Category: nannystate

Tax Me Harder!

It’s too bad that the Conservatives continue to remain largely silent on the critical issue of repealing Justin’s capital gains tax hikes. The impact is far from trivial.

Based on conventional assumptions that an increase in the tax-inclusive cost of capital by 10 percent causes the capital stock to fall by 7 percent, I estimate that Canada’s capital stock would fall by $127 billion. Employment would permanently decline by 414,000. To put this in terms of its impact on unemployment, the capital gains tax hike would increase unemployment from 1.5 to 1.9 million Canadian workers as of August 2024. GDP will fall by almost $90 billion and real per capita GDP by 3 percent.

 

Closing The Exits

The Israeli finance ministry has been musing recently about limiting cash transactions and possibly criminalizing the holding of gold and silver. As heavily indebted governments like Israel begin to fear a loss of confidence in their ability to service those debts, they will look at measures to prevent citizens from finding a way not to be their creditor. Historically, this would not be the first time that a government barred the financial exit doors in a monetary system.

And The Police Were Completely Irrelevant As Well

David Henderson- An Opening for Private Liquor Stores in Manitoba

The above is a picture I took last night of people lining up at a Manitoba government liquor store in Winnipeg. For about 2 years now, the government has had a system in place to allow people in the stores one by one. The reason is that a few years ago, there were a number of gang attacks on the liquor stores. People, typically youths, would enter all at once and steal liquor. Some employees were injured.

Bailouts In A Flood

In addition to bailing out the Treasury, it’s likely that the Fed lowered interest rates in order to stem the losses on its own bond portfolio as well. Whichever aspect you focus on, none of it is good news.

The “higher for longer” policy only lasted eighteen months.

The U.S. budget deficit reached $1.897 trillion in the first eleven months of the 2024 fiscal year, and annual interest costs on the public debt topped $1 trillion for the first time….Furthermore, in its own projections, the Treasury expected an increase of $16 trillion in government debt between 2024 and 2034. The Congress Budget Office estimates that the implementation of the Harris economic plan will result in a further $2.25 trillion increase in debt.

Lockdown Hangovers

The economic damage caused by the lockdowns was bad enough and obvious to most, but there’s another side to that travesty that is less talked about.

The lockdown babies are now starting school, and the impact of their extraordinary early days is stark. “There’s a school in Birmingham where more than half the children entering [Reception] were still wearing nappies,” says Paskins. “Before the pandemic there might have been one or two. Now more than half have that developmental delay, and what that means in terms of how children are able to learn and function.”

The other thing that was really bad about Covid and the lockdown was that we were threatened with the idea that if we passed it on to somebody, we’d almost be responsible for their death. It just made life so miserable.”

She adds: “A lot of people have never really quite recovered. I would say it took me at least two years, and even now lots of my friendships are impacted.”

Fly The Expensive Skies

If you think air fares are already high in Canada’s centrally planned airline market, just wait.

The airline has offered to increase the aviators’ pay by 4% annually over three years, plus an upfront 26% pay boost as well as other benefits, according to a source who asked not to be named to discuss confidential details of the agreement.

The 42% compensation increase over the four-year contract is expected to cost the carrier C$1.9 billion.

 

Racial Profiles

After the end of South Africa’s policy of Apartheid, one would have thought that laws sorting people by race would be a thing of the past, right? Well, think again. As the Institute for Race Relations points out, from 1910 to the present 314 racial acts have been passed by their parliament. However, 117 of those acts have been adopted since 1994, and 141 racial acts are operative today.

Almost immediately [after 1994], however, the government began (re)enacting race law and pursuing racial policy. The two most notable instances of this are the 1998 Employment Equity Act and the 2003 Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act. Various other pieces of legislation exist among dozens of charters, plans, regulations, directives, notices, and policies that attempt to regulate aspects of society along racial lines and racialise commerce.

 

The Totalitarian Mindset

If the Green Party ever gets ahold of the levers of government, western civilization will be done like dinner.

“We must stop the spread of anti-human and anti-constitutional content on the internet,” demanded Hofreiter, who serves as the chairman of the European Affairs Committee in the Bundestag. Violations of applicable law must be punished consistently. With regard to social networks, this means that they “will be blocked if necessary,” said the Green politician. This would also include the X platform owned by Elon Musk, which the left views as an imminent threat due to its emphasis on free speech, according to Frankfurter Rundschau.

Average Nonsense

Economist Frank Shostak delves into the perplexing issue of governments attempting to discern an “average” price level for the economy or calculating GDP “growth”. In a nutshell, the whole idea is nuts.

Suppose two transactions were conducted: In the first transaction, one TV set is exchanged for $1,000; in the second transaction, one shirt is exchanged for $40. The price or in the first transaction is $1000/1 TV set. The price in the second transaction is $40/1 shirt. In order to calculate the “average price,” we must add these two ratios together and divide them by two. But $1000/1 TV set cannot be added to $40/1 shirt, implying that it is not possible to establish the “average price.”

The employment of various sophisticated methods to calculate the “average price” cannot bypass the essential issue that it is not possible to establish an average price of various goods and services. Accordingly, various price indices that government statisticians compute are simply arbitrary numbers. If price deflators are meaningless, so is the real GDP statistic.

 

Made-up Numbers

It’s not unreasonable to assume that government statisticians routinely “massage” unemployment numbers in order to allow their political bosses to claim that the economy is in better shape than it actually is. Economist Ryan McMaken delves into the mechanics of this smoke and mirrors game.

The establishment survey report shows that total jobs—a total that includes both part-time and full-time jobs—increased, month over month, in August by 142,000. The establishment survey measures only total jobs, however, and does not measure the number of employed persons. That means that even when job growth comes mostly from people working multiple part-time jobs, the establishment survey shows increases while the total number of employed persons does not. In fact, total employed persons can fall while total jobs increases. For instance, the total number of employed persons has fallen by 66,000 since August of 2023. This is in contrast to a gain of 2.3 million “jobs” in the establishment survey over the same period.

Broken Landing Gear

Economist Frank Shostak offers these insights as to how an economy comes to be saddled with massive malinvestments (EV plants come to mind) which must eventually be liquidated in a painful recession.

Whenever a central bank tampers with financial markets and manipulates the market interest rates this falsifies individuals’ “instructions” to businesses. As a result, businesses invest in the wrong infrastructure (i.e., not in line with individuals’ priorities). This ultimately undermines the process of wealth generation.

For instance, the central bank lowers the market interest rates while individuals have not lowered their time preferences. This means that people have not increased the supply of real savings. Businesses, however, attempt to increase investments in response to the central bank artificially lowering the interest rates. This will fail since there are not enough real savings to fund the buildup of the capital structure at that time.

Wrongthink

I can think of a couple of issues besides plate tectonics where scientists have not lived up to the ideals mentioned. Can you?

One aspect of science, however, is a good model for our behavior, especially in times like these, when so many people seem to be sure that they are right and their opponents are wrong. It is the ability to say, “Wait—hold on. I might have been wrong.”

Not all scientists live up to this ideal, of course. But history offers admirable examples of scientists admitting they were wrong and changing their views in the face of new evidence and arguments. My favorite comes from the history of plate tectonics.

Steal It Back!

With all the talk of “stolen land” flying about these days, we need to keep in mind the ideas that gave rise to this non-concept.

…a group of first-year university students at the University of Connecticut were welcomed to their campus via a series of online ‘events’. At one event, students were directed to download an app for their phones. The app allowed students to input their home address, and it would piously inform them from which group of Native Americans their home had been ‘stolen’.

So what can be the harm in acknowledging every morning that Canadians live on stolen First Nations land? The problem is this: if you begin the day by acknowledging that your country, your society, and people of your ancestry are particularly egregious, this is a sure route to self-doubt, impotence and societal failure.

The New Economy

It’s a basic principle of economics that price controls negatively affect supply. But apparently that did not occur to the BC government when they decided to clamp down on Airbnb entrepreneurs. That, combined with the tapped out marginal consumer saying no to outrageous hotel and restaurant prices, is having some unpleasant effects.

Kelowna Boat Rentals has been booked solid in past years from July through August, but this year is different.

“Business has definitely been a little down this year. I think it’s mostly because of that Airbnb ban. That seems to be it. It’s kind of a ghost town down here compared to usual,” said Tom Entwistle, manager at Kelowna Boat Rentals.

“Last year was slightly slower, but we were still pretty much fully booked every day, and then this year we are at about 70 per cent capacity during the weekdays,” said Entwistle.

Dispatches from the Maple Gulag Truck Stop

 

This will be the first in a multi-part series on what has happened with the Coutts trial, and the many, many questions which flow from it. As we all know, the mainstream media are not going to ask these questions, nor tell you the truth about what went on, because that is not their job, and the Canadian government is going to do everything they can to pretend like the last four years didn’t happen, and absolve themselves of any responsibility.
WIth what’s going on in the UK, and the looming possibility of Bill C-63 passing in Canada, getting to the bottom of the conspiracy against the Coutts men is of grave import to rights Canadians hold dear, such as the right to freedom of expression, and to protest. –  Gord Magill

Part 1

Most Recent Newsweek Article

 

Honoring Dictators

Given the disastrous outcomes of Covid pandemic policy and the massive backlash that it created, one would think that governments would go out of their way to avoid giving too much notice to those responsible for such fiascos, but apparently the government of Manitoba thinks otherwise.

Manitoba’s chief public health officer, Dr. Brent Roussin is a physician, law school graduate, and familiar face to Manitobans as the province’s top public health authority and spokesperson during daily COVID-19 pandemic news conferences. A specialist in public health and preventive medicine, Dr. Roussin also brings an understanding of administrative law that was particularly helpful during the province’s COVID-19 response.

Functionaries like Roussin basically assumed the role of provincial dictator and divided their fiefdoms between “essential” and “non-essential” businesses, bankrupting many in the process. They also implemented such inanities such as restaurant masking rules and, in Manitoba, the bizarre measure that one could only golf with members of one’s household. Why do some insist on honoring such fools?

It’s Finally Over!

Global- British Columbia lifts COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health-care workers

B.C. provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry has ended the COVID-19 public health emergency in British Columbia and ended the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in health-care settings.

However, the province is making it mandatory for health-care workers to disclose their immunization status, including COVID-19, influenza and measles vaccines.

Collecting these records will allow health-care administrators to make staffing decisions in the event of an exposure, outbreak, or future pandemic.

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