Clueless

With the recent protests against Wall Street and Corporations, the NDP will likely be making political gains – they are after all, the anti- corporation party and most importantly, the “party of change.” However, if you analyze what they represent and what they would do if given a mandate, you can easily see that while they are on the other side of the room, they are more of the same.

 

 

If you are left-minded, there is a good chance that you will disagree with this article and what I have to say. Bear in mind, however, that I don’t agree with any of the existing parties and how they would decide to run our country. While I believe that we can have the best public services in the world, I don’t believe that we need to pay as many political and financial prices to get them.

 

Let us start with the NDP rants about big business and big banks. The NDP has traditionally been a Union-based party and thus is bias in the same way that the Conservatives are. First off, what is a Union? While most will define it as a group of people who fight for the rights of workers, we can look at them as an anti-corporations. The similarities between corporations and anti-corporations are indeed stunning. Both make money off of people, both are big and powerful, both lobby governments, and both act like cults. So, what is the difference? Anti-Corporations and Corporations are opposed to each other and anti-corporations aren’t taxed. The NDP does a good job at painting a picture where corporations are essentially groups of people with a lot of money with power who like to oppress their employees. They also make a good case that only unions can stand up to these big bad banks and these big bad corporations.

 

But let’s take a step back from the NDP rhetoric and propaganda for a second. Regardless the situation, the NDP will side with the unions and regardless the situation, the Conservatives will side with the corporations. In the end, both sides will demand the moon, the stars and the universe, and we as tax payers will have to pick our poison. Can one define a union as a corporation that goes against corporations? Quite certainly. Can one say that corporations are bad and unions are good? Not quite. While the mainstream media and the NDP have done a good job as depicting it this way, corporations and unions are simply two groups of people. Both work and earn livings, and both want more power. Every worker pays money to a union –student's in Quebec do and all we see are militants who go to battle.

 

Let’s take a look at the postal workers. They are federally funded employees and they decided that they weren’t being paid enough. So, they went to their union with their demands and the union took on the Crown corporation. What came of it was the Crown corporation made an agreement that the Union didn’t like and the union made demands that management couldn’t fulfill. If management would have bent its back over, like the NDP would have demanded, you and I would have had to pay more for the postal workers’ salaries and benefits and other unions would have got the queue to start demanding the moon, the starts and the universe as well, and it would have ended with you and I paying an arm and a leg to anti-corporations who demand more power. If we think about it, this has gone on for years, just in the opposite direction. All the corporate tax cuts were executed by Conservative-minded economists that sided with the corporations unconditionally. If we elect the NDP we can expect to pay more taxes to pay unions to give a little bit back to those beneath them and keep a bit in their treasuries.

 

So if we look at the NDP and the Conservatives in terms of their stance on management and corporations, we can see that both are bias and will end up giving the moon, stars, and universe to the side that it favors. It is nothing more than a power struggle between corporations and anti-corporations which leave the involved in-between their clashes and not as beneficiaries. We could even argue that the amount of gain that the workers will make as a result of a pro-union government will be directly taken back through tax increases – just as the gains that the corporations make came directly from us through tax increases. Do we really gain with the anti-corporations in charge of corporations? Not at all, instead, it will only get worst as when unions are given the power, they will demand more from the people that they represent and more from the government who became its sponsor. It is just human nature and plain logic.

 

When it comes to economics, we can all be afraid of the NDP. While the party may be split on nationalizing the banks, we can all conclude that the idea is a bad one and that it will resurface once they get elected. Many NDP supporters will likely find the idea of borrowing from a nationalized Bank of Canada as a better one than borrowing from foreign or privatized banks. Let’s take a small lesson in logic. The Bank of Canada is where money is printed and every time money is printed, its value decreases. If we borrowed from ourselves, we would have to print the value to make it exist which means that the value of our money decreases with every loan that the government makes.  Given an NDP government and $76 billion in new spending, we can see that the value of your money will decrease fast. This leads to our next point, inflation. Inflation is the result of a devaluation of our currency. As more bills are printed, and as money becomes easier to get – essentially – inflation increases. This means that the steady 2% inflation that took years to achieve will balloon and since we would always be borrowing from non-existence, we would have inflation that always approached infinity and any attempts to compensate with salary increases would result in faster inflation to a margin where people won’t be able to afford anything, lose everything and the entire market and Canadian economy will collapse.

 

If you weren’t already convinced about how ridiculous it would be if we borrowed from the Bank of Canada, let’s look at this a different way. Imagine that you enter a grocery store and buy $100 worth of groceries. You don’t have a penny on you, but you figure that you can borrow it from yourself and pay it later on your own defined interest rate. So, you take out a pad of paper and write the value of your purchase on it and hand it to the retailer. When the retailer goes to buy the new set of goods to stock his store shelves, the supplier will discredit your paper and see right away that he will never get the value of the $100 that was on that paper. Here is why. You made that $100 out of thin air and since it never existed, it can never be created. You would have to physically print that $100 for it to be worth something to the supplier and retailer, but doing so will mean that you are worth less as it is now easier to get $100 as you just created it out of thin air.

 

With this analogy, you can buy a mansion the same way, and again, you would create money that didn't exist. As it becomes easier to get money, it becomes harder to get stuff – from food to clothing to housing. Relative to what you are worth – not much if you can make money out of thin air – is the value of everything that you can buy. As money is easy for you to get and you can get infinite amounts of it, it will become infinitely harder for you to get stuff. The next time that you have to go to that same retailer, his bill for the same items will be $1 million as it is already easy to get $100 out of thin air. Again. you find that $1 million out of nothing and your value decreases even more as a government. Everyone below you will suffer the greatest price as a result.

 

In a dream world, you could say that we can force the value of a good to meet the assigned value we pull out of thin air, but that would defeat the whole purpose of money and currency and this form of trade. If everyone could get $100 from thin air, then you might as well physically take the objects from the other person for free. But someone spent time to get those goods for you to take. When he sees that he doesn’t need to work as he receives no compensation from his labor, he will stop working and you won’t have anything to take and as a result, the supplier will lose all business as there was none to begin with. It will spiral out of control until civilization crumbles and we are left in a primitive age – everyone fending and supplying for themselves – one where more than half the population of the planet will die off under.

 

You may still disagree with me and think that I have taken the matter pretty far, but when you really think about it, the foundation on which the western world was laid is one of a trade system where people work and sell their goods and receive a value in return. This value means that there needs to be a set value of money that can be distributed for the object to have value and as the amount of physical money increased, the rate of inflation increased so that people who worked to get goods to you wouldn’t be losing because it was easier for you to get the money that you have.

 

So why doesn’t this happen when we borrow from privatized banks or foreign banks at high interest rates and debt? Think of it this way. If you borrow money from a friend, the money that you borrowed existed and relative to your net-worth, it existed and your value doesn’t change. So if you get a credit card, you are essentially borrowing from a person who already has an infinite amount of money and the reason why it doesn’t impact the value of your dollar is because this pool of money is external to the economic mechanism itself. While it does make it easier for you to get money, it doesn’t make it out of thin air (even though it technically does). Since the banks are private, the money doesn’t need to exist as it has no net-impact on the value of your dollar when you go to buy things.

 

The private banks make a profit by charging interest rates, yes, but in our economic context, they need to be considered as separate of the country in order to prevent the economic collapse that was described earlier. While some may argue that our current system is already destined to fail and isn’t renewable and this may be the only way to rebuild the economy, one must consider that this is an unnecessarily painful route to take and that by better managing public finances, governments can avoid these crashes. Therefore it is best not to spend money like drunken sailors – like the Conservatives have been doing and like what the NDP intend to do if given a future mandate. Instead of spending money on unneeded and illegal wars, instead of spending it on plane rides to the Bahamas and fake lakes and gazebos, instead of spending it on prisons and new prisoners, instead of spending it on increased bureaucracy, new senators, new MPs and themselves, the money should be going to infrastructure, healthcare, education and to programs that not only benefit the people, but give them the tools to help mold the country and society of the future.

 

The NDP will try to convince you that anyone who says other to them is either a conspirator, a person from a big bank or a person from a big corporation. Keep in mind that the NDP will do whatever it takes to get your votes to get themselves into power and we have watched them be the most vicious and backstabbing politicians to date – even though Jack Layton put on a smile and gave you all a message of hope. Remember that it is your critical thinking that counts, along with mathematical reasoning which is crucial to understanding why the NDP can never form the next government of Canada if you do not want to become a slave to an empowered anti-corporation or bankrupted and overtaxed by their reckless experiments with our already fragile monetary system.

 

So therefore, if the NDP are just a polarized side in the war for power between corporations and anti-corporations and if they are going to be reckless with monetary policy which could lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it, how can they possibly form a government? How can they fundamentally be any different from the conservatives?