Alberta Politics & Government Thread 3.0

[puffnstuff]

Originally Posted by Slava

I thought that they were fixing healthcare in 90 days? Maybe I didn't keep track of when that 90 days started, but I'm pretty sure it been longer and everything is fixed by now?

1,149 days and counting...

[puffnstuff]

Listening to this hurt my brain

https://bsky.app/profile/thebreakdow.../3m7trrahzbs2t

Her big plans for this province seems to be the govt shouldnt do anything after first complaining about not being able to have control of the money govt spends...

[Fuzz]

The one thing any rational person recognizes is that government is not private business, and should not be run in the same way because the goals of each are entirely different.

Danielle thinks the free market can solve every problem. This, clearly, is dumb. One of the biggest problems with capitalism is consolidation of wealth, leading to a collapse in the system when the poor have too little to continue to support it's growth. So what happens when you put the free market in charge of health care, schools, etc? They'll do what capitalism does, strive to maximize profits. That is ultimately the only goal, otherwise it wouldn't be capitalism. How do they make the most profits after all efficiencies have been found? Reduce quality, quantity, add co-payments, fees, and turn every citizen into a profit centre for them.


We've already seen failure after failure and massive corruption, and it appears we are only at the start of this journey into hell. Someone pull the ####ing ripchord.

This is why you don't put massive ideologues in charge. It'd be like making Steven Guilbault PM. You guys can obviously see why that would be a disaster, I don't know why you missed this one so hard. But y'all ####ed up, badly.

[Slava]

I don’t entirely agree with you. Capitalism and democracy have been instrumental in making the world a better place. We’ve collectively lifted millions and probably billions of people globally, out of extreme poverty. Out standard of living is exponentially better than it was say 100 years ago, but even 50-75 years ago. That’s capitalism and democracy at work, and it’s clear in the parts of the world where those advances and achievements have come from.

The part I do agree with you, is regarding running the government like a business. I disagree with that for several reasons, but some of them are the most fundamental aspects of running a business. I don’t think that everything the government does should be profitable or should breakeven. That’s pretty significant point of departure from running a business, of course.

But one of the issues is that the people who always seem to say “we should run government like a business” have seemingly never run a business. Looking at how politicians allocate resources and capital makes me realize that I wouldn’t want them in charge of a business I owned. They can’t seem to prioritize, and make decisions based on ideology and emotion. Can you imagine owning a business like the provincial government, where regardless of the polices you espouse you have obvious, glaring problems. You talk about those issues with your employees and are really concerned about healthcare, education, revenue stability or other huge factors. The next day though, your employees are out there working to change license plates or drivers licenses. It’s appalling incompetence.

[troutman]

How capitalism is destroying democracy

'Authoritarian capitalism is where the U.S. is heading,' says Yale historian

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-c...racy-1.5786136

[Fuzz]

OK, replace "capitalism" with "late stage capitalism" then.


I'm not saying capitalism is bad, but it requires government to restrain it for the benefit of society. It's not a good method to deliver public services, because it sets up an adversarial system whereby the providers are doing everything they can to maximize profit within the rules(and often not, depending on punishments, corruption, delaying tactics etc) and the government constantly adjusting the rules to counter the motives of profit to ensure services. And if you reduce their ability to make a profit too much, they'll just stop doing it(eg. Alberta Insurance). So taxpayers are forever held hostage to ensure profits, which means paying more than the cost of delivery, which is why it doesn't make sense.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

OK, replace "capitalism" with "late stage capitalism" then.


I'm not saying capitalism is bad, but it requires government to restrain it for the benefit of society. It's not a good method to deliver public services, because it sets up an adversarial system whereby the providers are doing everything they can to maximize profit within the rules(and often not, depending on punishments, corruption, delaying tactics etc) and the government constantly adjusting the rules to counter the motives of profit to ensure services. And if you reduce their ability to make a profit too much, they'll just stop doing it(eg. Alberta Insurance). So taxpayers are forever held hostage to ensure profits, which means paying more than the cost of delivery, which is why it doesn't make sense.

The key problem is if you take away competition on service and price capitalism no longer works.

So for a thing like a hospital - huge initial capital and infrequent visits and limited number of locations near you there is no meaningful way for competition to improve the product.

So you rather have a government monopoly than a private one.
Insurance should be something that could be delivered privately but the risks have gotten to non-independent so need larger and larger areas of coverage to provide house insurance.

Car insurance should work privately and it used to work privately where sask and bc had significantly more expensive insurance.

[Coach]

Originally Posted by GGG

The key problem is if you take away competition on service and price capitalism no longer works.

So for a thing like a hospital - huge initial capital and infrequent visits and limited number of locations near you there is no meaningful way for competition to improve the product.

So you rather have a government monopoly than a private one.
Insurance should be something that could be delivered privately but the risks have gotten to non-independent so need larger and larger areas of coverage to provide house insurance.

Car insurance should work privately and it used to work privately where sask and bc had significantly more expensive insurance.

But the government is built to prevent this as much as it can potentially interfere with it. The corporate world itself is killing competition and using power over government officials to continue to consolidate, while crying poor about a non-existent tax burden and the market-killing force of socialism, working as hard as possible to reduce workers rights, pay and benefits, and and then provide sh** products and services with what little we have left over from fronting the whole tax burden for the services the corporations use every day (our roads, our educated workforce, our subsidized healthcare).

They're killing their own markets.

The problem for us as Canadians, is we are so intrinsically tied to the mess the US has created that we can't really affect what Boeing does, or what Netflix does. We just have to hope the US anti-trust laws would do what they ere supposed to do, but they barely exist anymore and what does is rarely enforced....so we will live with planes falling apart mid-air and crappy entertainment.

[Wolven]

Originally Posted by Slava

I don’t entirely agree with you. Capitalism and democracy have been instrumental in making the world a better place. We’ve collectively lifted millions and probably billions of people globally, out of extreme poverty. Out standard of living is exponentially better than it was say 100 years ago, but even 50-75 years ago. That’s capitalism and democracy at work, and it’s clear in the parts of the world where those advances and achievements have come from.

The part I do agree with you, is regarding running the government like a business. I disagree with that for several reasons, but some of them are the most fundamental aspects of running a business. I don’t think that everything the government does should be profitable or should breakeven. That’s pretty significant point of departure from running a business, of course.

But one of the issues is that the people who always seem to say “we should run government like a business” have seemingly never run a business. Looking at how politicians allocate resources and capital makes me realize that I wouldn’t want them in charge of a business I owned. They can’t seem to prioritize, and make decisions based on ideology and emotion. Can you imagine owning a business like the provincial government, where regardless of the polices you espouse you have obvious, glaring problems. You talk about those issues with your employees and are really concerned about healthcare, education, revenue stability or other huge factors. The next day though, your employees are out there working to change license plates or drivers licenses. It’s appalling incompetence.

To build on some of the other responses...

Capitalism, like most things, is great in moderation. Kinda like how we need to drink water to survive but too much water will kill us. Capitalism is a fantastic system for commerce but it needs competition, guardrails, checks and balances to ensure it stays healthy (and you should never, ever trust "capitalism" or corporations).

Unchecked Capitalism will essentially destroy everything for profit. To make the most profit, corporations want to build monopolies and/or oligopolies. As they earn more and more profits their ambitions grow to consolidate wealth and power into them selves and they will use that wealth to own the rest of us, literally. Every major corporate merger is a step toward this. The few richest people in the world will create artificial monarchies (authoritarianism) through capitalism and the people will essentially become assets, or serfs, in these new corpo-kingdoms. It seems dramatic but Musk is trying to do this right now in the US.

The job of government in capitalism is not to "run like a business" but to provide services to the population, use collective buying power to our benefit, add competition (public alternatives) to the market when none exists, and act as oversight over businesses and markets to ensure that they are staying balanced within the economy and interfacing with the population in a healthy and safe way.

Democracy is fantastic but there needs to be ethics and accountability, especially in a representative democracy where someone is voted to represent a large number of people. If the elected representative betrays the will of the people or gets captured by corporations and shifts their power from the function of representing the voters to representing themselves or the corporations then we see the degradation of the competition, guardrails, checks, and balances that keep democracy and capitalism healthy. We see this with the UCP constantly and feel it in our pocketbooks as they do the wrong things with regulations on utilities, insurance, etc.

America is the prime example of democracy being corrupted and destroyed by capitalism. Ever since the 70s, corporations have been openly capturing the American government more and more. Before the legalization of corporate dollars in politics, the corporations relied on backroom deals that had a risk that if anyone found out, people would go to jail. Now there is a constant stream of money pointed at congress, the senate, and the president and the outcome of most votes can be predicted by which side of the argument is giving more money.

With the advancements of technology, it starts to beg the question "do we need representatives?". Especially representatives that are so easily bought by corporations? If a TV show can enable real time public voting, why can we not do that with our government? Direct democracy would solve some of these problems we are seeing where the political parties are getting more and more corporatist and just provide lip service to the voters every 4-5 years when an election comes up. Instead, we could send out daily or weekly polls to the population to vote on the direction of government and then allow the administration to go ahead with enacting the will of the people with no middle men.

Personally, I think this is one of the reasons politicians try to keep people scared about technology. It is also why they continuously insist that everything be paper ballots. The moment we digitize and secure processes like voting, we won't really need 87 MLAs in Alberta making $120K - $200K+ each... that is over $12M in cost savings every year.

The current Canadian Conservative parties are hugely captured by corporations and other external forces. They run a playbook of flooding the field with horrible and incompetent things to distract you from the big rocks they are moving to erode guardrails, checks, and balances. The end game is a government that is no longer accountable to the people and will allow their overlords to fully take over. In Alberta, the UCP is as corrupt as it gets and, unfortunately, we see it daily.

It is a stark reminder that the culture war is a massive distraction to make us worry about things like trans kids or teachers rights when the government is actually hiding much, much worse things in the background. The root cause of many of those things is capitalism working to make more profits by undermining democracy.

[#-3]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

The one thing any rational person recognizes is that government is not private business, and should not be run in the same way because the goals of each are entirely different.

Danielle thinks the free market can solve every problem. This, clearly, is dumb. One of the biggest problems with capitalism is consolidation of wealth, leading to a collapse in the system when the poor have too little to continue to support it's growth. So what happens when you put the free market in charge of health care, schools, etc? They'll do what capitalism does, strive to maximize profits. That is ultimately the only goal, otherwise it wouldn't be capitalism. How do they make the most profits after all efficiencies have been found? Reduce quality, quantity, add co-payments, fees, and turn every citizen into a profit centre for them.


We've already seen failure after failure and massive corruption, and it appears we are only at the start of this journey into hell. Someone pull the ####ing ripchord.

This is why you don't put massive ideologues in charge. It'd be like making Steven Guilbault PM. You guys can obviously see why that would be a disaster, I don't know why you missed this one so hard. But y'all ####ed up, badly.

As soon as Smith gained power she became a socialist, as long as she is the one with social decision making power.

I'm not sure how many crow corporations she has mused about. Energy Distribution, Lab Services, O&G marketing and export... But it's definitely a hobby horse of hers.

The pattern is she make some statement about what the private sector should be doing, smarter people than her explain to her why they are doing it and how her very own regulation often encourages them not to do that. Then she threatens to nationalize the industry if they don't 'Get on Board'.

Something about how the political spectrum is a flat circle and as soon as the outright libertarians are faced with the flaws in their ideology they start trying to justify that it would work if only they had the power to tell everyone exactly what to do and how to do it (very libertarian indeed).

[Fuzz]

It's just basic authoritarianism, and she's working to dismantle any restraints that keep slapping her hands when she gets out of line.

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by Slava

I don’t entirely agree with you. Capitalism and democracy have been instrumental in making the world a better place. We’ve collectively lifted millions and probably billions of people globally, out of extreme poverty. Out standard of living is exponentially better than it was say 100 years ago, but even 50-75 years ago. That’s capitalism and democracy at work, and it’s clear in the parts of the world where those advances and achievements have come from.

Capitalism pre-dates the time periods you’re referring to. Capitalism also lead to things like slavery and is currently reversing some of the gains you’ve mentioned. Properly regulated capitalism provides benefits but to state that capitalism in itself leads to nothing but benefits is flawed. Even democracy in itself doesn’t always guarantee positive long term gains, though it is still better than the alternatives.

The part I do agree with you, is regarding running the government like a business. I disagree with that for several reasons, but some of them are the most fundamental aspects of running a business. I don’t think that everything the government does should be profitable or should breakeven. That’s pretty significant point of departure from running a business, of course.

But one of the issues is that the people who always seem to say “we should run government like a business” have seemingly never run a business. Looking at how politicians allocate resources and capital makes me realize that I wouldn’t want them in charge of a business I owned. They can’t seem to prioritize, and make decisions based on ideology and emotion. Can you imagine owning a business like the provincial government, where regardless of the polices you espouse you have obvious, glaring problems. You talk about those issues with your employees and are really concerned about healthcare, education, revenue stability or other huge factors. The next day though, your employees are out there working to change license plates or drivers licenses. It’s appalling incompetence.

The only business one could argue that a government should be run like would be a not for profit. Realistically though a government should be run like a household or an investment portfolio (that’s not an endorsement Slava!).

Basically know how much money you have coming in to spend, try to increase revenues sensibly where you can, plan for and invest in long term projects without overextending yourself and understanding that there are times when you may need to reassess your goals. Politicians seem to be really good at overcomplicating that.