German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not returning U.S. President Barack Obama’s calls. I’m being theatrical. Obama is demanding that Germany pull its weight in the global-recovery effort by aping the US: spending more and producing less.

Here are the providential orders verbatim, via the WSJ:

“U.S. President Barack Obama [has called] for Germans to aid the global recovery by spending more and relying less on exports.”It is not only Germany that Obama wishes to knee-cap economically, but Canada, Japan and China too. Given that big-spending Americans exist at the sufferance of the frugal, productive Chinese, I don’t quite know how this would work.

“Ms. Merkel countered that Germany’s growth and employment are rising—and therefore the world’s fourth-largest economy has no reason to rethink its dependence on its powerhouse industrial sector and large trade surplus.”

Know-it-all New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is a guide to those who’re perplexed about the US government’s monetary policy, Obama’s and Bush’s. Are you in doubt as to how “progressive” the US really is? Listen to Krugman berate “the monetary priggishness of the German heavyweights in the European Union, who are ‘foolishly’ seeking to prevent inflation [in the Greek debt crisis] and impose fiscal discipline.”

The Obamarxist-Merkel contretemps are a prelude to the upcoming “Group of 20” summit in Canada, where, by the looks of it, the US (once the economic engine of the world) will bicker with Germany, China, Canada, and Japan (nascent economic superpowers) to cut back on their robust exports and match its level of government and household debt.

Merkel is not quite as outspoken as Peer Steinbrück was about America’s errant ways. Germany’s former finance minister was something of an Austrian—an Austrian economist. When Bush launched the spend-into-prosperity program we’ve been on ever since, Steinbrück shocked Newsweek with his acid observations about the conversion of the US, UK, and EU from decades of supply-side politics to “crass Keynesianism.” Steinbrück suggested, lo, that a crisis that was created by cheap credit ought not to be corrected by more of the same.

Keynesianism ─ which has nothing to do with economics, and everything do with politics ─ is not merely “crass”; it’s criminal.

In Steinbrück, a member of the European center-left Social Democratic Party, we had a freer marketeer than American centrists such as Republicans pride themselves on being. Germany’s present Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is also bucking Obama and backing the Chancellor. According to Bloomberg Business Week, Schaeuble, standing alongside Merkel, told reporters that, “Nobody can seriously dispute that excessive public debts, not only in Europe, are one of the main causes of this crisis. That’s why they have to be reduced.” Germany’s Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle added that it was “urgently necessary for monetary stability that public budgets return to balance. This is something we should also tell our American friends.”

I mentioned Schaeuble’s predecessor, because, as Spiegel Online reported, the Nobel Prize winning Krugman had blasted Germany’s Steinbrück, at the time, for breaking step with the US, and resisting economic stimulus spending. A “bonehead” and a “know-nothing” is what Krugman called him.

Even more austere than Angela Merkel is Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper ─ in addition to slashing deficits and deficit spending, Harper wants his G-20 partners to reduce ratios of debt-to-GDP.

What has Canada got to show for her otherwise conservative economic practices─ among which are banks that are not nearly as leveraged as ours, and tough lending standards that do not make home owners of those who cannot afford homes, or give credit to those who are not creditworthy?

Let’s see: By the AP’s estimation, Canada can boast of “an economy that grew at a 6.1 percent annual rate in the first three months of this year,” and a hot housing market. The country has also recovered three-quarters of the 400,000 jobs lost during the recession.

What has Merkel got to show for her oddball austerity? Again: rising growth and employment, and a “powerhouse industrial sector and large trade surplus.” “German export successes,” said Merkel, “reflect the high competitiveness and innovation strength of our companies. Artificially reducing Germany’s competitiveness would be of no use to anyone.”

Obama comes to the debate armed with his May jobs report: He hired 411,000 government parasites to conduct the Census. The hogs left breathing room for only 41,000 new productive, private-sector workers.

Perhaps his European friends can explain to our community organizer that government jobs are not an addition to the country’s payroll; they are an increase in the nation’s payload. Mr. Obama is making productive Americans run faster to keep in place. Ms. Merkel is refusing to use her printing press to do the same to her compatriots.

The other day, at my local branch of the United States Postal Service, a devoted USPS customer told me in high decibels to go back whence I came. Although I speak and write English at a level this yahoo could not aspire to, I do the former sans an American accent. In the chauvinistic, provincial mind of my post-office foe, my accent condemned me. Even more of a liability was my apparently un-American, unpatriotic audacity. I stood up to a USPS bureaucrat, who has, for the past seven years, faithfully fulfilled her role as a bully.

Incidentally, the Asian service clerk in question had not managed to master Pidgin English, but somehow I doubt that the brassy American postal patriot would have dared to order her out of the country.

For well over a decade, I have been sending snail mail from North America to South Africa, where friends and family still reside (and where the accent originates). Having used the Canadian, South African and European equivalent services, I can safely say that there is no viler or more inhospitable dump than the United States Postal Service. The latter is far and away inferior to the aforementioned rival monopolies. Enviously I eye the items my mother posts from the Netherlands. Whereas mine are festooned with at least two labels per package; hers are form-free, care free, shipped with ease.

A seven-year saga has prepared me well: I arrived with the requisite labels filled out and handy. This time, the express package was destined for the in-laws ─ a belated birthday gift, as well as a timely one. The package was boldly addressed. It has to be so ─ for the clearer and bolder the lettering, the more likely the thing is to arrive at its South-African destination. That country moves to its own rhythm. But I should not be forced to explain, or apologize for, the manner in which I address my envelope. After all, I was paying a hefty sum for the privilege.

Politely, I asked the sour, dour postal worker to avoid plastering the express-mail label over the bold, clearly written address. Sullenly she turned away and reached for a new label and envelope, and then hissed a reply. Translated from pidgin: If I wanted to stop her from blanketing this crucial bit of information ─ repeated in Lilliputian letters on the express label ─ I would have to fill in yet another form, place my envelope in a new envelope and readdress it.

How this exercise in futility was supposed to alleviate anything other than this woman’s sadistic urges is a mystery. In any event, I refused to oblige or budge, and informed our Employee of the Month that I was not going to fill in more labels and forms. Nor was I going to entertain repackaging and readdressing my well-wrapped, clearly addressed item.

On an earlier visit to the same coven, I had encountered a slightly more obliging African-American clerk. (It’s hard not to notice that my USPS branch is dedicated to correcting past “injustices” by utterly excluding any “oppressors” from its workforce.) I mentioned the “seven-year saga” suffered at the hands of his female colleagues. He refused to believe me, and then and there, made me promise I would call on him if ever the “ladies” lapsed.

I did. Whereupon my supposed “savior” proceeded to do his subversive best to do me further disservice. Patronizingly, he told me my tormentor was only protecting me. The need for clear, large lettering on an envelope destined for South Africa was no concern of his or hers. (This last “argument” made him smirk a bit. I believe he thought it showcased his superior reasoning skills.) His verdict? The “work station” belonged to sour-Asian-lady-who-speaks-in-tongues. There was nothing rude-African-American-guy could do to assist. It was preordained: The destination address was to be concealed!

This was precisely the kind of dialogue Joe Bauers, the protagonist in Mike Judge’s superb satire “Idiocracy,” had conducted with the “‘tarded” doctor character:

Doctor (Justin Long): “Hey, how’s it hang, ese?”Doctor: “Well, don’t wanna sound like a d-ck or nothin’, but, uh, it says on your chart that you’re bleeped up. Uh, you talk like a fag, and your sh-t’s all retarded. What I do is just like, like, you know… like, you know what I mean? Like– (chuckles)” Joe: “No, I’m serious here.”Doctor: “Don’t worry, scrot. Now, there are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded.” She’s a pilot now.Joe: “I need for you to be serious for a second here, okay? I need help.”Doctor: “There’s that fag talk we talked about.”

Back at President Camacho’s post office, I stood my ground. Eventually, the adjacent clerk gestured to me: “I will help you, as soon as I’m through with a client,” she whispered softly. Because of their insistence on scrapbooking over my address, I had been arguing with her “‘tarded” colleagues for over 20 minutes. In no time, the young clerk stuck the express label alongside the boldfaced address, without obscuring it, stamped the envelope, took my money, and sent me on my way.

The hold-up was no more than a sadistic display of power, honed in a state monopoly, where captive “customers” are pinned down like butterflies by “service providers.” The discretion left to these petty tyrants is wide ─ fear of being fired minimal, if non-existent.

Would this farce have transpired had I been able to grab my package and, at the first sign of insanity, flee next door to a competitor? Imagine competition that had dismissed a disgraced pidgin-speaking-Asian-lady; whose projected losses for 2009 and 2010 did NOT run upwards of $7 billion; which had NOT incurred over $70 billion in unfunded liabilities, and was NOT funding the parasitical existence of 800,000 postal workers by borrowing from the Federal Financing Bank (read: the taxpayer).

Just you wait until a “worker” of this caliber, subject to the same disincentives, is in charge of determining whether to schedule your emergency CAT Scan (or maybe not). You don’t wish to set that cat among the poor pigeons. Such workers will be the very beasts rising out of the sea of statism unleashed by a government-controlled healthcare system.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office considers the USPS “costly and high risk.” The GAO has posed the following telltale questions vis-à-vis the USPS ─ musings that give an idea as to the chain of unaccountability the mailing public endures:

• “Should USPS be held more directly accountable for its performance and, if so, to what extent, to whom, and with what mechanisms?” [Read: Right now, no USPS employee pays for the pain he or she causes.]
• “What oversight is needed to protect the public interest, including the interest of customers with few or no alternatives to the mail?” [Read: Currently your “interests” are nothing but a curiosity to USPS monopolists.]
• “What recourse should customers and competitors have to lodge complaints?” [Read: This implies that now there are practically none. You can, however, file a “complime
nt” to a postal worker.]

As I departed, I was accosted by the feral female PO devotee who heaped scorn on me: “They [USPS] do what they do for a reason. This is how we do it in America. If you don’t like it, go back to where you came.”

“Code Blue Intensive Care Unit,” “Code Blue Intensive Care Unit”:

When the Code-Blue alarm sounded over the hospital’s loudspeaker system, my husband and I knew it sounded for our daughter. It was 11:00 at night. The hallways of the British Columbia hospital were dark. Only one emergency operating theater was in use. She was in it. The skeletal staff came running. Resuscitation carts were rushed toward the theater.

My own heart nearly stopped, because she is my heart.

To follow Dr. David Gratzer’s plainspoken definition (the good doctor is a Canada-care whistle blower), Code Blue is “the term used when a patient’s heart stops and hospital staff must leap into action to save him.” My then 12-year-old had stopped breathing on the operating table and was being revived.

Earlier that day she had broken her arm sliding down an embankment with friends. She arrived home, coat draped awkwardly over her disfigured limb, and stood in the doorway sheepishly. Sheepish because she feared I’d be angry. You see, she had fibbed about her whereabouts and was supposed to be studying.

Sheepish, but heroic, as we would soon discover.

“Oh those bones, oh those bones,” goes the old song. My familiarity with the structure of the human arm until then extended to, “The finger bone is connected to the hand bone, and the hand bone is connected to the arm bone, and the arm bone is connected to the shoulder bone, Oh mercy how they scare!”

A subsequent X-ray of Nicky’s arm many hours on would reveal that nothing much was connected any longer. Hers was not just any old fracture. The humerus and the ulna were completely severed. The free-floating bones were pushing out against the skin. Yet the child never so much as whimpered. We rushed her to the hospital where we imagined she’d get care right away.

Recent immigrants to Canada, this was our first encounter with the single-payer health-care system. Back in the “old country,” South Africa, we had benefited from a thriving, profitable, private sector in medicine, where relatively unrestricted entry into the profession, and the prospects of a lucrative, prestigious career, attracted the country’s crème de la crème, and ensured a steady stream of graduates from excellent medical schools. (These once venerated institutions have since succumbed to the malignant effects of affirmative action that privileges the majority population. Consequently, South Africa’s medical schools are no longer internationally recognized.)

The old-fashioned family physician had pride of place in this market and still made house calls. Emergency calls were answered by an “on call” partner in a practice, and not an answering machine. If you had no insurance, you’d contract directly with your medic, and pay him off, little by little, if necessary. Commensurate with job satisfaction, voluntarism was high among the doctors I patronized. Once a month, my daughter’s pediatrician, bless him, would venture into the “bush,” to treat underprivileged children, gratis. Another specialist repaired cleft palates, also for free.

These superb practitioners had done stints in Britain’s government-run National Health Service. Obama would call them racists, but, as they told it, the NHS was staffed mainly by graduates of Pakistan’s medical schools. Oxford and Cambridge-bound students were less likely to be enticed by the prospects of capped physician fees and squalid working conditions.

My daughter was born in a private, spiffy, state-of-the-art South African clinic, entirely within the financial reach of a middle-class young family. Now she was writhing in excruciating pain, on a hard bench, in full view of her unforgiving “caregivers,” in the dilapidated corridors of a state-run Canadian hospital.

In retrospect, the admissions process was devoid of any medical prioritizing. A woman who complained of a migraine was being interviewed at length ahead of us. She took her time, as did her interviewer. A few sullen sorts were being checked out for mild sniffles, as we waited. And waited.

It was abundantly clear that the service, perceived as free by the freeloading public, was being overused. Yet separating urgent from trivial cases did not seem to form part of the protocol. This was compounded by the cruel indifference of the gatekeepers ─ the receptionists and emergency nurses. So we sat and we sat.

Every now and then I’d rise to plead for a palliative for my agonized child and her detached limb. Cold stares and stern admonitions were all I got. Two hours into the wait, my daughter finally began sobbing quietly. Still, the staff stared. When we were eventually summoned, a bureaucrat began filling in a lengthy questionnaire. I realized where she was going with her probes. Before the medical abuse would cease, child abuse had to be ruled out. The woman was investigating us for breaking our daughter’s arm!

Next in store was a protracted stretch on a gurney, unattended. Another eternity passed before the mangled arm was X-rayed with great difficulty. A tired looking young surgeon explained the severity of the fracture. This was not a case for a cast. Nicky would require surgery sometime that night. When, he could not say. An inept nurse began poking the child’s arm for a vein. I swooned at the sight of the punctured, bleeding little appendage. My husband kept vigil as I recovered outdoors. After another nurse was called in, a morphine IV was finally inserted. It stayed in until she was operated on. Hours later.

A cursory investigation into why Nicky coded that night was conducted. The findings were, conveniently, inconclusive. The custodians of Canada care had tried to convince me that my daughter had reacted to a compound in the chemical cocktail that was the anesthetic.

A decade on, the same precious person required wisdom teeth extraction, this time in the United States. She had forgotten how close she had once come to dying, but the thought of another such procedure terrified her mother. Nicky’s American oral and maxillofacial surgeon, however, had no qualms whatsoever about putting her under in his well-appointed rooms. (Yes, we paid him ourselves: ever heard of saving for a procedure instead of going on holiday?) For after hearing all the facts of the case, he was in a position to explain what had happened ten years back.

It took a free American practitioner, in private practice, to deconstruct for me what had transpired on that fateful day.

The subpar care Nicky had received entailed the ongoing administration of morphine. Morphine, especially in a young child, depresse
s the respiratory system. Administered following hours on a powerful opiate, the general anesthetic acted cumulatively to stop her breathing.

Why is this episode typical of a day in the life of a patient interned in a state-run healthcare system? As one wag warned: “Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.” [Except for Obama, naturally.]

The license to exercise near-unlimited power goes hand-in-glove with an indifferent, cruel, and invasive bureaucracy. In the US, an overly litigious society has led to the practice of defensive medicine. But in the “public option’s” sphere of influence, responsibility is collectivized. The culprits of a Code Blue or the odd slip of the scalpel have no out-of-pocket payments to fear. Had I sued the hospital, the comatose Canadian taxpayer would have been forced to pony up for the malpracticing parties.

In defense of the medics who ministered to Nicky let me say this: Most were good. All were hopelessly locked into a professional gulag in which wages are tied to a negotiated deal with labor, rather than ─ as is the case in a competitive market ─ to the individual physician’s performance.

For his considerable skill, the surgeon who pinned Nicky’s shattered bones together is rewarded with an increased workload but no extra pay. Medical men and women like him must watch as mediocre practitioners are elevated beyond their capabilities, and as underperforming hospitals are “fixed” with infusions of funds. For such are the perverse, inverse incentives in all government departments ─ failure is rewarded with more resources. Coupled with capped fees and overflowing waiting rooms, these medical conscripts must contend with antiquated equipment and obsolete drugs. Doctors are all corralled into this one and only “company.” There is no other option, private or public. Should their instinct for freedom get the better of them, they must defect to America

And soon that option will die too.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaliy.com & Taki’s Magazine
July 31, 2009

The eerie thing about the elections now looming in the US and Canada is the profile of the voter. The folks who head for the polls in both nations have more in common than not, as are they in lockstep on the issues with voters in Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Overwhelmingly, Medicare and other entitlement programs are the deciding issues. Why then have entitlement programs become the salient feature of elections in Western democracies? Where is the debate, for instance, over foreign policy and the need to replace interventionism with peaceful unbounded free trade?

In After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State, scholar Paul Edward Gottfried offers a profound analysis as to why “democratic citizenship has come to mean eligibility for social services and welfare benefits,” and why “being administered and socialized by a custodial class is now the defining aspect of democracy.” As in any voluntary trade, what you give up you value less than what you gain. Citizens, says Gottfried, have willingly abnegated the responsibility of self-government for the guarantee of entitlements.

In tandem with an exploration of how 20th century social planners have gained leverage over citizens by dangling economic entitlements, Gottfried advances the thesis that there is no coherent liberal tradition to which the managerial state can lay claim. Based on meticulous exegesis of intellectual history, Gottfried proves that the liberal democracy that serves as the impetus for the managerial state’s social engineering has no connection to 19th century liberalism.

“19th century liberals did not believe that public administrators should work to change social classes or social values,” writes Gottfried. The liberalism of the 19th century, from which today’s faux liberals depart, stood for private property and constitutional liberty. The removal of tariff barriers and the ushering in of free trade was seen as a means to bring people together. Life, liberty and property were the natural rights governments were to uphold, no more. Social equality, which compels coerced distribution of wealth, was considered incompatible with liberty.

Absent its 19th century heritage, “liberalism now survives as a series of social programs informed by a vague egalitarian spirit,” its power maintained by wagging fingers accusingly at antiliberals. The public administrator turned into a social reformer wielding political power with the advent of the welfare state. Along the way, these 20th century social planners, who spoke of “control of production, prices and consumption”–essential socialism–began to call their social planning “liberal”. This continuity is contrived, explains Prof. Gottfried. Notwithstanding the surreptitious “semantic theft”, “punishing homophobes and sexists and trying to rearrange the income curve” doesn’t jibe with liberalism proper.

The present managerial state certainly is not an instantiation of the liberalism of the American Founding Fathers. The post-revolution federal government was not to levy any taxes, and an expansion of its power required the consent of every sovereign state. “The American Revolution,” writes economist Murray Rothbard, “was against empire, taxation, trade monopoly, regulations, militarism and executive power,” all now implicitly embraced by the US and its Western allies.

Undergirding our public administration is an unyielding ideology bolstered by a monolith of toadying journalists and intellectuals. The dubious precepts of social psychology and the enforced “public philosophy” of pluralism have become means through which bureaucrats, educators and state-anointed experts embark on crusades against “prejudice”. Together with official multiculturalism they form an instrument of control, designed to privilege a certain position and to stigmatize those who think differently. By extension, speech codes, human rights legislation, employment quotas and other infringements, contradict the classical liberal espousal of rights to property and freedom of association.

“Unlike the communist garrison state or the Italian fascist “total state,” the managerial state succeeds by denying that it exercises power. It conceals its operation in the language of caring. But “behind the mission to sensitize and teach “human rights” lies the largely unacknowledged right to shape and reshape people’s lives. Any serious appraisal of the managerial regime,” cautions Gottfried, “must consider first and foremost the extent of its control—and the relative powerless of its critics.”

Come elections, look for vestiges, however faint, of equality under the law (flat tax)–but not equality of outcome (affirmative action), reject government expansion (entitlement programs) and intrusion into people’s lives and livings, and look to the affirmation of private property rights as the mother of all liberties. The purists among you may shun most candidates. But we don’t live in the arid arena of pure thought. Prof. Gottfried’s thesis must at the very least assist us to exclude such arch-managers as Al Gore and his party, and the Canadian Liberals and New Democratic Party.

©2000 By Ilana Mercer
The Calgary Herald
November 2

Only weeks back, health care experts celebrated the imminent infusion into the Canada Health and Social Transfer system of some $21.2-billion dollars. There was a sense of being back on track. The experts, for the most, claimed a renewed pledge had been made to the health care Leviathan, although they gingerly proffered that more of a change in delivery of services was required. This has been forgotten. Defection of specialists continues unabated, waiting times for life saving treatment grow, and much of the diagnostic equipment is obsolete.

Make no mistake; I am not here accusing the Feds of good will. But even they, however, are powerless to give the nation what it demands, because no amount of money will do, not ever. A socialized system by nature midwives the dilapidation we are witnessing.

Show me a company in the private sector (which is not the recipient of government handouts) that is shielded from bankruptcy. An audit doubtless would reveal that Medicare is insolvent, yet the fact that the taxpayer is forced to bankroll it indefinitely with tax dollars, immunizes the system against fiscal accountability. Medicare, it can be said, is a perfect system of unaccountability. Compounding this, prices of services are pegged at zero. This drives consumers to use the service voraciously, with the result that endemic shortages are built into the system.

And why are the experts in a tizzy attempting arbitrarily to figure out where the latest cash is needed most? They can’t seem to decide whether it should go to technology, staff, or maybe towards new databases to keep tabs on Canadians. In a free market, the institute of private property ensures that we have prices. Prices are like a compass: pegged to supply and demand they ensure the correct allocation of resources. Conversely, in a nationalized system there are no prices because there is no private property. Absent such knowledge, misallocation of capital is inevitable. The attitude, however, seems to be that of “let the people use derrière doctors (proctologists)” if misallocation causes shortages of surgeons.

By design, a monopoly produces a different kind of worker. Unwilling to have their wages capped and freedoms restricted, the best inevitably leave. Mediocrity, unfortunately, gives rise to fewer malcontents and thus is a prerequisite for stability in the system. Put it this way: if a socialized system wants to survive, it must expunge the most driven and gifted from its midst. When wages, moreover, are tied to a negotiated deal with labour, rather than, in the case of a competitive market, to the individual physician’s performance, the position of the mediocre practitioner is further reinforced.

In Canada, who takes her cues from North Korea and Cuba, medical professionals can only but work for one Firm, so to speak, if they want to practice their skills. If their instinct for freedom overcomes them, they must flee Canada’s jurisdiction. While many medical professionals have been driven away by such fascism, the perverse incentive scheme operating in a socialized system soon subdues the rest. Rewarding competency with increased workload, but no extra pay, is one hell of a way to ensure professionals become sluggish, if only for the sake of their own self-preservation.

Medicare is in fact a pit of perverse incentives. It’s hard to get kinkier than to make failure tantamount to success. If a hospital consistently underperforms the administration has cause to celebrate. Why? Because it is rewarded with more funds to ostensibly “fix the problem”. To underperform is to have your budget increased. With no out-of-pocket payment for the odd slip of the scalpel, the underperformers shoulder little responsibility. The eternally patient or comatose Canadian taxpayer is the one who must pony up for such pooling of risks or insurance. Absent competition, Canadians are trapped in the dilapidated corridors of this national symbol.

The system is not beyond pressing doctors into occasional slavery by making it an offense for them to refuse to treat defaulting patients. In British Columbia some doctors are now suing one of Medicare’s front organizations for “not receiving payment for performing medical services”. Guess who pays?

Food is undisputedly more vital to the survival of the species than is health care. Without the seed growers, the farmers and the retailer we would starve. How then can we abandon this life-giving industry to the free market? The reason the leaders have not nationalized the entire food industry, although they have recklessly regulated aspects of it, is because even they know that if they did, we would all starve. Yet such a scenario with its attendant parallels is well underway in Medicare. Why then do we refuse to draw the inevitable conclusions?

 ©2000 By Ilana Mercer
  The Vancouver Sun
  October 26

Three cheers for the Justice for knowing when to discard hundreds of testimonials and when to discount a life well lived ~ilana

The shackles on Allen Richardson emphasized his fragility, as did the flanking, beefy bailiffs who escorted him to a New York state prison to serve the remainder of a 28-year-old sentence. Originally, when I wrote about Mr. Richardson, I called him the latter day Jean Valjean. Richardson was wanted in the US for escaping a 4-year sentence for selling a small amount of hallucinogen to an undercover law enforcement agent almost three decades ago. Then 19-years-old, Richardson bolted to Canada, after being told he would be returning to the infamous Attica where 43 people had just died in a riot. An exemplary member of the community ever since, Richardson has worked for a UBC-affiliated research facility for almost 20 years.

When the story broke, I noted with irony that it was not the Americans who had issued an extradition order, rather, it was the Canadian immigration authorities that piped up, whining righteously that those with a criminal record were not welcome in Canada. Since when? I was under the impression that Canada had extensive—if unofficial—welcoming schemes for criminals, and that, once they availed themselves of Canadian benefits, these prized individuals were well positioned to launch successful careers throughout the commonwealth of NAFTA. For every one terrorist caught at the US border, there must be many Canadian success stories who make it across.

Back last year, there was at least one specimen known to me, Jose Mauricio Jimenez, who had been welcomed into Canada under the criminal reunification and recruitment tacit agreement, in-spite—or maybe because— of concealing a series of convictions in the U.S. Clearly Jimenez had what it took, and was able to exhibit the kind of moxie Richardson couldn’t muster, and, as it turns out, Canadian authorities are looking for: once in Canada, Jimenez was convicted of assault with a weapon. Was he deported? Are you kidding, not with AIDS he wasn’t. Go Jimenez! Even my plumping can’t make Richardson look good in the face of such stiff competition. An absolute wimp, Richardson is non-welfare dependent and a tender partner to his ailing wife, Amalia. The man never stood a chance.

Why, on the same page updating the Richardsons’ recent travails, loomed the story of another shining recruit to whom Richardson could not hold a candle. With her less than supple mind, Supreme Justice Le’Heurex-Dube averted a huge loss to Canadian society. A Le’Heurex-Dube ruling enabled an equally cerebral lower-court judge to keep a rapist, who had been declared a danger to the public, from deportation. Now that’s a close call. The judge concluded it would be devastating for the Canadian wife and children to do without the rapist’s tender ministrations (we Canadian ladies like our men a little rough around the gills). No, I applaud the justice system. I applaud Immigration Canada for ordering Richadson to leave the country. Good riddance: Canada does not need the kind of riffraff who, for all his years in Canada, has failed to slurp at the Human Resource Minister’s patronage trough. What’s more, I will go so far as to hail the Foreign Affairs Minister for having the fortitude to intervene on behalf of those exported Canadian arch-criminals, Christie Lamont and David Spencer, but still having the gumption to remain silent in the Richardson affair.

Dear me, all these accolades and I almost forgot the magnanimous Justice Connell of Rochester, NY, whose stellar logic led him to make Richardson an example for aspiring future “papillons”. I’m sending a message that escaping prison will not be tolerated, he said. Three cheers for the Justice for knowing when to discard hundreds of testimonials and when to discount a life well lived.

Okay I’m cool. Allen Richardson was never rehabilitated, because Allen Richardson was never a criminal. Just because government legislation decrees that consenting adults may not voluntarily choose to use or exchange certain substances—does not make government right or give it the moral (as opposed legal) authority to aggress against the people it condemns for such activity. Allen Richardson did not hurt or coerce anyone. If it is the health of the population at large that Richardson allegedly imperiled, then government ought to criminalize tobacco, alcohol, bungee jumping, fatty foods, and my own nemesis, the chocolate dealer.

The laws of the land can and often do diverge from the principles of justice. The facts of the law, however, should never make a discussion about justice moot. Call it reason, call it Natural Law, or, for all I care, call it the law that dare not speak its name, but a justice system that fails to be informed by its principles is an ass.

 ©2000 By Ilana Mercer
  The Vancouver Sun
  July 25

*Image courtesy of Nader