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Max's law... explained

"You like po-tay-toes and I like po-tah-toes." – George & Ira Gershwin "I'm okay; you're okay." – Thomas Harris "You say tomato, I say shut-up.
opinion_maxed1

"You like po-tay-toes and I like po-tah-toes."

George & Ira Gershwin

"I'm okay; you're okay."

– Thomas Harris

"You say tomato, I say shut-up."

– Annabelle Gurwitch

Long before anything was called social media, back when the Internet was something largely used by the military and academics, Mike Godwin formulated a seemingly immutable law of online discussion. Godwin's Law states, more or less: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Those of you who have a firm grasp of probability, fractions and/or percentages can skip the next sentence. For the rest of you, as a refresher, a probability of one means something is absolutely going to happen, 100 per cent of the time. In every human endeavour except professional sports, 100 per cent is as good as it gets. In professional sports, if you've come to win, you will inevitably give it 110 per cent, which goes a long way towards explaining how it is crooked agents, lawyers and accountants manage to regularly leave jocks who've made tens of millions of dollars broke.

But I digress.

Max's Law can be seen as a corollary of Godwin's Law. It states: Any online discussion will inevitably move toward polarization leading to a profoundly stupid, false moral equivalency.

Allow me to demonstrate. Any discussion of, say, Stephen Harper's latest assault on the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or, less formally, an institution, ideal or belief many Canadians believe actually define this country — the search for which is still our number one pastime — will, sooner or later, run up against the brick wall of someone who argues, "They're no worse than the other guys. They were crooks too."

Generally, the argument will continue, losing steam, until, in an attempt to be more specific, the proposition will be made that, "The Conservative's (insert outrage here, e.g., contempt of Parliament, environmental record, fiscal misadventure) is no worse than the Liberal sponsorship scandal."

That's usually the last post I read because I don't enjoy arguing with idiots or reading what they have to say. It is particularly disheartening, however, when it's made by people I generally think of as intelligent and at least somewhat politically aware. I chalk it up to another victory for our learned sense of false moral equivalency.

Let's take a brief detour into history.

The federal Liberals came to power in 1993 after the Dark Ages of Mulroney, a time of Conservative rule notable for the nosebleed fiscal deficits run up by putative conservatives during a time of unimaginable — by today's standards — prosperity. Administering some bitter, in all senses of the word, medicine, the Liberals, to everyone's disbelief, began to balance the budget and even run surpluses by 1997.

In 1994, the electorate of Quebec once again lost their minds and elected the Parti Québécois to power, with Jacques Parizeau at the helm. In 1995, the second Quebec referendum on sovereignty was held. The move to secede from Canada was defeated by a margin of 50.58 per cent to 49.42 per cent, which is about as close as things get if you're not a professional athlete wondering which way the other 10 per cent voted.

Jean Chrétien, long a nationalist schooled in the Trudeau camp, decided that was close enough he didn't want to be around for a third referendum or, if he was, wanted the voters in Quebec to at least comprehend there was some benefit to staying a part of Canada. He launched the federal government sponsorship program.

It was a wave the flag, show 'em we love 'em kind of PR campaign designed to raise awareness in Quebec of the myriad ways the federal government contributed to the province's well-being. Now to anyone outside Quebec that seemed apparent since the province got the lion's share of transfer payments, spawned a disproportionate number of the country's prime ministers and was generally treated with far more respect and importance than they ever would have as the third-world banana republic they would have become had they actually formed their own country.

The program ran for eight years, 1996 to 2004, and ostensibly did things like sponsor and brand festivals and events, run ad campaigns, and other such piffle. But, to no one's surprise, it was rife with illicit and illegal shenanigans or, as politically connected people in Quebec like to refer to them, business as usual. Money was paid for work never done. Money was washed from one hand back into the other hand, returning full circle to the Liberal party. It was corrupt. It was a mess. And it eventually led to the downfall of the Ditherer in Chief, Paul Martin, and the Liberal party, no longer known as the natural ruling party but simply referred to as "those other guys."

But it was also peanuts.

The sponsorship program awarded $2 million in contracts that lacked a proper — read honest — bidding process. One and a half million was spent for work that was never done; one million of that was repaid. Another $250,000 was tacked onto a contract for more work that was never done. And the real money hole was the $14 million bucks it took the Gomery commission to conclude all this.

The year after Stephen Harper took the reins of his first minority government, he announced he was cutting the GST from seven per cent to five per cent. Notwithstanding there were virtually no voices in the country aping the U.S. mantra of lower taxes and no really compelling reason to cut the tax, other than ideology and political pandering, one per cent was lopped off in 2007 and in January, 2008, another one per cent.

Reducing the GST to five per cent cost the federal budget $11 to $11.5 billion every year.

Though the world was still nine months away from watching Lehman Brothers dance into bankruptcy court, the global economy was showing every sign of swirling the bowl in 2007 when Harper set the country on this road of fiscal mismanagement, leading to serial deficits and this week's budget cast in the school of when you wish upon a star economics.

The litany of morally, ethically, economically and constitutionally outrageous acts perpetrated by the Harper government is longer than I can stomach detailing without becoming ill. They include his serial contempt of parliament, proroguing that body twice, muzzling government scientists and now rogue librarians, cutting funding and shutting down research when muzzling wasn't enough, zero environmental initiatives and severely negative ones to expand the oilsands and pipe bitumen into the ocean, lying about the costs of the F-35 program... etcetera and, unfortunately, etcetera.

There is no moral equivalency that justifies comparing what this government has done in its time in power to the Liberals pissing away a couple of million bucks. Those who suggest there is place themselves firmly in the company of climate change deniers, anti-vaccination fanatics and those who believe wishing upon a falling star will make their dreams come true.

Meanwhile, Pinocchio's nose gets longer and longer.