‘Defund the police’ should be a conservative rallying cry, too
Sunday, June 14th, 2020
Police forces… are an expensive and wasteful way to make people feel secure. Crime rates in cities have been plummeting for decades, and in most big cities are at historic lows. Yet the number of cops, and the cost of policing, has not fallen, nor has anger at police discrimination… A smart policy would use a small professional force for things that police do well…
Tags: budget, crime prevention, featured, ideology
Posted in Child & Family Policy Context | No Comments »
Want a competitive capitalist economy? Choose big government
Friday, October 18th, 2019
North Americans decided to make a choice between big corporations or big government, and favoured the former; Europeans realized that big government was the pathway to keeping corporations competitive and was good for consumers and society. We should not be looking at life as a choice between big, activist government or a successful market economy. To achieve the second, we need more of the first.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, privatization, standard of living
Posted in Debates | 1 Comment »
Poverty gives way to inequality and the Great Frustration
Saturday, October 20th, 2012
Oct. 20 2012
Inequality has increased – and when that happens, economists have shown that there’s a corresponding collapse of social mobility, the ability to escape your income group for a higher one… When the rich get richer, the poor usually get poorer. But the converse isn’t true: Countries with strong redistributive systems and free economies are usually both wealthy and equal.
Tags: economy, ideology, poverty, standard of living, tax
Posted in Equality History | 2 Comments »
The poor ain’t what they used to be
Saturday, September 29th, 2012
Sep. 29 2012
… everything has changed. The poor are still with us, but they aren’t who they used to be. And “ending poverty” doesn’t mean what it used to mean… now that the inequality is no longer international but within nations, there’s a “need for a fundamental reframing of global poverty as largely a matter of domestic distribution… Growth by itself isn’t going to do it… There will still be a lot of poor”.
Tags: budget, globalization, ideology, philanthropy, poverty, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion History | No Comments »
Tear down those mountains of cash
Wednesday, August 8th, 2012
21 July 2012
… debt is not the major problem. That was four years ago. Today, a far bigger threat is… cash hoards… at least 45 per cent of Canada’s biggest companies are hoarding cash rather than investing in employment or capital. None of it is going into research and development, expansion of market share, new offices and factories or, crucially, on employing people. Nor is it going into tax revenues, since cash reserves – and some of the earnings that contribute to them – escape the taxman, giving companies an incentive to not invest.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, privatization, standard of living
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
The world’s losing its workers. How will we compete?
Sunday, February 12th, 2012
Feb. 11, 2012
The world’s supply of working-age people will soon be shrinking, causing a shift from surplus to scarcity… There are currently almost five working-age Canadians whose income taxes pay the pension and health-care costs of each retiree; within 20 years, there will be only three. As a result, according to Ottawa, health-care costs will double and social-service costs will rise by a third… Immigration has spared Canada from the worst of aging, but immigrants adopt host-country family sizes very quickly, so they’re a temporary fix.
Tags: economy, globalization, standard of living, youth
Posted in Debates | No Comments »
London riots rupture the ruling class
Sunday, September 18th, 2011
Sep. 17, 2011
Mr. Cameron denounced them as the product of the “slow-motion moral collapse” of British society… While everyone agrees the rioters were the product of a morally challenged community prone to family breakdown, these things are a symptom, not a cause… prisons… are being used too much and are actually producing criminality, not reducing it… an even larger problem lies in schools, which still allow – and often encourage – students to drop out at 16… Most of the rioters live in… grim postwar public-housing complexes (known as council estates)… last month the inner city finally came to call…
Tags: economy, ideology, poverty, standard of living, youth
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Norway shows we must expose dangerous fictions
Monday, August 1st, 2011
Jul. 30, 2011
There’s nothing wrong with criticizing immigration, even urging that it be stopped completely. Or with condemning “multiculturalism,” however it’s defined, or with arguing that religion, even specific religions, is bad for society. Those are important topics in a democratic society… But these writers have created a larger fiction, one with dangerous implications… they conclude with a millenarian message of impending societal takeover, in which the demographic and cultural fictions are combined into an urgent warning that, unless an unspecified something is done, we’ll all be under “their” command.
Tags: ideology, immigration, multiculturalism, participation
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Why did all the West’s big centrist parties go down the drain?
Sunday, May 22nd, 2011
May. 21, 2011
For decades, they were the untouchable monoliths of politics: The big nation-wide parties that straddled the centre ground, leaning slightly to the left or right, capturing big swathes of votes across the spectrum, forming the lion’s share of national governments during the half-dozen decades after the Second World War… Suddenly, they are falling apart, their gradual seepage of voter support during the past 10 or 15 years exploding into sudden ballot embolisms.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, participation, standard of living
Posted in Governance History | No Comments »
Look east and south: Witness the end of post-colonialism
Sunday, January 9th, 2011
Jan. 8, 2011
… we are witnessing the end of the post-colonial era in politics and economics. In China, Brazil and a dozen other countries, the type of thinking known as “post-colonial” – defined as a stark choice between angry resistance or humiliating subservience – has simply ceased to matter in political and business relations… While post-colonialism clings on in Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Zimbabwe and a handful of other places, it has vanished from most of the world with amazing speed.
Tags: economy, globalization, ideology
Posted in Policy Context | No Comments »
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