Mr. Speaker, one of the false allegations levelled at parties on the left is that they are against people getting rich. In fact, they are not against people getting rich. They work very hard to make themselves very rich. We have a millionaire Prime Minister and a gazillionaire finance minister.
The Liberals are not against rich people. They just have a different idea of how people get rich. They believe that people should get rich off the government through corporate subsidies, through complicated loan-guaranteed schemes, through inflated electrical contracts for so-called green wind and solar energy, etc. These policies have made a small number of people spectacularly rich, but when one is getting rich off the government, one is getting rich by making everyone else poorer.
In a free market economy, one can get ahead only by selling people things they actually want to buy with their own money. They are, by definition, better off, or they would not be spending their own money to buy these things. When a teenage high school student who makes his money mowing lawns goes to an Apple store to buy an iPad, he may have a net worth of $1,000. He is negotiating with a nearly trillion-dollar enterprise, yet in that one moment that high school student has just as much power as the biggest company the world has ever known, because it cannot get his money unless it gives him something that is worth more to him than what he has to part with to get it. That is the genius of the free market. Everybody must necessarily win in every single transaction for it to occur.
If the government wants to democratize our economy, it will reinstate the free market system and put an end to the excessive controls of the government and the elites that the Liberals have instilled since they took office.