News Why do countries nationalize their resources?

[fourier jr]

Why spend a bunch of time doing something yourself when you could just order products to meet your low demands, and do it at a lower cost? It's part of the "buy what you need, sell what you don't" mentality that most countries and companies go by. Look at any company and you'll see they don't make most of what they use. Miller makes beer; they do not grow hops, or barley, or yeast, or sugar. They buy all of those things, put it together as beer, and sell beer. On the flip side, a farmer does not make beer; he grows barley. He sells that barley to Miller, and he may even buy back his own barley in the form of Miller beer. In the end, both the farmer and Miller benefit by focusing on what they do best - growing barley and making beer. The United States had lots of cotton, so they sold cotton.

...& then they gave up their comparative advantage in natural resources & started up indigeneous industries. singer sewing machines was one of the 1st american multinationals. sweden gave up its comparative advantage in exporting raw materials & started up their own industries also, & not long afterwards they perfected the diesel engine, produced lots of ball-bearings & invented dynamite. if you want to know more why not just email gordon laxer yourself? he's director of the parkland institute @ u of Alberta. wait why not ask him in person since you're in edmonton. (the belly of the beast, as it were).

Those countries have dictatorship governments. Iraq has insane amounts of oil, and it's nationalized. Do the people benefit from it? Saddam was a billionaire while his country was rather poor, so no. Iran? Same thing. Saudi Arabia? Again, the same thing. USSR sold its oil because that was basically the only thing anybody wanted from the soviets, and most soviets were still poor. That country is just now getting back onto its feet since private investment and greed have returned.

if you look at all the south-american countries they don't have dictatorship governments & they nationalized their oil so the people of the country get the profits. pretty much all the governments use it to help the general public, rather than the rich like Canada does.

As for the east-west power grid, why the hell would you want that? Power loss in wires is directly proportional to the length of the wires, and you're thinking of running wires across more than 5000km of land? Why don't we just save time and set our oil reserves on fire. That way we can waste the energy right now instead of waiting until the infrastructure is built.

at the time the 1st feasibility studies were being done (late 50s), Canada was already the world leader in preventing losses over long distances. churchill falls & james bay are kind of far from montreal. you can email karl froschauer (former bc hydro engineer or something & now director of the inst of Canadian studies @ sfu) about that also since his address is publicly available on the sfu site. maybe it wouldn't hurt to email dwight duncan, gary doer & danny williams & ask them why they would want to be a part of a national grid when it's apparently so impracical. email dwight duncan especially since he's in the middle of yet another fesability study on a national power grid.

What you need to keep in mind about those nationalization surveys is who are they asking? Alberta controls the vast majority of Canada's oil, but Albertans are the ones most in favour of keeping oil and gas privatized. Your link even states that, with Alberta being the least in favour of nationalization "Forty per cent of respondents on the Prairies and 36 per cent of Albertans were in favour."
Now ask yourself, why would Albertans, the people with oil, be the least willing to give it to the government? The answer is very simple - Alberta thrives as long as that energy is private. It means the money is held by corperations, and that money goes to people who work for those companies, which is then leaked into the local economy. Fort McMurray is a great example of this. It's a town sitting on lots of tar sand, lots of money. Workers get paid lots, land value is extremely high, everything is expensive, and everybody is rich. If that tar sand were to be nationalized, the money would no longer belong the corperation centralized around that town; it would belong to the government located thousands of kilometers away who couldn't possibly care less about Fort McMurray. It wouldn't be a situation of Albera works, Alberta prospers. It would be Alberta works, rest of Canada steals from Alberta.
It may seem greedy for Alberta to want to stay prosperous without sharing any of it, but ask yourself this: what has the rest of the country done for Alberta? We lost billions and billions of dollars to Trudeau's stupid ass national energy program which forced us to sell oil to the rest of Canada at below market price. Do we get trees from BC below market price? How about fish from the maritimes? Or Manufactured goods from Ontario? Dream on. We're getting screwed. It'll be a cold day in hell when Canada takes our oil away from us.

for one thing, ontario subsidized Alberta for decades, & didn't hear a word of thanks as far as i know. again, just as the rich people in venezuela can't stand chavez (& likely similar to the situations in other south american countries) the rich people in Alberta can't stand the "ottawa mandarins" like trudeau who wanted to help out the Canadians who weren't so well off. i ask again, why would a non-dictator like chavez want to nationalize the oil industry in venezuela, one of the major non-opec oil-exporting countries?