Letter: The freedom of your fist ends where the freedom of my nose begins

By Letter to the Editor on April 23, 2022.

Re: Drew Barnes’ MLA Report, published April 14

Dear editor,

“The economy flourished, prosperity was born, and with it the rigid social class structure of the day began to dissolve.”

This sentence could have been written by a resourceful Grade 8 student doing a brief perusal of Wikipedia (my apologies to all Grade 8s). It’s a sentence pregnant with false and overreaching generalities. It glosses over 600 years of volatile and complex history. This sentence, porous, glib, cheesy, and empty of substance, forms the main pillar of Mr. Barnes’ argument. No surprise then, that with the slightest analysis, his argument crumbles into barren prairie dust.

However, I agree with Mr. Barnes in his characterization of some government officials as ‘gatekeepers’ “… who use their positions and influence to feather their own nests” and also “… who pick winners and losers in the market using subsidies.”

One recent example is illustrated by Mr. Kenney’s gift to insurance companies in Alberta in the last two years. Removing the NDP cap on the price of home and auto insurance premiums in Alberta resulted in dramatic increases in premiums for homeowners and drivers in Alberta this year. Now that’s a gatekeeper – allowing the siphoning of money from your pockets into the back pockets of the already over-fed insurance companies. I’m with Mr. Barnes on this one.

I hope we are rid of this sneaky and unprincipled gatekeeper next April – if the grassroots don’t do it next month. Incidentally, I’ll be happy to bid Mr. Barnes adieu as well.

One more point: Mr. Barnes’ habit of squeezing the word ‘freedom” into any context possible, echos the style of Mr. Kenney’s ultra conservative former playmate, Pierre Poilievre. Neither one of them, if pressed, could give a short and satisfactory definition of what they mean by the word. So let me offer an illustration.

Freedom (to paraphrase J.S. Mill): The freedom of your fist ends where the freedom of my nose begins. Or more timely, the freedom of your truck horn ends where the freedom of the ears of Ottawa citizens begins. Absolute freedom is anarchy, and anarchy, Mr. Barnes, is practised safely only in your own back yard. It has no place in a peaceful, democratic society.

And by the way: A Member of the Legislative Assembly without a caucus is like a disobedient Grade 8 student sent to the cloakroom for bad behaviour. He is, in effect, nobody’s representative, and is therefore not doing the job he was sent to Edmonton to do. Mr. Barnes, please consider paying back a significant portion of your sizable MLA income. That would be one honourable thing you could do for your constituents. Freely.

Peter Mueller

Medicine Hat

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