Flights Of Fantasy - The Left's Approach To The Economy

If you're planning to read this post, you probably should get a coffee because it's a long one.

Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party is worried about Canada’s trade imbalance. I know this because their leader, Thomas Mulcair, has waxed poetically in another of his apoplectic fits as he blamed the government for this newfound crisis. He is positively livid about the fact that Canada is currently importing more than it is exporting.

Sometimes, he gets so livid his face turns red and I worry about his blood pressure rising to the point that he becomes dizzy and might trip over his sanctimonious rhetoric and hurt himself.

Earlier this year, he was positively livid about the fact that western provinces like Alberta were doing very well while Ontario and Quebec and were struggling economically. Mr. Mulcair, in what has become the mantra of the left these days, blamed the successful economies in the west for the failure of those who mismanaged their affairs in the east. Sounds like so many today who blame their personal plight on those who have succeeded doesn’t it? 

Blame and envy are something at which the left has become very accomplished.

The Ontario and Quebec Liberal governments who had bought their way into power on borrowed money weren’t responsible for their economic woes according to Mr. Mulcair; it was the success of the resource driven economies in the west. It wasn’t absurd entitlement and meddling policies of the left-leaning governments that were responsible, it was the successful governance of the Conservative government in Alberta.

That argument sounded good but didn’t fly very well unfortunately because a rather significant wave of inconvenient facts in both Parliament and the media undermined Mr. Mulcair's carefully crafted criticism..  Undeterred, Mr. Mulcair has switched course and is now blaming the state of things on Canada’s trade imbalance. 

Mr. Mulcair is nothing if not flexible and willing to embrace change on a moment’s notice.

While I’m sure that most of us welcome the NDP’s newfound interest in the benefits of trade to our economy, I think it would be prudent if they took the time to learn how it all works before jumping into the debate. 

The NDP seem to want to have it both ways. They criticize the government for negotiating free trade with Europe and parts of Asia while criticizing the government that we don’t have enough markets for our exports and they positively deplore our free trade agreement with the United States. 

The NDP have, in fact, consistently voted against every trade deal negotiated by the government over the years, including one with Liechtenstein. They were quite concerned about the negative impact of trade with a nation that has a population of 35,000 and whose major exports are ceramics, sausage casings and false teeth. 

One shudders to think of what will happen to Canada’s sausage casing industry now that our government has negotiated a trade deal with Liechtenstein. 

The simple reality is that trade is a two-way street. You can’t trade by yourself. Trading with yourself could be called hoarding and doesn’t work very well. You have to have someone to trade with and if they aren’t prepared or able to trade with you because their economies are in the toilet, then there is going to be some kind of slowdown in trade activity. 

Apparently Mr. Mulcair was so focused on blaming other Canadians for the mess in Ontario and Quebec while trying to save the sausage casing industry, he didn't notice that most of the world is in economic recession.

Canada’s economy is quite stable, in fact it is outperforming all countries in the G7. This means that we have stuff to trade and the ability to buy but some of our trading partners are in less stable economic shape than we are. Hence, we’re importing more right now than we’re exporting. Mr. Mulchair and his NDP would shout that we wouldn’t have to import so much if we manufactured more and he’s correct. You can’t manufacture more, however, when government tax and energy policies along with unions salary demands have priced manufacturing jobs right out of the market.

The simple truth is that manufacturers are leaving the country, taking their jobs with them to countries where labour and operating costs are less expensive.

The fact is that if it costs more to manufacture something, that cost will be reflected in the selling price which affects whether or not people will buy it. It is difficult to trade Canadian manufactured goods when so many of them are more expensive to produce thanks to high labour costs, than those same goods can be produced elsewhere.

It is one of the great weaknesses of the left, that it has never understood that government does not control the economy. In fact, most politicians on the left don’t fully understand how economies work at all . That is evident by the interfering policies they implement.

In Quebec, for example, the new PQ government is moving to protect Quebec-owned corporations from foreign takeover. This is in response to a recent offer by Lowe’s to purchase Rona, a large Quebec-owned hardware/lumber chain. The government refers to Rona as a “champion of Quebec business”. Some champion. Over the past five years, Rona’s shares have plummeted 48% which is more than four times the drop in the Standard & Poor’s/TSX Composite Index over the same period. It makes you wonder how well the non-champions in Quebec are performing and how much that's going to cost taxpayers.

Fortunately, the new socialist PQ premier has reassured us that both she and her new finance minister, a former academic, both have MBA's so I guess we can all sleep better tonight.

The Quebec Government authorized the purchase of shares in Rona to artificially prop up the share price. Who pays for that? Why taxpayers of course.

And that’s the problem with the left’s approach to the economy. 

They introduce policies that negatively impact the market which hurts shareholders which include every day folks like you and I, as well as, many public sector and private pension funds. That drives capital to other, more attractive investment opportunities, which undermines economic growth. This has a negative impact on the companies that the government was trying to protect for political optics which results in more tax money being spent to prop up those companies as we saw in the bail out of the auto sector in 2008/09. It undermines investor confidence which reduces business development and job growth.

It also discourages new business start-up and foreign investment which further impedes job growth and economic prosperity.

The government of the United States is shutting down coal plants at the cost of thousands of jobs at precisely the time when unemployment is a huge problem in America and without a plan in place to replace those jobs. It bans off shore drilling in the United States but provides billions in support of the same thing in Brazil. Only the left would spend billions to prop up in another country what it bans in its own, providing jobs to that foreign country rather than its own unemployed citizens.

It was the same government that declined to approve the Keystone pipeline which would have provided thousands of high-paying American jobs and a stable supply of oil from a friendlier ally than many from whom America now depends on for oil imports.

This is done to win favour with the environmental movement that love sustainable energy and who are as clueless about the economy as fruit flies.

Sustainable energy is the darling of the left with claims of new jobs and cleaner environments. For the foreseeable future it is nothing but wishful thinking, a flight of fantasy that was tried in Europe and which is failing. Even the NDP's much vaunted cap and trade policy has been tried only to result in increased cost, slower economic growth and outright corruption.

The problem with sustainable energy is that it remains too expensive and unable to meet industrial demands. Millions were spent by the Obama administration on Solyndra to advance solar energy only to see the company go bankrupt, taking its promise of cleaner energy and a half billion of tax payer money with it.

In Ontario, the government squanders billions on wind and solar which is seeing companies paying absurd increases in energy costs. In some cases, increases under Ontario’s Clean Energy act have been upwards of 1000% and that, my gentle gum drops, causes companies to shut down and/or relocate which costs jobs which cause economic hardship and undermines prosperity.

Ontario's economy, which just a decade ago was the powerhouse of Canada, isn't even the envy of Greece these days and most of it is the fault of bad economic management by a Liberal government and it's fuzzy economic policies.

Quite frankly, if the objective is simply cleaner air, the left’s program will work well because in the end, nobody will be able to afford to live here and everyone will have moved away leaving a big empty place with lots of clean air.

The really stupid thing about the Clean Air Act in Ontario is that of the top 10 cities with the cleanest air in the world, Canada already had eight of them. Considering how the left has screwed up our economies, I would suggest that stupidity was a bigger problem than clean air.

It almost makes you long for the good old days when the Liberal Party of Canada simply stole money from taxpayers as they did during AdScam. At least we didn’t have to deal with all this pretentious, self-serving and uniformed rhetoric every day and it really didn't hurt the economy or cost jobs.

Clean energy, like fair trade and equitable labour practices, are all laudable goals and should be part of a nation’s long-term economic planning but the left doesn’t plan. It reacts. It grasps at trends and politicizes issues to the point where more damage is done by their policies than by simply leaving things alone. 

Studies have shown that prosperity has consistently been higher during periods of reduced government interference than during those periods where government increased its presence through regulation and control; but that doesn’t deter the left. Despite repeated historical failure, it persists in its absurd attempts to do what cannot be done, control economies and socially engineer societies.

Government doesn’t belong in business any more than business belongs in government. It is government’s job to provide a level and fair playing field with sufficient regulation and safe-guards to protect investors, employees and the public and then get the hell out of the way. It is the responsibility of business to make a profit and in so doing, provide jobs and prosperity for the country.

The sooner the left realizes that, the better off more of us will be. Don’t hold your breath, however, as people like Thomas Mulcair have shown time and time again, when it comes to the economy the left are slow learners.

I told you this was going to be a long post.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

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Sinkhole Of Common Sense

This past summer we experienced about five weeks with no appreciable rainfall at all. It was a drought that has devastated some crops and which caused two mini-forest fires within city limits. Both fires were contained fortunately but there was a significant amount of damage and threat to surrounding residential neighbourhoods.

The city’s first responders, in particular its fire department, did a solid job and are to be commended for their efforts. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could say the same about the bureaucracies behind them?

We can’t.

It took the first fire which went on for a couple of weeks to make the bureaucracy realize that it should be cutting the grass in its parks down to the bone. The grass had turned to straw which could be set afire with a carelessly tossed cigarette and that could easily spread to trees and other foliage also dry and almost like tinder.

Fortunately, the city did finally realize the danger and it did cut the grass down to the bone. Unfortunately, other levels of government that also own and maintain parkland within Canada’s capital did not.

They were bound by legislation to protect nesting water fowl rather than being bound by common sense.

Daily, during the drought, we would drive along the river through parkland where grass that was dryer than kindling, stood two feet high and not just out in the open. It bordered trees and small thickets, homes and businesses.

This is environmentalism gone mad.

I’m all in favour of protecting nature but when it is at the expense of protecting people, I part company with my friends in the environmental movement. What amazes me about the decision to wait until the nesting season was over to protect birds was the thought that if the nesting area caught fire and burned to a crisp, what would all those birds do then?

Given a choice, do you think the birds would prefer a closely trimmed, inconvenient environment for a month or two or no environment for years thanks to devastation by fire?

Nobody who makes the decisions about these things asked themselves those simple questions. They are bureaucrats and they are paid to implement legislation. They are not paid to think.

Last week, a sink hole emerged on a main route out of the city core into its large suburban east community. One unfortunate fellow drove into the hole but was unhurt fortunately. The same can’t be said about his car which seems to have pretty much disappeared.

Apparently a very large pipe that is part of the sewer system broke and that caused the sinkhole. The city had applied back in April for emergency repair to the pipe although they are now saying there wasn’t really an emergency.

It appears the city was denied the permit by another level of government that is tasked with protecting the fresh water fishery. The repair work the city wanted to undertake would be right in the middle of spawning season for various fish species and we can’t permit that, no matter how much damage and expense that decision may subsequently cause.

The river is huge and extends for miles, disrupting the spawning season in one small section would have had very limited, if any, impact on the river’s overall fishery. The decision, however, has had a major impact on people.

Traffic in and out of the east end of the city is virtually in gridlock. The cost to the city for repairs is significantly higher than it would have been six months ago before the pipe burst and in terms of additional transit resources it is now using to try and expedite getting people in and out of the community.

Here’s what I don’t get.

What if someone had been killed as a result of this decision? It is more than conceivable that the person who drove his car into the sinkhole could have been seriously injured if not killed. What if it had been a family with small children? How important would the environmental movement think those bloody fish were then?

The simple fact is that we have become so narrow in our focus these days that we are incapable of seeing beyond the ends of our noses. Nobody makes the connection of the possible outcomes of the decisions they take and virtually nobody in government or NGOs applies common sense. They blindly follow the narrow dictates of their policies and government legislation, only realizing after the fact, that the decision was the wrong decision.

It inevitably costs us money. It costs us time and lost productivity and sooner or later, it’s going to cost somebody their life.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Hot, Sticky and Stupid

The weather has just been flat out stupid this summer. 

It has been unbelievably hot, humid and we haven’t had any real rain in over a month. Some days, I feel like a slab of over-cooked meat. Before my friends in the Climate Change Brigade start rushing around yelling “I told you so” and “the sky is falling, flee the village”, we’ve seen this before.

Every now and then, the weather (like some people) just gets flat out stupid.

It has been so hot this summer that my garage door sticks when I press the remote, our grass looks like kindling and all the plants and flowers Maggie worked so hard to plant reach out and grab our ankles as we walk by whispering in parched little voices, “water, water, please…..some water.”

It’s so hot that even our Springer Spaniel, Jasper, is hard-pressed to be his usual psychotic self and spends much of his time sitting in a corner and staring at me with with a far-away accusatory look in  his eyes and his tongue hanging out as if the weather is my fault. It isn’t!

I recycle (not happily but I do it). Even though we live in the country, we use our car less than the average suburbanite and we use only electricity in our home. No green house gas emission there boy. We use air-conditioning sparingly, barbeque most of our meals and bag most of our groceries in ridiculously too large or too small cloth bags. We're careful about energy consumption and do what we can to keep our little part of the world clean.

In other words, we are living the dream. Like so many others we're following the mantra (or at least most of it) of the environmental movement and guess what? The weather is still hot and I personally don’t believe it is because there is Styrofoam in the landfill, gas-driven economies or plastic bags.

The earth is a hostile environment. It is beautiful in many places but hostile. It is filled with dangerous places, dangerous creatures (some so small you don’t even see them before they bite and poison you) and guess what? The earth has a dangerous climate because the earth is part of a dangerous solar system that is powered by a highly volatile star; we call the sun that is constantly throwing off sun flares which have a very dramatic impact on our world.

There were a number of serious solar flares over the past year and here we are with stupid hot weather. The solar flares burn off all that space dust that acts as a barrier between us and the sun’s harmful rays. Less dust, more heat gets through and my lawn turns to hay and Jasper's tongue comes out and his eyes start to roll.

None of this will matter, of course. The environmental fanatics will be down at the climate-change temple complete with its Icon of Al Gore, holding hands in a prayer circle to try and use positive energy to bring the world together in eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. Either that or they will be celebrating the fact that they were right and the end of the world has arrived.

Unless the temple is air-conditioned, I won’t be joining them. I’d rather burn a little more energy to cool down whatever room I’m in and I’m prepared to risk climate change to get my body temperature back down to 98.6 or somewhere near it.

What really annoys me though is not that our weather goes through periods of extremes like it is this summer but that it has those extremes upside down. It really is stupid. Smart weather would put some of the extreme hot period in winter where it would do some good and some of the extreme cool weather in the summer. That way, we might get some balanced temperatures throughout the year. This would be smart weather because it would be environmentally friendly (not to mention people friendly). It would cut down on the use of power consumption for air conditioners and furnaces to start with.

I’d like to blame politicians for the weather because it just seems to fit so nicely with everything else they’ve screwed up but the truth is, the weather isn’t their fault. I do believe, however, that our weather is a perfect metaphor for our politics; extreme and stupid (C’mon, you knew I was going to mention politics somewhere in the post).

But, in the end, this stupid heat wave isn’t the fault of politicians. It isn’t my fault or the fault of greenhouse gas emissions, SUVs or plastic bags either. It’s just part of the natural order of things and I suspect we would be a lot further ahead if we stopped worrying about who or what to blame for it and started devoting more time and resources to learning how to adapt to it and live comfortably and safely with it.

While you guys work on that, I’m going to get a cold drink and go sit in the air conditioning for awhile. It looks like it might rain soon. I’ve been fooled before by the weather (it’s such a tease) but there is always hope. 

Let me know what you come up with.

RELATED


George Carlin & The Bear On Saving The Planet
http://bearsrant.blogspot.ca/2011/09/screw-green.html

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Dancing In The Dark - Hi dee Hi dee Hi dee Ho!

“St. Paul the persecutor was 

a cruel and sinful man.

Jesus hit him with a blinding light

and then his life began.

 I said yeah, yeah, oh yeah!”

-The Rolling Stones

Light! 

We associate it with all kinds of things but especially with knowledge. Educational organizations often use a stylized illustration of an ancient oil lamp to symbolize knowledge and most of us are familiar with the light bulb over the head symbolism for getting an idea.

We have expressions like, “I see the light” which usually means, “I understand” and “there’s a light at the end of the tunnel" which means “things will be better soon”. We are led to believe that dead people are told to walk towards the light but we don’t need to talk about that right now. If you’re reading this hopefully you won’t have to worry about walking toward the light until later.

I mention all of this because lately there seems to be an awful lot of dim bulbs around and to be honest; it is beginning to become more than just a little wearying. Except for the gratuitous violence, it has become boring.

There Is Not Much That Is Progressive On The Left These Days

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child,
I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became an adult, I put away childish things.“

– 1 Corinthians 13:11

I am conservative by nature but not always by how I vote and throughout my life I have voted for both Conservatives and for Liberals. I tend to vote for whomever I believe demonstrates the most common sense at the time or failing that being an available option, whoever I believe will do the least damage to the country, the province or the city in which I live.

In my experience, both the right and the left have had their share of corruption, dishonesty, lack of vision and vested self-interest but lately it seems that it is the left that has become more disengaged from reality.

It has become fashionable, especially on the left, to declare that labels like right and left are dead. Whether that is true or not, a rose by any other name is still a rose and so is a pig. Part of the right in the United States now likes to call itself the Tea Party and in Canada, the right fled the Progressive Conservative label opting for Reform Party then the Canadian Alliance only to finally settle, just a few years ago, on a new name, The Conservative Party of Canada. It seems like an awful lot of effort to me just to basically arrive back where you started.

For their part, the left has sub-divided into a variety of labels including Labour Party, Liberal, New Democratic Party and Democrats but regardless of the various political party labels, the left has tried, by and large, to brand itself with the word ‘progressives’.

Responding To The Criticism That Our Generation Wasn't Green

I remember my nephew coming to me a couple of years ago and giving me a good natured shot about his generation and all the technology they use so easily now. His closing comment was that I was probably envious of the gadgets they now had and I responded that I agreed that all this technology was pretty neat, which is why my generation invented most of it.

If you’re like me, you’re getting just a bit tired of the arrogance of the young lecturing us on how much smarter they are or how much harder things are today. One of their favourites is how environmentally illiterate we were when we were younger and what a mess we made of the planet for future generations.

There is nothing quite as silly as the arrogance of youth, especially those who never bother to do a little research before they open their mouths to lecture us about how unenlightened we are. For their benefit, here’s an article of just how environmentally unenlightened we were back in the old days.

I didn’t write this but I wish I had. It’s brilliant.

Layin' Pipe - President Obama Expedites "Part" Of Keystone

"I'm layin' pipe all night long. Layin' pipe. I'm workin' so hard"
                       - David Wilcox, Canadian singer/songwriter

Well, isn't that special! After first giving Canadian oil the middle finger wave, President Obama announced in Oklahoma that he was personally accelerating approval of 'part' of the Keystone Pipeline which would transport oil from Canada's oil sands to Texas.

More Inconvenient Truth For The Global Warming Crowd

photo: Science & Public Policy.org

Maybe Al Gore got it right when he named his alarmist video about impending climate catastrophe "An Inconvenient Truth". It appears there are an increasing number of inconvenient truths coming out about global warming but it appears they are more inconvenient for the movement than the planet.

Guest Contributor: Rogue Operator Rips Apart The Global Warming Myth

Why the Greens are Bluffing on Manmade Global Warming
by Rogue Operator

Time to call the enviro-commies’ bluff.  I’m going all in on a monster.

The manmade climate change debate has centered around the question of whether or not man contributes to climate change. To answer this question shortly: Yes, man does.

But the debate really needs to center around three interrelated questions.

Environmentalist Opportunism

I saw this photograph in the newspaper today and it made my head want to explode, not because I'm Canadian and was being overly patriotic but because of the ridiculous rhetoric. I'm no great defender of the Oil Sands; it is the hypocritical, over-the-top and flat out self-serving dishonesty attached to issues like this that makes me wonder if anyone ever stops and thinks about an issue before they plant themselves in front of the media.

George Carlin & The Bear On Saving The Planet

"It's not easy being green." - Kermit the frog

George Carlin on the arrogance behind

the "Save The Planet" movement

Back in the mid 90's, scientists were predicting an impending ice age. I didn't take it too seriously because they weren't overly specific about when it was going to happen and I have a really good winter coat. They predicted glaciers would reemerge and cover key parts of the continental land mass. Now, I don't know a lot about glaciers but I do know they move really slowly and I am pretty sure that even I can outrun (ok, ok...I don't actually run but I'm pretty confident that I can lumber along faster than a glacier), so I wasn't overly concerned. I pretty much set my mind to accepting that it was going to get cooler which suited me fine because hot weather is very unpleasant for a guy built like a bear.