Mid-stream Media misses the point, Again.

The National Post's Jen Gerson got part of the story right, concluding that Alberta's Spend-Happy Progressive Party Premier Allison REDford needs to reign in government spending. Unfortunately she and the majority of the midstream media continue to miss the root of the problem, that Allison Redford is a Tory in name only.
From her election-night acceptance speech to the present day she has persistently referred to her party as the 'PROGRESSIVE conservatives' and has made clear her intention to make real that last-century fiction adopted by conservatives across the country.  That was when they made an oxymoron of their name by adding 'Progressive' to their name in an attempt to make their party more palatable to voters during socialism's unfortunate ascendancy into so-called respectability during the 20th Century.

The midstream media's role here is the same one we saw repeated over and over again in the last few decades: 

1. mislabel spendthrift interventionist big-government politicians as 'Conservative'
2. then blame 'Conservatives' and/or 'Conservative Ideology' when the shit hits the fan

It's not a conspiracy, it's merely an example of like-mindedness. Fake conservatives tend to get a pass from the fake-imparital media as the politicos conduct their social engineering experiments at your and my expense. Later,  when the experiments inevitably fail, the actual Liberals and socialist parties look more reasonable at election time.  Witness the electoral histories of B.C., Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.

Why then has Alberta stayed conservative for so long?  It has, but in name only. Premiers Lougheed, Getty, and Klein all proved to love big government spending. Yes, in spite of his early big cuts, even Ralph Klein.  Allison Redford has merely recognized that for a good socialist to get power in Alberta, you have to appear to be a conservative to the voters. 

Conservatism is pretty simple. It just takes a little familiarity with math. Every dollar stolen from me by the taxman is a dollar less I can use to feed my family, and you can't increase government spending without getting the money from somebody.  Socialists all conveniently forget that if they raise taxes on the corporations that sell us the stuff we buy, the corporations always raise their prices and we pay for it anyway. This has happened everytime it's been done in the past. D'oh!

Make life better for people by reducing the size of the government we have to pay for, reduce it's  interference in our lives, and improve our lot in life by freeing up our spending power through lower taxes.  Only an idiot or a liar can't see the math. Yes, I see most socialists as liars or idiots.

That said, the National Post's Jen Gerson makes a good point that the mixed messages from the Ms Redford and her Finance Minister (we could try a sales tax, no we won't raise taxes, we're not going to reduce spending, we're looking at a 'hard-times' budget, etc...) can hardly reassure Albertans. Gerson's big failure here is either in failing to call a spade a spade, or in her inability to see Redford for the liar I expect she will prove herself to be.

Too Much of a Good Thing...

 

...isn't a good thing.

Now that I’m back in marketing after a twenty-two year hiatus I’m noticing newspaper ads again. Mostly because they’re proving to be a fine way for me to find businesses that would benefit from moving their advertising dollars out of a dying 17^th century media and into the twenty-first.

One of our local papers had a sale on full page color ads, selling for $300 a pop what would normally cost over a thousand. Many local merchants thought that was such a great idea that they crowded like lemmings into this week’s weekly edition which had over 51 pages in a row of full color ads …and not much else.

Now how many consumers will want to read all that? Probably just the merchants who paid for them. I’ll wager the rest of you (if you’re a subscriber) will take one look and toss the entire thing into the trash.  That’s $16,000 of advertising money wasted.

I’ve always said advertising is supposed to stand out. I’ll be finding out this week how some of those merchants feel about being squeezed into the middle of 51 pages of ads.

 

I’ve also always said you get what you pay for.  But in this case I don’t think those merchants got their $300 money’s worth.