The Rural Voice, 1991-08, Page 8AGRICULTURAL
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4 THE RURAL VOICE
SOME ARE INSULATED
FROM THE REAL WORLD
Keith Roulston, a newspaper publisher
and playwright who lives near Blyth,
is the originator and publisher of The
Rural Voice.
When people start talking to me
about the importance of the market-
place or the discipline of the market I
get kind of leery but deep down, I
guess, I do believe in the marketplace.
It's just that the people who are al-
ways talking about the importance of
the market too often are using it as an
excuse for sitting back and doing no-
thing while other people get hurt.
People who talk about the importance
of the market are also usually the
people who are currently the winners
undcr free market conditions.
But then I go to a meeting, as I did
the other day, and hear the other side
of the story. A civil servant was before
a local council explaining why coun-
cillors should go along with a 28 per
cent increase in his department's bud-
get at a time when people were trying
to cut back in everything from gov-
ernment expenses to personal living
expenses because of the recession.
The man had a presentation filled
with so many statistics he put some
councillors to sleep, but they woke up
in time to put some hard questions to
him at the end. He did his best to ex-
plain the need, and, in his own mind,
probably felt he had justified every
cent he asked for. He pleaded the im-
portance of his service to the commu-
nity (in his case it even meant protect-
ing little children so what more could
you ask). He pleaded that more staff
was needed to do the job properly. He
argued that his municipality was be-
hind the surrounding municipalities.
It made me think how different the
world is for those shielded from the
realities of the marketplace compared
to those of us who live in the "real"
world. I was thinking about my own
little corner of the world. If money
wasn't a reality, I could easily argue
that we need, for instance, more staff
writers and advertising representatives
for Rural Voice. I could argue that we
need new equipment, that we need an
art department, or that our staff is
underpaid.
But unlike the bureaucrat in gov-
ernment, or for that matter big busi-
ness, there's a bottom line in our busi-
ness just as there is in farming. When
bad times hit, you know the rules have
instantly changed. People in small bu-
siness know their incomes aren't guar-
anteed to increase by the cost of living
plus a little each year. We live in the
world as it is, not as it should be.
In the name of fairness, for in-
stance, we've instituted pay equity. I
suppose there are some who would
still argue against equal pay for work
of equal value, but most of us accept
the principle. The problem is that
women working in predominantly
"female" occupations don't have any
men to be compared to. So, seeking
fairness, regulators went searching for
ways to compare "equal value," com-
paring one occupation to another.
I'd gladly apply the same prin-
ciples to my own case. I figure I'm in
the education business so I could
make a good argument for pay equity
with teachers. Maybe I should get
more since I work 12 months a year
and a lot more hours each week.
Farmers, under that reasoning,
would be the highest paid people in
society. After all, doctors would be
helpless to save patients if they were
starving because there were no far-
mers to produce food. Starving people
wouldn't worry about buying cars, or
going to the Skydome to pay multi-
million dollar salaries to ball players.
But we don't live in the world as it
should be, we live in the world as it is.
We live with the marketplace, even if
a huge part of our population today
doesn't. Farmers are in trouble.
People in small businesses do without
things those in big business or govern-
ment think are essential. Like it or not,
we live in the real world. Somebody's
got to.0