So, the deficit in oil-soaked Alberta is going to be $3.4 billion in the coming year. That follows a deficit for the current year that hit an all-time record — despite accounting tricks. And according to government forecasters, a balanced budget is several years away. Ho hum.
The deficit’s sheer size is bad enough. As is the refusal to make real spending cuts of the sort that anyone who has run a business has had to do at least once in their career. That’s the proximate cause of Alberta’s chronic budgetary disarray.
But worse is the acceptance by “conservative” politicians that spending less necessarily leads to poorer services. They’ve so internalized one of the animating premises of the Left — that there is no such thing as wealth creation; only distribution of spoils and, ergo, no such thing as productivity — that they can’t imagine the possibility of doing the same job, or even a better job, with less money. As the finance minister, Lloyd Snelgrove, put it: “We could have made cuts… that would have been damaging to core programs or infrastructure plans.”
To Snelgrove, it’s inconceivable that by improving the way we do things, we could get by with less money.
How does one arrive at such a mindset, let alone proclaim it without shame? Everywhere in the private economy are the stunning results of productivity gains. Leave aside the easy example of cheap imported consumer goods, although that’s huge in itself. The same FedEx guy has worked my part of downtown Calgary for almost 20 years. The other day, he dropped off a rather rare model of alpine skis, unavailable from any retailer on the Prairies. It had taken me one minute’s Google searching to find them languishing in a store in California. It took another three minutes to open an account and do a credit card transaction. Forty hours after I clicked on “Complete Order,” the FedEx guy toted said skis into my office.
The combination of continental free trade, hungry retailers, the Internet (including electronic payment) and FedEx’s incredible shipping system had accomplished a level of speed, convenience and reliability that would have been difficult to match 10 years ago and impossible at any other time in human history. Electronic information systems should have facilitated similar huge improvements in government, which is largely about process and administration. Services should be vastly better, performed by a fraction of the number of bureaucrats employed 30 and 50 years ago.
Instead, it’s exactly backwards. And the managerial/technocratic class that has largely replaced the risk-taker and entrepreneur in Alberta is just fine with it. What is worse, that expanding class embodies these ideas and its members are drawn to public service to help perpetuate it.
Maybe it’s no surprise the fiscal madness seems contagious and self-replicating. IE
The contagion of public waste
Despite being awash in oil, Alberta’s public debt continues to spiral. It’s a self-perpetuating malaise that could use an injection of entrepreneurial principles
- By: George Koch
- April 4, 2011 October 29, 2019
- 14:42
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