Markets, Freedom, and Truth
April 21, 2020 Leave a comment
The business owner was determined to remain open during the coronavirus lockdowns, even switching to a curbside model to continue serving customers. But her employees discovered that “the best possible pay of their lives they could possibly get, [is] to be unemployed” right now.
— Continue reading at DISRN —
February 6, 2018 Leave a comment
The School for Public Policy published a useful review of the 2018-2019 equalization payments.
Let’s take a look.
Looks pretty typical in a lot of ways. West (+Newfoundland) pays East.
Also, while Quebec gets a lot of flak for getting the biggest payment, they are far from the biggest recipient on a per capita basis.
But wait a second, didn’t Ontario just become a “have” province? Why are they getting a big cheque?
And that leads to the most interesting part of this year’s equalization:
This brings us to Ontario. The $963 million it will receive in equalization is entirely composed of adjustment payments. Absent these payments, the total equalization program would cost $17.2 billion and Ontario would receive nothing. But at $70 per person for receiving provinces, the adjustment payments add $1.76 billion, which brings the total cost of the program to the $18.96 billion dollars paid in 2018/19.
A Costly Quirk?
Why should adjustment payments be made at all? And why should they be paid to Ontario, a “have” province prior to this stage of the formula? The limit was put in place by the previous government in 2009 to keep costs under control and limit uncertainty. But why does it also act as a floor? And… must it? The Fiscal-Arrangements Act is somewhat ambiguous on this point.
Nope, this doesn’t appear to be a redistributive scam at all. It’s not like Canada already has the federal health and social transfers, or that the federal government already spends money in provinces at different rates.
July 21, 2016 Leave a comment
Without public schools forcing students to read excruciatingly awful novels like The Stone Angel on a massive scale, Canadian authors like Margaret Atwood would probably sell far fewer books.
We should remember this when we read stories about Margaret Atwood’s approval of a new Ontario government policy that will force public school students to read even more boring books by Canadian authors.
Assuming no more than self-interest, artists, like most people, will tend to welcome subsidies that benefit themselves. It’s the model of corporate welfare applied to the artistic world. When they say it will “strengthen arts and culture,” remember there is no reason to believe that “good” arts and culture will prevail as the new learning material for children. Likewise in the corporate welfare scenario, subsidies to, say, the auto industry will be claimed to “strengthen the economy and domestic industry” even though economics tells us the opposite is true.
To the extent it survives on government money, art is a welfare program. The entire process of deciding what novels should be studied in public schools is completely political and thus likely to produce bad outcomes. Sometimes you get lucky and a real treasure comes out of the system, but the results tend to be bad. By relying on the government to “strengthen arts and culture”, you can be assured the arts and culture will be get worse while kids consider drinking bleach to avoid being forced to read books like The Stone Angel.
December 1, 2015 Leave a comment
It was bad enough when Harper was doing this, but Trudeau will double it. Terrible.
Are we to be spared nothing when it comes to the lies of climate change?
July 31, 2013 1 Comment
Detroit has declared bankruptcy. The images and descriptions of the city evoke a wretched ghetto. Meanwhile, if you cross the border to Windsor, Ontario you find a relatively nice place.
Both cities have economies heavily invested in automobile manufacturing. Both cities also have various welfare systems available. They are both rife with municipal regulations. Canadian and American cultures are fairly similar.
So what’s the big difference?
Detroit’s bankruptcy filing lists about $18-20 billion worth of debt. Even if you low-ball it, this amounts to debt of about $26,000 for everyone in Detroit. This is a city where the average per capita income is a pathetic $14,700 per year.
Windsor’s debt is around $115 million. They have about a third of Detroit’s population. Windsor’s debt per capita is $545 only.
Debt is not bad. The key is to use the debt for something productive. Since all government spending is inherently wasteful, cities should spend as little as possible and minimize their debts. Otherwise they will become Detroit.
June 22, 2013 Leave a comment
The Premier Redford and Prime Minister Harper have pledged “full support” to victims of the devastating Alberta floods.
What they do not mention is that both Alberta and Ottawa are broke. There is no special fund for disaster relief. They can only provide help by taking more of other people’s money — either through taxation or borrowing. They will probably borrow money from countries like China.
At a time like this, giving money to corrupt foreign governments seems even worse than it does normally.
Last year, Canada gave almost $6 billion away in foreign aid (MS Excel). That might seem small, but it is a very significant amount of money for Canada’s small population. That money would definitely be useful to help Canadians during times of disaster.
The biggest recipient of our foreign aid was Ethiopia — an American puppet state that takes money from the West to fight brutal wars against the Somalis. Another big recipient of Canadian aid is Afghanistan — where we help NATO inflict man-made disasters with missiles, then we pay up to rebuild what we destroyed.
Southern Alberta is underwater, thousands are homeless, and our governments have no money. But aren’t you glad the Canadian governments gives millions to evil regimes in Jordan, Burma, and North Korea?
May 28, 2013 1 Comment
Sweden is regarded by many as the ideal balance between capitalism and socialism.
A lot of people genuinely believe it is a “Workers’ Paradise.” They worship the “Nordic model” as something all Western democracies should emulate.
Recent events show that the model of a lavish welfare statism cannot erase deeper economic and cultural divisions. Right now, Sweden is seeing the worst riots in years as immigrant youths trash everything in sight, and clash with mobs of immigrant-haters. Cars are torched. Rocks are thrown at police and firefighters. Schools have been set ablaze.
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Sweden has experienced various riots in the last few years. Usually these cool off after a day.
The latest riots have gone on for a week. The situation evokes memories of the 2005 Paris riots, or the 2011 London riots.
But why should anyone want to riot in Sweden? Isn’t everything perfect?
The disturbances erupted in Husby last weekend, after police shot dead an elderly man brandishing a machete inside his house. Angered at what they saw as police heavyhandedness, youths torched cars and buildings and stoned police and firefighters. Police were then forced to draft in extra manpower from outside Stockholm as the trouble spread to other immigrant-dominated suburbs of the capital and towns such as Orebro in central Sweden, where 25 masked youths set fire to a school on Friday night.
According to one rioter:
“In the beginning it was just a bit of fun,” said one young man in his early 20s who did not wish to be named. He was one of a Husby group of 30-40 youths that battled with police.
“But then when I saw the police charging through here with batons, pushing women and children out of the way and swinging their batons, I got so damned angry.”
The Swedes just can’t understand why this is happening.
“We have tried harder than any other European country to integrate, spending billions on a welfare system that is designed to help jobless immigrants and guarantee them a good quality of life,” said Marc Abramsson, leader of the National Democrats Party. “Yet we have areas where there are ethnic groups that just don’t identify with Swedish society. They see the police and even the fire brigade as part of the state, and they attack them. We have tried everything, anything, to improve things, but it hasn’t worked. It’s not about racism, it’s just that multi-culturalism doesn’t recognise how humans actually function.”
It’s fair to wonder, if this can happen in Sweden, why not everywhere?
(Maybe not Canada. Instead, we riot over god damn hockey games.)
Multiculturalism has never worked anywhere, ever, in all of human history. It’s not because different groups of people can’t get along. Trade and peace is natural, even between people of different religion, race, culture, or ethnicity. The blame instead rests on the institution of the state itself.
Rather than erase conflict between different groups, as many like to believe, welfare statism aggravates the conflict between them. This happens because the state encourages not cooperation and respect between people, but rather dependence on its ability to transfer property from one group to another. This always breeds resentment between people who are more or less on the dole than other people.
The state cannot create harmony between people. It creates only discord.
— Read more at The Telegraph and Yahoo News —
May 1, 2013 1 Comment
William Plotnikov. Remember him? He was a Russian-Canadian boxer from Toronto who converted to Islam, then went to fight with Islamic militias against the Russians. He was killed by security forces in Dagestan last year.
It appears that he may have been acquainted with Boston Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was also an amateur boxer. Plotnikov gave Tsarnaev’s name to Russian agents when he was interrogated in 2010. They had communicated online, and it it highly plausible that the two had met at some point, perhaps when Tsarnaev had attended a boxing event in Toronto (where his aunt also lived).
It has been reported that Tsarnaev traveled overseas to fight in Dagestan, but he fled back to the US immediately after Plotnikov’s death. Did Tsarnaev lose his nerve to be a front-line Jihadist after his buddy had been killed?
Even more scandalous is the possibility that Plotnikov and Tsarnaev may have received support and training from Georgian authorities. This is being investigated in Georgia now. The previous Georgian government, which had fought a war with Russia in 2008, was very interested in contesting Russian influence in Dagestan.
Justin Raimondo says: “The Georgian connection points to a classic case of ‘blowback.’ A covert operation conducted against the Russian government, originally, that got out of hand – and came back to bite the hand that fed it.” No joke. The Tsarnaev family received $100,000 in government welfare.
— Read more about this at The Telegraph, Time, Daily Mail, and Izvestia —
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