We know what the Egyptians, or at least their head honcho Pharaoh, did to attract the wrath of G-d. He wouldn’t let His people go. But everyone paid the awful price – those ten vile plagues culminating in the genocidal murder of all Egyptian first-born.
But what have Canadians done to evoke the wrath of the heavens? What have Ontarians done? Or poor Hogtowners? Though it’s our pharaohs who sin, only regular folks pay the price. It’s a trifecta, folks. Harper the asbestos killer in Ottawa, Ford the city-wrecker in Toronto, and, come October 6, very likely Hudak the math-challenged in Ontario. Won’t we be in a pretty pickle then? What have ordinary people done to deserve this plague of right-wing Conservatives? Equally mysterious, why have so many ordinary folks supported them?
It defies rationality to have come to this. Much of the world is still trapped in one of the great economic meltdowns in the history of capitalism. Yet whom have Canadians turned to in their justifiable anger but Conservatives? Hardly anyone of right mind disagrees that it was the insatiable greed and reckless irresponsibility of Wall Street, which had been deeply unregulated over the past 30 years, that plunged much of the world into its economic tailspin. In Canada, even Stephen Harper boasts about how our banks, thankfully constrained by government regulations, were prevented from going off half-cocked the way they did south of the border, which saved us from the worst of the collapse.
In a real sense, we can say it was social democratic restraints on the Canadian speculator class that saved us even more misery here, as if the great decline in manufacturing and high unemployment wasn’t enough. And it was precisely the free-market religion so passionately embraced by Conservatives – whether Mr. Harper, Rob Ford or Tim Hudak – that could have damaged us further.
Conservative economic policies have had another overwhelming consequence: an astonishing increase in inequality and the incessant enrichment of those wealthier than some entire countries while normal people stand still if lucky or slip back. These two dynamics have converged nicely in the years since the collapse. Those who caused it, already rich beyond the dreams of avarice and with government funds bailing them out in the tens and hundreds of billions, continued to reward themselves with unimaginably large payouts. So the filthy rich got filthier while the rest struggle to make ends meet each week.
In fact, while the world continues to face humungous economic challenges, the world's wealthiest are getting even richer and more numerous. Whatever picayune slippage some suffered after the 2008 banking crisis, a new report shows they're already filthier than they used to be. This happy state of affairs has been dramatically enhanced by the generosity of governments everywhere in reducing even further the tax burden on the filthy, which of course has led, together with smaller recession-time revenues, to large deficits in governments’ budgets.
These circumstances should logically have led to demands for more social democratic values to reduce the chances of further bankers’ follies and to attack the problem of growing inequality. Nothing makes more sense than to turn to the state, J. K. Galbraith famously explained, as the only possible countervailing power to the vast might of the corporate sector. But right-wingers didn’t give an inch, as the National Post’s Jonathan Kay, of all people, pointed out in a thoughtful and surprisingly positive review of Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks’s The Trouble with Billionaires in the Literary Review of Canada last year.
Bear in mind this is a man who thinks Jeffrey Simpson is “centre-left.” Conservatives, Mr. Kay wrote, “do not even pretend to have a solution to the inequality problem. Based on my experience at the Post, I’d say that most do not think of it as a problem at all. I cannot think of a single Canadian conservative aside from Conrad Black who has made any serious intellectual effort to reconcile his or her faith in capitalism with the free market-engendered meltdown of the American economy. Instead, they mechanically spout ritualized denunciations of the politics of ‘tax and spend’.”
