Over at the Cato website, Chris Edwards is making sublime mischief with just about everybody’s head by arguing, persuasively, that if you really are a small-government conservative then Canada is starting to look a lot better than the United States. Today’s post:
Over at the Cato website, Chris Edwards is making sublime mischief with just about everybody’s head by arguing, persuasively, that if you really are a small-government conservative then Canada is starting to look a lot better than the United States. Today’s post:
Thomas Jefferson famously opined that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground,” but Canada has bucked that gloomy forecast in recent years. As my co-authored op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday showed, Canada has:
- Cut government spending
- Cut government debt
- Balanced its budget consistently
- Pre-funded its version of Social Security to make it solvent
- Decentralized power within its federation of provinces
- Cut taxes, particularly corporate taxes
Meanwhile, the United States has headed in the opposite direction in each of these policy areas.
The piece from yesterday that he mentions has charts that will make your brain melt.
Before everybody engages their comment-board autopilot, I should point out that almost every Canadian trend Edwards applauds was well underway before the current Canadian federal government was in place. So if you’re a Liberal who thinks this is awful news, you’re going to have to have some words with Jean Chrétien. And vice versa, sort of.