{"id":15621,"date":"2012-06-23T00:27:14","date_gmt":"2012-06-23T05:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15621"},"modified":"2013-03-05T11:45:20","modified_gmt":"2013-03-05T16:45:20","slug":"trade-deals-as-mutual-disarmament-pacts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/06\/23\/trade-deals-as-mutual-disarmament-pacts\/","title":{"rendered":"Trade deals as mutual disarmament pacts"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s a very sad commentary that the only way the current “pro-business” federal government can even consider scrapping our supply management<\/a> monopolies is because “our trading partners forced us to”:<\/p>\n

If the government were of a mind to get rid of supply management \u2014 it swears it is not \u2014 that is perhaps the only basis on which it could: our trading partners made us do it. Certainly it would not dream of doing so otherwise. Such is the power of the supply management lobby, especially dairy, that a suffocating consensus has settled over the issue, of a kind rarely seen in a democracy. Consensus is not even the word. Every party strives to outdo the others in the fulsomeness of its support. And not just every party: every member<\/em> of every party, in every province and at every level of government. It\u2019s quite creepy.<\/p>\n

Yet virtually every economist or policy analyst of note agrees that supply management is a disgrace. The primary effect of the quotas \u2014 the intended<\/em> effect \u2014 is to drive up the price of these foods, staples of most Canadians\u2019 diets, to two and three times the market price. The burden of these extraordinary price differentials, of course, fall most heavily on the poor, a fact that ought to trouble self-styled \u201cprogressives\u201d but evidently doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

But it isn\u2019t only consumers who pay. Since the quotas are tradeable, the premium over market prices gets capitalized into the value of the quota. The right to a cow\u2019s worth of milk production, for example, runs to about $28,000, meaning a farmer looking to get into the industry faces an initial outlay, for the typical 60-cow farm, in excess of $1.5-million \u2014 just for the quota, never mind the cows, the barn and the rest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a very sad commentary that the only way the current “pro-business” federal government can even consider scrapping our supply management monopolies is because “our trading partners forced us to”: If the government were of a mind to get rid of supply management \u2014 it swears it is not \u2014 that is perhaps the only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,74],"tags":[320,410,469,266,258,890],"class_list":["post-15621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-food","tag-freetrade","tag-mercantilism","tag-monopolies","tag-protectionism","tag-stephenharper","tag-supplymanagement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-43X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15621"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19293,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15621\/revisions\/19293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}