People of British Columbia: Go Fuck Yourselves!

Sometimes people wonder why I seem to hate democracy so much. In actual fact, it isn't democracy that I hate so much as it is people. Despite living in an age where more information is available to more people than at any other time in human history, most people are not only getting deliberately dumber, they seem so fucking proud of it. Anyone who has been following the Republican primaries has probably noticed this. And since you can't really have a democracy without people, my faith in the institution is more than somewhat undermined.

The triumph of ignorance is probably best exemplified by the recent Resurrection of populism in our body politic. Populism has always been a fundamental misunderstanding of how governmental systems work, and is therefore crass, deplorable and should be destroyed every time it rears its misshapen goddamned head.

Populism is predicated on the idea that we live in a pure democracy, which no one does. Western nation states universally live under one form or another of representative government, which means that we elect people to make decisions for us and get the fuck out their way for about four years. Populists think that we live in an Athenian democracy, where everybody gets to vote on everything, or that we even should.

The fact is that we don't and we shouldn't. Moreover, Athenian democracy wasn't all that and a bag of chips. As a matter of fact, "only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens", thereby restricting the franchise to about 20% of the population. I'll grant you that this did weed out the retards and reprobates who currently determine our  fate, but it was hardly the perfect picture of "the people's voice" that populist morons try to paint for you.

You know what you get when you let everyone vote on everything? California is fucking what! Conservatives like to paint California as a horribly liberal place. It really isn't. It's just a perfect representation of self-interested human stupidity, which populism enables. When given the choice, folks will always vote themselves free shit, while retarding their ability to pay for it. Do that long enough, and you wind up being California. Or Greece. Or Italy. Or the United States of America.

Which brings me to British Columbia.

One thing you need to know about Canada is that we have a federal sales tax, the GST, which was introduced in 1991. Since then, no fewer than five federal governments have been trying to entice the provinces to merge their sales taxes with the GST.

A couple of years ago, the Harper Government (which I think that I'm now legally obligated to call it) struck harmonization agreements with Ontario and B.C. Because harmonization extends the reach of provincial taxes, Ontarians were furious for about twenty minutes, but Ontarians are only ever furious about anything for about twenty minutes.

The hillbillies in B.C stayed mad. For the most part, this had a lot to do with being governed by Gordon Campbell, who, despite being massively unpopular, governed for a full decade when he wasn't being arrested for drunk driving in foreign countries. He was able to do this because he lacked any real opposition, the provincial NDP having imploded years earlier and the Conservative party not existing there at all. When his approval numbers fell beneath even Jerry Sandusky's, he got the fuck out of Dodge and fled to Limeyland. Campbell was succeeded by talk-radio host and professional nobody, Christy Clark.

Clark, for reasons that escape anyone with even the slightest understanding of how life works, allowed the HST issue go before the people in a referendum. She supposedly thought that people would enthusiastically vote to expand their own tax liability. Guess how well that went?

There was a small catch. Ottawa isn't exactly stupid. When the deals with Ontario and British Columbia were sealed, the provinces got a ton of money, roughly $4 billion and $1.6 billion respectively. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty, who at the time was also about as popular as kidfucking, gave it away to taxpayers as a way to successfully bribe himself into reelection. The Campbell and Clark governments just spent it on horseshit.

Harper's dimwitted finance minister, Jim Flaherty, in perhaps the only smart thing he's ever done, included a clause in the Ontario and B.C agreements that said if either province fucked with tax structure in any way in the first two years, he got his money back.

Is Premier Clark proposing to do the responsible thing and live up to the agreement her government signed? Fuck, no!

The B.C. government is exchanging ideas with the Harper government on ways to ease the province’s burden in paying back the $1.6-billion advance it received from Ottawa to establish the Harmonized Sales Tax in 2010, Premier Christy Clark said Wednesday.

Clark, who spent Tuesday in Ottawa meeting with Conservative politicians on various federal-provincial issues, said her government is floating several payback options.

Clark said her government has suggested that B.C. receive some credit for the more than two and a half years the HST will be in place before it is dismantled.

Turns out that B.C is over $3 billion in the hole, and can't afford to just pay back Ottawa, like it is obligated to do.

To which I say, "Tough shit! Give back the fucking money, you dumb cunts! Do it NOW!" You got the money all at once, pay it back all at once, you dipshits.

Here's my issue. Once you let one dickhead province renege on a deal because it isn't prom-queen fucking popular, you're left with no choice but to let them all do it. And then you're left with no government at all.

Besides which, people need to know that their idiotic opinions have costs, if they think that they can be governed by them. The stupid goddamned B.C HST referendum chipped away at the very idea that a duly elected government can be held accountable for anything at all.

That might sound like a middling point, but imagine that you're an international baker, or just hold bonds on that province's debt. Are you going to go out of your way to extend credit to crazy cocksuckers that renege on deals on a fucking whimsy and expect no consequences to arise from it?

Fuck each and every person in British Columbia. I hope that those dumb motherfuckers are forced to pay higher taxes at goddamned gunpoint to pay back Ottawa immediately, not that I expect Harper and Flaherty to have the balls to do it. They might be the biggest fiscal cowards and ward-heeling motherfuckers that this country has ever shit out. I suspect that they'll both gladly let Christy Clark peg them infinitely if they think that they can get a few Vancouver seats in the next election out of it.

Those crazy bastards need to be taught that, in the words of the great Dr. Hunter Thompson, if you buy the ticket, you take the fucking ride. And if Harper doesn't do it, I hope to Christ that the financial markets do.

The funniest part about this who fiasco is that the same stupid pricks who voted against the HST in B.C also voted for Harper in the federal election three months earlier.

And you people expect me to take popular democracy seriously?