Eva Morales, Bolivia’s President believes that mining must be “reformed”. The future of the Canadian Wheat Board is up for review—farmers will vote to keep or scrap this long-standing government monopoly. There are uncanny parallels in these two fights over who should control a country’s resources, namely the government or private enterprise.

It is easy to judge what is right and wrong about Bolivia’s proposed “reform” of that country’s mining industry. It gets confusing when you apply the same logic to the Canadian Wheat Board. It is easy to say that it is wrong for Morales to nationalize the mining sector even though he premises this on the insistence that “mining resources must benefit the country and not just exporting companies.” But is it as easy to say that Canada should retain the Wheat Board so that agricultural resources benefit the country and not just exporting companies?

If I were a small miner or a farmer on the plains of Canada I would support any action by the government that gave me greater access to resources, greater income, more assured prices, and government subsidies when international prices for my commodity fell.

As an investor, a consumer of wheat products, and a taxpayer, I resent government appropriation of companies, monopoly control of resources, and subsidies to favored groups. I remain convinced that in spite of a focus on self-interest, the free working of the market place by free people inevitably brings greater efficiency and hence lower prices and taxes.

So my thoughtful opinion is just another expression of selfish, self-centered, personally motivated greed. As they say: politics is all about access to and control of resources. Morales and his fellows have the majority behind them, and the majority wants to get its hands on Bolivia’s mining resources. This objective from a Bolivian report says it all about why they want to take away resources from foreign mining companies and hand the resources to their supporters: “[The Ministry will promote a] …normative judicial framework for the integral development of the mining industry, as well as the development and diversification of a potential mining metallurgical sector for the country,”

Why would any foreign company do that when the threat of expropriation hangs over their heads?

Democracy is at work in both Bolivia and Canada (or at least so it seems.) Morales is a majority government. Canada’s distinctly minority government has decided to put the future of the Wheat Board to the vote of the farmers, but not the country as a whole. Which is the more democratic situation? I tired these arguments out on my many Canadian friends who admire Castro and who holiday in Cuba—they say they go there only for the music, but I find that hard to believe. I tried these arguments out on my farming friends from Iowa who benefit from corn and soya bean subsidies.

The Canadians support Morales for his concern for the common man, for his actions on behalf of the people, and they are horrified to think of the dissolution of the Wheat Board. And off they went to the government-controlled liquor outlet to buy some booze. Maybe I have too narrow a circle of friends in Canada for I found none who support my views about free trade in wheat, mining, and liquor stores.

The farmers from Iowa extolled the virtues of the family farm, retention of family solidarity, and the contribution a little subsidy makes to upholding national values. They know not, and care not about Canada, Cuba, Morales, Bolivia or any of those other places that espouse socialism and won’t let the local grocery store sell brandy on Sunday. I mean why worry about another of that infinite group of badly run places where gas is expensive, cigarettes taxed beyond their value, they do not speak English, and there is no trinity of government, i.e., a separate and independent legislature, executive, and judiciary. As for an appointed Senate—serves them right if there is no balance. And your opinion is? Comment below