Newspapers across the country on Friday reported in large print about federal finance minister Jim Flaherty’s proposal to sell off Canadian assets — possibly including the CN Tower — in order to help balance the federal budget.

Leave aside for a moment the fact, as nearly all economists agree, that avoiding a deficit should not be the top priority in a recessionary economy. Forget that. Still: Flaherty wants to do what? Sell capital assets in order to make up an operating budget shortfall? I believe the technical term for such a strategy among economists and financial planners is “complete lunacy.”

Let us examine why it is a bad idea: if you sell something, you no longer own it. Any revenue it brought in now goes to someone else. And while the money from the sale will help pay the bills this one time, you will still have to find a completely new way to pay those bills next time and you’ll no longer have an asset to sell in order to do it.

It’s equivalent to selling your car to make a mortgage payment: now you have no car, but you still have another mortgage payment coming due next month. And since you sold your car, you now have fewer work options available to make the money you need to pay it. Whattaya gonna do now?

Even worse, Flaherty is suggesting that Krayzee Jim’s Government Yard Sale take place during a real estate crash and a global financial crisis, which ensures that we’d get the lowest possible price for our assets.

So the question of whether he’s floated a good idea now takes a back seat to the apparently more pressing question: is our federal finance minister — the man in charge of managing Canadian citizens’ money — a complete moron? Those tracking his public statements about the city of Toronto and the province of Ontario might be inclined to think so.

However, there is another theory available — that he’s more a weasel than a whack job.
As Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells detailed in a cover story during the federal election campaign, Stephen Harper and his government, including Flaherty, are right-wing ideologues taking an incremental, pragmatic approach to slashing government.

Wells used the two-point GST cut and increase in provincial transfer payments during Harper’s first term to illustrate the point: “This is a massive decentralization of Canadian federalism. By constraining Ottawa’s ability to pay the bills with the GST cut, and ensuring a steady and growing stream of cash from Ottawa to the provincial capitals, Harper has sharply curbed the ambition of his government and of any government that might manage to succeed it. All of this has happened under Canadians' noses, more or less unremarked by the Liberal opposition…”

So now, if you are ideologically opposed to government ownership of capital in the first place, as Flaherty surely is, then you may be just waiting for an excuse to sell things off. And a looming budget deficit may look like an ideal excuse to implement that ideological program, even if it doesn’t make a lick of economic or financial sense.

This suggests that Flaherty may be more scheming and dishonest that simply stupid. Which might make him feel a little better about the whole thing. But either way, it’s still a bad idea.