THE RECORD
December 05, 2001

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

Our esteemed Premier keeps on talking about how he wants to make BC "more competitive" to open up the taps of wealth and prosperity. I have yet to hear a politician promising anything else or delivering on the promise. Would anybody admit today having voted for Mulroney in '84 and again in '88? How about Vander Zalm?

The present BC government is paid by the neo-liberal business community to follow the examples of wealth creation found in the publications of the so called "prestigious Fraser Institute," billed as a "conservative economic think tank." Contrary to claims, the Fraser Institute is not an economic organization, but a bona fide advertising agency. It's job is to sell the program of a global corporate dictatorship and call it freedom. This is going on all over the world, with people being destituted and killed by the millions in pursuit of the economic ideals of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics.

Monetary competition, sold as a cost cutting and wealth creating ideal, is a conspiracy to defraud the public. It doesn't cut, but increases costs and prices in the long run by transferring them on to other sectors. Economists then tell us that the increased transfers were really cost cuts. We'll see ample evidence of this in the coming months with the massacre of the civil service, the destruction of ICBC and BC Hydro, deregulations and the importation of multinational service providers.

The costs will not only go up, but multiply and the profits will be taken out of the country. We can already see this happening with most of our industries while Canadians line up at the food banks.

Increased costs by private providers jack up the GDP which is used to measure economic success, so even while poverty is growing governments and economists are reporting boom times. The fact that the country and citizens are destituted makes no difference to the GDP, which is also increased by accidents, damage, and suicides.

The purpose of real competition is the search for excellence under the neutral protection of equality, life and property.

The purpose of monetary competition, as it is of war and crime, is the forced acquisition of benefits and properties against the owners' will.

I have studied the question of competition for a long time and stopped competing about 30 years ago. Competition can not cut costs, it only increases costs and transfers them on to the losers. Cutting real costs is a mathematical impossibility. The purpose is to eliminate the competition and set up oligopolies, a few big players who then distribute the spoils between themselves, and sock it to the public. The oil companies are the prime examples.

All forms of competition work on the laws of speed with large energy inputs required for the smallest increases in performance. To increase the speed of a vehicle by a few kilometres per hour requires large increases in fuel consumption. In industry the replacement of a few workers with automated equipment usually demands hundreds of horsepower of extra energy. It increases resource use while diverting the benefits from workers into the pockets of special interests.

This is the reason for the constant demands for so called "business friendly governments" and making those demands is the purpose of outfits like the Fraser Institute. It is what they are getting paid for. There are over a hundred of these advertising agencies in the USA, like the Cato Inst. the Heritage Foundation, etc. Their job is make certain that politicians won't step out of line and become soft hearted by throwing a few bucks to the public and spoil them with services they don't deserve.

One of the strongest weapons in the armories of these propaganda agencies is the twisted meaning of words, double talk, double standards and fraudulent accounting systems to show that the economy is moving in the right direction: Into the pockets of fewer and fewer people.

It is a carefully hidden secret that in fact profits are not made, but taken from others. To make profits is another mathematical and physical impossibility. We can neither create, or destroy anything, only convert resources into other forms, which can be useful things needed for survival, or junk, or garbage and pollution. Profits are arbitrarily added figures on the top of real costs and trade values and must come out of the pockets of the public. The higher profits banks and other big businesses report, the more people line up at the soup kitchens. There's no other way and we have all the figures to prove this.
Anybody who doesn't know this should look at bank and other large corporate profits and the numbers of employees they fire, ostensibly to cut costs, but in fact increasing and transferring them on the public.

Copyright (c) 2001, West's International