Category: economics

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Lawyers

I used to be in charge of benefits administration at a small social service agency. It was my job to evaluate and understand all the provisions of our benefit package, in order to explain them to new employees and file claims.

I must have been more stupid than most: I got out the policies and actually tried to read them. Every word. Well, not exactly every word. I figured it would take two months or more to read every word, and another ten years to fully understand it. But I did read a lot of inscrutable text about all the subtle little conditions and notwithstandings and wherewithals and provisions. I discovered that our liability coverage had so many exceptions to it that I doubted that it actually covered anything. Sometimes I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It sounded so contrary to good sense that I thought I must have misunderstood it.

I phoned our agent and asked him to explain. In the back of my mind, I think I expected him to say that the small print didn’t mean anything because, of course, no reasonable person could ever find enough time to read it and, therefore, no one could ever really agree to it. That’s not what he said. He said that of course the small print applied. It’s all part of the agreement. He tried to convince me that all insurance companies had the same basic agreements. I called some of those other agencies and found out that that was not true. When I told him we intended to cancel the policy, he offered to cut our rates in half. Just like that! So much for the assumption that they were making a “reasonable” profit.

We cancelled anyway and switched to another company with more agreeable small print.

Did you ever think about the fact that the biggest agreements of all, God’s covenant with us, is phrased in the plainest, most straightforward language you can imagine? I will be your God. You will be my people. I will send a Redeemer. I will never again destroy the earth with a flood. He who believes in me shall never die.

The small print exists because lawyers write most of these agreements and, like many other professionals, they, consciously or not, want to ensure that they will always have plenty of work. It is there because insurance companies want to be able to protect themselves against having too many claims filed. It is there because banks don’t want you to know how obscene the interest rates on charge cards really is, or how much power they have to destroy your life if you forget to make a single payment on a loan.

Did you know, for example, that a lot of home-owner’s policies have a provision that during any extended absence by the homeowner, the insured house must be entered and inspected by someone every day? And there you were in Florida in your lawn chair feeling so comfy and reassured.

A lot of people won’t believe this, but there is no need in the universe for small print. It should be abolished, banned, exiled, censored, shredded. The law will not collapse. The courts will not be inundated with frivolous claims. Injustice will not prevail. In fact, I am quite sure the opposite will happen.

A holding company in Toronto which rented 30,000 apartment units tried to eliminate all the small print in their leases. The new lease agreements basically said “You agree to pay so much money every month so you can live in this apartment at this address. You agree not to damage the apartment. We agree to maintain the apartment. If you don’t pay the rent, you have to leave. If we don’t maintain the apartment, you don’t have to pay the rent.” Done. In plain English. What happened? The company saved thousands of dollars in legal fees every year because everybody understood the agreements and, as a result, were far less inclined to challenge or break them. The tenants loved the agreements. They understood them. They had the wonderful feeling that they weren’t about to be tricked or cheated because they didn’t have the time to read twenty pages of incomprehensible legalese.

The only drawback… ahem… is that most lawyers would be put out of business.

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The Plan Plan

Have you ever been part of a strategic planning session? I always picture Napoleon Bonaparte doing strategic planning. He’s in uniform at the front of a group of generals sitting on the grass and he’s got a easel with a big wad of lined paper, and he’s writing on the paper with magic marker.

Meanwhile, the other side, without a mission statement or a strategic plan or a list of stakeholders, has attacked from the rear and our noble conqueror is slain or captured.

Napoleon Creates a Strategic Plan:

Napoleon: All right, let’s talk about who we are. Anyone? Who are we?
General #1: conquerors?
Napoleon: (writes it down) Conquerors. Do you spell that with an “e” or an “o”? “O”? Okay. Anyone else?
General #2: soldiers?
Napoleon: Okay. That’s good, but too general. What do soldiers do? Pierre?
General #3: Well, we loot, and pillage, and burn houses down.
Napoleon: That’s good. Loot. Burn. Pillage.
General #1: And we rape.
Napoleon: Rape? Do I put that down.
General #2: Well, it’s not really part of our mission, as soldiers. I don’t think it belongs in who we are. It’s more like a strategy.
Napoleon: So, you’re saying that our goal is not to rape, but if rape facilitates the achievement of our goals–
General #1: Yes, like our mission.
General #3: To conquer. I think killing and burning belongs under “strategies” too.
Napoleon: Okay, but we’ll get to that later. Now, I think we need a mission statement to put on here so we can reflect on it and discuss it in terms of appropriate strategies, and resources, and other stakeholders. Then we come back to it at the end of tomorrow and discuss if it still reflects our thinking as a group? Agreed?
General #1: To conquer Europe?
Napoleon: That’s good. That’s simple, easy to remember. (writes it down).

 

The first thing to know about a “strategic plan” is that the term itself invites ridicule: a strategy is a plan. So what you have is a “plan plan”.

The second thing to know is that no group of employees who is using all of their time to contribute to the success of their company has any time for a “strategic plan” or “missions statement” or any other such nonsense.

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Small is Beautiful and Other Momentary Lapses in Justice

Twenty-five years after E.F. Schumacher published “Small is Beautiful” the Ontario government still doesn’t get it.

It is about to close hundreds of small schools across Ontario because they are “inefficient”. The Ontario Public Schools Association predicts that 600 small schools will have to be closed to meet the demands of the Harris government. In Toronto alone, 128 schools are slated to be shutdown. In response to the public outcry, Harris tells the boards to cut their own “bloated bureaucracy”. He tells them, to give up some of their administrative space, though he must know that even if they gave up all of their administrative space, it would still be less than 20% of what is required.

The Toronto Board has already implemented the following:

  • School superintendents (making $100,000 a year) cut from 92 to 47.
  • Trustees cut from 74 to 22.
  • Trustees’ salaries cut from up to $50,000 to $5,000.
  • Administrative staff of 2,000 to be cut in half over three years.

Well, hey, we all hate bureaucracies, so way to go Toronto School Board! I’m too stupid to figure out what 2,000 administrative staff do in a city the size of Toronto, so let’s turf them.

Well, what do they do? The truth is, I have a feeling that a lot of what they do is administrative masturbation. You need a clerical worker to do the filing for an administrator who organizes training seminars for other administrators who run the human resources department which administers the pension plans and benefits packages for the secretaries and the administrators. Other administrators spend a lot of time doing “the vision thing”, going on retreats, and making strategic plans.

Anyway, speaking of Napoleon, I’ve had enough the Harris sniveling about “improving” education. He thinks we are stupid enough to believe that reducing the money spent on education will result in smarter, better students and teachers. Just as you know that if you reduce the amount of money you spend on a car, you will end up with a better car, right? And if you spend less on plumbing, you get better pipes, right? And if you hire the cheapest computer programmer, you get the best software, right? Riiiiight.

Now, obviously, spending more money does not guarantee a better educational system, just as it doesn’t guarantee better software. But you certainly can’t have a good educational system without spending the money necessary to do the job well, attracted good people, and provide adequate resources.

I attended small schools all my life. My children attend a large high school. The larger high school has some advantages, but the biggest difference between the two, by far, is that it is relatively easy to coast unnoticed through four years of education without learning anything in a big school. And it is hard for parents to get to know your kids’ teachers. You see them once for the one semester your child is in their class, and then you never meet the same teacher again. You never develop a strong enough relationship to feel that wonderful sense of accountability that teachers in small schools feel.

Small schools are often an important social and cultural force in the communities they are located in. They are where everyone goes for Halloween parties and the Christmas pageant and graduation. Parents volunteer to help in the classroom and to improve facilities. Everyone meets there at 3:15 to bring their children home. Everyone cares about their safety.

Harris wants to put them all on a bus, demolish or sell the schools, and convince the parents to place all their trust in an institution he has been slamming ever since he came into office.

Does Harris really care at all about education? It’s hard to believe that anybody could be so stupid as to not care. But all of the policies and directives and initiatives he has taken seem far more concerned with reducing costs than actually improving anything. The truth is, improvements do cost money. The truth is, even though we know schools and school boards waste a lot of money, they do still accomplish things. Students need good lab equipment, computers, books, field trips, art supplies, film, paint, desks, and so on. Having all those things doesn’t guarantee a good education, but you can’t have a good education without them.

* * *

The government has stacked a committee that was supposed to hold hearings, listen to varying viewpoints, think about the information gathered, then come to a rational and fair conclusion about how 46 million hectares of publicly owned land in Northern and Central Ontario should be used. This committee heard from loggers, industrialists, commercialists, environmentalists, cottage-owners, and the general public. They then adopted a very thoughtful expression and said, “hell, let’s turn everything over to the loggers.”

The Committee’s official conclusion is that 7.6% of public land should be set aside for preservation. “Hell, let’s give everything to the loggers.”

Now, this is a government that says no one gets a free ride. No more welfare bums. No more government handouts for people who don’t contribute. This government wants to charge user fees for fresh air. This is a government that wants schools of 10,000 students, taught by video camera from a windowless cell in Port Elgin. This is a government that wants MacDonald’s to operate our prison system. But then they turnaround and offer all the trees in Ontario to the logging companies for practically nothing.

If you’re poor. If you’re destitute, and living on the streets of the Toronto– this government says, tough luck, fella. I can’t help yah. But give that bum a chain saw, and the government says, hey, you want some trees? We don’t need them.

* * *

Hey, I’ve been saying this all along! You know those late penalties they charge you on your utilities bill (in Canada)? Like, about $20.00 if you’re one day late on a $200.00 bill? The real interest rate on those charges is, according to actuarial experts, about 5,000,000,000%. That’s right, five billion. In Canada, it is illegal to charge interest rates higher than 60% per annum (which is pretty ridiculous anyway). Well the Supreme Court just ruled that these interest rates, contrary to previous rulings, and with the complicity of the Minister of Energy for Ontario in the 1970’s (under Premier Comatose, Bill Davis), may well be subject to Federal law after all.

This was just another example of the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules. Now it looks like there’s a chance that the law might be applied equally once again.

The court case is based on a challenge of the penalty filed by Gordon Garland against Consumer’s Gas, on behalf of the 30% of customers who pay late.

* * *

The Blue Jays are demanding a “better deal” from the Skydome or, so they say, they will play at the “mistake on the lake”, Exhibition Place, next season.

Watch your pockets. A “better deal” means the Blue Jays want the taxpayers of Ontario to subsidize the cost of playing baseball in the Skydome so they can pay Jose Canseco $28 million over four years to bat .234.

Why don’t they just pay Jose Canseco less? Because the New York Mets just agreed to pay Mike Piazza $91 million over seven years to play catcher for them. How can they pay this guy so much money? Well, they can’t. Buy we can. You and I will gladly hand over our money for stadiums and police and road construction so Mike can have an extra limo, three or four extra houses, body guards, and a $25,000 stereo system.

If we don’t pay, undoubtedly, they will move the Blue Jays to Sarasota or someplace that has more suckers per capita than we do.
* * *

How many wars are there in the world this year? How many conflicts between two or more nations in which people are shooting or bombing or shelling each other?

None. Nada. Not a single one.

Yes, there are conflicts. But every conflict in the world this year, involving military action, is a civil conflict, between two factions within a single nation.

It’s true– you can check it out. Is humanity making progress? I think so. Eeyore says, “oh, there’s sure to be another war soon.” Pooh says that’s dumb.

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My Cars

love cars.

I mean, public transit is great, and we should use it more often. That way, there’d be less of you people in the way when I get on the road with my car.

As you an see from the list on the right, I have owned 12 different cars in my life. Well, the Studebaker was my brother’s, but I ended up with it. The Impala was my Dad’s, but I drove it most of the time. The Beetle never made it to the road.

Not one of them is a mini-van. I am trying to round up pictures of all them just so you can see how wonderful they all were.

That’s a quite a pile of cars. Where are they now? Oh, just anywhere. I got rid of them. They have disappeared from my life. It was easy: you tow them off somewhere and leave them. Someone else takes care of it. It’s not my problem anymore. Two tons of rusted, decaying metal and rubber and plastic— poof! Gone! You try to get rid of a gallon of toxic herbicide like that! Forget it. They make you fill out a form at least.

When my 1964 Dodge Dart, a car I dearly loved, broke down for good, in Calgary, I called the Ministry of Fear and told them that though the car was registered in Illinois, I would like to junk it in Calgary. They nearly had a fit. You couldn’t do that, they said. You had to import it first. When you import a car, you pay taxes based on the assessed value of the car. But the government liked the car a lot more than I did. They thought it was still worth thousands of dollars. A government official warned me that there would be dire consequences if I didn’t pay up.

I didn’t want to pay a lot of money just to tow it to a junk yard. We argued for days. I was ready to try to fix the thing just so I could drive it down to Montana and ditch it in the first Forest Preserve I could find. I got an estimate for fixing the broken starter motor and the transmission and the door. Then I realized it might be cheaper to import it after all. I called the government back.

Then I read an article in the paper about a man who had bought some golf clubs in the United States and then smuggled them into Canada without paying duty. You know what the police did? They seized the golf clubs.

That was good enough for me. I called the government back: seize away, it’s yours. The government official said, well, we’d rather not have to tow it. Could you drop it off at the compound? So, my friend Sid came over with his Malibu and we towed it to the government compound and left it there to be seized. Gone. Poof.

If you put all twelve of those cars in my backyard today, it would make a pretty cool tower of jagged steel. It would stand about 80 feet high, towering over the houses in the neighborhood. It would tell you something: this is the kind of monumental mess a single human being can create in only twenty-five years here in the affluent West.

I never paid a cent to dispose of my old cars. Usually, I got a few bucks. Think about it. In our society, do people ever do anything for you for nothing? Would your neighbor like it if you dropped five bags of leaves onto his driveway? Does he want your old stereo? Your old freezer? No, never! This leads me to believe that there are people out there who want your old car. Old cars are so good for the environment, that the government doesn’t even charge you to dispose of them, the same way they never charge corporations to clean up their big polluted dumps or poisoned rivers. I’ll bet there are lots of people out there just crawling over each other for a chance to have a wrecked car. And that’s where my next wrecked car is going to go.

But in the meantime, here I come! Out of the way, you slow-moving eco-baby freaks! I’m coming by at 120 kilometres per hour! I don’t care where I’m going: I just want to drive!

My Cars and the Years I Owned Them:

1960 Mini Morris [1970]
1961 Studebaker [1970]
1965 Peugeot [1971]
1965 Chevrolet Impala [1972]
1965 Volkswagen Beetle [1974]
1964 Dodge Dart [1975]
1967 Plymouth Valiant [1978]
1972 Plymouth Valiant [1979]
1971 Dodge van [1981]
1983 Lada [1983]
1978 Ford Fairmont [1987]
1983 Chevrolet Malibu [1989]
1987 Toyota Camry [1998]
1987 Toyota 4Runner [1998]
1999 Honda Accord (1999)
2004 Toyota Corolla (2007-11)
2001 Honda Accord (2005?)
2002 Honda CRV (2010-11)
2010 Toyota Corolla
2012 Toyota Rav4

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Marketting Lennon

Well, Apple Computer has done it again. They persuaded Yoko Ono, presumably, to sell them her vampirish endorsement of their computer products. “Think Different” is the theme of the campaign.

But wait– isn’t that John sitting beside Yoko? Isn’t that a picture from the “bed-in for peace” in Amsterdam? John Lennon, who wrote:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
Nothing to kill or die for
A brotherhood of man

Well, this takes the cake. It reminds me of Rolling Stone Magazine, emerging from the flotsam of the 1960’s as the first, supposedly, “counter-culture” magazine. In actual fact, it was no more counter-culture than dental floss. Jann Wenner, the publisher, simply realized, before almost anyone else did, that there was a lot of money to be made in the “money can’t buy me love” business. A lot of trinkets to be sold. A lot of images to make and remake and sell. And all of it while pretending to be “different” from the materialistic older generation.

There ought to be a law against exploiting the dead. There is something particularly offensive about taking someone like John Lennon, who genuinely did stand for something, and using his image to market consumer products for one of greediest and most self-centred corporations in Silicone Valley. Yes, Apple, not Microsoft (Dracula, not Frankenstein).

John isn’t around to mock the whole idea the way he probably would. “Imagine there’s no Windows/It’s easy if you try”. He was one of the few rock stars of the 1960’s to stay relatively true to his own vision.

The vampires of Wall Street has no shame.

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Video Rip-Off Terminals

Video Ripoff Terminals

Should the government allow video lottery terminals? Should the government be in the gambling business?

No.

Well, maybe they should. I didn’t think so, but, hey, the arguments in favour are pretty persuasive. They say that people should have a choice. Maybe you think gambling is stupid, but, other people might not. If they want to gamble, what skin is it off your teeth?

Well then, what’s holding them back? Maybe nothing. Maybe they already have plans to set up brothels too. Why not? It’s about choice. If a woman decides to make money by selling her body, who are we to complain? And if a man chooses to pay for sex rather than earn it by marrying someone and giving them a house and car and large appliances, then who am I to stand in the way?

Of course, the difference is, when you pay a prostitute for sex, you generally get the sex. But gambling is founded upon a different principle, namely, that people are stupid. People are stupid enough to walk into a fabulous casino, see all the people and equipment and furnishings and security guards and entertainment, and come to the conclusion that this place has been losing a lot of money lately.

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Traffic

I was driving to Huntsville, Ontario the other day. I had a meeting scheduled at 10:00 a.m., so I had to leave Kitchener by 6:00 a.m. It is still dark at that time in this neck of the woods. I get in my car, stop by at the nearest Tim’s for a coffee, and I’m off. I’m thinking– at least there won’t be any traffic. Poor deluded me: the highway was crammed with cars.

What happened? Did I miss something? A hurricane? An alien invasion? Amway salesmen?

No, just people heading off to work. This is insane. It is six in the morning. It is dark. It is not fun getting up at six– your body wants to stay in bed. Yet, here they are, thousands of people, all racing around in their cars as if they were going somewhere interesting.

I stopped for a second coffee in Guelph. It is now 6:30 a.m., and the Tim’s is packed. There is a line-up.

Has our society gone berserk?! People are getting up at six in the morning, getting dressed, going out into these giant mechanical beasts, and racing to the coffee shop. I think they’re doing it just to annoy me.

I used to get up at 6:00 a.m. sometimes in the summer to go fishing. Now, I am not, by nature, an early riser, but there was one compensating charm. It was quiet and there was no traffic on the roads. I drove to a pier in a small village and dropped my line into the water and actually took pleasure in watching the nearby towns quietly, gradually, wake up. After an hour or so, you’d see people walking around, getting into their cars. By 8:00, there would be a few more fishermen, retirees who didn’t feel strongly enough about catching anything to want to get up any earlier.

This is sane. This makes sense.

But nowadays– 6:00 in the morning and the highways are full. There are delays. There are tie-ups, traffic snarls, enraged drivers pounding their dashboards. Racing, racing, racing— where to? That’s the bizarre thing. There are so many cars on the road at all hours of the day that you can’t go anywhere anyway. You just sit there in traffic, waiting, waiting, waiting. This is madness.

People— stay home! Don’t get up. Don’t get on the road. Don’t line up at Tim’s at 6:30 a.m. for coffee. Stay in bed. Sleep. Ignore the alarm. Quit your jobs. Join a religious order. Work at home. Spend more time with your families. Just stay off the roads.

I do have a solution. It’s so simple, I can’t believe that nobody else has thought of it before now.

You have to understand that we really do have lots of roads. There are millions of miles of roads. They go everywhere. Some of these roads are 16 lanes wide. That’s plenty. We don’t need any more. We also have enough cars. Everybody has one. That’s enough. So the problem is, that too many people are putting their cars on the highway at the same time. And you know the crazy thing: we let them! We have this big traffic jam in the 401 and people are moving about an inch an hour and somebody else wants to get on the highway— and we let them! This is insane. Let’s work it out. We need to tell these people, “sorry, there’s no more room.” It’s simple.

First, we figure out how many cars can be on the highway on any given day before we start getting traffic congestion. Then we convert this figure to what I call “driver miles”, which is, the number of miles people can drive on a given day before exceeding the capacity of our highways. In other words, at a certain point, we can calculate that we have no more driver-miles left– there is no more space on the roads. Then we take the driver miles and share it out with all the drivers of Ontario. Maybe we put a little computer in everybody’s car, with a cell-phone and a modem. And that’s it. You can only drive your allocated driver-miles on any given day. When you’ve used them up, you have to get off the roads. You’ll have to stay home. And no company will be allowed to fire an employee just because he had to obey the law and stay home. This will make the law popular with workers, if not corporations. But then, there’s a lot more workers than corporations anyway.

Simple, isn’t it? Of course, people who don’t need all of their driver-mile credits can sell them to other people if they want to. Or, you could save them up and one day make a really big trip.

And the biggest advantage of all: when you make your trip, you will actually be able to go somewhere.

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The goal, in business, is to make money by convincing people to buy your product whether they really need it or not. Leaves, for example, fall from trees all by themselves. Left to their own devices, they rot into a nutritious mulch which is good for all things organic. Your local hardware store, though, convinces you to gather all the leaves with a rake ($14.95) and put them into plastic bags ($.35 each) so a garbage truck can hall them to a dump, where they are prevented from decaying by an insulating layer of disposable diapers ($22.75 per box).

There’s pretty good money in the trinket business. But you can do much better than that if you can make people pay to not have the benefits of the use of your product. So if you sell leaf-blowers, the idea is to also get into the earplug business. If you sell enough leaf-blowers, you may also see your sales of rifles and ammunition go up.

Bell Telephone has a similar scam. As part of your regular phone service, they list you in the phone book. This must have cost them a lot of money at one time, to type in everyone’s name and address and phone number. You would think Bell would have a little charge for it, on your phone bill every month: “Directory listing: $.25”. But that’s not the way it is. If you want Bell to NOT list in you in the phone book, you don’t NOT pay Bell… you pay more.

Bell has another service: Call Display. Now, you’ll notice that they didn’t offer you a chance to say if you wanted your number to be on Call Display. Oh no. That would be too rational. Your number is on display whether you like it or not. No charge. Isn’t that nice? Maybe not. Maybe that charge is included in your monthly phone bill. Actually, without a doubt, it’s included in your monthly phone bill. You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t want it. But you’re going to pay for it.

Well, suppose you don’t want your number displayed. Bell says, “Okay. We won’t display your number.” Then they give you a discount, right, because a “service”– displaying your number on someone else’s phone– is being terminated. Uh uh. Bell charges you extra. $5.00 a month. That’s like Mr. Leaf Blower coming up to your house and blowing all your leaves into the street. If you don’t pay, he blows all the leaves back. If you ask him to stop, he’ll say, “Sure, for $5.00.” Then he’ll try to sell you an ear plug.

Anyway, you bite the bullet and pay them $5.00 a month to not display your number. How’s that for business acumen! A few years ago, you didn’t even want your number to be displayed on people’s phones! You didn’t ask for it. Now you’re paying to not have it done. This is progress. This is customer service. Bell’s mission statement must read something like: “We will persuade as many people as possible to pay as much as possible for services we don’t provide.”

I can’t wait until they offer us “Call Un-display Display”– this service will show you the phone numbers of people who are paying $5.00 a month to not have their number shown on your call display. Does that seem unfair? Well, for an additional $5.00 a month, they will un-display your number from display phones that display un-displayed numbers.

I understand business now. I am going to go into business myself. I am going to gather personal information about everyone, including gossip and rumours, and post this information on a big web site. I’m thinking of stuff like “bad breath”, “an accident last year”, “two drunk driving convictions”, “looks ugly without his hairpiece”, “stands on the porch at 7:00 a.m. in his underwear to let the dog out”, “farts at movies”. It’ll be a lot of work, and I’ll have to start mostly with people I know. I will also offer $5.00 per tip for any information other people send me about people they know. I also intend to copyright this information, since the U.S. government is now intending to allow the copyright of collections of facts. So if I put all this information into a data base, nobody else can use it without my permission. I plan to keep lots of lawyers very busy.

Then I will offer a service to the general public. For $5.00 a month, I will take your name off the website. For just pennies a day. For less than the cup of coffee! Isn’t respect and public esteem worth this tiny amount?

Then I’m going to make even more money. For $10.00 a month, I’ll let you see the information about people who have paid me $5.00 a month to not show it to anybody! What a country!

I have a second idea that’s even simpler. For a mere $2.50 a month, which is less than half the cost of call display and some other service I can’t think of, only pennies a day, the cost of a cup of coffee or less, I will install a device on your phone that shows you the number you have dialed.

Or did somebody already beat me to this one?

I plan to be very, very rich.

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Telemarketeers

A man named Bob Trottier, who worked for a telemarketing firm a few months this spring, wrote an article for today’s Kitchener Waterloo Record defending Telemarketers. “Businesses and many other services have to use telemarketing because it works, whether you grit your teeth at the intruding phone calls or not”.

This is one big piece of horse manure. Nobody has to use telemarketing. Telemarketing didn’t even exist thirty years ago, and nobody was the wiser. What Trottier really wants us to believe is that telemarketing creates new demand for products. This is good for the economy, you see. In fact, the advantage of telemarketing probably only lasts as long as it takes until a competitor with the same product starts to use telemarketing. It’s like Sunday shopping. Where’s the advantage if all the stores are open on Sunday? Thus we are led by the nose by our own short-sightedness.

The biggest mistake you can make with a telemarketer is to listen. The simplest, most effective thing to do is hang up, immediately. Don’t listen. Don’t wait for the telemarketer to shut-up, don’t ask yourself if you might actually want what they’re selling (believe me, you don’t).

I don’t necessarily believe that telemarketing should be banned. I think it would be more effective to make a law that says that the owners of a telemarketing firm must spend at least eight hours a day doing the same thing his employees are doing, calling people and pestering them in their homes. They should hear what people really think of pests.

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Homeless in Ontario

Premier Mike Harris has long made it his own particular virtue to proclaim that the provincial government will no longer support deadbeats. Get out there and find a job, says Mike. Stop sponging off the hard-working taxpayer. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!

Well, let’s say you’re one of the uneducated poor and you do find a job. Maybe not a great job, but a job nonetheless. Maybe not even a full-time job. But at least you have a reason to get up early most mornings. Mike is happy. You’re no longer a deadbeat. Let’s say this job is half-time at minimum wage with no benefits and pays you all of about $550 a month. That’s $6,600 a year. Could you live off of $6,600 a year? Would you get up early every morning, get dressed, scrape the snow off your car— more likely, wait in the cold for a bus– and get yourself off to a job for $6,600 a year?

Until now, the provincial government realized that someone making only a little money would probably not have much left over for “luxuries” like prescription drugs or dental work. So the government, sensibly enough, has allowed these people to be eligible for a special drug, dental, and vision plan normally available only to welfare recipients. Now tell me: in your heart of hearts, does this sound unreasonable? Wouldn’t this person be more likely to improve his chances at a full-time job if he could at least take care of his teeth and replace his glasses once every two years? And if that’s all we do for the working poor, isn’t this, in fact, embarrassingly pathetic?

Well, it wasn’t pathetic enough for the Harris government. They are removing that benefit. They are also removing certain exemptions and changing other rules so that a jobless man living at home with his parents gets all of $52.00 a month to take care of all his needs. The Harris government is now also going to require that welfare recipients provide receipts for any rent they have paid. If they don’t or can’t, their welfare check gets slashed by $180. They will then receive a grand total of $195 a month basic allowance. That is $2,400 a year. How much did it cost you get through the last year? Do you feel wealthy? Most people spend about this much on movies and eating out.

Now if you really believe that we should be the kind of society that is merciless and heartless, don’t read any further. We have built this society that runs like a machine. We’re spinning right now at maximum rpm. To survive in our society, you have to keep up with a million details. You need the right education, the right clothes, the right haircut, the right forms, the right location, the right skills, the right connections, the right state of mind. Not everyone can hack it. It doesn’t surprise me that there are 30,000 people living on the streets of Toronto because they can’t keep up. So if we want to be merciless, we can say to them, “Tough. Go drop off the edge of the earth.” Or we can say, it’s a fact of life that not everybody can fit in.

It’s not a question of blame. It is true that some people abuse the system. It is also true that a lot of people pass around third-hand stories about people living the high life on welfare and unemployment insurance, double-dipping, and squandering all their money on cigarettes, lottery tickets, and booze. But there really are a lot of people out there who fall through the cracks simply because they don’t have the mental or emotional make-up to succeed in this hyper-world. So we toss them a pittance, maybe enough to eat semi-regularly, and we provide some shelters so they can sleep inside on the coldest winter nights.

The only hard research on this subject indicates that the real rate of abuse is very small, but everyone’s got a story and a lot of people are credulous. Life on welfare shouldn’t be too easy– after all, it’s not good for people to live in dependency anyway. But it’s one thing to have reasonable restrictions; it’s quite another to kick someone in the teeth when they’re already down. By steadily diminishing their access to assistance, we are pushing them into a state of desperation.

Some social workers don’t believe that the government is actually going to save much money with this latest jab at the poor anyway. It’s just another mean-spirited expression of the Harris’ government’s contempt for losers.

Our society generates enormous wealth. There was a time, in the 19th century, when it was believed that there was a fixed limit to the amount of wealth any economy could generate. If wealth was diverted to the poor, that meant that someone had to give it up. Social conservatives argued that there wasn’t enough wealth to go around, and that redistribution would simply make us all poor. Socialists played this game, declaring that, whether there was enough or not, more of it ought to be taken from the rich and given to the poor.

The late 20th century has proven these arguments false. We are, in fact, generating more and more wealth, on a scale that was unimaginable in the 19th century. The problem is, as almost every significant study shows, that more and more of the wealth is ending up in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Nobody knows what someone with ten million dollars needs another ten million for. What can you buy with twenty million that you can’t buy with ten? Isn’t this called greed? Then why does our society heap admiration and honors on people like Conrad Black and Bill Gates and Michael Jordan? And why do we heap contempt upon young mothers with children who live in brutal conditions off a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of pie? Are we that heartless?

With budget surpluses looming, a surprisingly large percentage of the voting population favours increases in government spending on social programs, education, and health care. Perhaps this is the beginning of a reversal of a twenty year trend that has seen a growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots.