It sounds better when he says it, anyhow:
A year or two back, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me saying, “You need to start kicking up a fuss about this, Steyn, and then maybe Canadians will get mad and elect a conservative government that will end this nonsense.”
Makes perfect sense. Except that Canada already has a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the “human rights” commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference.
Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists — sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists.
The short history of the postwar welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life…
This is one of the points that was grasped in the earliest stages of turning India around, by such as the late Rajiv Gandhi. The argument was that business and all other private activity suffered, because the country’s “best and brightest” were magnetically attracted to the prestige of so-called “public service.” It was what upwardly mobile parents prepared their children for.
But through that “public service” came the self-serving blindness and arrogance of India’s “ruling caste.” These were people who did not have to stoop to pleasing the labouring masses, in the way capitalists must, if they are going to sell anything. Instead they acquire the attitudes that I have found here, too, in almost every encounter with a “public servant,” dressed in a little authority.
