The Canadian Century: A “visionary work”, says Globe and Mail’s Neil Reynolds

Columnist Neil Reynolds has devoted his column to The Canadian Century in today’s Globe and Mail.

Finally, amid the pervasive gloom, comes an exuberant expression of optimism – nay, faith – in Canada’s future. Remarkably, it comes from three economists, practitioners of the famously dismal science. The 20th century, they say, wasn’t destined to belong to Canada, as turn-of-the-century prime minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier once asserted it would be. But Laurier, wasn’t really wrong, they say – he was merely premature. Make it the 21st century instead.

What went wrong? What caused a 100-year postponement of Canada’s manifest destiny? Laurier put everything in place for a century of stupendous advance, these economists say – but the country discarded Laurier’s precepts for decades. “We abandoned almost every tenet of Laurier’s plan,” they say, “and we paid a heavy price for it.”

But, bit by bit, Canada has tentatively restored, or begun to restore, Laurier’s lost tenets – a restoration successively accomplished by Conservative governments (notably, Brian Mulroney’s free trade agreement with the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s), NDP governments (notably Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow’s principled return to balanced budgets in the 1990s) and Liberal governments (notably Paul Martin’s paying down of the national debt in the late 1990s and early 2000s).

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Canadian Century celebrates the good beginning that the “redemptive decade,” with its tentative return to Laurier’s lost tenets, provided – apparently, given the great global recession, just in the nick of time. It laments the retreat from these tenets that the recession produced. Now, the economists say, is the time to finish the job – now that Canada’s opportunity has been doubled “by America’s confusion and loss of direction” – and by its own loss of the tenets that produce enduring prosperity.

Fear the boom and bust: Hayek and Keynes duke it out in rap music

A hilarious video in which two rappers represent F. A. Hayek and John Maynard Keynes! as they argue about the right role for government in dealing with the boom and bust cycle and economic management more generally. Those of you who know me will be aware that I did my Ph.D. on Hayek’s social and political thought and I also did a two part series about Hayek for CBC Radio’s Ideas programme  that included a lot of material about the great rivalry that pitted Hayek against Keynes in the middle of the last century, when they were the two greatest living economists. If you’d like to hear part of those Ideas programs on the Hayek/Keynes bust-up, an audio extract is available on my media page.  Thanks to Brian Ferguson of Guelph U for bringing this video to my attention!

Squeezeplay Political Panel

The video of my Jan. 27 appearance on Squeezeplay is available here. Topics of conversation included whether corporations should be able to give money to charitable causes (or if that money belongs to shareholders) as well as the opportunities created for Canadian financial institutions by Washington’s increasingly erratic and autocratic attitude toward US banks.

Capitalism’s death in C2C

C2C, a feisty on-line journal, has just released its new edition focused on the downturn and prospects for recovery. They have kindly included an extract from Fearful Symmetry where I talk about why markets, the rule of law and economic freedom remain the only principles on which prosperity can be based and that therefore the reports of capitalism’s demise as a result of the recession are greatly exaggerated. To read the extract (and find out more about this fine journal), click here.