Can't we all be Keynesian about this?
This may have been more than a little impolitic but can’t we all agree on one thing?
Environmental advocates have reacted with outrage after a provincial energy minister in Canada said that coronavirus restrictions on public gatherings make it a “great time” to push on with a contentious pipeline project.
During a podcast hosted by the Canadian Association of Oilwell Drilling Contractors, Alberta’s energy minister Sonya Savage was asked about the Trans Mountain expansion project, which is under construction despite despite fierce opposition from environmentalists and some Indigenous groups.
“Now is a great time to be building a pipeline because you can’t have protests of more than 15 people,” Savage said.
“People are not going to have tolerance and patience for protests that get in the way of people working. People need jobs and those types of ideological protests that get in the way are not going to be tolerated by ordinary Canadians.”
Her comments prompted disbelief and indignation among environmentalists.
It is a standard application of crude Keynesianism that troubled economic times are exactly when we should go build all that lovely infrastructure. You know, the multiplier effect and all that. Even - as Krugman with the alien defence system even if aliens don’t exist - that spending upon something entirely wasteful and useless still makes us richer because Keynes.
Now the insistence is that it does matter what is built. We agree - it does matter what is built. The what, the why, the wherefore, they always matter. Even if we accept - which we usually don’t - the existence of that multiplier it still does matter what is built and whether it is useful in and of itself.
Which is very cool - we now need to examine each and every idea for government spending as to whether the thing being spent upon is worth having in itself, it is no longer enough to just shout “Stimulus!” Or at least that would be true if these people were consistent and perhaps we should hold them to being so?