As a technology company founder, the capital gains tax increase feels like the last straw in Canada’s accidental war on risk taking innovation. If we can’t tell the difference at a cultural values level between property speculation and inventing things, we are screwed economically.
Too many people place the emphasis on the distribution of the pie, and too few on the expansion of it. The way we talk about the economy, it’s like a force of nature, ebbing and flowing like weather. But the things we want, and don’t want, and believe, are in sum what becomes the economy. The economy is a crude attempt at measuring the exchange of value between people within and among groups. You can temporarily overshare the pie, but the only way to improve the situation in the micro is to expand it. If I work hard and focus on it, I can give you more of what you want and you can give me more of what I want. That process of reciprocal want, diligence, focus and a duty of care to each other is how we know that the economy is more than just a zero sum game that arcs towards injustice. We have to start with ourselves.
So much of the discourse in the time since Covid has been populist and extreme criticisms of other populist and extreme politics. It is not hard to see where each modern political party is wrong. We have no vision and no tolerance for other flavors of liberalism. Liberal communists battle it out with liberal fascists and forget our shared goal of a free and fair world.
Liberalism for a long time was viewed as a positive sum game. It started with an idea that by looking down, around and beyond ourselves we could see past the monotheistic religious dogma of the middle ages. That idea, fueled by coffee, the wealth of monopolistic trading companies and ideology, became itself a dogma that it was possible for the world to be organized in a positive sum way and for freedom and fairness to co-exist. That liberal ideal was challenged by the political climate of recent times. The liberalism bubble popped, so you have a yin and yang war between liberal-fascists and liberal-communists. We tried fascism and communism before, and sooner or later liberalism seems to win.
For liberalism to win we have to overcome confusing criticism with vision. We have to actually have higher expectations of everyone, starting with ourselves. Social capital is a form of capital that has met the same zero sum fate as economic capital has but itself needs to be revived with a compelling positive sum vision. We don’t need to be rich to have a good life and care for each other, but we do need to care for each other to have a rich and good life.