Societies Sometimes Do Stupid Things. They Usually Pay Dearly For It.

The title of Jared Diamond's now classic book says it all, "Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." (If you haven't read it you can get it free here in pdf, epub or Kindle format). The operative word isn't "fail" or "succeed", it's "choose." Diamond illustrates how many societies that have collapsed chose their fate, sometimes quite knowingly.  The usual situation is one generation that exploits something out of sheer self-interest knowing full well that it could destroy the society for generations to come. Does that sound familiar?

An excellent example is our modern mantra of "everyday low taxes." A politician who tries to raise taxes is an enemy of the people. It's part of the neoliberal model that, for most, has become a race to the bottom and that leaves us fearful, confused and often angrily divided at the signs of chaos we recognize but do not quite understand.

A lot of the infrastructure we rely on, without which our prosperity would falter and collapse, was paid for by our fathers' and grandfathers' generations. That includes everything from the Trans-Canada Highway, especially the 401, to our electrical grid and the sewers and water mains so critical to our towns and cities. Someone had to pay for it, we didn't.

We haven't even paid to maintain all that stuff. It's crumbling before our eyes whether it's slabs of concrete falling from overpasses onto traffic below or rivers of precious freshwater from broken mains flowing like rivers down city streets. This stuff, the essential arteries of our society and our economy, is rotting out, breaking down, and the cost of fixing it swells with every passing day like the interest charges on a delinquent credit card.

We think that everyday low taxes is the hallmark of responsible government.  When that becomes unworkable we fall back on the standard lies of having to trim waste or more budget cutbacks, ever more defunding of government.  We won't raise revenue. We'll pretend we can magically find it just behind the curtain and then go out and borrow it and leave the bill to our kids. That's what passes today for responsible government. We used to chuckle that "military intelligence" was an oxymoron. Well now you can add "responsible government" to that list.

It's easy to blame the political caste but there can be no responsible government without a suitably responsible voting public and it's been a while since we had one of those. Our political caste is partially to blame for the decline in our civic virtue but the main culprit is probably the corporate or commercial sector with which our governments chose to share our national sovereignty, their blood sacrifice at the altar of neoliberalism. Civic responsibility might, indeed would, represent an obstacle to those intent on maximizing consumerism.

We don't believe in responsible government. You can't when you don't trust government to spend your tax dollars. Again a good measure of the blame rests with our political caste that is, if we're to be completely honest, completely untrustworthy.  Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney ushered in the neoliberal order but they also abdicated much of their responsibility owed their peoples to the corporate sector. Decisions they ought to have safeguarded in the public interest were instead yielded to the superior wisdom of the private sector, the market. Those decisions included critical long-term issues that were effectively handed to an entity that thinks in terms of the next fiscal quarter.

We were bequeathed, "gifted" if you like, a wonderful country with terrific infrastructure and, with it, we grew and prospered. Only, like things that come with no strings attached, we tend to take these gifts for granted. Our political leadership, by not taxing us to properly maintain, modernize, and replace our essential infrastructure, played a major part in conditioning us not to want to pay our share for these things. Now we have rotting water mains, rotting sewer systems, roads and bridges that are falling apart and it's all compounded by the arrival of early onset climate change impacts.

While Calgary was underwater in 2013, the World Council on Disaster Management held its annual conference in Toronto which itself had been inundated just a month or two before. In attendance was Dr. Saeed Mirza, professor emeritus in structural engineering at McGill. He estimated the cost of repairing, upgrading and replacing Canada's essential infrastructure to meet the demands of the changing climate during the 21st century could run upwards of a trillion dollars. He added that the costs to our society and to our economy of not rehabilitating our infrastructure would be much worse.  I guess unless you're willing to live in a cave.

This ongoing obsession with everyday low taxes is a genuinely stupid thing. It's reached the point where it is presenting a threat to the future of our society. We're that threat. We, the "not my problem, man" voting public and the political leadership we elect, we're that threat.