Liberals make poor socialists

The $3 billion state intervention into the local economy to build highways, though welcome, is misdirected and only promises to remove more household wealth from the Lower Mainland

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Tuesday’s announcement of a $3 billion public investment by the Province of BC into truck and car-based transportation infrastructure makes certain once and for all that there is no ideological difference between the governing conservative Liberals and the NDP opposition. This is good news, because it means proponents of socialism should no longer feel they need to make better arguments about the merit of heavy-handed state inter-vention in the economy. The Liberal Gateway Plan for bridge building and highway widening sets the new high-water mark for economic socialism in the province’s history. As it was for restive factions of the old Soviet Politburo, the only political arguments available in BC now are those restricted to the more mundane questions of where such heavy state intervention should take place, and for whose benefit.

While The Republic, as a fan of strong central government and thoughtful state-economic intervention, applauds this instance of big public spending generally, this project, in particular, is the wrong place for it. One of the benefits of big state intervention in the economy is the opportunity it buys the governing caucus to encourage and discourage certain forms of public behaviour. By directing public spending into or out of this or that area of the economy, the governing caucus projects onto the governed society its vision of what it conceives to be the nature of society and the humans inhabiting it. Where it directs new spending is the strongest indicator of where it believes humans and their society are straying the furthest from their conceived ideal.

(Free-enterprise, small-government proponents are no less marked for their ideals and conceptions. Their program is to remake society into the ideal as conceived in the boardrooms of major consumer-oriented corporations. And historically, such small-government proponents, when they achieve power, have run up record-high government deficits in pursuing their economic interventions.)

There are good arguments backed by credentialed experts advancing both pro and con arguments about the merits of a $3 billion plan to build new freeways and bridges in the Lower Mainland, and to widen the all-important Highway One corridor to more lanes; and those arguments have been given sufficient air elsewhere. What concerns us here is what this heavy-spending plan reveals about the present government’s conception of the ideal society and where it thinks that society is most in need of such high levels of remedial guidance.

Prominent time was given in both the government’s official statement and coverage in the leading local media to projections of time lost in traffic bottlenecks today and in the future, if no investment were to be made. The most striking projection was the length of traffic jam on the suburban side of the Port Mann Bridge, said to be 5 km today, and up to 17 km by 2021. This projection assumes that humans, like insentient machines, will continue to buy homes in Langley, take jobs in Vancouver, and passively line up each morning and evening to cross the bridge between them, enduring ever longer delays.

The Province assumes that the only possible release of such pressure will be found in the twinning of the bridge and widening of the freeway into Vancouver. A different conception of humans might have reached the conclusion that unbearably long wait-times in traffic bottlenecks would lead instead to residential accommodation being sought closer to work, to work being sought closer to residences, and to successful demands for other forms of traversing the gap. While expanded car-oriented freeway expansion was the answer in most of North America over the last half-century, in most rapidly growing metropolitan areas today, other solutions are capturing more attention.

The cost of car-based work-home commuting is also assumed by the present regime in Victoria to be “elastic,” as economists say—the government presumes citizens have a nearly limitless capacity to spend on their work-related travel. But of course that assumption is borne also on a delusion that lingers like a hangover from the previous half-century of apparently limitless oil at remarkably low prices. As recently sustained $65 prices for barrels of oil show, the era of cheap oil is over. There are good arguments about whether global oil production has peaked or has thousands of years to go before declining. But planning built on optimistic forecasts of good times forever is never prudent government policy. There is enough expert concern over prices rising much higher and staying high to warrant their consideration in any long-term government planning and large-scale public investments. It may be that commuters will continue using cars on new freeway lanes and bridges well into the future. But they will likely do so out of necessity and at great cost to other items in their household budgets. Homes and personal transportation are the two items in families’ household budgets that have risen the most dramatically in the last decade. It’s no surprise the industries reporting the hugest profits today are banks, which own the mortgages on those overpriced homes, and oil companies, which own the fuel-powering personal transportation.

Those profits—in the case of ExxonMobil, a world-record US$36 billion last year—are a direct measure of money removed from other items in local household budgets, like that spent on food, clothing, entertainment, or savings. While the provincial government can do little about the global price of oil or the surging prices of homes, it can intervene in the economy to lessen the amount of money leaving the local economy through these avenues overall. Less car travel, for example, spells fewer dollars per citizen spent on gasoline purchases, dollars that leave the country. Less car travel resulting from homes and work moving closer together decentralizes housing demand away from popular centres and toward the less costly centres, spreading around the housing-price spikes and blunting them.

The government’s $3 billion plan, however, ensures more car travel on easier and wider freeways. It also ensures housing will remain cheaper in those regions that are already cheaper, and more expensive in those areas already more expensive. The plan, in other words, ensures that our society will send more of its wealth away to companies abroad, and spend proportionately less on local goods and services. The Gateway Plan further enriches already bloated oil companies and banks, and impoverishes our society’s households.

The question posed to planners, given that the government has already chosen the route of heavy state-economic intervention, should have been “How do we provide the same short-term marginal relief of average travel times in ways that divert our society’s household wealth away from banks and oil companies and into the local economy?” The answer to that question is surely not more bridges and freeways connecting Vancouver to the suburbs even more by individual car travel. The conservative Liberals are not just socialist in their economic planning, they are bad socialists.

****