Quotulatiousness

May 16, 2026

Canada’s imaginary “immigration consensus”

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

An informative post from earlier this year, showing how the much-talked-about “immigration consensus” was never any more than an expression of Laurentian Elite luxury belief:

Ever since immigration became a hot issue, it has become fashionable to say that “Trudeau broke Canada’s immigration consensus”. But this “consensus” was based on a false narrative that is easily disproved with data.

UNHEARD VOICES

Until about 10 years ago, I had also believed that there was an “immigration consensus” in Canada. But once my life in Canada had settled down enough for me to have the mental space to dabble in public debates online, I came across an opposing view. An Indian immigrant who was then working as editor for an English language community newspaper in the GTA wrote often about opinion polls showing a fairly high level of opposition to high immigration. His name is Pradip Rodrigues. I corresponded with him via email, and later we became friends.

What struck me at the time was that the lone voice talking about these polls was himself an immigrant. Some years later, I came across an article in [the] Vancouver Sun by journalist Douglas Todd, saying that Indo-Canadians in the Vancouver region were unhappy with the large influx of international students [from] India. Given how much value the Progressives (which category most of the MSM is a part of) put on “lived experience”, the reporting by Pradip and Mr. Todd should have attracted urgent attention.

But because the mess being created by excessive immigration hadn’t reached crisis levels by then, these voices went unheard. At best, they were preaching to the choir, and at worst, they were accused of racism (or, in the case of Pradip, “internalized racism”). Smart people see beforehand the problems that are coming and take steps to avert them. People of average intelligence attend to problems after they have occurred. Fools keep denying that problems have occurred, and it always takes a full-blown crisis to get them to accept that they have a problem on their hands – at which point they segue effortlessly to blaming others for the problems. We see this in many policy areas in Canada, and immigration is one of the most salient examples of this shortcoming in Canadian society.

RAISON D’ETRE

No politician will ever tire of saying that “Canada needs immigration to boost our economy”. An ancillary statement is that “immigrants pay taxes that support Canada’s social programs”. But as I showed in my article “Immigration Does NOT Increase Prosperity“, the inflation-adjusted compounded average growth rate (CAGR) in per capita GDP fell by a precipitous 84% between 1970 and 2021, ending up at an anemic 0.67% in the decade ending in 2021:

Clearly, the capacity of Canadians – long-time residents and newcomers alike – to “boost Canada’s economy” and “pay (more) taxes that support the social programs” has been eroded almost to zero. It is worth pondering how, in spite of clear signs evidenced by data, the exact opposite narrative could prevail over such a long period, and how so many people subscribed to it. This is as if Abraham Lincoln’s sage statement that “You can fool some people all the time, or all the people for some time, but not all the people all the time” was held in abeyance in Canada from 1970 onwards – or is that the case?

Not all of the people, but enough of the boomer generation who were raised with the constant drumbeat of propaganda from the Liberals — Canada’s “Natural Governing Party”, as they liked to refer to themselves — and now that most of them are comfortably retired, they seen no reason to rock the boat, even when their own children and grandchildren tell them how bad Canada has become since their prime.

“Do not expect a quick fix or some magical solution”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Chipiuk points out that it’ll take more to get our governments out of the habit of kicking the can down the road than just change of faces at the top:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

No one said it would be easy. Nothing worth fighting for ever is.

Fighting powerful institutions is what I have done my entire life. It is not easy, but it is worth it because you know what is at stake.

This is also not a new problem. History has repeated this pattern before. “The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.” — Ernest Hemingway

Most do not want to give up an inch of their power or control because many have built their identity, influence, and livelihoods around those systems. Some have convinced the public that they know what is best for everyone else better than citizens know for themselves. Yet all you have to do is look around to see the lie. We are not better when people are divided, angry, fearful, and distracted, turning on each other instead of asking harder questions about the institutions and incentives driving the problems in the first place.

And if good people stop standing up, asking questions, and pushing back when something is wrong, those institutions only become more powerful and less accountable. That has been happening for a long time, which is exactly why many systems are so entrenched and disconnected from the people they are supposed to serve.

History repeatedly shows that when governments and institutions avoid addressing deeper structural problems, they rely on temporary measures, slogans, fear, distractions, and promises of quick fixes to maintain stability and public support. But eventually reality catches up, and and ordinary people bear the cost.

So do not expect a quick fix or some magical solution. Democracy, accountability, and freedom require informed citizens willing to stay engaged, stay principled, ask difficult questions, and do the hard work necessary to protect them.

Because in the end, what is more important to fight for than freedom, accountability, and the society we leave behind for future generations?

May 13, 2026

A quick look at the race to be the next governor of California

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Chris Bray somehow seems to find the election coverage by a multi-decade veteran Los Angeles Times political reporter to be, dare I say, lacking just a little objectivity and honest analysis:

Robin Abcarian has been a professional journalist for four decades, mostly at the Los Angeles Times. She’s spent her adult life writing about politics. So go read her column about the last gubernatorial debate in California. Here’s how it opens:

    What am I looking for in a new California governor?

    Like a big chunk of the state’s voters, I’m not exactly sure.

You can already tell you’re in the hands of an experienced professional. There aren’t really any big issues or anything in California right now, so how would you zero in on something you would want from someone who wants to lead the state’s executive branch, right? It’s all just a shrug and a guess.

Then she recites: This candidate said X, and this other candidate said Y. And she tells you which of the recited things she likes: I like X. I do not like Y. She doesn’t analyze or argue or contextualize: she just says I like that one and I do not like that one. The effect is that you’re watching someone wander barefoot through a field of statements and either make “ooooh, pretty” sounds or “ick, yucky” sounds with a kind of vibration from her brain stem. Billy likes blue balloons, they are pretty. Becky loves pink balloons, they are even prettier! She can’t explain any of it, though she attempts some explainy noises, and then it gets worse:

    I know who I don’t like, though.

    Every time I see Republican Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, with his Tom Selleck mustache, I can’t help thinking he should play a lawman on TV.

  1. Should Chad Bianco become the governor of California?
  2. He has a mustache

CHAD BIANCO WISHES TO BE THE GOVERNOR BUT ACTUALLY HE APPEARS TO BE VERY MASCULINE THINK ABOUT IT

Have I mentioned that Robin Abcarian has a graduate degree in journalism? You can see how her education sharpened her mind.

She adds that Bianco has said some deeply disturbing and disqualifying things, and then she gives an example: “A lack of affordable housing has nothing to do with homelessness, Bianco has said repeatedly”. Gasp!

Instead, outrageously, he claims that homelessness has something to do with “drugs and mental illness”.

It is very bad to say this. Why is it very bad to say this? She doesn’t explain, but it’s very bad to say it. Homeless people are all just fine, and they would immediately be okay if you just gave them a house, because the whole crisis is just affordability. Drugs and homelessness!?!? In CALIFORNIA!?!?!? What are you even talking about!?!?

This woman is a journalist in Los Angeles, where you can experience psychotic episodes in the street next to an encampment by driving to lunch.

By the way, this video of homeless people on Skid Row smoking fentanyl right next to the LAPD’s Central Division station? I drove over there this afternoon, and yes. Open drug dealing, drug overdoses, ambulances running day and night, bodies in the street, police station.

Let’s have a look at Abcarian’s analysis of Katie Porter, whose marriage quite notoriously ended with her husband accusing her of once expressing an (apparently frequent) rage by dumping a boiled pot of mashed potatoes on his head, part of a pattern of what he described as an abusive relationship. Abcarian:

“I’ve always liked Porter and her famous white board. I don’t believe snapping at your staff or a reporter is disqualifying, and I’m glad she’s been able to joke about the leaked video that damaged her campaign.”

I like Katie Porter. She is nice. People say she yells a lot, but that is okay. She makes jokes about when she yells at people who work for her. That is funny! She is funny and nice.

Decades on the payroll of a major American newspaper. Will a candidate be an effective governor? “I’ve always liked Porter.” Thanks for your analysis, Robin.

And then finally, big finish, watch how aggressively obtuse this person is. Just watch. It’s a gold medal performance.

First she discusses the attacks on Democratic frontrunner Xavier Becerra. The other candidates are criticizing him because “on his watch at HHS, the Office of Refugee Resettlement lost track of 85,000 migrant children”. Abcarian acknowledges what happened next, when “many of the minors, mostly teenage boys, were exploited by sponsors, who illegally put them to work in various factories, food processing plants and as roofers”. So she has explicitly discussed migration as a source of human trafficking and exploitation.

Then she says that Tom Steyer won her heart by promising to shut down ICE and prosecute ICE agents. Here’s Abcarian’s complete discussion of the way she feels about Steyer promising not to enforce immigration laws: “Could it be I’m falling in love?”

  1. Unmanaged migration across borders is human trafficking and exploitation, often of children
  2. My uterus is a little gushy over this candidate who says he’ll block the enforcement of immigration laws and shut down the agency that enforces immigration laws

Does she notice that she did this? Does she notice the one-two punch of talking about tens of thousands of minors trafficked across the border to be exploited and then the immediate wine aunt pivot to this ooh-he’s-so-cute swooning about Dreamy Tom Steyer promising to not let anyone enforce immigration laws?

My position regarding the high-cultural-status AWFL and biologically male pseudo-AWFL, in media and politics and academia and NGOs, is that none of them notice themselves at all. They have noises that they’re been trained to make, and they make the noises. Warm and wonderful unhoused neighbors. Warm and wonderful trans kids. Warm and wonderful immigrants. They have categories that they purr about, because one purrs about those categories or else one is a Trump person who belongs in a trailer park. It’s been purely automatic for years and years.

“Electoral authoritarian” regimes

Filed under: Europe, Germany, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

eugyppius points out that the reflexive descriptions of the former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s government as “electoral authoritarian” fail to note just how authoritarian the rest of the EU’s national governments have become:

this description of an “electoral authoritarian” regime applies far more aptly to Germany than to Hungary. What did Orbán do, defund a few NGOs? meanwhile our police, intelligence agencies & state media have all collaborated for years to keep the opposition out of power.

And after some harumphing from the cheap seats, he followed up with:

Various people are clapping back at this, so let me tell you what is happen in liberal democratic non-authoritarian Germany:

– Getting raided by police, charged with speech crimes, etc. because you post online is a professional risk, I personally know various people to whom this has happened and I live my life with a bunch of opsec annoyances for the day it happens to me.

– State media coordinates with intelligence agencies to smear and harass not only the political opposition but their prominent supporters, for example by doxxing them, getting them fired, subjecting them to harassment.

– The state funds a vast “civil society” network of violent street thugs to intimidate the political opposition and also anybody identified by state-sanctioned ops like those detailed in the above item. Opposition party congresses, other events routinely disrupted by coordinated civil society protests, where the local population is sympathetic (as in many east German venues) they bus in protesters from the west and the big cities to create the necessary atmosphere.

– Domestic intelligence agencies use espionage methods to surveil and compromise the political opposition; among other things they pay informants, tap telephones, read emails, and so on. We’ve had various indications that materials gathered in these operations are then used for state media smear campaigns.

– Yes, domestic intelligence openly coordinates with state media and certain private media elements too. Various aspects of political coverage in Germany are staged by secretive unelected bureaucrats.

– Procedural rules, other laws are routinely changed in ad hoc ways to disadvantage political opposition, though we haven’t had any outright gerrymandering like in the US so that means Our Democracy is safe. 👍

And:

I’m sure I’m forgetting some things. I’ve spent years documenting this shit on my blog and literally none of the present Hungary hyperventilators have ever given the slightest shit. Orbán was a guy who observed the Euro freak show as it is manifested in countries like Germany and tried in a kind of inept half-hearted way to imitate this machine from the right, the results were ridiculous and transparent and like 25% as effective as what the German state gets up to but nevertheless all these clowns confronted with a hint of their own methods started shrieking about FaSciSm.

“The dark genius of bureaucracy”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Auto-translation on the social media site formerly known as Twitter has brought some posts from Brivael Le Pogam to my attention, like this one:

The Invisible Cemetery

Milton Friedman said a phrase that should haunt every European legislator for the rest of their life. On the FDA, he said this: there is overwhelming evidence that they have caused more deaths through delayed approvals than they have saved through early approvals.

Read it twice. More deaths from excessive caution than lives saved by caution.

And no one sees it. That’s the dark genius of bureaucracy.

Bastiat theorized the principle 175 years ago. “What is seen and what is not seen.” The economist, he said, is not distinguished from the bad economist by the ability to see the immediate effect of a decision. Everyone sees that. He is distinguished by the ability to see the invisible effects, the delayed ones, the ones diffused across the entire population.

The self-driving car is the perfect example. And it’s playing out right before our eyes.

Tesla publishes the numbers. One accident every 7 million miles in Autopilot. One accident every 700,000 miles in the average American human. Autopilot is, at this stage, ten times safer than a human. And it’s only getting better, with every release.

Now France. 3,200 deaths on the roads in 2024. 91% involve human error. Speed, alcohol, fatigue, distraction. If we deployed a self-driving car ten times safer tomorrow, we’d divide the carnage by ten. We’re talking about 2,800 lives a year. Over ten years, 28,000 people. The equivalent of an average French town that disappears, because no one pressed the right button in Brussels.

You’ll never see them. No newspaper will headline: “Today, 8 people died because the self-driving car is banned in Europe”. No parliamentary commission will investigate. No bureaucrat will be fired. Those deaths will go in the “road fatality” box. We’ll run moving campaigns with their photos on 4×3 billboards. We’ll say it’s sad, that’s life.

Meanwhile, the first accident of a self-driving car will be front-page news in every paper for three weeks. The regulator will summon the manufacturers. NGOs will call for preventive bans. Deputies will write op-eds. The minister will decree a moratorium.

Five visible deaths will outweigh, in the media and political balance, five thousand invisible deaths. That’s the iron law of bureaucracy. The bureaucrat who authorizes something that goes wrong loses their career. The bureaucrat who bans something that would have saved thousands of lives is never troubled. No one holds them accountable for the deaths they could have prevented. They don’t exist in their statistics. They don’t exist in their trial.

Friedman had identified the exact mechanism: when a regulator errs on the side of laxity, their victims have names, faces, families, lawyers. When they err on the side of caution, their victims are anonymous, scattered, statistical, ghosts. The structure of incentives makes over-regulation rationally inevitable. And the invisible cemetery grows, generation after generation.

Europe is going to sit out 10 years on the self-driving car, just as it sat out on AI, as it sat out on genetic engineering, as it sat out on fourth-generation nuclear. Every time, the same playbook. Precaution, moratorium, ethics committee, white paper, directive, transposition. And every time, behind the curtain of words, deaths that appear in no official statistics.

These are deaths. Not opportunity costs. Not “economic losses”. Human beings who were alive and who died because an innovation that could have saved them was delayed by people whose literal job it is.

That’s what needs to be built, and it’s probably the most important political project of the century that’s opening. A system for accounting for invisible deaths. A registry of the cemetery that no one sees.

For every regulation, every moratorium, every preventive ban, we should be able to produce a signed, dated, quantified estimate of the human cost in lives of the decision. Not direct effects. Delayed effects, indirect ones, statistical ones. How many deaths per year caused by banning a technology that works elsewhere.

Imagine. On the desk of the European commissioner about to sign a moratorium on the self-driving car, a document: “Central estimate, 2,800 deaths per year for the duration of the moratorium. High-end range, 4,100. Low-end range, 1,900. Source: comparative analysis Tesla Autopilot vs. human average, NHTSA and ONISR data, public and audited method.”

On the desk of the European deputy who will vote on the AI Act: “Central estimate, 38 billion euros in lost GDP, 240,000 jobs not created, X deaths per year due to delays in AI medical diagnostics, Y deaths per year due to delays in deploying autonomous drones for medical delivery in rural areas.”

Today, we sign blindly. We sign without cost. We sign with a clear conscience because the deaths we cause are anonymous and the lives we protect have faces. That’s what needs to be broken.

A bureaucracy is an institution that operates without being held accountable for the invisible consequences of its decisions. As long as invisible deaths are not counted, bureaucracy is mechanically, structurally, inevitably a machine for producing deaths it will never see.

Europe isn’t losing a technological battle. It’s filling a cemetery. Year after year. And no one wears mourning. No one lays flowers. No one knows they’re there.

Friedman saw them before everyone else. Bastiat before him. Williams after him. And each posed the same question, which echoes like an accusation through the centuries: who weeps for the deaths we didn’t see coming?

That’s the work ahead of us. Making the invisible cemetery visible. Accounting for it. Auditing it. Publishing it. Confronting every bureaucrat, every day, with the exact list of lives that their signature takes with it.

Before the list becomes ours.

May 10, 2026

The state of Britain – “Where did it all go wrong?”

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

Reposted from Samizdata with Patrick Crozier’s kind permission. Parallels to the same period of history here in Canada or in Australia or New Zealand should be fully evident to my fellow former colonials:

The Britain of the mid-19th Century was the greatest civilisation that has ever existed. It had a mighty empire, a mighty navy, it had wiped out the slave trade and it was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the greatest improvement in living standards in history. And now, as I write, it is hanging on by a thread: divided, debt-ridden and weak.

So, where did it all go wrong? Here – in reverse chronological order – is my list of the key dates:

2008. Reaction to the Financial Crisis.
Had the banks just been allowed to go bust and the banking regulation that reduced their numbers abolished we would not be looking at 20 lost years.

1997. Opening the borders.
Allowing the establishment of hostile communities in your country is not a good idea.

1987. Leaving the NHS untouched.
By 1987, the Thatcher government had privatised just about everything. Only the NHS and education were left. And they flunked it. Mind you it would probably have been electoral suicide.

1969. Failure to defeat the IRA.
If you reward terrorism you get more of it.
[NR: Canada did defeat the FLQ‘s campaign of terrorism and murder … and then basically conceded everything short of full independence that the FLQ had demanded. This is a classic example of winning the war but losing the peace.]

1965. Race Relations Act.
Keir Starmer is wrong. Britain does not have a “proud tradition of free speech”. But it did have some free speech. This act along with various successors outlawed some forms of speech. Those successors progressively outlawed freedom of association which might have gone a long way to taking the sting out of the Integration Crisis.
[NR: Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech seems ever more relevant to the daily lives of everyone in the west …]

1964. Abolition of the Death Penalty.
I appreciate libertarians tended to be divided on this issue. We may have a lot to say about what the law should be but very little about what should happen when it is broken. But if you are going to end a long-standing tradition it had better work. It didn’t.
[NR: I used to be fully against capital punishment. I’m much less doctrinaire about it now. Some people cannot be rehabilitated, and capital punishment is a better solution than life in prison.]

1963. Robbins Committee.
This led to the subsidisation of higher education and the subsidisation of student living costs. Where you get subsidy you get communism.
[NR: Universities have always been hotbeds of progressive thought. From the 1920s onward, they’ve been taken over by ideologues who want to utterly destroy western civilization … and we’ve been handing them ever more money to indoctrinate our young in their beliefs.]

c.1948. Ending of the right to defend oneself with a firearm.
I got this from the late Brian Micklethwait but I haven’t been able to confirm it. Brian’s point was that if you couldn’t use guns to defend yourself there was very little point in having one and so it became easy for the state to ban them.
[NR: Canada is in the middle of yet another spasm of anti-gun hysteria triggered (you saw what I did there) by events in the United States. There are hopeful signs that Canadian gun owners may yet indulge in peaceful civil disobedience over the the latest attempts to disarm us.]

1948. Nationalisation of rail.
Along with coal, steel and many others along the way. Losses, strikes, decline, waste, unemployment.
[NR: Patrick and I began communicating a few years ago when I asked him for additional information about both the 1920s forced consolidation of British railway companies into the “Big Four” and the subsequent full nationalization into British Railways. We clearly agree that this was, whatever its intentions, a bad move for both the railway companies and the nation at large.]

1947. Town & Country Planning Act.
Pretty much stopped building anywhere where people might want to live. A huge contributor to putting home ownership out of the reach of millions.
[NR: I heard much more about the zoning issue from American libertarians, but the Town and Country Planning Act was a major leap in bringing government regulation into everyday life in Britain.]

1931. Abandoning the Gold Standard.
Inflation and boom and bust became the order of the day.
[NR: In retrospect, this may have been Winston Churchill’s biggest blunder: putting Britain back on the Gold standard at the pre-WW1 rate of exchange.]

1920s. Abolition of the Poor Law.
I mean to write about this one day but TL;DR while the Poor Law had many shortcomings it did at least keep people alive while keeping the costs down.
[NR: Orwell’s eloquent writing about the plight of the poor between the wars illustrate a lot of the negatives for the jobless poor of the interwar era. Far be it from me to claim Orwell was wrong … but he didn’t show the entire picture.]

1922. Creation of the BBC.
A monopoly communist propaganda organisation using the most powerful media then in existence which non-communists were forced to pay for. What could go wrong?
[NR: The BBC was for a long time constrained in its advocacy for socialist ends, but they kicked off the traces at some point. Canadians will be more familiar with the power of state-sponsored media now that the Canadian government will be paying one-third of the salaries of all the mainstream print and broadcast media outlets … and the media have already transformed into sad parodies of Nazi German or North Korean state media.]

1920. Beginning of the War on Drugs.
Other than the crime and changes to the drugs themselves (making them more dangerous than ever), the persistent failure of the War on Drugs gave the state the excuse for ever greater assaults on civil liberties.

1918. Universal Adult Male Franchise.
This meant that people could vote themselves other people’s money. It very quickly led to the replacement of the (not very) Liberal Party by the (not-at-all liberal) Labour Party. Mind you, it should be pointed out that a lot of the damage was done well before.

1910. People’s Budget et al.
In introducing the state pension, a state GP service and unemployment benefit this laid the foundations of the Welfare State that is currently doing such a good job of bankrupting the country.

1910. Payment of MPs.
I put this one in tentatively. I would like to say it meant Members of Parliament no longer had to have made something of themselves but given that a large number of them came from rich families that is not quite true.

1906. Taff Vale Judgement.
This effectively put trade unions above the law leading to endless strikes, uncompetitiveness, industrial decline and unemployment.
[NR: This was an understandable concession when unions were all in the private sector. Now that the plurality, if not outright majority of union members are government workers …]

1890s. Death Duties.
Bit by bit this destroyed the aristocracy by forcing a fire sale every time the head of the household died. [And that did what exactly, Patrick? Summat! It did summat!]

1875. Trade Union Act.
This allowed picketting or the intimidation of non-striking workers by trade unionists. I have to thank Paul Marks for bringing this one to my attention.

1870. Forster Act.
This established state education along with all that went along with it such as indoctrination, poor quality education and the opportunity costs involved in children not being able to earn money or learn a trade.

1845. Banking Act.
This began the extension of the Bank of England’s monopoly to the whole of the country.

Anything I’ve missed?

May 9, 2026

Argentina not in the news

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Martin Varsavsky illustrates the real situation in Argentina after Javier Milei was elected as opposed to the dystopian nightmare imagined by the western media:

“Argentine flag” by papajuan74 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

After more than two years of Milei, the international press still does not understand what is happening in Argentina.

The narrative abroad is “shock therapy, social pain, fragile coalition”. That frame misses the actual mechanism. Argentina did not have a budget problem. It had a printing problem. From 2003 to 2023 the central bank financed deficit after deficit until the peso lost 99 percent of its value against the dollar. Annual inflation hit 211 percent in 2023. Half the country was poor. That was the floor.

What changed is not vibes. It is arithmetic. The fiscal deficit was eliminated for the first time in 16 years. Monthly inflation fell from 25 percent to low single digits. The central bank stopped printing to fund the Treasury. Country risk dropped from over 2,500 basis points to a fraction of that. Argentine sovereign debt, which used to trade like a default option, began behaving like normal emerging market paper.

Critics say poverty rose. It did, briefly, because removing price controls and subsidies revealed the real prices of energy, transport and food that the state had been hiding with debt. Once measured honestly, poverty has been falling fast. Real wages are recovering. Mortgages in pesos are reappearing, something that had not been possible in a generation.

This matters beyond Argentina. It is the clearest live experiment in whether a developed-style economy can be rebuilt by pulling the state out of places it never belonged. Spain, Italy and France should be paying attention. A country does not get poor because it lacks resources. It gets poor because its political class learned to live off printing money and calling it social policy.

Argentina spent 80 years proving that. It is now spending two years proving the opposite.

QotD: Morality and taxation

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

First off, “morality” doesn’t have jack shit to do with taxation. You pay what you legally owe. Nobody willingly pays the government more than they legally owe.

This has always been this way since America has had income taxes. There is endless court precedent. You pay what you legally owe. That’s it. If you pay less than you legally owe, then the government will fine or imprison you. If you pay more than you legal owe, the government will laugh and laugh, because you are an idiot, and you deserve to be poor.

Every single person who barks about how somebody else should be paying more? They themselves are paying the minimum they can get away with. As they should. As should you.

I remember when I was taking my first tax class back in college. This class was all accounting majors by this point. At the beginning of the semester the professor (who’d had a long career as a tax guy) gave us an imaginary family as our clients and had us do their taxes. One kid didn’t take advantage of all the obvious deductions for his clients. When the professor asked why, the kid said some mushy thing about how he didn’t think it was FAIR to keep that money from the government … Holy shit. The professor ripped this kid a new asshole. HOW DARE YOU!?! IT IS NOT THE GOVERNMENT’S MONEY! IT IS YOUR CLIENT’S MONEY. YOU OWE THEM YOUR BEST! IT IS YOUR SACRED DUTY TO SAVE THEIR MONEY! YOU DISGUST ME AND YOU SHOULD NEVER BE A CPA!

That class was one of my favorites.

Basically, you pay what you owe, no more, and anyone who claims otherwise is full of shit.

Larry Correia, “No, You Idiots. That’s Not How Taxes Work – An Accountant’s Guide To Why You Are A Gullible Moron”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2020-09-28.

May 7, 2026

Great success! Honda “postpones” their Ontario EV project

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As part of their mindless fanboyism for anything remotely related to “Net Zero”, the federal government and the Ontario provincial government have been serving up subsidies for electric vehicles and hastening the “inevitable transition” away from internal combustion vehicles. Through legislation and regulation, they’ve been doing everything they can to close down the traditional car and truck manufacturing sector and replace them with zero emission vehicles. The various governments have handed out subsidies amounting to billions, and yet one after another after another the much ballyhoo’d EV factories, battery plants, and other futuristic projects fall by the wayside, leaving very little in exchange for those billions:

There was a time, not very long ago, when Liberal politicians treated EV battery announcements like moon landings.

Hard hats. Safety glasses. Giant ceremonial cheques. Breathless speeches about “the future”. Every battery plant was “historic”. Every subsidy package was “transformational”. Every corporate press conference looked like a motivational seminar for people who think buzzwords are infrastructure.

All we were missing was a fog machine and Bono.

Meanwhile ordinary Canadians were standing in grocery aisles doing mental math over bacon prices, delaying dental work, and wondering whether they could survive another winter utility bill without sacrificing whatever scraps remained of their savings.

But while Canadians were trying to keep their heads above water, Ottawa was busy launching one of the most expensive industrial subsidy experiments in modern Canadian history.

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

The Honda EV project in Ontario was supposed to be one of the crown jewels of this brave new green economy. Politicians lined up in hard hats and safety glasses like a traveling theatre troupe performing The Future Is Here. Canadians were assured this was proof the country was becoming an EV superpower.

Turns out it may have been more of a very expensive PowerPoint presentation with taxpayer financing attached.

[…]

In March 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Mark Carney as an informal economic adviser during the COVID recovery period. Over the following years, Carney increasingly promoted “green transition” investment frameworks, climate-linked financial systems, ESG-focused economic planning, and massive public-private investment partnerships tied to decarbonization strategies.

Which is important context now, because the EV subsidy era did not emerge out of thin air. It grew out of a broader worldview that treated government-directed green investment as both economic policy and moral mission. The assumption underneath all of this was breathtakingly simple:

“If government wants it badly enough, reality will cooperate.”

That is usually where things begin going sideways.

Canadians were told the EV transition was inevitable. Questions about affordability, charging infrastructure, winter range, electrical grid capacity, or consumer demand were often brushed aside like annoying little details raised by peasants who simply lacked sufficient enlightenment.

Then came the subsidy gold rush.

[…]

Corporations are not charities. They are not loyal patriots. They are not emotionally attached to government slogans.

They follow incentives. They chase profitability. They change direction when conditions change.

That is exactly what Honda did.

Meanwhile Canadians are left holding the bill for another “historic transformation” that produced:

  • endless announcements
  • glossy photo ops
  • consultant buzzwords
  • government self-congratulation
  • escalating subsidy exposure
  • and corporate renegotiations every time market conditions shifted
  • while producing no completed Honda EV manufacturing hub and no fleet of Canadian-built EVs rolling proudly off Ontario assembly lines.

What remains instead is a stalled megaproject, a confused tariff policy, a government spinning contradictory narratives depending on the week, and taxpayers once again discovering they were voluntold into becoming venture capitalists for political vanity projects.

Apparently this is what “economic leadership” looks like now.

Hard hats. Press releases. Fifty-plus billion dollars in EV-related exposure. And a factory plan slowly evaporating into the mist while Chinese EVs roll through the front gate anyway.

Pay no attention to the Laurentian Elite behind the curtain!

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Canada before Confederation was largely run by the Family Compact, an informal oligarchy of wealthy and influential families who had a virtual monopoly on social advancement, political appointments, and the justice system. As kids we were all told in school that this all withered away and now we live in a wonderfully meritocratic society (that’s also a genocidal racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic dystopia, but those are later lessons after the land acknowledgements). They didn’t fade away, of course, and the behind-the-scenes power brokers are still there, still wielding informal but widespread control over the government and the economy. We just call them the Laurentian Elite, so that’s totally different than the bad old Family Compact, eh?

The Laurentians very effectively keep themselves out of the public eye. Most Canadians don’t even know this class exists. So, they are in that sense a shadowy cabal.

Of course Canadians want prosperity and whatever. Everyone does. Of course they think this is the purpose of the government. Of course the government’s messaging is largely around economics.

The government’s actual activities, however, are immensely economically destructive. This is because of their religious fanaticism. Canadians believe in “peace, order, and good government”. The Laurentians believe in multiculturalism, mass immigration, gender woo, and climate change. They just lie about these things being good for the economy. It’s now obvious that they are very bad for the economy, and yet, they continue, so.

The gimmigration restrictions are a joke. The government is continuing to hand out PRs and passports like Halloween candy, and turd worlders are continuing to grab them like the black kids who think the whole basket is all just for them. It is allowing TFWs to flood the asylum system, which it uses as a back door to keep them in the country. The numbers they publish are a bullshit accounting game, but even if they’re to be believed, letting in hundreds of thousands of new PRs every year isn’t a reduction from anything but the truly insane spike in 2022-24.

The housing market is fucked, yes, but I’m skeptical this is because immigration has been “reduced”. It’s more likely that a decade of zero economic growth, rapid inflation, even more rapid asset inflation, shit jobs, and high taxes means that no one can afford the overpriced housing, so no one buys it. The shoebox condos they threw up all over Toronto are a contributing factor: no one wants to spend $500,000 on a 500 square foot condo, so no one does. Investors can’t afford to sell for less, so they sit on them. Developers look at tens of thousands of units of unsold inventory, and refuse to start new projects. Whole system is seized up because of many years of malinvestment, not because the government has meaningfully reduced the invasion.

You say that Canadians will go back to Laurentian rule once the excesses are curbed. That presumes Laurentian rule slackened for even a moment, and that the Laurentians have any intention of curbing their excesses. Neither of these are true. They are doubling down on everything. Destroying Canada — as one element in the destruction of Western civilization — is a religious imperative for them. Nor was their power ever threatened, because it is propped up by brainwashed parasitic client groups — boomers, women, immigrants — that now comprise the bulk of the country.

The “pivot” was about two weeks of campaign rhetoric, during which a fast-talking globalist banker gave the boomers a reach-around about “British and French heritage”, which dazzled the affection-starved senile coots because it was the first time they’d heard something nice about themselves in a generation. Since then there’s been no rollback in DEI. No rollback in gender woo. No rollback in net zero. No rollback in Internet censorship. To the contrary, it has been full steam ahead on every single one of their hateful programs.

No revolution? You’re probably right, although the Freedom Convoy suggests that there are possibilities. Nevertheless the most likely scenario is that Canada devolves into Argentina Del Norte, its bones picked by vultures posing as patriots, kept in power by the most mind-raped boomers on planet Earth.

I do not think this is a good thing, obviously. I love my country very much. I suppose the reason for my vehemence on this matter is that I do not see any future for Canada with the Laurentians remaining in charge. We cannot work with them. They aren’t going to change. They aren’t going to slow down. They need to be removed, prosecuted for high treason, their assets seized, their oligopolies nationalized, and many of them sent to the gallows. Absent this, Canada is doomed.

May 6, 2026

“I don’t want a solution, I want to dismantle our socio-economic system!”

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

On his Substack, Christopher Snowden explains how “public health” is just another of the many, many anti-capitalist branches of progressive belief:

Some people don’t really want to solve problems. They want to change the world for other reasons. That was the argument I made in Not Invented Here last year, a multi-author IEA publication that essentially elaborated on this meme …

One example is obesity, which we are told can only be tackled by fundamentally changing the food environment, banning advertising, taxing more products and demonising “Big Food”. None of this has ever actually worked anywhere. We do, however, now have GLP-1 drugs that work wonders for many people.

Plenty of “public health” academics are notably resistant to “fat jabs” because what they really want is to fundamentally change the food environment, ban advertising, tax more products and demonise “Big Food”.

Take this article from three self-described “public health scholars” in JAMA Health Forum, for example. They object to obesity being framed as a “a disease requiring individual treatment” because, they say, it undermines public support for government action. They even complain that “medical societies consistently argue that we do need to both prevent and treat obesity” because treatment — i.e. losing weight — is something that individuals can do for themselves. Moreover, studies have shown that when the public hear about people losing weight on their own initiative, they are less likely to support population-wide policies such as food taxation.

    Broadcasting a “we need to do both” message, it turns out, is a counterproductive communications strategy for addressing the obesity epidemic. Studies message-testing obesity narratives find that public support for government action is highest when obesity is framed as the result of food industry manipulation and addresses toxic food environments.

The authors don’t seem particularly interested in whether this narrative is true. The main thing is that it can “build support for addressing upstream drivers of the obesity epidemic”. They conclude that medical professionals should stop talking about GLP-1 drugs in public and bang on about “BiG fOoD” instead.

    While we acknowledge that public and media discourse often expect clinicians to comment on treatment efficacy and emergent therapies, in an ideal world, the medical community would move discussions about GLP-1 drugs targeting causes of individual cases in-house, while using its credibility and authority publicly to amplify much needed political discussions about the root causes of increasing obesity incidence.

    This messaging should include concrete policy proposals targeting unhealthy food environments shifting the debate toward the structural causes of the obesity epidemic, such as World Health Organization–recommended sugar taxes and other policies that would effectively reverse the rise in ultraprocessed food production, marketing, and consumption and, importantly, the corporate power that has so far prevented governments from enacting these policies.

You can see why they are worried about fat jabs. The drugs work by giving people artificial willpower and prove that if obese people simply eat less food they will stop being obese. It has nothing to do with advertising, price, availability or “corporate power”.

From the perspective of the authors, these drugs are a threat, but what exactly is their perspective? The first author, Luc Hagenaars, has written a lot about sugar taxes which he compiled for his PhD thesis. He also worked at the Dutch Ministry of Health in the early 2020s when the Netherlands was undergoing its anti-liberal counter-revolution. Last year, he wrote an article titled “The Ozempic Era Could Shift Blame for Obesity From Individuals to Commercial Food Systems” which made exactly the opposite argument to the one he is making here.

Update, 8 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! 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.

May 5, 2026

Seattle’s Mayor to wealthy residents: “Bye!”

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

I’ve heard many people praise Seattle as a great place to live with lots of amenities and a fantastic setting. Like a lot of places with those kinds of attractions, it also has a political scene that leans strongly to the left, as Mayor Katie Wilson recently highlighted:

“Seattle Skyline” by Atomic Taco is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Seattle’s socialist Mayor Katie Wilson has a message for prosperous people leaving Washington over the state’s soaring tax burden. “Bye!” she says with a laugh, to cheers from a largely progressive audience. Entrepreneurs and investors will certainly take that comment into account as they consider where to live and do business. We can be sure of that fact because recent research further supports the commonsense idea that people often leave high-tax states in search of lower tax bills.

Goodbye, Wealthy People!

Wilson’s comments came during an April 16 discussion about “The New Progressives” as part of Seattle University’s Conversations series. Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay fielded a series of questions by host Joni Balter and graduate student Ari Winter.

Asked about major companies leaving or threatening to leave over Seattle’s and Washington’s escalating tax burden, Zahilay acknowledged that “everything is a tradeoff” and “of course I think taxes can make companies make decisions about staying or leaving”. You wouldn’t necessarily want to live under his policies, but he sounds like he understands that his decisions may drive people out and impose costs on the community.

Wilson, a self-described “socialist“, was presented with a follow-up question by Winter. She was asked, “do you still think progressive taxes are an easy and promising solution?”

Wilson responded that it was “very, very exciting to see the billionaire tax pass the legislature” and described her history of advocating for higher taxes. She then cut to the heart of her response.

“I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are, like, super overblown. And if, you know, the ones that leave, like, bye!” she said with a wave and a snicker. The audience at the university event joined in with whoops and applause.

Wilson may want to practice her goodbyes. Fisher Investments moved from Washington to Texas to escape a new capital gains tax. Starbucks is building a corporate hub in Tennessee and moving jobs there, largely over tax concerns. Billionaire Jeff Bezos fled the state for Florida, also motivated by taxes.

“Jeff Bezos sold about $15 billion in stocks before the new law took effect, potentially saving over $1 billion in taxes”, the Washington Policy Center’s Chris Corry noted. “Moving his primary residency to Florida would ensure that any future stock sales would not be subject to the excise tax.”

Tech giant Microsoft criticized Washington’s tax environment and threatened to move jobs elsewhere.

May 4, 2026

Public housing perpetuates the poverty it was supposed to cure

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Critic, John Wills explains that public housing organizations, like any organization with perverse incentives, will never solve the problem of providing enough housing for those who cannot afford it:

Homes Fit for Heroes – Dagenham
“These are typical examples of the housing on the Becontree Estate. Initially 25000 homes were built by the London County Council between 1921 and 1934. These homes fit for the heroes of WW1 had all mod cons gas, water and electricity with inside toilets and bathrooms. A further 2000 homes were built before WW2. The Becontree estate was the biggest council estate in the world.”
Image and description from geograph.uk. Photo by Glyn Baker – CC BY SA 2.0

There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has spent serious time inside a housing association, when the institutional logic becomes impossible to ignore.

Perhaps you are sitting in a meeting, reviewing the organisation’s performance: voids are down, rent arrears are within tolerance, development pipeline is healthy and the regulator is satisfied. By every measure the sector uses to evaluate itself, things are going well.

Outside the window, however, the waiting list has not reduced. The families in temporary accommodation are the same families (or families very much like them), who were there five years ago. In short, the problem the organisation was created to solve is precisely as large as it was when the meeting began.

Despite these demonstrable facts, nobody in the meeting thinks this is strange. Nobody considers the organisation a failure. The metrics are, after all, fine.

I spent a decade working at a senior level in housing associations. I left as I became disillusioned with a model that has evolved to measure everything except the thing that matters.

The founding logic was sound enough: postwar Britain faced a housing crisis that was specific, urgent and — crucially — finite. Tens of thousands of homes had been destroyed or damaged, men had died in enormous numbers, and a baby boom was placing acute pressure on stock that was already inadequate before the war started. Social Housing was therefore a rational response to a bounded problem: build homes, house people and alleviate a crisis that would, in time and as a result of the initial centralised effort, resolve itself. You might also apply the same logic to slum clearance a decade later: deplorable housing stock needed replacing, and the state needed a mechanism to do it. The model remained defensible so long as everyone understood that success meant crossing a defined finish line.

However, nobody thought to define that finish line. The problem here is that once you remove the time horizon from an organisation tasked with solving a problem, the organisation’s survival becomes contingent on the problem’s persistence, not its resolution. This is not a conspiracy and it requires no bad actors, nor even a conscious decision to perpetuate matters. It is simply what institutions do when the incentives are wrong. As a thought-experiment, imagine that the eradication of smallpox had been incentivised not by the goal of total global elimination, but instead by vaccines administered, clinics built or healthcare workers employed. What would the probability be of us continuing to battle smallpox into the 21st Century? I cannot be certain, but suspect it would be considerably higher than nil.

The regulatory framework for social housing has compounded the error rather than correcting it. Regulators, quite reasonably, dislike hoarded capital. A registered social landlord (RSL) sitting on large reserves and doing nothing with them is, from a regulator’s perspective, a problem to be solved. The solution the sector has converged on is growth — more stock acquired, more homes built, larger balance sheets, bigger organisations and more services and people employed to deliver them. The key metric of a healthy RSL is therefore its size: which is to say, the scale of the problem it exists to address. (To test this proposition, ask someone in housing to describe their organisation. The chances are the first words out of their mouth will be the number of homes they manage). An organisation genuinely succeeding in its mission — one that is housing fewer people because fewer people in its area of operations need housing — under the current framework would look like a failure. It would be encouraged to merge with a larger, more “successful” neighbour, which is to say one that has accumulated more evidence of unresolved housing need.

May 3, 2026

How to Declare a Live Person Legally Dead – Death of Democracy 14 – Q2 1936

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 2 May 2026

In Q2 1936, Adolf Hitler consolidated power after the Rhineland gamble, tightening the machinery of dictatorship while projecting strength abroad. As Hermann Göring took control of Germany’s economic lifelines and Heinrich Himmler centralized the police, the regime accelerated its transformation into a fully integrated police state.

Behind Olympic pageantry and propaganda triumphs like Max Schmeling’s victory, the Nazi system deepened repression. Courts enforced the Nuremberg Laws with chilling logic, reducing Jewish citizens to a state of “civil death”, while Joseph Goebbels expanded total control over media and public discourse.

At the same time, Germany’s economy bent further toward war, with dwindling foreign reserves and rising dependence on autarky. Yet domestically, resistance remained minimal as propaganda, fear, and perceived stability drove growing public support.

Globally, the quarter exposed the weakness of the League of Nations during Italy’s conquest of Abyssinia, saw Léon Blum’s rise in France, and witnessed the outbreak of the Arab Revolt in Palestine — signs of a world drifting toward instability.

This episode examines how dictatorship consolidates not just through terror, but through law, economics, and consent — and why, by mid-1936, meaningful resistance inside Germany had largely vanished.

May 2, 2026

Cancelled chancellor?

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

The German Chancellor’s future looks unhappy, and eugyppius notes that even the lapdog mainstream media outlets who praised him last year are now publishing calls for his ouster:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, 5 May 2025.
Photo by Sandro Halank for Wikimedia Commons.

Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles. These kinds of chancellors will continue to exist only so long as they can be sold to the geezers of the Federal Republic’s care homes by the amateurish marketing campaigns of a complicit state media as the incarnation of far-sighted competence and (more importantly) bourgeois respectability.

Early in 2025, Merz had the chance to seize a measure of power for himself and make facts. He could have forged a deal with Alternative für Deutschland on the most important questions, established a minority government and set about force-marching the obese German state through necessary reforms. It might’ve torn his party apart, he might’ve failed, there would’ve been a huge fight, but whatever happened nobody would ever forget Chancellor Merz. Instead, the Pigeon Chancellor let a lot of deranged Antifa street protesters and screeching women with parareligious concerns about atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations dissuade him from the only reasonable path. Instead of making history, he chose to spend the first year of his chancellorship making the Social Democrats fat and happy at the expense of the nation. Most don’t even hate Merz, because hate like love has to be be earned. He inspires nothing more than mildly scornful indifference.

Everyone who was not a complete idiot knew that Merz’s mad coalition with the Social Democrats could never work. Yet the man has been lionised in the international press and even in centre-right domestic papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a serious reformer. These people told us Merz would rebuild the Bundeswehr, reduce insane social spending, impose fiscal discipline, solve the migroid problem and restore economic growth. Even if the leftoid half of the German establishment press didn’t embrace all these myths, they nevertheless worked hard to make Merz seem presentable, serious and viable. He was worth a shot, he would do his best, and after the crazy Scholz years Germany was back on solid footing.

Now, in the the space of about two weeks, the entire myth of Chancellor Merz has collapsed. Major papers that used to defend his government and praise his prospects are suddenly saying it’s over. They’re writing front-page editorials in the spirit of stuff I was posting here over a year ago. Merz appears at town-hall meetings where he gets asked how he’s made life better in Germany and before he can answer the audience just laughs at his stupid ass. His coalition partners say he’s doing a terrible job. Back-benchers from his own party are calling his political strategy a failure to his face and leaking it afterwards to the press so everyone knows what they said.

Still worse, people from the Chancellery are talking to the tabloids. They’re explaining that Merz’s government has been hanging by a thread since at least last December; that his party thinks he’s a pushover whom the SPD constantly manipulates; that often Merz just absorbs the opinions of whatever person he last talked to and so his handlers have to limit his contacts to keep him from going off-message in insane ways; that Merz is now almost totally isolated, having burned through most of his close confidants; and that nobody has any solutions or ideas and increasingly everybody doubts that the Chancellor has the talents to save himself.

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