Midweek Musings

Cowards in a Sea of Troubles

A bad economy does not a beautiful society make

I thought that I would begin my ruminations on what the Beautiful Society might be with a discussion of spiritual values. But I got sidetracked by the insistent drumbeat that says our economies are about to collapse in which case, nothing beautiful will survive. Fear, hunger, and chaos are ugly, especially when they are self-created. As they certainly are.

Since I enjoy connecting people and eras that on the surface appear to have nothing in common, allow me to introduce Frank Stronach, Austrian immigrant Canadian entrepreneur billionaire to the Prince of Denmark. Both are asking that clichéd question: to be or not to be. Let’s take a closer look at these fine if rather different gentlemen. Here is Frank via Wikipedia.

Frank Stronach CM (born 6 September 1932) is an Austrian and Canadian billionaire businessman and politician. He is the founder of Magna International, an international automotive parts company based in Aurora, Ontario, Canada, Granite Real Estate, and the Stronach Group. With an estimated net worth of $CAD 3.06 billion (as of December 2017), Stronach was ranked by Canadian Business as the 31st richest Canadian.^[1]   

He is married, a grandfather and an award winning horse breeder. Considered far right in politics though these labels seem to have almost no relationship to reality any longer. Stronach is notable for running a business in which his employees are partners and share in the company profits. This sounds almost like a type of enlightened socialism common in Germany, doesn’t it:

When you break it down, the economy is driven by three forces: smart managers, hard-working employees and investors, all of whom work together to turn the wheels of commerce. All three of these forces, or stakeholders, have a right to a portion of the profits produced by the business. The plain fact is, no business can make a profit without employees.

And here is Hamlet: Prince of an imaginary Denmark who discovers that his uncle has murdered his father. that he has wed his mother in untimely haste and that his girlfriend is mad and oh yes, his father’s ghost haunts him and demands he do something about all of it. Oh dear. Hamlet then discovers that he has trouble doing what he knows he must do and so wastes a lot of energy in angst-filled ruminations. At the end, the stage is littered with corpses. Not a good ending, you might say. Shakespeare wrote the play in 1600 and it is set in the late medieval or Renaissance time periods. This was a pivotal moment in history during which many things were changing as the world shifted into the Early Modern era.In other words, a world of confusion much like our own.

The fact that both of men ask the rather lofty question about whether Being is worth the price of admission, is proof that human nature and its outcome, human society, hasn’t changed much since Shakespeare. We’re still grappling with the very serious business of creating a society worthy of being called Beautiful, encompassing tested values, inherited customs and just laws. The fictional Denmark and the actual West seem to have a lot in common except for one thing: we do not yet know the End.

But not to worry: this isn’t going to get too ‘heavy’ because I prefer to discuss serious matters in a light manner. The attack of seriousness we are currently suffering from should end soon because we’re all sick of it. Begone culture wars, Covid wars, cancel culture, Wokery Pokery and Putin lecturing us on his unique version of Russian history. My super sensitive trend tracker tells me that we’re ready to act instead of dithering like Hamlet, poised to discover the tiny optimist hidden in our souls and prepared to expend what is left of our waning energy on something Better. Let’s face it, the current regime of semi criminal governments in cahoots with big corporations, a deplorable thing called Crony Capitalism, has to go. As the Americans put it so beautifully, let’s throw the bums out!

First and foremost, we must stop the ugly collusion between Big Pharma and government that led to the production of vaccines that were expensive, unsafe, and mostly ineffective. Second, our current crop of politicos must go because they are wrecking our economies in a danse macabre. In Canada, it works this way: governments enact stupid laws that make our companies uncompetitive. When they lay off hundreds of people in order to remain in business, Trudeau goes on an anti-business rant and tells them that he is ‘seriously pissed off’ .

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-bell-media-cuts-pissed-1.7110512

Meanwhile our own Premier Eby calls the decision to stay competitive by closing branch plants as one of our largest news companies recently did, ‘crapification’. How serious is all this for us little people just trying to make it through the day? Pretty serious.

Stronach has it right when he says that a functioning economy is the bedrock upon which all other good and beautiful things rest. We are now living downstream from the utterly destructive Covid lockdowns, the carefully cultivated hysteria re Climate Change and its corollary, Net Zero policies, and a couple of nasty wars destabilising global shipping not to mention the multi-trillion dollar debt overhang—there is no nice way to put it; the economic structure on which we depend is crumbling and may in fact, collapse into the worst nightmarish recessions/depressions ever. That is one ugly society.

But of course, we’re not going to roll over and play dead before we actually are. The Cavalry is coming and just in the nick of time, too. And it’s not just Jordan Peterson.

Stronach, entrepreneur and worried citizen of this once great nation, is so concerned that he wrote a scorching article about our economic future for one of Canada’s first rank newspapers, The National Post.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/battening-the-hatches-for-the-coming-economic-storm

For many small business owners in Canada right now, we’re already in a period of deep economic turmoil. A report published last week by the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy showed that, in 2023, business bankruptcies were up 75 per cent over the previous year. It was the largest rise in nearly 40 years of tracking data. That’s a sad commentary on the business environment we’ve created in this country.

He believes that food shortages, job losses and general economic malaise is on our horizon. Not being a vacillating kind of guy, he sprang into action and created an organization focused on an Economic Charter of Rights, reversing the decline and fall of the small business in Canada.  According to Stronach, government has no business in business except to make sure that the rules are fair, few, and apply evenly to everyone. In short, none of this semi criminal Crony Capitalism. Back to basics.

Here is his plan of action:

One of the surest ways we can bolster our economy is through the implementation of an economic charter of rights that will get our government finances and economy back into smooth economic waters. I believe it would completely regenerate Canada by raising incomes and living standards and reining in the damage currently being done by high government spending and out-of-control public debt.

Small business owners, who are being battered right now from all directions, would especially benefit from the economic charter, since it would eliminate their business taxes and dramatically reduce the number of regulations currently strangling small businesses.

https://economiccharter.ca

Unlike Hamlet, Stronach isn’t dithering. He is calling Canadians to get on his bandwagon and force our idiot politicians to take note that their days are numbered. Or to put it into Peterson language: he is sending them home to ‘clean up their rooms’. Cleaning up the economic rooms might be a lot like cleaning out the Aegean stables. There is so much sh….t everywhere. It stinks to High Heaven. And I fear that we cannot wait for the good and great of this nation to do it for us. We have to do it ourselves, pace Stronach. Dithering about possible outcomes and moaning about the awful uncertainties that face us so we can’t move, can’t make decisions, won’t do. Hamlet knew this:

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

Maybe the question we need to ask is not whether we want to be, but whether we want to act when we are feeling confused and afraid. When we are feeling like cowards.

That is the question that all too often is answered by evasion, foot dragging and finger pointing. I think we are running out of time and space to delude ourselves that we are living in ‘normal’ times. We are not. Existential threats are here, and we must meet them or perish. At stake is whether we will live in the Ugly or the Beautiful Society. I know which one I prefer.

What that society will look like is the next question. And it’s the one I will address in next week’s musings. Until then, enjoy that small business on the corner; it might not last because government strangled it with well meaning bureaucrats bearing red tape.