Gwyn Morgan, according to the brief bio beneath his byline in the Globe and Mail, is "a Canadian business leader and a director of two global corporations".
Yesterday Morgan's astute analysis cut straight to the heart of the global economic crisis. The world is divided into two camps. On the one side you have the "givers". These would be your hard-working right-voting folks; entrepreneurs and wealth creators.
On the other side is your left-tilting grab-bag of liberals, Democrats, socialists of all stripes, welfare cheats, drug addicts, the sick, the halt, the lame, the weak of back and slow of mind, et. cetra. These are of course the "takers".
Quoting reverently from Glenn Beck's idol Friedrich Hayek, Morgan warns the reader that the long-suffering "givers" are on the verge of giving up. It's clear to Morgan that the insatiable demands of the "takers" are threatening the very future of the free enterprise model, which history has irrefutably proven to be superior. He cites two vastly over-simplified examples.
Look at Germany when the wall went down. Free-enterprisers on the one side. A socialist wasteland on the other. Germany was able to absorb those Eastern slackers and become the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe, but now all these "takers" in Greece and Spain threaten to break the back of the German miracle.
He finds an example in Canada as well. Look at those student protesters in Quebec. Talk about thankless "takers"! The lowest tuition in the land and yet they march for lower tuition?
And the "givers" in his Canadian scenario are the tax-payers of Alberta, who work tirelessly digging their self-created oil wealth out of the ground so that they can provide the "lions share" of the 7 billion in equalization payments that the rest of us bestow on Quebec every year.
But no economic analysis by this Fraser Institute regular is complete without a gratuitous slap at the NDP, the former socialist party with aspirations to form a government in the event that Canadians ever wake up and smell the Harper.
So Morgan has got the pro-labour NDP leader Thomas Mulcair marching to the barricades with the Montreal students. There they go, students and unionists arm in arm, rallying to "replace free-market capitalism with government controlled socialism".
The final triumph of the "takers" over the "givers".
Then it struck me that both the students and the NDP leader would be more than comfortable in Germany!
No tuition!
Government mandated union representation on corporate boards!
And suddenly I realized that it's not such a black-and-white world after all. Maybe there are other options besides "free-market capitalism" and "government mandated socialism".
Maybe a government regulated capitalism?
Perhaps we should embrace the German model, Mr. Morgan!
But his economic analyses aren't all that's dodgy about Gwyn Morgan.
In the course of his business career Morgan built Encana into North America's second largest natural gas company, leaving a trail of despoiled communities all over the continent as a result of his wholesale embrace of industrial-scale fracking practices.
Since leaving Encana he has become Chairman of the Board of SNC-Lavalin, the Canadian conglomerate currently under a cloud of suspicion over corruption in Bangladesh, Mexico, Libya and Switzerland.
And here's the punch line; he's on the speakers circuit these days, giving lectures around the world on the topic of business ethics!
No comments:
Post a Comment