008 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 008

Air Date: June 7, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

Disclaimer:

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants, and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Bob Metz:

Good morning London. It is Thursday June the 7th. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM where we will be with you from now till noon. No, no, not right wing. Just right.

Well, it’s that time to pick the lesser of two evils again, isn’t it? Looks like the elections on in Ontario, unofficially. Welcome to the show. This is Just Right. I’m Bob Metz and if you want to join the conversation sometime today, the number is 519-661-3600. And among the topics we’ll be talking about today over the show, if we get to them all, is about the Ontario election, the campaign being on, globalism in the G8 summit which is going on right now over in Europe and healthcare choice versus no choice because of course we’ve got Michael Moore coming to town tomorrow. And if I have time to get to this issue, we’ll be talking a little about rich and poor and the gap between the rich and poor and what it really implies and wealth and poverty and those kinds of issues.

But first, this week Dalton McGuinty, our esteemed premier of Ontario, has ended the Ontario legislature four weeks early. Usually they would get out on around June 28th. And with that, he has unofficially launched the Ontario election because just think of it, isn’t this going to be fun? All of June, July, August, September and October. Aren’t we all just looking forward to five months of campaigning before we get to that October 10th date?

Now there’s a positive side to this. I don’t know if you know the old famous saying, no man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the legislature is in session. So I guess we’re safe for five months while they’re all out there campaigning to let us know which of our freedoms and how much of our money they’re going to be taking away from us between now and the time they want to get elected. Now, I have to tell you, it’s already, for me, of course, most of you who know me, I’ve got a very serious bias in this issue. I’m not a liberal, I’m not a conservative, I’m not a NDPer, I’m not a green, I’m not even a libertarian or a communist. Of course, I’m with the Freedom Party and that’s been sort of how I’ve been known throughout the community.

I’ve also been on with the London Middlesex Taxpayers Coalition and HALT and many taxpayer and advocacy groups, Ontario Taxpayers Coalition. So you can kind of tell where my general political interests are and I will talk about why I’m not supporting any of those parties in a moment. But, if you look at what is going on right now with what we’re hearing, already, can you really tell the difference between a liberal and conservative or even an NDPer?

I can’t. They’re already just falling over each other, trying to outspend each other and outgreen each other, spending your money, restricting your freedom to get the electoral support of those groups who are receiving financial handouts and getting all the political power. And I hate to say it, but as usual, the conservatives are being more liberal with your money than the liberals ever would be to say nothing of the green policies, which are actually red. But, here’s the liberals, okay, we’re going to spend 55 million dollars in aid to Ontario farmers. Conservatives come out and say, no, we’re going to spend 150 million in aid for farmers. Liberals are saying, we’re going to ban incandescent light bulbs. Conservatives are saying, well, why haven’t you done so already? So you can see that, there’s not much difference.

I have to really make a strong emphasis point here. All of the, what I would call the left wing policies of the NDP, of the liberals and other groups, even though they were all advocated by those parties, guess who actually enacted most of them in law here in Ontario? It was the progressive conservatives. It was them who introduced the income tax to Ontario in 1969. They created Ontario’s health care monopoly. They banned private health care. They maintained a two-tier education monopoly.

They discouraged the teaching of phonics in school in favour of child-centered education. They gave us rent controls. They gave us phony human rights codes. They monopolized Ontario hydro, and now they want to lead the global warming bandwagon, as I say. So I know a lot of you aren’t really hearing me, but it’s the conservatives who really act to bring in the most harmful leftist policy to the province of Ontario while the other parties basically did the preaching. In today’s PCs, I think, are even more left than they were in the past. They’re getting on the whole global warming issue, anything to stay in power.

That’s all that matters there. So that’s why I always kind of expect the worst legislation to come from the conservatives, since their track record is pretty good for being the baddest of the bad. And, even if we look at it, the federal liberal has only talked about the environment. Harper is actually acting on the environment, which just pleases everyone on all sides of the issue, which probably explains why liberals never really did anything. So, there’s an old saying, if you want to force an unpopular or bad policy on the populace, just get the conservatives to do it, and you’re all set. So I remember when I first got into politics. By the way, you’re listening to CHRW 94.9 if you want to call in.

It’s 519-661-3600. When I was first, I was just like everybody else. I have voted conservative, I have voted liberal, I have voted NDP, I’ve committed all the sins of which I preach against today, and I basically did so, probably till my late 20s or so. And then it suddenly struck me when I got a little more involved with the political system, which is a whole story in and of itself.

I may tell you that story one of these days. But it struck me, why do I always have to choose between personal freedom to pick one party or economic freedom, and I have to pick another party? Why do most political parties only represent essentially what is seen to be one side of this equation? What about those of us who like to have both personal freedom and economic freedom? So, but even more so, I only realized recently again, even thinking about it that way, and I have told recently, that’s an error too.

Because you can’t define a political party by what freedoms it allows. I know that’s how we think about it. That’s why you see, for example, you see business generally. These are very wide generalizations I’m making here. There are certainly exceptions, and there are crossovers, but if you look at the big picture, I think you’ll find necessarily consistently true. And that is that, if you look at the wider picture, neither liberals nor conservatives, you see businessmen, they would associate themselves more with conservatives because they think conservatives stand for free enterprise, more economic freedom.

You would see people concerned with issues that you might call liberal, anything from drug laws to censorship laws to gay marriage, issues like that, more going to the liberal side because they’re into personal freedoms, and they see the liberal ideology as being more about personal freedom. But this is a tremendous mistake to make because neither side is in favor of freedom. Freedom is something each of us already has. That’s inherent in our natural rights and being human beings. So if you define a political party on the basis of what freedoms it allows, you’re making a tragic mistake.

What you have to look at is, the proper way to look at a party is determine which of your rights and freedoms that that party wants to take away from you. And here’s the great irony. And this is an incredible irony when you think about it. The only reason that the NDP seems to be a party of personal freedoms and the liberals to some degree, but there’s another story with the liberals, is because the NDP doesn’t really care about your personal life. They really don’t care. And so they’re going to leave you alone.

That’s the real reason. Ironically, the NDP is very materialistic. It’s socialistic. It wants to redistribute wealth. It’s only concerned with money. And that is why you’ll see the NDP wanting to restrict you economically, restrict who you can trade with and put up trade barriers. That’s why they want labor monopolies and things of that nature. Now on the other hand, when you look at the conservatives, in particular the social conservatives, they seem to be in favor of economic freedoms, because they really don’t care about your money.

I know you’re thinking that doesn’t sound right, but it’s true. In general, they’re more spiritualistic. They care more about morality, ethics, social conduct. And that’s why you see so much of that kind of restriction coming from the conservatives.

And between the two, I almost think that second one is a little scarier, because at least if they’re only taking your money, you can still say something about it. You can do something about it. You can react.

You can run. But if they take away those basic freedoms, your liberties, that’s even worse than just taking away your money. Now all the parties, of course, are either in favor of the status quo or making it more restrictive. Nobody is moving in the other direction. With the exception, of course, I believe that’s Freedom Party, the party that only one I would ever vote for. So then you have the liberals. Now the liberals, they’re the pragmatists. Okay, they will be quite happy to destroy both economic and personal freedoms because they’re into power for power’s sake.

And so they use every opportunity to do that, to restrict your power. Remember when Jean Chretien was asked what’s your greatest accomplishment, Mr. Chretien? And he says, well, I got elected.

He keeps getting elected over and over again. Just that power for power’s sake. Now the irony of all this, of course, is that freedom, individual freedom, and never mind my political aspirations, I’m saying this as a generic statement, it’s the best policy for both personal and economic spheres of life. Because by restricting freedom in those areas of our concern, we will end up with less of what we think we’re trying to preserve, of what we’re trying to save. It doesn’t work that way.

When you restrict economic freedom, surprise, there’s less wealth for everyone. I wonder how that comes, that works. The experiments are in. It’s not a theory anymore.

We can see it everywhere. And if you’re one of those people that say, oh well, socialism’s a good idea in theory, but it just doesn’t work in practice, which I hear so often. You have to understand that if something doesn’t work in practice, it’s not good in theory. Try telling that to an astronaut before he gets in the rocket to take off for orbit and tell him, well, this rocket should take off in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.

No, if it doesn’t work in practice, then the theory is incorrect. And that’s how you have to look at it, so you can’t look at it that way. And of course, if you restrict personal freedoms, the same thing happens again. You get less personal freedom, because what happens, one group has its freedom restricted against another, and you end up with intolerance, distrust, hatred on the part of the controlled towards the controller. So, of course, the opposite of freedom is tyranny, it’s dictatorship. So what do we actually mean when we say freedom in a free society? What is that all about? Does that mean you can do anything you want?

Of course it doesn’t. A free society has its own inherent limits, and environment of freedom demands that every individual respect the equal and similar freedom of every other individual. In other words, you can’t just do what you want in a free society. If what you want harms another person, that wouldn’t be freedom. That would be license.

That’s what they used to say. Remember that saying, freedom, not license. It’s meant to imply that unrestrained actions amount to license. Well, guess who issues licenses? Governments. They issue licenses. So what’s that all about? And the irony is, if you do get a license, you can trample over everybody’s freedom.

Ask Mr. Rogers, who runs the Rogers Cable Company. So, just some thoughts on, individual freedom is a social concept. It’s not an individual man on a lone island kind of concept. It’s talking about freedom that is rightly yours, including a responsibility, regardless of whether you belong to some group or not, or anything of that nature. And one other mistake not to make is don’t confuse equality, freedom, and democracy. They go hand in hand, but they are all different.

Because remember, you could be equally oppressed too, and just equality alone does not suffice. So, that’s enough on that subject. When we come back on the other side of these commercials and interruptions, we’ll be dealing with a little bit about the globalism and the G8 summit that’s going on right now.

Audio Clip (from Yes Minister):

But even so, they are the people’s representatives. Democratically chosen. MPs aren’t chosen by the people, they’re chosen by their local party. 35 men in grubby raincoats, or 35 women in silly hats. When the government are selected from the best. Bernard, there are only 630 MPs. If one party has just over 300, it forms a government. Of that 300, 102 old and too silly, 102 young and too callow, which leaves just about 100 MPs to fill 100 governmental posts, there’s no choice at all. They’ve had no selection, no training. We have to do the job for them.

Comedy Routine (Speaker 1):

What’s one big difference in America at the end of the year, the people plan to throw party? In the old country, the people plan to overthrow the party.

Bob Metz:

Welcome back to Just Right. I’m Bob Metz and you’re listening to CHRW Radio 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you from now till noon. You can call 519-661-3600 to join us and that’s exactly what caller Stan did. Good morning. Welcome to the show, Stan.

Stan:

Good morning, Bob. I was listening to your theory on the differences between conservative and liberal philosophy.

Bob Metz:

I wasn’t talking about the philosophy, I was talking about the action and the policies they put in.

Stan:

I’m only going to paraphrase you, I can’t remember exactly word for word, but without getting into semantics, you said that you observed that, for example, conservative party is more concerned about our fiscal matters at the risk of personal freedom, unlike the liberals, which go too far the other way, and the proof of the pudding is that, for example, they want to, conservatives wish to legislate on moral or standards and all that sort of thing. I take issue with that.

Bob Metz:

Fine, I said particularly the social conservatives, who I have met many of and that’s exactly what they want to do. I did not say the conservatives were concerned with fiscal matters, I said exactly the opposite that they weren’t.

Stan:

They weren’t concerned more on matters. Which is why they’re associated with more economic freedom. Well, I’m not, I do agree with you, but the inference was that if you want some Bible-thumping dude to tell you how you’re going to live your life, because he’s a right-winger and a nationalist, I think that’s quite wrong, because my way of looking at it is conservatives have been less interested in government interference and personal freedoms, i.e., you’re responsible for your life, baby, and it is what you make of it, not what some centralized organization is going to make of it for you. And I do tend to agree with that.

You are more responsible for earning your living and for your own social situation.

Bob Metz:

Well, I agree with that. That way I see it as a party that is more interested in personal freedom, rather than one that is less interested in personal freedom. They want to get out of micromanagement.

Well, that’s not what I’m seeing in the conservative movement at all. In fact, if what you, the philosophy you just expressed, I agree with, but I wouldn’t call it conservatism, self-sufficiency, and all that. Conservatives support all of the policies that the liberals and NDP do. They support healthcare to the same degree. They just want to manage it differently.

They support a government monopoly in education. Where is the self-responsibility and freedom in those issues if everything’s going to be government provided and they’re just promising more and more of it?

Stan:

I can think of two issues in the media right now. One is gun control, where they equate some duck hunter to a gangbanger running through the streets of Jane and Finch, and they will treat both the same if they would both care to register, guess who does. And the other one is the Youth Offender, what now they call it the Youth Criminal Justice Act, which is entirely a liberal thing, which is they do not know what they do. Society and the law is too terrible to visit on the heads of children. And we’re going to let them run the streets, and it’s going to be three out of four gun deaths in the last couple of years.

It’s been done by people under 18 who, incidentally, didn’t register their pistol. Now, if they’re going to treat us all like the lowest common denominator, I see, and this is a liberal kind of a deal, if they’re going to treat us all as the lowest common denominator, I see that as an infringement on human rights rather than an enhancement of it.

Bob Metz:

Well, it certainly is, but again, you’re not answering my question. I’ve made a very large general. I’m sure there’s tiny differences between the parties on issues of justice, but remember, 59% of Ontario’s complete tax revenue from all sources goes to one thing alone, and that’s our healthcare system. So you have to look at healthcare and education and the big money spenders as being the major things, because that’s where most of the money goes.

Stan:

And we’ll reduce the lowest common denominator. God forbid we should have a two-tier system, even though one does exist. People will leave the country to spend money, but they don’t figure in Canadian stats, so we’ve got to accept the kind of medical care that society can give us. And let me tell you, the average dude is going to go through a million bucks worth of medical technology in his lifetime. He’s not even going to pay that much taxes. Where is it going to come from? You’ve got to have a competitive system to go hand in hand with a socially supported kind of a system, but no.

Bob Metz:

And what conservative, could you name for me who’s in support of what you just said?

Stan:

The left wing approach to that is that everybody’s going to get the same care, no matter how many doctors leave. Okay, now could you name for me a conservative who believes what you just said, who says that we should be able to pay for our own way in healthcare, which I’ll be talking about later on in the show today, by the way.

No, I can’t. I can say that we, I can name a few that agree, including the last host of the show around this time period, that a mixture of private and subsidized healthcare will allow for a better and a more comprehensive healthcare system in this country, as it does in other countries, rather than an ideologically utopian left wing view of everybody gets the same care, no matter how bad it is, we don’t have a two-tier system, although those of you who can afford it go to other countries.

Bob Metz:

Well, that is two-tier.

Stan:

And that’s actuality, there’s a difference between what is and what should be, and that’s what is.

Bob Metz:

Okay, well listen Stan, I appreciate your comments, I hear you saying something in terms of an idea I agree with, but I can’t see how you apply it to conservatives. So anyways, we’ll be talking more about the healthcare issue in an upcoming segment of the show.

And I want to thank Stan for his input on that issue. Right now, I happen to have a piece of paper in my hand, not a piece of paper, an article from the London Free Press, what’s the date on here? June 2nd, big headline, G8, braces for anarchists. I haven’t seen that word anarchist in the paper in a long time when I saw that, it really caught my attention.

And of course, this seems to be a constant association with what’s going on every time the G8 gets together. We see the potential for these riots and all these wonderful lovers of peace and left-wing causes, who in fact are, their real enemy of course is the free market to capitalism and all the parts of the world’s economy that create wealth. But I found very interesting in that article, they quoted a woman, Ottawa activist, Chris Jones. She’s going to be in that crowd, can quote, determined to show the influential political leaders there is power and solidarity in the pro-environment anti-globalization movement. And who at the same time says she’s utterly profoundly committed to nonviolent action. Well, of course that’s not what we see, we see clashes and to associate yourself with that and even with the ideas that they are promoting are violent.

Hello! You want to interfere with everyone’s freedom, you want to restrict freedom, you want to take more money from people without their consent. And the whole issue is utterly confused in terms of, you talk to people about what globalism is, most people don’t even know. And I was very honored about four years ago to have the opportunity to speak at Upper Canada College on February 11th, 2003 where I addressed the World Affairs Conference on this very subject of globalism. And it was interesting some of the discussions that came out of that. There were a lot of kids from all over the province there, of course there you got high school, college, university kids that come for these special conferences.

And that’s where you always get the best questions and the best input and challenges. So in defining what I wanted to get globalism to mean to them, I basically said, first of all, I support the concept of globalism. You hear that word, it sounds so friendly, it’s got that one big happy family feeling about it, globalism. But when you talk to other people, for them that’s not what it’s about. Now on a purely technical level, globalism can only have meaning if we’re talking about some process of uniting the world under a single common jurisdiction and law. And most people are thinking, well that means the one world government.

And I’m saying, no, it doesn’t necessarily. And I don’t think that will ever happen, in fact. I think the closer we get to that, we’ve got big trouble. Globalism could equally be established through a series of contracts, treaties, agreements between governments of different jurisdictions. And the net result, as long as each nation abides to its agreed rules, would essentially be the same. So you can have globalism without having a one world government, with still having autonomy within nations, and there’s still going to be disagreements. That will never change because every nation acts in its own interest. So basically, on a political level, different concepts of globalism can mean the difference between wealth and poverty, which is what a lot of these summits are about, or between life and death.

So, quick summary. I support global freedom, okay, not global government control, organization and management. I support global capitalism, not global socialism, fascism, anarchism, Marxism, determinism, or any other ism.

You might want to add to that list. And I support individual rights, not group rights. If those were the basic themes on which globalism was based, I think we’d have a pretty happy world here. We’d all be in that voluntary society where people are doing and acting responsibly. So, let’s again here not throw out the concept of globalism with the bathwater, and what you’ll see, I think, when you are like, or the baby with the bathwater type of comparison.

So, when you hear people talking anti-globalism, what they’re really talking about, if you look carefully, is an anti-capitalist attitude. That’s enough on that subject when we return. Back to that healthcare issue that we were just getting into a little bit prematurely, and we’ll talk a little bit about Michael Moore and what, how should our healthcare system actually be operated? Back after this.

Audio Clip (from Yes Minister):

The foreign office is pro-Europe because it is really anti-Europe. The civil service was united in its desire to make sure that the common market didn’t work. That’s why we went into it.

What are you talking about? Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now when it’s worked so well? That’s all. Ancient history, surely.

Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn’t work. Now that we’re inside, we can make a complete pig’s breakfast on the whole thing. Set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased. It’s just like old times.

Surely we’re all committed to the European ideal, really, Minister.

If not, why are we pressing for an increase in the membership? Well, for the same reason. It’s just like the United Nations, in fact. The more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes. It’s a polling solicit. Yes. We call it diplomacy, Minister.

Comedy Routine (Speaker 2):

This is a true blessing to be here in Montreal. I enjoy the city. Especially because it’s a very place. This planet in general has a very level of humanity we have not yet acknowledged in America. You guys have a health care plan, which is an amazing concept. I can tell that you’ve got a health care plan, too, because from what I’ve seen, you’re the most arrogant jaywalker I’ve ever seen in my life. Man, you guys just go strolling out in the street, man. Oh, well, if I can get fixed for free anyway, so I’m going.

Bob Metz:

Welcome back to Just Right. I’m Bob Metz, and this is CHRW 94.9 FM. You can call to join the conversation if you like at 519-661-3600. And that’s what one person did. We just had a just informed by my operator Ira, by the way. And Ira, you got to forgive me. I should be thanking you for operating the show all this time.

And I’m still new at this. But Ira is always talking to me in the headsets here when we’re on the air, and I’m getting all sorts of instructions. And anyways, during the break there, we had a caller who preferred to remain anonymous saying that he was a psychiatric patient, and that he feels that he gets looked after very well in the health care system that we have here in Canada. And I’m not here to argue with him. I agree with him.

I think when you get looked after, you get looked after well. But that misses the entire point of the debate. The debate is not about how well you get looked after once you are in the doctor’s office. When we’re talking, that’s a tremendous confusion in this issue.

And if I can clear up one thing today, if that’s the thing I can clear up, I think I will have accomplished my purpose in life for this week. Let me start with two letters to the editor I just happened to catch in the free press, May 28 and May 31. One written by a fellow named Dale Carruthers, who basically is arguing that we should be thankful for the system we have, and another by Tim Hodges, the writer, who states, yeah, we have a great system, but a lot of people can’t get what they want here.

Now, in Dale Carruthers’ letter to the editor, he talks about, he’s concerned about inequities in the system. And he says, any person in favor of privatizing Canadian health care should go see Michael Moore’s new film, Sicko, to witness the horrors caused by a private system. Well, you all know Michael Moore is going to be in town tomorrow. Boy, this city is getting famous. We’re getting all kinds of famous people here from Al Gore, Michael Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger coming to Toronto, David Suzuki making regular trips.

All the people are coming to Canada lately. But when you say the horrors caused by a private system, I mean, that’s not even wrong. That’s not even on the scale of what’s being talked about here.

Let’s make one thing clear. All health care delivered in the United States, Canada and abroad and everywhere is private. The doctors are private. The hospitals are private. Everything’s private. What’s not private is you. You’re the guy that’s not allowed to pay for his own health care. It’s not, nobody’s taken anything away.

Even I with Freedom Party, if you look at Freedom Parties, staying on health care, we don’t want to take away the guarantee of health care. Do you think I want that? You think I don’t want to be covered?

No. You think I want to worry about being in a hospital? What kind of person would I be? I’d be shooting myself in the head if I was sitting here saying, hey, I want an old private.

I want to pay for it myself. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about insurance and the freedom to go where you want when you’re sick and you really have to deal with an issue. Tim Hodges points out in his letter how Detroit has used profits from Ontarians who are going over there to get surgery and all sorts of other things done. They’re using the profits that we’re spending there to improve their health care system.

If you want to see an example of what we’re talking about in terms of two-tiered health care system, CTV did an incredibly tragic show on a fellow in Kitchener named Jeff Clark. This was aired on CTV on April 15th. I still have the news clip. It’s a three-minute news clip.

I’m not going to play it for you here, but I do have it. What he did was he had extremely bad back. His disc was out. He needed back surgery. He’d gone to many specialists in Canada doctors.

They kept putting him on drugs. For six years, he was more or less stoned out of his mind, walking around with a walker, could hardly think, couldn’t walk, until he heard of a group called, let me see, what are they called here, Surgical Tourism Canada. And they linked him up with doctors in, of all places, India. And get this, and this was all documented and shown on CTV. For $15,000 Canadian, he paid for his flight to India and back, paid for his surgery, and paid for a two-week stay in a five-star hotel, along with all the attendant doctors and nurses and everyone. One week out of surgery, he’s up and about, off drugs, walking around back.

Totally productive person in society. And it was really, what was really funny in this ad was listening to the Canadian health care system trying to defend itself. Here’s a guy, proof is right in front of him and they’re denying it.

Oh, he shouldn’t have done that. Not enough tests, not enough this, not enough that. I was just out of my mind watching it, but that’s just an example of what is wrong with the health care system and the way people are looking at it. Just heard Michael Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia this morning on the radio, telling us that we should be proud. You know, Canadians should be proud to have the right to stand in line.

I’m thinking there shouldn’t be any lines at all. So what do we do? What do we do about health care?

How can… Oh, by the way, there’s another important point I wanted to make too, before I say that. It’s not as though this was not known about or that when we got into socialized health care in Canada, in Ontario particularly, that we didn’t know about it. Socialized health care in Canada started on July 1, 1962, and that was in Saskatchewan, the first socialized health care system in North America.

And it was brought under the then premier Woodrow S. Lloyd. And at that time, a month before, in fact, there was another doctor, a doctor named Leonard Peikoff, who made a prediction about what would happen with the state of socialized health care in the country and how it would work out in the long run. And so he basically asked the question in an essay he wrote called Doctors and the Police State, interestingly enough, because that’s how they looked at it then. And by the way, all the doctors in Saskatchewan were totally opposed to the plan, but they were conscripted into it and they were told, oh, you don’t have to worry about it, we’ll get you the money. So here’s what Dr. Peikoff said.

What will happen to the caliber of medical practice in this country if the socialists take over? Then he says, let’s look at the evidence from England, Holland, Hungary and all the other countries that had done it up to that time. And he says, the degrees and details vary, but the pattern is always the same.

And here is the pattern and tell me that this doesn’t sound familiar. First, the government announces free medical care for everyone. Then there’s a sudden insatiable endless stampede. As malingerers, neurotics, and the authentically sick all clamor for medical attention. Then the doctors, crushed by the impossible overloads, abandon and despair, the attempt to treat each patient’s problem thoroughly and conscientiously. Increasingly, doctors turn into traffic directors, routing people out of their offices in three to five minute appointments per patient, making instantaneous diagnoses, dispensing routine prescriptions and then calling for the next man. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats, dismayed by the endless flow of money pouring into the bottomless pit of patients, begin to clamp down more and more severely. The doctors who use expensive new techniques or exceed their quota of drugs are fined for wasting the people’s resources.

Restrictions and forms multiply and triplicate. Doctors become part-time clerks, bureaucrats and their friends multiply. The doctors begin to check a patient’s political contacts before they prescribe.

And in the end, the patients who have no contacts but really need medical attention start running to non-socialized countries if they can find any end quote. Now, I said this was a doctor, Leonard Peikoff, who wrote this. You might think he’s a medical doctor. No, he wasn’t. He’s a doctor of philosophy. But everyone else in his family was medical doctors.

I believe they came from Winnipeg originally. And of course, this is exactly what’s happened. You know that in 1991, all our first ministers, our health ministers in Canada met in Banff, and at that time, because they were concerned exactly what Dr. Peikoff said about the explosion and cost, they thought they could control it by controlling the number of doctors. And they came up with statements saying that we had too many doctors, and they purposely passed legislation to limit the number of doctors, which is why we have such a shortage. And the tragedy of all this, I mean, I could go on for hours on this.

I think I will do a whole show on this subject once, but I just want to touch on the basics now. The tragedy is that socialized medicine has been a sacred cow in Canada for a long time. Let’s face it, it’s been like that for 20, 30 years.

You can’t even talk about changing that. But people seem to think that the system is collapsing because people are talking about, oh, it’s privatized. Let’s have more privatization. Let’s let people have more choice. The bad news is the system’s collapsing whether there’d be another system or not.

It’s collapsing under its own weight. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that other people can have choices. There are other systems out there. You cannot have a system that has total open ended on one end where everything is free, and then on the other end, you’ve only got a limited supply of that resource. So you have to start rationing.

You have to. And in particular, we in Ontario have a problem that most other socialized countries with medicine do not have. We have literally, thanks to the conservatives, okay, I hope our caller, our previous caller is listening, we cannot go to private healthcare sources like that. Poor fellow had to go all the way to India to get his operation.

He should have gotten right there in Kitchener because it didn’t seem to be that complex to me. So what you have is all these people have to take tremendous, tremendous efforts on their part to get the healthcare that they need. And the irony is you could pour, we could put trillion dollars in our healthcare system. It’s not going to improve it because it doesn’t change the system under which it operates. Only Ontario, North Korea, and Cuba are the jurisdictions that in addition to having socialized medicine also ban private practice. And in essence, what we’re talking about is insurance, not practice.

Sorry, I even made the mistake myself. You hear that? It’s insurance that we want. That’s what would cover everyone. So, oh, and the other issue, universality. That’s another word we hear a lot when we talk about healthcare. And everybody thinks that universality means, oh, well, everybody has universal access to the healthcare system, right? That’s what universality means?

No, it doesn’t. We had universality before socialized medicine. Universality means universally free, not universally accessible.

And when you have universally free, universal accessibility eventually ends. Here’s what we need to do. We need to be able to pay our own way. We need to be able to get private health insurance or purchase the government health insurance that everybody seems so happy with.

You have those three choices, you’re on your own. And the guy that can’t even afford the government health insurance plan, okay, that’s not an issue. You don’t have to pay 100% of his problems.

Pay his insurance. How simple is that? Nobody wants to do it because there’s no political power in it and they can’t control you that way.

They know you can control your own life if you were given those choices. Enough on that. We’ll be back after this talking about the rich and the poor.

Comedy Routine (Speaker 3):

Everyone had the same concern. They’re concerned about healthcare because the healthcare system in Canada is like a hospital gown. You only think you’re covered.

Comedy Routine (Speaker 4):

How great would that be to win the lottery all of a sudden? I bought one for this week actually. At the corner store talking to the guy behind the counter. We’re shooting the breeze about how great it would be to win the lottery and what we would do with the money. This guy in line behind me, I hear this guy say, oh, money won’t buy happiness. Have you ever talked to one of these knobs?

What do you even say to somebody that’s stupid? Money don’t buy happiness. I don’t want it to buy happiness. I got happiness figured out. I sit around in my underpants giggling until noon. I’m happy as a clam. The Simpsons come on seven times a day if you have a decent cable package. How happy do you need to be?

Bob Metz:

Welcome back. You’re listening to Just Right with Bob Metz. We’re here on CHRW 94.9 FM. If you want to join the conversation, it’s 519-661-3600. Does money buy happiness? Not necessarily, but there’s that old statement by the late Sophie Tucker who said, I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and, honey, rich is better.

That’s always true. But of course, whenever you’re talking about money and wealth, the little greedy envies come out and then you get people wanting to talk about things that don’t really have to do with money and equality. I have an article in my hand here again from the Free Press. The richer getting richer, a new study says. There’s a growing gap between rich and poor in North America. I guess the implication is that some of us are getting poorer, and that may be true. If you really want to know whether you’re getting richer or poorer, it doesn’t matter whether you are richer or poorer. Wherever you are, look and see if you’re making more money this year than you did the last year.

If you only made 100 bucks last year and you made 120 this year, you’re richer. That’s all it means. It’s just a relative word. The worry we get about the gap between rich and poor is outrageous.

To me, it says nothing except that the person who’s saying it has some deep envy. Now, there is a good historical reason why the poor have generally hated the rich. A reason that basically vanished about 100, 150 years ago, but a good one before that. And that’s because the rich people at that time were all in government. They were kings, queens, people who controlled everyone.

People were essentially slaves, serfs, and had to bow to the queen, even Britain, if you want to talk about the most free nation for many years relative to the rest of the world. So, in a way, if a person has earned their wealth, not earned their wealth, but just taken it rather from the people who did earn it, the resentment is quite understandable. You can look at a criminal politician. You see this in Africa all the time where it’s just glaring, where the country’s in poverty. Meanwhile, the dictator at the top is sitting there with billions of dollars in some Swiss bank account. You hear about this all the time.

That’s definitely a legitimate case of grievance. But when we start looking at people like Bill Gates and saying the man’s too rich, and I’ve heard that said, I think we’re losing our minds here. Bill Gates is not rich because he stole money from anybody. Bill Gates is not rich because he took it from anybody.

I mean, there might be the odd law suit here in terms of patents and copyrights. That’s not what I’m talking about. Bill Gates is wealthy as are other people in that industry, in any industry, because he made you wealthier. That computer you’ve got sitting on your console, most of us. My whole living is made using computers.

I couldn’t prepare for this show. I do my edits weird. The things we’re doing on the air here require computers. These computers, the power on one of them, is incredible. I don’t think we understand what we have there. You know that when the first Apollo astronauts went to the moon, the computer they had was something equivalent to the level of a Commodore 64?

Anybody remember what that was? I started on a Commodore 64 with those big floppies. And when we talk about power with a computer, it is power. You have had power placed in your hands. And the computer and the amount of power it can put on, just sitting on an average person’s desk, used to be unimaginable to the richest millionaire only 20 years ago. You’d have to be a billionaire to have just what that computer can do on your desk.

So think about that. It’s the wealth. You gave your money indirectly to Bill Gates, if you’re buying his products, or if it doesn’t matter whether you’re buying Macintosh or whatever. But that’s how wealth is created in a capitalist society. If you have that, and then the other issue is, do I care how rich Bill Gates is?

People talk about the riches, though they’ve got this money. Remember Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck? And Uncle Scrooge would have this house full, or not a house, what am I talking about?

I think it was a skyscraper full of money from the basement right up to the roof. And he would be wallowing in the money and kicking his feet up. And whenever poor Donald Duck would come by to visit him, of course, Uncle Scrooge wouldn’t lend him a nickel.

And everybody would figure, well, that’s the way Uncle Scrooge is. Well, that is almost the epitome of the way people think about what riches. You think Bill Gates can really spend the billions he has and spend them on himself? That’s not where that money is sitting. That money is sitting in stocks, in bonds, in capital, in the investment, in all of his businesses. The fact that he has control over them, and it’s called his, quote, personal wealth, everybody thinks he’s the richest person, family in the world.

That’s actually not true. It’s the Walmart family. But the reason they don’t get mentioned is because they’re a family. So they split the wealth among the handful of them. So that’s how Bill Gates rises to the top. But Walmart’s actually, at least the last I heard, has a greater wealth capacity than even Bill Gates. But they’re just not considered a single person because of the way they structured the company, I guess.

So it’s an interesting situation. I was here, socialist, new Democrats, I remember one saying, that excess wealth shouldn’t be allowed to exist, and that wealth should be redistributed through a more equitable tax system. Well, I’d believe that if we were talking about his money and how he gets his money, because if he’s getting it as a politician, I wouldn’t mind some of that back.

What has he done for me? But if he’s talking about Bill Gates, or if he’s talking about all the people who make it possible for us to be richer, even though we don’t have the fortunes that they have, that’s a criminal act as far as I’m concerned. If it was me going around saying, oh, I want to redistribute the wealth of others, what would you do with me?

You call that what it is, by its proper name. That’s theft I’m advocating. But when a politician does the exact same thing, goes in front of the public, oh, we call it equity. It’s not theft anymore, it’s just equity. If the government does it, if you’ve got a gang behind you, oh, then you can go and take your neighbor’s money because, hey, that’s democracy, right? So, as an old friend of mine used to say, thus by some mysterious alchemy, stealing is transmuted from the base metal of criminal activity to the pure gold of high and noble purpose.

And this is both the purpose and the method by which the left generally operates. It’s interesting, quite a few years ago, if you recall, there was an author named George Gilder, and he wrote a book called Wealth and Poverty. I agree with a lot of what George Gilder says in his book. I’m not entirely in agreement with his entire philosophy, but he certainly brought out some fascinating issues with regard to the mystery of history in terms of how society has constantly been so hostile to its greatest benefactors, the people who actually produce the wealth. Remember, all the other isms, socialism, fascism, communism, they are all parasitical systems, and they have to all be parasites on essentially what is capitalism, the only system that creates the wealth, all the other systems are designed to redistribute wealth. But there’s nothing in their philosophies that creates the wealth that they need to redistribute, and that’s why they always have to allow capitalism, and that’s why at least some degree of it. Russia learned this the hard way.

This is one of the first truths that I learned in politics too when I started looking. As a generality, you can say that the more capitalistic a country is, and there’s various degrees, there’s no purely capitalistic country around, it’s all mixed economy, that we have to understand that. But the part of the economy that always works is the capitalist part, and it’s not a profit system, it’s a profit and loss system, and it’s important to understand. Many people in the capitalist system are losing money because they take risks and they put their own money into ventures that you don’t have to, and then after five or six tries of failing at something, wow, they succeeded something and get real rich and make you wealthier at the same time. In his book, Wealth and Poverty, Gilder points out to the fate of the Jews and Hitler’s Germany, because they were considered the wealthy class, the pogroms against the Russian Kulaks, the slaughter of the Ibo tribesmen in Nigeria, the killing of almost a million Chinese in Indonesia. And Gilder says, quote, everywhere the horrors and bodies pile up in the world’s perennial struggle to rid itself of the menace of riches, of the shopkeeper, bankers, merchants, traders, entrepreneurs.

There’s a reason that people in government generally don’t like business people and why they have to paint all business people as something that is essentially evil. If you’re going to go to somebody and violate his rights and steal his property, you have to make it sound like you’ve got a good reason to do it. You’ve got to paint him to be a bad guy. So you can’t go there and say, I’m going to steal your money because you were a nice guy and you made me rich and you helped society. So you’ve got to actually go to that person, paint an evil picture of him, make him sound like he’s evil incarnate and that anything you do with business and anything you do to raise wealth is just morally wrong.

They get that moral issue in there that just being self-interested and doing things for yourself. This is what Adam Smith discovered. You hear that old term, the invisible hand and he never used the word capitalism by the way. Capitalism was a term created by Karl Marx to make it a bad thing. That’s why he added ism to it.

Capital can’t be an ism but that’s another issue. But the idea of that invisible hand where people working in self-interest end up benefiting everyone. The thing that makes that difficult for some people understand is that on the other hand government has a very visible hand and when they do something, they do the big fanfare, they build, oh we created 10,000 jobs here in this sector while ignoring the fact that unemployment is going up because in creating that 10,000 jobs quote, they took that work from somebody else because that’s all they can do.

Governments do not create, they can only destroy and we need an instrument of destruction in society, an instrument of force but only in self-defense and only to protect our rights and end our freedoms. So I think we have to dispense with this notion forevermore that some people can be helped by confiscating the wealth of others and if that’s a message I can leave with you today and to think about till next week when we will return. So we want you to join us again next week. We’ll be back in our journey to the right direction. Right and think right. See you next week. Take care.

Comedy Routine (Speaker 5):

So I’m not married, if you are married good for you. It’s just what is it? One in three marriages ends in divorce now and the other two murder suicide. It’s different, it’s different mindsets, that’s the problem you know.

Women get married is all these factors you know romance, security, sex, all rolled into but guys can separate you know love and sex. Two different cities if necessary. I’m kidding. I love her and I travel.