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Whenever Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government, or for that matter any government, tries to restrain public spending, the impacts of the cuts it makes are always personalized by those who want to maintain the status quo.
Thus, “children will starve” or “people will die” if our current unsustainable levels of spending, deficits and debt are not maintained, they claim.
But what is never personalized is the negative impact of debt on the public and on public services.
This point was made recently by Tony Chapman, a Newstalk1010 commentator and successful entrepreneur.
He asked why people aren’t demonstrating in the streets over the countless examples of government waste and inefficiency that contribute to unsustainable debt.
The great American conservative thinker Thomas Sowell also addresses this issue in his seminal book, The Vision of the Anointed, Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.
“When the government creates some new program, nothing is easier than to show whatever benefits that program produces,” Sowell writes. “Indeed, those who run the program will be more than cooperative in bringing those benefits to the attention of the media.”
But what these programs are never weighed against, Sowell warns, is the question of whether the taxpayers’ money it cost to finance them could have been better spent elsewhere, on different programs, or used to lower taxes, or to pay down debt.
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