No one has the testicles to stop this disgrace…Every native has a say on oil but do you ever hear them complain about this….I believe I heard that they export enough logs in 1 year to keep 17 sawmills running…NO gov. whether it be NDP Liberal,Socreds you name it has tried to stop this…Shame on all of them…

Also no one has the gumption to BOYCOTT any item MADE IN CHINA. These corporate pigs moved your job to there so they can make more profits and YOU now have no job. So when you go to any stores and see MADE IN CHINA then do not buy it. Leave it there on the shelf to rot. DO NOT buy ANY item from them. Whether it be a toaster or shirt or any other item just DO NOT BUY it. Of course these corporate pigs will keep making the stuff there if YOU are stupid enough to buy it from them. Just save your money and maybe make them unemployed. They love seeing us unemployed and YOU are contributing to this every time you buy something from china. We CAN stop these corporations or slow them down much if we could just stop buying for a few months and make them suffer. By going to walmart and buying this garbage YOU are in fact saying you like raw logs being sent out to them and all the other raw things they get and YOU have no job now. JUST STAY HOME AND DON’T BUY ANYTHING FOR A WHILE. WE COULD REALLY HURT THEM IF WE FOLLOWED THAT SIMPLE PLAN.

prov1 wrote: “I believe I heard that they export enough logs in 1 year to keep 17 sawmills running”

And this means what?

If one cannot sell the products that the 17 sawmills (if that is the right number on whatever size those mills are supposed to be) produce then how are you going to keep the sawmills going? Gotta feed the mills with customers.

Do you think those who buy the logs are stupid? They know we dug our own grave by selling to what is practically a single market ever since we started producing dimensioned lumber and panels.

We are now playing catchup. Luckily for us, the Chinese and possibly the Indian market is opening up. They will take our lumber, but they also want to manufacture some of their own.

I do not know what the deals are which are being made; whether there are any quid pro quo conditions on our selling lumber and shipping raw logs. We do not get that kind of information, I suspect.

We do know that those on Vancouver Island were not prepared to lose all jobs when the mills started shutting. They wanted to keep harvesting and transportation jobs, and maybe even a silviculture job here and there rather than shutting the whole industry down.

This is not non-renewable oil or ore which we are making into a value added product. This is a renewable resource which has an allowable cut based on our educated decision of what is a sustainable harvest level. Sustainable harvest levels are based on regular cuts, not 10 years no cutting followed by 10 years of cutting a 20 year harvest level. That would send a hiccup through the entire cycle for many generations.

I have not the faintest clue whether we can compete with European, including the Russian far east, forest product manufacturing industry for European markets. I do not know what the South American market potentials are or the Arican potentials. Both have timber of their own and their own housing construction methods.

We have massive amounts of timber. In my opinion, far too much to even make a dent in feedstock if we were going to begin competing more seriously in the finished carpentry end of the market.

We have few options for the short term. Mid term, who knows. I do know that if one does not try to expand our market and our products from where we have been ruminating for over a half century or more, then we will never know what else we could become proficient at.

In the meantime, including raw logs in our list of goodies we have available to the world is likely an acceptable option, inspite of the perception.

Pat Bell says thinks are looking up in the forest industry I guess this is why.

I say ship them all the dead rotting pine they possibly can. Might as well get something for it. The mills have a really hard time with it anyway. I’ve seen 12 inch dead pine logs go it and nothing come out but tooth pics.

“In the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. we’re having mills shut down because they can’t afford the logs”

Jeez …. the US of A told us that we were subsidizing our timber to the mills and hit us with countervailing duties because their “ma and pa” mills back east could not compete with our lumber.

They told us that we did not have a free market economy with respect to our stumpage rates which were too low for their liking.

So now the northwest is sending more logs offshore than they were used to (the docks on the Washington State side of the Columbia were always jammed with logs going overseas even 20 years ago) and getting a comparative arm and a leg for them.

Seems like “free” enterprise at work to me.

BTW, once again, it seems to me that if there were domestic buyers for the products the sawmills were putting out that those mills would be able to buy more timber, even at the higher prices.

Those people who think that an entire industry is going to sit and wait till housing starts up again without trying to find another market have to be dreaming. Once the industry starts up, do not expect prices to be the same that they were before the housing crash.

Toothpics is all that is needed for composite panels, pellets and pulp.

Of course, the key thing that is needed is a market to sell those products in. At the moment it seems that pulp is still a marketable product. Pellets seem to be iffy. Panels, forget it.

Can anyone tell me the real number of raw logs exported annually? I hear rediculous claims from both sides but no facts. Yes that is an honest, serious question. I suspect the number is not near as large as some are spouting but I simply do not know.

Gus, in the US Pacific Northwest the logs being exported are from private lands. Of which there are a great deal more of there than here, particularly in regards to private forest land ownership in the BC central and northern Interior.

US National Forest and State owned Bureau of Land Management timber is not exported as raw logs, but many timber sales from lands under the jurisdiction of both are often stopped or delayed for years due to Court actions initiated by the US “Environmental Industry”. This has reduced the flow of timber from these lands to US sawmills to a trickle over the last three decades.

Many of the surviving mills are finding that they can’t even access burned over National Forest timber as salvage. Or get the ‘thinnings’, if these forests were properly thinned to reduce the hazard of future forest fires, without engaging in a long and often costly process of litigation with the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Earth First!, and other similar environmental parasites who believe, in the words of the founder of that last one,”That every problem on Earth, both social and environmmental, could be solved by phasing out the human race.” One can only hope that this ‘phasing out’ would start with THEM, but we’ll never be so lucky!

One would think that with the restrictions the US mills have faced over the years they would have turned away from making ‘commodity’ products and gone into what’s often called ‘value-added’. They haven’t. The best chances of survival for a mill there over that period has been enjoyed by those that cut the most basic of commodity lumber products ~ the nominal 8 to 10 foot 2×4 and 2×6 stud. There’s lesson here for those who care to learn it.

It is exceedingly hard, if not outright impossible, to ‘value-add’ any product that is already valuable through what is essentially a further process of separation. All that is really being added is ‘cost’, and that cost won’t all be able to be recovered in ‘price’.

“Can anyone tell me the real number of raw logs exported annually”

I do not know whether anyone keeps count of the number of logs. However, a count is being kept of the volume and the price.

Go to this page from bcstats and click on “log exports” about half way down the page. It will open in an Excel file with pivot table and all …. may not be all that user friendly to some. If not, let me know and I will try to help.

http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/bus_stat/trade.asp

While you are at it, you should also read this document. It is more than 10 years old, but the issues stated in it are still as true today as they were then.

http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/pubs/exp/exp9903.pdf

It might be revealing to some that the USA was the world’s largest exporter of logs in 1996 (45%) with Russia at 20% and Canada at 2%.

As I said, Kelso, WA, on the Coumbia River, is a place that ships them out through a special dock where they cut logs to length, sort them, stack them and load them onto freighters.

The Port of Longview (Kelso) page
http://www.portoflongview.com/AboutThePort/History.aspx

From that page, here are entries regarding LOGS

1950 – Japanese ships returned to Longview for the first time since the end of World War II. They regularly loaded LOGS other materials.

1979 – At the Port of Longview one cargo handling record after another was set, all based on strong LOG exports.

1994 – LOG exports continued to slide while dry-bulk exports surpassed one million tons.

2010 – LOGS, which became a scarce comodity in the 1990s, have resurfaced as a stronghold cargo at the Port.

Loaded log ship picture from Longview-Kelsohttp://www.panoramio.com/photo/25409128

“That every problem on Earth, both social and environmmental, could be solved by phasing out the human race.”

An interesting philosphical argument.

As far as earth goes without humans inhabiting it, there would be no beings left capable of contemplating the state of the Earth, thus all problems will go away immediately no matter what actually happens on Earth, other than perhaps other beings capable of such contemplation inhabiting it once more at a later time.

;-)

“It is exceedingly hard, if not outright impossible, to ‘value-add’ any product that is already valuable”

So you must then believe that a log which can be made into violins has the intrinsic value of the total number of violins which can be made from it and that that value should be paid for at the moment of purchase of that log and that all subsequent transportation and similar ancillary costs as well as the human labour costs, getting the finished product to market, and so forth should not be paid for but should be provided gratis.

You know, socredible, you completely lose me, and I suspect many others, with this essoteric notion of economics which has not place in the real world that I can see.

Nice to talk about in a pub or at a coffee house while we also talk about how many angels can dance on the hed of a pin, but that is about the only value I can see for such notions.

;-)

StasCan
http://cansim2.statcan.gc.ca/cgi-win/cnsmcgi.pgm?Lang=E&ResultTemplate=CII_CIMT5&CIMTSrch=1&RootDir=&Sort=0&Year=2011&Month=10&Freq=6&C2DB=PRD&Commod=44

Figure out what you want data for.

Here is what I looked up:

The top 5 for BC with 2011 first figure and then 2010, 2009, 2008

0 – Total World$521,449,975$377,497,172$260,311,354$283,474,296

1 – China$277,308,006$117,871,397$37,583,652$20,778,638

2 – Korea, South$113,218,855$79,491,523$47,887,855$34,964,327

3 – Japan$93,452,934$133,641,263$120,803,502$140,369,954

4 – USA$28,196,442$40,012,544$49,754,301$83,086,506

5 – Hong Kong$5,685,092$2,781,607$11,956$288,615

Thanks Gus – I am on my phone so will open it when I get home. My concern comes from knowing we have a logging contactor in town who is slated to harvest aa million cubic meters this year, as well as several other contractors doing 400 – 500 thousand CM just to service the few sawmills around the central interior. When I hear claims like “we export enough raw logs to run 17 sawmills” I start to question. Those poor few loggers left out in Terrace must really know how to move wood!

Any talk about the ‘esoteric’ nature of economics aside, Gus, you yourself started out very well in one of your pieces above when you stated:-

“If one cannot sell the products that the 17 sawmills (if that is the right number on whatever size those mills are supposed to be) produce then how are you going to keep the sawmills going? Gotta feed the mills with customers.”

And that’s the problem with “value adding”. You can’t SELL it, ALL of it, for what it COSTS to make it. If you could it would be done. Still. Because virtually every sawmill of any size in days gone by engaged in some form of “value added”.
And more than a few to a far greater degree than anything seen nowadays.

They did it as a means of reducing waste which would otherwise have ended up in the burner, or at best fuel for their own boilers. And to be a “one stop shop”, where a customer could order a variety of items without shopping around to source them.

They made products as simple as lath, and as complicated as moldings. As well as profiled components for sash and door factories, casket makers, wooden toy manufacturers, etc.,etc.

But that was when logs, in most cases logs far superior in quality to anything that’s being logged now, were both plentiful and cheap.

As those logs got more expensive, mills simplified their product line. And they did it for much the same reason as the “big box” stores do it in EACH line of products they stock.

If a product doesn’t continue to ‘turn over’ quickly it isn’t carried on their shelves. They simply cannot afford to have “dead stock” in the store. Even if that stock MIGHT sell ‘sometime’ for MORE margin than other products that move faster do, you don’t make anything until it actually does SELL. And while you’e waiting, the ‘costs’ against it keep piling up.

When you ‘value add’ nowadays, you are not only lengthening the time it takes to “get your money back” for what you paid for the raw material and the initial breakdown of it, but at each successive step of the process you risk losing an increasing amount of money for whatever becomes ‘waste’.

And that has nothing to do with anything that’s ‘esoteric’ in regards to economics, it is a statement of FACT. I’ve “value added” myself, or tried to, in the way that many of the proponents of “what should be done” are advocating. And it DOESN’T work. Not that way.

They are dreaming in technicolour if they think this is going to be a work creating substitute for the ‘commodity’ products the forest industry turns out now. If they put any meaningful value on that ‘work’ in terms of what it actually accomplishes in terms of a needed or even wanted product, that is. And not just for providing an excuse to give pay someone an income.

I just cheked the current Annual Allowable cut for BC

TSA = 64,780,319 m3
TFL = 13,619,607 m3
Total = 78,399,926 m3

Total logs exported from BC in 2010 for a variety of purposes = 3,737,565 m3 or 4.77% of the AAC.

I do not know what we are cutting right now, but it is substantially below the AAC driven by the collapse of the market.

Canfor’s Houston sawmill has a capacity of 1.4 million m3 annually. They have access to some 15 million m3 of AAC.

So, 17 sawmills would not be modern, large, efficient mills but likely smaller mills creating some types of specialty products in order to be competitive.

With modern mills there are more jobs in the woodland operations and all the work and planning associated with that, than there are jobs in the mills. So shutting down harvesting can be very expensive when it comes to jobs maintenance.

The only solution is to shut down the earth and start a new one in a perfect parallel world, socredible.

I’ll follow you when you have it set up … ;-)

“And that’s the problem with “value adding”. You can’t SELL it, ALL of it, for what it COSTS to make it. If you could it would be done”

I think that is a bit ass backwards. The same as building an apartment building or anything custom made. You pre sell it and then make it to order in effect. Only high risk takers “add value” (create something) on pure speculation based on no info on whether something will sell or not.

Speculative production has risks associated with it and typically the cost of the product includes the probabale cost of those risks (at least in the case of those business people who know what they are doing.)

The “free” market economy is totally based on probability, fortune telling and all the associated risks with that. It has tons of built-in redundancies and resulting over-pricing in order to mitigate risk of business failure.

Look at a service industry like a specialty or ma and pa restaurant. Up and down like a yoyo. Their product is food service, ambience, pretense of luxury, etc. It is true value added. You pay more for what you get on the plate than you would have to pay in a grocery store and even more than if you were growing it in a community garden.

Create a planned economy, risk is removed, as is adequate supply, typically. Nothing left on the shelves, and if all calculations were done correctly and assumptions prove to be true, then we have a true value added system?

Gus once again you confuse ‘free enterprise’ with free markets’. The two are not the same and vastly different.

Free enterprise… is about building up the middle class upward mobility equal opportunity in a merits based system of rules and regulations that discourage monopoly capitalism, but encourages small business and private ownership of the economy.

Free markets… are about the lowest common denominator in finance working with and towards globalization through specialization of monopoly capitalism by resource, region, products, or services. Its about subsidizing corporate growth through arbitrage of human labor, environmental standards, and taxation regulations across jurisdictions.

Free enterprise is about building up the country through a sovereign economy that lifts all boats, and is our historic tradition in Canada up until the 80’s.

Free markets has been the mantra since the Canada USA free trade agreement talks started, and has lead to the stagnation of incomes and opportunities, and the decline in the ability for our economy to be sovereign and sustainable, and has lead the world economy to the cliff it now stands before. Free markets are about new world order banksters and their criminal monopolization of industry through the corpocracy that our democracy has become enabling lowest common denominator economic policy.

Free enterprise is about adding economic value throughout the life cycle of a resource… and free markets are about parochial profits to the detriment of local value maximization in the life cycle of the resource.

IMHO

Good afternoon ladies and gents

Hats off to the USW for their response related to log exports. Northwest BC is turning into a waste land due to log exports and Chinese infiltration and Chinese purchase of lumber and pulp producing facilities in the area. These facility acquasitions were made and allowed to take place with the full support of the existing Gov now in office. The chinese companies purchased these facilities with one purpose in mind and this was solely to acquire the timber rights in order to log them and export them to China. The area, believe it or not, has a chinese company logging and exporting logs off of a licence that they hold. You will never see any of these facilities running again and the logs will continue to flow out of the province.
Pacific Bio has shut down the Kitwanga lumber mill in Kitwanga putting 50 sawmill and planermill personel out of work. When they bought the facility they transfered the timber licence into another company that was a union of Pacific Bio with Forsite logging called Pacfor and guess what…the plant no longer has a timber license to go with it anymore…kinda like if you wanted to buy a car with no wheels. Why would anyone want to purchase this facility without a timber license. The volume of log exports out of the province will increase and the info I have gathered to date indicates that the exports are also going to start including the interior log resource….This means Canfor and West Fraser are going to loose timber as well. But hey – who cares as long as the company (CEO/Executives) keep making money. Many of you may not think this is a bad thing because you say “well at least some of the loggers are working”…I read this statement in the Smithers Interior News written by Brian (Tipper) Mould from Kitwanga.
My question to you all is….do you really want Canada to be the next Republic of China….I know I sure do not.
If your answer is no… THEN YOU ALL HAD BETTER START MAKING SOME DAMN NOISE, AND I MEAN LOUD AND STRONG BECAUSE THE BATTLE IS ALMOST OVER.

Have a great day all

So how many loggers, truckers, fuel stations, truck shops, equipment shops, scale operators etc etc etc did it take to keep those 50 sawmill employees working? To say “a few loggers” is a giant over-simplification.

Ps – I lose interest when people cannot tell the difference between lose and loose.

Gus:-“I think that is a bit ass backwards. The same as building an apartment building or anything custom made. You pre sell it and then make it to order in effect. Only high risk takers “add value” (create something) on pure speculation based on no info on whether something will sell or not.”
——————————————-

There is a very big difference between ‘pre-selling’ apartments (condominiums) in a market like Vancouver or Victoria, where many of the buyers are speculators anticipating that the price of the unit will increase over time, and that, more than their desire to have a home is driving the market, and ‘pre-selling’ the same product elsewhere.

People generally want to see what they’re actually getting if their purpose in buying is primarily ‘use’ rather than speculation.

But aside from that,there are two distinct processes involved in wood products value adding. The first is a process of ‘separation’, where the raw material is broken down into some semi-manufactured state, and then broken down further and further again into the desired end product. That would be the area that most sawmills were engaged in in the past, and some still are today. Each step in the process involves waste, and the further the steps go the more costly any waste becomes. For you lose not only the original cost of the raw material, (which, if that happens near the end of the process, may result in having a product absolutely useless for anything), but ALL the labour and overhead costs that have been put into it up to that point.

The second is a process of ‘combination’, where lumber is made into some product like trusses, or furniture, or even pre-fab houses, etc., etc. Wooden box making for the tree fruit industry was once a huge ‘value-added’ industry in the southern Interior ~ one that has virtually all but disappeared now with the advent of the cardboard fruit box.

Likewise with much of today’s wooden furniture. It’s not ‘solid wood’ anymore. Same with ‘wooden’ flooring and siding ~ the modern composites are much more cost effective to make, to stock, and to install.

To ‘pre-sell’ something rather than produce it ‘on spec’ is fraught with risks too, particularly when it involves wood that hasn’t been cut yet.

We live in a “just in time” world, and those who have the product ‘in stock’ NOW, and can quote on a FIRM price (that’s competitive, because they’ve already produced the product, and know what their costs were ~ not what they should be, but then turn out to be much higher because of a myriad of unanticipated circumstances), get the order.

The other problem with ‘pre-selling’, or waiting to get the order before you produce it, involves trying to keep your plant operating steady. If you produce ‘value added’ products a considerable amount of effort has to be expended in training your employees, and, or alternately, in closely supervising them.

To keep a good crew you have to provide steady work, and “orders” do not exactly flow to you in exactly the right proportion at the right time to always do that. Often it’s feast or famine ~ either everybody wants what they want right now, or ‘yesterday’; or hardly anybody wants anything at all.

Many value added products are highly seasonal, and often the buyers themselves are not sure how much product they’re going to need until the particular season is upon them.
—————————————-

Gus continues:-” Speculative production has risks associated with it and typically the cost of the product includes the probabale cost of those risks (at least in the case of those business people who know what they are doing.)”
—————————————–
Yes, that’s quite true. But you’re always going to have to have some ‘speculative’ production if you want steady business.

Socredible.

You mistake the use of the word speculation as to who the speculator is. Yes, in the case of preselling the builder is not the speculatior. Yes, in the case of the apartment building in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, etc, the buyer might be an investor or specualtor, chose whichever word you wish, the outcome is the same and sometimes it is difficult to tell whether the person owning and occupying is a user or speculator. Often they are both.

In PG, most houses are built on “spec” = speculation. Home builders need to keep a few houses in inventory so that they can sell it in the same market and to the same type of buyers as the rest of the housing that is on the market.

Thsoe who do not build on spec (speculation) are custom home builders. They might not actually build what I would call a custom home, one which is designed for a specific user, but there will be 10 models to chose from with all sorts of finishing choices, etc. So, it is what goes for a custom home in a small town.

So, I stay with that as a scenario.

“People generally want to see what they’re actually getting if their purpose in buying is primarily ‘use’ rather than speculation.”

Back to housing. That is why developers of large subdivisions in large cities build 4 or so houses so that people can walk through the real thing, pick out finishes and models etc. and locate it on a map as to whre they want theirs built. And, of course, in a good market, they will already be building 10 or 20 or more so that people can buy and move in sooner than a 2 or 3 month period.

Just like auto manufacturers, they can slow down production, put other models on line, stop production, etc.

Thanks for that, eagleone.

However, to me, when someone tells me I am “free” to sell my product to anyone in the world that I want to, then I have a market available to me that is unhindered. It is “uncontrolled”. It is “free” for me to access as I wish.

Perhaps I should call it an unhindered market so as not to confuse it with your meaning of the term “free market” which sounds like that used in a dissertation about class struggle. I am not using it in that context. ;-)

As soon as there is a quota set on it, or a DIFFERENTIAL tax or tariff, then it is no longer “unhindered” in my view, even though every merchant may end up paying the same tariff.

What you call “free enterprise” does not sound exactly “free” to me as in the meaning of “uncontrolled”.

I like using definitions which are in common usage rather than used as jargon, for some specific context such as discussions of class struggles, etc.

The definitions as I understand them and as used by the two dictionaries recognized by the courts in North America (Oxford=Canada and Webster=USA) are as follows:

– Free enterprise (Oxford) = an economic system in which private business operates in competition and largely free of state control.

– Free Enterprise (Merriam-Webster): freedom of private business to organize and operate for profit in a competitive system without interference by government beyond regulation necessary to protect public interest and keep the national economy in balance.

– Free Market (Merriam Webster): an economic market operating by free competition. It mentions that it is a term which has been in use since 1897, a few years before NAFTA. ;-)

– Free Market (Oxford) = an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.

And then, of course, we have the term Command economy = An economy where supply and price are regulated by the government rather than market forces.

BC needs to have a review of it’s forest tenure system. There have been many changes in the last decade and I feel we should have a public debate on what is working and what is not. The one issue that I don’t agree with is companies selling thier tenure for millions when the right to cut the forest belongs to the people of BC.

These facility acquisitions were made and allowed to take place with the full support of the existing Gov now in office. The Chinese companies purchased these facilities with one purpose in mind and this was solely to acquire the timber rights in order to log them and export them to China.
It’s amazing how everyone is concerned, now that IT”S TOO LATE! Everyone loves the Liberals all the while they have been selling this Province out left and right for the last 11 years.
Bye, bye timber and anything else that was ever made in Canada. The landfills better get used to being filled with all that quality junk coming from China. Just wait till China takes over which is coming very soon, all they need is to control the resources and they own the Province. Gotta love them Liberals, When Christy was saying “Families first” I didn’t realize she meant China’s families first and then B.C.

You don’t really have a totally “free market” anywhere, since EVERY country has restrictions in place to protect what it sees as its national interests.

In the USA, that great bastion of free market capitalism, for instance, the ferries run by Washington State Ferries not only have to be built in the USA under US law, (the “Jones Act”) but also in Washington State under a State law.

This is to ensure that there will always be a shipbuilding industry based in the USA, (and Washington State), regardless of whether the financial costs of building ships there is higher than having them built elsewhere or not.

Likewise with any cargo vessel traveling between two US ports; it must be American built, of American registry, and crewed by Americans, to ensure that the US will always have a merchant marine at its disposal under its own control if and when needed in a national emergency.

The “Jones Act” was the bane of the American lumber industry in the Pacific Northwest for years before their railways were enabled to be competitive to marine transportation.

A BC coastal mill could ship lumber from a BC port to the US Eastern seaboard through the Panama Canal using “flag of convenience” ships crewed with ‘Third World’ seamen at a fraction of the cost a US coastal mill could having to use a US ship crewed by American sailors.

Canada has similar laws in place to protect what we deem are our national interests. Broadcasting, magazine publishing, and banking are all areas where foreign participation is certainly not governed by a ‘free market’here.

In theory, with certain exceptions such as those above, ‘free markets’ make a great deal of economic sense internationally. Those who can best do something, wherever that may be, should be the ones to do it.

Where the theory falls apart is when we introduce ‘money’ into it in the form of national currencies which do NOT ‘circulate’ internationally, but must be bought and sold as if they, themselves, were a ‘commodity’.

If we left that out, and simply compared the ‘productivity’ of Chinese labour, given the average plant the Chinese forest industry works with, with BC labour given the average plant our forest products industry works with, we are far and away more ‘productive’ per man/hour worked than they are.

Yet they are said to be able to produce lumber, and a myriad of other products, ‘cheaper’ than we are? How can this be? Is not an “hour’s labour” an ‘hour’s labour’, no matter who performs it, or where? And the TRUE ‘cost’ of that labour what was ACTUALLY generated in ‘product’ over that hour? But is the TRUE ‘cost’ the FINANCIAL ‘cost’, or does the “trade” in currencies distort something?

Now surely it should be apparent that if one George Soros, international financier, could arrange single handedly the devaluation of the British pound to win a bet with former British PM John Major that he could do just that, there can hardly be what anyone could call ‘free market’ forces governing this international trade in ‘money’.

That far from those money markets being allowed ‘free play’ to respond to the change in value of each country’s currency based on what it will actually BUY in terms of goods and services in its home market, it is being manipulated to distort that value.

This gives us some very interesting international ‘trade’ anomalies. The US State of North Carolina long billed itself as “The Furniture Manufacturing Capital of the World”, the word ‘world’ meaning, to anybody other than an American, ‘America’.

And it was. Some of the great names in US furniture manufacturing were located there. Companies like Broyhill, Lazyboy, and many others. Some of the best US hardwoods are located in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, and they’ve been lumbering there and making furniture for over 100 years.

North Carolina is hardly a hot-bed of rampant ‘labour activism’ with trade unions running up costs with endless demands for ever higher pay and improved benefits. It’s the heart of the US ‘Bible-belt’, where ‘work’ is viewed as the penalty to be borne by Man without complaint for what went on in the Garden of Eden.

“Norma Rae” country, only ‘Norma’ would’ve been out on her ear, if not worse, if she’d got uppity like she did in the movie.

Why, back before there was international competition, one major mill in neighbouring South Carolina, closed up shop completely when the US Federal government announced they were going to start enforcing the Minimum Wage Act! So the whole region was hardly what you’d call a “high cost” area for making furniture, or anything else.

But not any more. The furniture factories are shuttered. A lot of them. The machinery stripped and shipped, in many cases off to China. Because according to the ‘money trade’ it’s now ‘cheaper’ to rail North Carolina hardwood logs all across America, to a port in California, load them on a ship bound for China, unload them, rail them up into the interior of China, (because Chinese labour is too expensive on the coast), saw them, dry the lumber, and make it into furniture there, NOT for sale in China, but to retrace the journey back to America the log took on its way over.

Where said furniture will be sold within a few hundred miles of where the tree grew. And this is said to be ‘CHEAPER’? How in the name of all that’s Holy could ANYONE in their right mind deduce that?

There is NO WAY you can ship raw materials half way around the world, and bring finished product back, with all the energy that involves, and say that such a process is ‘cheaper’. That is a PHYSICAL impossibility. But under our screwed up money system, a FINANCIAL ‘fact’, (if there still really be any such thing in ANY system like that!)

“You don’t really have a totally “free market” anywhere, since EVERY country has restrictions in place to protect what it sees as its national interests.”

I am well aware of that.

We can hamper our language and be picky to the nth degree and then what happens we stop talking …….

There is an element of reasonableness which has to enter into a conversation.

Jeez, enough already.

“There is NO WAY you can ship raw materials half way around the world, and bring finished product back, with all the energy that involves, and say that such a process is ‘cheaper’.”

There isn’t, eh??!! LOL

Yet we do it.

If we were to measure a process by energy spent, then you would be right. Fact is, we do not. Such is life today.

Maybe in 100 years life will be different. Who knows, and who cares.

I watch Dragons Den for savage amusement. The show today had a fellow on who has a line of shoes now selling across Canada that are made in Ethiopia. One model costs him $25 a pair. One of the Dragons told him he was an idiot. He could get the shoe made in China for less than half the price. If he thinks that the shoe from Ethiopia is better, then the stores need to double the current price of $140.

Quebec makes shoes. betch the shoe from Ethiopia costs at least three times the price in Quebec. Take out the transportation costs of $5 a pair or so and Quebec still can’t compete.

Its a fact of life when there are countries which have a subsistance life style and we have a lifestyle of riches. What do you think economic colonialism is all about?

Gus you don’t seem to get it on a number of levels. Point one is that there is a big difference in what free enterprise is as opposed to free markets.

One (free enterprise) is about the rights for a business to operate in a fair regulatory environment as it pertains to the influence of government, or monopolies (or freedom from them depending on ones perspective)… and the other (free markets) is about the freedom as it relates to pricing and valuations (with most valuations being subjective).

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– Free Enterprise (Merriam-Webster): freedom of private business to organize and operate for profit in a competitive system without interference by government beyond regulation necessary to protect public interest and keep the national economy in balance.

– Free Market (Merriam Webster): an economic market operating by free competition.

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ie exactly what your own quote from the Merriam-Webster says above… key words for free enterprise being ‘private business to organize and operate for profit’, ‘competitive system’, ‘regulation necessary to protect public interest and keep the national economy in balance’.

Their is nothing that says you have to have free markets to have free enterprise or even that free enterprise is adventitious to free markets… but if you want to have a national economy in balance and the public interest protected than free enterprise is the way that is done.

One needs to understand the difference not as a wiff of class struggle arrogance, but as a reality that the word ‘free’ placed in front of one word doesn’t mean another word with ‘free’ placed in front of it has the same sloppy meaning in substitution. This is especially important when one considers the two words are actually the ying and the yang of each other making a botched use of the terms undermine any debate involving the subject.

Gus point number two is about the debate on pre selling… or the just in time term you throw around as the new standard in business.

The latest news out of Japan is that JIT was great when things are going well, but can destroy a company when something like the disaster they experienced last spring happens. They now term JIT as the high risk takers when it pertains to a companies solvency, and claim many companies now see having inventory as an insurance against any further JIT risk.

So just so one doesn’t have to see it as either one extreme or the other.

The basis of my political ideology is free enterprise, and so it irks me to see people use the term wrongly giving it the attributes especially of free markets.

Some are partisan conservative, others partisan liberal, others partisan socialists, and others swear by free markets, or communism, or by any other creature of the banksters… myself I view myself as an independent that recognizes the value in free enterprise economic order (the greatest generator of small business and middle class wealth)… one day there might even be a political party that recognizes the true value of free enterprise economic order….

Don’t hold your breath on that one, Eagle. We once had a BC Social Credit ‘Party’ (which for a long time wouldn’t use that word, preferring to be formally called a ‘League’, and informally a ‘Movement’)that recognised the value of “free enterprise” in the same way you do.

But it did not have the Constitutional power over ‘money’. That resided with the Feds. So it got corrupted by same, and eventually fell from grace with the voter.

In its second coming it had no problem calling itself a ‘Party’, nor subjecting itself to what amounted to a reverse takeover by most of the then BC Liberal Caucus. The moniker still had a better marketing value then, probably for nostalgic reasons, than the “Liberal” one did ~ but there was precious little left of the original thrust towards a “free enterprise” society where ‘finance’ was to be the servant of man, and not his master.

Gus:-“Maybe in 100 years life will be different. Who knows, and who cares.”
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Well, Gus, we all should care. For we won’t have to wait “100 years” for “life to be different”. It’ll be very different well within our lifespans if some very vital financial corrections are not made soon. For if history is any guide at all, and I believe it is, an international ‘trade war’ for markets in an ever increasingly industrialised world, has always led straight to ‘military war’. That was the history of the 20th Century, and there’s no indication that we’ve learned from the mistakes of the past. If that’s the way we want to go, better not criticise the current government for anything it spends on the military. We’ll soon need every fighter jet and warship and everything else we can muster.

War? Fighter jets?

Tell you what, if it comes to an actual war, this part of the country is just as expendable for that purpose as it is for any other purpose. The military is not large enough to defend a country this size. Who are you trying to kid?

100 years from now my grandchildren are likely not even going to be alive. It is all good and well to think about 7 generations down the road, but it is just emotion backed up by very little reality.

No, we should not knowingly ruin this earth, but noboy really knows what is sustainable and what is not sustainable and what level of living standard is actually used for determining sustainability.

Just think, had our ancestors in 1912 been measuring their legacy in terms of 100 year sustainability, how well would they have done? Better still, how well would we be doing today living like they did back then? LOL …… The entire notion becomes ridiculous if you really think about it.

I go back to the real challenge – world overpopulation. That is the root cause.

You say we are able to do this that and the other thing if we just valued things differently (at least that is the way I summarize it). If that is true, then we could see another incremental increase in world population and something else will be the cause of strife.

The fact is, we cannot go on adding billions of people and expecting all to attain the same average level of living standard we have right now. Our living standard, in many ways, has gone down in the past decade or so.

The question of log exports as it applies to this province is the same as the question of local processing of local timber in a local facility(s).
The question of why that is important as to who benefits and how much is derived in either scenario is also the same.

If you look at this debate from a corporate profit view you come up with an entirely different stategy than that of a local citizen wanting a better community or a provincial wellbeing objective.

Shipping logs from one area to another does the same as exporting logs from this province when it involves the survival of a community. What is our province but a group of communities and the resources that surround them? How many communities will survive without locally processing the resources which surround them? How well will our province do if our communities fail because they have no sources of employment OR no resources available to them?

It is quite amazing that we believe what we are told by people who wish to do what suits them at our expense. It is discouraging to hear people advocate for things which simply and blindly follow the corporate propoganda..which suits them..at our expense. Why is it that people would believe it preferable to sell the rights to our natural resources to foreign owned corporations who dictate the prices of which we recieve? at the fastest rate possible and with the least local/provincial benefit?