The Incomparable Mark Steyn

In the most recent issue of Imprimis (brought to you by the folks at Hillsdale College), Mark Steyn unravels the idea that somehow Canada should be the model for the United States, particularly from an economic point of view. Admittedly, this appears to be an idea that has traction only among a small slice of Americans, but given that this group tends to include academics, politicians and those organizations that control what news you see on television and read in the newspaper, it's probably a good idea to debunk such nonsense wherever one finds it.

Steyn on entitlements:

And if you have government health care, you not only annex a huge chunk of the economy, you also destroy a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of the junkie and the pusher, and you make it very difficult ever to change back.

And fantastically:

Quebec has a civil service that employs the same number of people as California's, even though California has a population nearly five times the size.

Steyn then explores one of my major concerns, corporate welfare:

Among the farmers piling up the dollar bills under the mattress are Ted Turner, Sam Donaldson, the oil company Chevron, and that dirt-poor, hardscrabble sharecropper David Rockefeller. But what you may not know is that also among the number is Edgar Bronfman, Sr., who isn't just any old billionaire, he's the patriarch of Montreal's wealthiest family, owner of Seagram's Whiskey, which subsequently bought Universal Pictures. So the U.S. taxpayer, in his boundless generosity, is subsidizing the small family farms of Canadian billionaires.

Steyn closes, not surprisingly, with some demographic statistics that make the future in Canada look bleaker than Edmonton in January. It's not long and Steyn is terrific, so enjoy the whole thing.