We will talk a lot in the coming days about the Quebec government’s budget.
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It cannot be otherwise: we will once again have before us the spectacle of a State which claims to organize society in its smallest corners and which has replaced, over the decades, civil society and the demands formerly valued of individual responsibility.
This is what we call the welfare state, or even social democracy, which serves as its doctrinal base.
It is based on absolute confidence in the public apparatus and its experts, who are supposed to plan collective life, by multiplying regulations, laws, programs and subsidies.
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Taxes
Many see it as a brilliant Western invention: through it, our societies would have become fairer, but also freer.
This statement cannot be brushed aside: a civilized society must ensure its members have real access to basic social services, such as education.
It must ensure that no one is left behind, while knowing that it will never completely succeed: society cannot always save the individual from their failures and the consequences of this failure. And we cannot make each failure the result of an exclusion of which the individual would have been a victim.
That said, and I come back to it, because the essential thing is there: in Quebec as everywhere else, we also know the other side of the welfare state; I am talking about a public apparatus suffering from morbid bureaucratic obesity and which is not on the verge of curing it.
The explanation is rather simple: any organization, whether private or public, tends to want to grow and constantly finds reasons to justify this growth.
When we talk about financing the education system as well as the health system, in Quebec, we talk a lot, and perhaps even above all, about the education bureaucracy and the health bureaucracy. And for this, it must drain ever greater resources from ordinary mortals with taxes which suffocate them and which, if one dares to say things clearly, amount to fiscal theft.
Photo Agence QMI, JOEL LEMAY
The ordinary taxpayer sees it: the more he works to improve his situation and that of his family, the more his assets will be confiscated.
But if he finds a way to complain about it, he will be made to feel guilty, he will be accused of selfishness, and of being foreign to the common good. As if the latter were reduced to the technocratic system which claims to ensure its defense in addition to having its exclusive definition.
Selfishness?
It is added that groups that live on subsidies have multiplied over time: they often claim to defend rights when in fact they exert constant pressure for the State to expand its functions.
It is the profitable welfare society for organized activists. Faced with all this, I come back to it, the angry taxpayer can’t take it anymore. But we don’t listen to him. We look at him with contempt.
He would like to keep more of what he earns: how corny! Let him shut up!