The Diseased Ethics of Bailout Culture

Examining Canada's entrenched kleptocracy

Management said we should try Flex Seal. Something about liquid taxpayers in a can.

What would you do if I told you that the most important part of wealth generation was . . . generating wealth? Would you be surprised? Would you look at me like I’d just told you that the wheels on the bus do, in fact, go round and round?

One might hope.

Sadly, we no longer live in times where we can assume general agreement on basic facts. Thus, instead of the time-tested formula for prosperity, otherwise known as labour → wages → reinvestment, we must languish under the auspices of “progressive” math, which looks like labour → taxation → redistribution. Which really just looks like an approaching renaissance of soviet-style living blocks.

One of the results of this new formula rollout has been the steady acceptance of what might be called “bailout culture.” Bailout culture develops when half-dead businesses, organizations, and institutions are supplied with indefinite transfusions of government money. What revived my attention on the topic was recently learning that Ontario has pledged 1.2 billion dollars towards “beleaguered colleges and universities,” but the truth is that most of Canada’s infrastructure has been consuming snowbank-sized quantities of government sugar for decades. Which explains why it's so inefficient, unproductive, and hard to watch climb the stairs.  

Part of the problem is that a hungry state never wants to let go of its vested interests, even when its skin is falling off in sheets. They also know they won’t have to. You see, it doesn't matter how unproductive your interests are, so long as everyone is forced to use them. So good luck trying to sell milk outside of the Canadian Dairy Cartel — I mean Commission; which incidentally received 4.7 million of your tax dollars in 2021.

The other part of the problem is that most of us have been conditioned to believe regulated bodies can do a better job of running stuff than private-sector bodies. And we only believe that because we’ve been conditioned to believe the government is a lean, mean, organized machine, when really it’s more like the first UNIVAC computer, which spent thirteen hours trying to spell “hat.” Thomas Sowell puts his finger on the problem: “[R]ight now there is a widespread belief that the unregulated market is what got us into our present economic predicament, and that the government must ‘do something’ to get the economy moving again.”

What’s the government going to do about the housing market? What’s the government going to do about rental prices? What’s the government going to do about understaffed hospitals and schools? What’s the government going to do about the fact that I only had seven dehydrated carrots in my instant soup-powder mix? If you’ve ever asked any of these questions, you know the conditioning has worked.

How did we get here? As with everything, it starts with sin, which in this context looks like a dark and perverted desire to avoid responsibility. If people can be convinced that such a desire is justified, all it takes is some benefactor, in this case the state, to come along with an offer of “help.” Instead of asking whether it’s any of his business, or considering what we might lose in the exchange, we agree. That was easy, we think. And so we do it the next time. And again and again, until things really are easy because we don’t own anything.

At first the 20-year old son thinks nothing of it when his parents offer to let him live at their house for free. Jobs are scarce, rent is high, and Mom won’t admit it but she likes having someone around she can control. Eventually that son turns 30, then 40, at which point the thought of ever having to live on his own provokes a cascade of IBS symptoms. So long as he’s still allowed walk to the convenience store in his batman pajamas, it’s much easier if his parents keep running things.

So much for the origins of bailout culture. But then, what’s the big deal? Is it really that dangerous?

Night of the Insolvent Dead

Perhaps the biggest danger of bailout culture is that those businesses which should be allowed to expire, so making room for live specimens, are continually injected with unnatural money.

These zombified businesses not only consume tax dollars like salted peanuts, but the inefficiencies that made them need bailouts in the first place don’t get resolved, thus requiring further bailouts, thus requiring higher taxes to finance them. This not only prohibits competition from smaller business, which would help restore balance to the market, it also causes untold suffering for consumers. Try to recall the last time you had to navigate the machinery of a government appendage. Remember how, three-hours of elevator music and a bewildering chat with Ghulam Ahmed later, you wanted to bore out your ears with an oyster fork? 

Take the well-documented administrative bloat in the “beleaguered” post-secondary institutions. Forbes’ recently noted, “There are now 3 times as many administrators . . . as there are faculty at the leading schools in the country.” The same could be said of hospitals, clinics, crown corporations, and elementary schools. Insulating decrepit institutions and organizations from a free-market economy doesn’t help anyone except the state.

At our private school, we've often dreamed about what we could do with even a sixteenth of a public school’s budget. This isn’t because we’re extraordinarily smart or strategic, but because we’ve learned to be extraordinarily resourceful, knowing grandpappy state isn’t going to be there to cover the tab if we screw up.

Our culture has been shaped by the godless notion that compassion means the abolition of consequences. Addicts should be given a free home and a safe place to kill themselves. Career criminals should either be released, or sequestered away in a resort prison where he can think about what a bad boy he’s been. Corrupt politicians should be allowed to weasel their way out of straight answers and accountability structures. But God will not be mocked, nor can the fixed order of his creation ultimately be undermined.   

Pastor Alex recently remarked that the great irony of socialism is that it actually thwarts its own aims. When only a few people are generating wealth, the resources available for those actually in need are diminished. And vice versa. The more people there are generating wealth, the more everyone — including the poor — benefits. Socialist systems, predicated as they are on laziness, resent, and the avoidance of responsibility, are not productive. Within the confines of their system, they can’t afford to be compassionate. In order to maintain their virtue-signalling illusions, they must resort to robbing those outside their system. In polite society, we call this taxation.

At this point the West is so far down the socialist sinkhole that changing course, barring miraculous intervention, is about as likely as a decent Lord of the Rings mini-series. Our government will continue to spend what isn’t there until the proverbial chickens come home to roost, only to realize their roosts have been donated to the home for chicken-identifying foxes. And you just know I’m on the edge when I start mixing metaphors and folk idioms.

The essence of biblical love is putting the needs of others before our own (Philippians 2:3–5). Those who labour, working with their own hands, not only free others from having to carry them, but are able to provide for those who are truly in need (Ephesians 4:28). Loving our neighbour also means telling them the truth. And the truth is that work is hard, and that it will be that way until Christ returns and makes it free and beautiful again. The good news is that our labour in the Lord, no matter how seemingly small and futile, is not in vain.

So chart a course. Grab the wheel. And get to work.

And don’t forget your bailing bucket.