Tag Archives: Monopoly

News

Canada’s state run broadcaster fights back against probe of finances

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From the Toronto Sun. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

The CBC — the mega-corporation that is demanding yet another $1.1-billion bailout from taxpayers this year, just like it demanded a $1.1-billion bailout from us last year — is panicking.

For weeks it’s been sweating about a parliamentary investigation into its bad behaviour, including its violation of the Access to Information law. That’s an important law to allow taxpayers to scrutinize how government agencies spend our money.

The non-partisan information commissioner has given the CBC a grade of “F” for its secrecy — but it still violates her order for it to disclose the truth. It’s spending millions in legal expenses to hide how it’s spending billions in other expenses.

This bad behaviour was coming to a head last week when Parliament was going to turn over some rocks and see what was going to go scurrying.

And so it panicked.

On the eve of the Parliamentary inquiry, it used part of its $1.1 billion — money that is supposed to go to journalism — to launch a crazy, personal attack on the president of Quebecor and QMI Agency, Pierre Karl Peladeau, one of Canada’s most successful private-sector media entrepreneurs.

Unlike the CBC, Peladeau built his company honestly and with his own efforts. He took a newspaper company started by his father, Pierre Peladeau, and turned it into Quebec’s most successful media company, Quebecor — and then joined with English-Canada’s biggest newspaper company, Sun Media Corp. And then he built the Sun News Network.

All without a billion-dollar-a-year bailout.

And so last week, the night before Peladeau’s testimony to Parliament, the CBC freaked out.

In an unprecedented move, it issued what can only be called an attack ad against Peladeau. It wasn’t a news story. It was a false and defamatory attack on our company, as vengeance for our questions about how the CBC spends taxpayer money.

If any other government department had done something like this, whoever responsible would be fired immediately. It wasn’t just unprofessional. It wasn’t just outside of its mandate of what it is given its government money for. It was an attempt to destroy a private-sector competitor.

Why is this interesting? Because it shows what happens when the government oversteps its bounds and starts to compete with the private sector in areas that are totally unrelated to its enumerated powers and specific responsibilities. Not only will you find corruption in nationalized corporations, but massive waste as well. Private sector companies face competitive pressures that government monopolies do not face. That forces them to root out corruption and waste, because there is always the firm next door looking to serve the customer better – with higher quality and at a lower cost.

We need to be very careful about handing money to people in government who simply don’t care as much about the needs of their customers. Do you think that the CBC could ever favor tax cuts or spending cuts or even more choices for taxpayers? Of course not. They have to tell people whatever causes them to vote for bigger government, because that’s where their money comes from.

Commentary

Which political party should Christians vote for?

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Mary sent me this disturbing story from Citizen Link, which shows how secular leftist special interests want to restrict religious liberty.

Excerpt:

A “who’s who” of Leftist, humanist, abortion and gay organizations submitted a stern letter to President Obama on Tuesday, demanding that he rescind part of the 2002 Executive Order protecting religious hiring rights.

More specifically, the coalition wants Obama to prohibit contractors who do business with the government from using religious-based hiring criteria.

The letter, signed by 52 organizations, comes days before the 70thanniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order that barred discrimination by federal contractors. His directive was then codified into law in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employers from hiring and firing based on religious beliefs. In 1972, it was slightly amended to exempt churches and religious associations.

The timing of the letter also coincides with the federal government’s stepped-up efforts to codify into law special protections for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgender people.

Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for CitizenLink, noted the biased news coverage of the weighty issue. “The liberal news media has given Americans the impression that faith-based charitable groups are pushing to rescind these protections,” Hausknecht said. “Not true. A closer look at the list of cosigners reveals the true motive: to silence people of faith and push them out of the public square.”

Cosigners include: American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for the Separation of Church and State, Catholics for Choice, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, National Education Association, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and the Transgender Law Center.

When you elect a Democrat, you’re electing someone who wants to use the power of the state to marginalize and censor Christianity. In fact, if you read classical works on economics like “The Road to Serfdom”, you’ll learn that socialism necessarily leads to the destruction of all other liberties, including religious liberty. That is because the bigger that a secular government becomes, the less they are willing to allow individuals to make their own decisions based on their own personal morality and religion. Obama is one of the worst offenders in this regard – we have never had a more pro-abortion and pro-same-sex marriage President. We have never had a President who was more allied with pro-abortion lobbyists and pro-gay-rights lobbyists. And he is also in favor of paying welfare to women who freely choose to raise children without fathers. This man is anti-life, anti-family and anti-marriage. No Christian could vote for such a man.

Should Christians vote for Democrats who want to “tax the rich”?

Let’s make it clear, because a lot of Christians don’t understand this. In order for you to exercise your freedom as a Christian, you need to have money. With money, you can afford charity, private Christian schools, Bibles, apologetics books, marriages, children, homeschooling, and so forth. How do you get that money? You work for it. And how do you make it grow? You invest it.

Now let’s see how the secular left and their agenda of redistribution at wealth hurts that plan.

  1. They get you fired, like Frank Turek was fired by Cisco Systems, because you are a Christian
  2. They tax your income and give it to anti-Christian groups, like Planned Parenthood
  3. They tax your investments to fund public schools which undermine Christian truth claims (evolution) and Christian morality (sex education)
  4. They confiscate money from your employer and redistribute it to government workers and unions, which makes it harder for you to stay employed
  5. They restrict your choices for educating your children, by sending more money to public schools and legislating against private schools and homeschooling
  6. They take over health care, forcing you to subsidize secular leftist causes like abortions, sex changes, in vitro fertilization, etc.
  7. They take over health care, forcing Christian doctors and nurses to perform procedures that violate their consciences
  8. They halt military spending and pro-democracy initiatives, and coddle captured terrorists, encouraging terrorist attacks, like 9/11
  9. They spend enormous amounts of money, increasing government dependence and discouraging families from having children

And so forth. Basically, the more you vote for free market conservatism, the more small businesses there will be. The more small businesses there are, the better your chance of finding an employer who will not discriminate against your Christian faith. (Contrary to popular beliefs, conservatives DO NOT like big corporations – because they are almost ALWAYS liberal, seeking to use the government to block younger companies from challenging them with better quality and lower prices). The more employers there are to choose from, the more likely you can find a higher salary. The higher your salary, the more you have to spend on charity, as well as your family and your community. The more money you make in investments, the more you can buy apologetics books and sponsor apologetics web sites and conferences and debates. The more the government stays out of the free market, the more choice you have to buy goods and services that are in line with your Christian values – e.g. – SCHOOL CHOICE. The more the government stays out of health care, the less you will pay for health care since you don’t need coverage for abortions, sex changes, in vitro fertilization, etc. The less government regulates business, the less opportunity there will be for these secular leftist special interest groups to lobby government to discriminate against Christians.

News

Poll: Disengagement grows the longer workers stay in government jobs

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Map of Canada
Map of Canada

From the Ottawa Citizen. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Recent post-secondary graduates recruited by the federal public service appear to become more disengaged and less ambitious the longer they’re in their jobs.

That’s a key conclusion of a new study that provides an intriguing window into perceptions of government employment by new public service hires and potential recruits. The study, recently posted to a government website, was done for the Public Service Commission by EKOS Research Associates.

It involved online surveys with two groups of people hired through the government’s Post-Secondary Recruitment Program (PSR), as well as recent hires recruited through other methods and “potential recruits” — mostly university graduates under age 35.

As part of the study, EKOS re-interviewed 219 PSR recruits who were surveyed in an earlier phase of the study in 2009. It found some “troubling shifts” in their attitudes.

The importance these recruits attach to “key intrinsic job aspects” has declined over the past year, the study reports. The weight they give to the opportunity to be creative declined by nine percentage points from 2009 to 2010, it says, while the importance they attached to the prestige associated with their jobs fell by 10 points.

There were also smaller declines in the importance ascribed to meaningful work and opportunities for career advancement, while “more extrinsic issues” — such as attractive compensation and a good work-life balance — assumed greater significance.

“These findings suggest that PSR recruits become less ambitious/intrinsically motivated as they spend more time in the federal public service,” the study concludes.

Can people who are disengaged serve the public as well as private sector workers whose compensation and continued employment depends on their being engaged in their work? This is why we need to privatize as much as possible.