Quotulatiousness

December 10, 2025

Murmurs of dissent from within Canada’s supply management cartel

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Food, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Juno News, Sylvain Charlebois shares a sign of internal dissent inside the supply management system that prioritizes protecting producers at the cost of significantly higher prices and reduced choice for Canadian consumers — not to mention getting Trump’s attention (and anger) for shutting out American competitors:

Every once in a while, someone inside a tightly protected system decides to say the quiet part out loud. That is what Joel Fox, a dairy farmer from the Trenton, Ontario area, did recently in the Ontario Farmer newspaper. In a candid open letter, Fox questioned why established dairy farmers like himself continue to receive increasingly large government payouts — even though the sector is not shrinking, but expanding. His piece, titled “We continue to privatize gains, socialize losses“, did not come from an economist or a critic of supply management. It came from someone who benefits from it. And yet his message was unmistakable: the numbers no longer add up.

Fox’s letter marks something we have not seen in years — a rare moment of internal dissent from a system that usually speaks with one voice. It is the first meaningful crack since the viral milk-dumping video by Ontario dairy farmer Jerry Huigen, who filmed himself being forced to dump thousands of litres of perfectly good milk because of quota rules. Huigen’s video exposed contradictions inside supply management, but the system quickly closed ranks. Until now. Fox has reopened a conversation that has been dormant for far too long.

In his letter, Fox admitted he would cash his latest $14,000 Dairy Direct Payment Program (DDPP) cheque, despite believing the program wastes taxpayer money. The DDPP was created to offset supposed losses from trade agreements like CETA, CPTPP, and CUSMA. These deals were expected to reduce Canada’s dairy market. But those “losses” are theoretical — based on models and assumptions about future erosion in market share. Meanwhile, domestic dairy demand has strengthened.

Which raises the obvious question: why are we compensating dairy farmers for producing less when they are, in fact, producing more?

This month, dairy farmers received another 1% quota increase, on top of several increases totalling 4% to 5% in recent years. Quota — the right to produce milk — only increases when more supply is needed. If trade deals had truly devastated the sector, quota would be falling, not rising. Instead, Canada’s population has grown by nearly six million since 2015, processors have expanded, and consumption remains stable. The market is expanding.

Understanding what quota is makes the contradiction clearer. Quota is a government-created financial asset worth $24,000 to $27,000 per kilogram of butterfat. A mid-sized dairy farm may hold $2.5 million in quota. Over the past few years, cumulative quota increases of 5% or more have automatically added $120,000 to $135,000 to the value of a typical farm’s quota — entirely free. Larger farms see even greater windfalls. Across the entire dairy system, these increases represent hundreds of millions of dollars in newly created quota value, likely exceeding $500 million in added wealth — generated not through innovation or productivity, but by regulatory decision.

December 9, 2025

The age of Trump – “America has ‘walked away’ from its allies”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney talks about last month’s annual Halifax International Security Forum, where the biggest change from previous events was the official absence of US government representation:

Late last month, attending the Halifax International Security Forum, I was having the damndest feeling. Can you have déja vu for something that you only experienced via fiction? Because it was kind of like that.

The fiction in question was a novel by an Australian, published during the Second Iraq War. Anti-American sentiment was running rampant all over the world. The premise of the novel is out there in the realm of sci-fi — America disappears. Specifically, Americans disappear — some mysterious wave of energy scours most of North America clean of life. Virtually all of the U.S. is wiped out; most of Canada and Mexico, too. Somewhat to the surprise of the anti-Americans, this does not result in an improvement in life on Planet Earth.

Standing around at the forum, eating the delicious snacks and drinking the good coffee and chatting with friends old and new, that was what I kept thinking about. Where are the Americans? And what the hell are we going to do without them?

And, in case you’re wondering what’s up with that headline, here’s another question — what will we do if they one day try and come back?

The forum is an annual gathering of senior military officers, defence and intelligence officials from across the free world, and representatives from the media, think tanks, large companies and civil society organizations whose work relates to defence and security issues or in some way seeks to promote and preserve a healthy democratic world. Funded by NATO, the Canadian government and private-sector sponsors, the event is a major part of Canada’s “soft power” offering to our allies — we host the big party and show everybody a good time. The actual schedule is split between on-the-record panel talks or presentations, off-the-record sessions, and informal time for mingling and schmoozing. I am grateful to have been invited to participate again this year.

Especially this year. I’ve been going to the forum for years, and the event always had a strongly American flavour.

Not anymore! Yankee went home.

Like, literally. He was ordered to go home, or stay there. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to avoid a series of high-profile annual defence summits. That includes Halifax, and others in places like Munich and Singapore, and even inside the United States itself. The reason, according to the Pentagon’s press apparatus, was that, and I swear to God this is the actual quote, such events promote “the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country and hatred for the president of the United States”.

Oh. Well, then.

That’s what made the forum so fascinating this year. As I told my colleague Jen Gerson while I was in Halifax, the entire event felt a little bit like the first Thanksgiving after a divorce. It’s great to see everyone, but there’re some notable absences, is the thing.

Auditing where the money goes, First Nations edition

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t think many Canadians would argue with the government providing funding to First Nations groups in remote areas so they have access to services and amenities that most of us take for granted. But the government has been giving so much money for so long with very little evidence that the money is actually making a difference. Surely, a regular system of audits would show what happens to the money after the feds cut a cheque and why conditions in First Nations communities aren’t improving? Well, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @The Reclamare shares a thread detailing some of the findings of a recent audit of a First Nations NGO and it’s kind of disturbing:

Where our taxes go, First Nations Edition

KPMG audited the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) representing 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan

They analyzed spending between April 2019 and March 2024

Hang on🧵

#1 – COVID Funding

$26 million was audited
KPMG found $23.5 million was questionable
** an 89% failure rate**

– no records
– missing contracts
– missing invoices

# 2 – Travel expenditures

$800K of travel spending was audited
$316K was flagged by auditors, a 39% failure rate

Half the travel bookings couldn’t be justified, either policy violations or they couldn’t explain the purpose. And one Vice Chief was billing personal trips

# 3 – Executive Pay Raises during Covid

On November 5, 2020, a briefing note went to FSIN’s Treasury Board recommending:

$60,000 pay raise for the Chief
$40,000 pay raise for each Vice Chief

Retroactive 8 months prior

(more…)

December 8, 2025

If Britain’s political leadership were trying to destroy the country, what would they have done differently?

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

My Canadian readers — and possibly the occasional Aussie or Kiwi — can read Spaceman Spiff‘s essay and feel it applies almost 100% to our respective nations as well:

Image from Postcards from the Abyss

Britain is a disaster. The country seems to be in terminal decline.

Not only do we see a lack of ability to turn things around we witness leaders and prominent decision makers evidently clueless about normal life and the hardships many now face.

The political and media classes best reflect this phenomenon. Their views are insular, fictional and at odds with reality. They promote unorthodox ideas that are widely derided yet their enthusiasm is evident as are their hostile responses to being challenged.

Minor comments about immigration are treated as precursors to genocide. Criticism of a biased media unwilling to report events is dismissed as conspiracy. No discussion of climate policy and its unaffordable costs is tolerated. Deviation from the establishment view means excommunication and social exile.

Those in leadership positions drive Britain’s descent into authoritarian governance. Attempts to discuss changes to society leads to extreme overreactions, including jailing noticers, something they now boast about.

Britain has become a madhouse. Our leaders are unable to think like normal people. None of them are facing reality. They seem crazy.

Or, rather, they seem neurotic.

Neurosis is everywhere

Britain has degenerated into a technocratic regime that views the public as its enemy. Normal people disgust the country’s leaders and it shows. They no longer hide their contempt.

But there is a palpable sense of fear emanating from the powerful. Their reactions to normal events paint a troubling picture of who is leading the country, particularly the political and media classes.

If the British establishment were a person we would think them mentally unstable. The qualities we see most are those of a neurotic individual, a type that is well understood.

Here are some features visible in Britain’s ruling class.

Chronic anxiety and worry

A key attribute of neurosis is persistent fear or worry. Rumination is commonplace, circling around and around the same problems. There is also a tendency to overreact, with the response disproportionate to the issue at hand.

The current British regime is wracked with anxiety and worry. This defines them. They are vocal about their concerns.

We are reminded of an endless series of horrors we must attend to; systemic racism, lack of diversity, an imperial past and our cultural dominance along with our impact on the world.

One simple example illustrates the degree to which minds can become distorted by excessive worry.

James Watt perfected the steam engine in 1769 which kickstarted in the industrial revolution, changing the world forever. This would ultimately elevate most nations on earth and led eventually to the establishment of cheap abundant energy for almost everyone.

Until recently these events were viewed as an epoch-defining moment of engineering brilliance. Now this has been recast as a dark stain on Britain’s place in the world, with climate zealots keen to blame the British for all pollution caused by industrialization.

Instead of pride we now see embarrassment and even anxiety about the “damage” Britain has done to the world because it ushered in an era of cheap widespread energy for everyone.

Any rational person would understand this extreme view to be a distortion of reality and excessively negative, yet it permeates everything. Those who rule Britain are ashamed of our past. They worry about it. Only they do this, normal people are proud of our history.

[…]

Welcome to the madhouse

A system of governance driven by neurotics takes on their characteristics. Britain has become a neurotic bureaucracy; a neurocracy.

Neurotics overthink and live inside their heads. They lack the calm, detached strength needed to govern sensibly. Power structures inevitably take on these qualities.

The British government has become paranoid. Digital IDs, internet regulation, censorship. They jail normal people for social media posts. Dissenting views are increasingly punished with custodial sentences.

These are not the actions of the mentally strong. This is an embattled minority fighting reality and becoming desperate.

A gulf is opening between the rulers and the ruled. Increasingly no common ground is even conceivable as the fictions needed to maintain narratives grow. They become overtly false but are needed to feed the neurosis.

One of the things I like about the social media site formerly known as Twitter is how quickly authoritarian bullshit like this can get called out:

Update, 9 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

“Canadian culture” apparently doesn’t include books anymore

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte considers what the omission of financial goodies for the Canadian publishing industry in the latest federal budget (unlike the CBC, music, film and TV subsidies) says about the government’s view of what “Canadian culture” actually is:

You might have noticed that last month’s federal budget introduced a whack of new cultural spending. The CBC got another $150 million, the Canada Music Fund took $48 million, film and television raked in over $300 million. Books? Nothing.

The budget’s rationales for this new spending are to foster a sense of cultural identity and belonging in Canada, to sustain an informed citizenship, and to protect vulnerable industries. The unwritten context is the recent American assault on Canada’s independence. You would think there would be room for books in this sort of budget. Is there anything more foundational to Canadian identity and an informed citizenry than books by Canadians and about Canada?

Yet somehow our political leadership overlooked the literary sector. It’s odd. The first thing our politicians do when they want to explain or advance their own careers is knock on a publisher’s door.

Granted, it’s usually the door of an American publisher, because the net result of our government’s efforts to nurture the publishing sector in Canada over the last several decade has been to drive Canadian-published books from more than 20 percent of those sold in Canada to less than 5 percent. We have the weakest domestic publishing industry in the developed world. Our prime ministers think nothing of taking their books to New York-based Penguin Random House or Simon & Schuster. Most of our most prominent fiction writers give all their North American rights to US publishers instead of separating out Canadian rights and leaving them with a Canadian publisher. It’s a travesty.

I have a solution. In fact, I have many solutions. I have a whole book of solutions coming in January from Canadian public policy guru Richard Stursberg. It looks like this:

Richard’s solutions are not the same as my solutions. I like his, too. I’m not picky. I’m going to flood the zone with solutions and hope people in Ottawa wake up to the fact that we have a problem. The solutions will almost all involve more public support of the industry, not because I’m keen on public support of the industry, but because we have ample proof that the alternative to more public support is no domestic book publishing industry. Also, if you’ve been following us here (see SHuSH 232, The Wasteland), you know this is a “you broke it, you own it” moment for our federal government.

So here’s my solution de jour. Given that books are fundamental to any notion of Canadian identity, given that our domestic publishing sector is pathetically weak, given that any self-respecting country needs to be able to publish its own stories rather than rely on the branch plants of an increasingly difficult neighbour to do it for us, we arrange the following.

We massively expand Canada’s public lending right program (PLR). At present, the ridiculously underfunded PLR pays out about $15 million a year to some 20,000 authors whose books are circulated in Canada’s public libraries. The distributions are based on a complicated formula that mostly notices how many libraries hold the author’s book. It’s capped at $4,500 an author, and most receive only a few hundred dollars annually.

We expand the PLR’s spending envelope by a factor of ten: $150 million. Does that sound like a lot of money? It’s not. It comes to about $3.75 per capita. That’s about a tenth of what we spend annually on the CBC, which employs roughly the same number of people as book publishing. It’s about a tenth of what we spend in direct funding and tax credits on film & television. It’s less than half what we’re spending on newspaper and magazine subsidies. A small price to rebuild a decimated publishing sector.

I think you could argue that the dollar amount should be much higher. As a society, we believe that books are more important than the products of other media. The governments don’t give you free cable or a free opera pass or a free spotify subscription: they give you free books through public libraries, because books are that important to the well-being of our citizenry. We’re so good at promoting the value of our public libraries that four out of every five books read in Canada are borrowed rather than bought. If books are that important, $150 million is a bargain.

QotD: Austerity versus “austerity”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Too great attention to the use of language is a distraction from the essential and easily becomes mere pedantry; but to pay too little is to risk being deceived or manipulated by those who use language wrongly. Words, Aristotle said, should not bear more precision than possible; but neither should they bear less than possible.

Words have connotations as well as denotations, and one way of insinuating an untruth into someone’s mind is to disconnect the two, so that the denotation and the connotation are at variance and even opposite. An excellent example of this is in the use of the word austerity as applied to certain government economic policies. Frequently one reads, for example, that the difficulties of countries such as Britain and France in the matter of responding to the Covid-19 epidemic were caused by previous government austerity, that is to say, failure to spend more. But irrespective of whether, had the governments spent more (and France already devotes a greater proportion of its GDP to healthcare than the great majority of countries at the same economic level), the epidemic would have been more easily mastered, their policies in restricting their expenditure cannot be called austerity, because they still spent more than their income: as, in fact, they had done almost continually for forty years.

Supposing I were to say, “This year I’m going in for austerity. Last year I spent ten per cent more than my income, but this year I am going to spend only five per cent more,” you would think I were uttering a sub-Wildean paradox. But if I were to say only, “This year I’m going in for austerity,” you would think I were going to wear a hair shirt and subsist on locusts and honey. To say that the British and French governments have exercised austerity is to mean the first and imply the second, which is clearly dishonest: though we should note that the proper term, reduction of the deficit, is neutral as to whether it is economically wise or unwise. After all, I can borrow equally to start a business or drink champagne for breakfast.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Controlling Thought”, New English Review, 2020-06-09.

Update, 9 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 6, 2025

Canada – a subsidiary of the Brookfield Corporation

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Melanie in Saskatchewan reminds us that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s interests seem to align far more with those of the Brookfield Corporation than with those of ordinary Canadians:

Canadians are tired of being treated like an afterthought. Eight months ago, Mark Carney parachuted into the safe Liberal seat of Nepean, shoved aside a long-serving MP, and promised voters he would be their voice in Ottawa. Today, there is still no constituency office open in the riding. Residents who need help with immigration files, CRA problems, or passports are told to send an email and wait, sometimes for several weeks. That betrayal starts at home, and Nepean is living proof that Carney’s priorities lie somewhere else entirely.

That “somewhere else” has a name: Brookfield Asset Management.

A $500-million federal “green steel” subsidy was rushed through cabinet for Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie. Nothing wrong with helping steelworkers, except the electricity for the project comes almost exclusively from wind farms owned by Brookfield Renewable Partners. Mark Carney still holds roughly $6 million in unexercised Brookfield stock options that vest based on the company’s renewable-energy profits. In other words, every tax dollar sent to Algoma flows through to the bottom-line gains that Carney himself pockets.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer has already flagged the transaction as one of several in Carney’s $78-billion deficit budget that rely on “creative accounting” to hide the true cost.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s on the public record in Carney’s own ethics disclosure filed with the Conflict of Interest Commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein. The same disclosure that conveniently claims his former advisory role was “exempt” from stricter rules, rules that apply to every other cabinet minister.

While Canadians wait 33 hours in emergency rooms, watch their real wages shrink, and see layoff notices pile up at Stellantis, CAMI, and Algoma itself, the Prime Minister’s old firm is doing just fine. Brookfield’s stock is up 18 per cent since the subsidy was announced. Coincidence?

Hardly.

The hypocrisy runs deeper than one subsidy. Carney spent years on the world stage lecturing banks and governments about “climate risk and the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels”. Yet the same Alberta energy memorandum that triggered Steven Guilbeault’s resignation quietly allows new pipelines and extends oil recovery through carbon-capture tax credits, credits that, once again, flow disproportionately to companies in which Brookfield has major stakes.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May says Carney personally assured her those provisions would never see the light of day. Nine Liberal MPs are now telling reporters, off the record, that they feel betrayed by the same broken promise.

December 4, 2025

The Swiss vote overwhelmingly against a new wealth tax

Filed under: Europe, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As the California government wants to impose a new wealth tax, it’s worth checking how similar schemes are viewed in other jurisdictions. The Swiss voters were given an opportunity to scalp their very richest citizens and permanent residents with a proposed wealth tax, but it went down with 78% voting against it:

“Switzerland on Sunday overwhelmingly rejected a proposed 50% tax on inherited fortunes of 50 million Swiss francs ($62 million) or more, with 78% of votes against the plan, an outcome that even exceeded the two-thirds opposition indicated in polls,” Reuters reported this week.

All Swiss cantons already tax assessed gross worldwide assets, minus debts and with exceptions, making it one of the few countries in the world to retain a wealth tax. But competition among cantons keeps the tax burden relatively low and, as the Tax Foundation notes, “the Swiss wealth tax acts as a substitute for a capital gains tax and an estate tax, which are common in other countries”. The referendum would have imposed an additional and very steep national tax.

This was actually the second recent failed attempt to impose a national wealth tax on inheritances. Seventy-one percent of Swiss voters rejected a 2015 proposal for a 20 percent tax on estates and gifts of over 2 million francs. The revenues would have been earmarked for old-age pensions.

‘Inequality in Opulence is Better than Equality in Poverty’

The 2025 tax scheme openly played to envy. It was targeted at combating “inequality” by seizing half the assets of the rich and allocating proceeds to offset the climate damage they allegedly cause.

Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter opposed the proposal, warning that “many wealthy people would simply emigrate to avoid the tax and keep their wealth”. She also pointed out that while all but two of the country’s 26 cantons tax inheritances, “the people have abolished inheritance tax for children and spouses in many cantons”. She added, “I think it is right that what was developed in the nuclear family can be passed on”.

Philosopher Olivier Massin, a professor at the University of Neuchâtel, criticized the motivation driving much of the campaign for the tax. He wrote that “inequality is by nature neither good nor bad” and that envy is the main driver of egalitarianism. “Envy being inglorious, we grimace in indignation, making what is ultimately only the expression of resentment a moral cause.”

Massin added that “inequality in opulence is better than equality in poverty”.

And Switzerland is undoubtedly “opulent” — or, at least, prosperous — with a per capita gross domestic product of $103,669 as compared to $85,809 for the U.S., according to the World Bank. It builds that wealth with a second-place score in the current Index of Economic Freedom (the U.S. is now ranked at 26), suggesting that less government meddling in economic matters is the best way to increase prosperity.

Don’t put a lot of trust in the “surging Canadian GDP stories” they’re pushing

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Stephen Punwasi put together an interesting thread on the latest “rosy scenario” GDP numbers the state media have been making such a big deal about:

2/ What do we see? Imports contributed 0.7 points out of 0.6 points of Q3 GDP growth. The rest of the economy was a net drag.

Imports contribute to GDP as a part of net exports: exports minus imports.

Smaller imports boost net exports. Imports made the biggest drop since 2022.

3/ What we’re seeing is a phenomenon called import compression: the balance was boosted by falling imports.

It’s a superficial improvement due accounting mechanics. The only growth is actually weakness.

We figured it out. But wait — how do they get import/export data? 😬

4/ Let’s start with imports. I recalled reading about the CBSA’s new customs & revenue management (CARM) platform.

Totally normal bedtime reading for weirdos, I know.

CARM delayed data to StatCan, who had to estimate on trend & revise. I can’t recall the issue being resolved.

4/ I contact StatCan. Delays have improved but recent data is heavily impacted.

They warn to expect larger than usual revisions to September — a third of Q3. 😅

It gets funnier: 🇺🇸’s gov shutdown means 🇨🇦 can’t get data for ~75% of its exports. Trend estimate again.

5/ so all GDP growth was imports, which fell faster than exports.

Imports & exports are estimates based on trend.

But wait — what exactly is a trend? It’s based on seasonal adjustments — smoothing predictable variation.

In 🇨🇦, that means suppressing summer & boosting winter.

6/ non-predictable variations to consumption like recession & trade wars can’t be filtered out.

The adjustment over/understates. e.g. 🇺🇸 Fed research shows this overstated recovery & lengthened the financial crisis. Ditto with COVID.

It can’t be fixed until years later.

7/ let’s put this together:

– 🇨🇦’s GDP grew exclusively due to the trade balance.

– import compression — a weakness that overstates growth

– trade had to be inferred via trend

– trend overstated by irregular shock

Yup.

8/ just to clarify — none of this is StatCan’s fault.

They’re tasked w/a deadline over the past year & 🇨🇦 decided to overhaul its trade data during a trade war.

They told me Dec 11th will be when revisions for imports come in & we’ll get an update on CARM.

9/ Bonus fun facts for the pros:

– by pushing it back to the 11th, this overstatement helps suppress yields for the GoC cash management program

– the 11th is after the last auction data is provided to dealers

Fascinating combo while 🇨🇦 is asset cycling for short-term optics.

10/ anyway, full write up, direct quotes from StatCan, & a fun bonus GDP fact for the kiddos.

Also, follow @BetterDwelling if you found this interesting.

We take research & insights reserved for deep-pocketed investors & give it away to normies w/plain english explanations.

December 3, 2025

Like him or loathe him, Trump’s response to the DC shootings was “spot on”

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, Richard North makes the case that US President Donald Trump is the only western political leader who can stop the migration crisis:

Like him or loathe him, question his inconsistencies and his many other flaws, but in my view Donald Trump’s response to the shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington DC by an Afghan migrant was spot on.

There was none of the pussyfooting “my thoughts are with …” etc. Without equivocation, he immediately branded the shooting “an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror”, adding: “It was a crime against our entire nation”.

Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a tweet declaring: “President Trump’s State Department has paused visa issuance for ALL individuals travelling on Afghan passports. The United States has no higher priority than protecting our nation and our people.”

Attached was an official tweet from the Department of State making it clear that the ban was of immediate effect, with the Department “taking all necessary steps to protect US national security and public safety”.

This added to the ban in June when Trump imposed restrictions on citizens from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, but that ban did not revoke visas previously issued, and holders of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) were exempt.

Now Trump has gone further. In a Thanksgiving message posted on X, he offered a salutation which, in Trumpian style, didn’t mince words. It started with: “A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the world, for being ‘politically correct’, and just plain STUPID, when it comes to immigration …”

That was only the start of a very long and quite extraordinary tweet which, if nothing else, can be criticised for a complete absence of paragraphs and sentences which rivalled in length those in a Dickens novel.

With his opening out of the way, Trump asserted that the official United States foreign population stands at 53million, most of whom, he averred, “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels”.

“They and their children,” Trump continued, “are supported through massive payments from patriotic American citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape or form”.

Warming to his theme, he declared: “They put up with what has happened to our country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 [£27,000] with a green card will get roughly $50,000 [£38,000] in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher.”

Pressing his point, he stated what none of Starmer’s motley crew will admit.

“This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc)”, the Donald wrote.

In a passage which might have got him arrested had he posted in the UK, with refreshing candour, the President gave the example of “hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia” who were “completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota”.

Somali gangs, he said, “are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone”.

No matter which country they end up in, Somalis tend to be bad news. There are multiple reports stretching back to 2007 of a plague of criminal gangs among the 32,000 Somalis who have settled in Minnesota.

Recently the Minnesota gangs have been associated with a series of massive welfare fraud schemes, the proceeds of which may have been funnelled to the Somalia-based terror group al-Shabab.

The largest fraud scandal involving Somalis was the “Feeding Our Future” scheme. Prosecutors racked up 56 criminal convictions in what they alleged was a plot to steal $300million (£270million) from a federally funded programme meant to feed children during the covid event.

December 2, 2025

The elites will continue pushing high immigration despite the obvious social costs it imposes

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

One of the very tip-top luxury beliefs is that massive immigration is always and under all circumstances a good thing. A great thing, even. One of the things about the holders of luxury beliefs is that they are almost always completely insulated from any of the consequences of their beliefs, and this is especially true in this case. As Lorenzo Warby points out, the elites’ devotion to this cause contributes to collapsing levels of trust in the society absorbing all those immigrants and deeply undermines confidence that the leadership have anyone else’s but their own best interests at heart:

There is a straightforward, respectable view on immigration to Western countries. More people means more transactions, means more gains from trade, so immigration is a good thing. Immigration grows the economy, it increases GDP, so sensible folk support immigration.

There are extra bells and whistles, such as providing needed skills; compensating for falling fertility; willingness to do jobs locals are not. All the extra bells and whistles have responses. Why not train locals (i.e., citizens)? Won’t the immigrants’ fertility also fall? (Yes, though possibly more slowly.) The real willingness is to do jobs at lower wages and conditions than the locals would accept. For instance, potentially using US H1B visas to bring in entry-level employees who will work for less, and in worse conditions, than the locals.

Moreover, increasing total GDP is not the same as increasing per capita GDP. Even with per capita GDP, there are always questions about the distribution of those gains to GDP.

Nevertheless, the basic intuition is: immigration means more transactions, more gains from trade. Those who believe in markets — in positive-sum interactions — should support immigration.

This is not the trumping response it appears to be. Immigration does not only import workers—nor even just increase mutual-gain transactions — it imports people, so potentially affects all aspects of the receiving society. This means, of course, that there are a much wider range of possible concerns about immigration that “yes, but more gains from trade” is not an adequate response to.

Efficiency and number of transactions are not the only issues for a social order, particularly not a flourishing social order. There are also issues of social cohesion; social resilience; connections and social capital; the distribution of GDP gains; effects on relative prices; congestion costs; how well institutions are managing the influx; effects on local communities; cultural differences; social coordination issues and the ability to manage collective action problems; increased competition for positional goods — goods that cannot, or are blocked from, responding to increased demand.

These are all legitimate grounds for concern that are not answered by “yes, but more gains from trade“. How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with mass rape and sexual exploitation of young women and girls as a cost of culturally divergent immigration (and its systematic mismanagement)? How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with violent disturbance, even civil war, as a potential cost of immigration, even though we have historical examples of precisely that?

If, on one hand, the respectable people insist “yes, but more gains from trade” is an adequate response, and that other concerns are not legitimate, this will almost certainly be taken as the contemptuous dismissal it is. Not only will it not be persuasive, it will (and does) generate anger and resentment.

If people have concerns that the “reasonable”, “liberal-minded” folk will not deal with — or, worse, are dismissive of such concerns even being raised — then people will turn to unreasonable and illiberal folk, if they are the only people who will respond to their concerns. Significant gaps in political markets will be filled by political entrepreneurs.

If folk are told that “if you believe in markets, you have to support (high levels of) immigration” then many folk will respond with “OK, I reject markets“. Moreover, it is simply false that market economics entails that mass immigration is a good thing.

The idea that there is some economic phenomena such that marginal costs exceeds marginal benefits for all people over all ranges in all forms is not Economic thinking, it is magical thinking. (More precisely, it is class-signalling parading as Economics.)

It is magical thinking that falls foul of economist Thomas Sowell‘s dictum that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Immigrants may be engaging in lots of positive-sum, gains from trade transactions, yet still be imposing more costs than benefits on a society, and on resident citizens, precisely because societies are not just efficiency arenas for free-floating transactions and no one is just an economic transactor.

Update, 3 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 1, 2025

If they’re behind bars, they can’t easily re-offend

Filed under: Government, Law, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In City Journal, Tal Fortgang makes the case for keeping repeat offenders in prison (which used to be the norm) rather than allowing the small minority of violent criminals to rejoin society ever more easily and more speedily:

Approaching the dock at Alcatraz on a foggy January afternoon, 1991.
Photo by Nicholas Russon

It’s fashionable to blame America’s high incarceration rates on social injustice — and law enforcement — rather than lawbreaking. If policymakers would just provide disadvantaged people with sufficient resources and economic opportunity, on this view, the crime problem could be solved. That utopian vision gained traction during the mad summer of 2020, when activists, rioters, and the mainstream press, reacting to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, sought to replace law enforcement with programs that target the root causes of antisocial behavior. “As a society,” wrote activist Mariame Kaba in the New York Times, “we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm”.

The truth is otherwise. As Hyland’s case exemplified, violent crime is overwhelmingly the work of a small group of repeat offenders — that is, it is highly concentrated. The remedy, as [political scientist James Q.] Wilson argued half a century ago in his classic book Thinking About Crime, is not social engineering but incapacitation: keeping the violent few from striking again.

Most people are not teetering on the edge of felony, waiting to become, in the Left’s favored euphemism, a “justice-impacted individual”. The overwhelming majority of Americans never engage in serious criminal behavior, let alone commit violent felonies like murder or armed robbery. But those who do are likely to do so again, the evidence shows. Indeed, crime’s concentration is one of the most well-established findings in social science. In 1972, University of Pennsylvania criminologist Marvin Wolfgang reported that just 6 percent of males in a birth cohort accounted for 52 percent of all police contacts. (Violent crime, in particular, is overwhelmingly committed by young males.) Thirty years later, a similar study in Boston found that 3 percent of males were responsible for more than half of their cohort’s arrests after age 31.

The pattern holds across time and place. In 2014, data showed that three-quarters of state prisoners — the core of America’s incarcerated population — had at least five prior arrests. Nearly 5 percent had 31 or more, a larger share than those imprisoned after just a single arrest. In 2022, the New York Times reported that “nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City … involved just 327 people,” or 0.004 percent of the population, who had been “arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times”. And in Oakland, a gun-violence-prevention group found that about 400 individuals — 0.1 percent of the city — were responsible for most of the city’s homicides. Violence is concentrated geographically as well. It occurs primarily in poor minority neighborhoods, whose members make up most of its victims.

These figures may even understate how concentrated antisocial behavior is. Wolfgang found that the offending minority committed dozens of crimes for every one that led to arrest. Fifty years later, a similar study reported that delinquent youth “self-reported over 25 delinquent offenses for every one police contact … with some youth reporting upwards of 290 delinquent offenses per police contact or arrest”. Combined with the fact that more than 60 percent of violent crimes reported each year go unsolved, the implication is clear: by the time a violent offender ends up in prison, he has likely committed multiple violent acts and many lesser offenses. Again, these patterns are most common among young men “who exhibited more psychopathic features”, the 2022 study’s authors noted, and “who displayed temperamental profiles characterized by low effortful control and high negative emotionality”. As a massive study from Sweden concludes: “The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality”.

Update, 2 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 29, 2025

“There comes a point where government waste stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like treason”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canadians must be literally the most passive and forgiving people on Earth. It’s the only thing that can account for how we are governed by incompetents or idiots, yet keep re-electing them despite all the clear signs of failure and opportunistic crony looting of the public purse:

Image from Blendr News

There comes a point where government waste stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like treason. Canada has long passed that point. What we are witnessing now is not mere mismanagement or bureaucratic drift — it is the systemic looting of a nation by the people meant to serve it. Billions vanish with no oversight, no accountability, and no shame. The numbers have grown so grotesque that one struggles not to call this what it is: organized theft.

Take Stellantis. Ottawa handed the automaker $15 billion — the largest corporate subsidy in Canadian history — and the industry minister didn’t even read the contract before approving it. This, despite Stellantis shifting Jeep production to the U.S., delaying its employment targets at the Windsor battery plant, and refusing to appear before Parliamentary Committee hearings. Honda received a major subsidy without full Treasury Board review. Volkswagen hid its cost estimates. Northvolt was showered with subsidies and then slipped into insolvency. Each scandal blurs into the next until you realize the pattern is not incompetence but a business model.

Then there’s the LNG project in British Columbia. The main industrial partner is an American firm. The terminal will be built overseas, floated to Nisga’a land, and subsidised by Canadian taxpayers. In other words: Canadians take the risk while the profits flow abroad and the jobs go to Korea or Japan.

Or consider Telesat. They received $2.14 billion to connect rural Canadians to high-speed internet — with no obligation to connect a single home, no penalties for failure, no clawbacks if the project collapses, and no enforced timelines. Three years later, the network still does not exist. Meanwhile, Starlink already worked, already served rural communities, could have done it for half the cost, and offered immediate deployment — but was rejected because Elon Musk is “polarizing”.

ArriveCAN? $54 million spent on an app worth $80,000, much of it funnelled to GC Strategies, a boutique firm that admitted it didn’t actually build anything. Then the Sustainable Development Fund — the so-called green slush fund — where $400 million flowed into Liberal-friendly firms.

The State tells us its creed is “responsible governance”. Yet almost every act defies that claim. What we have instead is a system run by well-dressed operators who treat the public purse as their own. Canada is now a nation run by criminals, for criminals.

QotD: Are there no prisons? Are there no asylums?

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When the Trump administration proposed imprisoning homeless people who don’t voluntarily go to shelters, and the predictable howls of outrage arose, I remembered the most interesting fact I’ve ever learned about imprisonment rates.

The US is often pilloried for having a high level of imprisonment per capita relative to other countries. The US is also quite unusual in having shut down most of its insane asylums many decades ago.

My perspective on these facts changed a great deal when I learned that if you aggregate rates of imprisonment with rates of commitment to mental institutions, the US stops looking like an outlier.

The low-level mentally ill didn’t go away when we closed the asylums. Nor did they magically become more able to function in society when we pushed them out the doors. Instead, they now land in our prisons.

Another implication of all this is that it’s not “structural racism” or any other specific evil that gives the US high imprisonment rates. It’s an inevitable consequence of the social decision to make it very difficult to involuntarily commit people to asylums.

I’m not going to argue today about whether that decision should be reversed. I have an opinion about that, but this post is about facts and consequences, not value claims or what “should” be.

Let’s return to the homeless. It is now common knowledge that homeless people are almost never simply poor or down on their luck. Almost all have serious issues with mental illness or drug addiction, or both. Many refuse to go to shelters because they don’t want to — or are not capable of — complying with a homeless shelter’s behavioral restrictions.

While I don’t have firsthand knowledge or controlled studies to back me up, it seems obvious that the shelters are acting as a filter — the least damaged and most functional homeless go to them, leaving the crazies to inhabit the streets.

Thus, throwing homeless people who won’t go to shelters in prison is an exact functional equivalent of involuntary commitment to a mental asylum.

My question for people who object to imprisoning the mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless is: what do you propose we do instead? Are we prepared to reopen the asylums and lower the bar for involuntary commitment?

I don’t think there’s a third alternative anymore. Donald Trump, whatever his other failings might be, has an acute sense of the zeitgeist; popular tolerance for having the streets of our cities inhabited by crazy people is collapsing. It turns out we can only tolerate so many news stories about naked screaming nut-jobs on the subway.

I’m not going to propose an answer to the question I just raised, because I’m conflicted about it myself. My goal is to start people thinking about the right question, which is a very large one.

What is the humane way to treat people who are too damaged or broken to be functional members of society, and who inflict large costs on others if they’re not separated from society?

If it’s not prisons or asylums, what are we going to do? And given how ineffective psychiatric treatment is at anything beyond management of symptoms, is “prison” vs. “asylum” even a meaningful distinction?

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-13.

November 28, 2025

QotD: Life is not a race to some arbitrary “finish line”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On a friend’s Facebook page I left the following comment about the claim of the writer Abi Wilkinson (in the Guardian!) that inheritance should be confiscated by government to fund the UK’s welfare state. What could possibly go wrong?

I wrote:

    The hostility to inheritance also comes from a mistaken sense of fairness. As Robert Nozick argued in Anarchy, State and Utopia (I quote from memory), people wrongly think life resembles an athletics race, where the racers compete to hit the finishing line. As a result, those “lucky” athletes endowed by nature/god whatever with stronger muscles etc must be handicapped by having weights in their shoes, for example. Just as a child of rich parents must be deliberately held back to give poor kids a more “fair” chance of winning. But as Nozick said, life isn’t like that. It is about people exchanging goods, services and ideas with one another. There’s no fixed end-point to which we are all racing.

    Also, the idea that there is some “prize” that humans compete for implies that someone or some entity has created that “prize” in the first place. But that’s smuggling in a sort of communitarian assumption into the actions of individuals. In an open society, the prizes on offer are varied and multiply constantly.

I should add that the second section of Nozick’s renowned book dissects and ultimately rejects forced redistribution for egalitarian or other forms of “patterned” notions of justice, and he robustly defends what he calls an “entitlement” concept of justice.

One of the approaches that the late Prof. Nozick used was the thought experiment, such as the example referenced above about a fictitious athletics race in which the entrants are hampered/favoured to make the race more “even”, and then assuming that society in general should be like this. A race, held by people who know the rules and seek to abide by them, is not like an open society. “Open” is the key word here: there is no single end to which persons are heading, such as winning the race.

And yet a lot of the metaphors one comes across around discussions around equality, including equality of opportunity as well as outcome, seem to borrow, perhaps unwittingly, from this “race competition” worldview. To give another example, I remember reading some months ago about a university professor (Warwick) who suggested that when parents read stories to their children, this is a form of privilege. This also plays to the idea that life has a fixed end-measure of success, so that anyone giving a value to someone else is giving the latter an unfair “head start” on someone else. It would require a State to exercise totalitarian control of our actions from the moment we wake up to go to sleep lest our actions unfairly advantage/hamper someone in the “race” they are considered, by this worldview, to be on. (It also, by the way, shows that today’s Higher Ed. is full of certifiable fools and worse.)

Johnathan Pearce, “The assault on inheritance and the assumptions that drive it”, Samizdata, 2025-08-21.

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