019 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 019

Air Date: August 23, 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, August 23rd. I’m Bob Metz, and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM, where we will be with you from now until noon. Not right wing. Just right.

Welcome to the show this morning on CHRW 94.9, where you can call in if you’d like at 519-661-3600 to join in the conversation on some of the subjects today. Or you can email us at justrightchrw.com. Today’s theme is Insane Health Care Legislation. And apparently how stupid people are wrecking politics, according to some of the things I’ve been reading in the National Post.

And maybe I’ll have time before the show ends to even get into some basic issues of freedom itself and how it’s playing itself out in the whole Canadian political scene. But first, let us begin our story from last April. I’m looking at an article from back in April, April 23rd, written by Brian Hutchinson in the National Post. And the headline reads, Plastic given healing powers, country’s first private ER accepts credit cards.

MD calls health care legislation insane. Those are the headlines and the subheadings on the story. Now what makes this story more interesting than most to me, and I’ll be carrying through the theme with this today, is that for the first time in a long time I’m seeing here what I would call an accurate description of what private health care actually is, which I will contrast later to what you’re being told it is. But here’s basically what the story says, and it’s out of Vancouver. A six-story office building on Vancouver’s west side is essentially a hospital, a private one and profitable. Inside, patients are greeted by cheerful receptionists and are offered coffee and tea. Depending on their requirements, they are directed either upstairs to the busy False Creek Surgical Center or to the adjunct MRI and X-ray department located on the ground floor. Or they may go straight into a brand new and spotless emergency ward. Admissions are made quickly.

There are no wait times here. Called the Urgent Care Center, UCC, it is Canada’s first private medical emergency facility and a solution some say to an overburdened bureaucratic and unsustainable public system. Others insist it violates principles of universal health care in this country. Canadians should not be able to get better access to health care just because they are willing to buy it. And doctors are not supposed to extra bill for medically required services. I already like how that paragraph is worded a little better because they point out it’s because you are willing to buy it, not that you can afford it or not afford it, just that you’re willing to buy it. That’s a whole different thing.

That means it would be in some way affordable to you. The article continues that when the Center prepared to open last December, BC’s health ministry threatened to seek a court injunction to stop the launch. Here we have government hard at work denying health care to its citizens again, seeing as somebody wants to start offering some kind of alternative, take pressure off the system. There’s the government right in there stopping it all.

That’s where tax dollars are going. The Center soon found a way around the rules, however, by importing emergency room doctors from outside BC and as a consequence opened in April of this year. It also said some of the doctors were from South Africa, some from other areas in Canada, but they’re from other places outside BC. The urgent care center’s raison d’être, its one clear advantage, is efficiency. Doctors here can heal the sick immediately, but for a price. There’s no point in hauling out a provincial health care card here.

Credit cards are the rule. Each urgent care customer is charged a $200 diagnostic fee and prices climb from there depending on the required treatment. The center actually was founded by anesthesiologist Dr. Mark Godley, whom the article describes as Canada’s most outspoken and proactive private health care advocate. He says he dreams of the day when Canadian doctors will escape castration by what he calls restrictive and insane health care legislation. He was born and raised in South Africa where he moved to BC in the mid 1990s but could not find work. The province, he says, was closing surgeries and there was a glut of anesthesiologists. If you recall in the early 1990s, this was the period when all of Canada’s health care ministers met in Banff, Alberta, and they all decided openly and clearly to limit the number of doctors available to Canadians in a bid to save on outrageously uncontrollable health care costs. I wrote an article on this back at that time. You can still find it somewhere on one of Freedom Party’s websites and I remember talking about how they were complaining we had too many doctors.

When was the last time you heard that complaint? Too many doctors. Of course, even then we didn’t have too many doctors. What they meant by too many is too many to afford by the public health care system. They didn’t mean too many doctors in terms of how many were being demanded by the public. But to continue with the article here and here they’re quoting Dr. Godley. The benefits of private hospital services are obvious.

We are highly motivated. Dr. Godley notes, our management structure is flat, not hierarchical like in the public system, so decisions are made quickly to the benefit of patients. Ironically, when he said that, I’m thinking that the latter system, the hierarchical government system, behaves just like the private insurance companies that people complained about in the first place and they wanted to replace with the government.

And so you still have the same problem. Remember, he who pays the piper calls the tune, so the closer you are to being the piper, the more you get to call the tune. We are not distant to the delivery of health care. We are directly involved with every patient who walks in the door, says Dr. Godley. And this is the author, Brian Hutchinson writing here. He says he invited me inside an operating room where a patient flat on his back was undergoing sinus surgery.

This man came here after being put on a public waiting list, Dr. Godley says. His doctor told him he could expect to wait four to five years for the procedure. The cost of the procedure is between $5,000 and $7,000.

A lot of money and more than many people could afford to pay certainly in one shot. So we do offer a payment plan, Dr. Godley says. Payment schedules can be negotiated. Needless to say, all major credit cards are accepted and cash is also welcome. Now, a second private facility, the Maple Surgical Center, has now been opened in Winnipeg by the same team of doctors and now has over $10 million worth of medical equipment available to people who go there. All of it financed privately. Besides offering a more direct personal level of care, the centers have helped reduce patient loads at the other hospitals, at the traditional hospitals.

And they have been validated by the public health care systems. In December, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority signed a three-year, $2.3 million service agreement with the Maple Center, effectively buying up all of its surgery capacity. They’re contracting out. Even the government’s contracting out to the private sector, so to speak. And now, of course, you have to also consider the situation: some of these people going and paying privately here are in the same situation as a person sending their kid to a private school. They still have to pay for the government monopoly. So they still pay twice, even though their health care isn’t being paid back from the public system. They still pay that public premium, if you will. Now, let us move forward—that article there was again from April 23rd.

Now let’s move forward to July 31st of this year also from the National Post, and this time front page headline: Allow private care: CMA. Canadians should be allowed to use private medical insurance to pay for health services normally available under Medicare if governments cannot guarantee timely access to publicly funded treatments as a new report by the country’s largest doctors group.

Never thought I’d hear this one, folks. The Canadian Medical Association, CMA, also said provincial governments should be allowed to contract out public health services to the private sector and pay for patients to obtain treatment in other cities or countries. In other words, they almost want the public system to actually act like an insurance plan, which is what they were trying to get away from, but nevertheless. The CMA has hinted in the past that private sector solutions should be found to the problems, particularly patient waiting lists, that plague Canada’s overburdened Medicare system.

But never before has it so clearly stated its support for private health and private insurance. Now, Dr. Colin McMillan, who was the outgoing president of the CMA, said in a speech delivered in Charlottetown—and I found this very interesting—one of the few disappointments that I’ve experienced in the past year as CMA president is hearing how many Canadians, many of them highly educated, appear reluctant to enter into a dialogue about healthcare in a reasonable way. If we cannot discuss the future of healthcare delivery in Canada without resorting to ideology, emotions, or outdated rhetoric, then progress at the political level will be next to impossible.

Of course, the issue here is I agree with what he has said here, but I don’t think you can do it without resorting to ideology. It’s always about ideology. It just depends on which ideology. And in his case, of course, he’s really, without naming it, referring to the ideology of collective security, of socialism, of everyone paying into a pot and hoping that they’re going to get that service when it comes to their turn to get that service. Now, right now, I’m just going to take a quick break, and you’re going to hear a little bit of the other side of this issue. And when we come back, I’ll come back to the punchline of all of this. But first, take a listen to this.

Clip (Sicko – Michael Moore documentary, Various Speakers):

Doctors at the insurance companies deny these claims, because what happens now is if you go to see your doctor and your doctor says you need an operation for this, the doctor can’t just send you to have the operation or the procedure done. He has to call somebody sitting in a cubicle a thousand miles away at an insurance company and ask the guy sitting in the cubicle for permission to treat you. It’s absolutely insane when you think about it.

It’s even more insane to think about that the person in the cubicle is trying to figure out how not to treat you. It’d be one thing if that were a legitimate middleman that was actually helping along. But it seems like it’s designed to deny you treatment.

Well, yeah, because they can’t make money. Well, they’ve done a good job of scaring people and thinking the federal government is bad, which it’s not the government that’s bad. It’s some of the people that we elect that don’t run it right.

That’s really the problem. Is there a solution that is practical and will actually occur or is it pie in the sky?

Oh, Canada. We should do like that. Let’s not get crazy. No, they’ve already figured this out just as they figured other things out up there. They don’t like to invade other countries.

This is a good solution.

The solution to the health care crisis in America via Michael Moore is to invade Canada. And I think we can get that done.

Why not?

Clip (Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby):

A bullish education and science. That would be the end of civilization as we know it.

We’re only bothered by the department. Education and science were flourished. Without a government department, impossible.

Humphrey, government departments are tombstones. The department of industry marks the grave of industry. The department of employment marks the grave of employment. The department of environment marks the grave of the environment. And the department of education marks where the corpse of British education is buried.

Bob Metz:

And the department of health care marks the corpse of health care in Canada if you want to carry that principle through. Now let us move forward to August 11th and back here to Ontario where a letter to the editor appeared in the National Post written by none other than Ontario PC leader John Tory, who in responding to a previous article about Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s plans for Ontario’s health care system, lamented that the National Post article did not point out that Dalton McGuinty’s new plan looks remarkably similar to ours.

Let me repeat that. Did not point out that Dalton McGuinty’s new plan looks remarkably similar to ours. In other words, liberal equals conservative.

No difference. And the leader of the progressive conservative party is actually bragging about it and wants us all to be aware of it. So there he is telling you that he’s no different from the other party, that the other party is stealing his idea, whatever that idea is, but nevertheless they’re the same and that seems to be important for him to let you know. So what’s his argument?

A John Tory PC government will lead where Dalton McGuinty has not—which pretty much sums up Tory’s whole argument in the letter on health care. It’s a purely political statement and probably means that he can break a promise better than McGuinty can.

But on the issue of private health care, Tory is unequivocally committed to the current government monopoly status—and don’t let him for a minute tell you a difference, because he’s hypocritically trying to make it sound as if he’s in favor of something that I just described in Vancouver and advocated by the CMA.

He is not. And here’s what I heard him say when he was here in London going through his election tour and he made it clear: no cash, no credit cards will be allowed for private clinics. He insisted last week while he was campaigning here in the London area, you must use your OHIP card to access private health care clinics under his plan. Folks, this is just not private health care by any stretch of the word. Private—and keep this in mind if you wonder which politicians to trust and which ones not to trust—if you just keep definitions clear, that helps a lot, because when you understand that private always refers to private payment, not to the services rendered or received—all the services, all our hospitals, all our doctors are private—always have been.

Until the state actually takes them over and employs them and pays their paycheck directly, that’s the only time they’ll actually become public. So the point is if you are not permitted to pay out of pocket—and that also means through private insurance or other means—it’s not private, period, end of story. It’s just not private unless you can pay. Now, Tory is mindlessly confusing the issue, and his plan will in fact extend the crisis currently experienced in the public health care sphere to the private. If you still don’t have to pay for your medical treatment under Tory’s plan, not even a premium in the direct sense, how long do you suppose it’ll take before those supposedly private health care options will become overburdened and run down and look a lot like the public health care system?

I don’t think it would take that long. It might last a few years because things usually run good for the first few years in any case, but in the long term, you’re going to see the government under pressure as people asking for government money for every other purpose under the sun, from education to arts funding. We actually got a questionnaire from an arts funding group that wants us to toss millions into arts funding because they think arts funding is just as important as health care, and that’s how some people think in the province. But in any service that’s free at the door, demand always becomes infinite—economic demand—simply because the prices that would normally regulate demand by balancing supply and demand are not being allowed to operate. It’s as if there is a hole in the bucket, and no matter how much water you pour into it, you’ll just never fill that bucket, and you can pour millions and millions and millions of dollars into that empty bucket, and people wonder how come we’re not getting the results that we should be getting.

Remember, he who pays the piper calls the tune, and that’s just the way it is. Pretty much there’s only three basic solutions that are realistic with regard to the funding of health care: one, you can pay as you go; two, you can have private insurance; or three, you can pay a premium to a government insurance health care system.

It’s a matter of having the choice, and it’s amazing how people all want to be put in the same box and have those choices taken away. There are two other ways to get funding into the health care system, and we shouldn’t be looking at the health care system as this monopolistic government-run monopoly. When I say health care system, I mean all doctors, all practitioners right across the system.

So this leads me now away directly from the health care issue per se and to another article I ran across in the National Post, which might seem totally unrelated, and basically the theme of it was how stupid people are wrecking politics. And I simply could not disagree more with the National Post article, but I couldn’t disagree more with the opinions published in a series of book excerpts that recently appeared in the post entitled The Cult of the Amateur, written by Andrew Keen. I found his observations accurate but sort of misleading and completely out of context. And here’s what he basically says in one excerpt titled World Wide Wasteland—he’s basically blaming the internet for the collapsing state of politics today. But here’s what he says: at the time of writing—and by the way this was just printed within the last couple of weeks, August 16th—at the time of writing there are 53 million blogs on the internet, and this number is doubling every six months. And in the time it took you to read this paragraph, ten new blogs were launched. If we keep up this pace, there will be over 500 million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing public opinion about everything from politics to commerce to arts and culture. It seems to me for the first time we’re actually getting an insight into what public opinion actually is.

How else do you measure it if you can’t go directly to the individuals and people online who are expressing their opinions? But he says these days kids can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on Joe Schmoe’s blogspot.com. YouTube eclipses even the blogs in the inanity and absurdity of its content. The site is an infinite gallery of amateur movies showing poor fools dancing, singing, eating, washing, shopping, driving, cleaning, sleeping, or just staring into their computers.

In another excerpt titled How YouTube is Wrecking Politics, the author points out some clear examples of fraud and misrepresentation, which I fully agree are illegitimate. But he writes: in the Web 2.0 era, the “somebody put it on YouTube” excuse has become the equivalent of the dog ate my homework. The problem is that the viral editor-free nature of YouTube allows anyone from neo-Nazis to propagandists to campaign staffers to anonymously post deceptive, misleading, manipulative, or out-of-context videos. Imagine seeing something that’s out of context. This is the future of politics in the Web 2.0 world where one thoughtless throwaway remark overshadows an entire platform. When we, the citizens, don’t know whom to believe or whom to trust, we may end up making the wrong decisions or worse yet just switch off from the candidates, from politics, or from voting at all. The YouTube-ification of politics is a threat to civil culture. It infantilizes the political process, silencing public discourse and leaving the future of the government up to 30-second video clips shot by camcorder-wielding amateurs with political agendas.

Well, I wonder what planet Andrew Keen has been living on. Having just read all that, I would have to say that each and every criticism he has of what he calls the Web 2.0 world applies equally to the reality of public discourse 1.0 out there in the real world. The terror he expresses at the stupidity and irresponsibility of what he sees on the Internet is simply the result of being able to see what public opinion actually is.

And in that respect I guess I don’t blame him for his disgust. Anyone in politics knows about this, Internet or not. When you’re out there talking to people on the street and you find out what kind of processes of thinking they arrive at their conclusions with—especially when it’s about something you know about—you kind of have to scratch your head. So let’s take his premise: let’s say there are at least 53 million blogs on the Internet. Out of 53 million, would you not think it would be possible that there might be at least a thousand blogs that are reputable and accurate?

It’s sort of like finding planets out in space or life on the planets. We know that there’s millions and millions and millions—billions, trillions—of them that don’t have life and may never have life.

But out of those there may be thousands and hundreds and even millions of planets that do. That would still be—in the sense of news—a lot more sources of reliable information than we now have with a handful of newspapers and radio stations all generally owned by the same interests, and interests which I’ve discovered are generally political in the long run. In terms of reliability and objectivity—I don’t mean this paper has some good columnists in it—but I kind of place the London Free Press near the bottom of any credibility list lately. I’ve already many times on this show commented on my frustration with what I see as this shallow and superficial and biased reporting, not just in the editorializing but in the reporting that’s fairly routinely expressed by the paper, especially when it comes to issues of politics and economics.

My own mother has lately been referring to the paper as London’s own National Enquirer, but she keeps getting it because she subscribes for the obituaries. And if you want to see bold-faced lies printed in our edited mainstream publications, just look at all the nonsense you’ll see on, for example, global warming. Basically it’s a blatant fraud in which only a handful of newspapers like the National Post refuse to participate in. But even the National Post prints many news items that amount to what one of its own editors, Terence Corcoran, exposes and refers to as junk science.

Regular listeners to this show will have heard his remarks on that subject that were taped here at the university a few years ago, where he talks about all the junk science stories that appear in his own paper. And then of course Al Gore and David Suzuki—two completely unqualified people in the field of global warming—are constantly quoted as some sort of authoritative source on the subject by most major media. Now of course on this single issue, on the issue of global warming, the National Post has been standing out as Canada’s leading denier. For example in its August 13 edition, columnist Lorrie Goldstein—look at the numbers—refers to Al Gore’s claim in An Inconvenient Truth that nine of the ten hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade, when in fact the hottest year since 1880—and that’s the year from which they have any reliable statistics—is 1934, not 1998 which Gore says is the second hottest, but the third hottest is 1921. Four of the ten hottest years were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade. The fifteen hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before the atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise.

Seven occurred afterwards. In other words there is no discernible trend, no obvious warming of late. Wow, now that’s what I call a denial. He’s even denying that global warming is happening, so I don’t know that I’d go that far. Nevertheless Goldstein’s statistics are based on those compiled by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and he points out that available surface temperature readings cover only half the planet even today. And before the Second World War they covered less than a quarter.

So US readings for a period that goes back as far as 1880 are among the most reliable that there are, and that’s why they use them. Now I could go on and on with further examples of the nonsense in the mainstream media and politics, but that would probably fill the airwaves until the year 3050, and I simply won’t live that long. But the point I want to make—which seems to be a new discovery apparently to author Andrew Keen who blames it all on the internet—is that most people are stupid. And I include myself in that.

About any particular or specific point of knowledge outside their immediate experience or study—and it’s always going to be that way. It just has to be. I mean ask me to fix a car, cook a gourmet dinner, and I’ll be contracting out. I’ll tell you that right now. I may know something about politics but I don’t know a lot about a lot of things, and it applies to everything. Consider this statement from our previous topic about the health care: we hear from the CMA president who says he’s disappointed hearing how many Canadians—and he stresses many of them highly educated—appear reluctant to enter into a dialogue about health care in a reasonable way. That’s because they don’t know the facts. They don’t know the politics. They don’t know the nature of government because you have to acquire a certain expertise about that.

I said this many times in the past—said it on Jim Chapman’s show, and I was on with him many times—I said to most people, regardless of their education or intelligence—and they could be very educated or very intelligent or an expert doctor or scientist or anything—but when it comes to the subject of politics, folks, they are even less than ignorant. They literally know less than nothing about the subject. And if that sounds like a contradiction, let me remind you of Mark Twain’s famous insight: it ain’t what people don’t know that gets them into trouble. It’s what they know that ain’t so.

For example most people know that government healthcare and education are preferable to privately run healthcare and education, right? But it just ain’t so. And that’s a demonstrable truth but only when the two options are permitted to exist side by side. And that’s exactly why governments have to prohibit competition—because it would expose them for the frauds that they are when they try to do non-governmental things. Yet the other misunderstanding why people have trouble understanding politics is largely because we live in a highly technological industrial society where we are under an extreme division of labor, division of knowledge—we see specializing in certain areas.

You’re only on this planet for so long—and some of us longer than others—so you can’t absorb possibly all the knowledge that there is to absorb. And this is a principle that applies to art, entertainment, anything. I’ve got a lot of favorite TV shows that I watch and I talk about them on this show. I know there’s a lot of good shows out there that I’ll never get around to watching because I just haven’t got the time. So you have to pick and select and hopefully you get the ones that you enjoy most. In the short span of our lives we can’t possibly know everything. And even in a narrow field of interest or study that’s true. To complicate matters even further we have so-called public education—which is a euphemism for state monopoly indoctrination. But that’s a subject for another show. But if you want a generalized view of people in life you always have to turn to a legitimate working philosophy, which is the only way the mind can properly integrate all of the seemingly unrelated pieces of information with which we’re constantly bombarded—health care, education, any issue.

And it’s funny—I’ve seen this in action too. The same fact when presented to two people of differing philosophies will have an entirely different reaction and impact to that person. Take a word like capitalism—the person that thinks it’s dog-eat-dog and out there exploitation and stuff, that person will have a negative reaction to it.

The person who understands that capitalism is private property initiative, voluntary trade, will have a different emotional reaction to the word. You can see that even in a field like pornography—some people might think it turns them on and it’s art, and another person will think it’s disgusting and absolutely go off the deep end over an issue like that. And yet they might be looking at the very same thing. It’s been my experience that when an acknowledged fact conflicts with any subjective philosophy, the fact is generally ignored.

And if it agrees with the philosophy they promote it to the point of ad nauseam. Interestingly now you may think that given that I would never read columnists or study things of people who I disagree with—just so you know I do read columnists with whom I have profound philosophical disagreements. And I do take a lot of what they say with credibility but I have to divide where that credibility is.

For example one of them is Eric Margolis, whose reports and insights on the Iraq war and other global conflicts I think are nevertheless worth reading—going to the fact that he has directly experienced many of the things he writes about or personally interviewed key people in a given circumstance. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary I have a rule: I never deny a person’s experience because that’s one of my first rules in determining the validity of a given report or opinion. Now again he may give an accurate reporting of the fact but his interpretation of what’s going on and what’s the right and the wrong thing to do—there we may disagree profoundly. I mean if you told me that you saw a ghost I’ll believe that you believe that you’ve seen a ghost.

But I won’t necessarily agree that you’ve actually seen a ghost until I see one myself—and then I’ll be in the same position as the person that I just doubted. So if what you see on the internet is making you cynical about human nature, my advice to you is just stop seeking out the sensational, the stupid and uninformed. There are other options—few though they may be in relation to what’s actually available—and that’s true of everything. People say that television for example is just full of crap and I would agree with them. But out of all that crap there’s a couple of items that you will probably like a lot and you wouldn’t consider that crap.

And every once in a while you might even like watching crap because that’s just what you’re in the mood to watch. But it is those few people who actually are the credible ones and who do the work and get out there—and they are out there and they’re on the internet—and so are a lot of the major outlets and the so-called edited sources. They’re on the internet too—and so is this show for example. Those few who offer the best hold the future. So before we continue on into our next segment I just got one conclusion: I think I might start my own blog. Who knows? But when we come back I’ll be talking about the freedom to worship freedom here in Canada.

Clip (Stand-up Comedy):

I like stupid people. How many people here are stupid?

Dumb people. Hey, you want to meet dumb people? Lock your keys in your car. Dumb people walk up to you and go, so how’d you do it? I snuck out the exhaust.

I’m going to get the exhaust. Keep working out the window if we’re ever going to regain our freedom.

Clip (Star Trek: The Original Series – The Omega Glory):

Freedom? Freedom. It’s back. That’s what I heard, Captain. That is a worship word. Yang worship. We’ll not speak it. Well, well, well. It is our worship word, too.

Bob Metz:

But is it the worship word of Canadians? Welcome back. This is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM where I’m Bob Metz, and you can call in 519-661-3600 or email us at justrightchrw.com. And the question was raised as well in the London Free Press in an August 13th commentary by Jerry Nichols: Free at last wherever I am. And he’s talking about political debate in mainstream Canada. And he says that liberty is essentially a forbidden topic, he argues. Think about it. When was the last time you heard the leader of a major Canadian political party talk about the need to protect individual liberty or freedom? It doesn’t happen. Nichols points out that even Prime Minister Stephen Harper rarely mentions the importance of freedom, whereas Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan used the word quite routinely. What’s going on here asks Nichols.

Why does freedom become such a dirty word? Well the answer is simple. He speculates.

Freedom started becoming a dirty word when under Pierre Trudeau Canada started becoming a socialist paradise. As Fidel Castro can readily tell you, freedom has no place in socialist paradises. Freedom in fact is to socialism what SUVs are to David Suzuki.

The two just don’t mix. I think you could say that about freedom to David Suzuki as well. Imagine what would happen, speculates Nichols, to our political landscape if Canadians started demanding freedom from high taxes, freedom from burdensome regulations, freedom from social engineering, and from all the other big government schemes that underpin socialist paradises. It would trigger a revolution.

But to prevent this from happening our political establishment, elite opinion leaders, took action. They decreed freedom was actually Un-Canadian. Freedom they told us might be something those nasty Americans value and treasure but here in Canada we have different values. We want and need the government to coerce us and to tell us how to run every aspect of our lives. Sooner or later Canadians will come to see socialist paradises aren’t all they’re cracked up to be and that freedom isn’t just an American value but a universal human ideal. And while I agree with the sentiment of that last statement I certainly don’t agree with his expectations that Canadians are just going to wake up one day and find out that freedom’s a value they really want. I think it’s a completely false expectation divorced from actual human experience.

And trust me I know this. I run a political party called Freedom Party and people always look at you weird as though it was some kind of alien value. What are you talking about freedom for? Don’t we already have freedom? They don’t even understand what the nature of freedom is in the context of politics. There’s a million definitions of freedom—actually over 50 to 60 in a dictionary—but only one or two refer to the political field. The problem as I see it is that freedom is of no particular interest to most people unlike the goodies that the government hands out by robbing one group in society and giving it to another. Getting free stuff really is what motivates the average political mind. And you can see this principle aptly demonstrated in the policies of all the major parties—and that’s why they don’t talk about freedom.

I can’t tell you that I’m going to promise you your freedom if I have to rob you and take your money and restrict your activities so that I can please some other group. How can I even dare to go near that word if that’s the way I think in politics? I recall when way back in 1984—it’s when I founded Freedom Party and we actually took over another party and changed its name—and I was shocked that no one wanted the name Freedom.

I mean I thought it would be locked up somewhere under some copyright or something like this under the Elections Ontario regulations because you’re not allowed to register a party under a name that has already been taken or registered in some other way—and it was actually available when we applied to have the party registered under that name. Not even the libertarians wanted the word—and that was an eye-opener for me. But I learned a lot about the nature of freedom and why people are afraid of freedom not from my usual sources—you’ve heard me talk a lot about Ayn Rand and other people like that—but from a very unusual source, a fellow named John Macmurray who has written a number of books on freedom, and he has a philosophy that I would say I agree with say 85% and about 15% not. But John Macmurray is no longer with us—he passed away quite a while ago but had written a number of books—and I was surprised to hear that Tony Blair, past Prime Minister of England, had actually written a foreword to some of the later editions of John Macmurray’s books—and that was quite surprising to me.

Of course Macmurray is originally from Scotland although he spoke very frequently here in Canada and actually did a number of radio broadcasts out of Kingston, Ontario back in the 1930s. And he kind of opened my eyes when he basically wrote this. Freedom is, I am assured, the pearl of great price for which if we are wise we shall be prepared to sell all our possessions to buy it.

You wouldn’t know that in Canada the other way around—we give up our freedom for the possessions but that comes to an end too. The ancient and widespread belief that the supreme good of human life is happiness—for all its persuasiveness—is false. Freedom has a higher value than happiness, and this is what we recognize when we honor those who have been ready to sacrifice happiness and even life itself for freedom’s sake. We flatter ourselves too much when we imagine that we love freedom and strive wholeheartedly towards freedom. On the contrary there are few things that we fear so much. No doubt we like the idea of freedom and find it most attractive but the reality is another matter.

I see history in its concrete reality not as man’s struggle to win his freedom in a world that frustrates his efforts but as a record of the twists and evasions by which men seek to escape from freedom in a world which thrusts it remorselessly upon them. The determination which oppresses us is not the opposite of freedom—for what is determined is that man shall be free. Here then is the paradox of freedom. We are free to choose between freedom or security. This choice is not voluntary nor is it once for all.

It is compulsory and it is perpetually recurrent. It is a real choice for we can make either freedom or security our goal. The demand for security is a reflection of fear while freedom is an expression of courage. And if we use our freedom to escape from freedom we will frustrate ourselves.

If we persist in this choice we destroy ourselves. If we aim at security we aim at the impossible and succeed only in multiplying the occasions of fear and magnifying our need for security. There is no security for us except in choosing freedom. For our insecurity is our fear and to choose freedom is to triumph over fear.

And that’s John Macmurray’s view on it. George Bernard Shaw once also said freedom means responsibility and that is why most men dread it—although in his case I think he might have meant something a little different from what I would mean by it in the sense that individual responsibility.

I think Shaw was thinking more of collective responsibility. But generally a lot about freedom means accepting the consequences of one’s own choices. And of course many people have expressed this idea but those who value security more than freedom will assuredly lose both—and those who value freedom as the highest ideal will achieve both.

And that’s been a demonstrable situation in world history. The countries that have the most freedom also have the most security even though there’s always someone in every society who people always say needs help or can’t get enough help. It’s interesting—Leonard E. Read who founded the Foundation for Economic Education described why people were sort of opposed to freedom and what forms the enemies of freedom take. It has many popular names such as socialism, communism, state interventionism, and welfare statism. It has other names such as fascism, Nazism, local names like New Deal, Fair Deal, New Republicanism, New Frontier, and the like—or like New Democrat. By the way if you ever see the word new or neo or progressive as an adjective to describe its subject then you can be pretty sure that the concept is really the opposite of what it means to be.

It actually means not. Neo-conservative is not a conservative. Progressive conservative, not a conservative. If you ever see a new freedom party watch out—you’ll know that it’s a totalitarian party because freedom is freedom. Democracy is democracy and tyranny is tyranny. How many of you want to vote for the new tyranny?

Kind of makes it obvious doesn’t it? Progressive conservative—not a conservative but its opposite. So no wonder most people are so helplessly confused by politics. And if you take a careful look at the so-called progressive ideologies you will discover that each takes the form of a belief in the use of organized force—government—to control the productive and creative activity of citizens in society. And this belief in the use of force as a means of creative accomplishment increases—the belief in free people, that is in people acting freely, competitively, cooperatively, voluntarily—correspondingly diminishes. Millions of people aware that something’s wrong look around for someone to blame. They dislike socialism and communism and give lip service to this dislike but among the millions who say they don’t like these ideologies you cannot find one in ten thousand whom you yourself would designate as a skilled accomplished exposer of socialism’s opposite—the free market, private property, limited government philosophy with its moral and spiritual antecedents. How many people do you know who are knowledgeable in this matter?

Very few I dare say—and that’s how Leonard E. Read looks at it. And of course his thing was that you had to develop some leadership in the field of freedom and get more people out there to explain to people how important freedom is. Freedom is like the air.

You take it for granted until it’s not there—and then you notice how important it is. One of the problems I found in the field of understanding and promoting freedom is that there are many who may be excellent speakers and knowledgeable on certain aspects of freedom—like economic freedom or personal liberty or the more surface aspects like the benefits of freedom—but whose fundamental principles ignore the basics, the basis of what’s necessary to the foundation of freedom. And you see that around all the time and it’s sad but inept defenders of freedom do more damage to freedom than do its overt enemies. Now my time’s running out pretty close but after this break got a couple of little things for you. And when we come back a few little items of potpourri—political potpourri—and we’ll be back right after this.

Clip (Stand-up Comedy):

Even at this age people still ask me why I don’t go to the United States. I do go to the United States. The last time I was there the audiences were asking me about what was happening here. They asked me in what way are you people up there different to us? I said well a great American said give me liberty or give me death. A great Canadian said give me liberty or is there any more beer? I have no life.

I hate when you’re talking to people and they say I gotta go. I never have any place to go. I would say can I come with you? I hate happy people. I know I look happy but I’m not.

Are you happy today?

Bob Metz:

Welcome back to the show. Bob Metz here on Just Right, CHRW 94.9. Sometimes politics is a serious matter—it’s always a serious matter—but sometimes we have to just take a break and have a chuckle at it. And I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now. This is just for fun.

Those of you who like quick little jokes and stuff like that you might enjoy this little part. But back I published some newsletters and things like that and I used to collect what you might almost call daffy definitions. And they’re sort of daffy definitions for political purposes. And I call it my—I guess this will be our debut of the poly tricky dictionary. Let’s call it that.

How we define certain terms. Now I used to run these under a column called the jokes on us because there’s more to these jokes than just the surface joke—there’s generally a deeper meaning behind it. But these are basically humorous dictionary of the words and phrases which shape politics. And I’ve got a ton of them here—not enough to even get through A and B maybe—but I’m going to pick a few here as I go through them. And some of them are subtle.

Some of them will hit you on the head. But these are political definitions and they’re not meant to be taken too seriously in the sense of literally but think about them for a while. And they all relate to something political and political philosophical. For example under the letter A what do you suppose a definition of academic freedom is? Well it’s freedom to be academic. Now that’s a subtle one—you have to think about that. What does the word actually mean in politics?

Well it really means perhaps, possibly. Administer—our dictionary defines the word administer as to inflict as a medicine, a sacrament, justice, or a government. Or affirmative action.

The white man’s new burden. And what do we call an agnostic—a God-fearing atheist. Altruism—you hear a lot about altruism—what do you suppose that is? Well that’s concern with the selfishness of others.

I always used to get a kick out of that. People are always telling you you’ve got to be concerned with the welfare and the concern of other people. And I’m thinking well where do I get on the receiving end of that?

Do I have to count on their charity and their concern to get it back? Because really when you think about it that definition is so close to the truth of what altruism really is. And most people especially in the field of healthcare—and I found this and caught people at it—they talk oh we’ve got to have healthcare to take care of our fellow man and make sure nobody falls through the cracks.

And when it comes right down to it they want to make sure they aren’t falling through the cracks. Here’s one—how do you define an anti-racist? One who is prejudiced against the prejudiced and intolerant, and intolerant of the intolerant. One who hates the haters and discriminates against the discriminators.

That’s an anti-racist. I like this one—April Fool. I know we’re far away from that but what’s the April Fool?

Well it’s just a March Fool with another month added to his folly. And here’s one—Art, the definition of Art. And the answer is this word has no definition. And in politics what does the word assure mean?

I’m still on the letter A. Assure—to cause to feel uncertain. Isn’t that exactly how you feel when a politician comes up to you and he says let me assure you that you will get the healthcare that you are promised?

Well that’s when you start worrying is when they start assuring you. Here’s one for you—B-1. What’s the definition of B-1? A vitamin essential to the health of the military industrial complex.

Here’s one for you—the balanced budget. Definition.

After the government takes enough to balance the budget the citizen has to budget the balance. Big—what’s the definition of big? Well bad if it’s a business.

Good if it’s government. Bilingualism—able to utter double talk in two languages. And we get to hear a lot of that in Canada. And black market—what’s the definition of black market?

The under the counter economy. And here’s one that I will wrap up with today and it’s called book burning. What’s the definition of book burning? Censorship in the 451st degree.

That’s the temperature at which paper burns if you don’t know that folks. And that is what I will leave you with this week and we’ll have plenty more for you in the future. But that’s it for today’s show folks and we’ll be leaving until next week when we will continue our journey in the right direction. Until then think right, act right, do right and stay right. We’ll see you then. Take care.

Clip (Stand-up Comedy):

What happened to integrity? What happened to quality of life? I’m serious. My wife and I went to a funeral not long ago. That’s not funny but we did. We were walking out of a cemetery. I saw a tombstone. It said here lies George Riley, a lawyer and an honest man. And my wife said look, they buried three guys in one grave.