Isn't It Ironic?

Of course I have to comment on the news that Patrick "Asshole" Ross has joined Ezra Levant among the ranks of the Shit-Heads With Big Mouths That Get Them Successfully Sued. I notice that I'm on a list at "Asshole's" stupid blog of bloggers who ban people who disagree with them. Typical lying from Ross. In the first hyperlink above you can read that the reason "Asshole" is banned here is because he continuously mischaracterized my statements about the relative complicity of the Liberals and the harpercons on Canadian complicity in torture in Afghanistan.

But on to more important things. It's ironic that the fine, lefty blogger Crystal Ocean titles a post "Sometimes they get it right" and then proceeds to get everything wrong.

She begins by saying that harpercon hack Jim Flaherty has finally gotten something right by refusing to extend stimulus spending for provincial projects that got started late.

• First of all, Flaherty is incapable of getting ANYTHING right. If you find yourself thinking that maybe he has, you're probably confused about something.
• The stimulus program was a dreadful, idiotic mess of a thing with all sorts of needless demands upon the provinces and municipalities that would have been incredibly damaging to Canada had our economy turned out to be as weak as the USA's, but we still benefited from the economic activity it produced (which had to be dragged out by the opposition parties in any case).
  

Next she mentions that polling firms correctly identify the majority of Canadians' opinion that there should have been no stimulus spending, no supports for General Motors, and no support for the banking industry.

This is all wrong. Obviously we should try to refrain from deficit spending when feasible, and one way to do that is to tax the enormous reservoirs of untapped wealth that have built up over the past decade or so and which is pretty much socially unproductive. But our economy was in danger, massive danger, and fiscal restraint in such circumstances has been clearly understood for half-a-century as being the path to economic suicide. What is going on here is that a steady barrage of anti-government propaganda has convinced Canadians that deficits are inherently evil and that cliches like "spending like drunken sailors" and "burdens on the backs of our grandchildren" are taken as unquestionable wisdom.

Case in point:

The majority of Canadians would have preferred that people who consumed and spent like there was no tomorrow, all the while aware of circumstances strongly suggesting they should make changes, not be rewarded for their gluttony and intentional denial through emergency government programs.

The majority of Canadians think that no person, bank, corporation or industry will correct his/her/its behaviour toward survival if Big Daddy is always there for his/her/its rescue.

A couple of responses:

• The reason that the Canadian economy is not gasping for breath like the US-American economy is is most likely due to the fact that Canadian progressives and unions were more successful at resisting the slashing of the working conditions and social programs which sustain modest incomes than was the US-American working class. And all this resistance to austerity has really done is to allow Canadian households to continue to run-up our own housing bubble (based on increasing indebtedness), and to stave off the reality that our economy has no real life anymore.
• And Canadian households have not been increasing their indebtedness out of any generalized craze to binge and party like its 2099. We've been doing so to MAINTAIN our living standards in the absence of rising wages and in the reality of increasing job insecurity. And if we hadn't have been doing that, the neoliberal "miracle" [mirage] would have evaporated years earlier and all of us, from me, to Patrick Ross, to Crystal Ocean, would be in far more dire straits (although Ross's current woes are totally of his own making!).

In short, we must renounce this fetish for austerity. Until we can come up with the no-growth economy, we should pay attention to the fable of the bees.