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.
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.
deleted by creator