How long ago was it our ruling party was staing we would be the only province with a surplus? Ooops. Alberta says they will have 540 million in surplus. More creative book keeping I am guessing.

The Bc economy had had it . Also the effect from the Alberta oil and gas has raised its nasty head , all the folks from BC that had great paying jobs are now returning to collect EI. Crusty Clark wants them to come home well she better start finding some jobs and I do not mean Timmies and or Burger King . However groceries are at an all time high , don’t know how folks are going to feed their families . The folks on OAC are struggling so I would never brag about this economy .

Forget about the perverted emphasis on ‘jobs,jobs, jobs’, as if that were the only way to generate and distribute ‘incomes’. It isn’t. We live in a world that is dispensing with ‘jobs’ at a faster rate than it is ever going to be able to create them. That is if they’re ever going to be meaningful jobs, that actually are needed to produce and deliver real goods and services. Not just ‘make work’ excuses to pay someone an income.

We look on unemployment as the curse of our time. It should be seen for what it really is, and would be, if it were not currently accompanied by un-empayment. A release from the drudgery of never-ending labor. Is there some great moral argument to be made for forcing everyone into finding the hardest way to do something? For destroying all the advances of technology that have increased productivity a thousand-fold, or more, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution? For putting the whole world back into a condition of actual scarcity, where famine stalked many lands that have now become food exporters? Where every shoulder had to be shackled to the plow, and all craft was handicraft? There certainly is NO ‘economic’ argument for doing so. So why should there be any moral one?

Wake up and face the FACTS, people. We are more than capable physically of giving everyone in this country a standard of living far higher than we currently have on average. And at a far lower COST of living ~ a REAL cost of living ~ than we currently have. And we don’t have to “take from the rich to give to the poor” to do it ~ not that such has ever proved practical anywhere ever anyways at doing any more than universalising misery. We simply need to look at the way the current financial system mis-represents the physical facts it is supposed to be an accurate numerical reflection of, but is increasingly anything but. And correct it. It is JUST that simple.

Big oil ,big gas produces very few jobs and when the oil and gas are gone ,so are the jobs . The solar industry in California employs more people than does the big five utilities in canada by a wide margine . Those jobs will never go away . By the time crusty gets her new dam , the market will not need the electricity .

Pot, plain old Mary Jane…is one of the biggest economic drivers in this province and it is currently a tax free business to boot. While States all around us are legalizing it we ignore the positive economic impacts legalized marijuana can provide. BC already produces some of the ‘best’ in the world, it’s time to turn on this economic engine.

It’s a none starter Jim . Paul calandra just days ago said , as long as the conservatives hold power pot would never be legalized . I’m sure that the vast majority of BCs dealers and growers will be voting conservative , so as to conserve their income .

Non starter .

Give the home owner , businesses ,farmers , apartment owners , schools , parking lot owners , etc ,etc , the same deal that is given to run of the river projects and watch employment explode in numbers . Give our electrical engineers and lot something to do . Our rooftops are worth a fortune . Without it the smart meters are pointless .

Socredible, that seems like a departure from your usual viewpoint, if I’m wrong, forgive me. But, I generally agree with what you are saying about this country’s ability to provide a more equal standard of living for every citizen. But are you sure that in doing so we will not affect current productivity or cause hardship to some of us middle class types?
metalman.

No, if anything it would probably increase productivity, Metalman. Already we have way more capacity to ‘produce’ just about everything imaginable than we could ever possibly ‘consume’ it.

If we base our whole economy, as we have been doing, on the premise that we’re going to be able to always ‘capture’ some foreign markets for enough of all this production to enable there to be ‘full employment’ here we have to start to ask ourselves a number of questions that should’ve been asked a long time ago.

The first is just ‘how’ these foreign markets are ever going to meaningfully pay us for all these exports? International trade really only makes sense when it is just that ~ an actual ‘trade’ of one country’s relative surpluses for some other country’s alternate relative surpluses. So that consumption in both countries trading can be more diversified.

That isn’t what we’ve got right now. We introduce ‘money’ into the equation, and when we do we slew a whole bunch of factors away from the physical reality that’s patently obvious to anyone who cares to look at it, and that causes enormous problems.

For instance, we trade with China. But a lot of the products that come in here from China could in no way ever be made ‘cheaper’ than they could be made here, (and I don’t mean ‘cheaper’ in the sense that their quality is lacking, which it often is, but in regards to the actual ‘physical’ costs of production).

There simply is NO WAY ‘physically’ anyone could move raw materials halfway around the world to be manufactured and bring the finished products halfway around it back again to be sold here and do it ‘cheaper’ than doing the same thing here.

Just the energy cost alone of doing that is enormous, and that’s not even counting the relative scarcity of energy in China compared to here. Their wages are no doubt ‘cheaper’, their standard of living lower. But NOT THAT MUCH lower. And not enough to make up the difference. What does make it up is a mis-representation of physical reality ‘financially’.

And that’s just ONE part of the issue. There are many, many more.

I agree with what socredible is getting at. The ability to provide people with the necessities of life (and even the luxuries of life) really has nothing to do with the amount of hours they work, what we choose to use as money, etc. It comes down to our ability to extract what we need from the environment, transform it into something meaningful and distribute it to people. That’s essentially a physical exercise (gross oversimplification I know). Everything else that goes along with it is something we created to manage the process. It’s very much artificial.

If those physical exercises are able to be replaced by automated ones, it should really have no impact except for the fact that many more people would be laying around “doing nothing” instead of “earning their keep”.

Alas, I don’t think we’ll ever see much progress. Our entire society is based on “winners” and “losers” and I think we’re culturally wired to believe that any other alternative is not possible. We can’t even fathom the idea of letting people retire when they reach 65. How the heck are we going to get to the point where we find a level of comfort with supporting people in our society when they don’t, at least on the surface, appear to be “contributing”?

NMG:-“How the heck are we going to get to the point where we find a level of comfort with supporting people in our society when they don’t, at least on the surface, appear to be “contributing”?”
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Simply when WE are NOT supporting them, NMG. Which we can’t really do anyways. Not the way we’ve been doing it.

There will always be animosity when those who still work for a living feel they’re being penalised through taxation, or by other means, to support those who don’t.

All taxation, fundamentally any taxation paid in ‘money’, is a tax on income. Since none of us, with the exception of the banker and the counterfeiter, actually ‘make’ money. All we can do is ‘get’ money. As an income.

And with ongoing labor displacement via continuous technological advancement there are less and less of us getting money from that source (labor) all the time. Directly, that is. And to tax those who are, openly, or hit them with all manner of hidden taxes, with the notion that this will somehow enable some agencies of government to play Robin Hood, is simply a futile exercise by political Parties in a type of musical chairs game of ‘divide and conquer’. And we fall for it.

Lost in the shuffle is any one of them ever asking whether the money ~ that stuff those on the ‘left’ want to take more from us in taxation to try to level everyone down, (because that’s what generally happens when they do that ~ everyone is leveled down); or those on the ‘right’ need to mount a futile, rear-guard, retreat against letting those on the ‘left’ do what they want to do, (and the ‘right’ only ends up doing, too ~ because it has no other answers, and delay can only last so long) ~ is ever still collectively sufficient in quantity to fully meet the cost of everything on the market we need or want that’s ‘priced’ in money. And if not, why not?

Now we have a pretty good indication that it is NOT. Or Canadians, on average, wouldn’t be personally $ 1.62 in debt for every $ 1.00 of disposable income available to them. A ratio which rises each passing year, seemingly ever faster. So it seems we have an ‘insufficiency’. Of money itself. And no matter how you try to divvy up any insufficiency, never a sufficiency it will make.

It’s like having a community picnic where twice the number of guests expected show up, and the pie gets sliced thinner and thinner so everyone can have a piece. Well, everyone gets a piece, alright, but they all go away from the table still hungry, too! The solution is to bake a bigger pie.

We have already done that. We have a pie of ‘production’ that’s more than physically capable of satiating the total demand for ‘consumption’. But currently it can’t do so ‘financially’.

So we need to look at why this is so, and correct it. For if there is anything certain about economics it is that “Consumer Demand is the origin of all economic activity.” We produce to consume ~ not, as some politicos would have us believe, so someone can have a ‘job’. That latter comes as a result of the former.

Unless there is ‘consumer demand’, and equally importantly where there is, a way of making that demand ‘effective’, there’s not going to be any useful ‘production’. Or ‘jobs’.

So the first thing is to recognise that if this country is actually increasing its REAL WEALTH (its physical ability to increasingly produce goods and services more efficiently year after year after year), and it is ~ yet this progress is continually displacing labor and labor incomes ~ then if we want to be able to consume what we’re more than capable of producing it should be clear we have to issue money to every citizen to enable this to happen. NOT money taken from someone else in taxation ~ for that defeats the purpose. But new money, created to represent this advancing real wealth ~ and distributed to everyone as a matter of right.