Published in The Gazette, June 16, 2002
Politically-correct expressions and pidgin-sociology concepts tell much about the ideas of our political class. The policy statement on the National Strategy to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion published Wednesday by the Quebec government is full of such phrases as ''collective progress,'' ''social exclusion,'' ''citizen participation,'' ''sustainable development,'' ''social dialogue'' and so forth.
The accompanying Bill 112 grandiloquently defines poverty as ''the condition under which a human being is continuously deprived of the resources, the means, the choices and the power required to obtain and maintain his economic autonomy and to support his active inclusion in the Quebec society.'' Under this definition, the 6 billion inhabitants of this planet who are not Quebecers are poor. The bill also ''affirms the will of the Quebec society to mobilize itself.''
Don't laugh! These aren't just words. If you don't agree with what the state promotes as ''solidarity'' and ''sharing values,'' and decide not to buy them (i.e., not pay taxes), you'll soon find out that laws are not love wishes, but state diktats enforced by praetorians.
Coercive Strategy
Why do we need this coercive new ''national strategy?'' Doesn't the state already fight poverty? What did the Quebec government do with the one-fifth of Quebecers' incomes that it seizes in taxes? (Another fifth is confiscated by the federal government.) How can the policy statement talk about ''unequal access to health'' when health care has been nationalized for 30 years?
I don't mean to bash the poor, who are often caught in the "poverty trap" by state-induced dependency. Moreover, they're often forbidden to earn a living by minimum-wage laws that price them out of the labour market, by trade unions that protect their members from wage competition and by regulations that restrict getting a job in construction or driving a taxi.
Indeed, the Quebec government takes care to define its ideal of personal ''autonomy'' in such a way to exclude what is done without state authorization, such as illegal employment. ''To be autonomous in a market economy,'' boasts the policy statement, ''is to have a legitimate job or a legal remuneration.''
Poverty Industry
Another question: Could the state be more interested in certain other goals than in fighting poverty? At least half of government redistribution in Canada doesn't reach the poor. And a quarter of public expenditures goes to the very individuals who have financed it with their taxes. What the state does well is to create and enrich a thriving ''poverty industry'' of civil servants and other subsidized busybodies.
Moreover, as French political scientist Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote, ''The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the state.''
The government boasts that its goal is ''to build a better Quebec in which every person has their rightful place, can live with dignity.'' Only one question needs to be asked to reveal the hidden coercion: will people who strongly disagree with this new ''national strategy,'' and do not want to finance it, have their rightful place and their dignity preserved?
Pierre Lemieux is co-director of the Groupe de Recherche Economie et Liberté at the Université du Québec Hull.