Reply #107: one could think of that, I guess [View All]

[iverglas]

Think of what all needs could be served by the government owning the television and film industry.

It's just that some people actually see a difference between a natural resource and a manufactured product / generated service.

I gotta admit that I'm not familiar with how things are done down there. Up here, provincial governments collect royalties on extracted resources. E.g.:

http://www.energy.gov.ab.ca/842.asp

Some say not enough:
http://www.vueweekly.com/articles/default.aspx?i=4353

I gather than happens down there too.

http://txtell.lib.utexas.edu/stories/p0002-full.html
-- where the oil-for-schools idea comes from, I guess.



Here's an interesting Texas fellow I ran across in my googling of this stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Yarborough

Historically, Texas had been a one-party state. Democrats would win every statewide office, nearly all of the congressional delegation, and large majorities in the state legislature. Thus, general elections were formalities, and the real battles took place in the Democratic primaries between the conservative wing (pre-presidency Lyndon Baines Johnson, Governor Allan Shivers, John Connally), and the liberal wing (with which Yarborough identified), which was more in line with the national party.

... In office, Ralph Yarborough was a very different kind of Southern senator. He refused to sign the Southern Manifesto opposing integration and supported national Democratic goals of more funding for health care, education, and the environment. Himself a veteran, he worked to expand the GI Bill of Rights to cold war veterans.

... In 1964, Yarborough again won the primary without a runoff and went on to general election victory with 56.2 percent in LBJ's 1964 Democratic landslide. His Republican opponent was future president George H.W. Bush who attacked Yarborough as a left-wing demagogue and for his vote in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yarborough denounced Bush as an extremist to the right of that year's GOP nominee for president Barry M. Goldwater and as a rich easterner and a carpetbagger trying to buy a Senate seat. It has since been learned that then Governor Connally was covertly aiding Bush instead of party nominee Yarborough against President Johnson's wishes by teaching voters how to vote split ticket.

Although Yarborough supported Johnson's domestic agenda, he went public with his criticism of Johnson's foreign policy and the Vietnam War after Johnson announced his retirement. Yarborough supported Robert F. Kennedy until his assassination, then supported Eugene McCarthy until his loss in Chicago, and finally backed Hubert Humphrey for President in the pivotal campaign of 1968. In 1969, Senator Yarborough became chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare.

... He died in 1996 in Austin, and was buried in the Texas State Cemetery (the Arlington of Texas). Ralph Yarborough left a legacy in the modernization of the state of Texas and achieved political power at a peak of Texas's national power during the Johnson years. Yarborough was combative with the dominant industries of oil and gas, always pushing for petroleum's fair share of the public burden.

Legacy

Yarborough also was one of the last of the New Deal Democrats and liberals in a conservative southern state. The window of opportunity for a liberal in Texas to reach such a high office was narrow, between the Great Depression and the Great Society. Yarborough represented this brief political moment, both preceded and followed by conservatives (like Phil Gramm) and reactionaries (like "Pappy" O'Daniel). Ralph Yarborough is remembered as the acknowledged "patron saint of Texas liberals." Yarborough easily makes the list of greatest conservationists from Texas with his success at making into protected parkland Padre Island, the Guadalupe Mountains, and the Big Thicket (the last one after he left the Senate). Supporters and former aides that rose to prominence include Jim Hightower, Ann Richards, and Garry Mauro.

Ah, the good old days, when there were people in public life in the US who actually worked in the public interest, and a public composed of people who didn't always put their own interests above the public's.