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The Forest City Institute:
Civic Governance In The City Of London, Ontario
PLEASE NOTE: Due to a technical difficulty with the broadcast server approximately 2 minutes of the program was not archived.
Christmas arrives with its familiar calls for peace on Earth, selfless giving, and denunciations of commercial excess. Yet these very ideals warrant closer scrutiny.
Commercialism lies at the heart of the season’s joy. Trading goods and celebrating material abundance reflect human productivity, not greed. Pagan roots of winter festivals honor harvest and survival through reason and effort—values worth embracing openly.
Ebenezer Scrooge suffers misrepresentation as a miser. His wealth arises from honest effort, voluntary exchange, and refusal to live at others’ expense. Condemnation of him reveals envy of achievement, not moral failing. True generosity emerges from personal gain, not forced sacrifice.
Altruism promises virtue but delivers hidden costs. Mandating service to others treats individuals as means to ends, undermining genuine relationships built on mutual benefit. Even well-intended giving can humiliate recipients or mask power plays.
Peace on Earth remains elusive because rising prosperity sometimes fuels conflict, and aid can breed resentment rather than harmony. Reason, not sentiment, offers the clearest path forward.
Challenging these holiday myths while affirming life and achievement feels just right.
Money fascinates and frustrates in equal measure. With the Canadian dollar hovering at par against its American counterpart, conversations turn to exchange rates, yet few pause to question the deeper nature of this everyday abstraction. Why accept a piece of paper or a digital entry in exchange for real goods and services? The theme emerges clearly: money reveals far more about morality and freedom than mere pricing.
Three paths exist to acquire anything in life—by gift, by earning through voluntary trade, or by taking without consent, which amounts to theft by force or fraud. Politics often disguises the third as virtue, labeling wealth redistribution as equity while condemning the same act in private life as criminal.
Government compulsion in transactions denies consent, eroding the moral foundation of exchange. Voluntary trades create win-win outcomes, where both parties value what they receive more than what they give up, increasing overall wealth through mutual benefit. Forced exchanges, common in state spending, depreciate value and breed resentment.
Subjective value drives prices, as illustrated in everyday encounters—like a mother discovering why a rare comic book commands far more than a common one. Collectors assign worth based on desire, proving value lies not in inherent properties but in individual judgment. This principle exposes fallacies in collectivist schemes that treat wealth as a fixed pie to be sliced “fairly.” Production generates wealth; productivity, not mere hard work, elevates living standards by creating more with less effort.
Inflation confuses money with wealth itself, an illusion exploited by governments that expand credit and currency supply, eroding purchasing power—especially for those least able to hedge against it. Historical examples abound: paper currencies collapse while gold retains value across millennia. Credit creation by banks, often politically enabled, mimics counterfeiting, transferring wealth subtly but surely.
Discussions with callers highlight supply and demand in professions, the pitfalls of materialism mistaken for happiness, and the contradictions in visions of moneyless utopias like those in Star Trek. True progress stems from free markets where consent reigns, not coercion disguised as social good.
Money is Just Right as the barometer of a society’s virtue.
We observe once again how the political landscape in Ontario offers voters little more than a choice among varying degrees of statism, as the unofficial election campaign begins with Dalton McGuinty proroguing the legislature early. Parties compete not on principles of individual freedom, but on promises to expand government control over our lives and wallets—outbidding each other on subsidies, environmental mandates, and monopolies in essential services.
We note the irony: it is often the so-called conservatives who enact the most enduring leftist policies, from income taxes to health care monopolies and rent controls. True freedom requires protecting both personal and economic rights, yet no major party advocates this consistent principle. Instead, we see pragmatists in power pursuing control for its own sake, while restricting freedoms leads inevitably to less prosperity and greater tyranny.
Globalism, properly understood, means voluntary cooperation and free trade among nations, not centralized control or anti-capitalist protests at summits like the ongoing G8. Health care remains a sacred cow of statism: a government monopoly that rations care, drives patients abroad, and bans private alternatives—unique to Ontario among Western jurisdictions. Choice and competition, not compulsion, would ensure better access and quality for all.
Finally, the perennial envy of wealth ignores how capitalism creates abundance for everyone, while socialism merely redistributes poverty. The rich deserve their earnings when gained through voluntary trade, not confiscation. In all these issues, the solution remains the recognition of individual rights and free markets—just right.
