MASLOW'S HIERARCHY

The function of a national economy is to provide food, clothing, shelter and comforts to the people it serves. The standard of success is how well it fulfills that function.

We like to pretend that our economy rewards people in proportion to their contribution to the general welfare but that's obviously not so. Many of the people who make our society work earn very little pay, and some who are very well paid actually do more harm than good.

That's an obvious injustice, but there is probably no cure for it. A free society can't insist that people be paid what they are worth, or tell them how to make a living. For practical purposes, we even have to tolerate some illegal activity.

Just as a farmer can afford to keep some pets and purely decorative animals and can tolerate a few rats in his corn crib, a nation can afford to support some non-productive people and tolerate some predators.

The problem is to keep a balance. We have no standard to tell us what communities need, but scholars have looked at the needs of people. Psychologist Abraham Maslow studied the development of children and he postulated a five-layer "hierarchy of needs" that he says is common to all people. By inference, it should also be common to communities of people.

On his first level Maslow places "basic physiological needs" such as food and water. At the second level he puts safety and security, then belonging and social needs, esteem and status and finally, on the fifth level, self actualization and fulfillment.

Maslow assumes that no-one will worry about the higher-level needs until the more basic ones are filled. As an extreme example we can be certain that no one will worry about the highest levels of self actualization and fulfillment -- their chances of being elected president of the United States, for example -- until their basic physiological needs for food and water have been satisfied.

Taking a leaf from Maslow's book I propose a hierarchy of economic priorities in which we rate economic activity according to its importance.

We all need food, water and clothing and shelter appropriate to the climate we live in. Because we can't survive without them, producers of food, clothing and shelter are the primary industry. On a national scale we would have to include the manufacturing, services and education that support the production of food, water, clothing and shelter as part of the industry.

The fact that we can import food and clothing and the materials to build shelter does not change their primal positions because, whatever the cost, we can't afford to depend on imports.

These are the basic necessities, but Canada has already lost control of our supplies of food and clothing and we will soon lose control of our shelter. As a matter of national security we must regain and keep that control. When we do, the production of more benefit goods in Canada will solve many of our economic problems.

Safety and security are the second level in Maslow's hierarchy. In most countries that implies a need for armed forces but in Canada's case that's not so, because we have only one neighbor and that neighbor is the United States of America.

That makes the Canadian forces redundant because the United States would not allow any other country to invade Canada, and no Canadian armed forces could offer more than token resistance to an American invasion.

The best national security we can afford is a good reputation and a lot of friends. Canadians like to think that our participation in international peace-keeping gives us an international presence and it does, but we might want to think twice about our role.

If both sides to a dispute wanted peace there would be no need for peace-keepers. The peace-keepers that protect people on one side of a dispute protect them from people on the other, and in the process they make as many enemies as friends. More enemies than friends, because peace-keepers are never needed to defend the stronger side of a dispute.

Policemen around the world are seen as the enemies of criminals, and also of many of the people they protect.

The analogy to policemen is deliberate because their counterparts -- firemen -- are among the most honored and respected people in any community. I would not want to work as a policeman but I would be willing to work as a fireman, and I say Canada could develop a better international presence as a fireman that as a policeman.

Every year the world suffers countless natural disasters which range from minor events like tornadoes, hurricanes, landslides and floods to major ones like earthquakes and volcanoes. With the change in the climate the minor disasters are likely to become more frequent and there is always the possibility of a global catastrophe, like "the big one" earthquake that might sink California or the tsunami that might sweep right across Japan or a serious meteor strike.

We know that some disasters are certain to happen and that others are possible, but no single country in the world is prepared or equipped to handle them. Canada's defense budget is peanuts, on the world scale, but even so it could train and equip by far the biggest and best international rescue squad in the world.

A rescue squad could do nothing to resist a foreign invasion but neither can the Canadian armed forces and, unlike our armed forces, a major-league rescue squad could earn friends and respect around the world.

It could also earn us respect in a different league because the Canadian military can do nothing that would be important to a big country -- like the United States or Germany or France, for example -- but a rescue corps could. Canadian forces made no difference at all to the Gulf war but ten thousand well-trained rescue workers would make a big difference on the site of any major earthquake, hurricane or other disaster.

They would also have made a big difference in Canada several times in the past few years. The armed forces did help in the Winnipeg flood and the Montreal ice storm but they could have helped more with specialized equipment and training. A trained rescue force could also have helped in the Saguenay floods of 1996, the blizzard that isolated villages in the Fraser Canyon in 1997, and other disasters.

National security also demands industrial capacity and most nations' armed forces also help support their industrial development. Here too a Canadian rescue squad could do far more than our armed forces. Even if we had our own industrial sector our Canadian armed forces could never support the kind of research and development it would take to make us a world-scale weapons builder, but a national rescue force would be the only one in the world.

Even with the kind of military budget Canada can afford we could develop world-class rescue equipment, and while other countries compete for weapons sales we could have a growing world market to ourselves.

Maslow's third and fourth psychological levels are the need for belonging and social needs -- our membership in a group -- and for esteem and status. Development of an international rescue force could fill all of them, and give Canada a unique place among the nations of the world.

Maslow's fifth level is self actualization and fulfillment. Under a rational program of national development we would continue and perhaps even increase government support of the arts, with the big difference that as a self-supporting country we could afford the cost.

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