I took offense to Mark Ryan's editorial likening marbles to minimum wage. Using marbles to extol the "negative" effects of people making enough money to survive is insulting.
We've lost our way. Somehow we decided that instead of having privately-owned companies with a few people making money and organized labour collecting proper wages injected into the municipal, provincial and federal economies; we decided that we would base our economy on a model that does not exist.
The publicly traded markets around the world are not based on real money, so-called investors have been replaced by the masses who through stocks and mutual funds, try to keep-up with the Jones' and secure retirement. For many, the pensions have dried-up. Companies no longer bring in profits for a singular tycoon, rather the thinning profits are paid to shareholders in their multitudes. Shares have replaced real profits and while we've outsourced, and techno-replaced real people, we've created a landscape that one day will bring about a surplus of product with few people having the means to buy.
If you do not believe that we are heading to mass unemployment, remember that competitiveness was about improving product and productivity, not replacing productivity in your own backyard with unemployment. Online shopping, big-box stores and 'shareholders' are now the order of the day. Cities, as well as people, are doomed.
We can blame overpaid labour unions, high-cost domestic productivity and speak about the virtues of cheaply produced, foreign goods but we need to remember that our nation needs productivity, employed people and people making enough money to not just exist, but thrive. The less we pay our workers, the more jobs we ship away and the more we raise rents on people already being stripped to nothing, the more we endanger our own future. Sooner than later, social safety nets and the Canadian pension will run dry and we will find ourselves in dire straits.
Before everyone jumps on the bandwagon of retraining and better education, remember that we have thousands of degree-toting unemployed or graduates working menial jobs, we have also slaughtered our apprenticeship programs by giving them enough rope to hang themselves at the college level without companies hiring them to finish their apprenticeships.
The last government "fixed" things by hiring foreign workers and shipping raw logs at record numbers. I wish life were like a game of marbles, Mark.
Mike Maslen
Prince George
