On Jim Stanford's Economics

CAW economist Jim Stanford today enlightens us with yet another one of his Monday morning anti-capital diatribes in the op-ed pages of the Globe and Mail.

The crux of today's grievance is that Canadian business, despite record profits, is nonetheless "fail(ing) to invest in new equipment and technology" with the logical corollary that business should be making these investments instead of "redirecting a big fat slice from workers to corporations". Stanford's intellectual gymnastics begin to rival Olympic floor exercises when he asserts that his beloved market perverters (unions) are not "to blame for this miserable record", and that companies should "start doing their job" by investing profit, without of course illustrating how this will benefit the workers Stanford implies he defends.

But perhaps, Jim, just perhaps, business isn't in a position to undertake capital investments in industry infrastucture because many collective agreements make it difficult to do so. In the name of "saving jobs", some collective agreements result in an entrenched industrial obsolescence which makes it nearly impossible to add value to the business like proper capital investment should do, which is why (shock! gasp!) profits get reinvested in moveable capital or returned to shareholders through dividends.

I think it's time that Stanford redirected his vitriol towards unions and the contribution that they have to the very problems he is feebly attempting to address.