After posting a 1959 video interview of Ayn Rand, Mark Thoma rants about the common problems of “free markets”: Markets Are Not Magic … To listen to some commentators is to believe that markets are the solution to all of our problems. Health care not working? Bring in the private sector. Need to rebuild a war-torn country? Send in the […]
Read moreAs we have been hearing about the legacies of the great minds of economics, a name that has not cropped up much lately is Marx. The first article below suggests that Marx’s ideas live with us in the global economy, and growing inequality has awoken the old guy’s spirit. With it we are seeing a resurgence of the word “capitalism” […]
Read moreDean Baker makes the case below. I think this is a good way of internalizing the external costs of driving, including CO2 emissions and other nasty stuff. And in the case of BC and a few other provinces, it would be easy to implement via public auto insurance monopolies. In and of itself, however, I don’t think it gets us […]
Read moreThe recent flurry of stories about Canada’s copyright laxity (see below) suggests that the “rights holder” community is softening up the Canadian public for a strong dose of copyright medicine. Want to see first-run movies at your local theatre just like everyone else in North America? Better support some tough new copyright (and criminal code) measures friend. There are indeed […]
Read moreOverall, the UK coverage of IPCC 4 has had an urgency beyond what we are seeing in the Canadian papers (who are, to be fair, much better than they used to be on this mother of all issues). From the front page of The Independent, a paper not known for its alarmism: UN delivers definitive warning on dangers of climate […]
Read more Posted below – An attack on expected linkage between trade and labour standards by the new US Congress by Bhagwati et al in the Financial Post, and a response by Global Unions. Fast-track renewal could lead to tougher demands on the poor By Jagdish Bhagwati, Alan Deardorff, Koichi Hamada, Parvin Krishna and Arvind Panagariya Published: February 2 2007 02:00 […]
Read moreThere’s a lot of dis-information in today’s Globe, especially from Jeffrey Simpson, re the supposed impossibility of Canada achieving our Kyoto commitments. In fact, the Kyoto protocol clearly allows us to make up for any shortfall in domestic emission reductions through the Clean Development Mechanism. As Matthew Bramley from the Pembina Institute told the Commons Committee on Bill C-288 (which […]
Read moreThe December, 2006 OECD Economic Outlook (full text unavailable on line) points to sudden tax revenue windfalls in most member countries due to large capital gains and the fact that “the process of income and wealth distributions becoming more skewed has picked up pace lately …. and may be interacting with progressive tax systems to produce more than usual increases […]
Read moreThe Guardian has an edgier take on the story posted earlier today. Check out the reference in last paragraph regarding a certain Canadian think tank. Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study Friday February 2, 2007 The Guardian Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to […]
Read moreA colleague emailed me a submission to the Supreme Court of Canada seeking to have them interpret whether the investor-to-state dispute settlement regime of NAFTA (in Chapter 11) is in violation of the Charter of Rights. We will know in a few months time whether the highest court in the land will hear this appeal of a decision made by […]
Read moreLast Fall, in my capacity as a member of the Vancouver City Planning Commission, I helped organize a conference on affordable housing from a longer-term urban planning perspective. The final report is now available here. It features a summary of what happened at the conference, written by yours truly, but also contains lots of great visuals that were developed and […]
Read moreYesterday, the BC office of the CCPA released our annual alternative provincial budget, which we call the BC Solutions Budget. It is hard to keep these things fresh when the government does not listen year after year. Mostly, we harp on the fact that the budget estimates have become so conservative that they are off by billions come fiscal year […]
Read moreThanks to DeSmogBlog for posting a leaked copy of a new Fraser Institute report denying climate change.Their release follows; click the link to get to the desmog page which has links to more info and the actual leaked report. I think it is worth reiterating that the Fraser, like its US counterparts, has been very successful in sowing confusion over […]
Read moreThe minimum wage debate is heating up once again, with the NDP and labour strongly pushing for a minimum wage of at least $10 per hour in Ontario and at the federal level (as recently recommended by the Arthurs Report.) Anti poverty groups and the Toronto Star now strongly endorse a decent minimum wage as part of an anti poverty […]
Read moreI don’t entirely agree with Jim Stanford that RRSPs are a bad way to save for those not fortunate enough to be covered by a good pension plan, but I am struck by the absence of sober, independent analysis as we head into RRSP season. Today’s special Report on RRSPs in the Globe and Mail is, predictably, totally uncritical, and […]
Read moreVancouver is suffering from a plague of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, mental health issues and crime. The good news is that all of these are inter-related, and that senior governments have the funds to make a difference. So with the Olympics coming is just three years, the political culture of neglect is showing signs of activism. Vancouver’s Mayor Sam Sullivan […]
Read moreI am in Ottawa, where the price of gas is 78 cents per litre. When I left Vancouver a couple days ago, the price of gas was $1.05 per litre. Would someone please explain to me how gas prices could be so different, especially given that BC is right next to Alberta. Is it that Ontario is consuming middle east […]
Read moreThe status of the environment as the new top issue of 2007, and the coming federal election, is now uniformly accepted in the popular media. PM Stephen Harper is belatedly and desperately rolling out some “new” environmental initiatives (or reintroducing initiatives they previously had canceled) to try to out-green former Environment Minister, Stephan Dion. I doubt this will work, as Harper is going to have […]
Read moreIn neoclassical economic theory, corporations are supposed to “work”, just like the rest of us do. Their economic function is to organize production, innovate, and grow. This process, when it happens well, generates jobs and incomes (which is not to say there are not better ways to generate jobs and incomes). One way to measure the “work” of corporations is […]
Read moreThere have been a couple of important developments since I last posted about Stéphane Dion’s lack of progressive economic policy. A week ago, Murray Dobbin pointed out that Marcel Massé, Dion’s “principal secretary”, was a driving force behind the Chrétien government’s slash-and-burn approach to the Canadian state. Yesterday, Dion outlined his economic policy in a speech to the Economic Club […]
Read moreAs Marc noted, the Toronto Star is waging a journalistic “war on poverty”. The editorial in Monday’s National Post chastised “The Toronto Star’s poverty scam” for using the Low-Income Cut-Off, a relative measure, as an indicator of poverty. Today’s National Post includes the following letter from yours truly: In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, the founder of free-market economics, wrote, […]
Read morehttp://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070116/d070116a.htm One thing we don’t know about the current round of manufacturing job losses is what is happening to laid-off workers – though employment rates are slipping for older male workers in Ontario and Quebec, and even a supposedly “tight” job market is generating little if any real wage growth for most workers. This suggests that many affected by layoffs […]
Read moreI have just finished reading, and highly recommend, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning by George Monbiot (Doubleday Canada, 2006.) Monbiot is a columnist for The (UK) Guardian, probably best known for his work on environmental issues. He sets himself the difficult task of devising a credible plan to reduce UK greenhouse gas emissions by 90% from current […]
Read moreThe latest from the Toronto Star “war on poverty” series. Here is David Olive: A constant state of dread TheStar.com – News – A constant state of dread If the poor weren’t so conveniently invisible, maybe we’d come to our moral senses and devise a national strategy for eliminating poverty. But the one in six Canadians trapped in poverty […]
Read moreLast week the Fraser Institute released a report arguing for a shift in Canada’s tax mix that would increase the GST to pay for personal and corporate income tax cuts. The proposal would be a massive gift to the richest among us. It is kind of like asking everyone to make out a cheque for $300 to Jimmy Pattison. Such […]
Read moreThe World Trade Organisation We Could Have Had Now is the time to rediscover John Maynard Keynes’s revolutionary ideas for an international trade organisation and adapt them to rebalance the world’s economies in the 21st century. Susan George THE Doha agenda, launched at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting in the Qatari capital in 2001, has collapsed, and a […]
Read morePhilosopher Peter Singer asks what the super-rich should give in order to reduce global poverty. Drawing on Piketty and Saez, Singer finds that doing the right thing would barely be noticeable to their standard of living. From New York Times Magazine: What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You? By PETER SINGER December 17, 2006 The rich … […]
Read moreUBC’s David Boyd takes on dinosaur-in-chief Terence Corcoran on the nexus between environment and economy, and Canada’s lagging rankings: Old ideas produce heat, not light … The myth that nations must choose between economic prosperity and a healthy environment has been conclusively debunked.Countries including Sweden, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands are similar to Canada with respect to per capita incomes, […]
Read moreRecent publicity given to the CCPA report on the huge gap between the compensation of CEOs and ordinary workers should prompt some discussion on what should be done about it. Part of the answer undoubtedly lies in reforms to corporate governance. Shareholders can potentially exert some control over the compensation committees of Boards of Directors who set senior executive pay […]
Read moreWalden Bello, of Focus on the Global South, says yes: Globalization in Retreat Walden Bello When it first became part of the English vocabulary in the early 1990s, globalization was supposed to be the wave of the future. Fifteen years ago, the writings of globalist thinkers such as Kenichi Ohmae and Robert Reich celebrated the advent of the emergence of […]
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