More Michael Hlinka Drivel on My Radio

A good motivation for me to get to work early is to avoid hearing this radio columnist's voice even for a second.

Yesterday's bit of warmed-over Reaganomics was about how we should all stop complaining that we don't get enough vacation time. He starts with the old saw about how if you really loved your job it wouldn't feel like work. Well, I like my job as much as any other, but I like sleeping in and travelling and going to the beach a hell of a lot more. And people with families like to spend time with them, if they're good parents, anyway. Sorry, sir, but cutesy clichés are not getting this week's column off to a good start. And it gets worse.

Hlinka's points:

- The US has the lowest number of vacation days but the highest "standard of living". He doesn't say where this rating comes from or what it even measures. I suspect he's making use of the misleading way extremes on the high-end skew up "average" numbers to make the 'average' person feel like they're better off than they are. Sure the US's GDP per capita is higher than other countries', but how much of that is actually allocated to your particular capita? Not as much as an 'average' would seem to indicate.

But then, the faint hope that he might say something sensible..

- European countries, which have the most vacation days for workers, have a higher quality of life than the United States, but says this is not related to vacation time - does not explain why. At all. It's just a hand-waving 'please ignore this inconvenient fact' kind of dismissal.

He concludes this tax-payer funded waste of my time by saying that success is not given by government, it's something you go and get for yourself. But you don't get it by letting your boss pressure you into giving up your family's trip so he can make his bogus time estimates. That makes you a slave. On the other hand, if I have 5 weeks of paid vacation in a year, I might use that time to get the gears moving on a small business I might want to start. That's real freedom and opportunity, wringing every waking moment out of your workers is not.

Christ, what an asshole.

Labels: CBC, Economics, Work

More Loonie Talk

You know, I still find it bizarre that Canada is the only country in the world where you'll find media reports filled with doom and gloom and predictions of widespread disaster because our currency is going up. I'm picturing an obsequious little nebbishy Walter Mitty telling his boss "Oh, it's OK, sir, you don't have to pay me what I'm worth, I promise I won't go work for the nice man across the street. Yes I know it's costing me more to drive to work and feed my family and heat my home, but I'm comfortable in this little rut right here. Thank you, sir."

See, the other news that happened the same day as our dollar reached parity with the U.S. dollar was that the U.S. dollar sunk to the lowest point in history against the Euro, €1.00 = $1.40 USD. (Mac OS X power tip of the day: Option+Shift-2 will make a Euro symbol. Sweet.) This means that while Americans can buy less of our oil and nickel and lumber, Europeans can buy a lot more of it, and they can also afford to bring it over there. Tying your economy so much to one neighbour because it's easier than developing a shipping industry is proving to be a little shortsighted.

And I'm glad we're not doing anything or even making noises towards artificially creating a lower dollar. If our government did that I would personally consider that they robbed me and 30 million other Canadians of the value of our own money just so some lumber company wouldn't be inconvenienced.

Speaking of the government, if Stephen Harper keeps on paying down the debt and making sensible tax cuts - the value of the interest we would have paid given back in tax cuts is so utterly sensible it makes me weep - I may not burn him in effigy if he's elected again. Still won't vote for him though, don't worry. Jack Layton did make a good point about infrastructure, though. We don't exactly need to wait for one of our own bridges to collapse before thinking it might be a good idea to do some engineering reviews of our cities a little more often.

If Ireland can silently raise itself up so that its standard of living has surpassed that of the United Kingdom without the benefit of natural resources, we shouldn't have any trouble growing either because of or in spite of the US's weakening economy.

Labels: Economics

Atta Boy, Canadian Dollar

Well, as I wrote back in 2004 in the post My Prediction, the Canadian dollar has reached parity with the US dollar as of 2:00pm Atlantic time today.


This makes me think I should go buy some shoes in the J C Penny in New Hampshire that is itself bigger than the Charlottetown Mall. I imagine the parking lots near the Canadian border will have more than the usual sight of discarded Canadians' shoes as people leave their old ones right in the lot and put on the new ones to get by customs and save a couple of bucks in duty.

I'm starting to think that the credit crisis, US current accounts deficits, the strong Euro are all forming a perfect storm to deflate the US dollar. Unfortunately the Canadian dollar only looks strong when you compare it to the US dollar, but the Euro and the Yen have been growing steadily against both, only slightly less dramatically against the Canadian dollar. On world markets I suspect that most currency traders still view the two currencies as good or poor buys together, buying both or selling both at once based on what's happening in the US economy. Normally this isn't a bad idea, since our trade relationship is so tight, but I really do see the credit crisis in the US not repeating here. Sure Toronto and Vancouver have ridiculous real estate prices, but I think this reflects genuine demand, rather than inflated prices based on over-eager lending to people who turn around and spend more money than they have competing for every available home up for sale in nearly every major market.

I'm not too worried about this being too harmful to Canada's economy. What will hurt our exporters more than the dollar is simply the dismal economy down South, if people aren't building new houses because they can't get loans, it won't matter how cheap our dollar is if no one wants to by any lumber at all. But at least a strong Canadian dollar will help our ability to trade with the rest of the world, increasing our economic footprint and allowing us to engage on hopefully what will become a more open basis with Europe.

I hope Stephen Harper continues to pay down our debt and doesn't bring in any drastic tax cuts. I wonder if all the staunch supporters of Bush and his tax cuts for the wealthy realize that while they just had their taxes cut by 40%, the value of the money they now have is worth half what it was before Bush came along. But at least they still get to stick it to poor people.

Labels: Economics, Politics

Torture to Listen To

It was, of course, too good to last. But for two shining, hopeful minutes on Thursday, Michael Hlinka almost made sense.

Karen Mare must have been embarrassed to have to let this guy on her program. Her being the one who has actually travelled to Africa and talked to farmers who all had an intimate knowledge of how the World Bank operates, and him being just some twerp who as far as I can tell isn't even a working economist.

Hlinka is taking the classic American right wing line that because there are problems in some institution that was meant to serve some public good that clearly the whole idea was a mistake in the first place and it should be scrapped. Funny, though, that the Enron scandal didn't cause him and others like him to call for the end of corporate-friendly capitalism.

And yeah, I'm as familiar as any sheltered first-worlder can be expected to be with how rotten the World Bank and IMF are and how their policies are to the detriment of the countries they are meant to be helping. However, if Mr. Hlinka were to -- God forbid -- get on a plane and go talk to an African farmer about it, and suggest that the ideal solution would be to completely pull out and wait for private banks to roll in and start doing business there, the farmer would simply laugh in his pasty little face. Private Western economic interests already tell the World Bank what to do, letting them have at their victims directly is not any kind of solution.

Labels: CBC, Economics, Stupidity

The Mystery of Michael Hlinka

Dear CBC,

I'd like you to clear something up for me. Is Michael Hlinka a brilliant Swiftian satire of self-righteous college Republican idiocy, or is he actually as stupid as his radio column would suggest?

The net result of his diatribe this morning attacking the NDP's proposal to curtail exhorbidant ATM fees charged by banks as being "against freedom" is this:

1) I hadn't heard of this idea, now I have, and

2) I think it's fantastic. Go NDP.

The language he used was notably dimwitted. His 'gotcha' moment was when he said that you wouldn't pass a law preventing pizza places from charging a delivery fee because there'd be no more pizza places. There are two notable problems with this:

1) If ATMs didn't charge fees for withdrawals over $20 like pizza places offer free delivery for orders over $20 he might have a better analogy, and

2) If I could call up the Royal Bank and say "hey, send a guy over with $200 in cash, k'thanks" I would absolutely pay a delivery fee for this service. Banks don't do this. Michael Hlinkka is an idiot.

My other real problem with this radio column was that it was written specifically to attack, in blatant terms, a proposal by one political party. One line, and I'm quoting, is "and speaking of losers, that's a nice segue back to Jack Layton, Judy Wasylycia-Leis and the Canadian people". Hurling insults at a political party on free air time provided by Canada's public broadcaster is grounds for a CRTC complaint.

Which CBC VP felt that our morning show needed this childish form of balance, anyway? Who exactly was it that thought that the road to success in broadcasting in canada was to emulate John Stossel and his crusade to protect entrenched corporate power?

Labels: CBC, Economics, Michael Hlinka, Stupidity