ninthant

100% yes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

I’m not sure why you deleted that, because you’re absolutely correct.

If not for being targeted, my own country would have elected a shitbird and we’d have become the lone US toady as the world isolated both of our countries, while the Americans treated us like an open pit mine.

So it’s not that I think my countrymen are inherently superior. The Albertans who want to create a landlocked country — deeply vulnerable to American bullying — are acting dumber than the poverty stricken folks supporting Spraytan.

And it’s not that I don’t trust democracy, I do trust that it’s reflecting will of the people. The American voters have shown a lack of priority to respecting their own commitments worldwide and a dislike of the world order that placed them at the centre. So while many in the country do have that commitment, their inability to keep the deplorables out of power means that the rest of the world can have no illusions about depending on them going forward.

Carney has taken questions from mainstream media, as well as from overly partisan hostile alternative media.

PP gets a friendlier media, does fewer questions, and still fails to do anything beyond tossing out well-rehearsed empty slogans and stammering out word salad.

Love that idea and I’m going to steal that when discussing that in the future

It’s not just money, it’s the realization that we are nothing to them. It’s the betrayal of seeing someone you thought was a friend stab you in the front without remorse.

So I do believe it is different this time. Perhaps history will reveal you to be correct — PP yipping about being “Americas best friend” indicates at some think the old status quo will return — but I don’t think so.