INFLATION in Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock
Part 3 : Legislation Causes Inflation and Other Harms Too
“Legislation is the process or product of enrolling, enacting, or promulgating law by a legislature, parliament, or analogous governing body. Before an item of legislation becomes law it may be known as a bill, and may be broadly referred to as "legislation" while it remains under consideration to distinguish it from other business. Legislation can have many purposes: to regulate, to authorize, to outlaw, to provide (funds), to sanction, to grant, to declare, or to restrict. It may be contrasted with a non-legislative act by an executive or administrative body under the authority of a legislative act.” (Source: Wikipedia)
After reading the above description, it apparent that the statement “Governments hold the monopoly on the use of force in society” is quite true. It is also intuitively understood that the more power that our voting citizens grant to government institutions, the less Individual Freedom remains for citizens and business owners to make informed choices for themselves and their employees.
Personal Responsibility has been increasingly eroded over time. Canadians have elected political parties which promoted and passed “progressive” policies requiring more government. As such, the majority of citizens have tacitly agreed and submitted to the increasing authority of the state with barely a word or act of protest.
Defence? What defence?
In Canada, the original Bill of Rights and the subsequent Charter of Rights and Freedoms signed in 1982 were both intended to defend and protect every citizen from harm and aggression. When harm and aggression arises from the very governments that hold that responsibility, what recourse do we citizens have to prevent the unwarranted use of force that comes from excessive government expansion? You might suggest that it is the job of politicians to represent the interests of their constituents - including to protect them. However, anyone who has witnessed the expansion of government size, costs and scope of legislated authority over the past five decades will understand how toothless our political defence is against the government steamroller that has progressively flattened our Charter rights.
By now, my readers know that over 380,000 regulations had accumulated by 2018 to structure the work of the Ontario Government’s law enforcement responsibilities as executed by thousands of its ‘enforcement officers’ and agents.
What roles do regulations play in the use of force?
“Regulation is the management of complex systems according to a set of rules and trends. In systems theory, these types of rules exist in various fields. In government, regulation typically means stipulations of the delegated legislation which is drafted by (alleged) subject matter experts to enforce primary legislation”. (Source: Wikipedia)
If an automobile driver is caught by a traffic enforcement officer disobeying the rules of the road, a regulation stipulates the punishment and authorizes that officer to issue a charge against the driver. Another list of rules and procedures then prescribes how the driver can proceed to atone for that offence. These are regulations with which virtually all citizens are familiar. The Ontario Justice system is a massive, arcane and very expensive bureaucracy for which every citizen remits taxes to handle all traffic violations and much more.
Why and how did it get so big?
Boiling the ocean.
Did our fore-fathers anticipate a future society like the present? Did they establish the early public institutions to be robust enough to “boil the ocean” with mountains of statutes designed to legislate and regulate every aspect of life to the degree that exists today? I doubt it very much. Compared to today, early public institutions were almost an afterthought in the early days of Canada.
The burden of excessive government could have been prevented by trusting our citizens more and our politicians and public officials less. We often hear claims made by our teachers, their head office administrators and their union representatives about the excellence of our public Education system. If it is as good as they claim, why are we, its graduates, treated like children throughout our adult lives? Why are we so tightly supervised under the micromanagement of obsessively-controlling government offIcials?
Apparently, we are not educated sufficiently-well to be Free to Choose our best life options. It’s an odd conclusion to reach in the Age if the Internet which supplies endless amounts of information to to better-inform our choices than at any point in human history!
I have yet to meet any public official who knows me, my history, my current circumstances and my personal aspirations better than I do. What makes them think that they can help me better than I can help myself, especially if they look far less of my money in taxes?
Censorship and Cancel Culture
Our political leaders and public officials have steadfastly warned the public about the dangers of “misinformation” and “disinformation” from unsanctioned (by them) sources. Yet, the quality and quality of information that came from the sanctioned sources has been so poor that it’s understandable that many citizens have craved credible and reliable information from alternative sources especially during the pandemic.
When these alternatives information sources began to threaten the authority of our elected politicians and the public institutions, the officials chose to double down on promoting the “official” narratives while demonizing all other sources as “fake news” and products of “conspiracy theories”. Now that the pandemic is over, it is clear that the official narratives were false more often than correct. Millions of citizens paid dearly by those mistakes.
Sweden
The entire pandemic episode has revealed the enormous risks to our citizens when they vote to place too much power in the hands of central authorities. These elites only observe and understand a crisis from the mountaintop of this huge public institutions. Hierarchical organizations throughout history have all suffered from the same existential flaw - the top tier ‘executives’ are too far removed from ‘the action on the street’.
Sweden responded to the pandemic the way Canada should have. Anders Tegnall, the top public health official in Sweden, stated in an Unherd podcast hosted by Freddie Sayers that forced lockdowns and mandates were not an option because the Swedish Constitutional forbade it. Instead, he viewed the correct role of Public Health to be conduit of reliable information for the public. Their approach was to serve an educated public in a manner that would empower every citizen to make responsible and informed decisions concerning the virus risk to themselves and others around them. The outcome was that Sweden had far fewer adverse financial and mental health consequences from lockdowns than neighbouring countries which had imposed much more autocratic approaches. Sweden’s emerged from the pandemic with a better that average outcome than all European nations.
The Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration (www.gbdeclaration.com) was signed on October 4, 2020 and was made available to every head of state in every country in the world. I personally distributed it to Laurie Scott, my local MPP, in mid-October to bring it to the urgent attention of Doug Ford’s Conservative caucus. It was already evident from genuine scientific and epidemiology research that the mask mandates and lockdown policies were too extreme and harming more people than they were helping.
The Focussed Protection approach advocated by the 3 top scientific experts and authors of the GBD offered a science-based, common sense way to bring an end to the pandemic by or ignored by the Ford and Trudeau governments. The politicians instead gambled on the pending experimental COVID ‘vaccine’ as the holy grail which would save humanity from “the greatest plague in 100 years”. Of course, they failed to mention that the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 - 1921 ended without a vaccine but in the same way that pandemics have ended through human history - herd immunity.
The Iron Fist of Emergency Measures
The reaction to the trucker’s freedom convoy with “emergency measures” by both Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford was irrefutable evidence that too much power was held in the hands of a few out-of-touch elites. News media around the world broadcast this concerning message to their citizens while Canadian news media only promoted unflattering narratives about the peaceful protest movement and spilled for the aggressive, unconstitutional and authoritarian government response.
This whole truckers episode put Canada on the global stage like never in recent history. It showcased our nation as divided and led by auto rated and mean-spirited power thugs. It awakened millions of Canadians to the growing threat of a future that is arriving quickly and shepherded by global influences well beyond the reach of our cherished democratic traditions. Our national Phoenix had awakened and begun to stir to fight an epic battle that loams in our national horizon. Will the Phoenix succeed against forces that are unimaginable in size, organization, resources and scope?
Hypothetically speaking
What if our governments were 1/10th of current size, cost and scope of authority that they are today?
What if our elected politicians and government leaders had abided by our Constitution as Sweden had with theirs?
I suspect that the Four Principles for a Civil Society would have prevented our current crisis. They guide human relationships in an way that makes our reliance bully governments to ‘Big Brother’ us all into the distrustful and divided nation that we have become. If we were reminded of their principles as often as we are taught other messages in our schools, churches, media and other sources of influence, then our electors in every election would make better choices for a more prosperous, cooperative and compassionate society.
Four Principles for a Civil Society
Individual Freedom of informed Choices
Personal Responsibility to the greatest possible extent
Mutual Respect between our selves, community members and our public leaders
Fairness, applied equally to everyone under limited, unbiased laws.
