Renegade

There is no connection to being "essential" and subsidiies. It is only in your mind that they seem to be linked. I have never said that urbanites are more or less "essential" than rural dwellers. I have simply pointed out undeniable facts. No, I don't have to justifiy my own exitance, nor do I ask that any one else do so. However I do ask that when I and others are forcibly made to subsidize that there is justification for that subsidy. So far I havent' see it. It does and I will. It seem like your stated direction didn't last long, did it?

Not at all. I posed a simple mental exercise. One that you are unwilling to participate in, because you know what the answer is. I have never claimed to be essential to the economy and the country.

Protect society???? How on earth is society threatened? You don't avoid the question of why you don't have the same revulsion of two carriers of genetic diseases procreating. You also avoid the question of if procreating weren't an issue, wouild it make incest ok? Finally what about the case where the participants aren't genetically related (eg adopted kids), would that still be considered repulsive by your criteria. It would seem you are very comfortable imposing your standard of morality on everyone else. I am not. IMV, the separation of church and state, morality and law is a fundamental principle of our society.

Of course. There was a time when spousal abuse was tolerated, even expected. We can't evolve our system unless we constantly ask why.

I understand it is repulsive to you. FWIW it is repulsive to me too. However, I don't think what is repulsive to either of us is sufficient criiteria to make it illegal. So your objection is based upon the cost to the health and social system? Can I then assume that you have no objection to cases of incest where no children can be borne? Can I also assume you have the same repulsion to partners who marry and and have genetic disorders which they may pass on to their children? It is not a question of what is "NORMAL" it is a question of what shoudl be illegal. Many consider sodomy in opposite-sex relationships ABNORMAL, yet not illegal. It is clear what your standard of morality is. What is not clear is why your standard shoudl be forcefully imposed on everyone.

Ok Both of you, here we go again with this justification that if others are doing it we must do it too. It isn't rational and defies common sense yet you are all to willing to believe it. Let's do this mental exercise. If California decided that they would give all Canadians free tomatoes (or Korea decided to gve all Canadians free cars), would Canada be more or less prosperous after the gift than before?

Ok, let's generalize and talk about the myriad of ways one's live can take different directions - all beyond the control of oneself. We seem to accept that responsibilty for an individual rest with the parent prior to the time that individual reaches adulthood. Their are many responsibilities for the individual we expect the parents to take on behalf of that individual, including the financial and behavioural. The cost mitigation of factors beyond the individual's control should also rest with the parents. If the parents are unable or unwilling to assume these responsibilites, they should not be undertaking to be parents. At some point, as the individual transitions to adulthood the individual assumes those responsibilteis from his parents. This includes financial and behavioural and also the cost of mitigating circumstances beyond his control. It is really impossible to say. I suppose it really depends upon what is meant by a fate far worse. Would I afterthefact buy pre-birth insurance to insure that I inherited the genetics and circumstances I did? Probably not, afterall, with the luck of the draw I may have ended up being Bill Gates. As I have said before, even if this were possible I don't think it is an individual's responsibility. It is his parents. If he is born into favourable/unfavourable circumstances he should thank/curse his parents. With the decisionmaker relies the responsibilty. As the individual was not the decisionmaker, he should also not have the responsibilty. If society thought it was important enough to mitigate against the risk of being born to destitute or irresponsible parents, they should enact and enforce leglislation to make sure only responsible and capable parents have kids. In addition parents should have to buy insurance on the child prior to birth to cover areas beyond their control. Today, we put very few barriers to destitute or irresponsible parents having kids and in many cases actually encourage them to do so. If all of this means fewer people have kids, so be it. At least it better assure that the ones that do have kids are more responsible and the kids have a better chance of success in life.

Absolutely we should always examine an re-examine what we permit and disallow to make sure that there are real and jutified reasons for doing so. Only by questioning and not take it as an assumption do we evolve. It is easy to answer the question of why children having sex with their parents is "wrong". It is because they are incapable of giving informed consent, however incest spans much more than child-parent relations. Specificly what shoudl be addressed is why we disallow adults from making their own decisions about their sexual partners if there is mutual informed consent. Indeed, it shouldn't matter if it is repulsive to YOU. You can set a standard of behaviour well beyond what is legal. The question is should it be illegal? Making it legal doesn't mean saying it is "OKAY". What is deemed "OKAY" is a personal assessment. ------------------------------- BTW, while it may have offended you to even be asked the question, you still have not answered it.

Don, why should a 30yo son marrying his 50yo dad be illegal? Simply because you and others don't like it. Similarly why should 6 adults marrying each other be illegal? Marrying a horse is more problem because you need some way of knowing that the horse is capable of and is giving informed consent. That is true. There should be no basis for denying an adult father and son from marrying. Wrong is a subjective assessment. Should it be illegal, no. One of the more thoughtful post in this thread I've seen. Ultimately I think you are right, this is illegal simply because enought people "don't like the idea" but are unable to provide sufficient other justification. It bring up the interesting discussion of if enough people are repulsed by it, perhaps only because it invokes an emotional reaction, should that be sufficient critieria to ban an activity?

The landlord cares about only a few things about the tenant. One of the critical ones is if they are able to pay the rent. A credit check helps assure the landlord that the tenant will. The renter cares very little about a landlords ability to pay so a credit check is not very useful. What a renter looks for is very different. As I have said, all a renter has to do is ask previous or current tenants or even neighbours. Very few bother to do so. Let's assume a rental tribunal did not exist and the hot water doesn't work. The tenant has several options. 1. Pay to have it fixed and sue the landlord for costs. 2. Pay to have it fixed and withold it from the rent, and wait for the landlord to sue him. 3. Sue for breach of contract and damages and have the rental agreement voided. As you may no doubt point out, some of these options carry an overhead which may not be worth the effort, and exactly same is true of a landlord where the tenant causes a relatively minor transgression. No, you haven't denied that tenants have abused things, but the bulk of your statements have been directed toward landlords with scant mention of the abuses of tenants. If you think that "Lousy landlords get lousy tenants" is a truism, then prehaps you also believe "Lousy tenants get lousy landlords" is a truism. No I do not, any more than I think that speeding is "abuse" of the Highway code. It is a violation and it has penalties. My interpretation of "abuse" is when a law is misinterpreted and leveraged for advantage in a use beyond its original intention. It happens in tax law all the time which is why that law is always being amended and rewritten. Er, no. I think I made it clear that I think it is pretty much a one-way street favouring the tenant. It's his property and there are many terms he should be able to dictate just like any other vendor. For example. He should be able to ban pets. The law doesn't allow him to do so. He should be able to charge late fees when the rent is late. All of these should be spelled in the contract with the tenant and the tenant should be free to refuse them and sign elsewhere, or to negotiate acceptable terms wth the landlord.

I believe it is only part of the reason. I believe the major other reason was to alleviate the burden on the court system and provide a timely and cost-effective dispute resolution system for landlords and tenants which courts could not provide. I have no issue with providing an alternate dispute resolution system. I do have an issue when the law is skewed in favour of the renter as it always has been to my knowledge. The landlord is a vendor of a product and should be entitled to the same rights as any other vendor. The same is true for a tenant as a consumer. You claim he does, but show no evidence that the landlord has access to any better information on the tenant than the tenant does about the landlord. Just as court is an option for a tenant who has a greviance. It works both ways. If a tenant doesn't like what a landlord is doing, he can stop being a tenant and buy his own place, or he can find a landlord more to his liking. You finally acknowledged that the law was "abused" by both tenants and landlords alike. That was my point. Your original statement was that the law was "abused" by landlords in the 80s and 90s. BTW, I don't consider "key money" abuse. They are a natural reaction to price intervention. The only reason for "key money" is when you get artificial restriction of the housing supply without allowing prices to rise to curtail demand. If you are unhappy with the existance of "key money", you can fault government legislation. The other examples you cite are not "abuses" of the law. They are violations and there are penalties provided in the law, both now and then for those kind of violations.

That would seem to indicate that local produce have a natural advantage to local consumers making the case for subsidies weak to non-existant.

IMO you stretch the term "subsidy" much too far. Governments "intefere" with everything from consumer, environmental, and workforce legislation. It would seem to me just an excuse to provide our own subsidies. If some country stumbled upon a natural resource within its borders, which could be easily harvested and exported, would you consider this a "subsidy"? Assuming that natural resource was something Canada also produced, would the availabity of this cheap natural resource be good or bad for Canada? Should Canada then resort to subsidizing its own industry to make its prices competitive? Yes the auto companies and workers would boom, however the Canadian consumer would not. There are many more consumers than there are workers. You would in effect be forcing consumers to pay a premium in the quality or price of cars in order to buy the jobs of auto workers. It is exactally this kind of situation which led to sub-standard quality North American cars and generally led us to being less prosperous as a society. I agree that you are half-right. There should be no picking, no choosing and no subsidies.

We were discussing who should assume the cost of "insuring" a child for events or environments beyond his control before his birth. In my view, it should be the parents. I you want to hoist those costs to the child after the fact, fine, however it has got no or a very tenous connection to their success. Further, our country doesn't assume the "insurance" cost of all births. Some people are born overseas and someone else assumes those costs. Similarly we can't collect all the after-the-fact costs, even if those individuals are capable of paying, as those indiiduals may no longer even reside in the country of their birth. The most direct way is to tie the decision by the parents to the cost being incurred. Sure, but it is the parents doing the "playing", it is the parents who should do the paying

So why isn't sexual relationships between two people who are carriers for Tay Sachs criminal? What if the participants in incest bear no chance of having kids? (eg they are gay or infertile) Should it still be criminal?

The reason I ask you to answer is because your own response points to the flaws in your own argument. The reason we individually don't produce our own food, is because we SPECIALIZE at what we are efficient at. Some of us produce in manufacturing, some of us in services, some of us in informaiton industries. Just because we don't ourselves produce food, we don't feel a threat that our food supply will suddenly be cut off. The same is true at a country level. We should focus on the areas we can efficiently produce. Our food supply isn't threatned simply because someone else produces at a lower cost than we can ourselves. If they can we should let them, and probably say thanks. So again you are presupposing a threat which has never materialized before against ANY industrialized nation? Where we spend taxpayer dollars is always a matter of choice. I can point to much more real and immediate needs than the threat you seem to feel is onerous yet has never happened in history. Can you name how many countries produce significant amounts of oil? Can you name how many produce food? The volume of names should tell you why one scenario should be much more likely that the other. Given that an energy shortage is much more likely a food embargo, maybe those dollars spent on farm subsidies are better spent mitigating that threat. I'm glad you realize what a stupid analogy it is, because I bring it up since it is the equivalent of your "food is a weapon" analogy. Clearly, you lack an undestanding of economics and that we can achieve greater prospertiy by specalizing and not relying on us trying to do everything ourselves. Yet you keep responding.

How is it a subsidy? Do you think if the reverse were true (ie we banned the import of non-domestic cars) our economy would boom?

No you said it would be an economic disaster for Canada. Clearly the Canadian economy was not a disaster. It was the ag industry which was impacted. BIG DIFFERENCE. To be fair, you are quite right that it is not just rural residents who are subsidized. However to have a thread about all subsidization would be unmanagable, and therefore I focused on one type of subsiization. I have repeatedly said that I have a disdain for ALL subsidization.

It is also possible that it is not about lanlords at all. It is about votes. When tenants hold more votes than landlords, it make for political expediency to cater to their whims regardless of any percieved trangression. BS. Have you been a landlord? I have experience with landlords giving good references for a tenant simply because they want to get rid of them. I have first hand experience with tenant usiing their ftriends as "references" pretending that they were the applicant's previous landlord. You seem to think this kind of falsification can only be done by landlords. Pure BS. Absolutely a tenant can damage a furnace. One case I know of the furnace was damaged during a "moving out party" by one of the tenant's guests. The story only came out much later, long after the tenant had moved out. Beyond the damage deposit it is many times not cost effective to persue a former tenant for vandalism damages, thus they get away with it. What do you pecisely mean by "abused"?

What's your point? That everyone has got their hand out for subsidies. Agreed. That is why is the only sensible thing to do is to say no to ANY subsidies. Show me some economic theory or examples that prove this.

Sure we can. Let them subsidize. Let us buy at subsidized prices. It amounts a wealth transfer from them to us.

I saw a recent story on CNN: Unknowing twins marry each other What makes incest wrong? What makes this couple brother and sister? Is it simply DNA? Would two adopted kids who grew up in the same household as brother and sister but not genetically related, be considered "brother" and "sister" and any sexual acts between them incest? It seems to me that our crimminalization of incest is simply based upon past cultural taboos, rather than any rational justification.

Perhaps you can be more specific. What period are you referring to in which the law gave the landords an advantage over tenants. If a registry for bad tenants exist, it is because landlords have organized one. That same opportunity is open to tenants. Tenants are free to ask for references from the landlord, or simply to ask the previous tenant or other tenants of the same landlord. It isn't hard. Dilligence works both ways. You are assumning it is easy to detect the damage. A furnace which is damaged may not be detected until the following winter. Homebuyers often miss serious issues even AFTER an inspection by qualified inspectors. You think it is hard for a landlord to miss non-obvious damage? Precisely no landlord with a lick of business sense would be managing low income housing. Don't think so. If you look at the law at the time it is still heavily skewed toward the tenant and the onus is always on the landlord to prove the tenant wrong.

What other world industries do is irrelevant afterall isn't the argument that WITHIN Canada we are subsidizing each other?

Please explain why not. That would get to the heart of the issue. Then your whole point of "food as a weapon" is irrelevant. It is meaningless to chant "food as a weapon" as a justification of why we need a protected agricultural industry when there is no threat of the use of "food as a weapon" toward Canada. By your own admission you have no such example. The analogy would be if I said "air supply is a weapon" and I pointed to countless cases of indivdiuals being choked because their air supply was cut off. Such an analogy is meaningless because it doesn't apply at a country level, just as your "food as a weapon" analogy is meaningless. It is quite possible that ONE country will contemplate withtholding food shipments to us, but it stretches credulity to believe that ALL countries would simultaneously do so, because that is what needs to happen for the threat to materalize. Furthermore, all countries would need to collude to do so suddenly, so that Canada has no opportunity to stockpile food. To believe that all this could happen as a real threat, would be grasping at straws. Sure I do, if those necessities can be produced more efficiently than I can and I was assured of safety of supply. Both those conditions are met for food. I guess I'm surprised that anyone would post links which are irrelevant and so peripherial to the issue. I will have to decline your offer to post more irrelevant links. So you are trying to mitigate aginst a threat which has never happened, is unlikely to happen, and has a remote possibility of ever happening? It would seem to me that taxpayer dollars are better invested in the many other real threats and needs we face. Based upon your positioning of "food as a weapon" I'm surprised the US didn't think of it and starve Afganstan and Iraq into submission. When simple questions can't be answered it generally show me that the poster has no answers. Not to worry, I have low expections of your answers, and I haven't been disappointed.