Freedom Flyer 10

The April cover story, How to get money out of the government by Michael Clugston, is quite disturbing. Instead of advising Canadian Business readers to take advantage of government assistance, the magazine should condemn such programs on both moral and practical grounds.

These assistance programs are based on the fallacy that government dictocrats can spend other people's money more wisely and effectively than they can spend it themselves. In contrast, the legacy of government attempts to assist business is a long litany of failures such as Nova Scotia's Sydney Steel Corp. and Ontario's Minaki Lodge. Tlc effect of these schemes is merely to encourage and assist businessmen to make bad investments.

Politicians claim that these schemes can expand the economy and create jobs, but this is a myth. Governments must ultimately get every dollar they spend from the taxpayers, who consequently have less money available for their own spending. As a result, government spending does not create any additional jobs at all but merely displaces those jobs that the mxpayers would otherwise have supported directly.

The state cannot give even one dollar to anyone that it does not take from someone else. When the force of law is used to take money from people without their consent and give it to others, the law becomes an instrument of the very plunder it is supposed to prevent. Plunder is an immoral and criminal act, even when it is legal plunder.

The only real winners in this game are the cynical politicians who further their own ends with the taxpayers' money. Whether they take the form of a $200 million loan for an aging auto plant or a $10,000 small business start-up grant, government subsidies are morally wrong and economically unsound.