Mediaboss Marketing

In the real world, where successful businesses are operated somewhere in the broad range between break-even and absolute-maximum profitability, there was and is always leeway for being a bit unnecessarily fair and responsible to accept slightly smaller profit margins to fulfill implicit obligations to employees, customers, communities, society at large, decency itself. But while economists still argue over Friedmans theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists the Friedman doctrine turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life and his name became a synonym for miserliness. Likewise, a century later, in Its a Wonderful Life, the banker Mr. Potter is the evil, unredeemable, un-American villain. Here was Milton Friedman telling businesspeople that theyd been tricked by the liberal elite, that Scrooge and Potter were heroes they ought to emulate.

As for government regulation, Friedmans doctrine included a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose Catch-22. Any virtuous act by businesses beyond what the law requires is simpering folly, he insists, yet according to him too almost any government attempt to regulate business is the beginning of the end of freedom and democracy. Friedmans was a reductio ad absurdum purification of what had become a well-tempered, successful, increasingly fair free-market system. His vision was to revert to a fundamentalist capitalism from which a century of systemic interventions and buffers by democratic government and norms would be removed.

Friedman was horrified by the present climate of opinion, with its widespread aversion to capitalism, profits, the soulless corporation and so on. Indeed, a survey-research firm that had been asking people every year if they thought business tries to strike a fair balance between profits and the interests of the public found the number who agreed had dropped to 33 percent in 1970 from 70 percent in 1968. (By the late 70s it had bottomed out at 15 percent.) The very same month that The New Yorker filled a whole issue with excerpts from a liberal professors hurrah-for-revolution best seller, The Greening of America, Friedman delivered his counterrevolutionary economic manifesto to 1.5 million Times subscribers. Yet its self-righteous, hyperbolic, screw-the-Establishment confrontationalism is also a product of that 1970 moment: While Friedman was reacting against the surging support for social justice, he did so in the spirit of the late 1960s. Two ascendant countercultures, the hippies and the economic libertarians, in 1970 one large and one still tiny, shared a new ultraindividualism as a prime directive: If it feels good, do it; follow your bliss; find your own truth; and do your own thing were just nice utopian flip sides of every man for himself. For businessmen who felt demonized by public opinion and besieged by tougher government regulation for the last few years, the militancy of the Friedman doctrine in The New York freaking Times a year after Woodstock was thrilling. And then, as now, to get what they were mainly after politically superlow taxes, minimized regulation they exploited the voter backlash against street protests by aggrieved, angry younger Americans.

Just as America reached Peak Left, the Friedman doctrine and, a year later, a battle plan commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, drafted by the corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, quoting Friedman, just before he joined the Supreme Court became founding scripture for an economic crusade to discredit the New Deal consensus and rewrite the social contract. Democratic and liberal leaders, alas, didnt put up much of a fight. At the end of the 1970s, for instance, PBS commissioned a 10-episode series, Free to Choose, starring Friedman and funded by General Motors, General Mills and PepsiCo. A spokesperson for the show promised it would explain to viewers like you how weve become puppets of big government. And indeed, in that four-TV-channel era, Friedman used his noncommercial government-subsidized PBS platform to argue that the Food and Drug Administration, public schools, labor unions and federal taxes, among other btes noires, were bad for America. The series premiered in January 1980, just before the first Republican primaries, in which Ronald Reagan was a candidate. Of course, Reagan won the nomination and the presidency, after which Friedman patted himself on the back for his work with Goldwater and the epochal move away from New Deal ideas. As Friedman put it in 1982, you need ideas that are lying around his ideas as ready alternatives to existing policies, and then at a ripe moment the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Throughout big business and finance and much of conventional wisdom, the Friedman doctrine came to mean that the pursuit of absolutely maximum profit for your company and yourself trumped every other value or motive, greed-is-good definitively replacing concern for the common good. A result was an American economy and culture driven by selfishness, callousness and recklessness. Before long, a big Hollywood movies most memorable scene was a kind of dramatization of the Friedman doctrine, Libertarian Economics for Dummies. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, sexy Gordon Gekko told his ecstatic fellow stockholders, that greed for lack of a better word is good. Greed is right. Greed works. And greed, he promised, would make America great again.

In 1976, Friedman became the first Chicago school economist to win a Nobel Prize. That same year, two members of the University of Rochester business-school faculty published a 55-page paper conceived as an operational elaboration of the Friedman doctrine. Theory of the Firm made righteous greed seem scientific, with equations and language of the managers indifference curve is tangent to a line with slope equal to u kind. Its big point was that if corporate executives are mere salarymen rather than owners of company stock, theyll overspend on charitable contributions, get lax on employee discipline, concern themselves too much about personal relations (love, respect, etc.) with employees and the attractiveness of the secretarial staff. It is one of the most-cited economics papers ever. The professors also wrote a shorter, more accessible follow-up that ditched the math and the pretense of scholarly neutrality: big business has been cast in the role of villain by consumer advocates, environmentalists and the like, who want to spread the clich that corporations have too much power.

The modern understanding of how corporate managers should run companies, an article in The Harvard Business Review declared in 2012, has been defined to a large extent by that original Friedman-doctrine-inspired paper from 1976. It went beyond doctrinal Friedmania that companies must absolutely maximize profit, now positing as a kind of mathematical fact that stock price, a much less objective measure, was the only meaningful corporate metric. Soon a Reagan-administration S.E.C. rule change effectively gave free rein to public companies, for the first time since the New Deal, to buy up shares of their own stock on the open market in order to jack up the price. U.S. executive pay, meanwhile, shifted from consisting mainly of salary and bonus to mainly stock and stock options. Astonishingly, stock buybacks eventually consumed most of the earnings of S&P 500 companies, as they still do. So here we are with a re-engineered system in which just the richest 10th of us have 84 percent of all stock shares owned by Americans, and a ravaged economy in which the stock market is close to an all-time high.

Read the original here:
How Liberals Opened the Door to Libertarian Economics - The New York Times

The bill designed to keep the financial wheels of the provincial government churning is not yet a done deal, but the Opposition partiesand two Independent MHAshavescored a partial victory in the process, one that seeminglyquietsany chatter about an imminent provincial election.

Debate continues this week in the House of Assemblyon the Liberals'interim supply bill,which allows government money to keep flowing, ahead of a formal budget being passed.

For example, the billwould include funds to ensure workers are paid and the province to meet other financial obligations.

Late Tuesday night, the PCs, NDP andtwo Independent MHAsscored a political victory by passing an amendment making the interim supply bill for two months, instead of the three months the Liberals wanted.

"I think we simply demonstrated to the government that they can't do any old thing they want to do and we kept them to a sense of fiscal discipline," PC Leader Ches Crosbie said Wednesday afternoon.

Finance MinisterSiobhan Coadysaid "she didn't understandthe logic" of endorsing a 60-day bill. She said it took 57 days to pass a budget in 2018.

"I'd rather have more than less [time]," Coady added.

The PCs and NDPhad originally balked at the three-month proposal.

"We've been accommodating within reason but to be asking for threemonths right now is overreaching,"Crosbie said earlier this week. "Three months is a large blank cheque."

That measuredoesn't mean the entire interim supply bill has passed because other parts of the legislation must be voted on individually.

But the Tuesday night voteon the amendment underscores that the Liberal minority government needs votes from across the aislesin order to get bills passed.

Coady has said a budget will be presented on Sept. 30. The interim supply bill must be approved before that.

Budgets are usually announced in the spring, but the pandemic disrupted that financial schedule, and in March the Opposition parties supported a six-month $4.6-billion interim supply bill.

The NDPhad expressed concerns thata three-month supply bill would give the Liberals an opportunity to call a general election this fall.

On Wednesday, Crosbiepointedly said his party is not looking to potentially help bring down the government on a confidence vote related to the budget.

"They have plenty of time, the budget will pass[Coady]tells us in the House that there's going to be nothing in it that we canobject to, I'll take her on face value on that." he said.

"There won't be an issue passing the budget. There will not be an election, they will have plenty of money to pay the bills."

On Tuesday, before the vote on the bill's amendment, bothCoady and PC MHAand finance critic Tony Wakehamsaid neither party wants an election right now.

The supply bill was debated for a few hours on Wednesday morning and will continue this week.

Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador

Originally posted here:
Opposition parties, Independents shave month off Liberals' spending bill - CBC.ca

Paul Wells: Liberals are coming to terms with the realization that COVID-19 didn't cancel gravity, and that 'building back better' will, in fact, be hard work

Im grateful to the excellent Toronto Star columnist Heather Scoffield for noticing some fascinating comments Gerald Butts made on Monday.

Butts, of course, resigned in 2019 as Justin Trudeaus principal secretary and has been working since then as a consultant, climate-policy opinion leader and Twitter scold. He was a member of the Task Force for a Resilient Recovery, which spent the summer pushing hard on the build back better rhetoric that imagined the coronavirus pandemic as the dawn of a bold new green-energy future.

To say the least, excitement about a pandemic is counterintuitive. I started writing about the contradictions in June, when nameless Liberals were telling reporters, Itll be a good time to be a progressive government There are a lot of us who are dreaming big. I came back to the theme in August, when the PMO was setting Bill Morneau up as some kind of obstacle to their plans to build back better. And I wrote last week about the unsettling spectacle of Trudeau greeting Morneaus departure as, essentially, the end of history: We can choose to embrace bold new solutions to the challenges we face and refuse to be held back by old ways of thinking. As much as this pandemic is an unexpected challenge, it is also an unprecedented opportunity.

It was already clear last week that some of these considerations were starting to weigh, perhaps belatedly, on the Prime Minister and his advisors. Theres a sensitivity to being perceived to hijack the moment for a green recovery, a senior Liberal source told the CBCs David Cochrane. Boy, I sure hope there is.

Along comes Butts, who on Monday was addressing something called the Recovery Summit, an ambitious online virtual conference organized by some of the usual suspects, including the (Trudeauist) Canada2020 think tank in Ottawa and the (Clintonist) Center for American Progress in Washington.

Butts kicked off the proceedings by pouring industrial quantities of cold water on everyone.

Its important tounderstand and appreciate the level of anxiety that people are going through right now, he said. Conferences like this one were made by and for members of the progressive movement, he said. But in a clear warning to people who consider themselves members of that movement, he added, We depend on the support of the broad middle class and regular people. When we keep that support we form governments. And when we dont, we lose governments.

In an even clearer warning against the weird self-celebratory tone of some of the rhetoric from the government over the summer, he added:Its really important to emphasize what were doing and whom were doing it forrather than celebrate the fact that we are doing it.

I havent spoken to Butts since a few months before the SNC-Lavalin controversy wrecked his career in government, and I doubt he minds at all. So it was odd to hear him sounding warnings that resembled things Ive been writing for months. Its pure coincidence. It simply reflects the fact that to anyone with any distance from the government echo chamber, the Trudeau circles weirdly giddy triumphalism of recent months has got to sound jarring.

To put it diplomatically, I think that in any crisis situation, people will repurpose their pet projects as urgent and necessary responses to the crisis at hand, Butts said. And its vitally important that, when people are feeling as anxious as theyre feeling right now, we start the solutions from where they are and build up from there. And not arrive in the middle of their anxiety with a pre-existing solution that was developed and determined before the crisis thats arisen.

I know theres a widespread assumption that Butts never really left the Trudeau circle, that he remains the PMs puppeteer. I think thats farcical. Butts probably has an easier time getting Ben Chin to return a call than some of my colleagues do, but for the most part hes basically a sympathetic outsider whos watching the work of friends from a distance. His remarks amplify and consolidate things Dave Cochrane was already hearing from senior Liberals last week. Liberals are coming to terms with the realization that COVID-19 didnt cancel gravity or smite the foes of progress, as they define progress, from the earth. When Parliament returns next week, it will still be a venue of measurable personal risk for its occupants, like any large room for the foreseeable future. It will still contain more MPs who arent Liberals than MPs who are. It will be watched by a population that is worried, defensive, and incapable of ignoring risk for the sake of a resounding slogan. It speaks well of the Liberals that they have spent the summer working some goofy rhetoric out of their systems before returning to the real world.

This doesnt mean the government shouldnt pursue reductions in carbon emissions. They ran on promises to do so. They set ambitious targets, having spectacularly missed easier targets in the past. They faced concerted opposition and won. Working to reduce carbon emissions is necessary work with broad public support.

But it will be work. The clear implication of the dreaming big and unprecedented opportunity talk was that Liberals, including the Prime Minister, were talking themselves into believing school was out. That a global calamity would somehow transform hard work into a party, disarm the political opposition and, once againthis is a particularly sturdy fantasy of life in Trudeau-land, as Jane Philpott and Bill Morneau could tell youdelegitimize internal dissent.

It isnt so. Meeting the Liberals own climate goals will be hard work that will feel like hard work, if they care to take it up. The necessary changes will impose costs that will feel like costs before they provide benefits that feel like benefits. The very nature of this crisis will make building back better anything but a cakewalk.

First, because 2020 hasnt wiped out the former world. Building back better became a slogan a decade ago after earthquakes in New Zealand erased a lot of existing infrastructure. COVID-19 has been more like a neutron bomb, interrupting livelihoods but leaving neighbourhoods intact. If I had to build a new rail link from scratch between Toronto and Montreal, I might build something fancy. But the old one is still there. That makes a difference.

Second, because theres little likelihood of a sustained, long-term recovery like the one that characterized Canadas economy for 30 years after World War II, a comparison that was briefly fashionablea few months ago with the build-back-better set. The recoverys likely to be pretty quick, to pick up steam only after a vaccine or effective treatment becomes widespread, and to last only about as long as it takes to return to the status quo ante. Its fantasy to imagine miracle growth lasting the rest of everyones lifetime will take away costs and tradeoffs.

So the Trudeau governments duty to meet its climate targets remains, and so does just about all the difficulty of meeting them. Which means a central question about this Prime Ministerdoes he rise to challenges, ever? also remains.

Link:
Farewell to the Liberals easy green revolution - Maclean's

Among decided voters, 40% say they would back the Trudeau Liberals compared to 30% who would vote for Erin OTooles Conservatives. The NDP under Jagmeet Singh has the support of 15% of decided voters while the Greens have 7% and the Bloc Quebecois 6%.

Trudeaus support is strongest in Atlantic Canada, Manitoba and Ontario. The Liberals also have a strong lead among women of all age groups and men aged 18-34. The Conservatives only hold a slight lead among men 35 and up.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

The numbers, if they translated into votes, would likely deliver Trudeau a stronger majority than he received in 2015.

Nick Kouvalis, Principal at Campaign Research, said the numbers show that Trudeaus gamble in shutting down Parliament has worked.

I think that for a month now they havent been getting the scrutiny on the WE scandal and now the Trudeau Liberals are talking about national pharmacare, daycare money and building a green economy and now they are up in the polls, Kouvalis said.

Based on his polling, Kouvalis said there are enough Canadians interested in the massive spending and social programs he is offering that if Trudeau were to trigger an election, he could find strong support with voters. He added, though, that if the throne speech and budget receive significant scrutiny, that support could fade away again.

Anything can happen in election campaign, Kouvalis said.

Those words are true and should be heeded by all parties.

The Liberals, and Trudeau, had been riding high in the polls for months amid the pandemic bump that most sitting political leaders were seeing. That lead evaporated amid daily headlines of scandal.

More:
LILLEY: Closing Parliament and WE scandal boosts Liberal poll numbers - Toronto Sun

news, act-politics, canberra liberals, light rail, act election 2020

The Canberra Liberals want nothing more than to frame October's vote around cost-of-living pressures. But they could be risking a repeat of the last election by keeping light rail in play this campaign. In 2016, Labor won what was dubbed a referendum on light rail. The party was particularly successful in the Gungahlin-based seat of Yerrabi, where eight of Labor's top 10 booths were located. No surprises there - it was the primary beneficiary of Labor's blue ribbon election promise in light rail stage one. Chief Minister Andrew Barr would be more than happy to run another light rail election. For many, this fact makes the Liberals' refusal to back the city-to-Woden line particularly perplexing. They want to make the election about the cost of living, but by not committing to continuing the work on stage two of light rail, they could risk de-railing their message. The Liberals say they want to extend the network, but would decide what the next route should be after conducting an independent study. Transport spokeswoman Candice Burch says the party hears a lot of feedback that Belconnen to Airport should be the next leg. It means all the work done on the city-to-Woden line so far could be thrown down the drain, and construction timelines delayed significantly. Woden - and the seat of Murrumbidgee - will be a central battleground in the October election. The Liberals must pick up an extra member in that seat to have a chance of forming government. The Liberals' decision not to neutralise the light rail issue suggests they believe Woden residents will not vote based on the tram. It is true Woden cannot be seen through the same lens as Gungahlin. Unlike Gungahlin, it is a relatively strong area for the Liberals. It also has not had the same congestion issues crying out to be fixed as Gungahlin had in 2016. There are also real questions to be asked about the speed of light rail in Woden, with a journey predicted to take up to 30 minutes compared to 15 minutes on some express buses. The Liberals may have misjudged the public's support for light rail in 2016 when they pledged to ditch the project before. But at least voters knew what their party's policy was. There are very genuine questions about whether Woden would be the best next stage. A Belconnen line would be far less costly and complicated. And they have a genuine point when they say the government has lacked transparency. The problem for voters going into this election is they don't really know whether a Liberal government would extend the system at all. There have been no dollar announcements, and no real vision for their version of light rail. Just a commitment to do an independent analysis. And we all know "independent reports" from government are not always as independent as the name suggests.

https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc70nttdp4pl0lmt6cjgw.jpg/r3_265_5182_3191_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg

ANALYSIS

September 17 2020 - 4:30AM

The Canberra Liberals want nothing more than to frame October's vote around cost-of-living pressures. But they could be risking a repeat of the last election by keeping light rail in play this campaign.

In 2016, Labor won what was dubbed a referendum on light rail. The party was particularly successful in the Gungahlin-based seat of Yerrabi, where eight of Labor's top 10 booths were located.

No surprises there - it was the primary beneficiary of Labor's blue ribbon election promise in light rail stage one. Chief Minister Andrew Barr would be more than happy to run another light rail election.

For many, this fact makes the Liberals' refusal to back the city-to-Woden line particularly perplexing.

They want to make the election about the cost of living, but by not committing to continuing the work on stage two of light rail, they could risk de-railing their message.

The Liberals say they want to extend the network, but would decide what the next route should be after conducting an independent study.

Transport spokeswoman Candice Burch says the party hears a lot of feedback that Belconnen to Airport should be the next leg. It means all the work done on the city-to-Woden line so far could be thrown down the drain, and construction timelines delayed significantly.

Woden - and the seat of Murrumbidgee - will be a central battleground in the October election. The Liberals must pick up an extra member in that seat to have a chance of forming government.

The Liberals' decision not to neutralise the light rail issue suggests they believe Woden residents will not vote based on the tram.

It is true Woden cannot be seen through the same lens as Gungahlin. Unlike Gungahlin, it is a relatively strong area for the Liberals. It also has not had the same congestion issues crying out to be fixed as Gungahlin had in 2016.

There are also real questions to be asked about the speed of light rail in Woden, with a journey predicted to take up to 30 minutes compared to 15 minutes on some express buses.

The Liberals may have misjudged the public's support for light rail in 2016 when they pledged to ditch the project before. But at least voters knew what their party's policy was.

There are very genuine questions about whether Woden would be the best next stage. A Belconnen line would be far less costly and complicated. And they have a genuine point when they say the government has lacked transparency.

The problem for voters going into this election is they don't really know whether a Liberal government would extend the system at all.

There have been no dollar announcements, and no real vision for their version of light rail.

Just a commitment to do an independent analysis. And we all know "independent reports" from government are not always as independent as the name suggests.

Read the rest here:
The Liberals won't commit to Woden light rail, so will the 2016 election come back to haunt them? - The Canberra Times