As someone who contracts for the government, I can tell you the next thing that Canada needs to do to hack away at our debt is to slash and burn the public service even more than they already have.
For all the rhetoric and complaints that the PS unions spout and the "But what about the children" sob stories people wear on their sleeve because they know, as Stefan mentions, that if they had to work in the public sector they would fail miserably, the bottom line is this:
Most civil servants DO FUCK ALL ALL DAY!
My former boss, on top of being a closet racist with anti-Islamic tendencies, which he wore on his sleeve during our hour and a half lunch one day with a moment of enlightenment that I will never forget, the verbatim of which was "If we stopped letting Muslims into this country.... no more terrorism." (I am still disgusted that I worked for anyone who is as ignorant as to not only believe this, but say as much out loud while at work for the federal government.) would go out for breakfast once a week on the taxpayers dime. He would go home early on most Fridays. Then, he would go to breakfast whenever anyone of his contractors missed their bus and was late. Then, he would go for breakfast if he was there before anyone else. All told, for his 37.5 hour work week, I'm pretty sure he sat on his ass doing nothing but checking hockey scores and trying to find politically correct ways to espouse his anti-Muslim sentiments for about 17.5 hours a week.
Oh, and did I mention the frequent oogling of the Sunshine girls. When we had to change locations and walk through downtown Ottawa, he would gawk at girls walking by shamelessly, staring long and hard, and making lewd comments before they even got out of earshot. At one point, I had to tell him "Dude, you're embarrassing me. I know we all look, but on a Friday night, I'm gonna be in a bar trying to fuck that girl and I don't want to be guilty by association."
In our shop, even when I took my sweet ass time and did most of the work that there was to be done (because everyone else couldn't seem to manage to do our job without fucking something up, or the would take one tiny little duty and milk the shit out of it to kill time) I still had at least 2 hours of downtime a day. And how did they respond to all of this, given we had a 5 man team and each week, we spent a minimum of 100 man hours doing a whole lot of nothing?
THEY SENT HIM FIVE MORE CONTRACTORS!
By my calculations, those 5 contractors, who did absolutely nothing but wait around to be assigned work that wasn't coming any time soon, cost the government ROUGHLY $200,000 / year. However, no one would DARE say "We don't need these people" because if they say so then, God forbid, they would lose $1 million off their budget and it would be next to impossible to get it back. So, after a while, i was asked to train them to do my job, which I did, but for whatever reason, they couldn't seem to do it without messing it all up, which gave my boss more work to do, meaning it was left to me to do all the work, which was fine by me because as long as I am kept busy and productive, then my chances of getting the axe are slimmer.
Now, they ARE moving in the right direction because they ARE eliminating AKA Surplussing more positions and getting their existing staff to *gasp* do some ACTUAL work (God forbid), but as they mention in this video, as much as this is INCREDIBLY good for the economy because you actually get PRODUCTIVITY out of people, all those jilted former employees will cry about how cruel the government is, and then they air ALL the dirty laundry they know about (and trust me, there is an ENDLESS pile of dirty little secrets in the Public Service that NO ONE wants to come out because they don't want to deal with the shit storm that will follow) and they don't vote for the people who killed their jobs (altough Harper is a genius at Jedi Mind Tricking people into voting for him despite being directly opposed to their own interests.
So, as Stefan clearly mentions, most politicians buy votes from public servants by giving them a cushy gig. The Unions love it because they get rich off it with all the labour negotiations and saber rattling. The poor don't vote, so the tiny shit that politicians WOULD give about them disappears because why would a politician risk losing votes by siding with ANYONE who isn't going to vote for him or anyone else for that matter? It's a vicious circle, but, despite my MORAL objections to a lot of Stephen Harper's policies, the more I educate myself on the details of the subject matter and look at what Harper IS doing with his government, I realize that he is making a lot of the tough decisions that need to be made to reduce our deficit and create more opportunities or our country to compete in foreign markets.
Even though I voted NDP last election, the NDP have this naive and ridiculous idea that trade is a bad thing. "By Canadians for Canadians!" is there motto. That's all well and good on the surface, but there is a caveat to that ideology that they forget to mention. If we close our doors to trade, then get used to a $120 pair of jeans. Lots of people would LOVE to buy local, eat organic and support Canadian enterprise..... but unfortunately, no one can afford it. Especially after we do the slash and burn we need to do to trim off the fat and get some decent returns on the tax payers dollar.
I dunno about you, but I sure as shit don't like paying the ridiculous tax that I pay so that my lazy, racist old boss can eat at Don Cherry's three times a week on my dime and go off about "Pa-kis" (I fuckin hate that word) and Muslims (Who work the jobs that he and his kids are too privileged to work, and pay the same tax he does despite having a superior education that isn't recognized by our government when they immigrate.) The thing that people forget about immigrants is that they bring a work ethic and ingenuity to our country that our generations tend to lack. They don't aspire to have the cushy "Thumb-up-their-ass" government job where they do nothing all day.
They aspire to live in a country where the military won't show up and rape their 7 year old daughter in the middle of the night and force their 10 year old son to join the military and do the same. They start their own businesses, cooking and delivering the pizza we all get fat off of when we watch hockey and opening our minds and taste buds to new treats like Shawarma, Donair, Butter Chicken and Baklava. When most native Canadians start their own business, they fail miserably because they are either naive or unwilling to put the work and effort into it that is required to make it work. (That's not to say that ALL Canadians are like this, but when is the last time you saw a "Mom and Pop" shop that was opened by a 30 year old born-and-raised Canadian that offered a quality product at a competitive price that consistently earned your business on merit? The only Canadian I know of that do that are strippers and models, sad to say.)
And the ironic thing is, the reason they succeed is because, in their country, they got the same education that Stefan Molyneux got himself. They UNDERSTAND the difference between a Consumer Good and an Investment Good. They UNDERSTAND the opportunity cost of wasting all their money on a big house in a nice neighbourhood and a brand new ride is that they won't be able to invest in their own business which will provide them with financial independence (and independence from being a slave to a boss who resents them by virtue of their ethnic background and treats them like half a human being as a result), an opportunity to prosper by virtue of their own hard work and ingenuity, and in an ideal situation, something they can leave behind to their children so that they have the option of being masters of their own destiny, just like they are.
It's not complicated. The numbers speak for themselves. More immigrants are willing to take the risk and start their own businesses and make the sacrifices necessary to make them successful than "born and raised" Canadians are. We all dream of the free ride that our parents and our culture promises is with its lies and its half-truths, and when we find out its not there, rather than accept that we didn't GET the sweet job because we were C- students because we dranka nd smoked our way through University rather than getting the grades we needed to get ahead, and we are being crushed by monstrous debts we incurred when we got duped into paying out our ass for an education under the misguided notion that a magic piece of paper would be our ticket to Easy Street, instead of blaming ourselves, we point fingers.
We blame the government. We blame immigrants. We blame schools and nurses banks and religion and political parties when the bottom line is that we are all architects of our own destiny.
If you (the royal YOU, as in anyone who identifies with this statement) find your life is not to your liking, then get off your ass and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Tomorrow is promised to no one. Seize the day, but don't be fooled by the illusions and the mythology of our culture and our society. Your citizenship DOES NOT guarantee you a job or a livelihood. Your education DOES NOT guarantee you a job or a livelihood. Your Gender, Race, Ethnic Identity or Religion DOES NOT GUARANTEE YOU A DAMN THING!
Only guarantee in this life is death, my man, and if you want a guarantee, then tie a noose and ride it to your end, cuz that's the ONLY guarantee in this world that you can bank on.
In the world we live in, it's the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest. Natural selection by competition, and the day you rest on your laurels and cease to compete is the day you make yourself a target for extinction, because in order for me to eat, I gotta eat someone else's dinner, and if that someone is you, then no hard feelings chum, but you get what you earn in this life, whether you like it or not.
It's a harsh reality and a rude awakening that is pretty bleak if you are just realizing that most of what you were taught and told as a youth was a steaming pile of bullshit, but the sooner you get over it and put your shoulder to the grindstone, the sooner you're gonna carve a little piece of the shit pie that is our future off for yourself. It might not be tasty, but it's better than nothing. You can eat all the imaginary Pumpkin Pie in the world if you like, but I'd rather some real Shit Cake complete with diarrhea swirl icing on top in my belly than play the Pretend game and eat Imaginary Caviar and Ambrosia.
If you think it's bad now, wait thirty years. It's going to get a WHOLE lot worse in the future for reasons that are far too intricate for me to explain in this rant.
Fuck, now I've gotten myself all worked up. Time to go get shot in CS to help me chill the fuck out.
/rant complete
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