Where I work, I only have access to certain websites. No Facebook, no YouTube, not even Google. One of the sites they allow me to see is CBC. It’s where I get a lot of my news. But I have to make sure my BS detector is turned on every time I see it.
One of their stupidest areas is their so-called business section. It’s not even business-related for the most part. It’s more of a leftist Marxist-theory dumping ground which vilifies the activities of businesses. They have no concept of trade-offs or the power of the market. In fact, they see the market as a dangerous and scary place which should barely be legal.
One of the main activities of the business section is to warn customers about scary business practices. This goes hand-in-hand with their television coverage in which Bob McKeown waits outside in parking lots for the person in question to be almost in the car, and then start firing machine-gun questions at him as he’s getting in and trying to drive away. The person probably thinks they are under attack by some street person, but Bob McKeown portrays this as proof-positive that he caught them red-handed.
Some of the scary business practices include smaller packages of food, 100% juice (although it is indeed 100% juice, it doesn’t necessarily involve people hand-squeezing oranges directly into the boxes *gasp*), commercials appealing to people’s desire to be safe, commercials making big claims about their products.
Of course, most sane people already know companies go over the top in promoting their products. Nobody literally thinks the Cool Aid Man will burst through your wall whenever you consume his product. No one actually believes using Mr. Clean will bring the Mr. Clean genie himself into your house to clean everything. But CBC is so smug about “exposing” these evil businesses.
John Stossel, who was also a consumer reporter (and a much more interesting one than the people at CBC) and is now a libertarian, said he realized that after years of work that consumer reporting was basically useless. First of all, competition was much more effective in weeding out bad companies than any consumer reporter is. Word of mouth spread much faster than his reports. Good businesses essentially stayed in business and bad ones went bankrupt. I think he needs to talk to CBC.
I would say the CBC’s impact is essentially nil, but their goal is to appear to be Canada’s consumer watchdog, a trusted name people can turn to as a way to create a better society. Yet most of the issues they tackle just show how stupid and useless they are. And there’s always a degree of smugness associated with these reports that they produce. They act so proud that they are exposing evil businesses. But consider this: people voluntarily give money to businesses. If a business provides bad service, it’s not long before they go out of business in favor of competitors. But CBC doesn’t operate on this basis. Instead, we are forced at the end of a gun to fork over our hard-earned money to pay for CBC against our will. If they produce a product we don’t like, what is our recourse? While they literally steal our money, they complain that Tropicana is not hand-squeezed. Very hypocritical.
And what really gets me is they have one single, solitary response to every problem. The solution, according to the CBC, for every possible problem is *drum-roll please* REGULATION! That’s it, that’s all. I mean they could literally have a show where they just list one perceived problem after another and give their one word solution: regulation! So simple. What a great and simple world they live in. Easy problems, easy solutions. Who cares about actual real-world economics, about real trade-off, etc? We just need regulation! Phone bill too high? Regulation! Water not up to some arbitrary standard? Regulation! Dentist charging too much? Regulation! Wow, look at me solving all the world’s problems! I deserve the Nobel Prize! We pay over $1 billion per year for this (that’s how much the CBC costs)?
