Brandon, Manitoba, 1922
Canadian Thanksgiving, 2019
Mark Wegierski dissects Canada’s prosperity
Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October. Canada is certainly a country which has been blessed with great material bounty. However, in these troubled times, some somber reflections seem appropriate. There has been a perceptible downward trend in the Canadian standard of living and quality of life, especially when compared to the United States. The weak Canadian dollar is a symbol of continuing Canadian decline. It is possible that the great bounty Canadians are accustomed to is increasingly fraying, and may even disappear in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
For seven years in a row in 1994-2000, Canada had been acclaimed as the number one country in the world in which to live, according to the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI). In the year 2001, it dropped to number three, still a very high ranking. Whether such superlative rankings are accurate, depends on one’s perspective.
It is clear that Canada cannot be defended as the best country in the world for the majority of its citizens, if defined according to strict financial accounting. For the middle and working classes, taxation is exceedingly high, and the benefits of the current welfare state are a mixed blessing. For the bureaucratic and corporate elites, on the other hand, Canada is indeed bountiful. It is also bountiful for groups qualifying for state and corporate sponsored equity initiatives, who would face the prospect of a drearier existence under a different arrangement. Continue reading
Democracy makes us Dumb
Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche
Democracy makes us Dumb
by Ilana Mercer
From the riffs of outrage coming from the Democrats and their demos over “our democracy” betrayed, infiltrated even destroyed—you’d never know that a rich vein of thinking in opposition to democracy runs through Western intellectual thought, and that those familiar with it would be tempted to say “good riddance.”
But voicing opposition to democracy is just not done in politically polite circles, conservative and liberal alike. For this reason, the Mises Institute’s Circle in Seattle, an annual gathering, represented a break from the pack. The Mises Institute is a think tank working to advance free-market economics from the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics. It is devoted to peace, prosperity, and private property, implicit in which is the demotion of raw democracy, the state, and its welfare-warfare machine.
This year, amid presentations that explained “Why American Democracy Fails,” it fell to me to speak to “How Democracy Made Us Dumb.” (Oh yes! Reality on the ground was not candy-coated.)
Some of the wide-ranging observations I made about the dumbing down inherent in democracy were drawn from the Founding Fathers and the ancients. A tenet of the American democracy is to deify youth and diminish adults. To counter that, let’s start with the ancients. The Athenian philosophers disdained democracy. Deeply so. They held that democracy “distrusts ability and has a reverence for numbers over knowledge.” (Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, New York, 1961, p.10.) Continue reading →
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