In his 1942 book, The Unknown County, the legendary Canadian journalist Bruce Hutchinson wrote of British Columbia and its penchant for progressivism as he then defined it: lots of interventionism in the context and spirit of that Franklin D. Roosevelt-era.
Hutchinson noted how successive provincial governments tended to spend “taxpayers’ money and contracted debt with unequalled lavishness.”
Hutchinson, who died in 1992 at the age of 91, was, at least in the 1940s, sympathetic to such expansive and expensive progressivism. He did not have then, as we do now, the cautionary experience of post-war governments that have expanded government so dramatically over the past 70 years with only the occasional nip-and-tuck to their appetites for expansion, taxes and debt.
What that has meant in practical terms is that the law of diminishing returns has applied to government for some time. It is one thing, for instance, to argue for a slightly higher tax burden in the context of the 1890s or 1920s, this to expand educational opportunities or build a road.
In the present, it is quite another matter to make that same ask of citizens in 2013 when the public sector has itself become so large. In 2011, according to Statistics Canada, 410,895 people work in the public sector British Columbia. That sector has thus developed its own set of collective interests and clout. (For the record and context here, only about 12% of those workers are connected with the federal public sector; the rest, or 88%, are employed by the province or municipalities or their respective agencies and Crowns or receive funds from the same.)
Such already-expansive government is one reason why the B.C. government’s recent tax hikes were a bad idea. Another is that Premier Christy Clark, by raising taxes, gave into the errant notion that bigger and more expensive government is better and more compassionate.
Hardly.
A sensible progressivism would focus on results, not increasing taxes, and not even necessarily on public or private delivery of this or that service or good. A sensible progressivism would instead focus on competition as the way in which to combat possible monopoly-type profits in the private sector and above-average compensation in the public sector.
An aversion to concentrated power in the private sector is why cartels are outlawed. In the public sector, it is why government unions should be subject to competition from the private and non-profit sector for anything delivered courtesy of tax dollars – at least if one is interested in results.
Absent that, citizens are, in the private sector, held hostage to above-market prices and below-market services; in the public sector, vis-à-vis government, the lack of competition means citizens are held hostage to public sector monopolies. Think of the BC Teachers Federation and its stranglehold on much of the education system, as one example.
A progressivism of the type that blindly believes the public sector is “good” because it isn’t focused on profit misses the salient point that goodness or greed exists in every human being and in every sector. Besides, most human beings also and necessarily seek their own interest. Such impulses are exacerbated the larger any group becomes. The key thing in politics, government and society is to ensure individual and group interests don’t overwhelm the greater public good and the rights of individuals.
That undesirable state of affairs can happen when government unions become too powerful or when some company gets unique favours from government, corporate welfare being a prime example of the latter problem.
In 1942, Hutchinson feared the wartime powers that accrued to what was then called the Dominion government (the federal government) would never be repatriated to provincial governments. That was a perhaps legitimate fear in the context of that era.
But another problem, one Hutchinson did not conceive of, and many still do not in 2013, is that collective interests writ large are no more benign or friendly to the general interest merely because they receive a paycheque from government.
Big groups, big collectives, in the private and public sector, are lumbering creatures unaware or uncaring of the damage they can do to individuals and smaller interests. About the only remedy to such a problem is to demand that they compete on merit to serve the rest of us.
One hopes a smart progressivism circa 2013 recognizes that need for competition. •
Mark Milke ([email protected]) is the editorial board chairman of C2C Journal. His column appears monthly in Business in Vancouver.
