C’mon guys this is such an easy win for us as a country. Justin went a little too far with his style of governing for a lot of you and now the liberals have voted this guy to be it’s leader and new PM. This is who we want to lead us into the second half of the 20th century, this guy is so fucking smart. Pierre just sings slogans and simple pretty things that sound nice but in reality he’s just going to sell us off to American interests and cut the things that help working people.
No, it doesn’t. There are two important differences.
PP is a devotee of the cult of the free market, that markets are best and all we need to do is remove restrictions on them. Carney believes markets should serve to people, that the end goal isn’t just naked efficiency but they we need market forces directed to get human-centric outcomes.
This is extensively covered in Carney’s 2021 book “Values” which I encourage everyone to read in order to understand the important differences in these approaches. Carney’s approach is an explicit rejection of the idiotic free market cultism of PP and his ilk.
Another critical difference is in competence. Carney is an experienced leader who was so well-regarded in his field that the UK selected him as the first ever non-local to run the Bank of England. Whereas PP can’t even manage to handle questions from friendly press, let alone lead something.
So no, they are not the same. You might still want to prefer an explicitly socialist approach that rejects markets entirely, which is a legitimate perspective for sure. But aside from the revolution party no one is really advocating that at the federal level.
The difference, fundamentally, is that Carney studies markets, while Milhouse worships them.
The nuance I’d add is that while free markets are efficient, serving the public good is more important than the purest efficiency.
As an example, an unrestricted free market incentivizes the development of monopolies. This can be efficient and in the extremely long term these monopolies may fall to disruptive new entrants — but we humans live in the present and take little solace in the idea that the monopolist will someday get too bloated and fall. We just want to afford groceries!
So using competition bureau powers, we can restrict those markets. This may subtract from some extreme market efficiency but that’s an efficiency only the monopolist benefits from in a useful time frame.
The same principles are true in many other areas of the economy.
To add to this, as result of these differences, Carney might be able to extend the shelf life of the established capitalist system. PP on the other hand is going to accelerate its decline towards more inequality, poverty and instability. So from the perspective of preserving the system itself, Carney is the guy.
If Carney gets a majority and is unable to substantively turned things around, I’m giving up on capitalism.
I sincerely believe we will never have a better candidate to represent the perspective of directed market economics. As the sportsball chant goes: “If he can’t do it, no one can.”
Mass immigration into an existing housing shortage is not “capitalism”. Inverting the Phillips curve via mass immigration is huge government overreach.
It’s not so much capitalism as it is the premiers being literal throns in our countries side when it comes to progress (Alberta and Sask). They will threaten to “leave Canada” because of some bullshit reasoning that changing our economy from a petrol one to a green one will be bad for the economy. Meanwhile it will only generate new growth and stability for everyone who invests in it. Carney KNOWS this
The challenge for the prairies is that we need to undo the brain rot that has told the people in those provinces their only future is in servicing American oil extractors.
There is a story for these provinces. The Norwegian or Saudi model of having the oil extraction being state-owned — and then using the profits to enrich the population — has been tremendously successful.
Alberta and Saskatchewan control these rights in their provinces and the centre and left should be screaming this from the hilltops. The oil and minerals are non-renewable and they should focus on getting value to enrich their own populations, not rush to produce at a discount in order to enrich American shareholders.
Bingo. Alas all they consume is brain rot
Capitalism very much has large internal problems that require unending relentless work to keep from undermining it. So it’s very much a problem itself. Then the problems you highlight add to the challenge. 😂
Well put and I second the encouragement to read his book. If nothing else it will help one understand Economics a little better.
Which is separate from saying everyone should agree with it.
I’d love to see a similarly highly-competent socialist economics nerd leading the NDP in our future.
Agreed.
I would just love to see highly-competent people in politics across the board. We need less career politicians, and ideologues, and more experts in their fields running the show.
In the middle of it now and it’s only made me want this guy as our PM even more. But honestly most people today couldn’t read a book to save their life
Agreed on the first point, his book is a very good argument for him to be PM. But I wouldn’t say “Couldn’t read” to save their life, but unwilling to read that which they don’t already assume they will agree with. Which is a problem across the political spectrum unfortunately.
That’s is true, but honestly I know VERY few people irl that actually own books other than their textbooks from college or uni. They all scroll and get their news and Infor from Instagram or tiktok. It’s fucked and makes me incredibly worried about the future and it being full of people with the attention span of a walnut
I think you may need to surround yourself with better people, or work to influence the ones you already know in a positive way.
Oh believe me it’s already something I’m actively looking out for. Just closing on mine and my wife’s first house, changing jobs, election etc, so much going on and it’s just… Yeah it’s one of those times in your life where you just move on with who you hangout with and who you want to hangout with. People grow and should grow.
Mostly agreed but I would say that there’s plenty of room in all kinds of ways for a more unconventional approach to economics than what Mr. Carney proposes without going all the way to “reject markets entirely.”
I think there’s a vast gulf between absolutely unregulated ‘free’ markets of the typical cruel blue, and ‘reject markets entirely’. Just because the Cons typically play in the farthest anti-people range of the spectrum doesn’t mean everything that places any value on society over those markets is immediately rejecting markets entirely. There’s a lot of room for a gov to do anything beneficial to its people, and thus appear to be way more social than the cons’ typical position, and still not be anti-capitalist.
Perhaps it’s a failure of imagination on my part.
What I see from the NDP for example are extremely poorly considered centre-left policies that don’t go far enough but yet at the same time are ignorant of the economics they want to continue working within.
Take for example their proposal for national rent control. This is a disastrously ignorant policy proposal inside the context of a market economy as it will instruct the markets to halt any future construction of rental units.
Whereas I believe what they need to be doing is either what Carney is proposing, or giving up on the idea of markets entirely and using socialist tools to directly build the homes that the market has failed to build.
But I’ll take your advice to heart and listen if someone comes up with an alternative I’ve not considered.
It certainly would be nice if the NDP could learn to speak convincingly about economics, that’s for sure. Understanding how things work is a prerequisite to making the right changes.
The Green party sometimes finds itself in the general area of what I had in mind. Take a look at their plan for housing for example. In my view though, broader changes are required to break the stranglehold that entrenched oligopolies have on most of the Canadian economy. Concentration of market power is reaching new extremes, and it’s going to take serious changes to correct that. Keep in mind that “using money” and “having markets” do not necessarily mean capitalism at all, let alone capitalism as we know it.
There’s a whole world of ideas about how to run things differently that get talked about elsewhere and get no play in mainstream Canadian politics. All the usual social democratic stuff but also wilder things like MMT or variants of Georgism for instance. There are many possibilities and I don’t claim to know exactly which ones are best, but I wish the Overton window wasn’t quite so absurdly narrow as it is when it comes to this stuff. Maybe a competent manager of the status quo is the best we can hope for out of electoral politics for now, but sooner or later we’re going to need someone with big new ideas.
Well said. 100% agree.
I prefer to call it “that thing that has worked in some provinces for decades”, but okay.
These policies have abjectly failed with extremely harmful consequences.
Rent control is a very useful short-term bandage, to prevent a blip in the market from pricing people out of their homes.
What it isn’t, is a long-term solution inside a market system. After decades of rent control, developers have become largely disinterested in pursuing new rental units as it strictly limits the financial upside for them.
People who have been in these units get benefits, but with these benefits come serious drawbacks. Because rent control allows them to live beyond their means (relative to market prices), people in rent controlled units are stuck. They cannot find a comparable home if they want to move for a better job, to go to school or training elsewhere, to get out a bad domestic partnership situation, to find a different sized home because of life stage changes.
So yes I get that it feels good, and it absolutely helps in the short term. But it’s urgent that market prices come down as well. And while Carney is working on the market solution for this, the NDP or some other emergent group has ample room to come up with a comprehensive socialist alternative for this as well.
Capitalists do not have a monopoly on economic policies. Marx was an economist (amongst other things), for crying out loud. They can, they should, have a well-considered policy platform. For the love of gourd, NDP, don’t let a banker who works at a hedge fund have a better socialist policy on housing. It’s worse than embarrassing, it’s a goddamn travesty.
Perhaps a market approach to housing is the core of the problem. I don’t know, and I’m just tossing out an idea triggered by the repeated explicit assumption you’re making (“inside a market system”). I am tossing out the idea in the spirit of cooperative “yes, and…” discussion, I am not challenging your point, and I am not interested in debate, but rather, conceptual exploration to see what ideas might emerge. (If you know De Bono’s work, what I am saying is, “po housing is not based on a market system”).
I don’t know the details of that, but I’m skeptical. Nothing about the housing system has worked great lately.
That’s how I feel about the NDP aswell. They are basically all talk without any of the economic realities. Carney KNOWS how markets work and how we can harness them to create wealth and prosperity while building a net Zero future, by making it PROFITABLE to do so.
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