Canadian Cincinnatus

How President Obama could have beaten Glenn Beck at his own game

While I am not normally in the habit of giving political advice to Barack Obama, the political strategy wonk in me can’t resist.

Instead of continuing to enjoy the high life in Martha’s Vineyard and pretending that he hadn’t paid any attention to a gathering of 300,000 to 1 million people in Washington DC, Obama should have joined Glenn Beck at the Lincoln Memorial.

Because the Restoring Honor rally was billed as non-partisan (which I can attest to since I listened to most of it on satellite radio) with the goal of raising money for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation ($5 million has been raised so far), it would have been reasonable for Obama to have politely and publicly asked ahead of time to attend, stating that, as Commander-in-Chief, he is keenly interested in helping out a charity that supports the widows and orphans of Special Forces soldiers. Beck would have then been morally obligated to invite him. If Beck had refused him, he would have looked like a hypocrite and a fool.

Then, if the President had confidently strode into the lion’s den and given a non-partisan speech stressing the importance of honour while praising the military that he leads, he would have dramatically demonstrated courage and fair-mindedness – two particularly attractive qualities in a leader. He would have hit a political home run right out of the field. 

But by staying away, Obama implicitly sided with the arrogant and increasingly vicious media whose hysterical and condescending reaction to the Restoring Honor rally is a reflection of their own dawning realization that they are on the wrong side of the American people and therefore history. (Here is a particularly egregious example.) A smart politician would be looking for opportunities to distance himself from the losers who have declared war on ordinary Americans. But I guess, he isn’t that smart a politician.

Another million-man march nobody ever heard of

I am of course speaking about the Glenn Beck rally this Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial. The best estimate I could find pegged the crowd at 330,000 people. What was the media reaction? Chirping crickets - with smatterings of haughty condescension intermingled with empty charges of racism they don’t even bother trying to justify.

Let’s take another case: the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington, DC last year. Crowd estimates for that event varied from 300,000 to 2 million but the whole thing has vanished entirely down the mainstream media memory hole as if it never happened. Think about it! A million people or more marched down Washington in I’m-as-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore mode and its not deemed significant.

 If the media really were in the news reporting business, you would think they would make as big a hullabaloo over these events as they did over Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March (with about 300,000 participants) or Woodstock (450,000 attendees). But they are increasingly not in the news reporting business so they don’t.

Conservatives love to commiserate among themselves about the ratchet effect – that is, that big government always expands, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, but that there is nothing that can be done to stop it. Every expansion is permanent. According to this theory, the best a determined conservative leader can do is to keep the government at bay. He can’t push it back, but once he’s gone and the liberals are back in charge, the onward march resumes again.

Well, the media treatment of these rallies reveals another ratchet effect, one pushing in the other direction. Every time the media buries a story – the expansion of shall-issue concealed carry laws across the US in the 90’s, the Duke rape case acquittal, the Americorp Inspector General scandal, the New Black Panther voting rights scandal, etc. – they may succeed somewhat in burying an inconvenient fact, but each time they do, their credibility diminishes a little bit. The news leaks out and more eyes get opened, the mainstream media ratings incrementally drop, Fox News ratings incrementally rise, and Rush Limbaugh’s gets a few more listeners.

This effect has been going on since the mid 90’s and the evidence for its existence is now overwhelming. The news departments of the big three broadcast networks are at historic lows and all are heavily in the red; the New York Times and Washington Post are almost bankrupt; Newsweek was just sold for $1 (the buyer overpaid).

The case of Rush Limbaugh is very instructive. With regard to his ratings, every month in the past two decades has been his best month ever. He recently signed a $400 million renewal deal. Yet his negative ratings in public opinion polls are consistently among the highest of any public figure ever. How to explain the discrepancy?

Easy. He has about 25 million listeners. America has 310 million people. Even in its debased state, the mainstream media still reaches significantly more people than he does. And the media hate Rush and never pass up an opportunity to slag him. Their favourite technique is to take something he said out of context. If the MSM is your only exposure to him, you hate him too. But the truth gets out. People chance upon Rush on the radio. They discover that they agree with his views a whole lot more than they do with Katie Couric’s.  Each time this happens, Katie’s ratings go down incrementally and Rush’s go up. The key point here is that once people switch, they don’t switch back - ever. This is the reverse ratchet effect. 

It has been said that the mainstream media is really the gatekeeper media because an increasing part of what they do is to keep the gate shut. But they can’t keep it completely shut all the time. There is leakage. Over time, the leakage compounds. Until we reach the situation we find in 2010 when the MSM is almost completely under water.

I believe that the foundations of the mainstream media in the US have been eroded so much that the entire US media world is ripe for a gestalt switch. I predict that in the next two to four years, the conservative media will become the mainstream media - the default media. And the current mainstream media will become the fringe media.

The only thing holding that back right now is fear in the corporate world of consequences from the Obama administration. But if Obama’s popularity continues to tank and the right takes over Congress and President Obama increasingly looks like a lame-duck, one-term President, that fear will evaporate by early 2012.

That’s when it will happen.

The Inductivist: “Cherry-picking Nazi ideology for political reasons.”

The left loves to forget that the word ‘Nazi’ stands for ‘National Socialist’. Even more, they like to forget that ‘National Socialist’ is in turn short for ‘National Socialist German Workers’ Party’. Cripes! When you say it like that, Nazism sounds like a Teutonic version of the NDP.

But it is both true and important to remember that when Hitler came up with the ideology of his party, he explicitly made it a Hegelian synthesis of the right and the left. From the right he took nationalism, militarism and anti-Semitism. From the left he took socialism, totalitarianism, the organized extermination of the state’s opponents (Leon Trotsky invented the concentration camp) and eugenics (look at the early ideology of Planned Parenthood if you don’t believe me).

All of which makes a recent post by the Inductivist a must read. Some highlights:

“There are a number of problems with the argument that we shouldn't study the biological sources of behavior because such an approach led to Nazi atrocities against other races, but one criticism I haven't seen is that people arguing such a position are cherry-picking convenient Nazi beliefs. 

The core Nazi belief was public health--a healthy social organism in its proper relationship with nature. The social body will be healthier if people live healthier lifestyles; if they keep their bodies in shape through exercise and getting fresh air; if they eat wholesome, natural foods that are free of additives, preservatives, and other man-made toxins; if they avoid tobacco, alcohol, and meat; if air and water pollution are eliminated; if there are advances in private and public hygiene, advances in medical science, and access to current treatments.”

“As people who were focused intensely on nature, Nazis believed in respecting the ecologies they lived in. (Ernst Haeckel, a scientist whose ideas inspired Nazism, coined the term ecology). Nazis were conservationists. They advocated the preservation of fauna and flora. They fostered a love of nature. They passed laws against cruelty toward animals. Vegetarianism was encouraged. Researchers were forbidden from doing certain kinds of animal testing. The penalty for killing an eagle was death. The social body could not be healthy in a sick environment. The overall theme was health through harmony with nature.”

I can only add that Leni Reifenstahl, the director of the famous National Socialist propaganda film, Triumph of Will was a devout member of Greenpeace.

So there you have it. The next time some leftist calls you a Nazi (never a National Socialist!), ask them if they are an environmentalist.

Manufacturing: the way out of the Great Recession

The Financial Times has a great article on how manufacturing is America’s key to rebounding from the Great Recession.

“When Vicki Gerbino, a native of upstate New York, was deciding two years ago whether to move to Wichita, Kansas, the Midwestern city did not seem like a model for the future of the US economy”.

“But the head of the Greater Wichita Economic Development Coalition says she found a place filled with art, theatre and “smart people” – many linked to the aviation industry. “Everybody and their brother flies or knows someone who flies,” Ms Gerbino says.

Thanks to a cluster of aircraft manufacturers such as Learjet, Cessna and Hawker Beechcraft, the economic focus of Wichita – population 366,000 – is very different from the emphasis on services and consumer demand typical of 21st-century America. According to a study published late last month by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, nearly 28 per cent of the city’s gross metropolitan product is sold abroad. That makes it the most export-oriented in the country, just ahead of Portland, Oregon – noted for its computer and electronics companies – and San Jose in California’s Silicon Valley.”

According to Bruce Katz, the study’s author, these areas could be at the vanguard of a fundamental transformation in the US economy – away from consumers and housing towards investment and exports. “I personally think [Wichita] will be the norm in the next 10 to 15 years,” Mr Katz says.

Many economists believe this is desirable. Don Kohn, outgoing vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve, has said it would put America on a “stronger, more resilient, and ... more sustainable growth path” than before the recession, and would make households “less vulnerable and better able to withstand shocks in the future”. It could also help moderate the global imbalances that have afflicted the US economy in the past decade.

But if America is to change the sputtering, jobless nature of its recovery and grow at the rate of 2.5 to 3 per cent most economists think it capable of, a new model is more than just desirable. In spite of strong headwinds, creating more Wichitas and Portlands may be essential. 

A look at the shape of the US economy as it emerges from what has been dubbed the Great Recession shows the problem. Consumption has not grown faster than an annualised rate of 2 per cent in any quarter since the recovery began. Housing investment is 40 per cent lower than it was three years ago and investment in commercial buildings is down by almost as much.

Households are focused on repaying debt, says Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs in New York. “The private sector is trying to spend less than it earns, and ... someone else needs to willingly do the reverse.”

Nor is housing investment – normally one of the main drivers of an economic recovery – likely to bounce back given the legacy of the boom. “We’re probably not going to have a lot ... for quite a while because there’s oversupply,” says Christina Romer, outgoing chair of President Barack Obama’s Council Of Economic Advisors. 

That leaves business investment outside the property sector – on equipment and software, for instance – and exports. “I think that’s going to be the question: whether we can get those two sectors to expand and fill the gap that would normally be taken up by housing,” Mrs Romer says.

As Rev. William Boetcker once said, “you cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.” The reason why there was a housing bubble in the first place was because the US economy relied too much on consumption. At some point, the cheap credit runs out and the bubble bursts. Obama’s stimulus program is an attempt to reinflate the bubble. This policy is foolish because even if you succeed, then what? Another bubble that will burst the same way down the line, that’s what.

In a sustainable economy, value must be created. This is where manufacturing comes in. It is the ultimate value added activity. In fact, this chart (from the same Financial Times article) clearly shows that in the Great Recession net exports are up while personal consumption based growth is down. This is all a good sign of the economy atttempting to heal itself.

 

However, often economies are prevented from healing by well-meaning but misguided policies. FDR’s New Deal in the Great Depression is the textbook example. Obama’s economic wrecking squad is an example of more recent vintage.

So what kind of policies does the US government need to implement to encourage this modest trend further? First, get rid of policies that artificially inflate consumption. How? Repeal the Community Reinvestment Act, which encouraged the sub-prime mortgages that were the root cause of the crisis; get rid of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, which enable reckless home buying; and remove income tax deductions on mortgage payments, which encourage everybody to turn their house into a home equity loan generation machine.

Second, tax law should be changed to favour savings and work instead of consumption. What does this entail? Cut capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, taxes on interest income and income taxes (particularly at the top end).

Third, lift the regulatory burden on manufacturers and reform tort law. Clumsy oafs who fall off ladders shouldn’t be able to endanger the financial well-being of constructive enterprises. The fact that Cessna employs more lawyers than engineers is a symptom of this problem. 

And this is where I offer rare praise for Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty. In the past several years, he has shifted Ontario’s tax burden from production to consumption. He has systematically cut corporate taxes while widening consumption taxes by implementing the HST. This will all help Ontario’s manufacturing sector to become competitive again.

Why savings and investment are key to the economic recovery and low interest rates aren’t

Ever since the Great Recession began, I have been arguing in these pages that the best way out is to encourage work and thrift, and that to do the opposite, i.e. stimulus spending and debt forgiveness, would only prolong the agony. In a Wall Street Journal article, Gerald O’Driscoll of the Cato Institute makes the same point. Here are the relevant excerpts to his lucid article: 

“The housing boom and bust was a classic asset bubble, such as occurred frequently in the 18th and 19th centuries. Easy money working through cheap credit made long-term investments appear more valuable than would otherwise have been the case.

 

In most cases, investment booms drive industries with sound fundamentals. When the cheap credit keeps flowing, however, fundamentals are forgotten and the process evolves into a mania (to use the old-fashioned term). What cannot be sustained will not be, so the boom ends in a crisis.

 

In these scenarios, the collapse of demand is a consequence—not the cause—of the bust. Policies to address crises must get cause and effect right.”

 

“The declines in home values, investor portfolios and 401(k) plans, and the uncertainties surrounding retirement plans, have all had a big impact. The solution lies in restoring balance sheets. For financial firms, that means raising capital. For consumers and businesses alike, that means saving more of their reduced incomes.

 

Yet public policy has focused almost exclusively on stimulating spending without much regard to why spending, especially consumption, has flagged. Until balance sheets (corporate and household) are restored, increased spending cannot be sustained.

 

Temporary spending and tax breaks are always dubious, and especially so now when the rational motivation is to save more and consume less. One-off tax credits for homes, for example, merely borrowed sales from the future. These fiscal programs predictably depressed rather than augmented future consumption.

What is in short supply is not liquidity, but savings. The Fed can supply the former but not the latter. Both fiscal and monetary polices need to shift their focus. The Fed has done the heavy lifting and responded more than adequately to liquidity issues. Now there is little further it can do that is beneficial.”

 

“Low interest rates slow the process of restoring balance sheets by keeping asset prices artificially inflated. They also penalize saving, thus prolonging the process of rebuilding balance sheets.

 

In the fiscal realm, policy must be reoriented from stimulating consumption to encouraging productive investment (not renewed financial speculation). That means no income-tax increases or costly new mandates. In particular, the Bush tax cuts should not be allowed to expire. No matter how the administration spins it, their expiration would entail a large increase in marginal tax rates in the midst of economic weakness. That would further impede savings and capital accumulation, discouraging firms from expanding and hiring workers. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is proposing to repeat the mistake of Herbert Hoover, who persuaded Congress to raise taxes in 1932.

 

Markets are resilient, but their recovery can be impeded by bad policies. At present, both monetary and fiscal policies are on the wrong track.”

As O’Driscoll says, we need policies that encourage work and savings, not spending. Excess spending was the cause of our current woes. Trying to reinflate the bubble only keeps the bad times rolling along. And creating more cheap money, now that the banking system has been stabilized, will only cause further problems down the road. You heard it here first.

Mayor Bloomberg’s defence of the Ground Zero mosque illustrates how the liberal version of civil rights is the worst of both worlds for ordinary people.

The Mayor of New York defended the ground zero mosque by appealing to the principles of religious freedom and the right of Americans to do with their private property as they wish – both rights that conservatives hold dear.

Let’s take the property rights argument first. As Charles Krauthammer points out, Disney Corporation was not allowed to build an amusement park near the Manassas Battlefield and a commercial viewing tower was not allowed to be built on private land adjacent to Gettysburg. A broad coalition stopped both projects on the grounds that they would vulgarize the hallowed ground of great Civil War battlefield sites. Why didn’t liberals like Bloomberg defend the property rights of private citizens then? In fact, given the fact that the Ground Zero mosque could have been stopped with garden-variety zoning laws, does Michael Bloomberg’s principled defence of the mosque owner’s property rights mean that the mayor believes that municipal zoning laws are an unconstitutional infringement on property rights? Of course not. Don’t get cute. The only property rights he is interested in defending are those of the radical Imams who want to thumb their nose at America. If you are a patriotic, hard working New Yorker, he couldn’t care less about your property rights. So you’d better toe the lines on those municipal ordnances buddy, or Mayor Bloomberg will come down on you like a ton of bricks. He's a law-and-order guy you know.

Let’s move on to the religious argument. Mayor Bloomberg contends that stopping the ground zero mosque would violate of the freedom of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment. But what about the southern courthouse that has the 10 Commandments inscribed on the wall? Scrub it clean, and fast. Never mind that 95% of the residents of that county are practicing Christians. And the volunteer fire department in Texas that wants to put up a Nativity scene at Christmas? Faggettaboutit. Separation of church and state pal. And don’t even mention state’s rights, that’s raaaacist! It seems that when Christianity is concerned, freedom of religion means freedom from religion. But when Islam is concerned, then freedom of religion is a requirement for the state to go along with it. When President Obama has a Ramadan dinner, no problem. Haven’t you heard? we got separation of Church and State not separation of Mosque and State (to borrow a phrase from Ezra Levant).

It’s the same with the US constitution in general. Any fair reading of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution limits the power of Congress to write laws on 18 enumerated topics and only those topics, but hey that isn’t a problem because the Supreme Court can distort the Interstate Commerce Clause to the point where it would be virtually unrecognizable by the men who actually wrote it in order to allow Congress to do darn near everything it wants to, 9^th and 10 Amendments be damned. Those amendments aren’t to be mentioned in polite company anyway. The religious rights of detainees in Guantanamo require that they get access to the Koran and be given the opportunity to pray towards Mecca every day, never mind that they are not US citizens, nor residents of the US, not on US soil nor even lawful combatants (as defined by the Geneva Convention). On the other hand, it’s no problem at all to infringe upon an American citizen’s right to freedom of political speech through the yoke of McCain-Feingold, net neutrality or the fairness doctrine. 

The end result of all this is the worst of both worlds for the hard-working American. His rights are trampled and hemmed in at every turn, but when he needs the government to fulfill its basic functions - functions such as, say, border security - the government’s actions are hemmed in by an interpretation of civil rights so expansive that it is checked only when those rights begin to actually benefit him.

Bottom line: the liberal interpretation of civil rights screws patriotic Americans at every turn.

How exactly is scrapping the mandatory long-form census bad politics for the Conservatives?

The talking point of the establishment left is that scrapping the mandatory long-form census is bad for the Conservatives. To quote the CBC:

“the Liberals and NDP slammed Clement's "ideological" decision, saying it has thrown Statistics Canada into "chaos" and will leave policy-makers and organizations across the country flying blind.”

The truth be told, Statistics Canada does generate an awful lot of priceless statistical data and there is no doubt that making the long-form census voluntary will hobble Statistics Canada significantly.

However, it nevertheless must also be admitted that the reason Statistics Canada is such a fountain of information unobtainable elsewhere is because no other polling company or research firm has the power to threaten Canadians with imprisonment. That’s right. Statistics Canada uses the state’s legal monopoly on violence to get you to divulge personal information in the same way that Revenue Canada compels you to pay your taxes. It’s strange that the defenders of the long-form census are silent on the coercive aspect of Stats Canada’s business model.

Considering the methods, it must therefore be asked, how much information does the government need about us anyway? I understand the Federal government needs to know the size and distribution of Canada’s population so that it can adjust electoral district boundaries, but that information is found in the short form. What else does it need in order to carry out its basic functions - information that it doesn’t already have in OHIP, income tax, welfare and unemployment records? The Stats Can cheerleaders will respond that governments are restricted on what it can do with OHIP and tax records due to privacy concerns. Oh really? Doesn’t the long-form census raise a lot of privacy concerns of its own? I think the real answer is that many of the programs that require this information (like, say, affirmative action and multiculturalism) don’t need to be done in the first place. Starving them of information is a good thing. (This, I suspect, is the real reason for Taliban Jack’s apoplexy.)

Oh yes, and did you know that Statistics Canada hires itself out to private entities to collect information on their behalf? In other words, Statistics Canada uses the state’s powers of coercion to make a profit.

 But enough about why scrapping the long-form census is good policy, lets look at why it is also good politics. In past census years, if asked about their feelings on the census, people would usually note the obtrusiveness of the government and question it needs to know what God they worship and how many toilets they have in their rec room. I don’t recall anybody actually in favour of government obtrusiveness before this summer.

One of the talking points of the establishment left (as per its premier spokesman, Jeffrey Simpson) is that this is just a sop by Harper to its libertarian wing (“Oh those libertarians are so extreme. Imagine if they were to ever get into power. They would go up to Ottawa and proceed to leave everybody alone.”) It may well be, heck, it likely is a sop by Stephen Harper to libertarianism, but so what? On this front, the libertarians and Joe six-pack are in lock-step agreement.

And since when did privacy become an exclusively Conservative issue? Didn’t the Chretien Liberal’s bring about the vast, all-encompassing Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act into being in 2000?

The real importance of this issue is that it divides the establishment from the people. Stephen Harper was wise to choose it, and wise to side with the people.

Enemy of the TTC State

When does misinformation or obfuscation cross the line to outright falsehood?  The Toronto Transit Commission declared at many public meetings that the main reason they needed a right of way (ROW) for the St. Clair street car was to prevent left-turning cars from blocking the street cars.

When one smart citizen took the microphone at one of those early public consultation meetings and asked why the city didn't simply put advance green lights for left turns at every intersection to get left turning cars out of the street car lane, Mitch Stambler of the TTC jumped up to state that Toronto's traffic plan was far too complicated to install advance greens at each intersection for six kilometers.  It would slow the flow of north/south and east/west traffic he instructed the audience.  The only solution, he claimed, was reserved lanes for the street car.

Now that the ROW has been jammed down the middle of St. Clair, it is clear that Stambler was not being forthright with the public.  In order to allow not only for left turns but also for the u-turns that an ROW forces on traffic, EVERY intersection now has an advance green.  Anyone who had bothered to look at the Spadina ROW knew this would be the case, whether they were TTC planners or not.  It was obvious.  Spadina's ROW couldn't operate without them.

Finally, the TTC didn't seriously consider buses for St. Clair even though they would never be blocked by left turning traffic since buses operate in the right lane.

I used to support and believe in the TTC, but after their behavior over St. Clair, I have come to believe that Toronto public transit needs to be privatized like the Viva transit in York Region.  The TTC is not interested in moving people but in stopping cars.  While I still take the bus and the subway, I have been converted to an enemy of the TTC state.

This is a warning to Scarborough, Don Mills and Etobicoke, where David Miller's Transit City scheme of ROWs for street cars is about to begin.  Don't believe anything the TTC tells you until you can confirm its validity from some other source.  I have dozens of more examples of TTC misinformation and obfuscation that occurred during the St. Clair street car environmental assessment, but they are far too many for one article.  It requires a series.

Mike Downtown

 

 

The growing political viability of solutions to the West’s demographics death spiral

In a couple of posts (here and here), I pondered the pro’s and con’s of Mark Steyn’s thesis that the West is dying a not-so-slow death because of a lack of babies and is threatened to be overrun by hoard of more fecund barbarians.

In my article against the Steyn hypothesis, I stated that he is making the same mistake that Paul Erlich made in his book The Population Bomb. That is, that both are extrapolating existing exponential trends (all demographic trends are exponential) into the future and you can’t do this for very long because real physical trends inspire counteractions that soon swamp the dominant forces of the day. In this article, I posited one such policy counterforce:

Today’s demographic declines are a direct result of government policy – the welfare state. In the past, everybody had an incentive to reproduce. Your kids were your pension. It is still the same way in the third world where childless couples are pitied. Who will look after them when they are old? As a result, fertility rates there remain high (though they are slowly declining as the globalization decried by Naomi Klein spreads prosperity throughout the world). The contrast with the first world couldn’t be greater, where having children is an act of economic madness. It costs an average of $250,000 raise a child, to say nothing of the loss of personal freedom. To see the flaw in our arrangement, one only needs to ask, who is the state? The answer - when you are old - is all the people who are children today. So, from the perspective of society, it does make economic sense to have children. The difference between yesterday and today is that in the past, personal and societal aims were aligned. Today, thanks to the welfare state, they aren’t.

How does the government fix that? By ending social security as we know it. Replace guaranteed pension plans for all with a system that rewards people who have lots of children with pensions and penalizes those who don’t. 

Changing the pension system so that people with lots of children retire earlier and with more generous pensions while DINKs (Dual Income No Kids) toil away into their old age because they failed to create their replacements – doesn’t sound too politically doable does it?

Think again.

My homeland, Estonia, like most European countries is suffering from demographic decline. But because Estonia is a former Soviet country, the people there were immunized against political correctness by the overbearing Soviet super-political correctness (which must have rubbed off on me). For years, the country has had an open and uninhibited public discussion on the demographic state of the Estonian people. But in spite of that, I was still surprised to see this online poll in one of Estonia’s top newspapers, The Postman, two weeks ago:

 
 

This is a screen capture of the poll (which has long since expired). For those who don’t read Estonian, the translation of the Gallup poll question is, “Should the size of a person’s pension from now on depend on the number the children that person had?” The public’s answer was 54.5% yes. This is in a country where big families have always been rare. The article beside it reads, “Children would save Esonia from its pension problems.” 

What is happening here is that the sheer force of an exponential trend is inspiring an equally forceful counter. This is why the population bomb of the sixties turned into a bust. Take another failed prognostication. In the 1960’s, the famous (and justly great) economist Friedrich von Hayek looked at the relative size of Catholic and Protestant families and predicted that within two generation Catholics would swamp Protestants. Never happened. Why? Because when the West entered its post-Christian phase, Catholic atheist had even fewer children than Protestant atheists.

None of this is to say that Mark Steyn has not shed light on a very serious world-historical force (demographics) freighted with Big Consequences (i.e. civil war in France). He has, no question about it. It is just that there are countervailing forces that he hasn’t mentioned because, for now, they are almost imperceptible.

Toronto to Repeat Social Housing Failure

Toronto Councillor Howard Moscoe openly admitted that the Lawrence Heights social housing project is a failed left wing experiment, and he received a standing ovation (and hugs) from Toronto's left wing city council.

Of course he didn't phrase it the way I just did because that would imply that left wing policies aren't the utopian solutions that the NDP claim.  Moscoe instead stated that, "The theories on which Lawrence Heights was based have turned out to be wrong — putting poor people into new houses in a park like setting does not solve their economic problems."

So why the standing ovation?  Because the other part of Moscoe's announcement is that Toronto intends to replace this failed social housing experiment with a new one with higher density and less "park like" setting.  I can't help wondering if the "theories" of this new high density plan will be deemed a failure by some future left wing councillor 40 years from now.

If Toronto truly wants competitive affordable housing I'd like to suggest a new theory.  Sell off Toronto's massive stock of crumbling, poorly maintained social housing to private companies.  Lobby the Ontario government to change the Landlord Tenant Act so that all the sections designed to punish landlords and coddle bad tenants are removed, like the section that allows scammers to live rent free from October to March (completely illegal to evict) and then skip out ahead of the eviction notice and the sheriff in the spring with all that rent unpaid and uncollectible.

If someone truly and desperately needs their rent subsidized, the city should pay the landlord directly.

This will solve three problems:

1) It will get rid of all the CUPE unionized employees who eat up huge chunks of the Toronto Community Housing Authority budget while not getting much done to maintain the buildings they are responsible for.  That's a lot of money that can go to rent subsidization.

2) It will eliminate the social housing ghettoes like Regent Park and Lawrence Heights because people will be able to live anywhere the government is willing to subsidize.  No one building need be all subsidized housing.  Every building can have just a few units.  No one area need be packed with the poor.  The new left wing theory is that if they let condo developers build a bunch of condos in Regent Park and Lawrence Heights mixed in with the government housing, no one will notice the neighborhood poverty.  I submit that a neighborhood with a disproportionate number of poor will be a bad neighborhood, no matter how many jogging yuppies with ipods you try to mix in with them.

3) Property Maintenance.  The city has utterly failed to properly invest in their social housing experiments like Regent Park (currently being ripped down after only 40 years) and Lawrence Heights. 

I used to live in a privately owned apartment building built in 1948, and my guests always marveled that the building was so beautifully maintained.  Even though he was crushed by rent control, the owner (whose grand daughter lived on the sixth floor) did everything he could to keep it clean and strong.  That building is still a going concern, and Mike Harris's vacancy decontrol interested new owners who purchased it after the original owner passed away.  They have since poured tens of thousands of dollars of renovations into the building to bring it up to 21st century code.

The city clearly cannot maintain buildings as well private industry, and they should recognize that it's not environmentally friendly to build social housing with great fanfare and leave it to rot until it has to be bulldozed, trucked to landfill and the whole process begun anew.

Finally, the most important thing that Toronto can do (and has direct control over) is to stop punishing renters with high property taxes.  That's right, renters of apartment space pay four times the property tax rate of condo owners in newer buildings with the same square footage.  That's because condos are taxed as residential properties and rental apartments are taxed as commercial properties.  Most renters just don't know this because the taxes are hidden in their bills.  Toronto is the only jurisdiction in Canada that continues to hurt the lowest income bracket of society with this unfair tax.

Of course the left wing city council refuses to lift it because they're concerned that the building owners will just keep their rental rates the same and not pass on the savings to renters, which is probably true.  What councillors ignore is that with this tax burden gone, businesses will start building rental units again, which will increase the supply until prices start to fall.  It's time to make being a landlord a profitable business.

The shortage of affordable housing in Toronto was totally caused by failed left wing experiments in rent control, landlord punishment and subsidized housing.  It's time for the government to get out of the way and let private industry provide housing.  They've done a great job with condos.  And they've also done a great job providing office space in Toronto, but that's because the city (other than David Miller's office building for Corus Entertainment on the lakefront) has kept out of the commercial office space market.  Otherwise there would be very few office towers on the Toronto skyline, and most of them would be in desperate need of repair.

Mike Downtown

Note: I do not own or have a share in any rental property.  I will not gain financially from any of the suggestions I have made in this article.  But if the changes are made, who knows?  Maybe I'll invest in housing.  That's the idea: to get more investors into housing.