Carbon Taxapalooza

Last Monday Terence Corcoran declared Carbon Taxapalooza Week:

We hereby declare this to be Carbon Taxapalooza Week. The objective is to acknowledge and deplore the great stampede of provincial governments to tax the hell out of fossil fuels.

On Tuesday, Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission, a self-appointed group of allegedly market-oriented economic policy wonks, will release a report calling for the provinces to adopt “carbon pricing” to help Canada tackle climate change. [Here's the full list Ecofiscal "commissioners".  It includes Preston Manning, Jean Charest, Paul Martin, Bob Rae, Peter Robinson (Suzuki Foundation CEO), etc.  With that rats nest of progressives and eco-illiterates what could possibly go wrong?]

Until now, Ontario hasn’t had much interest in carbon pricing ... But now, having exhausted a range of bad policies, Ontario’s Environment Minister, Glenn Murray, is pushing to adopt another set of allegedly less bad policies.

 Peter Foster: The way backwards on carbon policy:

... On Tuesday Canada’s self-appointed Ecofiscal Commission released a study, The Way Forward, that amounts to a recommendation for policy chaos in pursuit of the ever-more dubious cause of fighting catastrophic man-made climate change. ...

Peter Foster: Chris Ragan, market beautician:

You can always tell a fan of Big Government by the way he or she addresses the Invisible Hand, Adam Smith’s metaphor for free markets. ... This week, McGill economist Christopher Ragan, chairman of the self-appointed Ecofiscal Commission, came up with a more subtle put down - “Sometimes the Invisible Hand needs a manicure, and the way is to improve market signals.”

See also, Dennis Ambler at The SPPI Blog: A nest of carbon vipers

Vast sums of money, influence and power are involved in carbon mitigation schemes, and yet there is never any mention in the media of these massive and lucrative conflicts of interest. They appear quite content swallowing the diversionary tactics pushed by the likes of DeSmog Blog and Greenpeace ExxonSecrets with their claims of “oil- company funded deniers”.  It is doubtful that mainstream journalists ever bother to look behind the scenes at these people, yet it is all available on official websites.

"The cause of the Canada-U.S. price gap is obvious — the government"

Mark Milke:

... the federal government recently introduced legislation — dubbed the Price Transparency Act — that will force retailers to explain why Canadians sometimes pay higher prices than Americans for the same products. 

... To think a government is remotely capable of collecting and properly collating this type of comparative information assumes a degree of specific knowledge that governments do not possess, as it would be impossible to track the millions of business decisions that are made on a daily basis.

... All of this ...ignores one significant reason why some prices in Canada are higher than those in the United States: government policy.  ... For example ... Ontario’s rising electricity costs ... federal “supply management” policies ... airline fares - federal government policy that prevents full cabotage ...

Several others have also written about James Moore’s proposed law:

Andrew Coyne: The whole ‘Canada-U.S. price gap’ issue is a con surrounded by hypocrisy
John Ivison: Moore trades tariff relief for discredited 1970s policies
Peter Foster: Regulations R Us

All make excellent points.  There is certainly nothing “conservative” about such regulation.  We are blessed with (mostly) free markets in this country.  Retailers are best able to price their products in those markets and consumers are perfectly capable of sorting out where to buy them and deciding what price is fair.  The government should not be meddling with or attempting to micro-manage retail businesses.

Mark Carney - overrated hypocrite

William Watson:

IMF head Christine Lagarde and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney both spoke last week in London on the subject of “inclusive capitalism” at a highly exclusive conference organized by Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild ...

... [both] made very literate and interesting speeches arguing that rising inequality ...  fundamentally threatens capitalism ...

Strangely, in view of their concern about inequality, neither ... offered to do their bit by taking a pay cut. ... Carney ... total compensation ...reported to be in the neighbourhood of £1 million per annum. ... If people at the top end making too much money is the dangerous social problem they both think it is, why don’t they help out by taking a pay cut?

Peter Foster:

... Canadian rock star Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney ...  was hypocritically flailing away at a straw man. [He] wittered on last week about how fundamentalist capitalism was increasing inequality and hurting the poor ... It is pretty much a rule that anybody who attaches a qualifier to the word “capitalism” is seeking to undermine it.

Carney may be among the most overrated men in recent history. It’s not that he lacks raw intelligence. It’s that the feats attributed to him ... are within the capacity of no man.

An explanation for this dangerous state of mind is contained in a must-read paper by an academic named Slavisa Tasic: “Are Regulators Rational?” Mr. Tasic concludes that they suffer from “illusions of competence” and are entirely blind to the power and subtlety of markets.

Nortel's "culture of arrogance" led to its demise

Globe and Mail:

The collapse of telecommunications giant Nortel Networks Corp. was caused by “a culture of arrogance and even hubris”...

... A University of Ottawa team of professors, led by lead researcher Jonathan Calof, released a detailed analysis Monday of Nortel’s failure ...

... The roots of Nortel’s collapse stretched back into the 1990s, the report said ... From the era of John Roth’s leadership as CEO ["cashed in his own stock options for a personal gain of $135 million in 2000 alone"] in the late 1990s onward, “it was felt by many R&D staff that management rarely listened to the engineers and that, when they did, they did not appear to understand.”

John Roth, CEO of the year for 2000.

Pope Francis - economic naif / dunce

Peter Foster on the Pope’s economic naivete and ignorance:

 ... the serious issue of whether the Pope knows what he’s talking about when it comes to his professed concern for the poor. 

The appropriate approach to poverty is not to sanctify it but eradicate it . ... if Pope Francis really is concerned about relieving poverty, his reflexive anti-capitalist attitudes are pointing precisely in the wrong direction.

Pope John Paul II actually praised the free market as “the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs. ... his successors  ... returned to the Church’s more traditional anti-capitalist stance, now larded with environmental concerns and support for UN-based global governance. ... Pope Francis came out of the Vatican gate in March sounding like the theological wing of the Occupy movement ...

... if the poor are truly his priority, then surely what is important is not “the gap” but the massive reductions in levels of absolute poverty in recent decades ... one can’t help asking whether the Pope is more concerned with relieving the poor or bringing down the rich.

he exposed his own economic confusion, first in implying that social benefits come only from charitable intention  ... and second in peddling the canard that promotion of markets represents some kind of quasi religious faith...

Price fixing hypocrisy - criminal charges laid against chocolate companies

The charges, laid Thursday, come ... after Canada’s Competition Bureau ...  found evidence suggesting that a price-fixing cartel collaborated, agreed or arranged to set the prices of chocolate products.

... Criminal charges have been laid against candy makers Nestlé Canada Inc. and Mars Canada Inc., and ITWAL Limited...

... “We are fully committed to pursuing those who engage in egregious, anti-competitive behaviour that harms Canadian consumers,” said John Pecman, interim commissioner of competition, in a statement.

I agree, price fixing is, or should be, a crime.  Yet, ironically,  the milk used by those chocolate companies is produced by dairy marketing cartels that engage in egregious, anti-competitive, consumer harming, price fixing with full government approval.

"The Invisible Hand vs. The Hand of God"

Peter Foster:

The problem is excess of moralism, which bolsters divine regulatory aspirations of those who would paint themselves onto the roof of the Sistine Chapel 

“A banker, a professor and a priest walk into a bar.”  Thus Father Raymond de Souza – to appreciative laughter – began his contribution to last Friday’s panel discussion titled “Banking, Trust and the Culture of Capitalism” ... the “banker,” outgoing Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney. The “professor” was Roger Martin, who is also soon to leave his post as dean of the Rotman School at the University of Toronto.

Joe Fesh and Bangladesh - Jon Kay gets it right

Dear CBC ... please lay off Joe Fresh

This was the worst accident in the history of the garment industry ... Almost every CBC show I’ve heard singles out Joe Fresh, identifies the Executive Chairman of Loblaws Companies by name, and laments the fact that he has not decided to come onto CBC airwaves to confess his company’s sins. ...

... This feels wrong to me: There are 3-million textile workers in Bangladesh, working at tens of thousands of facilities, many of which no doubt are also in a poor state of repair.  For activists, I see the logic of naming and shaming particular retailers. But the only difference between Joe Fresh and thousands of other Western companies that follow standard low-cost Western outsourcing practices is bad luck. 

... A building collapse is just one of many ways to die in a nation such as Bangladesh. Someone who’s laid off from a textile job surely won’t die in an industrial accident. But penniless and improvident, they might then be forced to watch a child expire from malnutrition or an otherwise preventable disease. Which is worse?

Peter Foster recently said something similar in Lessons for Joe Fresh from Bangladesh.

The Unilever CEO's “Global Salvationism”

Peter Foster:

Paul Polman, chief executive of British consumer goods giant Unilever .... confirmed that he ranks as perhaps the world’s foremost peddler of “Global Salvationism.”

... Mr. Polman is not only a co-chair of Davos, he is incoming chair of the WBCSD [World Business Council on Sustainable Development] and a prominent member of the UN Secretary-General’s High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Mr. Polman’s speech ticked all the boxes of what [is] also called “millennium collectivism.” He denigrated business short-sightedness, promoted climate catastrophism and suggested that what was needed was a “new model” of capitalism in which giant corporations would sacrifice shareholders in order to solve global problems.

... The problem of the modern corporation is not that it forces single-minded devotion to the bottom line on its managers, but that it gives them too much leeway to dabble with dangerous fads. Meanwhile, those who spout about a “new model” for capitalism invariably hold an inaccurate and demonic image of the free-market original, which is still the only truly “sustainable” version.

Nexen and Progress sales approved.

Harper government approves foreign takeover bids:

... the Harper government declared Friday in approving CNOOC’s $15.1-billion takeover of Nexen, while warning that state-owned enterprise takeovers of oilsands companies will only be permitted on “an exceptional basis only.”

... also approved a $6-billion takeover bid by Malaysian national energy company Petronas for Calgary-based natural gas producer Progress Energy Resources.

Terence Corcoran: Rocky road ahead for foreign investments in Canada

No sign of Adam Smith during Sandy

Peter Foster:

... Both the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, and the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, leaped into Sandy’s wake to assure their constituents that under no circumstances would they allow markets to work. The most immediate and obvious result of their interventions was four-hour lineups at gas stations.

... Governor Cuomo managed not merely to disrupt markets but to cause outright panic with the kind of initiative more associated with the likes of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. He promised consumers 10 gallons of free gasoline ...

Mr. Christie, ... imposed gas rationing over the weekend, allowing gas purchases on alternate days based on whether your licence plate is odd or even. He had already invoked collectivist solidarity by suggesting that “During emergencies, New Jerseyans should look out for each other ... Thus he suggested little or no ... grasp of Adam Smith’s two-centuries-old insight about the butcher, the brewer, the baker and the gasoline retailer: that they serve us best by serving themselves.

The biggest culprit? Public ignorance of  free market principles:

In the marketplace of what passes for political ideas, a primitive sense of “fairness,” condemnation of greed and selfishness, a belief that higher prices will advantage “the rich” (because only they can afford the pricier goods), and a seemingly immutable faith that government force is the answer will beat out Economics 101 every time.

Is there a chance that we'll see our school system begin to teach free market basics any time soon?  Nah, they're too busy flogging "social justice".

Jonathan Kay - "Olympophobe"

Peter Foster - The joy of competition:

... it’s time for my quadrennial smackdown with the Post’s foremost Olympophobe, Comment editor Jonathan Kay.

... During the Beijing Olympics four years ago, Mr. Kay bemoaned sport as a source of conflict. He quoted George Orwell’s claim that sport is “bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.” ...

Insurmountable problems with the progressive view of business and markets

Mark Steyn picks up on an AP "news" "report" that says of Republicans:

They and their ideological leaders argue that the marketplace should dictate what businesses thrive and falter, not Washington.

Commenter, "Lawrence" had this to say:

Implicitly, progressives believe the precise opposite.

Conservatives and progressives both accept that some businesses will succeed and some businesses will fail.

Progressives believe that the government should pick the winners and losers.

Conservatives believe that the free market should pick the winners and losers.

It's not about preventing failed businesses; for progressives it's about control. As Orwell put it describing the totalitarian impulse, they want to "usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip."

Those who believe that the government should have such control ignore several insurmountable problems.

- The problem of morality. Individuals have the right to self-determination and the right to property, and therefore the government has no moral authority to micro-manage their lives or their businesses.

- The problem of information. A cadre of experts may be smarter than any similarly sized group, but NO group can ever obtain the vast amount of distributed information that is processed by the price system, much less act on that information in an intelligent and timely fashion.

- The problem of incentives. The free market rewards businesses that provide goods and services that people actually want, and the greatest success is reserved for those that provide what the public sees as the best combination of high quality and low prices. The government rewards businesses that help the incumbents secure reelection, and it's only a coincidence that this work to maintain political power ever corresponds to meeting the real needs of the general public.

- The problem of the historical record. NO society in human history has ever taxed itself -- or regulated itself -- into prosperity. Even the authoritarian regime of the Chinese Communists have stumbled into modernity by freeing up the market, not through yet another disastrous and murderous Five Year Plan.

The ONLY thing that recommends collusion between Big Government and Big Business is the psychological appeal: it reassures the leftist of the high-mindedness of his oh-so-good intentions while feeding the more reptilian desire for control of other people.

Excellent comment!

Peter Foster on the CIBC's Jim Prentice

"The Sorcerer's Prentice":

... A speech Mr. Prentice gave to the Toronto Board of Trade on Thursday was a jaw-dropper. It was the kind of mushy mixed economics that is regurgitated with tedious regularity every decade or two by those who have forgotten, or never understood, the lessons of economic history.  Mr. Prentice appears to reject market orientation as unaffordable “ideological purity.”

... Adam Smith would instantly have spotted a market-challenged mercantilist. Unfortunately, Mr. Prentice too has embraced the cause that Smith exploded more than two hundred years ago.

... we should perhaps be relieved that Mr. Prentice is no longer at the Cabinet table.

I wonder what's in it for the CIBC.

Killing the Wheat Board - a step closer

This is taking forever:  "Canadian Wheat Board dealt blow by Manitoba judge"

facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is "a self-serving hypocrite"

Peter Foster: "Two-faced book"

... [Adam] Smith noted that businessmen — like all human beings — are often self-serving hypocrites. His point was that free commercial markets turned self-interest into public benefit. We can only serve ourselves by serving others. Meanwhile Smith scoffed at those who would “trade for the public good.”

Posturing obviously comes more easily to the search engine and Internet tycoons because they can claim they are more virtuous than those who run wicked old smokestack industries. Except, that is, when they are advertising their products, which just happens to be how the new tykes make most of their money. This brings us to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s letter in this week’s IPO filing.

... In his letter, Mr. Zuckerberg, who stands to be worth up to US$28-billion, claims that Facebook was “built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

... Where it really gets murky is where he writes, “Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.”

... We have representative democracies for a reason. They don’t always work that well, but they are certainly preferable to the rule of any NGO-stoked Occupy cybermob.

... it’s worth noting that while rattling on about higher purpose and the voice of the people, Mr. Zuckerberg ... is keeping a firm grip on Facebook control via a dual share structure.  ... while he is paying lip service to the meddlers, he is doing his best to insulate himself from them. We knew he was a smart young man. Shame about the bafflegab.

Great column!  Read any corporate annual report and you'll find it filled with the same kind of posturing bafflegab about "stakeholders", "corporate social responsibility" and "sustainability". They dedicate people as full-time generators of this bullcrap and to sucking up to NGOs.

Kill the Canadian dairy cartel

The wheat monopoly is as good as gone. Now the dairy cartel needs to be put down.
William Watson responds to a column by Wally Smith, head of the Dairy Farmers of Canada:

... [US vs Cdn prices per 4 liters] Three and two-thirds bucks compared to more than six bucks. Anybody feeling milked? If not hosed?

... Why we pay more for dairy products couldn’t be simpler: Our dairy cartel artificially restricts supply.

... To make the legalized price gouging work, of course, it’s necessary to keep cheaper alternatives out of the market. Which is why, in addition to police protection against excessive production in Canada, we have enforcement at the border via outrageously high tariffs: 241% to 295.5%, including 277% for ice cream. Imagine! A country that puts punitive taxes on ice cream!

... Mr. Smith’s main justification for output restriction is that before it came along, dairy prices would fluctuate. ... (Note that one of OPEC’s official aims is “the stabilization of prices in international oil markets with a view to eliminating harmful and unnecessary fluctuations.” All cartels believe devoutly in “stabilization".)

The dairy cartel should go the way of the Wheat Board. But it'll be a tougher nut to crack given that it's a shared federal/provincial jurisdiction.

"I Pencil": the video

A video supplement to Leonard E. Read's famous essay:



[Via]

Individualism vs collectivism

Xanthippa has posted a five part series of videos that neatly explain key concepts (and misconceptions) relating the various political philosophies - individualism vs collectivism, right vs left, rights, liberty, anarchy, socialsim, communism, fascism, Naziism, etc.  The series is topped off with a presentation by John Robson on the Magna Carta.  Excellent.

Dedicated libertarians know this stuff inside out and do a great job of explaining it.  But what they haven't been able to do very successfully is to get a sufficiently large following to attain political power based on libertarian principles.  The Libertarian Party has been unable to do even what the Green Party has done. Not even close. Canucks are too well indoctrinated, from birth to death, in collectivism.  As the videos warn: "The evidence presented here was not part of your education".  All that "greedy", "selfish", "uncaring", libertarian individualism is just too scary.  Though it could be argued that the libertarian philosophy does enjoy some measure of representation within the Conservative Party.  Maybe that's the most they can reasonably expect for now.

Klavan: The facts of life for liberals