BY CK REEDER
Is Ottawa at War With Its Own Citizens?
E
conomic sanctions are acts of war — and Ottawa has imposed de facto sanctions on its own people. If this seems to be a major misuse of language, that’s because our political dialogue has already introduced distortions to our thinking on these concepts. Politics is always characterized by the corruption of language. But
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it never stops with language. The corruption spreads to our thinking, because we mainly think through speech. So let’s try to clear the fog of this “war.” We are familiar with the issue of sanctions. The word embargo has all kinds of more militaristic connotations, while sanction sounds nicer. But these are basically the same things. When a government restricts trade, it is coercively preventing voluntary exchange that would
otherwise occur. Sanctions hurt both the producer and the consumer. The producer cannot sell to everyone he wants and the consumer cannot buy from everyone he wants. Sanctions are a regular weapon for international relations. Perhaps most notably in the last few years, Russia has been prevalent in the headlines, subject to a sustained USled campaign of economic sanctions that began in 2014. The most recent development is new US legislation to
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Laws attacking energy are an attack on property rights and are more destructive than bombs.
