Showing posts with label Mark Steyn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mark Steyn. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
MUST READ: IS CANADA'S ECONOMY A MODEL FOR AMERICA?!?
Is Canada’s Economy a Model for America?
by Mark Steyn
I WAS A bit stunned to be asked to speak on the Canadian economy. “What happened?” I wondered. “Did the guy who was going to talk about the Belgian economy cancel?” It is a Saturday night, and the Oak Ridge Boys are playing the Hillsdale County Fair. Being from Canada myself, I am, as the President likes to say, one of those immigrants doing the jobs Americans won’t do. And if giving a talk on the Canadian economy on a Saturday night when the Oak Ridge Boys are in town isn’t one of the jobs Americans won’t do, I don’t know what is.
...
Canadian Dependence on the U.S.
Yet, having criticized Canada’s economy in various features, let me say something good about it: It doesn’t have the insanely wasteful federal agricultural subsidies that America has. In fact, if a Canadian wants to get big-time agriculture subsidies, he’s more likely to get them from the U.S. government. I’m sure most people here know that very few actual farmers—that’s to say, guys in denim overalls and plaid shirts and John Deere caps with straws in the stumps of their teeth—get any benefit from U.S. agricultural subsidies. Almost three-quarters of these subsidies go to 20,000 multi-millionaire play farmers and blue chip corporations. Farm subsidies are supposed to help the farm belt. But there’s a map of where the farm subsidies go that you can find on the Internet. And judging from the beneficiaries, the farm belt runs from Park Avenue down Wall Street, out to the Hamptons, and then by yacht over to Martha’s Vineyard, which they really ought to rename Martha’s Barnyard. Among the farmers piling up the dollar bills under the mattress are Ted Turner, Sam Donaldson, the oil company Chevron, and that dirt-poor, hardscrabble sharecropper David Rockefeller. But what you may not know is that also among their number is Edgar Bronfman, Sr., who isn’t just any old billionaire, he’s the patriarch of Montreal’s wealthiest family, owner of Seagram’s Whiskey, which subsequently bought Universal Pictures. So the U.S. taxpayer, in his boundless generosity, is subsidizing the small family farms of Canadian billionaires. As a Canadian and a broken-down New Hampshire tree farmer myself, I wondered whether I could get in on the U.S. farm program, but as I understand it, it would only pay me for a helicopter pad on top of my barn and a marble bathroom in my grain silo.
Edgar Bronfman’s dependence on U.S. taxpayers is symbolic of more than just the stupidity of federal agriculture subsidies. In the end, there’s no such thing as an independent Canadian economy. It remains a branch plant for the U.S. Over 80 percent of Canadian exports come to America. From time to time, nationalist politicians pledge to change that and start shipping goods elsewhere. But they never do because they don’t have to—they’ve got the world’s greatest market right next door. So when people talk about the Canadian model as something that should be emulated, they forget that it only works because it’s next to the American model. The guy who invented the Blackberry email device is Canadian, but it’s not been a gold mine for him because he’s selling a lot of them in Labrador or Prince Edward Island. It’s been a gold mine because he’s selling a lot of them in New York and California and in between.
Canadian dependence on the United States is particularly true in health care, the most eminent Canadian idea looming in the American context. That is, public health care in Canada depends on private health care in the U.S. A small news story from last month illustrates this:
There you have Canadian health care in a nutshell. After all, you can’t expect a G-7 economy of only 30 million people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal intensive care coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote, rural Montana. And let’s face it, there’s nothing an expectant mom likes more on the day of delivery than 300 miles in a bumpy twin prop over the Rockies. Everyone knows that socialized health care means you wait and wait and wait—six months for an MRI, a year for a hip replacement, and so on. But here is the absolute logical reductio of a government monopoly in health care: the ten month waiting list for the maternity ward.
In conclusion, I’m not optimistic about Canada for various reasons—from the recent Chinese enthusiasm for buying up the country’s resources to the ongoing brain drain—but also for a reason more profound. The biggest difference between Canada and the U.S. is not that you crazy, violent, psycho Yanks have guns and we caring, progressive Canucks have socialized health care, but that America has a healthy fertility rate and we don’t. Americans have 2.1 children per couple, which is enough to maintain a stable population, whereas according to the latest official figures, Canadian couples have only 1.5. This puts us on the brink of steep demographic decline. Consider the math: 10 million parents have 7.5 million children, 5.6 million grandchildren, and 4.2 million great-grandchildren. You can imagine what shape those lavish Canadian social programs will be in under that scenario, and that’s before your average teenage burger-flipper gets tired of supporting entire gated communities and decides he’d rather head south than pay 70 percent tax rates.
So, to produce the children we couldn’t be bothered having ourselves, we use the developing world as our maternity ward. Between 2001 and 2006, Canada’s population increased by 1.6 million. 400,000 came from natural population growth kids, while 1.2 million came from immigration. Thus native Canadians—already only amounting to 25 percent of the country’s population growth—will become an ever smaller minority in the Canada of the future. It’s like a company in which you hold an ever diminishing percentage of the stock. It might still be a great, successful company in the years ahead, but if it is, it won’t have much—if anything—to do with you.
In that most basic sense, American progressives who look to Canada are wrong. Not only is Canada’s path not a model for America, it’s not a viable model for Canada. As Canadians are about to discover, the future belongs to those who show up for it.
Pertinent Links:
1) Is Canada’s Economy a Model for America?
by Mark Steyn
I WAS A bit stunned to be asked to speak on the Canadian economy. “What happened?” I wondered. “Did the guy who was going to talk about the Belgian economy cancel?” It is a Saturday night, and the Oak Ridge Boys are playing the Hillsdale County Fair. Being from Canada myself, I am, as the President likes to say, one of those immigrants doing the jobs Americans won’t do. And if giving a talk on the Canadian economy on a Saturday night when the Oak Ridge Boys are in town isn’t one of the jobs Americans won’t do, I don’t know what is.
...
Canadian Dependence on the U.S.
Yet, having criticized Canada’s economy in various features, let me say something good about it: It doesn’t have the insanely wasteful federal agricultural subsidies that America has. In fact, if a Canadian wants to get big-time agriculture subsidies, he’s more likely to get them from the U.S. government. I’m sure most people here know that very few actual farmers—that’s to say, guys in denim overalls and plaid shirts and John Deere caps with straws in the stumps of their teeth—get any benefit from U.S. agricultural subsidies. Almost three-quarters of these subsidies go to 20,000 multi-millionaire play farmers and blue chip corporations. Farm subsidies are supposed to help the farm belt. But there’s a map of where the farm subsidies go that you can find on the Internet. And judging from the beneficiaries, the farm belt runs from Park Avenue down Wall Street, out to the Hamptons, and then by yacht over to Martha’s Vineyard, which they really ought to rename Martha’s Barnyard. Among the farmers piling up the dollar bills under the mattress are Ted Turner, Sam Donaldson, the oil company Chevron, and that dirt-poor, hardscrabble sharecropper David Rockefeller. But what you may not know is that also among their number is Edgar Bronfman, Sr., who isn’t just any old billionaire, he’s the patriarch of Montreal’s wealthiest family, owner of Seagram’s Whiskey, which subsequently bought Universal Pictures. So the U.S. taxpayer, in his boundless generosity, is subsidizing the small family farms of Canadian billionaires. As a Canadian and a broken-down New Hampshire tree farmer myself, I wondered whether I could get in on the U.S. farm program, but as I understand it, it would only pay me for a helicopter pad on top of my barn and a marble bathroom in my grain silo.
Edgar Bronfman’s dependence on U.S. taxpayers is symbolic of more than just the stupidity of federal agriculture subsidies. In the end, there’s no such thing as an independent Canadian economy. It remains a branch plant for the U.S. Over 80 percent of Canadian exports come to America. From time to time, nationalist politicians pledge to change that and start shipping goods elsewhere. But they never do because they don’t have to—they’ve got the world’s greatest market right next door. So when people talk about the Canadian model as something that should be emulated, they forget that it only works because it’s next to the American model. The guy who invented the Blackberry email device is Canadian, but it’s not been a gold mine for him because he’s selling a lot of them in Labrador or Prince Edward Island. It’s been a gold mine because he’s selling a lot of them in New York and California and in between.
Canadian dependence on the United States is particularly true in health care, the most eminent Canadian idea looming in the American context. That is, public health care in Canada depends on private health care in the U.S. A small news story from last month illustrates this:
A Canadian woman has given birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets. The
four girls were born at a U.S. hospital because there was no space available at
Canadian neonatal intensive care units. Autumn, Brook, Calissa, and Dahlia are
in good condition at Benefice Hospital in Great Falls, Montana. Health officials
said they checked every other neonatal intensive care unit in Canada, but none
had space. The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician were flown 500
kilometers to the Montana hospital, the closest in the U.S., where the
quadruplets were born on Sunday.
There you have Canadian health care in a nutshell. After all, you can’t expect a G-7 economy of only 30 million people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal intensive care coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote, rural Montana. And let’s face it, there’s nothing an expectant mom likes more on the day of delivery than 300 miles in a bumpy twin prop over the Rockies. Everyone knows that socialized health care means you wait and wait and wait—six months for an MRI, a year for a hip replacement, and so on. But here is the absolute logical reductio of a government monopoly in health care: the ten month waiting list for the maternity ward.
In conclusion, I’m not optimistic about Canada for various reasons—from the recent Chinese enthusiasm for buying up the country’s resources to the ongoing brain drain—but also for a reason more profound. The biggest difference between Canada and the U.S. is not that you crazy, violent, psycho Yanks have guns and we caring, progressive Canucks have socialized health care, but that America has a healthy fertility rate and we don’t. Americans have 2.1 children per couple, which is enough to maintain a stable population, whereas according to the latest official figures, Canadian couples have only 1.5. This puts us on the brink of steep demographic decline. Consider the math: 10 million parents have 7.5 million children, 5.6 million grandchildren, and 4.2 million great-grandchildren. You can imagine what shape those lavish Canadian social programs will be in under that scenario, and that’s before your average teenage burger-flipper gets tired of supporting entire gated communities and decides he’d rather head south than pay 70 percent tax rates.
So, to produce the children we couldn’t be bothered having ourselves, we use the developing world as our maternity ward. Between 2001 and 2006, Canada’s population increased by 1.6 million. 400,000 came from natural population growth kids, while 1.2 million came from immigration. Thus native Canadians—already only amounting to 25 percent of the country’s population growth—will become an ever smaller minority in the Canada of the future. It’s like a company in which you hold an ever diminishing percentage of the stock. It might still be a great, successful company in the years ahead, but if it is, it won’t have much—if anything—to do with you.
In that most basic sense, American progressives who look to Canada are wrong. Not only is Canada’s path not a model for America, it’s not a viable model for Canada. As Canadians are about to discover, the future belongs to those who show up for it.
Pertinent Links:
1) Is Canada’s Economy a Model for America?
Thursday, July 19, 2007
MUST READ: THE WEST FACES EXTINCTION
Steyn: The West faces extinction
Commentary by Mark Steyn
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is it because Al Gore and a bunch of elderly rockers organized an all-star stadium gala on its behalf? The colossal flopperoo of Live Earth is a heartening reminder that there are some things too ridiculous even for global pop culture, and one of them is the Reverend Almer Gortry speaking truth to power ballads.
Why did so few people feel the urge to rock against climate change? Touchingly enough, the organizers put it down to the weather. Dismal TV ratings? “The BBC blamed the poor figures on Saturday’s good weather.” Sluggish ticket sales for the live events? “Organizers of Live Earth Johannesburg are convinced climate change is to blame for the paltry turn-out at the Coca Cola Dome today. Promoter John Langford claims it snowed last week for the first time in a quarter of a century, and the freezing conditions are keeping people away.” Too hot to stay in and watch it on TV, too freezing to go out and watch it in person: clearly, climate change is rampaging out of control.
Still, for the brave few who stuck with all 174 hours of Live Al, there was something oddly touching about seeing rock gazillionaires who’d flown in by private jet tell Joe Schmoe all the stuff he doesn’t need. Your own car? A washer and dryer? Ha! Why can’t you take the bus and beat your underwear on the rocks down by the river with the native women all morning long?
As long as we’re making environmentally-friendly lifestyle suggestions, here’s one thing we don’t “need”: Stadium rock. Amplifiers. Electrified instruments. Entourages. Recorded music. They all add up to one helluva carbon footprint. If we must eschew modernity in the interests of saving the planet, why don’t we return to the 19th century and gather round the environmentally-friendly acoustic piano and sing fragrant Victorian parlor ballads of an evening? Judging from nose-diving CD sales, the public may have already figured that out. At any rate, it seems to be willing to give up on rock’n’roll’s mid-20th century business model long before it gives up private automobiles and indoor plumbing.
So how far are the ecochondriacs prepared to take things? In London last week, the Optimum Population Trust called for Britons to have “one child less” because the United Kingdom’s “high birth rate is a major factor in the current level of climate change, which can only be combated if families voluntarily limit the number of children they have.”
“Climate change is now widely regarded as the biggest problem facing the planet,” says Professor John Guillebaud. “We’re nearing the point of no return and people are feeling increasingly desperate and helpless. The answer lies in our own hands… We have to recognize that the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers—in other words, human beings, in the UK as well as abroad.” As the professor sees it, having fewer children is “the simplest, quickest and most significant thing any of us could do to leave a sustainable and habitable planet for our children and grandchildren.” The best thing we can do for our children is not to have them.
Professor Guillebaud isn’t the only one. Just ahead of the Live Earth flopperama, another “rational” man of “science,” Professor Chris Rapley, head honcho of the British Antarctic Survey, turned up on the BBC to argue that population control is central to the environmental debate.
This is the logical reductio of climate-change fever: throw the baby out in order to save the bathwater. For a start, look at the “high birth rate” Professor Guillebaud is complaining about: Britain’s current fertility rate is about 1.8 children per couple. Replacement rate—i.e., what you need for a stable population staying pretty much exactly the same—is 2.1 children per couple. So the United Kingdom’s population is already headed for long-term decline (and would be in much steeper decline without the higher birth rates of immigrant communities). In Europe as a whole, the fertility rate is a little over 1.3, which is what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility, from which no society in human history has ever recovered. The Spanish, the Italians, the Germans, the Greeks, the Bulgars and Ukrainians will be extinct long before the polar bears or the Antarctic krill or the Latin-American three-toed tree sloth or any of the other species these professors want to protect.
How many Englishmen, Scotsmen, Greeks or Italians are around in the year 2050 will have no measurable impact on so-called “climate change.” None whatsoever. Having fewer British or Spanish babies will do nothing for the polar bear on the ice floes posing for Al Gore’s next documentary. But how many British and Spanish babies are born right now—this year and next year—will certainly have an impact on what Britain and Spain are like in the year 2050. These men of “science” have not called on Niger or Somalia or Afghanistan or Yemen—where women have seven or eight babies—to have one or even six less. Presumably the Optimum Population Trust (a magnificently totalitarian-lite moniker, by the way) feels the average Somali or Afghan has a more eco-friendly carbon footprint, and thus a world with fewer English and more Yemeni will be a more “sustainable and habitable planet for our children and grandchildren.”
Well, I guess Professor Guillebaud’s grandchildren (assuming he has any) will eventually discover whether he was right about that. Few Westerners are yet as boldly explicit in their anti-humanism, but there is a more general insouciance among these ancient European peoples as they commence, in effect, to vanish from the earth in an incremental auto-genocide: the Scots and Germans would rather weep for obscure insects on distant continents than for themselves. They agitate for a Live Earth but are indifferent to their own demise.
...
Maybe the world that comes after Western civilization will be more “sustainable” but I doubt it will be more “habitable.”
Pertinent Links:
1) Steyn: The West faces extinction
Commentary by Mark Steyn
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, is it because Al Gore and a bunch of elderly rockers organized an all-star stadium gala on its behalf? The colossal flopperoo of Live Earth is a heartening reminder that there are some things too ridiculous even for global pop culture, and one of them is the Reverend Almer Gortry speaking truth to power ballads.
Why did so few people feel the urge to rock against climate change? Touchingly enough, the organizers put it down to the weather. Dismal TV ratings? “The BBC blamed the poor figures on Saturday’s good weather.” Sluggish ticket sales for the live events? “Organizers of Live Earth Johannesburg are convinced climate change is to blame for the paltry turn-out at the Coca Cola Dome today. Promoter John Langford claims it snowed last week for the first time in a quarter of a century, and the freezing conditions are keeping people away.” Too hot to stay in and watch it on TV, too freezing to go out and watch it in person: clearly, climate change is rampaging out of control.
Still, for the brave few who stuck with all 174 hours of Live Al, there was something oddly touching about seeing rock gazillionaires who’d flown in by private jet tell Joe Schmoe all the stuff he doesn’t need. Your own car? A washer and dryer? Ha! Why can’t you take the bus and beat your underwear on the rocks down by the river with the native women all morning long?
As long as we’re making environmentally-friendly lifestyle suggestions, here’s one thing we don’t “need”: Stadium rock. Amplifiers. Electrified instruments. Entourages. Recorded music. They all add up to one helluva carbon footprint. If we must eschew modernity in the interests of saving the planet, why don’t we return to the 19th century and gather round the environmentally-friendly acoustic piano and sing fragrant Victorian parlor ballads of an evening? Judging from nose-diving CD sales, the public may have already figured that out. At any rate, it seems to be willing to give up on rock’n’roll’s mid-20th century business model long before it gives up private automobiles and indoor plumbing.
So how far are the ecochondriacs prepared to take things? In London last week, the Optimum Population Trust called for Britons to have “one child less” because the United Kingdom’s “high birth rate is a major factor in the current level of climate change, which can only be combated if families voluntarily limit the number of children they have.”
“Climate change is now widely regarded as the biggest problem facing the planet,” says Professor John Guillebaud. “We’re nearing the point of no return and people are feeling increasingly desperate and helpless. The answer lies in our own hands… We have to recognize that the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers—in other words, human beings, in the UK as well as abroad.” As the professor sees it, having fewer children is “the simplest, quickest and most significant thing any of us could do to leave a sustainable and habitable planet for our children and grandchildren.” The best thing we can do for our children is not to have them.
Professor Guillebaud isn’t the only one. Just ahead of the Live Earth flopperama, another “rational” man of “science,” Professor Chris Rapley, head honcho of the British Antarctic Survey, turned up on the BBC to argue that population control is central to the environmental debate.
This is the logical reductio of climate-change fever: throw the baby out in order to save the bathwater. For a start, look at the “high birth rate” Professor Guillebaud is complaining about: Britain’s current fertility rate is about 1.8 children per couple. Replacement rate—i.e., what you need for a stable population staying pretty much exactly the same—is 2.1 children per couple. So the United Kingdom’s population is already headed for long-term decline (and would be in much steeper decline without the higher birth rates of immigrant communities). In Europe as a whole, the fertility rate is a little over 1.3, which is what demographers call “lowest-low” fertility, from which no society in human history has ever recovered. The Spanish, the Italians, the Germans, the Greeks, the Bulgars and Ukrainians will be extinct long before the polar bears or the Antarctic krill or the Latin-American three-toed tree sloth or any of the other species these professors want to protect.
How many Englishmen, Scotsmen, Greeks or Italians are around in the year 2050 will have no measurable impact on so-called “climate change.” None whatsoever. Having fewer British or Spanish babies will do nothing for the polar bear on the ice floes posing for Al Gore’s next documentary. But how many British and Spanish babies are born right now—this year and next year—will certainly have an impact on what Britain and Spain are like in the year 2050. These men of “science” have not called on Niger or Somalia or Afghanistan or Yemen—where women have seven or eight babies—to have one or even six less. Presumably the Optimum Population Trust (a magnificently totalitarian-lite moniker, by the way) feels the average Somali or Afghan has a more eco-friendly carbon footprint, and thus a world with fewer English and more Yemeni will be a more “sustainable and habitable planet for our children and grandchildren.”
Well, I guess Professor Guillebaud’s grandchildren (assuming he has any) will eventually discover whether he was right about that. Few Westerners are yet as boldly explicit in their anti-humanism, but there is a more general insouciance among these ancient European peoples as they commence, in effect, to vanish from the earth in an incremental auto-genocide: the Scots and Germans would rather weep for obscure insects on distant continents than for themselves. They agitate for a Live Earth but are indifferent to their own demise.
...
Maybe the world that comes after Western civilization will be more “sustainable” but I doubt it will be more “habitable.”
Pertinent Links:
1) Steyn: The West faces extinction
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