Last week the entire world celebrated the tenth anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin wall. The wall, of course, wasn't the only thing to fall ten years ago - the ideology it symbolized, Marxism, was also razed to the ground. After seventy plus years of political subjugation and economic deprivation, millions of people were freed from the terror of communism.

Yet Marxist thought lives on. Today they call it "political economy" and you can find it on every university campus in Canada. At the University of Alberta the "political economists" work for an organization called the Parkland Institute.

Apparently, the folks at the Institute missed the anniversary celebrations - they were too busy working on a proposal to tax the life out of Alberta's resource-based economy. According to the Institute, Albertans have been short-changed by low oil and gas royalties ever since premier Klein came to power. The Institute claims that "had the Klein administration continued to collect energy rents at the Lougheed rate, an additional $3.78 billion per annum would have accrued in provincial coffers between 1992 and 1997." It's time, they say, to raise taxes on the oil companies.

Forget the fact that these companies already contribute 14.3% of all the province's revenues through resource royalties. Forget the fact that they contribute billions more through corporate taxes and the personal income taxes paid by their employees. And forget the fact that it is much more expensive to produce a barrel of oil today than it was in the Lougheed era. Let's soak them for more cash so we can hand that money over to bureaucrats and "political economists" who know better than anyone else how to spend our tax dollars.

And what would happen if we did raise taxes Higher resource royalties would bring a number of negative consequences. Let's start with higher prices at the pump. Oil companies aren't going to eat a tax increase - they'll pass that cost on to the consumer.

A tax increase would also translate into lower wages for everyone employed in the oil patch and related service industries. When you take more money from a business for taxes you leave less money in the pockets of its employees.

You also leave less money for shareholders. But who cares about them They're just a bunch of greedy fat cats exploiting the workers, right Wrong. These days the workers are also the shareholders. Just about anyone who owns a Canadian mutual fund is a shareholder in one or more of the oil companies that do business in Alberta. A hike in royalty rates would result in a drop in the value of grandma's RRIF, subsequently reducing her monthly pension. Is that what the Parkland Institute wants

Raising rates would not necessarily produce more revenue either. High taxes tend to dampen investment and production. The reason the current royalty regime was put in place was to spur economic growth - and guess what -- it's working. The revenues that will accrue to the provincial treasury through oils sands development will be the direct result of a competitive royalty regime.

This is not the Lougheed era. This is not 1979. Marx is dead. And with good reason.

Higher taxes will serve no one except perhaps the state-funded academics that propose them. We should do more than simply celebrate the collapse of "the wall", we should learn from it.