Saskatchewan’s 2008 tax cuts: did Saskatchewan strike the right balance between immediate universal relief and creating the environment for long term growth?
Year: 2008
The Financial Crisis: Bubbles Deflating Worldwide
The mortgage meltdown is much more than an American affair. Real estate bubbles have developed in all major English speaking countries – US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Where prices will finally settle, no one knows. Some analysts soothe the market claiming that the bottom is near.
Expert Touts Private Care
Countries such as Australia, New Zealand and France have private health-care businesses that run alongside the public health-care sector, which is what Chaoulli has been lobbying the provincial and federal governments to consider since 1992
Central Planning at Home and Abroad
The main difference is that a government that forswears central planning and leaves individuals free to make their own decisions within a system of property rights will typically end up being the government of a prosperous country.
Featured News
What Must Be Done to Curb Canada’s Household Debt
Canada is struggling economically. From inflation and deficits to investment and employment, everything that should be up is down, and everything that should be down is up. One striking symptom of economic rot is household debt, which is rising faster than incomes....
Crown Utilities’ Unfair Advantages Reduce Competition, Innovation
Largely unique among state-owned enterprises, ‘SEOs’, worldwide, Canadian Crown corporations have two key advantages over current and future private sector competitors: non-taxable status and access to low-cost public sector borrowing rates. Other implicit edges...
Equalization a Moral Failure
In our personal lives, we generally recognize three basic moral principles in our economic relationships with others. The first is to do everything we can to ensure that we do not become an unnecessary burden on our neighbours. The second is a core principle adopted from the practice of medicine. It is to do no harm. The third principle is to share where sharing is required but to do so in a way that does not breed dependence. The failure to measure the system against its principal goal means that federal regional subsidies fail this final moral test.
Fish Board’s Ship Sinking, Report Confirms
People who lived in rural or remote communities can now communicate via telephone or more importantly, the Internet. This medium has brought profound changes as the average fisher can surf the web and find out how much the free-market system is paying for various species of freshwater fish. In addition, they can now see that “value-adding” to their catch (smoking, marinating and modified atmosphere packaging) can derive not only better returns and longer shelf life, but provide meaningful jobs in their communities.
The Genius of Adam Smith
More fundamentally, Smith’s insights remain valid because he was not merely a supporter of markets and a critic of overweening governments, but also a student of human nature. Smith painted humans as complex and often internally conflicted creatures whose prudence, benevolence and ingenuity is nevertheless best encouraged in a free and open society with minimal government, clear laws and strong external defences.
No Smoking Hot Spot
The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don’t you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now?
Selfish is Asking High-cost Provinces to Subsidize Low-cost Provinces
Any new call for more transfers from Alberta – or Saskatchewan, BC and Ontario – is misguided. Existing redistribution schemes are already flawed.
Idea Power
Unquestionably, the idea that it’s important to keep promises, to be honest, to treat strangers with respect, to work hard, to take responsibility for one’s own failures rather than blame others — these and other such ideas that are so fundamental to modern commercial society are imparted more by example than by exposition. They are the soil of capitalist culture. Any government planted on such soil simply cannot grant privileges to special-interest groups if these privileges are widely perceived as violating these bedrock ideas.
Free Trade In Food? Not Until The Milking’s Done
Freer trade in agricultural goods would be a $3-billion annual boon to Canadian farmers, from grain growers to hog producers, not to mention offer a few developing countries a way out of destitution. But for the Canadian cow owners, the latest WTO proposals aren’t worth mulch.
Killing Jobs to Save the Climate
The civil servants from the Environment Ministry, the Environment Agency and the German Emissions Trading Authority made it sound easy for industry to take up carbon trading. “If that’s the shape the trading will take, we will simply move our cement operation to Ukraine,” a cement factory manager shouted into the lecture hall. “Then there won’t be any trading here, nothing will be produced here anymore — the lights will simply go out here.”
What Does the End of Cheap Oil Mean to our Urban Future?
Why the urban catastrophists are wrong and society will adapt to higher oil prices through technology and natural changes in behaviour.