Ed Deak

Without in any way trying to be facetious, Ed, what do you think of Major Douglas' ideas re the banks' misuse of money?

Did the early Social Crediters have the right idea?

I think, the original idea

I think, the original idea of SC was something that could have been developed into something very good, combined with the theories of Keynes.

The Manning/Bennett use of the SC name was a fraud and had nothing to do with the original idea. Just as the present use of Conservative and BC Liberal names are the same fraud, promoting the same old exploitative economics.

Personally, I have long discarded all ideologies, because even the most beautiful can be distorted into destruction, crime and murder, as we can see in our daily lives.

The only way out of this present mess is a physical laws based, cooperative economic system, tied to real, physical, or engineering efficiency: The most work done with the least resource/energy inputs.

Competitive systems always increase and transfer costs, therefore are counter productive.

So is the forced depopulation of rural areas and the jamming of people into energy wasting, huge mega cities, to raise the GDP through waste and exploitation.

At the same time, our present acreage subdivisions are also the real "footprints", with no gardens, and people commuting long distances to stupid, non productive jobs.

Ed Deak.

Ed Deak

Thanks Ed, that's interesting, I would never have thought of coupling Douglas' ideas with Keynes.

But then I discounted your ideas about "fiat money" being applicable today until I started to learn just what derivatives - which make banker games look like playschool - were all about.

But I would find it very difficult to write off competition, since it can be used positively, such as in the search for "greener" technologies. Where am I wrong?

Other than that, I'd hesitate to argue against your other points, since I feel basically the same way.

ME....the search for green

ME....the search for green technologies is not competitive, but cooperative with the ecology and humanity.

The same applies for lower prices. Which may sound funny, or outrageous, in today's warped ideology, but let's try to think about it for a while.

Once again: "Wealth can not be created, only taken...." This is not my idea, but a long established physical, or "green" law.

The purpose of economic competition, war and crime is the forced acquisition of benefits and properties against the owners' will.

Apart from he fact that all forms of competition increase energy inputs, which means real costs, therefore can not be green.

Now, this should send a few economists into convulsions, but, again, nobody can break physical laws and get away with it, although priesthoods and ideologues have been trying it since beginning of human history, and we know what happened to them and can see what's happening now? Or what will happen to "globalization" with the collapse of the oil economy ?

Ed Deak.

Gag me with a fork....."smart infrastructure"

The opening paragraph reads like a Board of Trade brochure; Vancouver's not as highly-ranked as it likes to promote itself as (look up "World Class city" on wikipedia). And who cares if the people who read Conde Nast think Vancouver is liveable; have they asked people on the the not-so-wealthy parts of town? I don't think surveys taken among wealthy travellers, or articles written by people on junkets who can stay in 4/5-star hotels, are qualified to decide if a city is "liveable". Fine, if you're on an expense account to talk about how enjoyable a place is; just try making a buck or making friends while you're e enjoying the liveability (unless you brought your liveability, i.e. lots of cash/credit, with you).......getting on the case of bumpf-shillers and their bloated boasting is like shooting fish in a barrel but that's not why I'm replying. This is:

"Smart infrastructure???

It's pretty clear that Mr. Leinberger has never negotiated our traffic for any length of time, whether in from Richmond and Delta or in off the freeway (which is "smartly" kept in Burnaby), or dealing with the bridges to the North Shore or the Fraser and Pitt bridges eastwards. Has he maybe only been taking taxis around the financial/hotel district or what? Or is he talking about Skytrain, which was the most expensive and least-comfortable of all options to be chosen (small seats, low headroom, no legroom), still isn't going where it should[ go, and instead got built to Richmond, plus a loop in Burnaby with stations placed where no one lives...and an awkward transfer at Commercial/Broadway and a similarly awkward one at New West/Columbia. Maybe he's talking about our bus system, crowded to the gills? Or is he talking about our under-the-ground electrical (West Side only)??

Most of all, the fact is that the chaos of Vancouver's suburbs is the direct result of Vancouver's "superior planning" in the core. The price of paradise is usually hell somewhere else.....that's if you consider the sterility of Yaletown and Coal Harbour to be "paradise"...

Next time, Mr Leinberger should maybe stay at Lougheed Mall or Coquitlam Centre or Scottsdale or Marpole etc. The Biltmore or the City Motel at 6th and Main, I suggest he try on those areas for "liveability". Then there's the Balmoral or the Cobalt of course...."superior planning" at work, and the Cobalt's location in the crux of the viaduct off-ramps and their connection to Highway 1 is a good demonstration of "smart infrastructure".

It's bad enough that Board of Trade types believe their own bullshit; brainwashing well-meaning outsiders is just sad....easy to be hypnotized by the scenery and fine dining, though....into thinking "if it looks good, it must be good"...

Talk about...

... the blind leading the blind. My Godless!

Over-developed and over-populated, smoky haze Vancouver as an example to the world, according to the definitions and studies of the "developer" class.

I agree with Fait Lux, again, on this one.

Competitive systems always increase and transfer costs, therefore are counter productive.

So is the forced depopulation of rural areas and the jamming of people into energy wasting, huge mega cities, to raise the GDP through waste and exploitation.

We, the US, and the rest of the world-. all need to move finally away from this notion of the mega-economy as the exclusive "property", to do with as they please, of a privileged ruling class. There is a need, on a new, more modern foundation, to get back to the notion of the economy as a collective/co-operative human activity serving the common good, in which all share power and ownership. How we concretely organize it and distribute that ownership/management power after that is thereafter likely to prove to be an "evolutionary" issue.

This current "never-ending growth" ruling class prioritized system is what underpins and drives this notion of never ending expansion of GDP, and with it, never ending over-development of the land base and burgeoning, pollution creating populations as a consequence-,to be the cheap labour,consume this ever expanding GDP and "fill the earth" to overflowing and famine.

It is time for the sports metaphored competitive system of "We have to be up to the challenges of the global market competition!", pitting whole peoples and societies against each other, (Which also often includes war as an aspect".) to be put away with the other childhood toys of human evolutionary history.

It has never been more obvious than it is right now.

BOARD OF TRADE PROPAGANDA FOR THE "SOPHISTICATES"

The opening paragraph reads like a Board of Trade brochure; Vancouver's not as highly-ranked as it likes to promote itself as (look up "World Class city" on wikipedia).

A really great post, Skookum1. I wish more people in Vancouver could use the common sense they were born with and start seeing promotional, advertorial material, masquerading as serious analysis, for what it really is, mainly high grade propaganda intended for consumption by more educated people. The trick in this strain of material is to hook the reader with their own sense of sophisticated superiority, and then stand back and let the rest follow. A few too many doses of this material and people will quite willingly, if they can possibly afford it, sign documents for a $500,000 purchase of a rather smallish, 800 square foot, two bedroom apartment. This will be their "family home", two people and one bird.

I have seen some similar price tags in downtown Seattle, that's true. But in Vancouver there is very little new building going on outside this price bracket. That suits developers and Board of Trade types, and it also suits the million or so existing homeowners, who are just delighted to see prices rising, and rising, and rising. It seems the only people it doesn't suit don't count. Just ask Gordon Price and Bill and Stephen Rees!

Just as...

Just as "The price of paradise is usually hell somewhere else.", an incredibly true statement by Skookum, the similar is true for poverty. Poverty at one level of society is overwhelmingly the consequence of a surfeit of riches at another social/class level.

All these conversations about development, or rather "over-development", densification pressures and the "market economy" on the one hand, and poverty on the seeming other, are really different aspects of the same underpinning reality phenomena.

Not so nice city

I am in full agreement with Skookum1, Canis L and the rest who note that yes, Van is a nice city to live in if you're among the relatively wealthy who can afford the skyrocketing costs of living there.

I just got off the phone with my cousin, who's a relatively well-paid tradesman who owns a mid-size house in Coquitlam he bought 15 years ago.

He tells me he soon won't be able to make his payments unless he converts his basement into a rental suite, which he doesn't want to do.

Likely in another 10-15 years his area will be selling off for condos, so then what?

IMO, this is the logical result of viewing one's home as an "investment", since social values have no currency in a "free market" system - except for the rich.

It's an ideological war

The real proponents of densification and the traffic mess we have in Vancouver are the people working in city planning. They are not just satisfied with planning roads, sewers and bridges, they are driving a political agenda; they want to impose a uniform lifestyle on most everyone living in the GVRD. And that lifestyle is based on the politics of global warming that rationalize living in condos so that everyone must use public transport.

Skookum1 hit his argument right out of the ball park.

For many decades, Vancouver planners have resisted in building Toronto style highways to facilitate traffic growth- all in hope of convincing people to leave their cars at home. Instead, we have massive traffic problems that are only now being addressed. Unless you can afford to live in Point Grey or Shaughnessy, you will never see the ideal, idyllic Vancouver of the 70s and 80s.

All these condos have been put up yet people still prefer to drive cars because it's simply more convenient than our poor public transport network. But, the planners hope that if we live densely enough the solution will present itself. Instead, we have a lower mainland dotted with ugly towers and sterile 'let's pretend' neighbourhoods like Yaletown.

Less IS Often more...

is really the reality of this situation we need to face up to-, as in less people, reduced GDP, less wholesale export of our resources offshore, but especially to the US, all of which can, around a more power shared economic base, result in less pressures on the natural air, land and water systems of the planet.

Cars, for example, are not so much the problem per se, as it is the sheer numbers of peoples demanding and driving them. There are not too many seals catching too many fish and polluting the oceans etc,, but too many fuqing people. We are the problem, our insane levels of growth and development.

And that is not to be anti-people, because I "are" one. But unless we want to become part of the boom and bust cycle forever of many other species, such as the snowshoe hare for example, and if we are to be as perseptive as we like to think we are-, we have to face up to and deal with our own self-destructive tendencies.

For all it MAY look "pretty" in some regards, Vancouver is really part of a very big global problem. It's just that looks can be deceptive sometimes-, as every man and woman should by now know. :-) lol

Less human population would mean more for everything and everyone, and reduced pressure on the planetary vital organ systems-, unless of course we continue to insist upon hanging onto this so-called "free market system", which really isn't free at all, but a system that wants to gorge itself to death, and us along with it.

By the by, ME2:

IMO, this is the logical result of viewing one's home as an "investment", since social values have no currency in a "free market" system - except for the rich.

A view we share, indeed.

a common story....

He tells me he soon won't be able to make his payments unless he converts his basement into a rental suite, which he doesn't want to do.

Likely in another 10-15 years his area will be selling off for condos, so then what?

Someone I know here in Hali (where I am these days) told me about an old schoolmate of his, now a crown prosecutor in Vancouver, married to another crown prosecutor, each making 80k or so....they can't survive on that. Now, never mind that I could survive on 160k a year, but the well-known fact in BC is that a single individual needs over six figures to even think about getting ahead. And largely it has to do with "real estate values". That we allowed homes to be treated as commodities, and allowed our realty market to be influenced by the dynamics of the Tokyo and Hong Kong (and Toronto) markets, is a crime perpetrated on the rest of the society by the free-enterprisers and all the yak about the "level playing field" back in Socred years....yes, the playing field has certainly been levelled hasn't it? Realtors thrive on escalating house prices, partly abetted by their own commissions; they need to hustle properties the way other people need to hustle pork belly futures. It's not about places to live, it's about finding suckers who need a place to live that you can get over a barrel; a captive market.

cont.

cont.

there is no real free market in realty; as I pointed out here a while ago Whistler, for example, has maintained land controls to keep values high there; and also opposed development in other parts of the SLRD because it could bring down values in Whistler by there being "too much on the market". There was a new townsite proposed for the Soo Valley or Rutherford area, north of the RMOW, meant for the working stiffs who are needed to keep the resort going, a not-quite-trailer-park community, not meant to b e marketed on teh spculator market, same idea as Whistler Cay long ago; the WRA/RMOW/Whistler Inc. shot it down in flames, too much risk to in-Whistler property values and they wouldn't have "design controls" to make sure it "harmonized" with Whistler's appearance....

That's a tangent (Whistler's pop. growth 2001-2006 was only 4% - Pemberton's was 33%...btw Lillooet lost 15%), what I really meant to say was:

"The only way you can afford to even think about buying into Vancouver is to own slaves or do something else that you couldn't do here". Well, some people do things here that are illegal in order to make the mortgage (grow shows...), but short of having a large extended family all working for mininum wage and living in the same digs, if you don't own businesses abroad you're faced with market competition here from people who do. The offshore money that's bought in here, and continues to buy in here, isn't made on the same rules that you or I or your pal in Coquitlam or that pair of crown prosecutors I mentioned have to deal with. It's a different kind of money. And it has more clout than ours, and it's printed on different paper, and issued by a different bank...sometimes quite literally.

At least under Roman and Greek law you were required to make sure your slaves were housed and fed properly.....