peterr@utcsrgv.UUCP (Peter Rowley) (03/27/84)
>From: chrisr@hcr.UUCP (Chris Retterath) >Subject: Re: oil "nationalization", social policy and crime rate > > ... >- a couple of unemployed people who set up a company in Hamilton >to provide a "Pet Finding" service to find people's pets was >closed down by the police; seems pets are property and you have to >pay a big fee (which they couldn't afford) to be a private investigative >firm merely to provide the service of looking for property. >This is as inane as most licensing arrangements. Agreed, this is pretty silly. Give anyone power and they will mess up now and then. That's certainly true in all the businesses I've worked in. Give government more jurisdiction and they have more of a chance to mess up. Give them less and the private sector has a greater chance to mess up, purposefully for profit, or through incompetence (e.g. in releasing a dangerous product). Since "government" is more readily identifiable than "business", it seems to suffer more for its incompetencies. The answer is to establish a balance and I'm quite happy to see conservatives arguing for one side of the balance, the NDP on the other, and the Liberals taking the middle ground. >- proposed censorship of video cassettes mailed to your house. This is a tougher issue (w.r.t. pornography) and my feelings on it are very mixed. Much more can be said on this too. It may not be constitutional. You see that some governments are not all bad-- they realize the need to constrain their own power, so they create Charters of Rights. >- regarding oil prices: I don't really care who owns the oil companies, >do you (really, now)?? ... Darn right I do. Some tens of billions of dollars flow out of the country every year due to this foreign ownership. There are also sovereignty questions that arise from a vital resource being foreign controlled. Much more could be said about this. >... And if the prices are high, do you really believe >the national oil company (Petro-Can) will sell at a lower price than the >multi-nationals? Yep. Petro-Can has been responsible for many of the gas price wars. And their profits stay in the country, even if they do pass through federal coffers. >There are probably better examples, and many more, than I can list >now. I personally wonder at the trust and hope people place in government >policies, when the record has been so pathetic and the costs so high. >Our "enlightened" social policies have racked up a bill that we >will all be paying for the rest of our lives, and our children's after us. >TANSTAAFL! On the flip side, I wonder at the extent to which business and people blame the government for society's ills, when clearly the blame should be rather more distributed. It is undeniable, for example, that many N. American co.'s spent their 70's profits on takeovers, rather than on modernizing plants. It is too facile to lay all the blame on some government's doorstep. The deficit: I have no quarrel with a deficit to take a country through hard times. I agree that it should be eliminated when possible, and that it's possible that additional controls are needed to do this (to counter the natural public desire to get something for nothing). Enlightened policies (medicare is a prime example) make this a more humane country than the US. I find it incredible that the "most powerful country in the world" lets its citizens be wiped out by major illness. p. rowley, U. Toronto