Category: Blogs

By comparing yourself to your immediate neighbour and pegging your spending to their level is a weak argument. It leads to a race to the bottom phenomena. “My neighbour spends less on maintaining the driveway; therefore, I need to spend equally or less then him.” Likewise, the conservative neighbour argues the same: if Alberta spends less, we need to spend less. This drives down the level of public spending on public services.

This is not something Justin Trudeau can solve in one or two weeks. This problem goes back to 150-200 years and there is no magic wand to fix this. Even a “fix” is not clear what it would be. First nations are divided themselves. Can you have both? Preserve way of life and culture and participate in the creation of goods and services? This is the question. To some degree yes, to some degree no.

This is not new. Past conservative governments are attempted the same. The plan now is to fund from public money certain health services you can access for pay. At the same time cut government services in health care. The rationale is the same as always. It is ideologically driven and does not make any economic sense at all. Let’s look at it how does it work.

Socialism is a yearning for something better than capitalism. As capitalism has changed and as experiments with socialism have accumulated — both good and bad — socialist yearnings, too, have changed. However, a bizarre disconnect surfaces as capitalism’s gross dysfunction during and since its 2008 crash brings socialism again into public discussion. Large numbers of people debate the pros and cons of socialism as if what it is in the 21st century were identical to what it was in the 20th.

One of the steps the new UCP government in Alberta made is the undoing the cap on insurance premiums put by the previous Notley government. Insurance companies are free to be “competitive”, meaning they can raise the price. And voila! What we see is that they are raising the price.

This is not just a question of Alberta. Many people all over the world wants to separate from others. The UK wants to separate from Europe. The Catalans want to separate from Spain. And some in Alberta want to separate from Canada.

Chris Wright writes in his book Worker Cooperatives And Revolution “the conceptual starting point of the worker coop is that labor has power over capital, whereas it is the opposite in conventional business. That is, in a capitalist enterprise both ownership and control (and the right to a share in profits) ultimately belong to investors, and voting rights are proportionate to the number of shares of equity held.” I highly recommend his book, it is a great look at their history in the United States, their practices today and he also provides a good theoretical analysis.

The current economic system serves the employers and much less the employees to be polite. Through their wealth they cement their position in an elite position to continue with the system in perpetuity. They make sure that from 1 tax dollar collected they pay only 25 cents and the employees pay 75 cents. They make sure they accumulate 12% in wealth every year while the employee’s income stagnates. There is an alternative to this.

After examining the Corporate Profit Rate in Canada in the previous post, I’d like to turn now to see how you fared in the past two decades.