 1867.
The British North America Act was basically a practical document, which was the philosophical underpinning of which was, hey, keep big central government out of the lives of the people in these local parts of the country.
You can't have someone, you know, 3,000 miles away telling you what to do when it comes to matters that you can govern yourself locally.
And particularly with the communication difficulties and transportation difficulties back then, it was completely impossible that Ottawa could respond to anyone.
That's right. But besides being impossible from a practical point of view, our founders were very strong on the notion that human liberty...
Was the most important thing of all.
Most of them had come to the colonies for that reason.
I mean, they thought of America as the new Jerusalem when they came to America.
Now it was going to be a land of freedom, free from government oppression, especially with respect to moral beliefs, religion, things like that, which were so important to our own founders as well.
So, British liberty is the term you could use to describe their entire belief system.
And in the first chapter of the book, I quote from a couple of our founders who say, there's no people on earth more free than the people in these colonies.
So, liberty was the founding basis of this country, British liberty.
By liberty, they didn't mean the modern libertarian ideal, which is kind of, you know, the individualist sort of me against everybody.
And when they thought of liberty, they thought of, you know, liberty to believe in their own God, liberty to run their own political affairs, To unite with their fellows in all sorts of civil associations.
So to them, liberty meant freedom to bond myself to those whom I choose, and those ideas that I choose.
And in that formulation, the government as a concept is not specifically or radically different from the individual, insofar as we all have the right of free association of property and of self-defense.
And those were the principles that the government was supposed to keep.
So there was no massive distinction.
between the government and the individual in terms of their moral rights and capabilities which changed a lot under Trudeau.
So, I think that basically, that was the way Canada was built.
And then in 1982, after a lot of years of muted discussion, because we can't say that Canadians ever really had a full and fair public discussion on the nature of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but along came Pierre Trudeau, and in his mind the whole time was putting together this Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which would kind of mandate socialism for Canada.
That to me was fascinating because I've read Trudeau's autobiography, I've read some books about him, I've never read the kind of Slaavish love affair with socialism that he openly discussed in the 60s.
There was a quote in there from when he was talking to some British students that was just shocking.
In the middle of a Cold War, I mean, if an American president had tried talking like that, I mean, he would have been gone, gone, gone.
But here, even in the middle of a Cold War, somebody could openly praise Castro and can openly praise communism, not even just socialism, because socialism is just slow-motion communism.
He was speaking to British students at the time, too, in England.
And so if you could just run through a few of those quotes, because it's kind of mind-blowing to me that he wasn't just, in a sense, holed up by his gizzards.
No, well, they just basically asked him what kind of socialism he was promoting.
He said, well, basically Cuban socialism or Chinese socialism, you know, from each according to his means.
And that's a phrase straight out of Karl Marx, and he knew it.
He was educated, in quotes, at the London School of Economics.
He was indoctrinated at the London School of Economics.
And this was not picked up really much on the media.
They're all, oh, he's got a buttonhole, and he's dashing, and he's talkless, but there's nothing about his ideology.
Well, Canadians then and Canadians now, I dare say, didn't know much about his ideology and didn't care much.
They don't care much now.
And I'm happy to say this is probably one of the few books, if not the first book, in which many of these statements he made are pulled together in one place.
He was the arch-social engineer.
There's a shocking little sentence or two in that book.
In that snapshot on Trudeau, where he basically says, look, someone asked him what it felt like to govern Canadians.
He said, look, it's like we're on a ship, and all the Canadians are asleep on their deck chairs or smoking their pipes on their deck chairs.
Turn the wheel. Yeah, and I know what he said, that if I just turn the wheel a little bit, when we start, they'll be getting off at a different island than the one they thought they were heading for.
That's a very manipulative thing.
And condescending, of course.
They were all asleep. But true.
That's the annoying thing. But true.
Because we were asleep during that time period.
We did wake up in a different time period. And he never hid from that.
He basically was a real strong man.
He had to admire that. I admire strength in people.
He was very strong, very articulate, very determined, committed to do it the way he wanted.
And Canadians never stood up.
And I must say, I mean, I'm just one citizen.
But I started to see this and get angry about it.
And my wife at breakfast one day said, I wanted to do something about it instead of, you know, complaining.
Yeah. All men have had experience over the breakfast table.
And write about everything. Why don't you say anyone?
Oh, I guess they could. Yeah, and I said, well, we can't do anything until we know what The Trouble with Canada is, and someone has to write a book about that.
And that's why I did the first book, and this is why 20 years later I've written The Trouble with Canada still, to try to explain what's happened over that 20-year period and sort of revisit some of the bones of the argument.
So, anyway, the long and short of it is...
That in the French system of thinking about politics, it's what I call a top-down system.
And the British system that we were founded in, and which is still here in many ways and in many of our institutions, is what I call the bottom-up system.
It's the idea that, you know, authority flows from the bottom, institutional...
Practices flow from the bottom.
Freedom flows from the bottom.
It's in the heart of every man and woman in the country.
It's part of our moral agency.
And so the bottom-up notion was what was, I think, embedded in the BNA Act when it was created.
Trudeau hated it because what it meant was there would be local differences.
Every province would be running its medical system differently, its education Resulting in competition for people if things got bad enough, right?
Which is great. And, of course, a guy like me says, look, if you don't like the medical system and school system in Newfoundland, so move to Ontario or move to BC or wherever.
And provinces under this kind of system, they begin to see themselves as It was putting an upward pressure on quality and a downward pressure on cost, precisely to attract people there for a tax base so that they can run themselves and run their government and not go backwards.
But people like Trudeau didn't like that.
He referred to it as checkerboard federalism because he didn't like having these differences in every area, which is precisely what our founders wanted to encourage.
So he brought in his charter in order to equalize We're good to go.
You can't get deeper into the burdens of the nation than changing the sexual morality of the nation in the way that he did.
So that was a lie. But having said that, he created the reality and the illusion in the minds of Canadian citizens that They could be free as birds.
And all these matters that concern their bodies, you know, abortion rights, homosexual rights, state will pay for all this, legalize it all, daycare, all these kind of things would come up, we'll look after, we'll do it all for you.
But when it came to anything that he thought the state could and should provide publicly, like this outside your skin, like, you know, education, medical care, the National Energy Program, all these kinds of things, I mean...
He regulated that through his charter.
And I guess the next question would be, how did he seduce provinces into going along?
They never seduce anyone.
It's all bribery. Well, I said seduce.
I was leading to the fact that he did it through fiscal bribery.
He basically said to the provinces, okay, the Constitution forbids me to tell you what to do, but I can fund half of your program and seduce you into going along with me.
So that means that local politicians have more money to hand out to new special interest groups, which have more votes.
And the circle keeps going around.
So, fundamentally, what happened was, with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in particular, which institutionalized these changes, we Canadians saw, some of us saw, a radical change, what I call a regime change in the first chapter of the book, in the nature of how Canada was to be governed.
The question now is, what are we to say about that?
80% of Canadians say they love the Charter.
They think it's a wonderful document, but I can walk down any street in this country, your street, my street, and knock on doors and say, what do you think of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?
People say, oh, it's fantastic.
Rights and Freedoms sounds good to you.
And then I say, have you ever read it?
Is it taught in schools, line by line?
Of course not. Was it compared to what came before, so people could see the differences?
Nobody's thought about it, nobody's read it, so it makes me feel that we are a dumb people when I know that we're not.
We're not a dumb people. Canadians are astute and practical.
And the tradition of liberty is still very strongly embedded.
I mean, it hasn't vanished from people.
But yeah, I mean, the language is like the Patriot Act.
How could you be against patriotism?
Rights and freedoms, how could you be against?
People just look at the surface language and say, well, that's what I make my decision on.
Right. And why don't they ever ask themselves, gee, I see this word rights coming up all the time, especially in public discourse in Canada, you know, human rights commissions and things like that.
But where are the human responsibilities commissions?
Mm-hmm. And I wanted to talk about that.
It's a little bit off topic from this book, but it's another book that you've written called The War Against the Family.
And I think that is very, very important stuff because the disintegration of the family unit from the 1950s and onwards, and there's some really great and shocking statistics about the degree to which daycare promotes separation anxiety and all sorts of problems.
In children, it's gone up from 30% to over 50% in just a generation and a bit.
The policies that have eroded, and you quote Charles Taylor, who writes a lot about this stuff, and has written very powerfully about the degree to which the welfare state and all of the subsidies have eroded the commitment that parents have towards each other and towards their children.
And that's a huge undertow, right?
So there's a lot of great knowledge that's coming out there.
that people are understanding, I think, the moral roots of the system, but this undertow of family disintegration is a real battle to be fought in the realm of ideas.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit.
I know it's not the whole topic, but it's a very important topic within this book, and you've got a whole book about it.
Yeah, what I'd like to tell your listeners is that in the first book, I didn't include much about the family.
And some of the criticisms, friendly criticisms, that I got were things like, gee, you didn't talk about the family.
And I said, well, that's another book.
So I wrote a book called The War Against the Family, which came out in 1992, like two years later.
And I have to tell you, it was a difficult and sorrowful experience for me.
Very hard to write.
Some of those topics were just shocking to me as a researcher and a writer.
And so when people now say they want to get that book and read it, I say, you better be sitting down.
Yeah. And I know some of the topics.
I've not read the whole book, but I know some of the topics.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what's happened to the family over the past 20, 30 years.
Well, in the broad picture, what I began to see here, well then and now, and I do mention it in this book a couple of times, is that modern states constitute, for lack of a better term, what I call a political sandwich.
We have the state at the top, which has a monopoly on power.
As a libertarian philosopher, you know a lot about that.
We have autonomous individuals at the bottom, just sort of wandering around.
We can't call them a society.
It's really just a mass of free individuals.
But then we have civil society in the middle, which was constituted of all the voluntary associations, which those free individuals freely bond themselves to.
And under the authority of which they sort of gather, the authority of the churches, the families, the hockey teams that they join.
And what used to be called friendly societies, where people would get together for insurance.
Yeah, so we are very social animals.
That's what human beings are.
Besides being political animals, we're very social.
So I began to see that it is in the interest of states, whether communist states, fascist states, or so-called modern liberal states, it is in their interest To remove the competition for loyalty from citizens.
In other words, they really want citizens to see the state itself as the great provider.
And so you get this drive in modern times.
Now, I specifically say modern times, although we've always had it.
For example, the Romans had it, and many other states have had it.
But what really distinguishes the modern states from all previous states in human history, I think, is the incredible wealth.
Which has enabled, in turn, an incredible tax harvesting.
Yeah. Which has enabled, in turn, an incredible degree of regulation of the lives of ordinary people.
So the state comes along and says, well, here's this stuff and fellow living over there on that street.
And, you know, I see him running home from work to his family and I see him running out to play hockey in the corner rink with his buddies and this and this and that.
And he's not thinking about us.
He's not thinking about government and about the state.
And we'd like to get some of that loyalty that he expresses to all these people.
So we're going to We're going to sleep in and we're going to take more of his money and then we're going to build a little government daycare center right down the street.
Suddenly, Seth is not going to be hiring a nanny or the girls in the evening to come and daycare his little baby.
He's going to take it down the street to the government daycare center.
We need to build more hockey rinks and fitness centers and things like that because we see he spends a lot of time with his friends there.
And who is he grateful to?
His friends, his buddies, his team, his coach.
But he could be friendly to us if he just thought that it was all coming from us.
So let's take just a little more money and we'll build a fitness center down the street.
Or even better, we'll borrow some money so it seems like he's got magic fitness center for nothing.
He won't even know. He won't even know.
His kids will pay, his grandkids will pay, and all this kind of thing.
So what I'm trying to describe is the process by which modern states have set about using taxpayers' money to disassociate them from their normal human associations and swing their loyalty over to the state itself.
So in the end, this sandwich looks very different.
You have a very powerful state at the top and a mass, increasing numbers of autonomous individuals at the bottom All looking for things with which to affiliate.
And the middle layer is becoming more weakened all the time, so they turn away from it.
They do go to the government fitness center, and they do go to the government daycare, and they do, you know, all this kind of thing.
So eventually you get a breakdown of civil society, and the argument I often use is that That's too bad because that's our only real defense against the state as individuals.
You and I are powerless against the government as individuals.
But if we can band together, say one and a half million families in Canada can band together and scream at the state about how we want it to get the hell out of our lives and stop competing with us for the family functions that we feel are normal to families, it will back off.
But one person can't do anything.
Right. Yeah, there is definitely this hollowing out.
And then there is an experience that you have, which you studied the history of what the world used to look like.
I think we've all experienced that.
If you remember in 1984, there's the scene where Winston Smith goes into the bar and he finds a guy who's really old.
And he starts asking him what was life like before, because all they get is propaganda from their government.
And he's asking, well, what was life like before this takeover and so on?
And the guy can barely remember it.
He can't. And trying to reach sort of through this memory hole, this blackness into the past becomes really hard.
I mean, I was at a conference in California recently.
I was speaking there, and I saw a great presentation from a guy who was saying that before socialized medicine or Medicare or Medicaid, he was talking about the U.S. experience.
There were these friendly societies where about 90 to 95% of the poor had their medical costs covered by a small contribution to a general pool which then people would draw from as necessary.
But of course, once the government comes in, it elbows aside all of these voluntary societies.
And then people say, well, without the government, there'd be a huge void and no one would get health care.
Or whatever it is.
In fact, they lose their interest in doing it themselves.
Well, it becomes pointless. And they want the stages back.
Look at the Soviet Union.
There's a large percentage still of Russian citizens.
Who pined for old Stalin.
They want it all back because, well, they didn't have to do anything for themselves.
And they, in a sense, human beings, the one thing that is constant is our capacity to adapt to different social environments.
And so once you adapt, you become sort of a...
You have to have that environment around you.
I mean, think of clawing back government spending.
It's so challenging. And of course, they're facing this in Ireland at the moment.
They face this in Greece. They're going to face it.
What a disappointment in Ireland.
Oh, my goodness. Oh, I know.
I did not expect to see the Irish doing this.
Not like the Greeks.
But it's the same thing, Bill.
Every time you get freedom, and freedom generates massive wealth, as you talked about, which then is like a blood vessel going straight into the cancer of the state, feeding, feeding, feeding.
We need systems to cut the blood off.
I remember 10 years...
When I was in the IT field 10 or 12 years ago, people were talking about Ireland was the economic miracle of Europe.
It went from grinding poverty, lowered its corporate tax rates, invited all of these major corporations in, massive job growth, and I remember saying even at the time, hey, you know what they're going to get?
There's a huge government now.
Because it's like, ooh, all this tax revenue, and everybody swarms to this money geyser.
You were right. And what a disappointment, anyway.
I think, you know, so many brilliant and culturally important people have come out of that tiny island.
I mean, think of the great writers, you know?
Oh, yeah. Just think of them. I mean, it's just wonderful stuff and bright, astute people.
I mean, how could they fall for that?
But then one day, I think, if they're not already, people are going to say, how could Canadians have fallen for this?
When the Brinks truck explodes, and money is scattered all through the air, people lose their reason, right?
And that's what the government, a huge Brinks truck exploding, and their money is just floating through the air, and people just go crazy.
I mean, that's what happens. So it's a strong order, but for people like you and me, and for many of the readers of this book, government, we know, needs to have some basic functions, which are pretty minimal.
But after that, I mean, government is the enemy.
The state is the enemy, and it doesn't always have to behave like an enemy.
Actually, when it's being most like an enemy is often when it's the most friendly.
We'll give you daycare.
Don't worry. We want to look after you.
We all care about the poor.
Yeah, all that kind of thing. The only people who currently care about the poor are the people looking for a radical revision of the system.
The people who are part of the status quo, because the poor are going to suffer the most when the system hits the wall.
Well, we have to actually have a situation where in welfare states like Canada, we need the poor.
To justify the various structures that are put in place.
You talk about this in the book, The Sliding Scale of Poverty, that no matter where you are as a country, there's always the same number of poor or more, and therefore you need greater funding.
And they call people poor who have a car and a microwave and maybe even...
It leads to a situation where if you become a more wealthy country tomorrow, it automatically means you have more poor people.
Even though they are also wealthier.
There's two other topics I'd like to touch on, depending on how much time you have.
The one that was very surprising to me was the amount of crime in Canada.
That's something because, of course, people who come from the U.S. have seen Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore's film, where he comes up to Canada and all the doors are unlocked and everybody gives him a hug and a donut.
But the degree of crime within Canada, which, as you point out, is largely driven by Aboriginal men, who are less than 2% of the population, or 26, 27%.
28% of all homicides in Canada are by...
Aboriginal men at 1.9% of the population.
And if that doesn't give people the idea that more government isn't a good thing, there's nothing but government all over the Aboriginal communities, right?
I mean, nothing but massive funding and programs and corruption.
It's crazy, right? But a little bit about the history of crime in Canada, and although there's been a bit of a diminishment, it still is one of the highest reported criminal activity countries in the world.
That's the UN figure for reported crime, what they call police reported crimes.
So if someone comes down the street and steals your doorknob off your house and you call the police, that's a police-reported crime.
About 90% of all these things are, I wouldn't say petty.
It's enough to make people angry enough to call the police.
That's how we tally it.
And then we send our reports into the UN. And if you look on their website, that's what you're going to see.
About 90% of it is anything from, you know, stealing the doorknob down to...
You know, burning down your garage, you know, arson and car theft and more and more serious things, until you get to the violent crime, which is probably 10 or 12% of all crime.
And that's the stuff that people are most concerned about.
Here's the picture, and I have good graphs in the book which show you.
Crime in most Western democratic nations, same with Europe, same with USA, really kept rising until about the 1990s.
And then it began to fall gradually, even though the point at which it's fallen is still about 300% or 400% higher than it was in the 1960s.
So we've got to take that into consideration.
And also, society is far wealthier now than it was in the 1960s, so even if we consider poverty as a cause of crime, it's even that much worse, right?
But here's something I think which is a devastating insight.
It's not particularly mine, although I did write about it before I saw some backup justification.
This is the Freakonomics chapter?
Yeah, the Freakonomics chapter.
I mean, here it was. A friend of mine pointed me to it and said, Bill, I hear you, he said, but a couple of good economists have already written about this.
And that is the notion that modern abortion, which is basically a free-for-all, especially in America and Canada, Less so in many of the European countries, where after the first trimester, it's quite limited, depending on the country you're in.
But in Canada, there's no law against divorce.
Right up to the moment before birth, you've got some horrifying writing about what happens to babies right before they're born.
Oh, it's shocking. Yeah, you read that.
I read it like one eye and one lie.
That's right. That's what I meant when I said it was really harrowing writing about that book, a family book.
That's very grim. So here's a situation where the Americans, in an interesting phrase which I use in the crime chapter, they call it womb lynching.
And what they're basically getting at is that we've been getting rid of potential criminals by killing them in the womb.
Especially in the case of black Americans.
This is a devastating statistical fact of American life that I think 38% of all American abortions are performed on black mothers.
Yeah, who are 10% or less of the population, if I remember.
Well, blacks are 12%, maybe 13%, so women would be 7%, females.
But fertile women who are having kids would be lower.
Even lower. So we have this devastating situation where there's a kind of, yeah, a womb lynching taking place.
So 20 years later, this was 1973 when Roe v.
Wade first came in. It was later in Canada, but Canada was getting pretty loose anyway.
I think 88 when we shot the Canadian law down.
But the long and short of it is that you're talking about anywhere from 25 to 40 million people who aren't here because we've been killing them off in the womb.
Half of those were men who would have been in their crime-creating years had society not improved itself in order to control some of that and redirect them.
Right. Et cetera, et cetera.
They would have been here doing that.
And so you see crime tumbling from the early 90s on.
Right. Right. It's a devastating reality.
So some people say, ah, well, then abortion is good.
No, I said, I didn't say that.
I said it's a consequence of abortion.
Well, then we could say, well, let's start killing off Aboriginal babies because they put on male babies.
I mean, that's no argument because it's a pretty wide net to catch a few criminals, right?
Yeah. But there is the reality of what our Western country and democracies have been doing.
Now, I don't know if you want to go even farther with this, but I enjoy thinking about it.
I say that all the Western democracies, for this reason, have become slave societies.
What are you talking about, Bill?
I appreciate the argument, so feel free.
My listeners will get it, so feel free.
I say we have all become slave societies.
And honestly, when people first hear this, they say, oof, wacko notion.
I say, well, it's not really, because what made slavery possible for the Romans, for the Greeks, and for the Germans when they did it in the Second World War, which they did, and for the Americans, which they did throughout centuries of their history, was the declaration of non-personhood of another human being.
So they basically created a special category of law, I call it category law, which said that this person, this slave, is not a real human being, not a person.
That's exactly what the Romans and the Greeks did.
Now, the reason they had to do that was because if those people were considered persons in the law, they would have had rights against their own confinement, against being a slave.
The same as kidnapping.
Right.
All kinds of interesting things come out of this, but my argument is that's exactly what we've done in the modern democratic regimes.
It goes like this.
In order to sustain and institutionalize our philosophy of individual human freedom, which is basically about the power of the human will, we've had to declare somebody a non-person, and that person is the unborn child in the womb.
We basically say, you're not a person, and therefore the mother can exercise her full will upon you.
This leads to devastating realities in our lives.
I have a doctor friend who said, Bill, there's a wall this thick.
Between my operating room and the next one.
In the next operating room, he said, the state is spending a million dollars keeping this four-pound premature baby alive.
Maybe two million. In my operating room, not by me, he said, but in my operating theater, at the very same hour, somebody's aborting a woman and throwing a four-pound baby in the garbage.
How do you put that together and what's the difference between that one-inch wall and the two rooms?
Well, the difference is the exercise of the human will.
That's what it's come down to.
The woman has said, I want this child, and this woman has said, I don't.
And the way in which, as you point out, they're drilling holes in the baby's skull.
When they're bigger and older, the partial birth abortion is a devastating reality.
I don't think it's practiced in Canada now, but if it is practiced, you're not going to hear about it, because it'll be done quietly by somebody in a private contract with their mother or something like that.
I doubt that it's happening, but I can't say that it never has.
Right, and of course, as you say, there's no law about it whatsoever.
So the general argument here was that we are now slave societies, and what is sort of consistently interesting about all slave societies is they don't see the evil that they are practicing.
The Romans didn't see it.
In fact, Aristotle, for example, he said slavery was normal.
Why was it normal? He said because slaves don't protest.
If they were really free, like the rest of us, they would run away, or they would kill themselves.
Anybody facing slavery must be humiliated, so why wouldn't they just kill themselves?
So obviously they don't, because it's free, it's part of their condition.
These arguments were made, and of course in America, in the Civil War, which was fought over that, and was fought over other things too, like states' rights, but slavery was certainly central to it.
But Americans said it's natural.
If black people are inferior, they're not really like us, therefore we have a category law to come together.
And maybe over time we can humanize them to the point where in the distant future they might, and it was out of the white man's burden and all of that.
What I'm getting at here is that they didn't see it.
See it morally, see it practically or actually.
That's why many of them fought it so hard.
And I'm saying that in modern society, which is a democratic society, with the philosophy of democratic individual freedom is very powerful.
People cite it all the time.
We don't see that we have actually created slaves in order to justify our philosophy.
If it weren't so, we have to say, I'm not free, because I've got another human being inside me, and I can't impose my will on that human being.
Therefore, I'm not ultimately free.
Right, right. Right, and I think it also goes, what we were talking about earlier, that what has grown since the 60s is an opposite morality between the state and the citizen, whereas before there was a congruence between what an individual can do and what the government could do.
So the individual could act in terms of self-defense, but if he was unable or unwilling to, the government would have an agent act on his behalf in terms of self-defense or at least retaliation.
But now you have the government doing things which are specifically forbidden to the population, right?
So I can't go up and down the street with a gun and say, my kid needs an education, give me your money.
But the government can do it on my behalf.
I can't go up and down the street with a gun and say, I need an operation, give me your money.
But the government can do it on our behalf.
So we've created this, in a sense, moral vortex where up is down and black is white.
For the state, it is immoral not to initiate force.
But if it's citizen, it is a moral to initiate force.
And that dichotomy between private and public morality, I think, is creating an increasing distance between citizen and state.
And a sort of vassalship, a kind of slavery, because that opposite morality, it takes away the universality, and everything becomes relativistic and...
We're consequentialist or pragmatic.
In other words, if we allow this agency to initiate force, are we going to get some result that we like in the short run?
And of course, in the short run, you are.
Just like a thief is going to go steal a car, in the short run, he has a new car.
In the long run, he's destroyed his own work ethic, he's made it less important for other people to own cars, and he's created an ethic that can't be universalized.
Somebody has to want to own a car in order for him to steal a car, so he's got an opposite morality going on.
And that kind of fragmentation from a central universal moral ethic, I think, has been a tragic consequence of what's gone on since the 60s.
Yeah, it has.
You used the word moral there quite a few times, and we can comment on that, I suppose.
That's my key thing. I want to say, before we do, that some great French writer in the 1920s, I can't remember his name now, but he said there's only three things...
That matter in politics.
He said public and private.
You know, huge distinction.
What he called command and obedience.
And insider-outsider.
Those three things are the realities of all political systems.
That's brilliant. Yeah.
It's not somewhat meaningful for a French writer to be that concise.
Isn't that right? No, I just wanted to mention that, and we were leading up to something else, which I've But if you step back from all politics, and this man who said that wasn't supporting it necessarily, he's just saying, that's the way it is.
This is the way it is, yeah. Yeah, it's about public, private, command and obedience, and insider-outsider.
That, by the way, leads me to say that something which, again, kind of, I wouldn't say shocks people, but they kind of go, whoa, never thought of that.
And that is that all important social institutions that we belong to are fundamentally illiberal.
In the sense that, they create an insider-outsider division.
There are very simple examples.
For example, when you marry someone as lovely as your wife, you have unique access to her being, just like she does to you.
Nobody else does. You're an insider in this marriage.
No one else can claim those rights to you.
That's illiberal in an egalitarian sense.
Yeah, for sure, that's an exclusionary factor in a marriage by definition, right?
Yeah, but it begins to appear to me, and I try to outline how this works in the book in a couple of places.
What I call social bonding is an essential product of this exclusivity and this illiberal nature of civil society.
And this is what makes civil society the enemy of the egalitarian state, because everywhere the state looks, It sees these illiberal organizations.
Your marriage is illiberal because it doesn't include gays, for example.
It doesn't include other people.
Your very definition of marriage, I would assume.
I don't know what you think about that.
And when you go play for your soccer team, You subscribe to the rules of the club.
You obey the coach. You pay your fees.
Driving to the soccer team.
I'm going to go on the road on the right.
Some other fellow walks along and says, hey, I want everything you're getting from that soccer team, but I don't want to join the soccer team.
You say, well, you can't. You're either inside or you're outside my soccer team.
Same with your company. You're an employee or not.
The company will fight for you, pay you, give you pensions, do whatever, but it's not going to do that for everybody.
It's just for you. There's a process which people go through when they enter into these...
Voluntary associations, as they're formally called.
And it's always illiberal.
And the last thing that it creates, this process of commitment to these organizations, the last thing that it creates is privileges for the member.
You become a member in your own marriage.
You have privileges no one else has in your marriage.
And no one else has who doesn't subscribe to the bonds of marriage in society as a whole.
Except with a charter in hand, and the egalitarian principle, which is that you're discriminating against me if you don't give me those things, they are getting them.
Right. And you know, I thought it was interesting how you pointed out that discrimination used to be a positive word.
I'm a discriminating purchaser, right?
I'm a discriminating individual, but it got conflated with racism or other kinds of isms, which I think we can all accept are pretty nasty.
And that's a real shame, that to have a preference of any kind now almost is called discrimination.
And technically I suppose it is, but that became negative.
They made a perfectly good and important word dirty, which is too bad.
Because all parents used to turn to their children and say, well that was not a very discriminating remark.
What I meant was, you haven't got the nuances and the niceties of this distinction myself, that kind of thing.
It's a proud word. Now it's been stolen from us, and you're made to seem like somebody evil if you even use it.
But the same with the word prejudice.
Burke used to say that prejudice was just morality made habit.
And he called them prejudices.
You should be prejudiced in favor of the good and against things that are bad and so on.
In other words, it got stolen.
Right. And that's part of, I think, the great tragedy of the philosophical movements of the second half of the 20th century is that instead of freedom...
It became freedom from, right?
Instead of the freedom to act in such a way that I don't impact on other people's rights negatively, it became a freedom from consequences, right?
So that I cannot take care of my health and other people will pay.
And the last bit I'd like to touch on is this issue of healthcare, because there's this myth that people are in general desperate need of catastrophic healthcare.
That people just dropping with heart attacks and cancers and aneurysms or whatever, and so we need to give poor people all this stuff.
But one of the things that I found very surprising and actually good, because I found I'm actually following these habits, was the idea that the majority of health ailments are self-created, are the result of bad habits.
And causing the healthy and responsible people to pay for the subsidizes the bad behavior and punishes the good behavior, which is only going to cause health care costs to escalate.
So I was wondering if you could dip into that a little, because it's a real sacred cow throughout most of the Western world, becoming more so in America.
Yeah, well, first of all, with respect to health care, I would say that it was one of the first things that was co-opted by statists.
After education. Always education first, and then...
Yeah, and that's because, I think it was Jefferson who said, ages ago, he said that the philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.
No question. So, people who organize government education realize, quicker than anybody, that if you want to control the government, you have to control the mindset of the people, and you've got to start young.
Start teaching them that mindset.
The old Jesuit argument, give them their voice to Stephen and he's mine for life, right?
Yeah, that's right.
There was a very interesting British movie, by the way, made on that theme called 28 Up.
That's right. They followed these kids, right?
They followed these kids from 8 to 7 upwards until they were 30-some-odd and finally abandoned it, but I don't think it's going anymore.
And every seven years...
I've been meaning to watch that. I've had a number of recommendations.
Every seven years they made the movie again.
It was quite interesting. But that was basically the thesis.
You get these characteristics.
Right. At a very early age, and then, you know, watch where it goes.
Well, states with setting up public education systems in which the teachers styled themselves as change agents.
A terrible word.
These people really thought about, well, changing the minds of the people at a very young age.
Now, if you want to see the institutionalization of this in Ontario, for example, You go to OISE, which is the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
It's actually, from my daughter's point of view, who spent a year there to get her teaching certificate, a massive brainwashing organization.
They graduate about 600 teachers a year.
And she said, Dad, when I started there, I was slightly enough to set her.
She said, I came out a staunch conservative.
I could not... That's a real fork.
You're never going to say the same, right?
No, she said, I could not believe, I could not believe what they are basically forcing these teachers to learn and to say to their students and the documents they're using and brainwashing plus, plus, plus.
She was sitting beside a man from Romania who came to Canada and wanted to get his teacher's certificate.
He was about 55 or 60.
And he would be there very quiet listening to all this nonsense and then he would nudge my daughter Ruthanne and he would say, Ruthanne, he said, this is exactly what I escaped in Romania.
This is exactly what I escaped in Romania.
Because she was protesting and trying to be brave and speak against me.
He said, shut up, he said.
Shut up, he said. Take you Go make your life.
He said, you will never change these people.
We did exactly the same thing in Romania.
And this fellow apparently translated Orwell's book, Animal Farm.
And for it, he was persecuted.
He said, I escaped from my country with machine guns at my back.
They were firing at me when I went across the border.
And he said, you don't have machine guns yet.
He said, you have prison without bars.
Prison without bars. Prison without bars in this country, you know.
Orthodoxy prisons. I'm ashamed to say that he's right.
When I was 18, 19 years old, my mom used to subscribe to Life magazine.
I remember in the Maoist Great, whatever he called it.
The way to leap forward, right? The way to leap forward revolution.
There was this picture of Tiananmen Square with like a million Chinese students, all dressed in the same black, all waving their red books.
There was a sea of red books with these ridiculous sayings in it.
I have a copy, so I read them.
Ridiculous sayings. And I remember shaking my head and saying to my mom, I said, wow, I said, I'm so glad we live on a We don't have indoctrination commissions.
We don't have human rights commissions.
We don't have people sending you to re-education classes, which we started doing in Canada, I would say, 20 years ago.
I remember the first ones.
This professor at University of Toronto was swimming in the pool where there were women swimming, and he was charged with ogling, ogling, whatever they call it, spying on the women.
And he had to go to sexual harassment classes.
And be re-educated.
But they were doing this in China en masse, and they're still doing it in China en masse, and now we're doing it in Canada.
And the culture of the country as well.
I thought it was noble and I can completely understand the crumbling that occurred afterwards when you said to the first publisher, I think it was the person who first published this book, I don't want to be supported by the government, right?
Because it's all a lie.
I mean, you're not supported by the government, you're supported by the taxpayers.
That to me was amazing too, and I can't remember the number of them.
The amount of money that has gone to radical feminist groups within Canada, It's in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Well, 1.5 billion, since 1973.
This is the first place to see it summarized, by the way.
Right, and the degree to which...
So people don't understand that the government pays people to lobby itself and that a large portion of what we call culture is government funded.
And that has huge effects.
People are very sensitive to the charge of hypocrisy.
So if you take government money and then criticize the government in its fundamentals, people aren't going to focus on your arguments.
They're going to focus on the, quote, hypocrisy.
It steers people away in a very subtle way from the kind of moral criticism of the society.
Because if you're taking the money, it's really tough to stand up with your fist in the air and criticize it morally.
He pays the bike for girls.
And so people don't understand that what they see in the art, what they see on TV, what they read about in the newspaper, is heavily skewed by this current of money that's just underflowing everything.
I don't know if I mentioned it in the book, but I was invited because my book, the first edition, was a big-time bestseller.
And so I was invited to an annual event held in Toronto for everybody in the publishing world around here.
And so there I was in a room with 400 people.
I mean, editors, illustrators for children's books, publishing houses, I mean, authors, I mean, all kinds of stuff.
I think I was, I'm sure, I was the only one in the room who's Whose undertaking had not been subsidized by government?
Because I told them, no way!
Yeah, magazines, too, that their mailings are all subsidized, and they get a huge amount of grants and money from the government.
And I think if you said it was finally, after many years, that real women, who are much more traditional in terms of their approach to feminism, finally got $21,000, as opposed to $1.5 billion.
Yeah, but they only applied to see if they could get it, to try to break them down.
They didn't want the money. And when I was arguing with the head of the so-called National Action Committee on the Status of Women at the time, On TV, she was saying to me, I said, how many members do you have?
She said, well, we've got, you know, whatever it was, 4 million members or something like that.
Some ridiculous figure.
And I said, well, why don't you just ask them for $5 each?
Why do you have to take my She just was dumbfounded.
Didn't know what to say. Well, because she knows that if she would have asked...
And she didn't have 4 million members.
What she did was she would go, for example, to the YMCA, which has, say, 200,000 members or whatever they have in Canada, and say, if you join as an individual, can we say that all your members are members?
And then they would say yes.
Oh, and then they wave four million votes in front of politicians, and that's how they get the money, right?
Yeah, that's what it's going to be. It's a great shakedown.
You know, democracy, if you look at the...
Just a different understanding. Yeah, if you look at the...
If you lift the lid and the rhetoric around how a system works, I mean, the amount of shakedowns and bribery and manipulation is...
Yeah. Gruesome and grisly.
I'd rather watch sausages getting made in slow motion than see how our laws get put together, right?
Right, right.
And I think the big picture here is that you have to ask yourself why have we found ourselves in a situation where, in fact, the people who are really steering this society are really governing from the side.
They're members of these groups, these political action groups that influence government from the side.
It's not a bottom-up situation where the people are demanding radical feminist programs, for example.
Canadians have never demanded radical feminist programs.
It's not possible.
Canadians have never demanded abortion on demand, for example.
Canadians have never demanded the end of capital punishment.
These were all government things.
No, they didn't say, let's start reducing criminal penalties to the point where murderers get...
You say the statistics are skewed as well, because the murderers get a plea down to plead a plea bargain, a manslaughter, and then they get out.
It doesn't get counted as murderers, because they bargain.
It's a disaster. What I was getting at was that we do live in this world where we are being pushed around by people who have utopian ideas for how society ought to be.
And they'll do almost anything they can.
In particular, they will try to circumvent the normal channels of normal And what has really fallen into their hands is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, because people don't understand that the words in the Charter, which are crucial to the direction of society from the point of view of social activists, they're all nouns or verbs.
They're not adjectives, they're adjectives.
In other words, they're not being qualified.
You see the word equality, but the Charter doesn't say what equality is.
The judge has to say that.
In other words, he has to supply the adjectives.
For the word. And because he's not elected, and he's there for life, he can bloody well say whatever he wants.
Well, governments are about limiting the behavior of others.
They don't like their own behavior to be limited.
That's why the Constitution is a living document, right?
Which means it's like a zombie feasting on the brains of the people.
Yeah. But the point I was getting, I guess, was that these social activists, or change agents, they're all over Canada.
And most of them are subsidized in one way or the other, or they wouldn't be doing any of it, because they're not paying it with their own money.
They are unhappy with the condition of the democratic state.
They don't like the fact that, you know, there's so much free enterprise around, that people are free to make their own decisions, using what I call dollar democracy.
They don't like that. So democracy has been most unpleasing to them.
So they are circumventing it, and they are circumventing it in the many ways I describe in my book.
Well, listen, I don't want to keep you here all afternoon, and you've also got some hideous traffic to get through, but thank you so much for taking the time.
The book, and I'll put the graphic up again, is called The Trouble with Canada Still.
It's a long read, but it is a great read.
It is a great read. I particularly appreciate the statistical breakdowns, the analysis, the charts, the huge amount of data that has been, I know you haven't done all the work yourself, it's been lying around waiting for somebody to put it into a coherent picture, and that is fantastic.
And if I could close by saying, just for the benefit of your listeners who are not from Canada, I get letters and email letters all the time from people who say, all you have to do is change the name of the country.
And this is describing our country.
You know, Britain, USA, whatever.
It is the trouble with a fragmented, subjective, relativistic democracy that focuses on consequences and bypasses the natural limits on behavior, which is consequences.
So if you introduce a government program and you immediately tax people for it, they will get that it's not free.
So what you have to do whenever you introduce any kind of government program, and this is universal to all the Western democracies.
I mean, if the people who wanted to go to war in Iraq got a bill the day that the war was declared, they might find themselves leaning a little bit more towards non-invasion.
And so this soft bribery of the present while billing the future is a huge problem.
And so it's not yet, you're exactly right, it is not specific to Canada.
There's information in here that applies to every Western democracy, which are all facing the same kinds of problems.
Maybe a little more here, maybe a little more there.
But I think it's really, really important for people to read this kind of stuff and to get the facts behind the arguments and to see the degree to which the consequences of reality line up so beautifully with common law morality.
We all know that theft and bribery and all these things don't result in good things, and we're seeing that in a grand scale.
So it's heartening in a way for ethicists to see the effects of this kind of immorality because it really does say that morality has consequences and That can be predicted ahead of time and that are almost universally negative in the long run.
And so we can go back to sort of a moral analysis rather than, well, if we pay more money here, we get better effects and we don't notice what's being taken away.
Right, right.
And I think that's a great argument that you make in the book.
Well, Stephen, thank you so much for having me on your show.
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