All the royalties paid out to Alberta over the years, Alberta should have no poverty the best infrastructure, roads, schools hospitals free education no one should be without housing etc. 48 years of conservative government and nothing to show for it. Except oh woah is me poor AB
— Laurie (@sweaterhag) January 22, 2023
Laurie isn't very bright: she actually thinks that the Green Party has anything of value to state about the economics of oilfield production. On top of that, she has no idea how governments screw things up.
How else do explain her apparent believe that "poverty" can be cured by oil royalties paid by the government?
The exchange is interesting, of course, in that when Wilkie claims that "corporate profits" were bad (presuming complaining that the royalties paid weren't higher) Laurie seemed to argue that the oil companies had to spend way too much money to the government who then somehow failed to achieve the goals she unilaterally set of it. Let's go through them one-by-one:
How would oil royalties solve poverty? One of the best ways to help alleviate poverty is by having a wide range of jobs available, from the most worthless mentally retarded piece of shit on the planet (since Wilkie keeps getting rejected by voters, he obviously needs a fallback position). This was, of course, being provided a couple decades back when oil was booming: 18 year olds got 6-figure salaries without any skills or training, and there was cash being thrown at everybody seemingly without trepidation. If you wanted to be a roofer, the world was your oyster (whether or not you actually had the slightest skill in roofing). On top of that was the spinoff salaries: I was 90% sure I'd blogged about this before, but one of the economic eye openers for a lot of people when the oil prices collapsed was how their industry depended on the oil money. The NDP-lover with the yoga studio didn't think that she had anything to do with oil and those rig piggers could all vanish tomorrow without any impact on her life...until all the girls in her yoga class stopped attending when their oilfield husbands got laid off. The black gold made poverty almost unheard of: when you did see a homeless bum you knew full well how hard he had to try to remain unemployed.
Roads are a little harder to wrap the ol' noggin around. After all, royalties are one of the ways that governments rape the productive driving class generate revenue that pays for roads: but then again, the increased traffic puts wear and tear on those same roads. Not to mention that Alberta weather is pretty hard on roads to begin with. On the flip side, who had a problem with roads? Anybody who drove in Saskatchewan knows full well that the "flat prairie" myth doesn't apply to their blacktop which in some places have peaks and valleys which rival the Andes. BC roads are roughly equivalent to Alberta roads and they have a pittance of them in comparison (and a much more skewed population breakdown between the Lower Mainland and everywhere else). In fact, I seem to recall better infrastructure being one of the things Peace Region BCers use as an argument to join Alberta!
Her next batch of wish lists are things that the government has absolutely no business operating anyways†! It doesn't matter how much money the government has: it could have trillions of dollars that fell out of the sky, it doesn't justify forcing me to use their hospital. There's a fundamental moral problem with these aspects of modern government. Beyond that, there's a good reason that they are somehow always failing: because as a practical matter governments can never get them working properly no matter how much money is being spent. Public healthcare will always be in crisis, public education will always be a cesspool.
Finally, she complains about housing (specifically in contrast to poverty) which also is neither a practical nor a moral function of government. Subsidized housing to solve "homelessness" is one of the reasons we have a tent city and violent addicts problem in our city. What we "have to show" for the extra expense turns out to be worse than if we had nothing at all.
† Yes, yes, in response to the screaming Martok is currently doing roads don't have to be government built and operated either.
Which brings us to the "nothing to show for it" nonsense. The Alberta Government was in a better financial position because of royalties than before them: indeed, it was under pressure from the clueless Lauries of this world that we started trying to take more royalties under a false guise of "fairness".
The final nail in the coffin is of course that far-left public sector unions had no problem abandoning Keynesian economics during the boom (they switched back during the bust of course) and insisting that they, too, get their "fair share". One of the reasons we don't have the best schools and hospitals is that these greedy workers demanded too much money. Indeed, if you oppose "for-profit" healthcare shouldn't nurses all be working for free?
Instead these selfish public sector workers mass rioted in the streets to steal the royalty money that didn't belong to them and keep it for themselves.
So, as the post title notes, shouldn't we demand that the public sector unions pay us back the money?
Unrelated: turns out it's hard to get public servants to pay money back even when everybody agrees they don't deserve it.
