Something every voter should know.

The Road Not Taken Why do we elect people who don't understand opportunity cost? Why do we vote for political leaders in the same manner we choose social media influencers?

Many years ago, I did an MBA, and my grades on the quantitative courses hung out on the west tail of the bell curve. But even I understood opportunity cost (OC). I can’t say the same for many of us.

OC is what you could have done with time and money if you hadn’t used it the way you did. That 12 years of pounding beer till you fall asleep in the recliner every night? What could you have done if you stayed sober? The pissing away of $75K in your twenties on a car that should have been a retirement reward is a half million by the time you retire; $45 billion for battery plants, other corporate pork, Bombardier’s mouth never leaving the government teat, the Liberals, the Ontario Conservatives and many others wandering around the country pissing away debt-financed money with an attitude that would make the proverbial drunken sailor blush. These all need to be viewed through the OC lens.

But many don’t get it. Debt is just a bunch of zeros in a big number that doesn’t affect us. But the opportunity cost? What else could be done with that money, especially when it’s debt-filled money, principle plus interest?

Opportunity cost asks if you are using the resources the best way. If you used them another way, would you get more out of it? Forty-five billion would have got us how many family doctors?

Why does the government assume that their investment choice is better than what the “we have skin in the game” free market players would have done with it? It’s a government conceit that keeps on giving and keeps on failing.

What if the feds hadn’t decided to give it away? It is simply debt plus interest, and the music will eventually stop. The next generation will have the chair pulled away from it and have to pay our bills with increased taxes and reduced services.

Because the bond rating agencies will say enough at some point, we won’t have a choice: increased taxes and lowered services. No questions.

But it creates jobs! Are you sure?

So, was everyone who started working there unemployed?

Corporate pork screws up labour and capital markets, creates inflationary pressures, and gives an unfair competitive advantage to companies that are beneficiaries; it distorts all the natural signalling of value that free markets give.

Regarding acting like opportunity cost doesn’t exist, I don’t think the government is that ignorant. Most of the time, they are just trading in the future for the present; they are burning the furniture to keep warm because they are too lazy to go outside and chop wood; they are putting their interests ahead of the public because they know that pissing away money on what we can’t afford may not politically or be a cost they have to suffer while they are in office.

They understand that the political benefits from debt—even with interest on our federal debt soon surpassing our health care spending—are today more significant than the costs.

It’s too bad we don’t have a parallel university to test all our bad ideas. We do have history, but we just had a room of MPs not figure out that their hero who fought our allies in WWII had to be with the bad guys. My hopes are not high for any appreciation of opportunity cost.