Insights the World War II it reached a massive 130 percent of GDP. “But no one cared!”, notes economist Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work. We didn’t even pay down that debt! On the contrary, we racked up more debt in the early postwar decades, as Ottawa invested heavily in infrastructure and expanded the size and scope of government. The debt kept growing, but the economy grew faster, making the debt burden relatively lighter. By the mid-70s, our debt amounted to only about 20 percent of GDP.
We never actually paid it off; we just effectively outgrew it, says Stanford. Those years are sometimes called “the golden age of capitalism” as the economy prospered and a strong middle class emerged. The deficit hawks can’t deny these facts, but they suggest this wouldn’t work today. In fact, with today’s record-low borrowing costs – with interest rates effectively close to zero – we’re well positioned to run up a huge debt at virtually no cost, allowing us to put Canadians back to work and begin building the
Thomas S. Harrington
Technocrats and authoritarianism
I
t is important in these days of constant calls to heed the advice of “experts” on the spread of the Coronavirus to recall the intimate historical links between the concept of technocracy and the practice of authoritarianism. As soon as the ideal of a truly representative democracy moved to the centre of European and American life at the end of the 19th-century, those slated to lose power under this new social order began touting the advent of a supreme modern wisdom, transcendent of disputes, that would spare us all the inherent
10 ColdType | June 2020 | www.coldtype.net
messiness and inefficiency of government by and for the people. Interestingly, Spain played a key role in the development of this ideological current. During the 1920s and 30s it took on a form known as “anti-parliamentarianism”, which held that only a clairvoyant class of military patriots, unencumbered by ideology, could save the country from the immobilism and corruption generated by party politics. When, after World War II, the idea of social salvation by men in uniform had lost much of its earlier lustre, these efforts to save the people from themselves
infrastructure needed to transition to clean energy. We could actually be on our way to a very different and promising future. But, count on it, the deficit hawks will soon be circling menacingly overhead, hell-bent on preventing any diversion from the austerity they’ve confined us to for decades. CT Linda McQuaig is a journalist and author of The Sport & Prey of Capitalists: How the Rich are Stealing Canada’s Public Wealth. This column originally appeared in the Toronto Star.
shifted their focus from the military to men of science, broadly understood. The term technocrat first came into wide usage in the late 1950s when Spanish dictator Francisco Franco entrusted the management of his country’s economy to a group of thinkers from the ultra-right wing Catholic organisation Opus Dei. These men, who would engineer a shift from a policy of nativist protectionism to one much more centred on foreign investment were many things, but people without ideology they were not. However, that did not prevent the regime and its many new banker friends around the world from presenting them as exactly this. Sadly, many outside observers came to believe it. The central conceit of technocratic thought was, and is, that there exists in data-based, scientific knowledge a clarity that
