The government is killing our downtown

The Government Is Killing Our Downtown

Ladies and Gentlemen thank you for gathering with me here today. Look around you. We stand in a beautiful oasis in a sea of poverty. You cannot deny the beauty of this pristine palace but nor can you deny the masses of homeless that line our streets. All too often, when the problem of homelesseness arises we attack either the homeless themselves, sometimes indeed literally with tragic human consequences or by attacking those who would try to help the poor in the only honest way : a job. There is a sickness in our city and it is not those who are aflicted by it's blight that are the cause. It is not the fault of the "callous" rich but rather the overzealous idioicy of do-gooders that have given us this problem. The solution is not more idiocy.

London is one of the wealthiest cities in Canada; a nation which is one of the wealthiest in the world. Why then does so much of our wealth get concentrated in the hands of a few? I have the answer for you. The solution is not to steal from the people and give to the government as politicians will preach to you. I depart from my colleagues on this ground; taxes are not a neccessary evil they are simply an evil. Look at those who line the sidewalks for a change! Confront the results of government regulations and incessant taxation. I have a solution for this problem but allow me to outline another blight that has struck our city and I believe you will see they are not disparate.

Politicians will tell you government programs are the way to generate wealth. They can take your money, give it to their special interests friends, and everyone will be happy. I have an alternate view. Businesses give people jobs. When people have a job, they have money and security. The more businesses the more trade the more competitive the market the quicker people can go from poor to well off or rich. Less businesses mean less trade and less competitiveness; you get monopolies or oligopolies where there is not much choice and everyone has crappy jobs. The answer is not to blame the corporations : they are only the structure reptilian enough to survive in the nightmarish world of government managed economies. Indeed it is economic darwinism in an extraordinary fashion. More and more of our wealth belongs to these foreign owned corporations every year. Our politicians are too busy spending their lavish salaries to care.

The answer is NOT to outlaw corporations. That would be terrible, killing the last leg of support our nation stands on. The answer is NOT to inflict more useless government regulations on these institutions. There is a great spirit of entrepeneurial spirit amongst Canadians of every stripe and we should stop impeding that. One of the easiest ways to do this is to cut property taxes. Get rid of some ridiculous government programs, stop sending aid to governments that oppress their people overseas (they tell you they send foreign aid but they never tell you they send it not to the people of foreign nations but to the governments that rule those people, often in an extremely brutal fashion) and get rid of the property taxes. That second blight I'm talking about is the "For Lease" signs you see all around our downtown core. Why? Because it costs too much to have a lease on the property. The lease is expensive because of ridiculous property taxes politicians impose upon you to get re-elected.

The only thing that can help the homeless is jobs. Now, you have to understand, when you're homeless (and I'm talking as someone who, while I never quite reached that stage, came close once or twice so I have an idea here from experience of what I'm talking about) you can't always get a job. You might not have clean clothes, can't shower, or even if you can you might not be able to work certain hours or for a long time. That's ok! When you're homeless you'd work for $2 if you could. And people would pay people $2 to do certain things, like paint a sign or something simple, if they could. But it's illegal. We consider that inhumane, to pay a homeless man $2 to paint a sign. What am I talking about? Minimum wage and ridiculous regulations on employment. Let's let people pay people whatever they want. How can we say "it is illegal to help this man who is lieing here on the street?". But even leaving minimum wage aside, simply by getting the property tax off the backs of our entreprenuers, people who are taking it upon themselves to enter the business world, there will be so many more jobs, that demand will go up, more people will get hired, and there will be less unemployed. And it is the unemployed that turn into the homeless. We must stop blaming them and start looking at the harmful effects of ridiculous government regulations.

The sad part is, most of the property taxes are probably due to ridiculous feel good projects like the John Labatt Center. I remember feeling outraged when I heard about it so many years... I actually went on Speakers Corner to argue against it at the time. I didn't really know anything about politics back then but I could just sense it was wrong.

Government projects like that are always an excuse for politcians to give money to their rich crony friends. It is time to speak out against this. It is time to get outraged and say "stop taxing us so you can your buddies can get rich". Indeed, we need to move towards a much less centralized system where decisions about where tax dollars should go are addressed by the people of the city rather than beaurocrats in Ottawa but ultimately the goal is simply to get government off the back of the people. The disastrous effects of this mixed market, socialist one day capitalist the next style economy can be seen on the people. I think, if I can paraphrase :

I have seen evil people do evil things,
And good people to do good things
But it takes politics for good people to do evil things

It is time for us to understand the Mike Harris was right. He unabashedly fought the insane growth of the government and we must understand that unless the Canadian people demand change, our welfare state will continue to grow. Already we loom, an abberation on the global scene one of the largest welfare states in the world. Through this system of government contracts and no bid spending or the fraud of 'procurement' the government makes select people rich at the expense of the people. Those hurt are not the rich, who's interests are always protected by the politcians who curry their favour but rather those on the very margin of society. In the name of giving them a hand up, we kick them in the face.

Some economists have argued the business cycle, which is taught in our schools and preached by our politicians as dogma is infact not true. There is one group of people who do not feel the effects of economic downturns, a truly elite ruling class. Politicians and the special interests they serve are unhurt by the vicious assault that is taxation; instead they consistantly divert public funds (the very source of the economic downturn for the those who do not attempt to take advantage of the government spending) to their own interests.

The only solution is to limit government. Cut their funding off at every opportunity, that is through tax cuts. While I do not advocate deficit spending (it is morally irresponsible to push our indulgences onto our children, and besides it is our children who will provide for us when we're old so there's the selfish incentive and we shouldn't be ashamed of that! It is not through the "goodwill" of the baker that we get our bread. Time and time again has proven that governments will spend not only whatever they have but also whatever they can get ahold of through borrowing so the only answer is to cut taxes at every opportunity and demand fiscal responsibility. This is the only realistic approach to reeling in the tax and spend instincts amongst the left leaning politcians in Canada.