THE GOOD, BAD AND UGLY OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP

In a Wrights Lane video I vented about government debt that will most certainly end up being nothing but a tax on future generations. I purposely stayed away from any references to particular federal or provincial leaders.

History, however, is replete with examples of good and bad leaders...Nothing new there.

Queen Elizabeth 1, for instance, was a much respected monarch who said: "It is not given to man to tax and be loved."  One would presume that what she meant was that a ruler cannot tax excessively and be respected by his or her subjects.  She practiced what she preached, taxed modestly and was adored by her nation.

Peter the Great was a Russian Czar who followed a long line of incompetent leaders. He abolished the plow tax and the household tax which together had been crippling the economy and replaced them with a simple and single poll tax on all males.  Peasants who worked hard and purchased new equipment and lands could keep the extra revenues generated.  He at least temporarily reversed the declining Russian economy by remaking the tax system, stimulating economic growth and decentralizing the state.

William Tell is famed in Switzerland not for shooting an apple off his son's head, but for inciting a successful tax revolt against Austria's King Rudolph. In 1315, Rudolph's troops descended on the Swiss infantry outnumbering them almost 10-1 and were still defeated...Apparently the Swiss were stronger when mad than the Austrians were greedy.

Sticking to the good, the bad and the ugly in leadership throughout history, modern Canadiana has had its share of the bad.  In the 1970s the Liberals gave us such an enormous per capita bureaucracy it was laughable on the world stage, and Pierre Trudeau himself will forever be remembered as the godfather of deficit financing.

Despite PC leader Brian Mulroney's '84 campaign promise to give civil servants "pink slips and running shoes," like a good liberal he hired a whole bunch more when he became PM and gave us the GST.  As England's Margaret Thatcher noted in her memoirs, he was a Progressive Conservative who placed far too much emphasis on the adjective.

Sometimes ya just gotta laugh!  It beats crying.