The nerve displayed by the rich and their largely conservative backers both in the U.S. and Canada can reach staggering proportions at times, from in your face taunting through their TV stations like Fox and Sun News, to a flood of gibberish coming from their die hard columnists in the National Post and scholars at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
The latest insult comes in the form of bashing the Eurozone crisis, conservatives reveling in the supposed vindication for their long held belief that a system where everybody chips in and helps each other financially through a currency and integrated economy will never work. The conservative train of thought on this follows the now classical, “Governments overspending caused the global economy to go into recession”, train of thought, whereas most socialist left wingers say that it is reckless speculation and uninhibited risk taking of corporations in a free-market system that are at fault.
Furthermore, in a recent article titled ‘Greek lessons for Dalton McGuinty‘ in the National Post, written by Tim Hudak himself, conservatives regurgitate their argument with a spin for Ontarians.
Hudak attributes Ontario’s “burgeoning” debt to the McGuinty government’s spending on its green energy policy, he claims that competitive, and by competitive he means lower, corporate taxes are the best tools to create jobs in a bleeding economy, the Ontario PC leader also suggests a wage freeze for the entire public sector and like a huckster compares, economically, Ontario to Greece and Italy.
Here is my reply to Mr. Hudak:
Privatization inevitably leads to cheap labor, lower taxation for corporations that employ cheap labor does not produce new jobs that pay more, for that would defeat the purpose of cost cutting, Ontario’s economy is not comparable to that of Greece or Italy, and the public sector income actually contributes to the economy, as long as those wages which produce a healthy standard of living for Ontarians get re-invested back into the province.
In other words, the more guaranteed money people make, first the healthier they are, second, the more they freely spend and thus re-inject the funds back into the economy. This assumption operates on the simple principle that people with secure government jobs with regularly increasing wages spend more than individuals working in the private sector, where the job market is more volatile.
Also, where wages are subjected to the whim of a free market system completely, we tend to find high levels of privatization, e.g. like in the United States, high levels of cheap labor and astronomical amounts of debt. There’s a very basic logic that explains this idea as well. Private sector wages fluctuate more violently than public sector wages, the more privatization the greater the cost-cutting, thus cheaper the labor. The cheaper the labor, the less money there is to pump back into the economy. Additionally, in a free market system we generally find more instances of cases where one individual earns a very large income while the masses earn very little. This weakens the economy of the country in question even further.
It is a fact though that liberal green energy policies are costing the province more money than is necessary. I wouldn’t as a liberal dispute that fact. It is also true that the McGuinty government could have done a better fiscal evaluation at the onset of the introduction of it’s Green Energy Act to understand the economic cost of such initiatives.
However, with that being said, the Green Energy Act is a novel and largely experimental initiative. It introduced pioneering policies that aim to significantly reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and if successfully implemented, will make Ontario the first province, in the far or near future, to have completely weened of such fuels. Green and renewal energy is the way of the future, whether Mr. Hudak and the conservatives like it or not.
Unfortunately, I read quite alot of conservative literature to familiarize myself with their arguments. I think it’s necessary but it’s also a form of masochism for a liberal. The latest conservative line of defensive arguments for the mistake of unregulated markets, obsessive speculation and rampant unsecured investments that produced the real estate debacle in the U.S.back in 2008, the Eurozone crisis now and the perpetually increasing deficit in Canada is what it has always been: “Blame it on the liberals and their socialist friends with their overspending governments.”
I say: Put a sock in it Hudak! and tell your conservative friends to do the same.
