To build a better, responsible, winning platform for the CPC, we must start with the realization of the complexities of the modern world.
Trudeau has stared down the Conservatives as the party of the past, the party that is stuck in its views to the 50-years-back realities. Indeed, he is right. Nothing’s really changed in our party’s platform since the times of Trudeau the Elder. But the world has changed vastly.
We now live in a truly post-industrial society where production of tangible goods is secondary to the production of ideas, at least in the developed world. The “globalized economy” that once meant an unrestricted flow of manufactured goods from the leading Western countries to the Third World, is now working the opposite way. The G7 has lost control over the world production and does nothing to regain it. Anything that can be produced in the West, is more easily and cheaply produced in Asia and Latin America. You plan to turn a “cold shoulder” to China; what are you talking about? It would suffice for China to hold back a handful of freight trains with consumer goods, and the Canadian public will immediately feel it. They don’t need us – we need them.
Donald Trump, a sound and practically thinking economist, was one of the very few leaders who understood just how much of a hostage we are of the former Third World countries who are now supplying everything the West consumes, and tried to do something about it. With his tariffs and protectionist measures, he tried to get the US off the needle of living at others’ mercy and supply. He managed to create a prosperous economy in just four years when no one else in the world prospered. Unfortunately, the fiery resistance of the establishment cost him his post. Joe Biden, the new president, immediately raised the old and empty Obama’s slogan of “Buy American”, abolished protectionism and promised the stimulus, putting the just-prosperous economy back on the needle. But we need to learn and do a better job than Trump explaining to the public what we are doing and why, because the needle is the course of death.
Two economic laws govern the world economy now, and they had better be named, spelled out, and understood. They are:
- Galbraith’s Law. John K. Galbraith, a Canadian (!) professor of economics, back in 1950 formulated the law that monopolization has killed the free competition, which was the power and the lifeblood of capitalism. The producer is now king, and can shape the market as he please, strangling smaller producers and rendering the consumers powerless. Every day, every minute we see confirmations of validity of this law. Never mind the people liked a certain product; if the producer decided to change the product line from their own considerations, the people have to just take what they are given. On the globalized stage, the concentrated capital of Arabic oil sheikhs and the Chinese power-state has taken over the world industrial giants, sucking the economic strength out of the West.
- Lassal’s Law, or the Iron Law of Wages. Ferdinand Lassal, a German socialist of the mid-latter 19 th century, formulated this law as follows: to be economically sustainable, the workers’ wages must revolve around the minimum amount necessary for their physical survival. Any attempt to raise the wages beyond that will immediately lead to oversupply of the workforce and the resulting economic recession. This is exactly what happened during the Great Depression and the crisis of the 1970s. Nowadays, the cheap labour force of Asia and Latin America is supplying all the goods we consume. Any attempt to produce anything in Canada or the US is economically unfeasible and has to be forced by either political or economic protectionist measures.
No one needs us to keep working except ourselves. Liberals and NDP know it and boo down the Conservatives’ preachings about the supremacy of job-preservation. However, we still need to sustain our families, and we need our jobs. We can denounce the Liberal and NDP job indifference as the proof of their anti-working people position. But by itself, this will not bring us votes until we unfold a realistic and practical plan of how to sustain jobs and defeat the global economic pressure.
The political climate nowadays evidences a bitter split in voters and how they see the world. In my next post, I’ll explore the origins of this division. . .