Twenty years of addressing economic folly
Anniversaries are always a useful time to reflect on life, family, career and how the world has changed. Here’s a personal “time-marker”: This summer marks 20 years of column writing courtesy of editors who indulge me.
That anniversary will horrify some readers, please others and be irrelevant to most — columns, assuming they have a few good ideas, can matter. But any columnist who thinks they changed history with 640 words should check their hubris at the editor’s door. Such impact is possible but not routine.
Twenty years ago, my first column was for the Financial Post and addressed a matter to which I regularly return: misguided government policy. It was about the rubbery “pay equity” issue that was soon to cost taxpayers billions of dollars, not to combat discrimination but to socially engineer higher pay for vastly different government jobs.
I wrote on such topics then (and still do) because governments with the necessary power to tax, spend and legislate are akin to an awkward, lanky teenager whose physical growth outpaces their motor skills and intellectual development. With governments, they also have a large monthly allowance and money to burn (ours).
The reality is human beings are imperfect and we all possess only fragmentary knowledge. Columnists can thus serve a useful function if they remind politicians to focus on core, necessary functions that the private and non-profit sectors cannot do, and avoid marketplace interventions.
Politicians should avoid — here’s my equal opportunity critique of private and government rent-seekers — subsidizing one business to compete with another or providing overly generous “Freedom 55” pensions to civil servants.
Over the years, I’ve written plenty on both topics and intense responses are inevitable. On public sector pensions, one correspondent wrote to advise that “should you want to do something more useful, why not attack the flagrant misuse of funds” obvious at various levels of government?
Actually, overly generous government pensions unconnected to private sector realities fit that definition. But privileged interests hate being outed as such. Both government employees’ unions and private sector interests too often presume the public treasury is their own cash cornucopia. It’s why I expose both types as rentseekers.
An example of the private sector variety: In 1999, after a group of investors bought the Edmonton Oilers and then sought city concessions and taxpayer cash, my Edmonton Journal column opposed that demand. My motivation was (and is) simple: a torrent of peer-reviewed economic literature demonstrates the folly of such government involvement. Also, using politics to prop up a business or a government employees’ pension plan is fundamentally unfair to the average person.
The facts matter little to those whose special interest is outed. Thus, after my column, someone with the Oilers’ consortium left a hysterical, angry phone message.
Criticism is useful because readers, and even privileged interests, have unique views and you can learn from almost any of them, mindless trolls being the exception.
But compliments also arrive; sometimes from unexpected quarters. In 2002, then B.C. NDP leader Joy MacPhail quoted my take on some bit of poor policy under the then B.C. Liberal government. MacPhail told the B.C. legislature that “I hope Mark doesn’t get nervous”, noting that she was “increasingly convinced” that I was non-partisan.” (Memo to Joy: I wasn’t, I am, and thank you.)
I am sometimes asked how I decide on a column topic. My answer is borrowed from William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review. Buckley was asked how he could write three columns every week. From memory, I’ll paraphrase his words: “I get irritated at least that often.”
In my case, irritated, but also enthused, because writing in a public forum is always a privilege.
Criticism is useful because readers, even privileged interests, have unique views …