To the editor:
Re: "Pool displeasure," Central Park, June 22.
Residents want to use the Lord Byng Pool. The facilities have been built. There is no shortage of life guards in a country that has well over one million people unemployed. So why is the pool closed for longer than a normal maintenance period? It's shut because of dysfunctional economics. Certainly the city and the province are constrained because they are merely users of the currency and are dependent on tax revenues. But the federal government is the monopoly issuer of Canada's money and can afford to guarantee that every lifeguard, and for that matter anyone who wants a job, has one.
If there were a war, would Canada ever surrender because we couldn't afford to pay our soldiers? For those indoctrinated to argue that federal government deficit spending would automatically lead to inflation, please note that Canada's debt to GDP ratio is about 35 per cent. Japan's ratio is 233 per cent and there is no sign of any inflation there.
As John Maynard Keynes put it many years ago: "The Conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed, that it is 'rash' to employ men, and that it is financially 'sound' to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness for an indefinite period, is crazily improbable-the sort of thing which no man could believe who had not had his head fuddled with nonsense for years and years-"
Larry Kazdan, Vancouver
