July 7, 2008

SURVEYS AND COMMON SENSE: Do consumer confidence or business confidence polls ever predict anything of any value or anything we didn't already know or that could not have been predicted some other way? I'm sure the answer is no. A survey would be interesting...
As for mortgage and subprime bailout laws, why is it that someone who was improvident with his/her money and spent unwisely and borrowed badly get a better deal now that things have gone wrong than those who have worked hard and have kept their credit rating? This sort of legislation punishes good behaviour and rewards bad behaviour.

NEW SOURCES OF ENERGY: Gordon Laxer, a professor of political economy at the University of Alberta, says that we are going to run out of natural gas reserves in 9.3 years. That's all we have left. In 1993, we were supposed to have 12 years of oil reserves left and 16 years of gas left. What happened? Until we remove the biggest restriction on the development of alternative fuel technology, such as capital gains taxes, there will not be the sort of development we need from the private sector. That's where the investment is for this sector. It won't be like the Manhattan project. We're not fighting the Nazis. We're fighting to get an oil contract from ourselves instead of tyrants and dictators. Not quite the same problem. So let's stop penalizing high-tech, innovation and research companies as they try to develop the very technology and alternatives that we need to move over to other energy sources.

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: The more people a representative has to represent, the less representative he/she becomes. If you look a the populations of three major democracies, the UK, the US and Canada. Since WWII, Britain's population has gone up roughly 10%. Its representation in Parliament has gone up about 5%. There are fewer MPs for people on average then there were before.

In the US, there are 435 Members of Congress (not including 100 Senators). During WWII, when the population was 50% smaller, the total was 529 (not including Hawaii and Alaska and including 100 Senators). But the population of the US has gone up 50% since then, so the average Congressman is representing twice as many people on average as his/her predecessor during WWII. While some states have declined in population, the likely figure is likely the same in most states.

The allotment of representatives is constitutionally fixed (since the 1960's) and the only reason the number of Members has increased is because of the admission of Hawaii and Alaska. There are more resources, technology and staff available now to a Congressman than there were in the 1960's. But he/she still represents twice as many people. And there are more committees to eat into his/her time.

In Canada, there were 264 Members of Parliament for nearly the first 100 years of Confederation. Our population did not affect how many members there were. In the 1970's there was a big redraw of the map and it added about 18 Members to our House and brought it up to 282. It was an unprecedented expansion of representation. We now have about 305 Members only 30 years later. We have therefore added about 10% of the original number of Members.

Our population, in the 1940's, was about 15 million. It's now twice that. The average Member is now representing about 80% more people than before. This is better than in the US, but not as good as in Britain. What's worse, a number of provinces are guaranteed a number of Members regardless of population. PEI has four and Quebec gets 75. Therefore, with the 30 year head start of the baby boom and shrinking populations in PEI and Quebec, the population is totally out of sync with its representation.