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The Rural Voice, 1992-06, Page 10"Our experience assures lower cost water wells" 91 YEARS' EXPERIENCE Member of Canadian and Ontario Water Well Associations • Farm • Industrial • Suburban • Municipal Licensed by the Ministry of the Environment ►�11 �,e 1,,,,Jill r • ' . 011-!'-- DAVIDSON WELL DRILLING LTD. WINGHAM Serving ontano since 1900 519-357-1960 WINGHAM 519-886-2761 WATERLOO Royal Bank is pleased to announce the appointment of Roger Denize, Account Manager, Wiarton Business Centre. Roger comes to Wiarton with a strong background in Agriculture and Business finance. He assumes the responsibili- ties of marketing Royal Bank's many financial services to Agriculture and Independent Business clients. Roger's international experience will be a significant resource to assist clients in meeting their needs in an increasingly global market place. Owen Sound and Bruce Peninsula arca includes branches in Owen Sound, Sauble Beach, Wiarton, Lion's Head and Tobermory. 6 THE RURAL VOICE Keith Roulston Competitiveness: Every age, even an age that seems to pride itself in having no religion, seems to have a dominant faith. In the 1990s, that religion seems to be competitiveness. Surely competitiveness is just a fact of life, not a religion, you say. Maybe. But the zeal with which people pursue competitiveness these days is almost like the zeal of new converts to a religion. There's a blind faith that in these uncertain times, the marketplace will bring the one, true certainty, just as faith in a god might in times past. "Let the market decide," believers chant over and over. The zeal to spread religion has been one of the dominant forces in world history. The desire to deliver the good news about Christianity, sometimes at the point of a gun, led European powers to spread their influence around the world. Moslem zealots conquered the Holy land, leading Christian nations to fight back during the Crusades. Moslem fundamentalists today are trying to take over many Moslem countries where they feel more moderate practice of their religion has led to a watered down faith. Such is the case too with the pro- moters of the marketplace and com- petitiveness today. The faith must be taken to the far corners of the earth, even to benighted people who just don't understand the benefits of the all-knowing system. If countries are quite happy with giving protection to portions of their population they feel necessary to keep alive, they must be made see the light of day. Barriers to trade and competitiveness must be broken down. The Japanese, worried about self-sufficiency in rice, must be forced into opening their market to American rice. Canadian dairy and religion of the '90s poultry producers must be made to see the error of their ways and shed their pagan belief in supply management. Don't listen to them when they say they're just practicing their beliefs in their own little corner: they endanger the one true religion if they continue. That's the feeling you get reading the farm papers or talking to some people in the business, these days. There was a processor I recently talked to who longed for the death of marketing boards because he felt it would bring more of a market for a by-product he had to sell. It's there in the literature from pork producers, grain producers, beef producers — everybody that isn't in supply management. Food processors want the death of supply management. Consumer spokes people can hardly wait. All evoke the hallowed name of competitiveness. But religious fervour always worries me a bit. When everybody starts thinking the same way I worry about the tug -o' -war of ideas that makes a democracy work. Right now the government, a large part of the bus-iness leadership, most economic aca-demics and a sizable portion of the press, have accepted without question the rightness of competitive- ness. The demise of communism is taken as a vindication of right-wing, market -place economics and anyone who tries to moderate the process, who tries to soften it with regulations or joint action like marketing boards, is a heretic. But like communism, hard -edged capitalism has had its failures. Slavery, child labour, unsafe work- places are all part of the heritage of unfettered capitalism. Only by having a softened free market system did we reach the prosperity we now enjoy. Sure a market free of competitive- ness is a market in trouble but there's a happy medium. We must be comp- etitive but we must be sensible too.0 True believers pursue it with the zeal of new converts Keith Roulston is editor and publisher of The Rural Voice as well as being a playwright. He lives with his family near Blyth, Ontario.