Give us the freedom to buy and sell
David Frum
National Post
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
We think of Canada as a very free country, and so of course it is.
But Canada is also a country in which it is a very serious offence for a farmer to sell butter or eggs without permission or for a radio station to play the songs its listeners most want to hear. Canada is a country in which the governments decide which medical treatments will be provided, and where, and when -- and in which it is again a serious offence for a doctor to provide treatments other than those offered by the state.
It's illegal for a wheat farmer to sell his wheat to the highest bidder, for a landlord in Toronto and other major cities to charge the market price for his apartments, or (in many provinces) for anyone other than the government to sell liquor or wine, and illegal for American Airlines to fly passengers from Toronto to Vancouver.
It is illegal for a nonCanadian to open a bookstore in this country or buy ownership of a newspaper. It is almost impossible for a Canadian to watch Fox News or HBO or MTV without breaking the law. It is illegal for an 18-year-old actress to appear in a beer commercial, illegal for a cigarette company to put a picture of its product anywhere at all, illegal for a vineyard to put up a billboard with the truthful message: "Wine in moderation has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease: Enjoy a glass with dinner tonight."
Now many people will be tempted to shrug off these restrictions. Freedom to buy and sell is the ugly duckling of personal liberties --the liberty that even freedom's defenders find vaguely embarrassing.
No less a liberal than John Stuart Mill tried to snip the connections between this commercial freedom and its more glamorous siblings: freedom of speech and of the press, of religion and of association. And John Stuart Mill's work continues to this day.
And yet, in our day as in Mill's, commercial liberty is the first freedom. It is the base on which all other freedoms stand, and when it is restricted all our freedoms are threatened.
This is so for three reasons.
First, economic liberty is important in itself. Human beings are intellectual, spiritual and sexual beings -- and the freedom to fulfill those aspects of our nature is very important. But we are also working, building, providing beings -- and those aspects of our nature are entitled to the benefits of liberty as well. Canada does a good job of protecting the liberty people use from 10 to 11 on Sunday mornings -- and an excellent job of protecting the liberty they use on Saturday night. But the liberty they might use from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, gets scanted in Canada. And yet that liberty probably means more in the end to most people than the more exotic liberties the courts have read into the Charter of Rights. Canadians would never tolerate it if the government told them they could worship at only one government-controlled church or read only one government-approved newspaper. How is it different to tell them that they may get their medicine from only one government-run health care system?
Second, economic liberty is inextricably connected to all our other liberties. A government that has the right to override economic freedom is sooner or later going to be overriding freedom of religion, speech, and the press as well. That's what a printer named Scott Brockie found out when he refused a customer who wanted him to do some work for a homosexual nonprofit organization. Brockie, an evangelical Christian, believed that the work was immoral. The Ontario Human Rights Commission fined him $5,000 and ordered him to take a sensitivity-training course where he could unlearn his religious views. An Ontario court ruled in June that the OHRC had gone too far. But it did not reject the basic logic of the OHRC's decision: that if we accept government's power to deny economic liberties (like the right to refuse customers), sooner or later we're going to have to accept the government's power to deny religious and moral liberty as well.
Third, as Alexander Hamilton pointed out 200 years ago, "a power over a man's livelihood is a power over a man's mind." As government's role in the economy expands, so necessarily does its influence over society.
A very practical example:
For many years, the cities of Ontario strictly regulated residential rents. These controls, of course, swiftly produced extreme shortages of rental housing. To mitigate the shortage, the provincial government created and lavishly funded a program of "co-op housing." A church group, a labour union or some other association would borrow money at favourable rates from the government, buy land and build an apartment building. The apartments would then be allotted to members of the church or union.
Because of the government subsidy, these apartments would be an excellent deal -- and for that reason, they became an excellent tool of discipline and control for the people in charge of the co-op. A nurse who objected too loudly to the decisions of the executives of the nurses' union would forfeit her chances for a co-op apartment. On the other hand, a member of the city council who voted the way the nurses' union liked could be offered an apartment at knock-down prices.
By ending commercial freedom in housing, in other words, Ontario ended up institutionalizing new controls on personal behaviour -- and legitimizing a new form of political corruption.
Like all freedoms, economic freedom has to be subject to reasonable restraint. Freedom of speech is not destroyed by laws against libel and perjury and false advertising, and economic freedom will not be destroyed by sensible economic regulation. Freedom is never an all-or-nothing proposition.
But if economic freedom is to survive the necessary restrictions, Canadians will have to understand it better and defend it more vigorously. And one excellent way to start would be to enshrine the ugly duckling freedom in the Constitution. Two amendments would more than do the job. Amendment one:
"Everyone has the right to acquire property and no one shall be deprived of property except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice."
And amendment two:
"Everyone has the right to make and enforce contracts, and this right shall not be abridged except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice."
These amendments are not poetry. They are written in the same flat bureaucratic style as the rest of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to underscore that they merit the same respect and protection as the other rights therein contained.
Nor are they the whole of the answer. They will not open medicare or the satellite dish industry to competition -- although they probably would invalidate most rent-control laws. But a country that added property and contract to a constitution notoriously inhospitable to either would be sending an electric new signal to its legislatures and its courts: Economic rights are human rights -- so quit trampling on them.
Free wheat in the west
David Frum
National Post
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
We think of Canada as a very free country, and so of course it is.
But Canada is also a country in which it is a very serious offence for a farmer to sell butter or eggs without permission or for a radio station to play the songs its listeners most want to hear. Canada is a country in which the governments decide which medical treatments will be provided, and where, and when -- and in which it is again a serious offence for a doctor to provide treatments other than those offered by the state.
It's illegal for a wheat farmer to sell his wheat to the highest bidder, for a landlord in Toronto and other major cities to charge the market price for his apartments, or (in many provinces) for anyone other than the government to sell liquor or wine, and illegal for American Airlines to fly passengers from Toronto to Vancouver.
It is illegal for a nonCanadian to open a bookstore in this country or buy ownership of a newspaper. It is almost impossible for a Canadian to watch Fox News or HBO or MTV without breaking the law. It is illegal for an 18-year-old actress to appear in a beer commercial, illegal for a cigarette company to put a picture of its product anywhere at all, illegal for a vineyard to put up a billboard with the truthful message: "Wine in moderation has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease: Enjoy a glass with dinner tonight."
Now many people will be tempted to shrug off these restrictions. Freedom to buy and sell is the ugly duckling of personal liberties --the liberty that even freedom's defenders find vaguely embarrassing.
No less a liberal than John Stuart Mill tried to snip the connections between this commercial freedom and its more glamorous siblings: freedom of speech and of the press, of religion and of association. And John Stuart Mill's work continues to this day.
And yet, in our day as in Mill's, commercial liberty is the first freedom. It is the base on which all other freedoms stand, and when it is restricted all our freedoms are threatened.
This is so for three reasons.
First, economic liberty is important in itself. Human beings are intellectual, spiritual and sexual beings -- and the freedom to fulfill those aspects of our nature is very important. But we are also working, building, providing beings -- and those aspects of our nature are entitled to the benefits of liberty as well. Canada does a good job of protecting the liberty people use from 10 to 11 on Sunday mornings -- and an excellent job of protecting the liberty they use on Saturday night. But the liberty they might use from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, gets scanted in Canada. And yet that liberty probably means more in the end to most people than the more exotic liberties the courts have read into the Charter of Rights. Canadians would never tolerate it if the government told them they could worship at only one government-controlled church or read only one government-approved newspaper. How is it different to tell them that they may get their medicine from only one government-run health care system?
Second, economic liberty is inextricably connected to all our other liberties. A government that has the right to override economic freedom is sooner or later going to be overriding freedom of religion, speech, and the press as well. That's what a printer named Scott Brockie found out when he refused a customer who wanted him to do some work for a homosexual nonprofit organization. Brockie, an evangelical Christian, believed that the work was immoral. The Ontario Human Rights Commission fined him $5,000 and ordered him to take a sensitivity-training course where he could unlearn his religious views. An Ontario court ruled in June that the OHRC had gone too far. But it did not reject the basic logic of the OHRC's decision: that if we accept government's power to deny economic liberties (like the right to refuse customers), sooner or later we're going to have to accept the government's power to deny religious and moral liberty as well.
Third, as Alexander Hamilton pointed out 200 years ago, "a power over a man's livelihood is a power over a man's mind." As government's role in the economy expands, so necessarily does its influence over society.
A very practical example:
For many years, the cities of Ontario strictly regulated residential rents. These controls, of course, swiftly produced extreme shortages of rental housing. To mitigate the shortage, the provincial government created and lavishly funded a program of "co-op housing." A church group, a labour union or some other association would borrow money at favourable rates from the government, buy land and build an apartment building. The apartments would then be allotted to members of the church or union.
Because of the government subsidy, these apartments would be an excellent deal -- and for that reason, they became an excellent tool of discipline and control for the people in charge of the co-op. A nurse who objected too loudly to the decisions of the executives of the nurses' union would forfeit her chances for a co-op apartment. On the other hand, a member of the city council who voted the way the nurses' union liked could be offered an apartment at knock-down prices.
By ending commercial freedom in housing, in other words, Ontario ended up institutionalizing new controls on personal behaviour -- and legitimizing a new form of political corruption.
Like all freedoms, economic freedom has to be subject to reasonable restraint. Freedom of speech is not destroyed by laws against libel and perjury and false advertising, and economic freedom will not be destroyed by sensible economic regulation. Freedom is never an all-or-nothing proposition.
But if economic freedom is to survive the necessary restrictions, Canadians will have to understand it better and defend it more vigorously. And one excellent way to start would be to enshrine the ugly duckling freedom in the Constitution. Two amendments would more than do the job. Amendment one:
"Everyone has the right to acquire property and no one shall be deprived of property except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice."
And amendment two:
"Everyone has the right to make and enforce contracts, and this right shall not be abridged except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice."
These amendments are not poetry. They are written in the same flat bureaucratic style as the rest of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to underscore that they merit the same respect and protection as the other rights therein contained.
Nor are they the whole of the answer. They will not open medicare or the satellite dish industry to competition -- although they probably would invalidate most rent-control laws. But a country that added property and contract to a constitution notoriously inhospitable to either would be sending an electric new signal to its legislatures and its courts: Economic rights are human rights -- so quit trampling on them.
Free wheat in the west