6 - Friday, December 4, 1992 - North Shore News Irresponsible act HIANGES TO the Infants Act of British Columbia will ondermine a2 parent’s or guardian’s natursl duty to be responsible for and make decisicns relative to the health of their child. An amendment quietly shuffled throvgh the legislature has siready passed third reading in Victoria. The amendmeni allows 2 ‘“‘Shealth-care provider’’ to become the sole judge of the level of bealth care 2 child receives. An existing provision defin- ing 2 medical practitioner (including medical, menial or dental) is with the term ‘health-care pro- vider’’ (sociz] workers, pharmacisis, peychologisis inciusive). Heakh care as defined within the amendment broadly includes cosmetic, td preventive and diagnostic treatments. The amendment would give children of any age the right to agree to medical treatment without the knowledge or con- sent of their parents or guardians. North Vancouver NDP MLA David Schreck says the existing law must be changed because it discriminates on the basis of zee and may violate the Charter of Rights and Freedems. By extension, the Young Offenders Act or the concept of waiting until one is 16 years old te drive and 19 years old to legally drivk alcohol in B.C. may arguably be discriminatory on the basis of age. Bat freedom in the absence of reasoned responsibility is a dangerous thing. LETTER OF THE DAY Longshoreman responds to Collins’ column Dear Editor: in reply to Doug Collins’ col- umn of Nov. 18, I'd like to cor- rect one or two misconceptions he appears to have about longshoremen. First: there is no mention of the dangers of our job; you should try it before you knock it, Doug. Second: a foreman who works eight hours a day, five days a week, 46 weeks a year would carn $51,520 per year. In order to make $102,000 a year longshore foremen must work 3,650 straight-time hours; in other words, 10 hours 2 day, 365 days a year. What actually happens is some foremen work a lot of double shifts to make this kind of money. If you work 16 hours a day, natu- tally you make more money. Third: I really don’t get the comparison between what fongshore foremen make and why doctors can't get the time of day out of Victoria. Don’t you know, Doug, that longshoremen are under Canadian law and have nothing to do with Victoria? Howard West North Vancouver Price hikes in former Soviet Union right on! ON THE first day of price reform in the former Soviet Union {ihe “‘CIS’’), according to Canadian headlines, citi- zens were angry that enormous price increases had not produced cheap goods immediately. No doubt this was an accurate depiction of the mood in the CIS, but there was also a worrying undertone of skepticism among Canadian journalists about the wisdom of freeing prices there. This skepticism misses the crucial role of prices as signals. The Russian people may be ex- cused such ignorances after 70 years of Communist education. But we should understand clearly that freeing prices in the CIS was essential. And what was essential was not that their absolute level should change, but that they should be free to change relative to one another. Prices function in a market economy as extraordinarily effec- tive convevors of information. It is customarily understood that the higher the price cf some- thing, the less of it people will agree to purchase. But a high price can also be evidence that a good or service is currently much desired. If people are willing to pay a high price for something, this signal then washes back through the production process, because the higher the price of the final product the more its producers can pay for the necessary imputs. And the more they can pay for the necessary inputs, the more of them they will receive, and the more of the desired good will be produced. This is why the ma: «1 is “‘effi- cient"’ in the sense of pr-ducing what real people actually waat. Because the most vaiuable thing most people possess is their own labor, prices measure the value of things by taking what is almost a public opinion poll as to what they are worth. And in this one people may not give dishonest or inaccurate an- swers when asked if something is worth working for, because the way the answer is to work for it or not to. Economic systems that do not rely on free market price forma- tion, by contrast, refuse to measure the worth of things by whether real people actually want them enough to work for them. The consequences of this can be very clearly seen in the former Soviet Union. Its economy was in important ways very productive; it won the By John Robson Guest Columnist race Khrushchev declared that it would win, outproducing America by 1980 in such heavy industrial products as steel, cement, oil, machine tools and so on. The problem was that it won the wrong race. For the proportions in which various things were produced in the U.S.S.R., and the uses to which they were put, were not determined by che preferences of its citizens. And therefore it economy was inherently incapable of satisfying those preferences. - And it still is, although prices have not been freed, because those prices have only just begun con- veying information. One thing they have revealed is that the CIS is desperately poor. They will now begin to improve the distribution of what can be produced with existing facilities; this will be mest effective in the case of agriculture, if the farmers can be made to believe it will con- tinue. But it cannot wash away the consequences of 70 years of so- cialist planning overnight. What is really needed in the CIS is for new productive facilities to be established that will satisfy the wishes of the people, and this cen only happen if the price system: is allowed to inform would-be pro- ducers of those wishes. That requires a long-term commitment to free market prices. - The problem with the cold Soviet prices was that they failed to determine what should be rela- tively expensive and what rela- tively cheap. The price reform now occurring should noi (and generally docs not) involve moving from a set of | low, administratively determined — prices to a set of high, ad- ministrati determined prices, but from a set of administratively determined prices to mar- . ket-determined prices. Nothing ct else, quite literally, makes Dr. John } Robson is an economist associated with the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver- based economic think tank dedicated to the promotion of the free market system. ’ Display Advertising 980-0511 Real Estate Advertising 985-6982 Subscriptions 986-1337 Classified Advertising 985-6222 Fax 985-3227 Aaministration 985-2131 MEMBER Peter Speck Oistribution 988-1337 panel Editor . _. Timothy Renshaw Managing Editor. ... Noel Wright Sales & Marketing Director Linda Stewart Comptroller... Doug Foot North Shore News, founded in 1969 as an independent suburban newspaper and quatfied under Schedule 111, Paragraph 4th of ine Excse Tax Act, ts pub&éshed each by North Shore Free Prete bid. and ry Printed on 16% recycled Rewsprnt NEWS photo = 2 WINE AND Dine British Columbia’s Leta Labiuk (centre) discusses various wines from B.C. at the recent Business 1139 Lonsdale Avenue, after Business gathering on the North Shore. North Vancouver, 8.C. 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