Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Purple Library Guy highlights the internal inconsistency behind regressive economics:

If you hold onto the "poor people are poor because they make sub-optimal choices" claim but admit that means free markets will not be efficient, then a compassionate person would suggest that if the economy isn't going to be efficient anyway it should at least try to take care of people. If you hold onto the efficient markets, then people's poverty must happen to them despite their making optimal choices, in which case you have to start wondering just what the "efficiency" is for.

These ideas can both be false, and in the real world they are. But they can't both be true; right wing economics combined with right wing justifications for poverty involve a basic contradiction.

- And both Jeffrey Simpson and David MacDonald rightly criticize the Cons' efforts to make our tax system even more regressive.

- David Olive joins the parade of commentators who have rightly concluded that they've had enough of the Harper Cons' contempt and deception:

Since we've not challenged Harper on his past, we're all condemned to relive it. In the fake costing of 65 jet-fighter planes (Harper cost, $17 billion; real cost, $29 billion) to the non-costing of new and expanded prisons that would be required by Harper's proposed tougher sentencing guidelines. (The outside estimates are roughly $9 billion.) It was a vote on that contempt of the people's house, and not the budget, that brought this government down last Friday.

But this episode is astonishing, a Harper rewrite of events that unfolded just yesterday. To the question of how far Harper will go in insulting the voters, there is no apparent answer.

- Saskboy is looking for a consensus around the idea of "more debates, not fewer debates". I for one couldn't agree more strongly with the idea.

- Finally, Scott Feschuk documents the tragicomedy of errors that's been the first week of the election campaign for the Cons.