The Just War Theory

The Christian Reformed Church officially believes that there is such a thing as a “just” war. It’s there in our official church policy, right next to sensual abstinence and charitable materialism.

I liked the 1960’s. Sure there were a lot of crazy ideas in the air, and a lot of foolish ones. And sure, the hippies were naïve and idealistic. But you have to see it from the point of view of someone “coming of age”. You have to appreciate what it was like before t he 1960’s.

The 1950’s was Frank Sinatra, Leave it to Beaver, Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was Billy Graham and Richard Nixon and John Wayne. It was military bands and double-knit pants, pant-suits and Tupperware parties.  It was Bette Davis and Doris Day and Rock Hudson and, god help us, Barbara Stanwyck, who all, to me, had the sexual appeal of dried potatoes.

The 1960’s was the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jesus Christ Superstar, and blue jeans. It was Woodstock, Janis Joplin, J.D. Salinger.  It was Natalie Wood and Ali McGraw and Faye Dunaway.  It was t-shirts and sandals and free love–whatever that was– and John Kennedy.

It was no contest.

One of the things a lot of people in my generation believed in–don’t puke now–was the PEACE movement. I remember arguing with my teachers and parents and minister about it. They all believed that war was a regrettable necessity, but a necessity nevertheless. They argued that the world was full of violent, evil people, who were just itching to conquer and destroy us, just like the Nazis, and the Communists, and, of course, Cuba. In order to preserve our God-ordained lives as suburban consumers, it was necessary to threaten to destroy all life on the entire planet. There could never be peace as long as there was sin in the world, and there would always be sin in the world.

The more sophisticated among us argued back: they are warlike because we are warlike. They hit back, because we hit first. They threaten to destroy us because we threaten to destroy them.

Hopelessly naïve, so we were told.

The Christian Reformed Church produced a thoughtful document that supported the pro-war faction. But a careful reading of it reveals that the peaceniks were gaining the high ground. This document laid out very stringent conditions under which a war could be considered “just”. The one that was most interesting: the benefits of a particular war should outweigh the cost.

Well, I suppose you wouldn’t have a hard time finding militarists who really believed that the benefits of almost any war outweighed the costs. Benefit: lots of medals. Cost: hundreds of thousands of lives. After reading this document, I came to conclusion that some members of the committee which wrote it were playing a joke on us.

It is of more than passing interest that the current generation of leadership in the West, especially Tony Blair in England and Bill Clinton in the U.S., are baby-boomers, members of the “Give Peace a Chance” generation. And guess what: they are proving us right.

The biggest difference between Clinton and Blair and their predecessors, Thatcher and Reagan, is that Clinton and Blair really do believe that peace is a good thing. (One of Ronald Reagan’s first acts as president, way back in 1980, was to restore the funding for military brass bands which President Carter had cut. Thatcher, of course, charged off to Argentina to save the Falklands for England, tally ho.)

And so we finally have peace in South Africa. Peace has a tenuous grasp in the Middle East. And so you have Blair in Ireland and Israel, and Bill Clinton lending the full support of the U.S. But it is not those two men alone. Baby boomers now hold the reigns of power in industry, commerce, education, and government, and whatever other compromises they have made in their lives, they seem to agree that peace is better than war.

Of course, there are still conflicts and civil wars and other disturbances, in places like Nigeria and Kosovo, and the Middle East could still explode if negotiations don’t make some progress soon. But over-all, has the world ever been in better shape? No, it hasn’t. Last year, there were two significant conflicts in the entire world. In any given year during the 1960’s, there were at least 20.

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Perhaps the difference in generations is most aptly summed up in a controversy that broke out several years ago between the Canadian Legion and some “peaceniks” in Chatham, Ontario. The Legion was outraged– outraged, I say– that a group of nuns and activists had decided to hold a peace rally in front of the local cenotaph. How dare they! In their protests, the Legion made transparent all their pretty rhetoric about heroism and sacrifice: the truth was, they didn’t go over “there” to die for their country. They went over there to kill for their country. And the monument was not a tribute to the peace they won; it was a tribute to the camaraderie of men who enjoyed dressing up and shooting guns off at each other, and then spending the next forty years boozing it up away from their wives and retelling the same boring stories about “Jack” and “Bill” and how splendidly they gave it to the wicked kraut.

They realized that peace activists devalued their most cherished accomplishments.

I had been brought up to respect these men for the grim work they did of defending liberty and freedom. After hanging around a Legion hall a few times, and after all we’ve heard in the last few years– about the Queen and admitting Sikhs to the Legion halls, and the flag and so on– I was left with the impression that most of these men had some skewed imperialistic notion of “liberty” that didn’t have much latitude in it for diversity or democracy. I don’t think many of these men cared much about the horrible injustices of the Nazi regime, except insofar as particular incidents could be used to paint the enemies as monsters.

More recently, the veterans complained bitterly when the National War Museum revealed plans to include a section on the Holocaust. How dare they? What’s that go to do with World War II? In the U.S., veterans complained so loudly and bitterly that the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. was forced to withdraw an exhibit that merely documented– did not damn or praise, merely documented– the bombing of Hiroshima. In one sense, their actions are a glorious admission of shame. They want to pretend that Hiroshima never happened.

I mean that, absolutely, their actions were a monumental admission of shame.  If they really believed there was nothing morally wrong with Hiroshima they would not have been bothered one whit about featuring it in an exhibit on the war.

I have gone from believing that these men fought out of a sincere belief in democracy and freedom and justice to believing that most of these men still hold the same attitudes and political views that gave rise to many of the 20th century’s military conflicts in the first place, namely, that honor and national pride are worth killing for, and that material wealth must be guarded against interlopers, and that killing in the name of a nation or a flag is honorable and right.

Sports and Taxes

Let’s see if I understand the logic of Gary Bettman.

He spoke to the Canadian Club in the luxurious York Hotel in downtown Toronto. He said this:

Cities are bidding to try and get franchises away and they’re willing to build buildings and they’re willing to not tax because they understand that there is an economic and an intangible value to having professional sports teams.

According to Bettman, the Ottawa Senators, who pay the least in Canada, a mere $3 million a year, in taxes, pay more than 20 U.S. teams.

So Bettman wants you and me, brother, to contribute our tax dollars to the Ottawa Senators, the Montreal Canadians, and the Toronto Maple Leafs, and the other Canadian teams, so they, in turn, can pay Wendell Clark two or three million dollars a year to sit in the press box, play golf, and once in a while show up in uniform to play hockey.

Are we nuts? Is he nuts?

Well, no, the truth is Bettman is pretty smart. As he points out, 20 U.S. teams pay less than $3 million a year in taxes, and get all kinds of other taxpayer sponsored concessions, like stadiums, parking, highways, and traffic police. From the point of view of professional athletes and the owners of professional sports teams, he is very smart indeed.

If someone came up to you and said, “Hey, would you please give me some money, so I can hire some athletes to play baseball?” you would probably say, “Well, how much do you need?” And Mr. Bettman would reply, on behalf of all sports owners, “Oh, about $60-70 million.” You might come to your sense about this point and say, “Why would any sane person pay someone that much money to play baseball?”

Why indeed.

This is madness, insanity, and incomprehensible idiocy. But it goes on and on and on.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation also reported that the Canadian Government has extended more than $11 billion in “aid” to corporations over the past 15 years (1982-97). Of the $11 billion, about $2 billion is not likely to ever be repaid. Remember that the next time you hear a politician or business leader talk about those “lazy” welfare cheats and their scandalous $365 a month.

Wei Jingsheng

Wei Jingsheng is a Chinese dissident who was imprisoned for almost 20 years because he had the courage to stand up for the basic human rights you and I take for granted as citizens of a free country. He was expelled from China in November 1997, probably because he was one of the most well-known of China’s many prisoners of conscience.

Jingsheng traveled to Paris where only the junior minister of “cooperation” would meet with him. In London, Prime-Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook were too busy to see him– probably had a party with OAISIS scheduled or something– so only an obscure bureaucrat would agree to talk with him.

The Clinton Administration had made a point of demanding that China honor the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, until about 1994, when more and more U.S. corporations insisted that Washington’s hard-line stance was harming business with the Communist giant. A lot of U.S. corporations salivate uncontrollably at the thought of a billion households that don’t yet have telephones, microwaves, or cable TV.

Cuba, on the other hand, only has about 7 million people, so it’s quite all right if you want to get all righteous about human rights under Castro. When it comes to China, however, you’re talking big bucks. As Bob Dylan once observed, before his own sell-out, “money doesn’t talk/it swears”.

A lot of people–especially corporate types–will argue that human rights should never be tied to commercial relationships. Oddly, this argument does not polarize along the political leanings you might have expected. Some very conservative U.S. congressmen support the demands for greater accountability for human rights abuses in China, while Clinton himself appears to be folding under pressure from the big corporations, and, as observed, Tony Blair and his Labour Party doesn’t have the time of day for a pro-union Chinese dissident.

You may recall that we went through this whole debate during the South African crisis, and Maggie Thatcher led the opposition to economic sanctions on the basis of the argument that they don’t work, and that they only harm the average citizen, not the powerful elite. Does Thatcher support sanctions against Iraq? The U.S. insists on tightening the sanctions against Iraq until they admit the U.N. weapons inspectors: isn’t Bill Clinton in a position of hypocrisy?

We ought to be more consistent on this. If sanctions worked against South Africa (they appear to have helped) and if they are believed to work against Iraq (this is somewhat questionable), and if it is hoped they will work against Cuba (dream on), then they ought to be applied to China.

What we have to do is remove the element of hypocrisy from the idea of sanctions. We constantly insist that we apply sanctions out of high moral principles, but we drop them as soon as we realize that there is fast buck or two to be made. The U.S. didn’t seem to mind the human rights abuses committed in Nicaragua or Chile, as long as U.S. commercial interests were served. Many European nations, like Italy and France, want to rebuild their business relations with Iraq, and thus they want to drop sanctions against Hussein. The U.S. won’t apply sanctions to China because U.S. corporations want to do business with the Chinese.

As China’s pursuit of the 2000 Summer Olympics demonstrated, the Chinese government does want relations with the West, and they need the technological and economic assistance only the West can provide. But such assistance ought to be dependent on well-defined and verified progress on human rights issues, democratization, and some measure of self-determination for Tibet.

Balanced Books: Jean Chretien and the Temple of Doom

For the first time in 30 years, the annual budget of the Government of Canada will show some black ink.

The immediate response of the Reform Party was to denounce the government for spending some of the new “fiscal dividend”, instead of cutting taxes.

The Reform Party is on record as having advocated big tax cuts years ago. Had we followed Manning’s advice then, we would still be facing billions of dollars in deficits, just as the Americans, who cheerfully followed Reagan’s advice, are still a few years away from balanced books.

The Reform Party has a problem. Most Canadians regard this balanced budget as a significant accomplishment. Most Canadians, I suspect, are pleased with Chretien and Martin, and a little self-satisfied: we took the high-road, we suffered years of cuts and sacrifice, but it has finally paid off. The annual budget is balanced.

If the Reform Party could see themselves, they might hesitate before making the usual partisan jabs at the Liberals. No one knows for sure, of course, but my guess is that most Canadians are really very pleased about this achievement. We’ve gone through a lengthy period of painful sacrifices to get the federal budget under control. It was difficult, but we did it. We should be pleased and proud.

Then we see Preston Manning with his bad hair-cut, whining about how this government, the first government in 30 years to bring the budget under control, is irresponsible and shameless because it is putting a few bucks back into some of the programs it’s gutted over the last few years.

Preston Manning is being dishonest when he claims to speak for most Canadians when he demands a tax cut. Most Canadians have indicated over and over again that, yes, while they would like a tax cut, they also believe that a good chunk of the “fiscal dividend” should go back into some of the social and health programs that make Canada a civilized nation. This is not a matter of interpretation or fudging the stats: the polls are consistent and decisive on this issue. Manning is not only wrong but he is also shrill and whiney. My guess is that the next polls show the Liberals ever farther ahead of Reform than they are now.

So it took a “free-spending liberal” to bring the budget deficit under control. Mulroney, a conservative couldn’t do it. In the U.S., Reagan, an arch-conservative, not only did not reduce the deficit: he escalated it from about $50 billion to over $450 billion, by cutting taxes (at least, for the rich) and increasing spending on the military. Clinton only now has brought it back under control, though the Americans are a year or two behind Canada.

Jean Chretien and Paul Martin should get gold medals. Chretien should get a special shiny gold medal for being lavish with praise for his finance minister. This is not a leader who is insecure about his position in the party or his ability to lead. This is a leader who thought that Paul Martin was a pretty smart guy and maybe he should be in charge of getting the deficit down, so he made him Finance Minister and then did the simplest thing possible: left him alone to do his job.

Born on Third Base

I was a little flabbergasted to discover that the reason the Government of Canada was finally able to balance their books this year was not because of all the slashing and burning over the last five years that have left Canada’s social and health care programs in a tattered wreckage. No, that’s not it, and the next time you see Prime Minister Jean Chretien beaming with self-satisfaction at a press conference, please throw a pie in his face.

No, the real reason the deficit has come down is simpler than that. It is because interest rates have come down, and because the economy is in the middle of the longest continuous growth spurt since the early 1960’s. Anyone who has renegotiated a mortgage from 10 3/4% down to 7 1/4% knows what effect interest rates have on a large amount of money. All of those budget cuts? They might have accounted for only 1/3 of the necessary savings.

There are some people out there who believe that the entire budget deficit was just a plot by the very rich to create a huge financial crisis to convince the general public that taxes are bad and that the government can’t be trusted with the management of public resources. The way the plot worked was this:

  • the government used taxes to address the massive imbalance of wealth between the rich and the poor
  • the people supported this activity
  • the government raised taxes, primarily on the well-to-do, to subsidize social programs that help everyone or just the poor.
  • the rich realized that if this system prevailed, they would only own five homes, not ten, and eleven Bentleys, not eighteen, and decided something must be done.
  • the rich, who control the stock market, the bond market, and the Federal Reserve, caused interest rates to go up, to “cure” inflation, at the cost of higher unemployment, which, of course, does not affect the rich.
  • Ronald Reagan, the tool of the rich, reduced taxes on the rich, while actually increasing government spending, especially on the military, which, combined with the interest rate hikes, thereby created a massive government deficit. The media, another tool of the rich, hammered home the idea that inflation was evil and must be fought at all costs, even to the extent of increasing unemployment and government debt.
  • the general public, not aware of the real cause of the budget deficit, became appalled at the size of the budget deficit and demand leaders who would reduce it, without raising taxes.

Here the plan goes astray: Bob Dole, Preston Manning, and John Major were supposed to be the beneficiaries of this strategy. In each case, the public, far more rational than the media give them credit for, elected relatively moderate, compassionate leaders.

Bill Clinton and Jean Chretien and now Tony Blair oblige the ill-informed public by slashing social programs, while maintaining the rhetoric of tolerant, compassionate liberals. Largely, this translates into same sex health benefits, a harmless frill, while diverting billions of dollars in wealth back into the hands of the rich.

The net result: a massive shift of wealth from the laborer to the investor. Read the newspaper, watch tv: how does the media interpret the state of health of the economy? In jobs? In pay for the average dude? In health care or social programs? No! In the value of the stock market, and in the returns on investment for the average stock-holder. When Chain-Saw Al Dunlap takes over a company and promises to slash tens of thousands of jobs, the value of the stocks of this company go up. Great news! You’re out of work! Your family can go to hell, we don’t care– as long as the stock market continues to rise! (One interesting irony: so-called pro-family politicians and religious leaders don’t seem to be “pro” your family, when your job is lost: they support the “lean and mean” economy, lower minimum wages, and anti-union measures. As far as they are concerned, you can go work at McDonalds.)

Here again, the plan has gone somewhat astray, in that growing numbers of middle-class wage-earners are investing in mutual funds, causing an unprecedented string of growth years for the markets. I don’t think anybody really knows what this means just yet.

Sports Economics

Everybody knows that salaries for professional athletes are completely absurd, but nobody seems have any rational idea of what can be done about it. The basic argument against doing anything is that if people want to pay $55 to sit in a huge stadium and watch a bunch of spoiled athletes shoot hoops or shag fly balls or run into each other, what’s to stop them? It’s a free country.

Ah, but it’s not that simple. There are rules by which all businesses in the U.S. and Canada must operate. Most of these are good rules, designed to prevent collusion and restraint of competition. But professional sports do not abide by these rules: they have an exemption, granted by the government. The solution to the problem of outrageous sports salaries is really very simple. You remove or modify the legal exemption. Bang. Done.

Few people understand what the meaning of this exemption is. The meaning is that professional sports teams are not subject to the usual rules of competition, even though they are for-profit businesses. They are allowed to cooperate together to form a single league with a de facto monopoly over players and venues. In exchange for this exemption, the leagues are supposed to provide a commissioner to ensure that the interests of the sport are served. In reality, in practice, all the commissioners serve only one interest, that of the team owners. New franchises are handed out like lollipops because the astronomical entrance fees are divvied up among the established owners.

What would happen if the exemption were abolished? It would take a while, but we would begin to see minor leagues flourish again and some of them would grow into genuine competition for the Majors. Most medium-sized towns would be able to support a professional team because, with a multiplicity of smaller leagues instead of one, exclusive, big league, players salaries would decline to a rational level. And instead of a very small number of black athletes emerging from the ghettos to make it very, very, very big, we might have a large number of black athletes playing on a large number of professional teams, making a decent living for themselves, and helping bring business to their home communities with medium-sized stadiums, where fans will also actually get a decent view of the game.

We would have to kiss goodbye to the concept of “THE” Major Leagues. Big deal. And no more publicly-funded stadiums, one of the most insane ideas of our time (why are we taxpayers subsidizing the outrageous salaries of professional athletes?).

Allen Inverson

Allen Iverson is a point guard on the Philadelphia 76ers. He is possibly the most promising young talent in the game. The Sixers pay him $9.4 million over three years, but he also receives endorsement money from Reebok. It costs $54 a ticket to watch Allen Iverson play.

Iverson grew up in Hampton, Virginia, in the ghetto, in a dilapidated house that was frequently unheated because his mother, who was 15-years-old when he was born, could not afford to pay the bills. The house reeked of backed-up sewage.

As he grew up, Allen watched friend after friend die violently in gang turf wars. Allen’s father served time–for stabbing a girlfriend–as did his step-father. But Allen was born with a gift, and he worked hard to perfect it. He starred in high school basketball, and then for two years at university. Then he hit the big time: the NBA.

Now that he is a millionaire, Iverson has moved his mother, his sisters, his aunts, his uncles… just about everyone in his extended family, and his girlfriend and two children of his own, into decent housing outside of Philadelphia. He also supports two full-time body-guards.

Who is after Allen Iverson? I don’t know. But every important person has a body-guard.

Allen Iverson served some time in jail when he was in high school because he was in a bowling alley when a riot broke out between some whites and blacks. The police arrived and arrested four blacks, including Iverson, and none of the whites. He was alleged to have thrown a chair that struck a woman in the head. He received five years in penitentiary even though he had no previous convictions and insisted that he had left the alley immediately after the trouble started. His conviction was later over-turned upon appeal and erased from his record.

Did you read that carefully? A young black man with no previous convictions received a 5-year sentence for allegedly throwing a chair at a woman during a fight in a bowling alley. Five years. Isn’t that a little harsh? What does five years in prison do to a young man like Allen Iverson? What do you have when he comes out? Do you think that when he comes out, he will say to himself, “Whoa! I’ll never do that again!”

Allen’s high school friends can’t afford the $54 it takes to see Allen play, but Sports Illustrated reports that some of the white men who can afford it heckle Iverson mercilessly.

What does Allen spend his millions on, after supporting his extended family? Incredibly tasteless, ostentatious jewelry, a red Jaguar for his mother, a Mercedes Benz for himself. Whatever he wants.

This is the face of the modern pro athlete. Everyone I know complains bitterly about the absurdly excessive amounts of money these athletes are paid. When we find out what they spend that money on, we are sometimes shocked at the waste and extravagance. We are disappointed that they don’t seem to put the money back into the poverty-stricken communities they came from.

Salaries for professional athletes entered the realm of absurdity years ago. Everyone seems to know it, but no one seems to know any way to stop it. And they keep going: the latest contracts are for over $100 million. This is beyond idiocy and absurdity: it is pure madness.

But the story of Allen Iverson should give us pause. It is one thing for comfortable, middle-class whites to stand appalled at the state of affairs in professional sports; it is quite another for a black-teenager from an American ghetto. For many of these teenagers, their only hope of leaving their poverty behind is either drug-dealing or professional sports. In some ways, Iverson’s huge salary is his payoff for suffering years of abuse and degradation.

Consider also the case of Latrell Sprewell, who assaulted his own coach, P.J. Carlesimo. The team and the League did the right thing, for once. The team terminated his contract and the NBA suspended him. Astonishingly, an arbitrator over-ruled both, shortened the suspension to six months, and reinstated his $17 million contract. Once again, we are beyond the realm of the unusual and into the realm of the completely bizarre. If you physically attacked and injured your supervisor, do you think you would be merely suspended? Where would you find an arbitrator dumb enough to reinstate you at full salary?

Given the general weirdness of all this, is it so hard to believe that the CIA deliberately encouraged drug-use by inner-city blacks, or that the budget deficit was the result of a conspiracy among bankers, investors, and the military, to convince the general public that government spending was out of control and force social spending down while continuing to line their own pockets? If you carefully analyze the changes in tax law over the past twenty years, two things are clear:

  • a huge chunk of the deficit spending went into the pockets of military contractors and suppliers (think of the infamous $450 hammers charged to the Pentagon)
  • a huge chunk of the taxes that will pay off the deficit is coming from the pockets of hard-working, average citizens, because of all the tax cuts and deductions that benefit the rich
  • the budget deficit did not hurt the rich one little bit. While you and I were constantly told that we had to lower our expectations, cut back, and make sacrifices, accept down-sizing, because times are tough, the rich continued to increase their own salaries and profits, sometimes by astronomical sums.

What has this got to do with Allen Iverson and basketball? Just part of the general weirdness of our economic system, that’s all. Millions of people go to work every day. They spend hours and hours working hard, doing various challenging tasks, and thusly they generate enormous wealth. Where does this wealth go? Well, we know that you and I are getting about the same amount we got twenty years ago, maybe a little less. On the other hand, professional athletes, heads of corporations, and Al Dunlap– the man who is famous for taking “down-sizing” to extreme heights in the name of shareholder profits–are all making way, way, way more than they used to. Bank profits are way up. Microsoft is making a bundle. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Madonna…. In 1990, the average NHL salary was $200,000. Today it is $1.1 million. When was the last time you got an increase in your pay?

Money moves around. We ought to pay close attention to how it moves around. There is one thing that is resoundingly clear about the way it moves around: pretty well anybody who can take more, will take more. There is no restraint on human greed. Some people regard unions as greedy. That may be true, but the difference is that unions distribute wealth far more widely than corporations do, and history tells us that the more widely and evenly wealth is distributed, the safer and healthier a society is.

The New Economy

On a grand scale, there’s a lot of strange things about our economy.

We thought we abolished slavery in the 1800’s, but if you define slavery as enforced servitude, who among us is not a slave? Could you quit your job tomorrow? You would lose everything you own. You would be cast out into the streets. You would sleep on a park bench and eat from a dumpster, or starve or die of some contagious disease.

Perhaps you feel that prosperity liberates you. We have more material possessions than any slave ever had. On the other hand, slaves lived much shorter lives than we do. They worked for 15 or 20 years, in exchange for food and a place to sleep. We work for 40 or 50 years. If we are so much better off than slaves, why do we work so long?

I’m joking of course. Slaves worked longer hours and didn’t get paid vacations. They didn’t have tv or cars or stereos and they couldn’t send their children to ballet school. So we are better off than slaves.

Still, I find it sadly ironic that we really have about as little choice as the slaves did about how we spend our days. Our society produces immense piles of goods. If you want an immense pile of goods, who is going to stop you? Suppose, however, that instead of a VCR, indoor plumbing, a car, boat, lawnmower, stereo, and digital camera… suppose all you wanted was food and shelter. You should be able to work for one or two days a week, live in a non-descript, unfurnished apartment, and do as you please the other five days. Could you do it?

Your expenses would come to at least $500.00 a month for the apartment alone. Food would probably be about $400.00 a month. So, you would have to be earning about $1,000.00 a month or $12,000.00 a year or $250.00 a week just to get by. Can you do that on a part-time salary? I don’t think so. The trouble is that the well-paying jobs are tied to full-time activities. The part-time jobs don’t pay nearly as well.

The Salaries of Canadian MPs

According to Southam Newspapers, Canadian MP’s rank near the bottom of the world in terms of pay. Here’s some comparisons:

The big surprise here is socialist Sweden, which pays their members of Parliament less than anyone else, though they sit for a respectable 125 days a year. My goodness. What happened to the stereo-type of the free-spending left-lib government hack squandering all the taxpayer’s hard-earned money on useless and wasteful policy-wonking? What’s going on here? How come the most conservative government in the western world, the U.S., pays their legislators nearly the most?

There is a theory that a national health insurance plan similar to Canada’s would never work in the U.S. (where the cost of health care is, proportionately, three times what we pay) because conservative doctors would consider it a moral duty to cheat the plan as much as possible. There is a good deal of evidence that this theory is true. So the conservatives have made themselves a self-fulfilling prophecy: national health insurance will not work in the U.S. because we will abuse the system to death.

Good for them. That’s why they get paid so much.

Canadian MPs are paid too little. Most people in responsible positions that are at all comparable to being a member of parliament earn well over $100,000. But if we do decide to increase their pay, we should demand something in return: genuine democracy. Thanks largely to Trudeau, our government has evolved into an overly centralized system wherein most key decisions are made by top advisors and cabinet and ordinary party members play almost no role in arriving at decisions anymore. If we really only need ten people to run the country, let’s pay ten people to run the country and toss the rest of the bums out. Let’s also abolish the Senate now and get it over with.

Yes, our MPs are paid too little, but one thing does need to be pointed out: they all applied for the job knowing full well what the wages were. No one forced them to run. If they don’t like the pay or working conditions, fine, quit. There is something offensive about these guys campaigning on civic-mindedness, prudence, and responsibility to the taxpayer… and then doing everything they can to line their own pockets once they get in.

The problem is: who decides what the government should be paid? I have a solution. It’s so ingenious I can’t believe no one every thought of it before! And it’s perfectly in tune with the modern spirit of privatization and downsizing. This is the plan: every candidate running for political office must include, as part of the registration process, a “bid” for his own salary. So when Joe Schmo launches his campaign in Kamloops, the first thing voters want to know is, how much is he offering to work for? Preston Manning can offer his services for $34,500 a year. Chretien thinks he’s worth $100,000. Voters can decide.

You may think this will give an unfair advantage to the rich, who can afford to offer to govern for free. I don’t think so. I think most voters will realize pretty quickly that a Paul Martin at $125,000 is worth a lot more than a Sheila Copps at $69,000, or a Conrad Black– should he decide to run– at $5,000. It would make elections a lot more interesting, because really good, popular politicians could set records for highest pay, and would be entitled to influential positions because the voters want them to have influential positions. Politicians would be more accountable, because we could quickly figure out if they were worth the amount of money they asked for, instead of the amount that all MPs, competent or not, receive.

One last rant here: the taxpayer subsidizes education in Canada to an enormous degree. I forget the actual figures, but I saw them once in the Globe and Mail, and believe me, the numbers are huge. Among the most expensively subsidized educational programs is medicine. And those figures do not even include the cost of providing hospitals and clinics in which doctors and nurses are trained.

I propose that every medical student, nurse or doctor, who enrolls in a Canadian college or university, should be required to sign an agreement to repay every last cent of the subsidized portion of their education if they ever decide to move to U.S. and practice there. The amount would probably be well over $100,000 for doctors, and $40,000 for nurses. Perhaps someone will come up with better figures for me. Why should we Canadian taxpayers, in effect, subsidize the U.S. health care system just because they’re too stupid or dishonest to have their own coherent plan?

Country Salary Sitting
Japan $169,759 43
Germany $102,798 66
United States $169,672 144
Canada $64,400 148
Sweden $36,465 125

 


	

Alan Eagleson’s Friends

I was, in my youth, somewhat of an enthusiast for Marxism. Our society seemed to me to be based on greed and corruption, and I thought a good dose of Marxism would solve a lot of social ills. Of course, I knew that the Soviet Union was an oppressive, unjust society. I just didn’t think the Soviet Union represented Marxism any more than I thought the United States represented Christianity. In each case, the high ideals of the state religion was propounded but the actual practice was ruthlessly materialistic. Nowadays, I suppose I could be called a liberal.

There are days when I miss the idea of overthrowing the established order. Like today, when I read in the Toronto Star about Alan Eagleson’s friends.

Alan Eagleson has been charged with more than 44 counts of fraud committed since 1994, when he was head of the National Hockey League Players Association. Among other things, he stole money from players he represented and he colluded with the owners to keep player salaries low.

Some players now say they did kind of wonder about why their union leader was spending so much time on the owner’s yachts. They did, did they?

There is not much dispute about his guilt: Eagleson has admitted to some of the charges, and has been sentenced to 18 months so far, of which he will probably serve six. He is presently serving his time in Mimico Correctional Centre.

The Law Society of Upper Canada, hilariously, is now trying to decide whether or not Eagleson has engaged in conduct “unbecoming a barrister or a solicitor”! Like what? Did he donate some of the proceeds of his fraud to a charity?

In the same article, the Toronto Star reports that Mike Gillis, a former Boston Bruin, sued Eagleson successfully in 1996 for $40,000, part of a disability payment which Eagleson had swiped from him. Gillis was awarded $570,000 but Eagleson has appealed. The trouble is that almost all of that money is going to go to Gillis’ lawyers. Conduct unbecoming? Eagleson is a crook precisely because he behaves like a lawyer.

Look at this system! A man is owed $40,000 by a lawyer. The lawyer refuses to pay. Is he arrested? No, hell he’s a lawyer! So the victim of the fraud has no recourse but to go to court. The judge says, you can’t represent yourself– get yourself a…. lawyer! So the victim hires another lawyer to get his money back. But he can’t afford to pay this lawyer, you see, because he lost his money to the first lawyer. So the second lawyer says, no sweat, we’ll sue for what he owes you and for what you will owe me!

Now, you might observe that Mike Gillis, having been enlightened as to the courageous, unselfish, righteous needs of his own lawyers, has the solution. This solution is carefully suggested and facilitated by his lawyers: he sues Eagleson not only for the $40,000 he is owed, but for an additional $500,000 to pay his lawyers. The lawyer says, “I’ll help you get back your $40,000 and while we’ve got him down, I’ll rob him blind.” The man doesn’t care because it won’t come out of his pocket. So the system “works”.

Everybody’s happy, right? Consider Eagleson’s lawyer. Does he mind? Hell, no. He will charge Eagleson at least $500,000 himself, to spare him from having to pay out $40,000! But if he does a lousy job and loses the lawsuit, does he give the $500,000 back? Now, don’t laugh yourself silly. If he was going to do that, would he have advised him to fight the lawsuit in the first place, knowing it would cost a lot more than any possible out of court settlement would cost?

The truth is that this system is insane. It is absolutely, totally, completely, irrevocably insane. And everybody knows it. This system destroys everyone consumed by it…. except, of course, for the lawyers. And who, pray tell, makes these laws under which these cases are heard? Who is the judge? Who is the defense, the prosecution? What profession is represented in our legislature at numbers all out of proportion to their share of the population? Lawyers!

Are we really so surprised that they have cleverly evolved us a system that pays only them?

And now the most distasteful part of this particular story. Eagleson’s loyal friends have written him letters of commendation. Eagleson is a good man. Eagleson is honorable. Eagleson is a loyal friend. Eagleson never done me wrong. Here’s a list (side bar) so you can remember their names. If you bump into Bobby or Willard on the street, please restrain your desire to punch one of them in the nose. And remember that Bobby Clarke is the hero of the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series for breaking Valery Kharmalov’s ankle with a wicked–and unpenalized– slash in game 5. Sittler? Shame on you.

Yes, this is how it works. These are Alan Eagleson’s friends.. So while he was cheating Mike Gillis and Glen Sharpley and Bobby Orr, he was carefully cultivating loyal friendships with Bobby Clarke and Paul Henderson and John Turner. What does this tell us? That, contrary to the testimony of Gillis and Sharpley and Orr and all the others that Eagleson was actually an honest man? That’s what these “gentlemen” want you to believe. Their signatures on their letters are a slap in the face to all the honest, hard-working NHL players whom Eagleson has cheated over the years. Paul Henderson is saying, “hey– he didn’t cheat me. Why should I care if he cheated you? Go to hell, Orr…”

The only thing their letters prove is that even a brilliant lawyer like Alan Eagleson couldn’t screw everybody at the same time.

We often hear about the two tiers of justice in this country, but we don’t often get such an intimate glimpse into how it works. You rob a string of banks of various amounts up to $40,000 and get caught and brought before a judge. If you don’t have your friendly letters from wealthy members of the establishment, judges, members of parliament, and retired professional hockey players, you can look forward to a long stay in prison. But if you are a lawyer and you rob a disabled hockey player of $40,000, and numerous others, and if you have invested that money wisely by acquiring the clothes and cars and boats and homes that allow you to move within the ranks of the privileged and blessed… you’re not likely to serve any time at all. Well, maybe 6 months. In mean old Mimico Correctional Facility.

Eagleson moves in conservative circles and was a member of the provincial Tory caucus at one point. I wonder if he ever partied with Mike Harris, who grew almost hysterically angry at the teachers who defied the law and went on strike last year. At moments like this, it seems transparent to me that the law has nothing to do with justice or fairness or good order. The law is there to hold you down while the lawyers rob you blind.

 

Who wrote letters asking the courts to be lenient on Alan Eagleson?

  • Bobby Clarke
  • Paul Henderson
  • Douglas Fisher
  • John Turner
  • Darryl Sittler
  • Willard Estey
  • George Gross
  • Darcy McKeough