Assumption of risk and active safety

Five or six years ago, I broke my left fibula just above the ankle. I did so in a rather less than glamorous way: while dancing to The Prodigy’s Breathe at a campus bar, I slipped on a puddle of what I trust was either water or beer, and my left foot slid out from under my centre of gravity. When it exited the puddle, my left boot regained traction, propping itself upright; my body didn’t care that my ankle wanted to be vertical, and fell over regardless. Snap, crackle, &c. Later on, I discovered that (regardless of what Michael Moore would have you believe) it’s entirely possible to spend four hours waiting for an x-ray in a Canadian hospital (I think it was seven before they offered me painkillers), and that when you’ve just had a stainless steel plate screwed into your leg, morphine beats the hell out of Tylenol 3.

Nevertheless, every time I hear that song, I want to dance to it. For the most part, I just like electronic music with a dark theme and a strong beat, but the fact that I broke my leg to that particular song gives it a bit more zest. There’s something about partaking — with intelligence and due respect — in demonstrably risky activities that earns one a great deal more satisfaction than simply playing it safe all the time, and I think that has a lot to do with the notion of active safety.

Let’s review: by my definition, you’re being actively safe when you acknowledge, prepare for, recognize, and avoid whatever dangers you incur, whether you’re climbing in the Himalayas or motoring along the highway. You’re being passively safe when you try to mitigate the effects of those dangers, and having taken static precautions proceed to ignore them. A motorcyclist who reads traffic patterns and changes lanes a minute in advance to avoid a developing collision is actively safe; an SUV driver who trusts s/h/its vehicle to absorb an impact and makes no meaningful effort to avoid a collision is (dubiously and) passively safe. The basic tenet of active safety is that behaviour can mitigate risk, whereas the basic tenet of purely passive safety is that it cannot — that risk is entirely random and out of one’s control.

The two are not, of course, mutually exclusive: that motorcyclist might take pains to actively avoid collisions, but probably wears a helmet, leathers, gloves, and boots to minimize damage if active avoidance doesn’t work.

The difference here is psychological. Interesting individuals (I’d love to call these people “meat-eaters”, but that would probably cause even more undue offence to vegetarians) will accept the risk in a given activity, take appropriate (active and passive) measures to reduce that risk, and carry on. These people are aware that their lives involve risk, and are able — even eager — to function regardless: largely because they are aware that, through responsible and competent behaviour, they can mitigate that risk. These people don’t just look both ways before crossing the street: they check for cyclists between the curb and the right lane, and check in front of and behind them for vehicles turning onto the street they’re about to cross.

Incidentally, if you catch me looking over my shoulder for no apparent reason, it’s probably because I’ve been struck in the back by one sidewalk-bombing cyclist and have no desire to be struck again, and bloody few cyclists will let you know that they’re coming. That’s right: even walking on the sidewalk carries with it a certain amount of risk.

Grass-eaters, on the other hand, are terrified of risk, whether it’s real or merely perceived. (These people are desperately afraid of internet pædophiles, but don’t run anti-virus software: the risk of malware infection is apparently difficult to perceive.) When confronted with an obviously risky activity — motorcycling, say, or weight training — these people will do whatever they can to avoid it, generally taking refuge in broad statistics that don’t differentiate between risky and cautious participants (for example, statistics on motorcycle injuries that don’t account for sobriety, experience, speed, or protective gear). These people figure that crossing at stoplights makes them “safe”.

I don’t really have a problem with that: if you want to deny yourself some truly enjoyable experiences (hard-contact sparring with a good friend, for instance) because you’re afraid of getting hurt, that’s your problem and not mine. I have a feeling that most grass-eaters are desperately envious of those who knowingly engage in risky activities — particularly those who recognize and actively minimize the risks involved — and make themselves acutely unhappy by their risk aversion, but there’s not much I can do about that. (I’ve tried on a few occasions: every time, the grass-eater has resented me for purportedly exposing his or her “cowardice”. As better people than I have said: bravery is not being unafraid; bravery is being afraid, but doing the right thing regardless.)

I start to have a problem when these people vote — in particular, when they try to legislate away risk. That almost never works. Impose mandatory helmet laws, and the people who would otherwise go bare-headed strap on ridiculous lexan beanies — protection from tickets, but not from impact. Legislate away dangerous intoxicants, and the drug trade goes underground, bringing massive profits to organized crime but doing nothing to stop addiction and abuse. Other examples, as Jeff Cooper would say, will occur to you.

What these people cannot or will not recognize is that accepting risk makes you safer. When you are aware of danger, you can find ways to avoid it, or at least to mitigate it. You lift weights to build stronger tendons and more stable joints to avoid snapping a knee in a grappling match (or an ankle on a dance floor). You develop a keen eye for your surroundings to avoid walking into a mugger’s ambush on your way back home on a Sunday evening. When you lift, you keep a tight arch in your back and even pressure on your knees — and you stop when your form deteriorates. When you cross the street, you make eye contact with every stopped driver and check for vehicles turning across the sidewalk. When you buy groceries, you pick up a few extra cans of soup in case of emergency.

Grass-eaters stay home and stay miserable. They don’t volunteer at the homeless centre for fear of falling afoul of “the wrong sort of people”. They buy an Escalade instead of that sportbike they always wanted, and the planet suffers. They don’t exercise for fear of hurting their knees (or their backs), and their health deteriorates. They isolate themselves in gated communities because the city in which they purport to live is “too dangerous”. And when risk finds them regardless, they don’t know what to do about it… and they panic, and die, because they’ve never confronted risk before.

Put some music on, and get up and dance.

Congress mistakenly gave away the Fourth Amendment

So it turns out that when Congress checked off the FISA bill, they “accidentally” opened the door to “physical searches on American soil”:

• Congress Gave Bush More Spying Powers Than Even He Wanted (The Liberty Papers)

(For those of you who aren’t up on the American Constitution, its Fourth Amendment guards against “unreasonable search and seizure”.)

Of course, only whackos and extremists like Ron Paul and Mike Gravel give two tenths of a fuck about the Constitution these days anyway, so it’s not like this is going to make a difference in the long run.  Essential liberty, temporary safety, you know the drill.

Consequences — I mean tattoos — are bad, mmkay?

So it turns out that some people who get tattooed regret it later:

• Tattoo boom sometimes leaves the sting of regret (CBC.ca)

No shit, eh? Pardon me for being an asshole, but I’m finding it hard to drum up too much sympathy for these folks. It’s not as if people are getting suckered into ink shops with false promises and empty reassurance the way that some folks have apparently been drawn into high-interest mortgages.  We all know that tattoos are permanent: that’s their appeal!

This article bothers me, because (for one thing) it portrays tattoos in a uniformly bad light, and (for another) it insists that ink is bad because it carries long-term consequences. I’ll address these separately.

Let’s quote the article, to start with:

The American Association of Dermatologists estimates that 50 per cent of people who get a tattoo come to regret it

Okay, so half of the people who get tattooed end up regretting it. Half don’t. I despise these sorts of statistics, because they mask behaviours. Do you suppose that, for instance, some people get inked whilst drunk and impulsive? Maybe they’re heavily represented in that “come to regret it” category — you think? Would you suspect that people ordinarily inclined to take great risks and make impulsive choices are also inclined to get tattooed? Could be, yeah.

Should we write these people off? Of course not. But if we’re going to start talking about the sort of people who regret their tattoos, should we really pretend that present and former risk-takers and those who conscientiously decide to embed a permanent reminder of who they are beneath their skin are just as likely to regret it? Of course we fucking should not.

The real issue that I see in this article isn’t a fear of green monster tattoos — it’s a fear of long-term consequences. Yeah, wouldn’t it just suck if you could get suckered into making decisions and then not be able to blow them off afterward? What if the consequences of your actions ten years ago actually affected you now? That would be horrifying!

If we can trust someone to vote, we ought to be able to trust them to get a tattoo — the consequences of electing the wrong guy are far worse than “painful pulsed laser procedures”.

Thoughts on motivation

Or, why neither government nor the market will save the world

Statists of all the usual political affiliations tend to claim that government will save the world and make things right — perhaps only if their preferred party’s in power, but government nonetheless. They cite government’s raison d’être — serving and promoting the interests of the nation and its people, presumably — as justification, and believe that only the strong grip of Leviathan can achieve that for which otherwise petty and self-interested citizens would lack the will. It doesn’t matter whether these statists are leftists or rightists, they trust only the towering edifice of the State to provide health care, or security, or sound economic policy, or even good judgement. Everything’s always getting better, because the government’s out to make sure that your life’s as good as possible.

Individualists rightly call bullshit upon this absurd escapist fantasy, but many commit a similar fantasy when they place their trust in the free market. For government to “work”, they note, it must adhere to its ideals — they claim that the free market need only adhere to its mechanism: the profit motive. These folks claim that, left to its own devices, a free market will constantly reward firms that sell higher- and ever higher-quality products and services, climbing a quality gradient until some lucky (or, more likely, hard-working!) company achieves the local maximum — where it will profit until some plucky entrepreneur finds a better product (or service) in a different part of the search space, at which point the cycle begins anew. Everything’s always getting better, because better sells.

It doesn’t take a graduate degree in modern history to recognize that both sides are fucked up beyond all hope of redemption.

First, let’s dispense with this nonsensical notion that we can treat “governments” or “markets” (free or otherwise) as if they are themselves atomic agents. They aren’t: both governments and markets are composed of a great many individual human beings. (So are other groups. I’d guess that the second-greatest failing of humankind — beyond our apparent incompetence with basic statistics — is our tendency to treat large collections of individuals as if they were atomic, homogeneous entities.) A fictional government may be motivated by altruistic nationalism, and a fictional market may be motivated by the pursuit of excellence, but the individuals that make up real governments and markets are not.

People in government are motivated by power, and people in markets are motivated by profit.

Aha! exclaim the idealistic individualists. The ideal mechanics of the free market are mirrored by the motivations of its individual agents! Such elegance! Such efficiency! Surely we must win this debate! No, you still lose. Here’s the problem: maxima are rarely profitable. The best general-purpose desktop operating system around these days is probably Ubuntu Linux, but Microsoft’s Windows variants still have an overwhelmingly dominant market share. Ferrari undoubtedly builds its automobiles to a much higher standard of quality than Toyota, but Toyota is by far the stronger corporation. Wal-Mart, McDonalds, The Gap, and Starbucks have built corporate empires by providing inferior products for moderate prices.

Excellence costs too much to be profitable.

Aha! exclaim the statists. The government doesn’t CARE how much ANYTHING costs!

(deep sigh)

Okay, let’s start over. Because it acts in unison (in theory), government is theoretically capable of much greater feats than private industry. (Governments also tend to be capable of applying vastly superior force than private industry, Blackwater and friends notwithstanding. In the final analysis, we pay taxes because the government will send men with guns to kill us if we don’t.) In theory, all of this power can be used for good — and in theory, it is, because government is not tainted by any motive aside from serving its country.

Nice. All of that theory revolves around the notion that government is atomic, and has its own intrinsic motivation. It ain’t, and it don’t.

Governments are composed of individuals, as I’ve mentioned. Just as some individuals go into the business sector to get money, others go into the public sector. Why?

Power.

“Oh, no!” you idealistic statists exclaim. “(my favourite candidate) went into politics to make a difference, to do good!” Go home, kid, this conversation’s for grown-ups. Power is central to politics. Power can be applied to “do good” or to “make a difference”, but you have to have it before you can use it. (The same thing can be said for money, of course.)

Look at the Democrats in the US right now. In 2006, the Dems won control of the House of Representatives — and near-control of the Senate — on an anti-war, anti-Bush, pro-civil liberties, even vaguely fiscally-responsible platform. Ethics reform was high on their list of priorities: “separate the lobbyists from the lawmakers” was their cry. It sounded good, and it worked.

What have they done? Sweet fuck-all. Democrats still aren’t publicizing earmark requests. Democrats just ratified the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — which, despite the “foreign” in its name, is one of the most egregious offences against American civil liberties since Lincoln (or Dubya, for that matter) revoked habeas corpus. And Democrats have systematically dropped the ball when given the opportunity to get the fuck out of Iraq. Why would the Democrats systematically renege on their campaign promises?

To maintain power.

Earmarks shore up support among lobby groups and local interests. A hard line on national security courts the fed-up-Republican vote and assures the centrist statists that the Dems care about the War on Terror. Keeping impeachment off the table makes the Boomers more comfortable by avoiding Nixonian parallels. And, of course, passing war budgets makes it easier for the Democrats to claim that they “support our troops”. The hard line was a stratagem to get elected in 2006; the backpedaling is a stratagem to cement power in 2008.

Now, some of you Democrats (do any Democrats read my blog?) are bursting with indignation. You’re protesting that temporary sacrifices over the next year and a half are necessary to ensure a sound power base in 2009-2012. It’ll all be worth it if we can just take the White House and retain a majority on Capital Hill. It’s all about the big picture.

Don’t tell me about the big picture. Find the friends and family of a soldier killed in Iraq during the past three or four months — you know, one of the soldiers that Pelosi, Reid, and company had promised to bring home — and tell them about the big picture. If they let you live, let me know how you felt. Again, it’s all about individuals, not faceless, homogeneous groups (“the troops”, “the terrorists”, &c.).

Let’s review:

• The market doesn’t produce excellence because it rewards profit, and excellence is rarely profitable
• The government doesn’t produce excellence because it rewards power, and excellence rarely results in power

See the method? If you think that some system ought to be “good”, examine its motivations: you won’t often find “good” anywhere near them.

With this method, we can see that celebrity and “good-ness” don’t go together. Celebrity culture rewards public obtrusiveness, which has about as much in common with the greater good (or even with the lesser good) as Christian Science does with real science. This is easy to see when sanctimonious rock-stars fly around the world in private jets to attend Live Earth concerts. For this reason, I tend to ignore celebrities who think that their public obtrusiveness gives them the authority to preach at me. (Yes, even Al Gore… but the way that he and his have turned global warming from a debate on evidence into a debate on belief deserves its own rant.)

Similarly, organized religion rewards public displays of piety and group affiliation, regardless of what Martin Luther (or Kierkeaard) may have had in mind. (Religions that reward private displays of piety tend not to be particularly organized.) Many churches do good; many don’t. Science (eventually) rewards inquisitive skepticism; whether its discoveries are “good” is entirely beside the point.

Once we realize that vanishingly few people are motivated to genuinely do good, we are far less surprised (and far better able to cope) when the shit hits the fan.

Fines for t-shirts

So it turns out that wearing the wrong t-shirt can get you in serious trouble with Big Brother:

• Fine threat over t-shirt slogan (The Beeb)

Briefly:

A man spotted wearing a T-shirt bearing an “offensive” slogan in a city centre has been warned he risks an £80 fine if he is caught again.

[...]

The slogan on the garment read: “Don’t piss me off! I am running out of places to hide the bodies.”

This sort of thing is known in some circles as a “HYCKMA” shirt — to people with something to prove it screams “Hey, You!  Come Kick My Ass!”  I wouldn’t say that the gentleman involved is necessarily an idiot for wearing that shirt, but he does come across as something less than perfectly discreet.  Nonetheless, it’s entirely the man’s decision what shirts he wishes to wear.  Right?

Here’s the problem: the British state is trying to use any contact with police as an excuse to shove your DNA into a national database.  In other words: this guy, by virtue of wearing the wrong clothes, could find himself marked for life as a suspected criminal.

Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Reciprocity and subsidized health care

So it turns out that some employers are charging supposedly unhealthy employees for the higher cost of their (employer-provided) health insurance:

• Employers Charging Unhealthy Employees For Being Unhealthy (The Liberty Papers)

Shock, horror, &c:

For employees at Clarian[sic] Health, feeling the burn of trying to lose weight will take on new meaning.

In late June, the Indianapolis-based hospital system announced that starting in 2009, it will fine employees $10 per paycheck if their body mass index (BMI, a ratio of height to weight that measures body fat) is over 30. If their cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose levels are too high, they’ll be charged $5 for each standard they don’t meet. Ditto if they smoke: Starting next year, they’ll be charged another $5 in each check.

Now, this is what happens when you try to treat people in abstract groups rather than as individuals: you fuck things up.  For example, let’s take the body mass index, or BMI.  The article quoted by TLP claims that BMI “measures body fat”, and indeed that’s what it was designed to do.  The only problem is that BMI is calibrated against supposedly “typical” sedentary adults.  It tends to list more athletic adults as overweight, mistaking muscle mass for fat.  (For example, I’m roughly 5′7″ and 170lbs.  That translates to a BMI of 26.6, which is well into “overweight” according to the chart on Wikipedia.  However, I have a body fat percentage of about 15%.  You know that whole “diet and exercise” thing?  It works.)  Here, the fuckup is Clarian (yes, they really do spell it that way) assuming that all of their employees fit the mould for which the BMI is designed — sedentary adults.  Athletic adults get the shaft — even though they’re more likely to save Clarian money on health insurance than cost extra.

Ah, extra cost.  Now we get into arguments.

It is of course somewhat crass to try to put a price on life — or even on good health — but it’s unavoidable.  Doctors, nurses, EMTs, and other medical staff must be paid; drugs and other medical consumables must be bought; MRI scanners and other implements must be purchased and maintained; and so on.  We must spend money to make sick people healthy.  The question is, who gets the bill?

Really, the only interesting question is whether the patient s/h/itself gets the bill, or whether someone else gets charged.  From TLP:

Herein lies the problem. Most people don’t like being told what they must do with their bodies. They don’t like it especially when it’s their employer, a relationship that already has the potential to be adversarial. But employees are incorrect when they refer to this as “personal” space. Insure yourself, and it’s personal space. Expect someone else to pay your health insurance premiums, and it no longer affects just you. I can guarantee that most employees will not like this development, but as I’ve always said with government, money and control come hand in hand. You’re taking their money, and you’re surprised they want to keep their costs down by keeping you in a low-risk group?

Basically: if someone else is paying for your health care — whether it’s your employer, your government, or your fairy godmother — you have an obligation to keep yourself reasonably healthy.  If you’re paying your own way, the by all means shoot smack and eat Twinkies if that’s what makes you happy.  Otherwise, you owe a little consideration to whoever’s going to pay for your angioplasty, be it taxpayers or shareholders.  That’s reciprocity: you’re willing to cover for me if I get sick or injured, so I’m going to do my best to make sure you don’t regret that decision.  If I run a risky lifestyle, you’re perfectly justified in resenting my carelessness: after all, if I end up in the hospital, you’re footing the bill.

Of course, there’s more to it than that: like most economic issues, reciprocity eludes simple answers.  If I’m a taxpayer in your country and you provide me with quality health insurance, I spend more time working — and pay more taxes on my wages, and support the economy by buying shit (upon which I pay more taxes), and so on.  If I’m sufficiently productive whilst healthy, your health care might pay for itself regardless of whether I stay in shape.  Or suppose I’m running one of Clarian’s competitors, and offer health insurance with no BMI criteria.  My “generosity” might attract better prospective employees, giving me (in theory) a competitive advantage.  In both (hypothetical!) cases, the provider of health care wins regardless of whether the recipient feels obliged to keep in good health — but there’s still reciprocity.  In the first case, the healthy citizen pays higher taxes and pumps more money into the economy; in the second case, the superior employee does a better job for the company.

Now, the recipient may be ethically obliged to minimize s/h/its impact upon the benefactor, and the benefactor may be ethically obliged to provide for the recipient (as much as possible).  Both obligations may hold at once!  But claiming moral imperatives doesn’t help: we’re still limited by unexpected illnesses and injuries, finite resources, and the costs of health care.  Good health may be a fundamental human right, but if you cannot provide that, it doesn’t matter: you’re back to the logistical problem of allocating finite (and probably insufficient) resources.  A consciously reciprocal relationship between benefactors and recipients tries to ensure that the benefactors always have enough resources to pay for the recipients’ health care.  Whether it succeeds is another question entirely, but ignoring the issue — because you feel that health care is a moral imperative into which cost should not enter, or because you feel justified in doing whatever you want with your body — isn’t going to help.

(Oh yeah: want a quick and easy way to improve health care?  Give blood.)

Is Wal-Mart evil?

Apparently so, if you ask Education-Portal (yes, they really have that hyphen in their name):

• Wal-Mart Steals Billions From Public Schools (education-portal.com)

You know what? It’s true: Wal-Mart has a whole army of secret ninjas (they tried commandos, but ninjas were better) who break into public schools and steal things. That’s how Wal-Mart maintains its low prices, and why the toy departments at Wal-Mart are so goddamn lame: everything in the store has been stolen from some public school or other.

Actually, no. They don’t do that. But they do something almost as bad:

State and local governments have awarded $1 billion in subsidies to Wal-Mart-money that could have been used to fund our struggling public education system or other public services. (Source: NEA.org)

You know what? That sucks. As far as I’m concerned, corporate welfare — like most kinds of government interference in the private sector — is an abuse of taxpayers. I surely don’t like the idea that my taxes are — in part — giving Wal-Mart breaks on its rent (or whatever). I’d much rather have those taxes back. If Wal-Mart wants a piece of my money, they need to earn it… maybe by doing something so radical as offering a product I want at a price I’m willing to pay.

On the other hand, I’m not particularly sympathetic to the idea that this Wal-Mart corporate welfare could be better spent on public education “or other public services”. Remember, folks: when those cops in LA beat the shit out of Rodney King, they were providing a public service. When local law enforcement manufactures a drug buy on your driveway, then shoots you when you try to stop them, that’s a public service. Forgive me if I’m a bit cynical about the idea of paying taxes to provide public services.

(I can’t help pointing out that the government usually services the public the way a bull services a cow.)

But let’s stick with Ed-Portal’s argument that, because of Wal-Mart, not enough money’s going to public services, and public services (police-supplied shit-kickings aside) are good. What’s their next point?

Taxpayers are forced to contribute billions to health care and public assistance funds every year to cover Wal-Mart employees who are not eligible for the company’s insurance plan.

Say what? Now Wal-Mart’s evil because too much money’s going towards public services? I mean, the gist of the article is “corporate welfare is bad, because it sucks up money that should be going to social welfare”. Now the problem is that Wal-Mart employees depend upon social welfare programmes? Isn’t taxpayer-funded single-payer health care going to save the world? (NHS perhaps excepted.) I thought that taxpayers being forced to contribute billions to health care and public assistance was good. Now I’m all confused.

But what’s next? Surely an upstanding organization like Education-Portal (do you have any idea how hard it is for me to hyphenate that?) has good reason to believe that Wal-Mart masterminds a shadowy conspiracy against the shining bulwark of reason and humanity that is the public school system:

The Walton Family Foundation has donated more than $100 million to private organizations that buy political influence and undermine public education support.

Could we be any more vague? Maybe we could claim that someone allegedly associated with an organization whose name rhymes with Al-Art does things that some people consider unethical? Oh wait, here we go:

The Wal-Mart Corporation often brags about the philanthropy efforts of its founding family, the Waltons, but the bulk of the money donated to education goes to efforts that support vouchers, charter schools, and tuition tax credits. According to USA Today, Wal-Mart donated more than $250 million to such causes in six years time.

In fact, the National Education Association (NEA) charges that the late John Walton provided tens of millions of dollars towards the anti-public education movement and sat on the boards of several major pro-voucher organizations.

Wait, what? Private schools are part of the “anti-public education movement”? No they fucking aren’t: they’re part of the “give people options” movement. I don’t know if you folks have noticed, but most people are free to do what they please with their money. It’s called property rights, and it seems to beat the alternative.
Yes, I sure wish they didn’t take my taxes to do it, but it’s misleading to lay the blame entirely at Wal-Mart’s feet. Like I said, it’s not as if Wal-Mart’s actually literally stealing from public schools (or from state and municipal governments). Those governments are, in fact, voluntarily giving money to Wal-Mart. If you don’t like it, pretending that the elected officials in question aren’t responsible isn’t going to help matters: kick out Wal-Mart, and they’ll give your taxes to Target.

Of course, an institution that depends upon taxes for revenue and draws its authority from state and municipal governments has a certain amount of incentive to pretend that said governments can do no wrong — but you’d think that a fucking school system would have a moral imperative to tell the unvarnished, complete truth. (Okay, now you’re beginning to suspect that I’m one of those idealistic home-schooled types, but I’m not.) If the people you elected to collect and distribute your taxes are giving said taxes to corporations of which you disapprove, you need to start by taking those people, whom you elected, to task.

And perhaps we should stop pretending that, by asking for and accepting money from state and local governments, Wal-Mart is “stealing from public schools”.

Finance Minister Throws a Tantrum

From the CBC:

• Cut prices to reflect stronger Canadian dollar, Flaherty tells businesses (CBC.ca)

Essentially, Flaherty’s annoyed that, given the strength of the Canadian dollar against the American dollar, prices on imported items in Canada aren’t lower compared to the same prices in the States:

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty says he is frustrated that Canadians are paying too much for imported goods and has told business leaders the government expects them to pass along savings from the higher Canadian dollar.

If consumers don’t see benefits soon, he said, they should exert pressure by shopping around for the lowest prices.

What an offensive notion — that consumers need to be told by an elected official to shop around for lower prices.  That’s how the market works, is it not?  When businesses charge more than consumers are willing to pay, the consumers take their business elsewhere — supply, demand, and all that, yes?

Perhaps more offensive is the notion that (a) Canadian businesses should give even half a fuck about what the federal government tells them to and that (b) said federal intervention (that is, Flaherty calling out Canadian businesses) should come before consumers doing what they do best — drive the demand side of the equation.  Last I checked, this was not a command economy.

Would you believe that I quoted Marx in my high school yearbook?  My, how times have changed.  I guess illusions can only survive a finite number of beatings from reality’s cruel fists.

Let’s go back to that notion of shopping around for the lowest prices.  Flaherty says:

“So my point to the business leaders has been, ‘You should do what you can to accelerate the benefit to Canadian consumers,’ and I think, quite frankly, that Canadian consumers can help by shopping around.”

“Shopping around,” it seems, doesn’t actually mean what you think it means.  See, Flaherty wants you to be able to take advantage of that wonderfully high exchange rate with the American dollar, as long as it doesn’t involve actually taking direct advantage of that wonderfully high exchange rate with the American dollar:

One reason for his concern, said Flaherty, is that Canadians might start shopping in the United States, where savings can reach 40 per cent.

Gee whiz, numbnuts, isn’t that exactly what you had in mind?  Book-lovers from Vancouver refusing to pay forty dollars at Chapters and driving down to Seattle to buy the same book for thirty bucks at Barnes and Noble might actually, you know, make Chapters want to lower their prices.

Oh wait, I forgot: comparison shopping is Flaherty’s plan B.

Now, let’s look at this “strong loonie” business for a minute.  The CBC reports that:

[Deputy chief economist for the Bank of Montreal Douglas] Porter published a report in June showing that while the loonie has appreciated by 50 per cent over the past five years, import prices have not dropped accordingly.

Appreciated by 50%… against what?

I’d have thought this was common sense, but I am apparently dreadfully mistaken.  The value of goods, services, currencies, and such is inherently relative.  Despite what we’d all love to believe about the American dollar or an ounce of gold, there is no constant global benchmark against which we can measure the value of our stuff.

For example, I’m a bit of a coffee snob.  I prefer to buy locally-roasted beans on a roughly weekly basis, grind them just before I use them, and brew my coffee in a French press.  Starbucks, on the other hand, does some weird shit with their beans and brews them in an industrial drip machine: the end result is stronger than gas-station coffee, but no less mediocre.  Starbucks charges (with tax) two dollars for a medium coffee — on a normal morning, you’d have trouble getting me to pay ten cents for their product.

However: I’ve shortsightedly run myself out of those delightful locally-roasted beans.  Tomorrow morning, I’m almost certainly going to walk to Starbucks and give them two dollars for a medium dark roast.  Circumstances have changed: that coffee is now worth two dollars to me, given that I’ve run out of beans.

Similarly, the Canadian dollar is not strong in general terms, it is strong against particular currencies — in particular against the American dollar.

• Canadian dollar vis-a-vis selected currencies (Bank of Canada)

“Vis-a-vis.”  Isn’t that cute?

So the loonie has gone from about 0.63USD in 2002 to about 0.95USD in 2007.  That is, indeed, quite a jump.  It has done similar things against the Yen and the Yuan — and I guess we import a few things from China and Japan.  But lo!  The very same loonie has gone from about 1.22AUD (that’s Australian Dollar) to about 1.10AUD in the same time — it’s getting weaker.  Against the Euro and the Swedish Krona, it’s stayed about the same.  What do you want to bet that we’d be hearing a much different tune from Flaherty if we bought most of our imports from Australia?

But never mind such piddling capitalistic details.  The market had better do what the government says, dammit!

After all, look how well that’s working in Zimbabwe:

• Q&A: Zimbabwe’s Economy (The Beeb)
• Zimbabwe launches $200,000 note (The Beeb)

Short version: recent government-mandated price cuts, designed to overcome hyperinflation, have completely destroyed Zimbabwe’s retail economy.