Bitch, bitch, bitch. It seems that all we hear in the media, from those we work with and those we live with are complaints. "Someone oughta do something!" is a common refrain along with "Why doesn't someone do something?". The world is full of people protesting things.
Poverty, unemployment, inflation, market instability, the dollar, the government, wife beaters, child abusers, pornographers, the government, right wing extremists, the deficit, crime, police brutality, prisoners rights, victims rights, pollution, high taxes, lack of government funding, too much government spending, day care, poor education, ....
These and many more things are complained about every day. Look at any newspaper or watch any TV newscast and you will hear a constant litany of complaints. However, if you examine the same media closely and listen to the complainers almost no one is proposing any solutions to these problems, especially not our elected leaders. Sure, they are working on the deficit but with the baby boom generation retiring early next century, you know as well as I how long they will be able to keep the budget balanced. Our elected leaders appear to be so afraid to offend anyone, they offend everyone. They are trying to be so fair to everyone, they are fair to no one Is there such a lack of imagination out there that no one can come up with answers? It looks that way.
To tell the truth I am sick and tired of doom and gloom from the media and almost every one else I come into contact with. One of the biggest problems we have is that we are being asked to worry about so much our eyes glaze over and we tune out what are very serious problems. Nothing ever gets done about these problems because after being fed such a diet of doom and gloom we would go mad if we thought about them all very hard. Instead, we spend a lot of time making a living and we occupy much of our free time with sports and TV, both designed to keep us pleasantly diverted and not plotting revolution. These are the circuses part of the old Roman bread & circuses formula for keeping most of the population out of politics.
The end result is a bunch of one issue lobbies that waste the media's time and the time of those in power. It seems that no one can look at the big picture and come up with workable answers. The function of this book is to propose some answers. They may not be the best ones and may never be adopted but they are presented to make you think about what could be done to alleviate many of our problems.
I'm no economist, business man, labour leader, socialist or anything else. While being a full time business owner in the 1970s (part time to the present day) and having some involvement with the labour movement, I'm a technologist (someone who does a lot of the work that an engineer does but gets paid somewhat less.), basically, a professional problem solver who has keeps his eyes open and who cares for the fate of most of his fellow humans. There are lots of people who have extreme solutions for problems (Line 'em up in front of a wall!) and many more with no solutions. I have tried to come up with concepts that are moderate (no firing squads), that don't step on too many toes (you can't please everyone) and that just might work.
I feel that a large part of our problems can be attributed to uncreative leaders, most often concerned with preserving their own positions or who owe so much to behind the scenes power brokers they are not primarily concerned with what is good for the country. What it takes to get elected is not the same as the talents needed to run a country. It seems that those who get elected are those who while making grand speeches, promise nothing. After all, the Liberals promised essentially nothing in the 1997 election campaign and were re-elected anyway.
The limited vision of non creative people is easy to understand. Creativity frightens the unimaginative. Things new and unimaginable come from creativity. Most people prefer a bad status quo to a different one that cannot be fully predicted. In this book I have tried to be as creative as possible while not going far enough to frighten the less imaginative members of our society, as least not to frighten them too badly.
Most of these solutions take the form of changing existing ways the government does things. There are those that feel that less government is better. While I resent government intrusion into my life as much as the next person, for those of you who feel that we need to dramatically reduce the level of government, kindly note that the number of poor and destitute people in the USA exceeds the population of Canada and their per centage who are poor is much higher than in Canada. Canadians, on average, seem to place a higher value on what may be termed "social goods". Perhaps this is because most of those Canadians who prefer to live in the dog-eat-dog environment in the USA have moved there. Most of the rest of us prefer to be Canadians.
While the free enterprise, capitalist system has proven to be the best system that we have found so far to produce the goods we want at acceptable prices, it only supplies those goods to those that the free enterprise system has chosen to reward. However, the system seems to not do well in supplying social goods. Perhaps the reason for this is that in the free enterprise system, individual choice is king. The market falters because the benefits to which social goods give rise are not limited to one particular consumer who purchases the goods, as is the case for private goods, but become available to others as well. When the benefits are available to all, consumers will not voluntarily pay for social goods. No voluntary payment is offered and the linkage between producer and consumer is broken and the government must step in to provide such goods and force the payment through taxation.
Therefore, these solutions are mainly in the "social goods" area as the free enterprise system is extremely good at supplying so called "private goods" and should be tampered with as little as possible. Any tampering with free enterprise should be in the area of allowing greater efficiency wherever possible, to make it easier for as many people as possible to be in business for themselves and to provide an environment to allow these enterprises to expand as much as they are able within the bounds of anti-trust laws. After all, I am not about to suggest that we adopt communism. That did not work as it was too extreme and once that kind of power is in the hands of a political elite, they do not take criticism well. The 70 year experiment in communism that was the Soviet Union proved the failure of communism all too well. We need to take a more balanced approach.
However, I feel that one of our problems is that we are using a type of free enterprise system to finance the social goods we want. These social goods include medicare, old age pensions, environmental clean up, public transit, road building, etc. There should be two distinct financial systems with their own methods of finance, one being essentially what we have for free enterprise for the production of private goods. The other being used to finance the supply of social goods. In economist speak, this would mean some decoupling between the microeconomic world in which individuals dwell from the macroeconomic world of nation states.
Remember, when it comes to our social services, we are starving in the midst of wealth. We are suffering from a surplus of doctors and health care professionals. We have people willing and able to take care of our health, educate our children, take care of our mentally ill, build hospitals and schools, run our jails, police our streets and we have others who need these services. We have all the abundance of materials needed to build all the schools, jails, hospitals, nursing homes, etc. we will ever need and yet for the simple lack of figuring out a way to transfer enough dollars from one group to another to make it happen we are suffering. This does not make sense.
This book is being written because maybe someday you will be in a position of power and could do something about it. To make you think and to realize that there are possible ways to solve some of the problems we are having. That is my goal.