038 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 038
Air Date: January 24, 2008

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

Clip:
Speaker 1: Hello, Alex.

Speaker 2: Hi, looking for me?

Speaker 1: You know you could really hurt a guy’s feelings. The way you’ve been trying to avoid me and all. We don’t see around the track that often. When, we do you’re always calling them right on the nose.

Speaker 2: So I’m lucky.

Speaker 1: Not today, pal. I can see we’re gonna teach you a little lesson about sharing the wealth. If you want to stay healthy, you and me are going to be partners.

Bob Metz: Good morning, London. It’s Thursday, January 24th, 2008. 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.

Welcome to the show this morning. Definitely a wintry morning, eh, Ira? Would you say? Ira Timothy’s the guy who’ll be answering the phone if you choose to call 519-661-3600 and join in on the conversation with us today.

Today on the show, public-private partnerships. Is that really a reality? On the whole idea of public ownership, I want to talk a little bit about why. I think that’s a little unreal, and maybe we should be looking at it. It was almost a fiction.

If I can get to it later on in the show, light bulbs, privacy and freedom. I’ve got to tell you about something that happened to me this week with regard to, of course, our government’s efforts to save energy.

And basically, crime and punishment. I want to talk about why punishments are so different and so out of whack, it seems, with one person getting a very serious sentence for something that seems to be light, and another person getting a very light sentence for something that seems to be serious. I think I may have some insight into why we see that happening more and more.

But first, before we get into those issues, those of you who tuned in last week on the show, our regular listeners, know I had guest lawyer Karen Selick from Belleville speaking to us about the Marc Emery situation, which we’ve been following up here. And of course, there have been some developments since last week. And just to make it clear that there might have been a slight misunderstanding in terms of what the situation Marc was facing with in the context that we were discussing last week.

And it’s interesting to note in the January 16th letter to the editor’s section of the National Post, there was a letter that appeared by Marc Emery’s wife, Jody Emery. And she basically cleared up some of the main things that she thinks were being not made too clear by a major portion of the media. And she said, at that time, remember, this is the 16th of January, because a deal has not been presented or signed, there’s still the possibility Marc will fight against extradition instead of plea bargaining.

And she also pointed out that co-accused Michelle Raney and Greg Williams’ charges have not been dropped. They are not mentioned or included in the deal. Marc has stipulated that he will only take the deal if his co-accused be spared from jail or prison, but further negotiations are needed to that end.

And then she also points out that Marc would still be extradited to the United States under temporary extradition and serve jail time, as the deal requires he plead guilty to charges in both Canada and in the United States. He would serve six to nine months in a U.S. jail awaiting sentencing, and then the Americans would have 45 days to return him back to Canada. And he must serve no fewer than five years of the 10-year sentence in Canada as part of the deal that they’re making.

Now, since that time, of course, there’s been more developments. Apparently the whole hearing has been moved up to some time in February. I think February 6th is now the date for the hearings in extradition hearings, that is. But it sounds like there’s a deal going on. And if just going by the last couple of days in the Free Press, sounds like something’s going on, that there’s some kind of tentative agreement that will spare his co-accused Michelle Raney and Greg Williams from doing jail time, at least if he gets that deal he wants. And he says here, actually this is Michelle Raney speaking. She says, I don’t feel it’s fair that Marc would have to sacrifice himself for us in any way whatsoever, said Raney, who has a legal exemption to use marijuana for Crohn’s disease.

And therein is another one of those great ironies of this whole situation, someone who’s legally using the drug here in Canada.

And just the massive mess up with this law, and it’s certainly been stressed in the National Post and all the papers, it’s just how hypocritical, contradictory, and anything else you can add are our drug laws.

This is sort of also a segue into my next subject, which will be coming up after the next break. And I thought it would be good to get to a couple items I never got to last week with regard to the whole Marc Emery situation. I had intended to include some of these items, but ran out of time as usual. However, I thought I’d go ahead with them anyway, since even though they speak to the Emery situation, they also help set the stage for my next topic, which is about crime and punishment and the relative differences and the seeming injustice behind them.

And not everybody’s in favour of Marc Emery, and that’s what I want to concentrate a little bit today on. And I was looking at an article here, January 11, 2008, written by Susan Martinuck, National Post.

Hardly a prince, says the headline, Marc Emery peddles a dangerous drug and flouts American law. Why should Ottawa protect him? And she says, two recent National Post columns have called for Canadians to support a drug dealer named Marc Emery. Of course, one of them was the one by Karen Selick, who was our guest last week. And the other one was, oh, who was that? Colby Koch, I think, was the other one she’s referring to.

Frankly, she says, this case isn’t that important or that complicated. Emery’s activities violate U.S. law. Canada has an extradition treaty with the United States, and our government has an obligation to honour its terms.

There is not a political issue. There is no issue of national sovereignty. The only fact that counts is that Emery repeatedly violated American law and did so deliberately. If his entire career as a marijuana vendor had been geared for his moment, then I say, let him have it. Marc Emery isn’t a hero. He’s a drug dealer. There isn’t much of a case to support government intervention in his extradition hearings. But there’s plenty of evidence to show why his activities are far from harmless.

And of course she talks about harm and damage that can be done by drugs in general. But if that’s an argument, so let’s extradite all the operators of the LCBO and the beer stores. I mean, many U.S. states are legally dry, and I’m sure they’ve sold to Americans before. And they come up here and they buy booze from our stores, and there’s plenty of evidence. I can show it to you to show that booze is not harmless. And my goodness, I think there’s even evidence to prove that the sale of cars is not harmless. So what kind of argument is that to put somebody in jail? I think it’s kind of a pretty petty and vindictive opinion.

And in her first sentence she states two falsehoods. One, that the National Post Columns called for Canadians to support the implied drug dealing, which is not what they said at all in any way, shape or form. And that Marc Emery even fits into the drug dealer category in the conventional sense.

Clearly this writer does not know Marc, nor understand his extensive history of campaigning on an incredible number of issues not related to pot, or Emery’s motivations for what he is doing. But more than this, I think it’s this unquestioning acceptance that it’s okay to extradite Canadian citizens from Canadian soil who’ve already been dealt with under Canadian law to the United States because something done here violates some law down there, particularly when those laws are differing and don’t involve what we would call capital crimes, or crimes of life and property. Another example, Jim Hunt, letter to the editor of National Post very quickly, quote, the rule of law is all that separates us from the savages. The law outlawing the sale of marijuana seeds was put on the books by politicians who thought it was the right thing to do, end quote.

Well, Jim, I got a couple of things to say for you. Number one, many savages who had laws, I mean, irrational mystical laws that were destructive to life in general, and which basically tried to protect a tribe from anything outside. That’s the kind of laws they had. It’s not laws per se that separate us from the savages, even from the animals, it’s rationality. And if you’re not rational, you can have irrational laws. And that’s what separates us from savages and from animals in general, both of whom are, by definition, at the mercy of nature.

And nature controls them rather than the other way around. Now, there’s no specific law outlawing the sale of marijuana seeds per se, although there’s some doubt as to that, depending on which jurisdictions you’re in. But of course, marijuana was made illegal, but not for many of the reasons related to its properties as a drug. It was made illegal for completely different reasons.

And that’s something I’m going to get into sometime in the future. I’ve done it before, but I want to expand it to give everyone a clear understanding of why we have drug laws. And the irony is that even from cocaine on down, it’s got nothing to do with the health reasons or health concerns at all.

Again, it’s about monopoly. And the history of drug prohibition in North America, and of America’s so-called war on drugs, I think is just an unmitigated moral, economic, political, and social disaster of almost unmeasurable proportions. I think this is the disaster of American foreign policy, is their drug policies.

And Richard Nixon’s so-called war on drugs, which has spent billions and billions and billions of dollars, and put more people in American jails than exist in almost any other jail of any country. Now here’s a different point of view. Robert Malamed, associate professor of biology from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the national post again, January 5th. Very quick, America’s approach to drug enforcement is criminal and ineffective, end quote. Now here we have someone who’s not saying obey the law, but actually pointing a finger at the law and calling it criminal. And I say good for him, because here’s the difference between people who just obey the law and people who think.

Law-abiding citizens, I’ve seen it over and over again. They’re the stuff of which totalitarian societies are built. They just obey the law blindly. In such societies, laws are usually used to force agreements between people, not to protect them from physical harm and fraud and things like that. Free societies, on the other hand, are built on the ability of moral citizens who act as free agents under a law that’s used to ensure consent in human relationships. And this is the thing that I think this country suffers from. To quote historian and author Joe Armstrong, whose great book, Farewell, the Peaceful Kingdom, was quite a seller a while back, he says Canada does not suffer from a crisis in leadership.

She suffers from a crisis in citizenship. And I do so much agree with, certainly with respect to many of the opinions expressed on the other side of this very sticky issue. Meanwhile, in other news, just related, it’s interesting that the London Free Press reported on January 11th that medical marijuana users now will get more freedom. They’ll be able to grow their own and not have to rely on a single seller to sell them the pot that they want.

And ironically, of course, Health Canada, in the past, when marijuana was prescribed to people, they used to recommend Marc Emery site as the place to go to get that medical marijuana. So what a mixed up mess this really is. So here’s Marc going to jail now, outrageous, absolutely outrageous circumstances in any case. So when we come back after this break, I want to talk about is there any justice? What happens when the punishment does not fit the crime? And we’ll come back right after this quick break.

Clip:
Speaker 1: The last time I had my car into the garage, it actually broke right down. I had to call a tow truck, get it towed into the garage. So I’m riding back in a tow truck with the guy and he’s got one of those little scanners, like picks up the police and fire and ambulance. And every two seconds, there’s another little clip coming on, alerting him of events. The one that I found funny was the police came on and they were looking for some guy. So they had to give the description of them over the scanner. This is the description of the guy that they gave. Male, white, naked.

Naked is one of those really good descriptive words. I mean, you say all these five, ten with brown hair, you’re like, well, that guy’s maybe five, eleven, kind of got dirty blonde hair. Naked. That guy’s naked. That guy’s not.

Book him, Dano.

And I’m not really a criminal mastermind, but if I’m going to be running from the law, I think I may go slap some pants on or something. Because eventually they’re going to be able to catch a naked guy. And really, what are the odds that I’m catching the wrong naked guy? Just some guy out there minding his own business, no particular care for pants. I’m sorry, sir. You fit the description. We can’t be too careful. You’re free to go about your merry naked way now. Let it hang out, my friend, is what they would say to him.

Bob Metz: Welcome back to Just Right, where we’ll be with you from now till noon. 519-661-3600 if you want to call in.

Is there any justice? What happens when punishment does not seem to fit the crime? There certainly have been a rash of letters to the London Free Press over the Emery situation. Emery has become a marijuana martyr, as Jamie Harris. Emery’s story shows there really is no justice. Who’s on dope when killers get less is another one.

And on and on it goes. Bad laws, I think, destroy justice. And are in and of themselves injustice.

That’s almost it. When there is an equivalence, for example, between the possession of a drug and of murder, in that the punishment for either is about the same, then I think we’ve lost our complete sense of what our justice system and law enforcement is supposed to be doing in the first place. The purpose of the administration of justice is not revenge, and nor is it meant, I think, or can it be, meant to be a means of control or prevention, even for murder. I don’t think you can use the law that way.

Now, to be sure, real victims of crime have real sufferings, and there are very real consequences. But I think the pain and grief that is felt by victims of crime, and I’m talking about in actual crime, is relevant to the principle of justice in only one real way. If it were not for the suffering caused by criminal or negligent behavior to others, we wouldn’t need a justice system to arbitrate those disputes and settlements between them and trying to arrive at something that we might regard as being just.

Now, some people might disagree with what I’m going to say, but justice is about judging someone, and in the passing of such judgment, I think you have to have a conscientious respect for the truth, for rationality, and that you judge the person for what he is. In other words, I’m arguing from the point of view that you judge the criminal, not the crime. Now, that doesn’t mean you ignore the seriousness of the crime.

There’s a context, of course, but within that limit of what the crime is, obviously you don’t treat murder the same as you treat jaywalking, which by the way isn’t really against the law interfering with traffic is, but jaywalking isn’t really. Others would argue that you judge the crime. They say equal time for equal crimes goes one version. I think it’s very simplistic and unjust approach to people who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. And really, justice is more than a social concept as such. I think it’s as much an issue to a man alone on an island as it is to a community or society. You actually can do an injustice to yourself whenever you give up, say, a higher value for a lower value, but that’s a discussion for another show, even though the implications of this may be enormous.

So here’s what I want to do with my getting away from the theory. Let’s look at the practice. I picked three people that have been in the news lately. One of them, ex-NHL player Rob Ramage, recently received four years for drunk driving resulting in death. Now he’s been described as an outstanding citizen, an all-round nice guy. He’s remorseful for the consequences of his actions. He’s not a repeat offender, but a first-time one. And most interesting, but only by way of observation, is the fact that the family of the victim doesn’t even want to see him serve any jail time, because of the circumstances and the accident.

On the other side of the coin, I hear most of the public opinion I’ve heard on the matter suggest that Ramage should receive a jail sentence with some, like mothers against drunk driving, mindlessly arguing that the four years he got is just not enough, and that quote, we’re not sending a message. Let’s compare that to someone else, Karla Homolka. Karla Homolka received 12 years and got her complete freedom for torturing, raping, mutilating, and murdering, not one, not two, but at least three female victims, all children, one her own sister.

Can you imagine that? Everyone, the victims’ families, the public, the police are opposed to her being released, but she’s out. Third person, the person we’ve been talking about, Marc Emery, facing the prospect of a life sentence in an American jail, possibly to be reduced to 10 years with no parole for five, for selling marijuana seeds to willing customers on the internet. So what’s wrong with this picture? Something sound wrong with this to you, or does this all sound perfectly okay to you? Do these relative punishments fit the crime? Now, there are people, again, as I said, who will argue a life for a life irrespective of the circumstances involved.

Some people want to send a message. Some people believe that the punishment should be relative to the damage or the pain or the suffering caused to another, or to others if there’s more than one person, then apparently it’s greater. But what each of these approaches to justice have in common is that they’ve left a judgment of the character of the accused almost completely out of the equation. And personally, I think that’s a completely unjust position. It’s patently immoral. It’s a refusal to make a value judgment, and instead treats all people with a moral equivalence, undeserved by either the good people or the bad ones. The bad ones will benefit, the good people will be harmed by a policy like that. And punishing people for the express purpose of sending a message to others is practically the definition not of justice, but of injustice. And I think it’s that kind of thinking that has led to such a dissonance and inconsistency with respect to the penalties we see made it out to those charged with breaking the law. Because year after year you hear somebody say, drunk driving, let’s say, the penalties aren’t high enough, so they raise the penalties.

To send a message, not to deal with the individuals involved and not to look at the individual circumstances, we almost want to bypass that. Pretty soon we’ll have no fault murder in this country where everybody just gets brushed with the same brush. And of course, to me the drinking and driving, cell phones, drugs, alcohol, guns, all that, those are all side issues. And you wonder really how it is that some people can suffer the consequences that they may suffer in situations that they can’t control, especially when they’re on the wrong side of the law.

Now what happened to Rob Ramage, of course, was, there was a life lost in that case because he was drinking and driving and his friend lost his life. And you hear people talking, well, what is a life worth? Isn’t that the issue to which justice must be addressed?

And that’s the greater philosophical issue, really, isn’t it? So what is a life worth? I mean, if one person’s life is taken by another, what’s the appropriate punishment? Which punishment do you think fits the crime? For example, where’s the dividing line between justice and revenge? Or should we always do the Christian thing, turn the other cheek and forgive those who commit serious crimes?

Or should we do the Old Testament thing, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? And you hear this constantly. These are the basic themes that you hear discussed in any kind of discussion on these issues. Again, it comes down to do we judge the crime or do we judge the criminal? I don’t think we can answer any of these questions rationally until we establish some groundwork and a firm perspective of the bigger picture. And I think sometimes we’re trying to reconcile something that’s irreconcilable, and it’s a hard thing to face. So first, let us reconcile ourselves to the fact that there is no reconciliation between life and death or existence and non-existence. A life for a life may definitely be equitable, I would say that, but is it just?

And that is what the courts have to ask. Now the second thing about life that we kind of have to reconcile ourselves to is that no consequence or punishment can possibly bring a life back. It’s funny about how we talk about life. People say he took his life or he took her life. Really, you can deprive another person of their life, but you can’t possess it.

It’s not really even accurate to say that the criminal took the victim’s life, when in fact you can’t really take a life in the sense of possessing it. And this is an important philosophic point because essentially it means that life is non-transferable. And that is why the rights inferred by the necessities of life, rather, are said to be inalienable.

The inalienable right to life has got nothing to do with strangers in the country or aliens coming down from outer space. It means that your rights are not transferable. You can’t give up your life or your rights to life for the benefit of someone else or for no reason in particular if that’s what you want to do. But you cannot literally transfer either. I mean, you could, if you’re giving up your own life voluntarily, your rights to life, well, you’ve made a choice that you’re not transferring your rights.

You’re just making a choice based on the fact that you had the rights to make the choice in the first place. Now, even the term rights is somewhat a misnomer because when we talk about rights, we almost talk about it like, here’s these rights sitting on the table. You can write them down and it’s like a noun. It’s a thing that you can have that rightfully really should be applied to a field of action, which normally requires verbs. It’s more correct really technically and philosophically to say that something is right to do or it is wrong to do. And that’s really as far as it goes and that’s really what I’m always implying to when I use the word rights. I’m always saying if you’re violating someone’s rights, basically that means you’re doing something wrong. It’s not that he has, no one has a right to things. You only have rights to actions in that sense because you have to act to get what you want. The right to housing doesn’t mean that somebody owes you a house and has to provide you with one. It means you have the right to take action, whatever is necessary to get your own home, to keep it under private property laws and things like that. But in the absence of a clearly defined context in which rights are discussed, the clarity breaks down to a point where people are applying the words rights to things, which I always call phony rights, rather than to the field of morality and to ethics, which is what it’s about. Just as properly understood, as I’m always reminded by Freedom Party leader Paul McKeever, is an ethical concept, not a political one or a legal one, which is not to say that justice is of no relevance to politics or law, but they’re subsidiaries. They come after that. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in politics and in law, especially of late, is that questions of morality are constantly evaded.

No one even bothers to ask. Is it right? As if the law or the political will are the starting points of any ethical discussion.

So what can you say? So here’s my final take on really the three examples of injustice that I’ve cited earlier. I know a lot of people will disagree with me on this, but Rob Ramage, I don’t think he should have to serve a jail sentence.

Not from anything or evidence that I’ve certainly personally heard or read in the news. Certainly, he should be charged with an offense of drinking and driving and treated like any other drinking and driving offense, but beyond that, I don’t see anything gained by imprisoning him. I don’t see anything that would serve justice, and I don’t think you use a person like him to send messages.

You just don’t. I don’t believe him to be a threat to anyone. I’m just taking at word what I read in the paper, what people say about him, and I’ve testified about him. I certainly don’t know him, but he sounds to me like a person of good character who made a mistake, didn’t do it before, or isn’t really known for anything negative, isn’t a repeat offender. I’d be really surprised if they let him out and it happened again.

I just don’t see that happening. So that’s where I think that should end, the tragedy that it is. On the other hand, I think Karla Homolka should still be sitting in a jail cell for the rest of her life. And here, again, the law and order types would argue, ah, but we made a deal with her and we can’t break that deal. I’ve heard that so many times.

I just don’t get the logic behind that. I’m going, look, yeah, we can break a deal with a person who’s never displayed the character or honor to honor the terms of one. With someone who’s capable of doing what she has done, I just find it alarming. But here again, and this time, it’s the justice system argues that breaking a deal with the likes of Homolka will send the wrong message.

Here we are sending messages again. Should they want to make deals with other criminals in the future? Truth doesn’t matter. Justice doesn’t matter. Sending messages and making deals matter a lot. And of course, that’s what’s going on in the court system with Marc Emery right now.

They’re making a deal. Morally, I think the death penalty would have been justifiable in Homolka’s case. Now, I don’t support the death penalty, but not for reasons relating to any sympathies for the criminals to whom it might and rightly would apply. But that’s another subject I’ll be dealing with in the near future, the whole issue of capital punishment in general.

And of course, third but not least, Marc Emery. Now, this is a whole different situation. I think he shouldn’t even be in this situation he finds himself in. The very laws under which he’s been charged are in and of themselves unjust. And by implication, that means immoral. Emery told the truth about his activities. None of which involved non-consensual activities or transactions. Which means that he should be free in campaigning on his next political issue, period.

That’s just it. And again, I brought this up with Karen Selick last week, the value of truth in the court system, especially the American one, again I brought up the example of how Martha Stewart, they said, oh she served her time not because of what she did in the financial transaction market, but because she lied to prosecutors.

Well Marc’s not lying to prosecutors, he’s given them more information than they could ever possibly ask for, to the point where they say that if we convict you, we will convict you on your statements. Because they don’t have evidence, they don’t have, except for a couple of seeds. I don’t know, all it would have taken really is to buy one single seed.

That’s it, one seed, send a man to jail for life, outrageous that we could even be talking about something like this. And getting back to all lives being equal in terms of the other cases, I don’t think you can really say that all human lives are of equivalent value. And we know that, we know soldiers kill people, why don’t we punish them for this? People kill in self defense, we call that justifiable. You’re just going to make all life equivalent, oh no you killed one guy, you got to die too, it doesn’t matter of the reasons or the background or of what value is virtue if you’re going to punish a virtuous person exactly the same as you would punish someone who couldn’t give you the second time, shoot you as soon as look at you. And would it be just to pass a life sentence on a person who was simply defending themselves? Of course we all say no, and yet that’s pretty much, we seem to ignore all these premises of what justice is and we always revert back to the law, the law-bearers.

So basically to say that all lives and all circumstances have some equivalence of value means saying that you believe that a Karla Homolka is equivalent to a Ramage. And folks, that’s just wacko. And that simply would not be the right thing to do. And of course that’s why I think that we, our laws are so out of whack.

We have too many people passing punishments on quote criminals and quote, not for the reasons relating to their crime or their actions or their character, but because they want to send political messages, social messages, which are totally ineffective from the word go, it’s just absolutely ridiculous. Anyways, when we come back after this, we’ll be talking about the fiction of public ownership.

Clip:
Speaker 1: I’ve got a confession to make. Well, I’m drinking and driving. You see, everyone says it’s dangerous to drink and drive. I can tell you two things that are far more dangerous than drinking and driving. One, drinking. Two, driving.

Do you know how many people were killed last year in Britain as a direct result of alcohol abuse? 35,000. Do you know how many people were killed as a direct result of driving a car? 22,000. Do you know how many people were killed as a direct result of drinking and driving? 500.

I’m not taking any bloody chances. I’m joking. Of course, I’m not condoning drinking and driving. It’s very wrong. It is for me anyway. I haven’t got a license.

Clip:
Speaker 1: I remember when I first moved here, I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone, watching the news at the same time. And I’m watching. I go, you’re not going to believe this. I’m watching the news. This is going to crack you up. What they do in Canada? They report every murder. There’s just one guy shot the other guy. It’s made the news. So cute.

Bob Metz: Welcome back to Just Right. I’m Bob Metz and you’re listening to CHRW 94.9 FM, where we’ll be with you from now until noon. 519-661-3600 is the number you can call if you want to join in on the conversation.

Now, about two or three weeks ago, I was listening to some open line talk shows and I heard local left wing activist Gil Warren, who might have debated publicly on several occasions. Used to debate him even on left, right and center until he said something real nasty to me and they kicked him off the show for a while. But I heard him passionately pleading for the ownership of London Hydro to be kept in the municipality’s hands. And his argument basically was that we own London Hydro and that we control our city councils and that if you placed it in private hands, we as citizens of London would suffer. And I thought, well, that’s an interesting argument. I’ve heard it before. I think it’s completely a little off the rails.

But interestingly enough, on the other side of the coin, these may seem to be two totally unrelated situations. I actually heard a city councilor, most of you might regard as right wing and I have certainly supported his points of view many times on this show. And that’s Paul Van Meerbergen talking about public private partnerships as the means to serve or sort to save certain government run services. Now, you hear this term a lot public private partnerships, which I think is a little bit of an oxymoronic kind of term.

It’s a contradictory phrase, as if somehow it will offer some viable option as a solution to run away government spending, which is really where the problem is. But I look at public private partnerships. And the equation there is public private partnerships equal really private private dictatorships because all public money. I mean, it’s just another euphemism for tax burdens imposed by government is just private money that was once private before the public or before the government took it. And that was forcibly taken from private citizens. So the real equation when you see public private partnerships is really public plus private equals forced plus voluntary.

Because generally when we talk about the public field, we’re talking about government. That’s what they mean. They’re not talking about the voluntary section. In fact, that’s when they use the word private. Private is voluntary.

Government is basically force. Now, as long as force remains in the equation, I don’t think it can be a valid partnership in the sense of what a partnership is. Any definition I’ve seen of the word partner or partnership involves two equal people with equal powers, equal status. I cannot see a government and a business or a government and an individual having any sort of equal status at all. I don’t think there can be a partnership between government, which holds a monopoly on the legal use of force and which can be used for anything.

I mean, beyond the proper functions of government and private citizens who are disarmed and held totally on a different standard than government. Like you’ve got to honor contracts and be honest and stuff like that. And I think if you’re participating in a public-private partnership, then basically you’re practically in bed with the devil. I think the words public and private have become totally misused in political parlance and completely out of context.

And that just thinking about those two words alone and thinking about them properly would clear up so many things in the way people think about political issues. It’s again, reality rubbing up against unreality. I think the idea of public property is an unreal idea. Okay, because it doesn’t really exist.

I’m going to illustrate and explain that. I think the word public should never be almost allowed to be used to mean government or the state. It’s almost a fraud and misrepresentation on a grand scale.

Think about it. Many privately owned institutions are public places. I go to the grocery store every week. We go to malls.

We go shopping. They are all public places, but they’re privately owned. And in the other way around, of course, many government-owned establishments are in effect private places. You can’t just walk in.

You have to have some sort of permission, status or whatever, but it’s not open to the public. You wouldn’t expect it to be because of the nature of what the government might be doing. And I think part of the confusion is perpetuated by indiscriminately failing to distinguish between geography and ownership. If that’s one way of describing it, for example, a public place geographically is any place the public’s allowed. It doesn’t matter who owns it. It’s public in that sense.

And that’s, to me, all that public means. The doors are open. They’re not open 24 hours a day. They’re not open all the time. You can’t, because the road is a public place, you can’t just set up your tent on the weekend and camp out in the middle of the road and say, hey, I’m a member of the public. I can camp here. So drive around me.

Doesn’t work that way. Now, it’s really interesting. I’m a big fan, of course, as you know of Isabel Patterson, who wrote a book called The God of the Machine way back in the early 1900s. And she wrote a fascinating chapter called The Fiction of Public Ownership, which I’ll just talk a little bit about from what she says in that. She says, the confusion and vagueness of terms always found in collectivist theories is not accidental. It is a reversion to the mental and verbal limitations of the primitive society it advocates, the inability to think in abstract terms. Savages and collectivists are notably ignorant of the severely logical branch of language, which is mathematics.

The savage does not go beyond simple addition and subtraction of digits. The collectivist may learn formulas by rote, but cannot grasp the principle of their application to physical phenomenon. Now, I’m just going to pause there for a second when she says that the collectivist may learn formulas by rote, but cannot grasp the principle. I actually said this in a more humorous way many years ago when I was talking about a lot of lefties and NDPers.

And I sort of expressed it like this. I said, you can sort of, you can talk to a lefty and tell him one and one is two and he’s still with you. And then you can tell him 10 is 20 and he’s still with you. You can even say a hundred and a hundred is 200. But once you get up to a million or a billion or a trillion and all of a sudden those numbers just get blurry in their head and it doesn’t have a real application anymore. As if the principles of measurement and relations and things all suddenly change just because you’re dealing with big numbers and complexities.

And that’s where a lot of people break down. Just because they’re not thinking in terms of principle and you can’t possibly keep track of millions of dollars in your head. That’s where that’s why it breaks down and why we even use numbers so that we can deal with the concepts. When you talk about a million, your mind could never possibly at one time hold in its consciousness, say even to be able to identify a million dots on a page or a million people standing in a crowd.

You couldn’t do that. The only way you could conceptualize a million is with that number. And by understanding what that number represents, it is a representative. It’s not a real thing.

It’s a representative thing. But to continue with Isabel Patterson, she says, two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time and that’s the reason why private property belongs to human beings as a creative being, which is, she calls a right both natural and divine. Individual ownership answers exactly to the conditions of physical phenomenon. Public ownership is fictitious.

Its verbal terms do not correspond to reality, to the properties of physical objects or the conditions of time and space. And quote. And Ayn Rand reminds us, she says, bear in mind that the right to property is a right to action like all the others. It’s not the right to an object, but to the action and consequences of producing or earning that object. It’s not a guarantee that anyone will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It’s the right to gain, keep, use, and dispose of material values.

And that’s a very important thing. I mean, if you own something, you have to have those rights. You have to have the right to gain it, keep it, use it, and dispose of it.

If you haven’t got all of those factors involved in something that somebody tells you you own, then you simply do not own it. And of course any alleged right of one person which necessitates the violation of the rights of another can’t be a right, just by definition. There are no conflicting rights. There are a lot of conflicting interests which people call rights. And there again, there’s a confusion when they talk about rights often they’re talking about legal rights, which are rights to things. But that legal right has been derived from the other moral and ethical rights. And then placed into a contract which was entered into consensually, which then defines specific rights to specific pieces of property or things. But that doesn’t mean that a right is always a right to a thing.

You only have that right to the thing because you have the right to make the choice in the first place. Now Rand says that when people clamor for public ownership of the means of productions, what they’re actually clamoring for is ownership of people’s minds, literally. Public property is a collectivist fiction, she says, since the public as a whole can neither use nor dispose of its so-called property. That property will always be taken over by some political elite, by a small clique which will then rule the public, a public of literal, dispossessed proletarians, as in the case of the public.

As she called them. So since there is no such entity as the public, which is merely a number of individuals, that’s all that public means. The idea that the public interest supersedes private interests and rights only means one thing.

It can only mean one thing. That the interests and rights of some people take precedence of the interests and rights of others. And since you can’t really justify that, there’s no objective criterion that you can guide that by. So that all public interest legislation and any distribution of money taken by force, from some people to give to others, you can’t really define any objective principles that would make it work, that would make it honest. It’s all arbitrary, undefinable, non-objective. And here’s the key, and I think this is so important to understand, where Rand says that the worst aspect of this is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly.

Understand that. You can’t, that’s why I’ve always said, you could have all the most honest person in the world getting into the government the way it’s being run today. He won’t be able to behave honestly once he’s in that system. He might within his own personal sense of integrity, but he can’t really exercise the law in a quote, honest way, as long as that law has the right to do what is dishonest from the beginning, taking from Paul, robbing Peter to pay Paul kind of thing. So she says, the wisest man in the world with the purest integrity couldn’t find a criteria for the just, equitable, and rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle.

It can’t be done. So the only thing that is in the public interest, in the real sense, is the thing we call freedom. And that’s the only thing that you could really say, if a person’s not talking freedom, they can’t be talking about the public interest. That’s the only thing that every member of the public, regardless of their personal and private interest, does actually have in common. And the point is that the most basic common interest of all people, if you’re rational, is freedom. Freedom’s the first requirement.

And it’s not what you do when you’re free, but the fact that you are free, and that all achievements that you have rest on that foundation. Isabel Patterson concludes, she says, theoretically, public property belongs to everybody equally, indivisibly, and simultaneously, which is absurd. If this assumption were applied, the result would be that any person presenting himself to use the property could be asked, are you everybody?

And he’d be bound to reply, no, while he could not assert any claim to use any particular division of the property. The property is ownership. That’s what the word almost means, if you say something’s property, it means it’s owned by someone. Things which nobody owns are not property. They’re merely objects in nature. And as Patterson points out, she says, perhaps the most senseless phrase ever coined, even by a collectivist, is that of Proudhon, when he said, all property is theft.

And she points out that it is indeed remarkable in its own way for the variety of errors compressed into such a brief utterance. In four words, it confuses objects, acts, attributes, moral values, and relations, as if they were interchangeable. Theft presupposes rightful ownership. An object has to be property before it can be stolen. So to say that all property is theft is a completely contradictory statement. And of course, once you accept the fiction of public ownership, private ownership soon becomes a fiction as well.

Take a look at the property taxes on your home or the income taxes on your personal productivity. Do you still believe that you actually own your home or that you really own your own body and mind? And if so, how does someone else get to take money from you without your consent every time you use your mind and body in a productive way? How do they morally justify that? If you actually believe that these taxes are taken away from you due to or provide a service, I think you’ve completely swallowed the whole fictional aspects of ownership. Really, these types of taxes, I’m talking about income taxes and property taxes, are in fact a penalty for doing good as the old saying goes. If the payments were actually for a service, you’d have a receipt or you’d have a contract guaranteeing that service to you, not to others.

And such a payment would be voluntary, like you wouldn’t be forced to pay for the service you don’t want or that you don’t use or that you don’t need. And so you see the confusions that come up all the time just because people misunderstand public and private. Everything from banning cell phone use in restaurants, theaters and schools, government funding of arts and culture, no smoking bylaws.

It’s really funny. They can ban smoking in private property, calling it public, but can’t control behavior in Victoria Park because the same counselors are arguing, we can’t do anything there. That’s public and it’s we don’t have any jurisdiction there. The public can do what they want there.

Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? And of course, seatbelt laws, tree preservation laws, I could get into any of these freedom of speech issues. But property taxes are, of course, one of the main ones I want to focus on. And the reason is I heard a fellow talking on a downtown London business owner calling in on an open line show who says he paid currently $8,000 annually on his property in the downtown area. And it only has about $140,000 value. And that that tax rate was down from $14,000 when it was, that was the rate it was at in the late 80s. So that would mean that for every 17.5 years, less than the term of most mortgages, that owner has effectively repurchased his own property and still doesn’t own it.

Never free from the perpetual encumbrance of property taxes, which are completely irrational, folks. They’ve got nothing to do with services. Services can be applied through consumption taxes.

Now, had his taxes not been lowered from $14,000 to $8,000, he would have been rebuying his own property from the city each and every 10 years. And that would just be merely the financial burden imposed upon the business by government. It wouldn’t include the regulatory burdens, license fees, or income and sales taxes. It still have to be paid by the same people. So if property taxes were really for the provisions of services, as so many people falsely believe, then the only proper moral and ethical recourse for the provider of the service would be to withhold the service in question until payment has been made if somebody’s not making payments. With the right to sue for the actual consumption of whatever the service property received.

Not to begin a forced sale on a person’s home or business three years after the fact, and to heck with you, you’re going to lose your everything you work for. Hey, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Yeah, I own it. I’m a member of the public. In fact, I own every bridge in the country because they’re public, and I’m a member of the public. And if you’re about to suggest that the other guy’s a member of the public too, and that you can’t sell him what he already owns, then I would suggest that you introduce that other guy to that downtown London businessman or owner that I just mentioned who keeps buying back his property every 10 to 17 years. He’s doing exactly that.

He’s buying back his own property. Now, before we go to my next subject, I’m just going to leave you with these comments here. We’re actually made by Paul McKeever on the subject of public ownership and the three P’s, the private public partnerships, and we’ll be back with another subject after this.

Clip (Paul McKeever):
Paul McKeever: But the fact of the matter is, if you look at the NDP, the Liberals and the Tories, their only solution is more public ownership of health care, more public ownership of schools, public ownership, public ownership, public ownership, which can only mean tax, tax, tax to fund them. That’s not capitalism. We are reaching a point now where socialism, it’s not financially feasible anymore, and that’s why we’re seeing the introduction of things like these P3s, public private partnerships. These were tried in the 1930s in Germany and Italy. They’re nothing new.

It’s just called a form of socialism called corporativism where the ownership of the systems, if you will, the medical system or the electrical system is private, but the government controls the operation entirely. This is sort of the last gasp breath for socialism. When you can’t afford to buy any more reactors or put any more things together, you let other people put them together for you. You beg them to come in and put things together for you, but then you tell them how to run the things. Of course, it doesn’t work.

Clip:
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Thank you. This is great. I feel a little strange tonight. I haven’t been on stage in a while, so it’s all right. Don’t worry about it. Stand up comedy. It’s a lot like riding a bike. You can’t make a living at it.

Bob Metz: Welcome back. I’m Bob Metz. You’re listening just right on CHRW 94.9 FM. Now, just a little light humor or light entertainment here at the end.

This comes out of a personal experience I just had this past weekend. It’s about our whole global warming campaign going on and what’s being done in that respect, and it actually hit me right in my home this past weekend. It’s about light bulbs.

Maybe I could call this subject light bulbs, privacy and freedom, or how everything the government does chips away at your personal freedoms and responsibility. This has to do with a personal experience. I live in an apartment building, generally well managed. I’ve been there for about 10 years now. And on Friday last week, I arrived home to find a notice to enter my premises on the floor in front of my door informing me that my suite would be entered on the following Monday. Now, I’ve received many of these notices before and generally there’s four basic reasons a landlord may enter your premises if you are a renter.

And according to the prefab form that I always receive in this respect, these are the four reasons. One, for the purpose of showing your suite. Two, for the purpose of conducting repairs.

And then they generally specify the repair. Three, for the purpose of a move out pre-inspection where they say we’ll be entering your suite to conduct a pre-inspection of your upcoming move out. And the purpose of the inspection is that they can schedule and plan any major work that may need to be done, such as renovations or painting, etc. And they always say, we will be in your suite for a brief time and there’s no need for you to be present. And the fourth one is for the purpose of a suite inspection. We’ll be entering your suite to conduct a routine inspection of the premises, which of course kind of opens the door to anything, anytime. Now, the idea of these is if you’re a renter, you legally are entitled to a 24-hour notice.

And so that might not always be the case. I’ve had many notices placed up my door that I didn’t know about because I didn’t open the door for 24 hours. And the next day I get a stranger walking into my apartment and I think that’s kind of strange to begin with. But it’s one of the things you give up when you live in an apartment in this weird society of ours where we’re not trusted to test our own smoke alarms. In terms of the landlord has to come in and do that because he’s the guy that’s going to be penalized or fined if we don’t carry through with our responsibility. But in this case, number two was checked and it says, for the purpose of conducting repairs.

And what repair you may ask? Well, get this, changing the light bulbs in my apartment unit. And it says, light bulbs to be replaced in landlords’ fixtures only. It will be in your suite between the hours of 11.01 a.m. and 3 p.m. on the following date, which was the Monday. You do not need to be present. Please keep pets secure. Thank you.

Now here’s what I got to ask. Since when is light bulb changing considered a repair? Is that good enough reason for people to have to come into my privacy of my home, interrupt my privacy to change the light bulbs? Well, sure enough, on the following Monday, two very nice representatives of the landlord appeared at my door and promptly began replacing my incandescent bulbs with these new energy-saving CFL bulbs. And now, of course, in my building, bear in mind, electricity is included in my rent.

So the landlord has an interest in reducing his electrical consumption. But then they took my perfectly good incandescent bulbs and put them in a box which they were planning to take away. And I said, wait a minute, I paid for those bulbs. Don’t I get to keep them?

Now I’ve got the receipts. I’ve been changing them for 10 years now. And I says the provision of light bulbs up till now, as far as I was concerned, was a tenant’s responsibility. I never went to the landlord to ask him to change the light bulbs.

That’s, I go in the grocery store and do that. But apparently their argument was that when I moved into the unit, it had light bulbs in it, though in fact, as I recall, most of them were removed by the previous tenant. But that’s a side issue. But if I wanted to keep my incandescence, they would have to give me back or take back the new bulbs. Because apparently, here’s the deal. The deal is with London Hydro, who I have to assume has provided these bulbs to landlords for some kind of exchange program. So what they’re doing is basically exchanging the bulbs you have in their fixtures and trading them and trying to get the old ones out.

So there you have it. The global warming campaigns finally arrived right in my own personal living room. Oh, no, sorry, not my living room. There are no outlets in my living room.

It’s actually in my bedroom, closet, kitchen, and study. Al Gore’s program of forcing technologies on us has already begun. And one thing I’ve noticed is that the new bulbs aren’t quite as bright as the replaced ones. They didn’t ask me if I wanted how many watts I wanted in where. And I have to ask myself, will there be annual light bulb inspections requiring landlords to enter units? And as a tenant, do I now have to call for repairs to change a light bulb in my own suite? Whose responsibility is that? Will there be a separate inspection or is it going to be incorporated with the annual fire alarm inspection? And if a bulb is changed to some other type or higher wattage, is there a penalty or will they just exchange it again?

And it just kind of operates on those kinds of questions. By the way, just so you know, as a renter, up until last year, and I found this out from the folks, actually, effective January 1, 08, landlords, when they tell you they’re coming into your property, they used to be able to say, well, be in your unit between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. They can’t do that anymore, effective January 1. They only have a four-hour entry period. And that’s why they told me that it had to be between 11 and 3. That’s an improvement. Glad to hear about it.

I’m out of time, according to what Ira was doing out there and waving at me. So, time to go. So, time to go. Hope you’ll join us again next week when we’ll continue our journey in the right direction. Until then, be right, do right, stay right, think right, and act right. Take care.

Clip:
Speaker 1: I bought a box of rat poison. Rat poison has an expiration date on it? What happens to poison when it expires? Does it become delicious? It’s already poison.

And why do they call it rat poison? It’ll kill anything. They could just as easily call it grandma poison.