It is very good that Canada has so many deep thinkers, because we have major public policy problems that require creative solutions.  For instance health care, which has underperformed at exorbitant cost for decades, and on which they have at last devised a plan: Spend a lot more money.  Why didn't I think of that?

Oh right.  Because it's been the plan for 50 years and never works.  The incentives in the system are wrong and the money vanishes like water poured onto sand.

To be fair, what I just said is not original, let alone trendy.  It's what economists have long warned us about grand schemes from socialized medicine to rent control, especially since the "marginal revolution" over a century ago.  And what "public choice" theorists have been telling us with increasing insistence since at least the 1950s: Incentives matter in government just as in the private sector, but they are different and harder to get right.

Thus politicians would rather open a shiny new hospital than spend on boring maintenance.  And go to a private clinic themselves while telling you not to.

Now to be fair to the deep thinkers as well, their plan is not just to spend more money, which might cause some sort of backlash from informed commentators saying health already takes more than 40 percent of program spending everywhere and was a horrendous mess even before the pandemic.  And from voters saying I can't pay more taxes.  Their plan has a cunning extra wrinkle.

The extra cash will not come from citizens.  It will come from Ottawa where, as you know, a magic money tree produces the stuff in unlimited quantities for anything you like and thanks to historically low interest rates we never have to pay it back or even face significant interest costs.  And since those historically low interest rates are the result of deep thinkers discovering printing money sure beats working for a living, it can go on forever.

Lumbering sauropods like me are prone to mentioning that having the money come from "Ottawa" rather than taxpayers was the spend-gazillions-on-health plan all along, through high interest rates and low, giving the current version a certain improvised or even desperate quality.  But the nimble primates who run Canada are not bothered by such considerations.

For instance, an Op Ed in Thursday's National Post bearing the name of Ontario premier Doug Ford admitted "The challenges we now face are critical: a backlog of surgeries, growing hallway health care, the need to build 30,000 long-term care beds…"  But it blithely ascribed it to "years of neglect" and claimed "The global pandemic has exposed many of the underlying cracks in a tired and neglected system.  Too few nurses and personal support workers, aging hospitals and a growing waitlist for long-term care beds are all the result of decades of underinvestment."

So full spend ahead.  But wait.  There's more.  You also get the tired though insufficiently neglected cliché that "When medicare was first established, the federal government agreed to cover 50 per cent of health-care costs."  But now it's down to "just 22 per cent" and if it doesn't go up "Ontario will face a $40-billion annual funding gap for health care by the year 2040."  So we just need that share to leap magically back up to 35 percent and "Ontario would receive an additional $10 billion in health-care funding every year" and gleaming new hospitals, MRIs, long-term beds and everything else will spring up from King Street to Kapuskasing.  Voila.  Free money.

It's not obvious what the premier or his scribe thinks "Ontario" is.  If it's the Ontario government he could be half-right.  But in case nobody ever told him, "Ontario" as a large and wealthy province actually supplies, or rather its citizens supply, much of the revenue that flows into federal coffers each year.  So if "Ontario" means the people who live there, the proposal is to take their money, send it to Trudeau and have him send it back to Ford as though it were created from thin air.

Even if Trudeau does print the money from thin air instead of raising it in taxes, sending it to Queen's Park will give the Ontario government claim to $10 billion more of the goods and services produced in the province, leaving citizens exactly that much less.  (That money is wealth is another of the deep thinkers' unoriginal and profoundly mistaken ideas.)  On the other hand, Ford will get the credit and Trudeau the blame.

Notice the incentive problem?  It's why in a story that could have run in any year in the past 20, the National Post just said "Premiers aren't expecting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to agree immediately to their demand for at least $28 billion more each year for health care."

The Spartans would have fun with that "immediately."  But not the deep thinkers, who have applied another brilliant and original solution: If you can't fix a problem, ignore it.  Not one in 50 of them, including those titled "premier", ever talks about whether socialized medicine rewards the wrong things.  Like keeping people out of the queue for specialized procedures so the dreaded "waiting lists" appear shorter than they really are.

Instead the deep thinkers have simply concluded that private enterprise is greedy, short-sighted and shoddy while government is benign, far-seeing and shiny.  Which is why socialism has worked so well everywhere except in Canadian health care, the Soviet Union, Britain in the 1970s, Venezuela and elsewhere on planet Earth.  But do not disturb the "next time for sure" consensus lest you be shrieked at over "two-tier health care" by privileged folks who never waited for a medical procedure in their lives and, if asked to do so, would promptly go to the United States or a private clinic.  (If the walls of, say, the Cambie Clinic could talk, there'd be a lot of red faces among its critics… if they were given to embarrassment which in fact they are not.)

Here I should give credit to my former Ottawa Citizen colleague Randall Denley, who recently suggested not just spending a lot more money but also spending it better.  Doubtless this stunning insight will appeal to the folks currently wondering why the system spends money so badly.  Whoever they are.

For the most part, the premiers seem convinced it spends money very well.  Just not nearly enough of it, especially other people's.  And if you ask them "Well, if 40% of program spending isn't enough, what would be?  How about half?  Or 60%?  Do I hear 75?" they'll turn to the deep thinkers and get a sage and reassuring response like "More would be good.  And it should fall from the sky."

Thank heavens we have such people in charge of public policy.  Imagine the mess otherwise.

Photo Credit: Calgary Herald