With the disgusting new NDP government in Alberta under the command of unabashed left-wing extremist Rachel Arab, it's a good time to review Ronald Reagan radio broadcasts.
Okay, so the segue isn't the cleanest one ever, but when you're dealing with the sort of unrepairable mess which is the provincial NDP caucus, it's probably for the best we all just get used to it.
Anyways, if you haven't heard the Ronald Reagan retelling of the Little Red Hen fairytale, you probably should click the link. It's extremely prescient in the wake of Notley's promise to perform a royalty review to determine what "fair share" of resource revenue her government will be stealing from companies developing the tarsands†.
At last the time came to bake the bread. "Who will help me bake bread?" asked the little red hen.Today in Alberta, it's easy to find the little red hen. There are tens of thousands of them, the majority working in the various direct oilsands†-related industries, mostly around Fort McMurray. They aren't the only ones, of course: many others are working in the secondary industries: those giant extraction facilities need equipment manufactured and maintained, and the companies themselves all need accountancy firms and lawyers and managers. Those are the little red hens in Alberta.
"That would be overtime for me," said the cow.
"I'd lose my welfare benefits," said the duck.
"I'm a dropout and never learned how," said the pig.
"If I'm to be the only helper, that's discrimination," said the goose.
"Then I will," said the little red hen.
She baked five loaves and held them up for the neighbors to see. They all wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share. But the little red hen said, "No, I can eat the five loaves myself."
"Excess profits," cried the cow.
"Capitalist leech," screamed the duck.
"I demand equal rights," yelled the goose.
And the pig just grunted.
And they painted "unfair" picket signs and marched round and around the little red hen shouting obscenities. When the government agent came, he said to the little red hen, "You must not be greedy."
"But I earned the bread," said the little red hen.
Rachel Arab wants to deprive them of their loaves of bread with her royalty review.
A lot of big talk from the left is nonsense about "fair share". The thinking goes that since the Albertan government owns the oil (and, quite often, the land above the oil), then the potential revenue belongs to the people who live in the province (this is not the same as "belongs to Albertans" by the way). The thinking continues that the only way for the people of the province to get this revenue is by raising the royalties on the companies which extract the oil from the ground (and, it goes without saying, ridiculously high increases to their taxes).
This thinking is wrong, of course, for the reasons Reagan made so clear in his modern-day Little Red Hen fairy tale. The Laffer-able truth is that the potential revenue of the oilsands† extraction isn't a constant. The people who actually do the work -- the little red hens at Syncrude, Suncor, Trinidad Drilling, etc. -- only do so because of the loaves of bread they get awarded. Take that away, as Rachel Arab is proposing, and you're implicitly punishing those who actually do the work and are compensated for the value of what they produce, and helping out the pigs and geese and ducks: the lazy unionized public sector workers, the useless twits wasting government funding in their post-secondary education, and the slacker-class who nominally work but don't provide enough value for their employers to justify giving them more money at the end of the biweekly pay period.
Seeing how actual Albertans are in general swamped by an invading class of foreigners who have no loyalty to the province yet despite their own employment at highly competitive wages in fields unrelated to the tarsands† are still lazy and entitled enough to think that they "deserve their fair share", it's completely inappropriate to confuse provincial government spending on social programs with an efficient effective or fair method of compensating the owners of this oil wealth with the benefits it provides. I covered a lot of this in my post on Norwailing, but it bears some repeating that the long-term benefits to Alberta are not met by providing government largesse in general, particularly when so many of these eastern creeps and bums are here consuming them at the expense of real Albertans.
The vast majority of the wealth being generated by the economic activity in the Wood Buffalo region should be provided only to the Little Red Hens: the people doing the work. Fortunately, as Reagan's story tells us, this is exactly what a capitalist free-market system does: from the swamper working at the Kearl Oil Sands Project to Al Monaco to the everyday Joe who owns shares in Canadian Oil Sands Limited, in a purely capitalist system every single person who actually contributes to the tarsands† wealth is already compensated for it, and...here's the real kicker...is compensated for it precisely as much as the value he provides for the wealth to be created. Isn't that wonderful?
Unfortunately, like Reagan's story and unlike the original Little Red Hen story, this one comes with an evil witch. Rachel Arab's plan will try to extract more money into the coffers of the provincial governemnt. While the province is indeed the owner of this resource, by unfairly and unnecessarily increasing the royalties (or, as leftists keep oddly calling it, "the rent") the overall level of wealth in the oilsands† is going to decrease, not increase. This means that the labours undergone by those who are doing the work will be compensated less lucratively than is currently happening (which is already below the "matching the value provided to create the wealth" that a purely capitalist system would provide). This punishes the Little Red Hen in the name of "fairness" while the ducks, pigs, and geese get a free payday in return for their vote. It's sick and abhorrent, and matches with the sort of perverted lessons that the Dippers will be directing into education over the next four years.
Rachel Arab's plan needs to be stopped. Robbing from the rich and giving to the poor always sounds good until you remember that in this case the rich got rich by being successful, and the poor got poor by being lazy, entitled, and uneducated (and, unsurprisingly, ended up voting NDP). This is hurting Alberta, hurting Albertans, and hurting all of those (regardless of whether they're Albertans or not) who have been productively creating wealth that has been helping all Albertans whether they realize it or not.
† Throughout this post, "tarsands" and "oilsands" are used interchangeably. Those who are curious about my willingness to use the politically charged term usually used by oilsands opponents can click here.
