Dear Editor
One of the undisputed facts of life today is the ever-widening income gap between the very rich and everyone else, just about everywhere in the world. Even here in Saskatchewan, with our record-setting revenues from the mining sector and sucking up of our abundant non-renewable natural resources, that gap is growing, even while the economy is booming.
In his letter to the editor in May 9 News-Optimist, Bill Hall, director of our local food bank, pointed out that the need for their services has increased by 15 per cent, with over 1,200 people relying on them for food. Here. In the Battlefords.
I can remember when we didn't need food banks, even though there was less revenue coming in.
For the past three or four decades, we have been experiencing a vast economic experiment, occasionally called "supply-side economics," gradually becoming more and more a dominant fact of life. Some point to its early beginnings about the time of Barry Goldwater's run for president in the Untied States, and its first significant blossoming happening during the time of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States. It has also been called the "trickle-down theory."
That experiment has at its core the utopian belief that somehow the key to the best kind of economy is to diminish the activities of the state to the barest essentials, such as defence and policing, and to allow businesses (i.e., corporations) unfettered control over everything else. That core belief, religiously held by its adherents, is that, once the government is out of the way, automatically, the result will be prosperity for all. I can recall Ronald Reagan's claim that government is the problem, not the solution.
The past few decades are testimony to the unreality of that notion. In fact, while the globalization of the world's economies has given large corporation more and more wealth and power - some of them wealthier than most sovereign states - most folks in the more developed countries, especially those where the role of government has been diminished, have had their share of the pie get smaller and smaller. That has resulted in the ever-widening gap between the very rich and the rest of us. While in some less-developed countries, the wealthy elite classes have grown somewhat, the rest of the people toil in conditions similar or worse than those faced by the common folk in the tales of Charles Dickens.
I can't believe that we may have already passed the point of no return and are inevitably headed for something similar to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But I also believe that could be the fate of humanity if people don't wake up to the danger, and begin to reject this new radical secular religion.
Russell Lahti
Battleford
