The technocrats are at it again. Experienced people of high standing and nominally conservative bent are annoyed at the messiness of free markets. They want to bend an entire, $250-billion-per-year economy to the will of provincial bureaucrats. This in Alberta, allegedly Canada’s most pro-free enterprise, risk-taking, individualistic province. They seem oblivious to the beneficial power of an economic system that has allowed Albertans to transform their natural resources endowment into Canada’s strongest economy.

Former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, former Reform Party leader Preston Manning and most of the candidates in the just-finished provincial Progressive Conservative leadership race to replace retiring premier Ed Stelmach are bemoaning some aspect of the free market. PC leadership candidates, seemingly terrified of another oilsands development boom, say the oilsands need to be made more “sustainable,” perhaps by “staggering” plant construction — that is, imposing greater regulations on the sector.

Lougheed, who had called for “more orderly development” of the oilsands during the previous boom, recently weighed in against TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL oilsands pipeline to the U.S. He wasn’t worried about its alleged environmental effects. No, he opposes its very concept — namely, the shipping raw bitumen. Lougheed has said it should be “public policy” to require domestic upgrading of bitumen before export. The man who went to war with Pierre Trudeau for the freedom to export what Alberta produces, and who helped bring about free trade with the U.S., now wants to prohibit a key export.

Manning, for his part, has mused about “balancing the ecological budget,” by which he means harnessing “the market” to get people to buy only environment-friendly products, even if they cost more, which, in turn, might require government “incentives” through such things as the pricing of water, brought about by a “stewardship coalition” in which everyone agrees to work together.

I don’t pretend to understand what Manning is talking about — other than that it’s anything but a free market.

These statements all betray a managerial/technocratic attitude toward business from people who aren’t actually in business but who could profoundly affect those who are — and all of whom should know better.

Alberta’s prosperity has always depended on access to world markets. These markets will fluctuate. They’re innately disorderly — and beyond our control. When things are growing too fast for someone’s tastes and have gotten a little inconvenient, you can’t bottle up today’s “surplus” opportunity and store it in a cupboard like a can of peaches. You need to seize the day, or tomorrow’s pain will be far worse. Tax it or regulate it to death now, and you’ll end up having to subsidize it back to life tomorrow.

At the heart of all this lies essential ignorance of what a market is; let alone, how it works. But government can’t manage business; it can only tax, regulate, interfere and destroy. That’s a lesson the technocratic mind never seems to learn. IE

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www.drjandmrk.com.