In light of the ongoing protests against tuition hikes in Quebec at the moment, and with constant discussion about what is a fair burden to pay for post-secondary education and who ought to pay it, I figured I’d chime in with my thoughts on the matter. Truth be told, I was thinking about writing about this topic before the protests broke out anyway, but since I expect this will end up being kind of lengthy I’d been putting it off in favour of watching playoff hockey. But I figure now is as good a time as any to finally organise my thoughts and get them written down.
I’m going to organise this post all academic-like by first describing what the current problem is, then discussing some of the potential solutions being discussed that I think are insufficient, before finally moving into a discussion of my proposed solution. I’m even going to make this more academic-like by having a clear thesis statement near the beginning of my screed. Ready for it? Here it is: the most simple, just, and effective way to pay for post-secondary education is to do it entirely through taxation.
Yesterday the Canadian Centre For Policy Alternatives, a progressive think-tank, released a report entitled The Big Banks’ Big Secret about financing extended to Canada’s banks between 2008 and 2010. The CCPA report attempts to document the financial support that Canada’s banks received from both the Canadian and American governments in response to the economic crisis that began in 2008. This runs contrary to the popular media line that Canada’s banks did not need to be bailed out, a line that has been used by Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party while successfully seeking re-election. Unsurprisingly, shortly after the CCPA report was released it began to come under attack. Criticisms included the argument that the banks hadn’t been bailed out at all and that the bailout that hadn’t occurred wasn’t secret anyway. Whether the banks were actually bailed out is the simpler of the two criticisms to answer, so I’ll start there.
You’re familiar with the recent firestorm surrounding Rush Limbaugh, right? The one about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, who spoke to Democratic Representatives about birth control and was subsequently the target of an ongoing attack by Limbaugh? And how advertisers then began pulling financial support for his radio show in response to criticism of Limbaugh’s remarks? OK. Discussion in the mainstream media about what Limbaugh said has generally centred around his use of the word “slut”, but I think that really misses the point. The reason I’m bringing this up now, nearly a month after the story broke, is because a number of incidents have occurred lately that indicate to me that the misunderstanding about what is actually at issue here is causing people to make all sorts of problematic comparisons with situations that are not materially similar.
Writing at The Daily Beast, Kirstin Powers argued that “liberals” are just as guilty of slut-shaming as Limbaugh is. She provides many examples, some of which are pretty on-point, like Chris Matthews’ attacks on Hilary Clinton, and some of which are entirely unrelated to gender, like the non-gendered insults lobbed at Michelle Bachmann’s intellgence. Next came some comments made by Louis C.K. about Sarah Palin, and I saw a couple of people question why C.K.’s remarks didn’t receive the kind of attention that Limbaugh’s did, generally with the assertion that he was getting a free pass because he’s liked by lefties. Some of his remarks were pretty reprehensible, like saying that Sarah Palin had a “retard making cunt”, while some of them were bizarre drunken nonsense; what does “I want to rub my father’s cock all over Sarah Palin’s fat tits” even mean? At any rate, I think he should have come under more serious scrutiny for his remarks, but I also don’t think they’re comparable to Limbaugh’s, for reasons I’ll get to in a minute. Finally, today the New York Times published a piece by Bill Maher in which he says that “If you see or hear something you don’t like in the media, just go on with your life.” The article compares a light satirical remark on the state of race in U.S. politics by Robert De Niro with Rush Limbaugh’s vicious verbal tirades against Sandra Fluke.
So why aren’t these situations comparable to Limbaugh’s assault on Sandra Fluke? Because the problem isn’t that Limbaugh called her a slut. Part of the problem was the sustained, long-term nature of what Limbaugh said. But it was also about the worldview he espoused; take a look at some of his remarks in more detail:
So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I’ll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.
This quote gets at the heart of what’s really worth being outraged about here. Slut-shaming is a real and serious problem, but Limbaugh is going far beyond slut-shaming. He’s articulating a worldview in which women are objects who ought to do what men want and not trouble them otherwise. He equates “taxpayer” with “male” when he says “if we are going to pay for your contraceptives”, suggesting that women are not really citizens and ought not be able to set public policy. He indicates that women’s bodies are merely tools for the enjoyment of men, saying “we want something for it”. He engages in galling hypocrisy, saying that women need to avoid sexual activity while simultaneously telling them to provide sexual pleasure to him. He also implies that having children is strictly an issue for women; he repeatedly attacks women for using birth control, but never once attacks men for agreeing to have sex with them and never once mentions that, if birth control isn’t used and a child is born, the male is equally responsible for the upbringing of that child. This isn’t about the word “slut”, this is about Limbaugh telling women to shut up, know their role, and do what men tell them to do. Men, on the other hand, can and should engage in sex in any way they want, including in ways that seek to exploit “slutty” women.
One other significant difference between Limbaugh’s remarks and the others mentioned above is that Limbaugh is not merely engaged in making insulting remarks; he is engaged in an ongoing effort to deny to women what to most of them (in my experience, anyway) is a fairly basic right – control over their bodies in regard to procreation. This is why Maher’s suggestion that women who “don’t like” what Limbaugh said should “just go on with [their] life” is asinine – unlike De Niro’s joke, which simply disappears and has no further effect on the world if you ignore it, ignoring Limbaugh’s attack on reproductive rights (and all the similar attacks by others) could easily result in very serious real world consequences for millions of women. Ignoring his remarks won’t let people get on with their lives in peace and quiet, it will let people like Limbaugh erode important rights that women have gained as a result of decades of difficult, but ultimately successful political campaigning.
So let’s stop pretending that what Limbaugh said is comparable to what’s been said by people like Chris Matthews or Robert De Niro or Louis C.K. It’s not, because it’s about a sustained, broadly misogynstic attack on women – particularly reproductive rights – and the only way to make it go away is by fighting to prevent it from happenning again.
I’ve seen the term “evidence based policy(-making)” used quite a bit frequently, and it seems to have come up at this weekend’s Liberal Party of Canada convention as well. I think that most people, generally, would agree that it’s a good idea to consider evidence when making public policy decisions. This leads to many disagreements over what exactly counts as evidence, which evidence is more reliable, etc., but I do think at least in theory most people are in support of this idea. But I do think that there is an important distinction to be made here – evidence should inform our policy decisions but it should not make our policy decisions. The reason for this is simple – the process of governing is not scientific, and there isn’t a “correct” answer to many potential issues that the government addresses. There are other concerns that I think are perfectly legitimate to use as decision-making criteria in a democracy, such as what the role of the government ought to be in the first place or whether a given outcome actually ought to be our goal.
For example, I think the argument that “we should bring back capital punishment because it will lower crime rates” is one that the evidence doesn’t bear out. So if your stated goal is reducing crime, then capital punishment is not a position that the evidence says you should support, and evidence-based decision making should win out. If, however, you make the argument that “it is irrelevant whether or not capital punishment is an effective deterrent because certain classes of criminals ought to be executed in accordance with the principles of justice” then the evidence doesn’t matter. The person in the second instance isn’t “anti-evidence” as people will often assert; rather the evidence related to deterrence isn’t a determining factor because deterrence was never their goal to begin with.
I think this distinction is important to make, because people on all sides of the political spectrum are accused of ignoring evidence when it suits their ideology. This may be true in some instances, but I think it is much more likely to be the case that these are actually arguments at cross-purposes – the people arguing that their “evidence” should be the deciding factor are often arguing from a completely different premise than the people who they disagree with. I think it’s fair to criticise people when their stated premise is contradicted by sound evidence. I don’t, on the other hand, think it’s fair to criticise people as hypocritical because there are instances in which they believe other factors are more significant than the evidence. Public policy is not a science, and it can not be reduced to a series of statistics; the kind of society we’re trying to build is an equally important a factor. Someone is not a hypocrite because their goals differ from yours.
I just posted this over at Pension Plan Puppets, and I think it encapsulates my feelings on language politics in Canada (and elsewhere) pretty well, so I thought I’d share it here as well for those of you who aren’t rabid Leafs fans, and also so that I have it written somewhere a bit more accessible for posterity:
There are very real issues facing Francophones in Canada, but my position on language politics is simple – language can’t be controlled by the government and it shouldn’t try. I have no problem with official bilingualism in terms of government services and departments, but a government can not control how language is used in the populace at large; L’Académie française has been fighting that failing battle in a predominantly French country for centuries. It doesn’t work, and it won’t. Language can, does, and will evolve, and it’s not the government’s job to get involved in trying to “fix” that.
I used to be the kind of guy who could have been a character in High Fidelity. When I was in college I would listen to almost every album that came out, and at the end of the year I’d put out a list of the best 25, 30, even 50 albums I had heard that year. And I’d have probably heard three times that many. Well, I don’t really listen to that much music any more, though I often wish I did. So instead, I’m going to list the 5 best albums I heard in 2011. It’s not nearly as exhaustive a list, but maybe 5 seems like more of a “best” than 50 does anyway. So here we go:
One thing I’ve noticed some people who support market liberalisation and smaller government say is that certain kinds of government spending are illegitimate. That is to say that they disagree with the government spending money in a certain way not just because they think it is bad policy, but because they think the government is violating some sort of fundamental principle by doing so. As one specific example, I have seen someone argue that the per-vote political party subsidy that exists in Canadian federal politics is undemocratic because in their words, it forces people to fund political parties they disagree with. More recently, I witnessed someone arguing against a grant given out by the U.S. government to an organisation attempting to preserve the history of video games on the grounds that one could not justify using the force of law in order to extract money from individuals in order to fund cultural preservation.
I’m not going to argue whether either of those programs is particularly good policy (though for the record, I more or less support the per-vote subsidy and am ambivalent on cultural preservation), but I think the logic behind the two views I described above is a misunderstanding of how government operates. Further, I think that when you follow that kind of thinking to its logical conclusion, you find that it doesn’t present a model of government that could actually function in the real world.
Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty today told Provincial Finance Ministers that the current 6% increase in health care funding per year from the federal government would end in 2016-2017, at which point the increases will become tied to nominal GPD, but will not be less than 3% (source).
I don’t see anything particularly unreasonable about the move. Health care costs can’t continue out-pacing inflation forever. If the transfers grow at a rate that is greater than the rate at which government revenues grow, that means the federal government has less money to spend elsewhere. Basically, it means money for health care funding has to be produced through funding cuts to other programs (or through tax increases). At some point, health care costs do have to be reined in.
There is one problem that I have with this, which is that the Conservatives, like the Liberals and the NDP, said during the last federal election that they planned on keeping the 6% annual increase in place. Now, I think governments generally should be allowed to change their plan as the circumstances change, but given how close this change has come to the election, and given that the country’s financial situation hasn’t changed notably since then, it seems as though what the Conservatives were saying a few months ago was pretty disingenuous.
Perhaps more importantly, throughout the most recent session of Parliament, the Conservatives repeatedly referred to the “mandate” they received to implement their election platform, and have repeatedly used this “mandate” as an excuse to try to rush bills through the House and eliminate opportunities for debate and oversight. Now, if what the government is doing is implementing the platform that they were given a mandate to implement, shouldn’t they also have kept the 6% health transfer increases in place? If they’re not sticking tightly to the platform, then the idea of implementing a mandate (and thus the Conservatives’ excuse for stifling Parliamentary oversight) disappears. They can’t have it both ways; either they’re implementing their mandate or they’re not.
As most people have probably heard by now, Christopher Hitchens passed away yesterday after a battle with esophogeal cancer. In the wake of his death, my Twitter feed (among many other places) sprung to life with glowing praise for Hitchens. He’s been described as a great wit, a powerful thinker, one of the best writers of the English language, and many other things. He’s been praised for his directness and refusal to stand on ceremony. Well then, in the spirit of that remark let me say that Christopher Hitchens was an asshole.
Why was Hitchens an asshole? There’s his support for the vile and disastrous Iraq war. There’s his disgusting sexism; he believed that evolution had made women unfunny and that sexual harassment was largely invented (and as an aside, it’s bizarre that Hitchens could say the same kinds of things that Margaret Wente gets excorciated for, and yet Hitchens is considered a great writer and Wente is considered a windbag). There’s his pompous bigotry toward religious people, with examples being too numerous for it to be worth naming individual instances.
Yesterday a blog post claiming to be about a study that showed that UBC undergrads think atheists are less trustworthy than rapists was spread widely around Twitter, and had many people up in arms about discriminatory views about atheists. The post in question claims that “even in Vancouver, and at UBC, the graph shows that respondents are more prejudiced against atheists than against rapists.” This seemed to me like it was, at the very least, a very unusual result, and so I decided to look into the study in question and see what exactly it said.
Firstly, the study in question doesn’t actually make the claim that students “are more prejudiced against atheists than against rapists.” What it actually says is “people did not significantly
differentiate atheists from rapists.” But even that claim I thought was very unusual, and I think that if we look at the construction of the study in question in a bit more detail, we’ll see that there are some significant methodological problems that make even the paper’s milder claim questionable.
