Giving the Financial Post its Due
There’s no question that the Financial Post, as the National Post’s business section, tilts heavily to the right. However, today’s letters section (FP15) could almost have been copied and pasted from this blog.
In the first letter, Shalom Schachter responds to the whiny Labour Day op-ed from John Mortimer of LabourWatch.
In the second letter, Kris Larson notes that continued Canadian corporate-tax cuts will simply transfer the tax payments of American-controlled corporations operating in Canada to the US treasury.
The third and final letter is a reply to the op-ed discussed by Marc. Peter Varley of the Ontario Chartered Accountants points out that inter-provincial labour mobility mostly already exists for those who are fully qualified and that requiring every province to accept every other province’s standards would cause a “race to the bottom.”
As an added bonus, today’s Andrew Coyne column on Mulroney’s constitutional misadventures provides another useful antidote to the hand-ringing about Canada not being “a real country.”
Back in the day we were all paying dutiful attention to a big electronic sign on a building in Vancouver that showed the Federal debt with scary numbers climbing across it like a scattering of mice. The “business community” (code for the biggest bandits) was clamoring for reduction of this debt. Reading a popular book about the structure of the finance “industry” (code for activities that are criminal viewed in isolation) I wondered what would happen if the public debt was cut in half. It looked like a lot of people in the finance business, would be out of business with the great reduction in buying and selling of government bonds. Now it seems that this same debt (it is still up there over $500 billion but it looks smaller because the GDP has got a lot bigger in recent years) is needed to provide the big bandits with a cushion.
There are just too many things we have to do that are very expensive and not much use, just to help out bandits. Enough, already.