first past the post vs. proportional representation
- Thread starter licks2nite
- Start date
Useful comments are based on valid facts. On the other hand, garbage in, garbage out.
In 2005 voters were 58% in favour of PR. The politicians didn't like the result so they ignored it. They then held two more votes that were skilfully and successfully designed for a NO PR result. You have been had. We have all been conned.
If you think that you've been had, I think that you're right but not for the reason you've said. Central planning has killed the Canadian economy. Hardly anybody outside non-producing government jobs can get a real enough income to own a condominium without a spouse working too, let alone a single detached family home without an inheritance. It's about transparency, small government to eliminate corruption. If you have to put your faith in government, put it into local government, your mayor and council, that you want local politicians and bureaucrats to have powers of provincial and federal governments to negotiate with product producing corporations to settle in your area that can give you a real job contributing to the Canadian economy, not the current fare of work that makes parasites of Canadian consuming from marginalized and slave labour overseas, and bigger drain on the Canadian economy than welfare recipients.
licks2nite, you might find Capital In the 21st Century by Thomas Pickety an interesting book. He provides fact based analysis of the things you are talking about.
And I don't think I've been had, I think we've been had by a small, wealthy and powerful elite. It's just a matter of how well we understand that process.
You sound like one of those who think we pay too much tax, have too much government and need to end government services. It may help you to look at the Scandinavian countries where they pay much higher taxes and have more government providing more services. They have less in natural resources and still manage to be better educated, healthier, wealthier and happier than us.
It isn't about how much tax we pay. It's about how we vote and how the tax money is spent. If you look, I think you will find that all those countries use a PR system for elections. With a better education they understand that FPTP is a useless system and they elect better politicians.
And I don't think I've been had, I think we've been had by a small, wealthy and powerful elite. It's just a matter of how well we understand that process.
You sound like one of those who think we pay too much tax, have too much government and need to end government services. It may help you to look at the Scandinavian countries where they pay much higher taxes and have more government providing more services. They have less in natural resources and still manage to be better educated, healthier, wealthier and happier than us.
It isn't about how much tax we pay. It's about how we vote and how the tax money is spent. If you look, I think you will find that all those countries use a PR system for elections. With a better education they understand that FPTP is a useless system and they elect better politicians.
BC as a singular province has the same landmass as all the Scandinavian countries combined, while they have 7 times our population density, which means cultural homogeneity. You cannot compare a country with mostly shared problems among its inhabitants to a country where inhabitants in the same province don't even live in the same ecological biome.
PR works in Scandinavia and New Zealand because they have great education and globalization that creates better and worldly administrators. It's not that PR works, it's that they have a better pool of candidates.
PR in countries that have shitty politicians like Italy and Albania are still shit. Canada is in the shitty politician pool - Most people I know have never been to university or even traveled outside their city / province.
PR won't work here because you're still going to elect morons that we elected in FPTP. Changing the way you elect morons is just making electing morons a more complicated procedure.
What BC needs isn't a new electoral system, but a new anti-graft commission.
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Well, you guys sound as if you're a lot more professional than I've ever been. I'd be the first to admit that I haven't done anything in my life to actually support myself with a job that could possibly balance any of the products that I've consumed, regardless of where in the world the products came. Except for maybe when I was twelve years part of one summer that I spent on a farm stacking bales of hay coming out the back of a bailing machine for cattle that might be producing exportable meat for the countries that I might be consuming products from. In the interim I've watched myriads of Canadian industrial producers disappear, aircraft, television, home appliances, building products beyond aggregate. Each that could have provided a base for export products were it not for the early phases of a wholesale tax that was replaced by the GST. That's mostly before judiciary handed Canadian trade unions exorbitant wage gains that drove out foreign branch plants that were trying to provide products for the Canadian market. Lest we forget Nortel that became the most valued corporation in Canada, and all basic sundry product producers. Been decades since there was any meaning in the term to "Buy Canadian".
No, I simply don't trust what central planning has done to Canada regardless of who's at the top of things or how many degrees involved. Places where sociopaths gravitate toward that degrees don't change, neither by guaranteeing the character of the person nor by keeping the sociopath out. And that's just the beginning. The "do-gooders" that get to the top can't do the enormous calculation to make everything work properly. The wholesale tax that applied to Canada's earliest producers. The judicial professions that grew rich handing out wage gains only to double-cross all the blue collar workers that were relegated to low-skill jobs regardless of how much time was spent in school. For it all, I want that municipalities take over jurisdictions in taxation, labour standards and the environment and make a go of it without federal Canada and provincial/territorial governments poking their noses into their affairs.
No, I simply don't trust what central planning has done to Canada regardless of who's at the top of things or how many degrees involved. Places where sociopaths gravitate toward that degrees don't change, neither by guaranteeing the character of the person nor by keeping the sociopath out. And that's just the beginning. The "do-gooders" that get to the top can't do the enormous calculation to make everything work properly. The wholesale tax that applied to Canada's earliest producers. The judicial professions that grew rich handing out wage gains only to double-cross all the blue collar workers that were relegated to low-skill jobs regardless of how much time was spent in school. For it all, I want that municipalities take over jurisdictions in taxation, labour standards and the environment and make a go of it without federal Canada and provincial/territorial governments poking their noses into their affairs.
Perhaps you can tell me. Is this man of the Keynesian persuasion that most academics are these days that has been responsible for all monetary intervention in interest rates and expansion of balances sheets (money printing) that has created all recessions since at least 1929? Or is he from the Austrian School that knows how to profess free market economies?
Monetary or fiscal policy seldom cause economic downturns. The last one we had was caused by excessive Subprime lending, A product of deregulated and free market economy.
The sub-prime lending crisis was any but a free market. "Community Reinvestment Act" legislated by Jimmy Carter and provided with stiff penalties by Bill Clinton mandated that banks in the United States would lend to almost anybody to buy a home. Low interest rates mandated by Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S. keeps inefficient corporations afloat, borrowing money for day-to-day operations and buying back its own shares to keep stock price up rather than investing in future growth of the company. Corporations, estimated to be about 14% of Europe's, face collapse in any European Central Bank mandated hike in interest rates.
These are signs of insufficient regulation against greed and the human factor. The collapse was ultimatedly caused by private sector banking using ETFs to sell bad debt to investors on leverage - none of which were regulated. Investment bankers used the leverage loophole to bet spreads on packaged bad debt and sold the idea of infinite profit to insurers and investment institutions. The unregulated nature of the US economy is why there is massive economic disparity and the existence of oligarchich plutocracy dominated by powerful lobby groups backed by corporate interest.
Planned economy is safe but inefficient. But deregulated market economy is ultimately efficient but unstable.
The Canadian economy is not where it should be because of protectionism, but that is a story for another day.
More about the "Community Reinvestment Act". In addition to penalties for banks not loaning to sub-prime borrowers, Bill Clinton provided guarantee in effect making the "B" rated sub-prime loan a U.S. government rated "AAA". Certainly a highly regulated effort and the reason why U.S. bankers didn't go to jail selling investment products labeled as "AAA" that contained "B" rated loans when U.S. government said that that is the way it has to be. Stability in free markets are corrected on a monthly basis not the decade long fiasco currently unfolding with a decade of central bank regulated low interest rates.
I am 2/3 of the way through his book and he isn't pushing any economic agenda. He is going through the economic data from the past 300 years and providing ways to understand it.
