Thursday Afternoon Links

This and that for your Thursday reading.

- No, we shouldn't be surprised that Clark-era PCs disagree with the Harper Cons given that their leader long since jumped ship as well. But Peter Blaikie's take on the Cons' dumb-on-crime policies is still worth a read:

A civilized, effective system of justice should have two overriding objectives: to protect society, perhaps forever, from the truly dangerous and, while punishing the others, using every possible effort to rehabilitate them, turning them into productive citizens.

The government’s approach, in effect and almost certainly in intention, reverses these objectives. It is all stick and no carrot. It even abandons the highly successful, self-sustaining, century-old program of prison farms, which taught generations of inmates critical life skills.
...
In addition to the human cost of the tough-on-crime policy, the financial costs will be enormous, involving many billions of taxpayers’ dollars annually. Either the Harper government has no idea what the additional cost of more prisons, more inmates and longer jail terms will be, in which case it is incompetent, or, equally disrespectful of Canadians, it does know and refuses to admit them, thereby being dishonest.

- Louisa Taylor notes that accuracy seems to be of no particular concern in the Cons' efforts to fearmonger about immigrants, as at least one member of their publicly-flaunted list of war criminals seems to be completely unknown to human rights groups who would have every reason to know if he was under any reasonable suspicion.

- While I don't agree with Sixth Estate's hostility toward economists generally, this much is well worth emphasizing:

What is being advanced by mainstream economists is not (despite what their fake Nobel Prize says they’re doing) a science of the markets, so much as a theology of the markets. The economy written about in pieces like these is a raging beast beyond our control. It’s easy to forget that “the free market,” as such, doesn’t even exist. It’s an academic abstraction for a certain range of ways in which people interact, carefully bounded by laws and regulations. In their headlong rush to build a “science” worthy of the name, economists have built a god of their own making and are attempting to drag us down into the same mud they’re mired in. Depressions aren’t caused by greedy fraudulent bankers and their pet politicians stripping away law enforcement and regulation, and plunging into absurd schemes from which they know taxpayers will grudgingly bail them out — they’re caused by a long-term economic process that just “happens,” every 70 or 80 years, to cause a major contraction.

Like all gods, the market appears to exist outside of human control, but at the end of the day it is our creation, and it is not a necessary one. We don’t need to allow preachers, or economists, to operate outside of the usual standards of logic and empiricism. We don’t need to run to either of these priesthoods whenever there’s a problem so they can prescribe meaningless fixes. We choose to create markets. And we choose to allow banks to operate as Ponzi schemes.

- Finally, it's well worth noting when Barrie McKenna takes note of progressive economics on his normally corporatist blog:

Canadian Labour Congress chief economist Andrew Jackson, on the other hand, sees Canada’s G7-leading finances as an opportunity to do a lot more to help the recovery and promote job growth.

“The major economic problem faced by Canadians is a very slow recovery and weak job market, not government deficits or rising debt,” Mr. Jackson argues in a blog post.
...
Canada’s finances are in relatively good shape, at least compared to other wealthy countries, Mr. Jackson points out. Total net government debt stands at 33.7 per cent of GDP in 2011, compared to the OECD average of 62.6 per cent. Total Canadian government deficits stand at 4.9 per cent of GDP, versus a 6.7 per cent average in the OECD. And interest costs on the debt are eating up 0.7 per cent of GDP, compared to a 1.9 per cent average in the OECD.

And yet Mr. Jackson said Canada is embracing more austerity than most of its rivals in the world by “artificially speeding” the pace of deficit reduction.

“Why are we taking the lead in imposing austerity, even though our economy is weak, and even though our deficit and debt is superior to most other countries?,” he wondered.