Bad Policies

Today’s Misguided Policy Ideas

1. Guaranteed Annual Income. This is posited as a “livable income”, that would theoretically keep everyone with at least enough money to live a lower middle class lifestyle. The problem – many people will not work if they are paid to stay home. To work at all, welfare has to be enough to just get by, thereby encouraging recipients to want to work. We already have a Guaranteed Annual Income…it is called “a job.”

2. The Human Resources Cloud. The plan is to put everyone who works into a cloud. When their specific services are needed, they will be pulled out of the cloud and employed, thereby providing them with work, and limiting the expenses of employers. This misses the human element of work – who do we work for and with, and how do we get along. Humans are not interchangeable. Example, pulling an extrovert out of the cloud to work with a passive-aggressive may not be too wise. We made a catastrophic error when we replaced long-service senior managers who knew everything about their area with generalists who only need abilities in the areas of finance, HR and horizontal linkages as part of New Public Management in the early 1990s. Having done serious damage to senior management, let’s not damage the employee cadre as well.

3. Public Debt. The Baby Boomers are retiring, meaning that we will have a population that is about 1/3 made up of retirees in the future instead of the 1/6 make-up that we have come to regard as normal. This means a generations-long drag on economic growth as the net income in society declines as Boomers retire and make less. Taking on massive public debt at the same time that your national income is declining is insane. We have done just that – individually, Canadians are now the most indebted people on earth - hold on!

4. Cannabis Regulation. Having legalized it, we are now massively over-regulating it. It can only be purchased in certain ways, such as from stores that need licenses that take up to a year to obtain – maybe. It can only be of a certain strength, from authorized growers and producers. It can only be marketed in a very limited way. The results of this will be that the illegal market will continue to dominate the industry, as their product will be cheaper, stronger and easier to get. We got the War on Drugs wrong…now we are getting the Legalization of Drugs wrong too.

5. Interest Rates. We kept rates too low for too long, and the results are housing and stock market bubbles. These will burst, causing massive economic havoc as those who are employed in the housing and finance sector lose their jobs, and everyone suffers. Head of the Bank of Canada, Poloz recently said, “Our assessment is that we're normalizing at exactly the right pace…,"as they slowly let rates rise again.  He is 7 years too late – and will blame everyone when this becomes obvious even to him. He is “The Central Banker Who Never Erred!”

6. Proportional Representation. This is about parties becoming sovereign instead of people. When you can only vote for a party, not a person, you will no longer be free, as political parties are not representative organizations – they represent party members and their interests, and no one else. Even hybrid models are deficient to the extent they do away with personal representation and replace it with PR. And PR will come one day as the proponents will never accept “no” in a referendum as they do not actually respect the will of the people – which is why the support PR in the first place. They want to replace the will of the people with the will of the party. For parties that cannot get elected, ranked ballots in a multi-party election is a better option – become everyone’s second choice and not only are you elected, you may be the government.

7. Social Media Presence as Political Power. Social Media is not power. It is group therapy mascaraing as something real. Rather than control anything, it is the participants in political social media campaigns who are controlled, as the damning lessons about our privacy from Google and Facebook plus the previous revelations from Mr. Snowden make clear. To influence power, you need to go directly to power – very few people have it, and without talking to directly to them those who would change the world are mostly irrelevant. This means that, rather than having a web page, you need to join and engage the parties and other mechanisms of the decision makers. 

But if you must have a web page....always add pictures of cute kittens to garner more attention.