By Christopher Jordan-Stevens
Left of Centre-Left: A reply to Hugh Mackenzie’s “Listen Up! Conservatives do not need liberal-lite“
While reading—and enjoying—Hugh Mackenzie’s opinion piece I was frustrated, though not surprised, to find a misrepresentation of left-of-centre ideology. This was frustrating, in part, because of Mr. Mackenzie’s own insistence on correcting certain stereotypes that are often associated with conservatism. For him to turn around and obfuscate the opposing position is not only hypocritical, but also counterproductive. Then again, fighting a straw soldier will always be easier than fighting a real one.
For starters, I should say that I do agree with Mr. Mackenzie on one crucial point: being a committed conservative does not exclude one from having progressive social beliefs—at least not per se. In fact, I would wager that when it came to appointing Andrew Sheer as its leader, the conservative party misjudged the willingness of Canadians to embrace a socially conservative leader.
Rather, it’s Mr. Mackenzie’s political analysis that needs correction. He writes, “So, what is the real difference between a Liberal and a Conservative and why is it important? The main difference, as I have said many times, is that Conservatives believe that government should not be all things for all people. Limited government is better than excessive government.”
If Hugh Mackenzie’s political affiliation was ever a mystery to you, it shouldn’t be now. According to his analysis, being left of centre means two things.
First, government is all things for all people. Though I have always suspected a hidden Bolshevik contingent in the liberal party—I’m looking at you Trudeau senior!—I’ve never had real confirmation until now. And as someone who regularly votes left of Liberal—yes, I am a millennial—I am suddenly overcome by a crisis of conscience.
Perhaps the second attribute of leftist politics will relieve me of my worry. Nope. According to Mr. Mackenzie, Liberals believe not in regulation, but in something called “excessive” government, a phrase which almost certainly indicates a question begging premise. So not only is a Liberal government all things for all people, it is also “excessive”. I never knew that we Canadians owned the means of production in this country. I wish someone would’ve told me earlier. Workers of the World Unite!
I kid.
Modification one: as a leftist, I do not believe that the government is all things for all people. In a democracy, a government reflects the will of the public. The government, in turn, is responsible for making society just and fair. Policies are imposed on society by society in the interest of fairness and justice. And guess what? Making society just and fair is incredibly expensive. That’s why taxes exist. Conservatives and Liberals disagree about how to make society just and fair, not that it should be so. They, therefore, disagree about the allocation of resources, tax policies, and the degree of regulation in commerce.
Conservatives are often defined by the belief that less government is better for the economy and, thus, for society as a whole. Leftists like me, on the other hand, believe that private interests need to be kept in check; otherwise the policies underpinning our social order will reflect those private interests instead of the social good. Not surprisingly, I believe that class inequality needs to be addressed, not by stimulating the private sector with massive tax cuts, but by making sure that the rules of engagement are fair and lucrative for everyone. I also believe that a climate crisis can only be addressed by organizational bodies that are mandated to reflect and protect the social good.
Modification two: speaking as someone who is left of centre-left, I do not believe in excessive government. I believe that the government should be involved to the extent that it must in order to make society just and fair. I also believe that individual freedoms need to be restricted to that same extent. Instead of working maximizing individual freedoms, I believe that a government should focus on maximizing equality, justice, and fairness. But don’t worry, justice and fairness cannot exist without individual freedoms.
The thing is, many people think of a community as a collection of self-interested individuals and, in thinking it, they make it true. Call this the ‘atoms-in-the-void’ view. But the atoms-in-the-void view is a false way of looking at the world. Individuals, and so family units, are first and foremost products of their communities. Without communities, there is no language, no education, no law, no justice, no money, no science, no health care, no art, no ethics, no economy—nothing, in a word, that makes us human. And without humanity, there are no individual humans either. That means that we fundamentally belong to a larger family before we belong even to our own. That family is our community and each of its members bear responsibility to the other. That’s why I believe that we are morally obligated to take less of a slice when it means that others can have more—yes, even if we “earned” that slice.
So, Mr. Mackenzie, I respectfully reject your definitions. I do not believe that government is all things for all people. Nor do I believe in “excessive” government interference. But to the extent that promotes a just and fair society—and, admittedly, it often fails at that—I do believe that the government, i.e. the will of the public, should dictate the rules of the game. When it’s working well, it’s not an alien force infringing on your freedoms. If anything, a republic builds the stadium in which our freedom can be enacted.
I would also like to mention something about ‘debt’. After describing the political landscape, Mr. Mackenzie goes on to point out that the Canadian national debt has gone up significantly under the Liberal Government. Predictably, Mr. Mackenzie is critical of that kind of spending.
It’s much more complex, of course. In Canada, the net-debt/GDP ratio is 34 per cent, which is comparable, and usually lower than, all other G7 countries. When you calculate provincial and municipal debt that number can jump to 88 per cent, which is still business as usual for a developed country in a modern economy. The net-debt/GDP ratio of the USA for example is 106.7 per cent. And Japan—the third largest economy in the world—has a net-debt/GDP ratio of 237.5 per cent.[1] Could the government spend more efficiently? Of course! But they could also collect more efficiently.[2] And I suspect that sovereign debt is partially indicative of corporate power run amok; when corporations and banks can hold governments hostage—indeed, when they can consolidate power and expunge competition—they become a lot harder to appropriately regulate and tax.
But to be honest, in most contexts I find that the squabbling around debt and spending is vulgar. A government is not (as the above should make clear) a company or a household. (That’s part of the reason why some economists believe that GDP is not the be-all-end-all indicator of a country’s economic performance).[3] So, I’m not going to quarrel about debt when, for one, many First Nations communities don’t have access to clean drinking water. And, while we are at it, I should mention the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. More broadly, Canada is dealing with food insecurity, and opioid addiction, and lack of affordable housing, and income inequality and well… you know, our impending terrestrial doom. You get the point.
Or maybe you—the general ‘you’—don’t. So here it is:
I’m not going to parade around an absolute number as an indication of fiscal irresponsibility when human rights are being violated or left unaddressed.
See it’s simple: each person—i.e. every person, without qualification—deserves to be treated with dignity. So, if human beings require x in order to exist with dignity, then x is a human right. Here, x is a place holder for many essential ingredients, including liberty, freedom from slavery, education, adequate housing, healthcare, etc.
For anyone questioning the validity of human rights—or for those who see it as an extension of entitlement—I would urge you to consider the alternatives to this principle: A) only some deserve to be treated with dignity or B) no one deserves to be treated with dignity. If human history has taught us anything—likely, it hasn’t—it’s that any attempt to delineate the desiderata for being worthy of respect leads to horrors beyond comprehension. That rules out (A). And as for (B), I would go so far to wager that without the idea of basic human rights, in either its restricted or universal form, we are little more than a blistering swarm of meat-socks spinning in the void. (B) is not worth entertaining.
My point: some issues need to be taken care of whatever the cost. Our dignity depends on it. Maybe that priority is a ‘liberal’ or leftist one, I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter. Because from a moral standpoint, the question ‘who’s going to pay for it?’ should always be met with a resounding and proud ‘we are!’
Chris Jordan-Stevens is a researcher, educator, and writer. He holds a PhD in Philosophy. He grew up in Muskoka and has since returned home to Huntsville.
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[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/federal-government-debt-deficits-1.5303554
[2]https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/06/28/canadians-with-offshore-holdings-evade-up-to-3-billion-in-tax-per-year.html
[3]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/24/metrics-gdp-economic-performance-social-progress
Ray Vowels says
Well Mr. Stevens I as a not very well educated man find this all very confusing except for the last part about the debt this Govt. keeps adding too. Your right when you say all people deserve to have clean water and good housing but in my opinion even with the Liberal Govt taking on more and more debt it doesn’t seem to be doing a lot for the people of this country because they borrow and give it to some other county sure doesn’t make sense to me..
Rob Millman says
Well said, Chris: It goes without saying that you are wise beyond your years. One thing, however, which I did not understand, was your use of “republic” partway through your dissertation. Not only are we not a republic, but as a result of the impeachment trial, we find that the country to our south is a “constitutional monarchy”.
According to Article 2 of their constitution, the President/King may do anything he wishes if he considers it to be in the best interests of the country. He may, therefore, withhold military aid to obtain “dirt” on a political opponent; as long as he considers his continuing Presidency to be in the best interests of the country. And far more dangerous than your garden-variety Monarchy, is the fact that it exists in a vacuum; without the normal checks and balances.
The Republican-controlled Senate certainly has a great deal to answer for with this precedent. Mr. Bolton’s book is assured to be enormously revealing; but of course, why allow witnesses at a trial?
Susan Godfrey says
Thank you Chris! You’ve renewed my hope today. If you are able, please keep writing for Doppler as we need many different perspectives including, of course, Hugh MacKenzie’s.
John Rivière-Anderson says
Thank you, Chris, for your balanced perspective on the politics of the eco-social common good. I suggest that the GPI, Genuine Progress Indicator, is a much better standard for 21st century well-being than the current so-called “economic” GDP, which is based on a seriously worn-out paradigm of limitless resource extraction, carbon-loading fossil fuels, profit that ignores vitals termed “externalities” , and infinite growth on a finite planet.
The Genuine Progress Indicator serves as a very useful model for understanding how our measurement of progress can be improved.
Below are a list of problems with the GDP measure followed by the factors that can be included in a GPI measure of well-being.
What is wrong with the GDP?
Since its introduction during World War II as a measure of wartime production capacity, the Gross National Product (since changed to Gross Domestic Product — GDP) has become Western nations’ foremost indicator of economic progress. It is now widely used by policy makers, economists, international agencies and the media as the primary scorecard of a nation’s economic health and well- being.
Yet the GDP was never intended for this role. It is merely a gross tally of products and services bought and sold, with no distinctions between transactions that add to well-being, and those that diminish it. Instead of separating costs from benefits, and productive activities from destructive ones, the GDP assumes that every monetary transaction adds to well-being, by definition. It is as if a business tried to assess its financial condition by simply adding up all “business activity,” thereby lumping together income and expenses, assets and liabilities.
On top of this, the GDP ignores everything that happens outside the realm of monetized exchange, regardless of its importance to well-being. The crucial economic functions performed in the household and volunteer sectors go entirely ignored. The contributions of the natural habitat in providing the resources that sustain us go unreckoned as well. As a result, the GDP not only masks the breakdown of the social structure and natural habitat; worse, it actually portrays such breakdown as economic gain.
GDP treats crime, divorce and natural disasters as economic gain.
Since the GDP records every monetary transaction as positive, the costs of social decay and natural disasters are tallied as economic advance. Crime adds billions of dollars to the GDP due to the need for locks and other security measures, increased police protection, property damage, and medical costs. Divorce adds billions of dollars more through lawyer’s fees, the need to establish second households and so forth. Hurricane Andrew was a disaster for Southern Florida. But the GDP recorded it as a boon to the economy of well over $15 billion.
GDP ignores the non-market economy of household and community.
The crucial functions of childcare, elder care, other home-based tasks, and volunteer work in the community go completely unreckoned in the GDP because no money changes hands. As the non-market economy declines, and its functions shift to the monetized service and financial “products” sectors, the GDP portrays this process as economic advance. The GDP also adds the cost of prisons, social work, drug abuse and psychological counseling that arise from the neglect of the non-market realm.
GDP treats the depletion of natural capital as income.
The GDP violates basic accounting principles and common sense by treating the depletion of natural capital as income, rather than as the depreciation of an asset. For example, The Bush Administration made this point in the 1992 report of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality. “Accounting systems used to estimate GDP” the report said, “do not reflect depletion or degradation of the natural resources used to produce goods and services.” As a result, the more the nation depletes its natural resources, the more the GDP goes up.
GDP increases with polluting activities and then again with clean-ups.
Superfund clean-up of toxic sites is slated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next thirty years, which gets added to the GDP. Since the GDP first added the economic activity that generated that waste, it creates the illusion that pollution is a double benefit for the economy. This is how the Exxon Valdez oil spill led to an increase in the GDP.
GDP takes no account of income distribution.
By ignoring the distribution of income, the GDP hides the fact that a rising tide does not lift all boats. From 1973 to 1993 in the USA, for example, while GDP rose by over 50 percent, wages suffered a decline of almost 14 percent. Meanwhile, during the 1980s alone, the top 5 percent of households increased their real income by almost 20 percent. Yet the GDP presents this enormous gain at the top as a bounty to all.
GDP ignores the drawbacks of living on foreign assets.
In recent years, consumers and government alike have increased their spending by borrowing from abroad. This raises the GDP temporarily, but the need to repay this debt becomes a growing burden on the national economy. To the extent that citizens borrow for consumption rather than for capital investment, they are living beyond their means and incurring a debt that eventually must be repaid. This downside of borrowing from abroad, or that of “quantitative easing” by printing money, today is completely ignored in the GDP.
What is the Genuine Progress Indicator – GPI?
The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) is a measure of the economic well-being of the nation. It broadens the conventional accounting framework to include the economic contributions of the family and community realms, and of the natural habitat, along with conventionally measured economic production.
The GPI takes into account more than twenty aspects of our economic lives that the GDP ignores. It includes estimates of the economic contribution of numerous social and environmental factors which the GDP dismisses with an implicit and arbitrary value of zero. It also differentiates between economic transactions that add to well-being and those which diminish it. The GPI then integrates these factors into a composite measure so that the benefits of economic activity can be weighed against the costs.
The GPI is intended to provide citizens and policy-makers with a more accurate barometer of the overall health of the economy, and of how our national condition is changing over time.
While per capita GDP has more than doubled from 1950 to the 1990s, the GPI shows a very different picture. It increased during the 1950s and 1960s, but has declined by roughly 45% since 1970. Further, the rate of decline in per capita GPI has increased from an average of 1% in the 1970s to 2% in the 1980s to 6% in the 1990s. This wide and growing divergence between the GDP and GPI is a warning that the economy is stuck on a path that imposes large — and as yet unreckoned — costs onto the present and the future.
Specifically, the GPI reveals that much of what economists now consider economic growth, as measured by GDP, is really one of three things: 1) fixing blunders and social decay from the past; 2) borrowing resources from the future; or 3) shifting functions from the community and household realm to that of the monetized economy. The GPI strongly suggests that the costs of the nation’s current economic trajectory have begun to outweigh the benefits, leading to growth that is actually uneconomic.
If the mood of the public is any barometer at all, then it would seem that the GPI comes much closer than the GDP to the economy that North Americans actually experience in their daily lives. It begins to explain why people feel increasingly gloomy despite official claims of economic progress and growth.
The GPI starts with the same personal consumption data the GDP is based on, but then makes some crucial distinctions. It adjusts for certain factors (such as income distribution), adds certain others (such as the value of household work and volunteer work), and subtracts yet others (such as the costs of crime and pollution). Because the GDP and the GPI are both measured in monetary terms, they can be compared on the same scale.
I. Crime & family breakdown
Social breakdown imposes large economic costs on individuals and society, in the form of legal fees, medical expenses, damage to property, and the like. The GDP treats such expenses as additions to well-being. By contrast, the GPI subtracts the costs arising from crime and divorce.
II. Houehold & volunteer work
Much of the most important work in society is done in household and community settings: childcare, home repairs, volunteer work, and the like. These contributions are ignored in the GDP because no money changes hands. To correct this omission, the GPI includes, among other things, the value of household work figured at the approximate cost of hiring someone to do it.
III. Income distribution
A rising tide does not necessarily lift all boats — not if the gap between the very rich and everyone else increases. Both economic theory and common sense tell us that the poor benefit more from a given increase in their income than do the rich. Accordingly, the GPI rises when the poor receive a larger percentage of national income, and falls when their share decreases.
IV. Resource depletion
If today’s economic activity depletes the physical resource base available for tomorrow’s, then it is not really creating well-being; rather, it is just borrowing it from future generations. The GDP counts such borrowing as current income. The GPI, by contrast, counts the depletion or degradation of wetlands, farmland, and non-renewable minerals (including, oil) as a current cost.
V. Pollution
The GDP often counts pollution as a double gain; once when it’s created, and then again when it is cleaned up. By contrast, the GPI subtracts the costs of air and water pollution as measured by actual damage to human health and the environment.
VI. Long-term environmental damage
Climate change and the management of nuclear wastes are two long-term costs arising from the use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. These costs do not show up in ordinary economic accounts. The same was true of the depletion of stratospheric ozone arising from the use of chlorofluorocarbons. For this reason, the GPI treats as costs the consumption of certain forms of energy and of ozone-depleting chemicals.
VII. Changes in leisure time
As a nation increases in wealth, people should have increasing latitude to choose between more work and more free time for family or other activities. In recent years, however, the opposite has occurred. The GDP ignores this loss of free time, but the GPI treats leisure as most North Americans do — as something of value. When leisure time increases, the GPI goes up; when North Americans have less of it, the GPI goes down.
VIII. Defensive expenditures
The GDP counts as additions to well-being the money people spend just to prevent erosion in their quality of life or to compensate for misfortunes of various kinds. Examples are the medical and repair bills from automobile accidents, commuting costs, and household expenditures on pollution control devices such as water filters. The GPI counts such “defensive” expenditures as most citizens do: as costs rather than as benefits.
IX. Life span of consumer durables & public infrastructure
The GDP confuses the value provided by major consumer purchases e.g., home appliances) with the amounts citizens spend to buy them. This hides the loss in well- being that results when products are made to wear out quickly. To overcome this, the GPI treats the money spent on capital items as a cost, and the value of the service they provide year after year as a benefit. This applies both to private capital items and to public infrastructure, such as highways.
X. Dependence on foreign assets
If a nation allows its capital stock to decline, or if it finances its consumption out of borrowed capital, it is living beyond its means. The GPI counts net additions to the capital stock as contributions to well-being, and treats money borrowed from abroad as reductions. If the borrowed money is used for investment, the negative effects are canceled out. But if the borrowed money is used to finance consumption, the GPI declines.
Source: Redefining Progress
One Kearny Street, Fourth Floor
San Francisco, CA 94108
Let’s opt for a collaborative politics of genuine progress and well-being.
BJ BOLTAUZER says
A first-class article, excellent commentary on Mr. McKenzie’s somewhat right off centre right views what should a socially conscious government of modern society be concerned with.
Individual freedom in the extreme unbridled capitalist countries means freedom to exploit and taking advantage of everything under the sun, from fellow humans to nature; not for the benefit of the whole society but for the benefit of the top 10% only.
Chris Jordan-Stevens says
Thanks for reading Ray and I appreciate/share your concerns. I do agree that spending does not always equal efficiency. My concern in the article was in the order of priority in the conversation — I should’ve been more clear about that. I would add however, that the richest countries in the world are also those who hold large burdens of debt. This suggests, as economists Thomas Picketty argues, that the question of debt has more to do with the distribution of wealth between private and public sectors than it does with absolute wealth (Piketty, Thomas. Capital In the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge Massachusetts :The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. p 700) .
Chris Jordan-Stevens says
John,
I appreciate you taking the time to read the article and I am grateful for this wealth of information. I agree that defining progress is a difficult and complex project. I wonder how much the pre-occupation over GDP has resulted from the politicization of what, for economists, is a tool for analysis — a limited tool, to be sure, but one that might be useful for certain kinds of information gathering. Clearly a metric that excludes factors like wealth/capital distribution and environmental health is an inappropriate index for progress.
Chris Jordan-Stevens says
Thanks for reading Rob. I appreciate your comment. Admittedly, my comment about ‘The Republic’ could’ve been clearer. I meant ‘The Republic’ in the abstract form. To the extent we are governed by elected officials, we are a republic in that sense.
Sandy McLennan says
Good points about dignity. I like a question such as: how do we (the Big We) want to live? as a starting point for moral service, which politicians (and in future, hopefully beyond the Party kind) respond to. And maybe we should all be required to supply our own turn at such service.
Great to have prompts from young folks. That is essential.
Write on, and let us all think on.