Editorial: The Greens want a command economy

There are many reasons to dislike Stephane Dion’s Green Shift (copyright disputed) or The B.C. Liberal government’s own greenward drift in policy. The most important of these, however, for many people, is secretly the most appealing one. And that is that the green movement is the latest argument for central planning, for a command economy.

The Left has always wanted to control the economy, (and for much of modern history, so has the Right.) Now the Left, sent into retreat everywhere by the collapse of the Soviet Union, has cleverly climbed into bed with the environmentalists and they are becoming wonderfully comfortable together. Witness the paradoxical alliance of loggers and environmentalists against Western Forest Products. Loggers a decade ago were driving their 4 X 4s through the protest camps of “tree huggers” with mayhem in their hearts and beer on their brains.

Now they jointly oppose forest owners who seek to turn their lands into subdivisions.

They find common ground in their desire to control the economy, to eliminate the messy business of free enterprise. Or in this case, they seek to take away the right of property owners to determine the best use of that property.

They justify their actions in the name of the public good (or humankind, or Nature—the stakes keep rising) and presume that they can do a better job at determining what this is and how it can be improved.

The American-turned-Canadian thinker Jane Jacobs, no right winger she, brilliantly exposed the fallacy of this thinking in her Cities and the Wealth of Nations. She describes one well-intentioned but disastrous exercise in economic planning or intervention after another: the Tennessee Valley Authority, the European Economic Community’s agricultural subsidies and various African megaprojects.

But Jacobs thinks Western civilization has done better in the period between the absolutist regimes of the so-called Age of Englightenment and the 20th Century social democracies. “I think that an ‘esthetics of drift,’ she writes, …worked better for Western cultures than ‘resolute purpose’ and ‘determined will.’

“In its very nature, successful economic development has to be open-ended rather than goal-oriented, and has to make itself up expediently and empirically as it goes along.”

This is so contrary to the spirit of the age that it’s amazing Jacobs remained a darling of the Left right up to her recent death.

Interestingly, Jacobs argues against the notion that “necessity is the mother of invention,” (which would tend to support the command economy approach). Instead she supports the idea that invention flows from what might be called idle curiosity, which is another way of saying freedom.

Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were tinkerers first, developers of marketable products second. They were motivated by curiosity about how things worked and how they might work. This week’s cover story describes the work of Chemainus car-builder David Saville Peck. His tinkering with a British sports car design of the 1950s has led to a faster, safer product that he builds for buyers who share his passion. The fact that Saville Peck does not do it “for the money” and does not want to move into full-scale manufacture does not mean that he will not some day produce a car worthy of modest mass manufacture.

The process Jacobs describes is import replacement. Saville Peck’s sports cars are cheap in comparison with other cars of their genre. His immediate task is to find his local market in Vancouver and Victoria and squeeze out the imports. There are already plenty of examples of small-scale Vancouver Island manufacturers of hard and software that first supplied B.C. markets and now are exporting. It has long been the Business Examiner’s goal to celebrate them. Their schemes weren’t planned grandly. They inched along by trail, error and ingenuity. BE