Saturday, January 17, 2009

Tribute to a border runner

Rolf Penner is a pro-free market farmer who has been a consistent and outspoken opponent of Canada's Wheat Board monopoly.

And at a recent wheat growers' event, he paid tribute to Jim Chatney, another farmer who in an act of defiance took a bag of wheat across to the US and donated it to a 4-h club. For that he was jailed.

Here's part of Penner's tribute:

"All of those farmers who ran the border made a very important contribution to the cause of freedom and Liberty in Canada. Until they did it the Wheat Board could always pretend that it was a benevolent organization. It was implied that if you sold your grain to someone else you would go to jail but until it happened nobody really took it seriously. What the border runners did, is they took what was implicit and they made it explicit. There was no longer any doubt that it was a crime in western Canada to sell your own wheat and barley."

Read the rest here.

4 comments:

percyq said...

Liberty and freedom my a**. Every one of them have been on the public teat from the first acre they ever ploughed. There's never any talk of liberty and freedom from farm subsidies for taxpayers.

Anonymous said...

Then you never caught my talk entitled " the subsidy snare"

Rolf

http://www.fcpp.org/main/publication_detail.php?PubID=1337

percyq said...

Sorry, Rolf, one lone voice doesn't a principled position make. If your border runners were giving back their nisa, aida, grip, cais, ad hoc etc,etc, etc. checks back, they'd have my admiration and support. Instead I find their position unprincipled and self-serving. Nelson Mandelas they ain't.

Anonymous said...

I am not alone, there are far more free market farmers out there than you might think. They do not get the press coverage as often as they deserve but they are there none the less. I don't think that it's any more fair to paint all farmers with same 'socialist' brush as it is to paint all Canadians that way.

BTW- How many free market minded Canadians use the public schools to educate their children, use the public medicare system to look after their ill's, have at one time or another collected EI, accepted the child tax benefit payments and will or are collecting CPP? I would guess most.

Sometimes you have no choice but to use the system that you are stuck with even while you are trying to change it. A Libertarian world view may be many different things but it is not a suicide cult and anyone who believes otherwise should check their premises.