Twenty-six years after the United States and Canada concluded their historic free trade agreement, it may startle some to see how their constituents size up the trading relationship.
In a report published last month, Nanos Research (in collaboration with the University of Buffalo) found that when Canadians were asked to ‘rank the top two countries that are closest with Canada in terms of business values’, the United States polled at 61 per cent, far beyond the next two challengers, with Britain at 20 per cent and Germany at 12 per cent.1
Meanwhile, when Americans were asked the same question in relation to their own business values, Canada came in at a mere 24 per cent, followed close at the heels by Britain and Japan, both at 21 per cent.2
Were citizens asked to describe the socio-economic fabric of their countries, no doubt a plurality of Americans would respond through a mantra coloured by the heroics of their Founding, noting their adherence to limited government, free market values, and individual freedom, principles which FEE founding father Leonard Read described as ‘the essence of Americanism’.3
Canadians, still hewing to the country’s tory origins (which skew social democratic), would list their traditions of robust government, interventionist economic policies, and communal politics. Indeed, many Canadians reflexively identify themselves as the ‘un-Americans’ — our own Confederation moment, aspects of which continue to show up in the Nanos/UB survey on border security. And yet in many respects, Canadians — or at least their federal government — have come to exemplify those American values which its southern neighbours have allowed progressive ideals to supplant.
During the Great Recession of 2007-09, for instance, Canadian banking rules regulating adequate reserves and conservative lending practices meant that Bay Street experienced few of the credit disturbances or the financial meltdowns that became regular occurrences on Wall Street. And, under the Liberal governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin and the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, Ottawa has pursued measures of deficit reduction and lower government expenditures as a percentage of GDP, policies virtually orphans on Capitol Hill with its $500 billion deficits and $18 trillion debt. Canada’s commitment to global competitiveness is clearly visible it its reduction of corporate taxes to 15 per cent, where in America corporate taxes are amongst the highest in the West at 35 per cent.
According to the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by the Heritage Foundation, Canada ranks sixth in the world, making it the ‘freest economy in the North American region.’ Its debt to GDP stands at 86 per cent — its path toward fiscal prudence slowed by the Great Recession. The United States, meanwhile, does not even place in the top ten, ranking twelfth among leading nations. Its debt to GDP now exceeds 100 per cent.
Canada’s economic successes are replicated within the Anglosphere, with Australia and New Zealand surpassing it on the Heritage Index (third and fifth, respectively), with Ireland at ninth and the United Kingdom placing fourteenth. (Britain’s former colony of Hong Kong, reunited politically to mainland China since 1997 under a ‘one country, two systems’ agreement, ranked first.)
All is not lost for the United States, though. Already the country has made strides in the right direction, largely through forced sequestrations and its indomitable entrepreneurial spirit to succeed. As Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations:
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often incumbers its operations; though the effect of these obstructions is always more or less either to encroach upon its freedom, or to diminish its security.4
America’s fundamentals remain strong; only its government agenda of Keynesian policies and interventionist programmes, including the Fed’s adherence to quantitative easing, need to be reformed. ‘Interventionist policies create uncertainty, raise the costs of financial intermediation and discourage investment. I might almost say that the problem is not that the government has done too little, but that it has done too much,’ writes Roger Koppl in From Crisis to Confidence: Macroeconomics after the Crash. ‘The problem is changing rules, uncertain regulations, shifting Fed policy. The problem is the variability and unpredictability of government economic policy.’5
These economic interventions are among the ‘impertinent obstructions’ with which the federal government burdens the states, business enterprises, and individual men and women. Canada’s own time of reckoning came in the mid-90s, when the choice was between reform or collapse. Forward-thinking leaders, putting national well-being before any ideological qualms, faced reality and restructured downward the Welfare State. Much the same scenario took place in Australia and New Zealand, with the United Kingdom making up for opportunities lost under its Labour governments.
To-day, with slight hiccups, the economic future of all these countries is promising. Now America is poised on a similar precipice. As Leonard Read observed, the key is leadership and a faith in ‘the spiritual antecedent of the American miracle’:
As this belief in the use of force as a means of creative accomplishment increases, the belief in free men—that is, men acting freely, competitively, cooperatively, voluntarily—correspondingly diminishes. Increase compulsion and freedom declines. Therefore, the solution to this problem, if there be one, must take a positive form, namely, the restoration of a faith in what free men can accomplish.6
Will the United States follow the Commonwealth example and, following the November mid-term repudiation of ‘Big Government’ and in preparation for the presidential contest in ’16, rally against coercive intervention and for economic prosperity?
1. CAN-AM Relationship Drift Continues, The Nanos-UB North American Monitor — Year 10, 11.
2. Nanos/UB Survey, 12.
3. See Leonard E. Read, ‘The Essence of Americanism’, The Freeman, 48:9 (September 1998), 527-32.
4. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edwin Cannan, ed., Vol. 2 (London: Methuen & Co., 1904 [1776]), IV.v, 43.
5. Roger Koppl, From Crisis to Confidence: Macroeconomics after the Crash (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 2014), 14.
6. Read, ‘The Essence of America’, 531.
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