Tories set to add forestry, mining to bailout list.

This is from Coyne's blog at MacLeans.
Often Coyne has interesting comments on current events but at other times he acts like a clown and to put it bluntly, is plainly ignorant. This article is one such example. Even his conclusion is ignorant. If anything according to his own murky light it is the Conservatives who are the socialists. His statement about the NDP is true enough. They haven't even been close to being socialists since they became the NDP. The CCF was through much of its early period a socialist party but the NDP has never been such.
What Coyne says of course makes sense in the present realm of political discourse where any government aid to industry is considered socialist, a position that is truly nonsense and merely shows the degradation of political discourse at the present time. Bailing out capitalism is not socialist. In fact it is diametrically opposed to socialism since socialism replaces capitalism through socialisation of the major means of production and exchange and produces for need not profit. Government aid or even nationalisation under capitalism is meant to socialise risk but not profits nor the means of production.
What Coyne is correct about is that Harper often abandons his more right wing free market ideology when it is necessary for political survival. That is all that he is doing now. So has George Bush so I guess he is socialist too.


Tories set to add forestry, mining to bailout list
After pledging more than $3-billion to rescue the auto sector, the Harper government is now poised to offer similar aid to the struggling mining and forestry industries in next month’s budget.
Industry Minister Tony Clement said Sunday on CTV’s Question Period that a number of industries are “under distress” and “other industrial sectors, other extraction sectors are on the table for our budget coming out on January 27th…”
In the Throne Speech, the Conservative government had pledged relief for automotive and aerospace sectors but nothing was proposed for the fisheries, mining and forestry industries.
NDP Leader Jack Layton credited the creation of the coalition between his party and the Liberals that is supported by the Bloc Québécois with forcing the government to act swiftly.
“It looks like the government’s finally changing direction,” Mr. Layton said on Question Period. “We’ve been saying for quite a number of months and during the election that we’ve needed strategies for these key sectors that were in trouble, and I think the Prime Minister was either in denial or just ideologically felt governments shouldn’t be helping out.”
Well thank goodness that’s over with — out with ideology, in with practicality! And what could be more practical, more pragmatic, more … Canadian, than to have everyone pitch in to bail each other out? The forestry sector bails out the auto industry. Mining bails out forestry. Aerospace bails out mining, fisheries bail out aerospace — and the auto industry bails out the fisheries! What each pays in taxes it gets back in subsidies. And vice versa.
But why not? There is no budget constraint. Deficits are no longer to be avoided. They’re “essential.” Spending is no longer to be controlled. It’s “stimulus.” The NDP are no longer socialists. They’re the Conservatives.