Bad for Business?

The other day, with a group of Liberals, I lamented the back-assward way that the Conservative government was approaching a series of environmental initiatives, warning how it would inevitably drive investment out of the country.

One of the people I was speaking to said, tongue half-planted in cheek, "So, are you saying that the Conservatives are bad for business?"

I started to say yes, but then I corrected myself and said "No, not the Conservatives. Governments are bad for business."

There are two reasons for this - the first being that politicians don't have ideas of their own- they get them from government bureaucrats who for the most part keep pushing the same idea they wrote their master's thesis on in 1983. Example - the recent slew of re-announcements by the Tories and their plans to regulate GHGs. There are a bazillion ways they could go about reducing GHGs without hard caps and strict regulations, but the government doesn't use (what I have coined) the tool box approach. Governments only use one tool - the (regulatory) hammer. Even to cut wood and paint. Hammer smash smash, scrape scrape.

The second is that the nature of government is to make it harder to do things. There are lots of examples, but the best and most easily understandable is trying to pay your taxes. Good luck. Governments complicate things in a way that would bankrupt the private sector and one only has to look at the size of your average government department to see why - there are almost as many people working at the DFO then there are fisherman.

It is at this cross-roads that my liberalism and my libertarianism clearly intersect. I have always believed that it was the market that drove change, not the government driving the change. We switched from clean burning whale oil to gasoline because of advents in the market. We drive smaller cars because the price of gas goes up and down. We drink skim milk because it is better for us.

But, the original question remains- why are governments bad for business? It is because they add costs to a business model during an unexpected cycle to meet a non-related social benefit - a social benefit which only they can define and understand. If business knew the costs of all government programs before investing, there would be no problem- mostly because in many cases they would avoid the investment entirely.

The role of the government is to ensure that the health, safety and security of its people remains protected from within or without. I have no problems with strict environmental laws - provided that they make sense in achieving clearly defined environmental goals, they predictable and are integrated into the cost of doing business. I have a HUGE problem with randomly precise regulations and targets that have disproportionately low environmental impact relative to the high cost of implementation and are disjointed from competing provincial or municipal regulations/bylaws.

All of this is to say that my experience is that it doesn't matter who is in power when the people giving them their materials don't think outside of their policy box to look at the bigger picture.