Mr. Speaker, “thank you” is the key expression in my speech today. I was in a coffee shop recently. I bought a cup of a coffee, and I said “thank you” to the barista serving it, and she said “thank you” back, and not “you're welcome”. I thought that was particularly bizarre, because we are taught from childhood that the sequence is supposed to be “thank you; you're welcome” and not “thank you; thank you.”
I then realized that this double “thank you” happens all the time when I am buying or selling goods. I finally stumbled upon an explanation, from the economist Steven Horwitz, as to why this double “thank you” occurs. In a free market economy, whenever we buy or sell something, we have something that is worth more to us than what we had before. If I have an apple and want an orange, and someone has an orange and wants an apple, and we trade, we still have an apple and an orange between us, but we are both richer, because we both have something that is worth more to us than what we had before. How do we know that? It is because the exchange was voluntary. Neither of us was forced to trade the apple for the orange. We each did it by volition, because we wanted the product the other person had.
Every exchange in a free market economy, literally every single one, without exception, is based on voluntary exchange: labour for wages, investment for return, payment for product. In each case, the buyer and the seller offer what they have voluntarily. By contrast, every single transaction done by government is done by force, even legitimate, desirable transactions. We all agree that the government should fund an armed forces to keep us all safe. We all understand that if left to themselves, citizens might not voluntarily donate enough money to marshal such a force. Therefore, we believe that the government has a role in compelling taxation to fund what is, in effect, a public good we all require and from which we all benefit.
However, surely we should also agree that the use of that force should be limited to cases where it is absolutely unavoidable and necessary. We should not expand government into areas people can decide upon and act out on their own volition. The government continually gets involved in areas that are easily done through voluntary exchange. In fact, it replaces free choice with force very often.
The Liberal government has done that. It claims that the need for government intervention in the economy is to protect the weak from the strong. That is a strange way of looking at the world. Since when does expanding coercion help the weak? Relationships of force typically favour the strong.
Let me give members a counter-example. An 18-year-old walks into an Apple store to consider buying an iPad. Now, this young man is worth about $1,000. He earned it in his summer job mowing lawns. The company he is dealing with is worth $878 billion, almost a $1 trillion. He is negotiating with the most powerful company in the world, which is almost $1 trillion in size. How could that negotiation ever be fair? The answer is voluntary exchange. Apple cannot get his $1,000 for an iPad unless it proves to him that it is worth more than the money he has to part with to get it. By contrast, he cannot get the iPad unless he can convince Apple that the $1,000 is worth more to the company than the product it has to part with to get it. In other words, this system of voluntary exchange takes the most powerful company in the world and lowers its power to the level of an 18-year-old with barely enough money in his bank account to pay for a tablet.
Now imagine they enter a different universe: government. If Apple decided it wanted a subsidy from government, paid for by the taxes of that young man, I am afraid Apple would have a heck of a lot more power in making that decision come about. The government could use force to collect the money to subsidize the company. In that scenario, Apple could hire an army of lobbyists, make political donations, and influence public opinion, whereas that poor young guy would be too busy mowing lawns to have the same political power.
Therefore, when the government is in control of the economy, the bigger, the stronger, and the more powerful forces always get ahead. They can use money to acquire political power and political power to acquire yet more money. That is why countries with big governments typically have much more poverty and much bigger gaps between rich and poor.
The current government is expanding itself into areas not necessary for governments to be involved in. Let me give some examples.
The Prime Minister said he was going to determine how much Canadians would choose to invest in Bombardier. In the end, he did not give them any choice. He decided for them. He gave $400 million of taxpayers' money to this company that is able to invest a fortune in lobbying. That $400 million was, in part, used to boost the salaries of the billionaire executives by 50% while 14,000 workers were laid off.
There is the infrastructure bank, which will give $15 billion worth of loans and loan guarantees to wealthy investors who are contributing to infrastructure megaprojects. This will ensure that if the project succeeds, the private investor will make money, but if it fails, the taxpayer will take all the loss. Again, this is a financial arrangement that not one of those taxpayers would voluntarily enter into. After all, what do they get? They get a big pile of losses. However, because the powerful interests that lobbied the government at the Shangri-La Hotel, where a summit of private-equity investors was held, were able to convince the government to force taxpayers into that economic relationship, the government is again favouring those who have political power over everyone else.
There is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank we just learned about in this very bill. Five hundred million dollars, half a billion dollars of Canadian tax dollars, would be invested in this new foreign-run infrastructure bank to build infrastructure in faraway, overseas lands. Who in Canada would ever buy shares in a bank that will never pay any dividends and will only ever offer loans and loan guarantees to wealthy investors, who will take advantage of it in the event that their projects go under? However, if those projects make money, and if they profit, those borrowers, again wealthy investors and construction companies on other continents, will get all the profits. They get all the profits; taxpayers get all the loss. Again, no one would voluntarily enter into such a transaction.
There is something called superclusters. The government has a billion-dollar fund it is going to hand out to wealthy high-tech investors, who will then use those subsidies to pay themselves exorbitant salaries. They are not necessarily expected to earn any of the money themselves, because they will be able to get their revenues and their capital from taxpayers, who are not voluntary participants.
In Ontario, we had the Green Energy Act. People were forced to pay 90¢ for a kilowatt hour that was only worth 2.5¢. We know that no free person would decide to pay 90¢ for something that is worth 2.5¢. Who won? Of course, it was the wealthy investors who turned themselves into multi-millionaires with this enormous wealth transfer. Who lost? It was the poor, the working class, the people whose power bills doubled to fund this monstrous wealth transfer from the working class to the super-elite.
In all these cases, the government has used coercion and force to appropriate more and more of the economy and favour those who have the most political power. All of those people are rich. Therefore, when the government claims that it is expanding its power and control over the economy to help the less fortunate, I ask, at the very least, that this House look upon such claims with great skepticism.
Instead, this House should favour the free market, where people are judged on their merit, on their contributions, and on the voluntary exchange of goods and services that requires every single person who wants to get ahead to offer someone else something worth more to him or her than what it costs. That is the free market, that is true empathy, and that is the way we build a just and prosperous society.
