Thanks to the U.S., Canada can shine
Conrad Black, National Post
Saturday, September 12, 2009
George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in the play of unintended consequences, are the greatest White House friends Canada has had in many decades. George W. vapourized the prestige and sapped the strength of the United States with his malapropisms, unilateralism, miring of U.S. conventional ground forces in Iraq for five years and continuation of the Clinton-Rubin economic miracle, the stupidest economic policy of any major advanced country since Margaret Thatcher took Britain off daily audit by the IMF 30 years ago -- colossal current account deficits, trillions of dollars of legislatively mandated noncommercial residential mortgages and the admission of millions of undocumented immigrants seeking low-wage jobs while millions of such jobs were being outsourced.
To be fair to Bush, the world is better off without Saddam, international terrorists did not enjoy Bush's tenure, the U.S. alliance with India was an important achievement and Bush's generosity in fighting AIDS in Africa will benefit millions of the world's most destitute people. But he is the sort of person at whose head foreigners naturally like to throw shoes. (So, apparently do many Americans, without necessarily first removing them from their feet.)
Meanwhile, Canada's apparent standard of living is about even with those of the other large prosperous countries: the U.S., Britain, Germany, France and Australia. All are between $44,000 and $47,000 per capita, though the figures become muddled because of lower purchasing power through higher sales and value added taxes in Europe, but also because of lower medical care costs in countries other than the U.S., without markedly inferior service.
Last year, the United States, understandably, voted for change. But after eight months, President Obama is still trying to sell a public policy menu that is unwanted and unworkable. He whipped up public fears to try to gain support for a more socialistic program than the country wanted or could afford.
Obama is proposing trillion-dollar annual budget deficits for 10 years, medical care that will cover 45 million supposedly uncovered Americans (a bogus figure as they are almost all either foreigners illegally in the country, prosperous individuals who make that choice and could pay medical bills if they arose, people changing jobs from one health-insuring employer to another, or the indigent who are covered by Medicaid), while reducing medical costs from their present $2-trillion without reducing coverage. He wants to increase taxes on the 5% of Americans who produce roughly 25% of the country's personal income to 69%, an uncompetitively high figure, especially hazardous in a recession; and he wants to introduce a cap-and-trade measure that will not raise government revenues or reduce carbon emissions, is based on unproved assumptions and will soak everyone who has a heater or air conditioner. A Star Chamber is now being set up to investigate those who interrogated terrorist suspects under the Bush administration, even though they saved thousands of lives, conformed to agreed standards of torture-avoidance and the Attorney General has conceded that Guantanamo is an unexceptionable detention facility.
And Obama is continuing inherited policies that include a failed drug "war" that ignores the facts that 42% of Americans are marijuana users at some point, including Obama himself, and that marijuana is the chief cash crop of California; that does not crack down on demand from the nation's middle class university students while scourging the poor African-American communities; does not deploy the greatest military force in the world to stop drug importation, but reduces Mexico and other countries to civil war as they are bullied by Washington to reduce supply.
There is nothing so far to reduce the state education system's dropout rate of more than 40%, to restore civil liberties and rights to due process to a criminal justice system that is a sausage factory of indiscriminate persecution based on the plea bargain (inculpatory perjury in exchange for reduced charges or immunity). Though illegal immigration has been sensibly reduced, there is nothing in place to attract the most qualified, assimilable immigrants.
Again, to be fair to this President, the automobile industry's reconstruction is shaping up better than seemed likely, Obama is facing up to the challenge in Afghanistan squarely and his itinerant confessional foreign policy seems to have been a passable public relations exercise. The current account deficit is sharply down, some of the TARP money is already being repaid and the country is rediscovering the virtues of saving.
Still, the United States has become, in Richard Nixon's famous phrase of 1971, a "pitiful, helpless giant." Business is despised, emasculated and incompetent. Wall Street is a mockery; the World Economic Forum now rates the U.S. as having the world's 108th most trustworthy banking system, behind Tanzania, and puts it 93rd in economic stability. The country is a bumbling, debt-ridden oaf in the world: California, General Motors, AIG, The New York Times, the Harvard University Endowment and Citigroup are all at or in sight of bankruptcy (whether coming or going).
America's public life is steadily coarsening and dumbing down. Clinton and Bush severely compromised the mighty and admired nation bequeathed to them by the statesmen who led it out of the Depression and to victory in the Second World War and the Cold War. Now this President is courting personal and national disaster.
The U.S. will get back on track eventually, but it will require years to rebuild its strength and prestige. In these circumstances, while they last, Canada can attract the immigrants, achieve the growth rates and invest the resources that always before in our history would have seemed derivative and even paltry compared to the Brobdingnagian strides of the American Nietzschean Superman at the Daily Planet next door.
There is no palatable replacement for a strong America, and I always wish that country and its leaders well (conspicuously unrequited though that sentiment is, officially, at the moment). But this is Canada's hour, and perhaps that of a few other countries such as Australia, Brazil and South Korea. It is not yet the time of teeming China and India, nor still of geriatric Japan or torpid Europe. This isn't another false or premature start of the kind that have been proclaimed at intervals since Laurier's time. The hare and the tortoise have become the eagle and the doughty beaver (whose incisive virtues were touted here two weeks ago). Arise!
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