Quotulatiousness

August 23, 2026

Trade deal? What trade deal? Best we can do is more tariffs

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

My sense has always been that the Carney government didn’t really want to get a deal done with Trump, because it was far more politically useful to keep the eLbOzOs all angry and posturing than to negotiate in good faith. Canada’s premiers, taken as a group, have been a never-ending stream of clown car antics, political gamesmanship, and schoolyard baiting. Yes, Trump is infuriating, inconsistent, obnoxious, and even more performative than Justin Trudeau but he’s the current American president and we needed to send sensible politicians and diplomats to work with him.

The presstitutes in the Canadian relic media have been eagerly fanning the flames of Trump Derangement Syndrome across the country, so when the latest episode of The Line podcast popped up yesterday, I had to provide a helpful edit to their episode title:

They’re going to do everything they can to deflect blame from their beloved paymaster, Dear Leader, and point accusingly at Pierre Emmanuel Goldstein and his band of anti-Canadian wreckers and looters in the Conservative party.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @jaycurrie discussed this when the news broke of the breakdown in talks:

The last minute collapse of trade negotiations between Canada and the US demonstrates a fecklessness on the Canadian side which is astonishing. The walking resume — in the very good suits — could not get’er done.

Apparently those damn Yankees had unacceptable last minute changes. No shit. You are dealing with serious negotiators who will squeeze hard. It is said of Trump that he regarded signed contracts as the beginning of the negotiation.

Brutal, unscrupulous, nasty. Orange man very, very, bad. But you play the hand you’re dealt. Had Canada sent serious negotiators a year ago rather than posturing and dumbly sticking the official elbows in the air, we’d have a deal.

Or, had we had negotiators who did not take Dudley Doright as a model, we would have signed a “bad deal” and gone right back to the table to get a better deal. I’d love to know what the show stopper American last minute “demands” were.

Trade is a constant series of negotiations. A deal in place would have avoided the BS 50% tariffs and set the stage for the next deal. This collapse just puts us in a deep hole smarter people will have to climb out of.

“That’s my final offer” is a tactic. Is it an offer you like? No. Is it an offer you can live with? Probably. Again, the devil is in the details. But unless the offer required Canada to cede territory (which Eby is already more than willing to do) it was workable.

“A bad deal is worse than no deal at all” when there are 50% tariffs looming as a consequence of “no deal” is a very dumb position to take. Brace for “defense of Canadian Sovereignty” in a matter of minutes.

These trade talks have been bungled from the beginning simply because a combination of the political advantages of TDS and an inflated view of Canada’s relative bargaining strength created a reality free bubble.

The sheer arrogance and vile political opportunism of the Carney Liberals has been on full display for a year. Trump and his people called BS. Carney was euchred. Canada is, frankly, boned.

Maxime Bernier:

New 50-per-cent levies will hit around $28-billion worth of Canadian goods, which is roughly 5 per cent of Canada’s exports to the United States.

Carney has said it will respond with retaliatory tariffs on $28-billion worth of U.S. products.

Escalation is a very bad idea! Tariff retaliation has just triggered an escalatory trade war we cannot win. The U.S. economy is 10 times larger than ours.

A study released last week by the Canadian American Business Council concluded that the end of USMCA would have a surprisingly small impact on the Canadian economy.

It estimates that, even with high and long-lasting tariffs, Canada’s economy would only be about 1.6 per cent smaller in 2035 than if the USMCA were renewed and respected, and tariffs fell to near zero.

We are further damaging our economy with these “dollar-for-dollar” counter-tariffs.

Retaliatory tariffs are NOT a weapon. They are a tax on Canadians.

Who do you think absorbs that cost?
Canadian consumers, businesses, and workers.

Let’s be brutally honest: the Canadian government is worsening the situation. Canadian families will pay the price at the checkout counter.

The National Roast gets it:

August 14, 2026

Ontario premier doubles-down on provoking Trump. What could go wrong?

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

At some point you have to ask yourself … if Canada was being run by people who wanted to destroy it, what would they have done differently in the trade negotiations with Donald Trump’s government?

Is Doug Ford the dumbest Canadian?

I know, it is a deep bench. But the tubby premier is extraordinary. You have to appreciate talent.

There are, apparently, two schools of Canadian thought on the trade fracas with the US. “Punch the bully in the nose.” and “For God’s sake get a deal already.” As I prefer a Canada with an economy, I pick door number 2.

Our Chief Trade Negotiator Janice Charette, is more combative. If Trump brings in his retaliatory tariffs in a week she’s packing up and going home. That’ll learn him.

The idle threat school of negotiation enjoys wide currency in both Ottawa and Queens Park. Meanwhile, Canadian businesses are looking [longingly] at the low tax, low reg world inside the Trump tariff wall.

I’m having a beer with a buddy who is in “founder’s mode” on a startup and, frankly, he’d be crazy not to be looking at domiciling his business in the States. Sure, have a Canadian sub, but why put your main business in Canada?

And decisions like this are being made all over Canada and, indeed, the world. People might hate Trump and all his works but the business attractions of Red States make Ontario and BC look pathetic.

You would think that after Ford’s Super Bowl ad fiasco he would have the wit to remain silent as his province’s fate is being negotiated. You know, avoid more damage. But no, the tubby premier likes to “talk tough”.

I actually feel a bit sorry for Carney having to deal with the fallout of this idiot’s remarks. Unless, of course, like the Super Bowl ads, Carney actually encouraged these remarks … In which case the competition for dumbest guy in Canada has tightened up.

August 3, 2026

The Ceuta invasion as a tipping point

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

On Substack, el gato malo suggests that the “refugee” invastion of Ceuta is a “bridge too far” for the EU:

peruvian strongman oscar benavides famously said “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”.

once, such a thing might have provided a succinct summation of the practice of privilege in its literal sense of “private law”. there were laws for the aristocrats and others for the commoners and still others for non-citizens and slaves.

such ideas date back to time out of mind before stone was placed upon stone in giza and stood as absolute expectation and norm in most of the world until quite recently (and pertain in many parts of the world even today). the idea that “all people should be equal under the law” was a radical alteration to social order, a repudiation of the divine right of kings and aristocrats and their monopolies on property and on violence. the literal idea that land could be owned by a commoner was an astonishing upheaval of established orders. it was also the freeing move that allowed for the west to rise and flourish and prosper, unlocking its vast human potential. one might think that people would be happy about this and cherish and protect this most foundational idea that serves as cornerstone to civilizations of liberty and plenty.

lol.

you must be new here.

[…]

spain looks to be in real danger of falling as a nation. they created a mass amnesty for illegal immigrants from places that do not believe in spain but only in tribe and who do not believe in rights but only in who may dominate whom. if one seeks to be a wrecker, it’s a brilliant incentive. pardon a million and give them access to your social safety networks and welfare payments which fund a lifestyle far in excess of where they came from (and the right to vote for more) and the next wave is already packing its bags to come. spread enough jam and you can attract infinity ants.

the US was well on its way to running this playbook (and likely has ~40 million illegals to show for it) before it was stopped. the astonishing bit was how easy it was to shut this off. you just cut off the incentives. no more free stuff, no more amnesty, no more “path to stay”, and no more “catch and release until our overwhelmed court system can have a hearing years from now”. it’s really that simple.

due process becomes rounding you up and sending you home, not giving you a nice place to live for the 3 years until your case is heard.

and it ALL comes down to prosecutors, courts, and agencies. immigration law became irrelevant not because the law changed but because enforcement did. the spectacle of american judges sneaking illegals out of courthouses to avoid their apprehension by ICE was really pretty astonishing. so too were the massive levels of entitlement fraud, literal government funded flights to needed voting districts, and the astonishing refusal to arrest or hold accountable any among them because “marginalized”. europe is worse.

the NGO bond villian insidious complex has been running the table on the west for 20 years.

and they are moving into overdrive now before the populist right forces they are giving reflexive rise to can take control.

[…]

the media is, predictably, either ignoring this or pretending it’s a humanitarian crisis of families and babies. it’s not. this is damn near all men.

and they are not behaving well.

some are claiming that many of these are criminals freed by morocco and bused to the border as a deliberate act. (this same tactic was used by central and south american regimes to dump their gangs in the US.) images of robbery, rape, and of murder are cropping up.

just what a town of 80k is supposed to do with 80k invaders and how they might be fed or sheltered or controlled remains an open question.

meanwhile, EU commission president ursula von doom has moved to action.

“we have sent a bureaucrat to monitor the situation. if this continues, they will tell people to ‘stop’. if that fails, they will say ‘stop’ again, perhaps in a firmer voice.”

to call this air and nonsense would be charitable. it’s an admission of helplessness. the EC relied upon a soft power it no longer possesses because it now faces people who believe only in hard power which the EC never had.

bluff called.

it’s over.

the EC was fine to govern the sort of citizens who yell at tourists for crossing an empty street against the light. it is wholly unsuited for this and like many an ill fated magician’s apprentice before them, they have now summoned that which they have no hope of controling and will eat them alive.

but here’s the part i really loved: “the images from ceuta are unacceptable”.

talk about saying the quiet part out loud. not the events. not the crisis. the images. even now, for her it’s all perception. you want to understand why they want to mandate ID to use the internet/social media and why they so desperately demand the right to censor it (once more using courts and agencies to enforce their whim)? this is why.

“for my friends, speech, for my enemies censorship and gulag”.

what they are doing cannot survive these images.

On Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes reacts to the progressives’ response to the Ceuta situation:

I often wonder about the open borders, “migrants welcome” people and I can’t square it.

I am traditionally a left leaning person from a mixed background who has travelled extensively.

To the current progressive mind this ought to make me automatically cheering on the levels of mass migration we are living with.

But it’s the opposite.

The well travelled “anywhere” cosmopolitans should surely be the most aware of cultural differences and that it’s precisely the concept that nations are “particular” and unique from one another, that makes travelling such a fascinating and sometimes challenging thing to do.

[…]

Travelling gave me a fresh and new appreciation of little things (that actually turned out to be important things) about Britain that I had taken for granted before.

The fact that these muppets think that any form of patriotism or nationalism leads to Hitler is absolutely moronic.

And of course they celebrate it everywhere else. It’s just us who are the baddies for wanting to hold onto our traditions, customs and culture.

Why are we uniquely expected to live by different rules? Surely that in itself is kind of exceptionalist?

A progressive travelling in India wouldn’t think twice about a Mumbai taxi driver having an Indian flag hanging on his rearview mirror.

Or a Thai guesthouse having a shrine to the Thai royal family.

When you travel, people are proud of their countries and towns. They want to show you around. They tell you their country is the best proudly.

Of course, I will be here all day pointing out progressive double standards.

But this one is a biggy!

Update, 4 August: 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.

August 1, 2026

The invasion of Ceuta

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In the last 48 hours vast numbers of people have learned that Spain still has territory on the African continent, as Morocco enables thousands of young men to cross into the Spanish city of Ceuta. The Spanish government has, to time of writing, refused to declare a state of emergency or to send military forces to assist the municipal authorities in Ceuta. In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill thinks this heralds the end of globalism:

Can we say “invasion” now? What other word is there for the rough intrusion of tens of thousands of young men into the sovereign territory of a foreign nation? Surely not even the sappiest leftist in his tattered keffiyeh and “Refugees Welcome” t-shirt would describe the thuggish gatecrashing of an independent nation as “asylum seeking”? That might be the one and only upside to the extraordinary events in Ceuta yesterday: the death, at last, of euphemism. The impossibility of any longer dressing up the West’s suicidal abandonment of its borders as “kindness”.

The scenes from the Spanish enclave at the tip of North Africa are staggering. An estimated 49,000 people, mostly Moroccans, mostly men, gleefully intruded upon the territory of the Spanish kingdom. That’s around the same number of people who illegally sail to Britain in a year. They scaled border gates and overwhelmed those charged with protecting Spanish lands. Viral clips show men punching the air as they swarm the enclave, clearly thrilled with their incursion into a sovereign state. Even the Spanish press is feeling the death of euphemism. “Ceuta, invaded”, says the front page of ABC, a newspaper of record, alongside an image of thousands of men streaming along Ceuta’s beach.

The mass storming of Ceuta has focused the minds even of Spain’s fatally apathetic ruling class. All of Ceuta’s parties, both right and left, have called on Madrid to send in the army to reinforce the border with Morocco. Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez promised an “immediate response“. Yet even if the Spanish manage to tame this searing crisis of sovereign rule – and that’s a big “if” – the lessons of it should reverberate not only across Spain but all of Europe. For the fall of Ceuta exposes the lethal strain in globalism. It speaks – screams in fact – to the chaotic trashing of sovereignty, democracy and our very way of life that globalism and its gold-collared acolytes have brought about.

The storming of Ceuta shatters the falsehoods of the left. For years, “progressives” gaslit the public, insisting that the men illegally crossing our borders are “vulnerable people” who are “seeking asylum”. Like Big Brother, they expected us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears and accept that these swaggering blokes from Eritrea or Afghanistan are the wretched of the Earth requiring our love and care and four-star hotels. Ceuta dismantles that lie. The whole world can see there are virtually no women and children in those mobs. The whole world knows Morocco is not ravaged by war or hunger. From now on, every utterance of the phrase “asylum seeker” should invoke noisy, angry scepticism.

The Ceuta crisis also confirms that the moral cowardice of the modern state is like a red rag to hostile actors. It is undeniable that Pedro Sánchez’s lunatic granting of asylum to illegal immigrants emboldened these Moroccan men to pour into soft-touch Spain. In January this year, Sánchez bypassed parliament and issued a royal decree to regularise virtually all “undocumented migrants” on Spanish territory. Almost 1.2million illegal arrivals applied for this regularised status that would grant them the right to reside in Spain, to work there and to enjoy unfettered access to healthcare and education.

The cope is strong in progressive commentators:

July 20, 2026

“Blame Canada”: evergreen. “Invade Canada”? It’s been done before

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Upper Canadian Cavalier points out the obvious … that the United States absolutely could invade Canada and there’s not a lot the Canadian Armed Forces could do to stop them. But that would be the easy part:

“A mere matter of marching …”

The question of “could America ever invade Canada?” is wrong before it is even asked. Picture the MAGA politicos huddled in D.C. and the anon poasters spamming maps of how America could take Canada, as if it were even a question, as if the border were a wall and the wall the point. The whole conversation is midwits who never grasped what America already occupies.

Occupation is the crude instrument of the conqueror who arrives too late, who finds the ground already held by another and must break it by force, and that has never once been the American position in the north. The American position is that of the covert shareholder rather than the invader, and a shareholder does not knock down the door of a house whose deed already sits in his desk.

Empire in its highest form neither occupies nor marches, because it has learned to administer instead, and it does not plant a flag on the palace, since the flag is a confession that the palace was not yet yours. The genius of the modern Global American imperium has been to take without ever confessing, to hold Canada so completely that Canadians experience the holding as their own free choice. To reach for the army now would throw all of that away, trading a profitable and invisible dominion for a visible and bloody one, and teaching the empire at ruinous cost the difference between owning a country and holding it.

The republic was born reaching north with a bayonet, and it should remember how that went. In the winter of 1775 it sent Brigadier General Richard Montgomery and Colonel Benedict Arnold (yes, that Benedict Arnold) up through the snow to seize Quebec. The spirit of the country rose up in the snow to meet them, and Quebec killed Montgomery in a blizzard at the walls, the land itself passing sentence on the invasion before a single treaty could be signed.

That was first offensive act of the American project, it was a failed invasion of Canada that froze to death in the cold for its own arrogance. There is a symmetry waiting at the end of this essay that the reader should carry from the beginning, because a republic that opened its history reaching north may yet close its history the same way. America could invade Canada, but then it would not be able to conquer it, and in that attempt it would destroy the very thing that made its northern dominion worth having, because the soft empire cannot survive being seen and that invasion is nothing other than the act of trading quiet profits for overt pain and suffering.

June 29, 2026

QotD: Roman Imperial frontiers and “defensive barbarism”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here I can’t resist a digression that touches on several of my favorite topics: where do you put your defensive lines? One obvious guess is what Luttwak calls “scientific frontiers”, geographic or other natural features such as rivers, mountains, the edges of deserts, places where the land is already bottlenecked. And that’s not bad as a first order approximation, but there are times that other considerations dominate. For example, placing your borders right along the banks of the Rhine and the Danube is actually quite awkward, because the headwaters of those two rivers come together in a sharp “elbow”. [Image from original post] This results in a kind of reverse-salient poking into your territory, and making it a much longer journey from one side of the intrusion to the other. Much better to conquer that wedge and push the border out a bit. Yes, the frontier is now marginally harder to defend, but it’s more than made up for by the reduced travel time for the army to get anywhere.

Here’s another one — why is Hadrian’s Wall where it is? There’s a much shorter and more defensible alternate location to the north, where the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde create a natural bottleneck. In fact at one point the Romans did build a wall there and claimed all the intervening territory. On paper, the Antonine Wall looks better in every way than Hadrian’s Wall. [Image from original post] It’s shorter, so requires less military “output” to defend. And it encloses more area, so brings to the “inputs” of the machine of state both additional arable land and additional people who can be taxed and conscripted. But as it happened, the Antonine Wall was quickly abandoned, and the empire retreated to Hadrian’s Wall. Why?

It all had to do with the people living between the two walls. They were … hill people who had perfected the art of not being governed. They managed to be so thoroughly intractable, so impossible to control or corral, so very unpleasant to be around, that the Romans eventually threw up their hands in disgust and left them alone. It’s important to understand that this means they must have been true outliers, because the Roman Empire had “unit economics” like an enterprise SaaS business, where “customer acquisition costs” are financed on the assumption that they’ll be paid back in the distant future. Every Roman bureaucrat understood that newly conquered territories would be a drain on fiscal and military resources for a while, until a generations-long process of pacification and Romanization slowly made them net contributors in both departments. But in the case of the lands between the two walls, the payback timeline was so long, and the implied interest rates so high, that even a people as meticulous and relentless as the Romans decided there were better opportunities elsewhere. I count this as a serious victory for the theory of defensive barbarism.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.

June 25, 2026

Why Britain voted for Brexit

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

Pat Condell explains some of the reasons British voters chose Brexit over staying in the EU back in 2016:

Why did we vote for Brexit ten years ago? Because we understood that the core purpose of the European Union is to destroy the independent countries of Europe by opening the borders and transforming a diverse continent of sovereign nations into a single homogenous political bloc governed by a committee of unelected bureaucrats, as a model for the planned global dictatorship.

Obviously, you’re not going to get many votes for that if you just lay it out for people, so you start with something innocuous like trade.

You say “Let’s harmonise our trade arrangements and everything will run more smoothly.”

And people say “Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”

Then you say “While we’re at it, let’s give this small group of people the power to organise all this from one place, and everything will run more smoothly.”

“Well, I suppose that makes sense. We want things to run smoothly.”

Then it’s “Actually, let’s give these people the power to make our laws and override our parliament and justice system, and everything will run much more smoothly.”

“Hold on a second, I don’t know about that …”

“You fascist. You racist. You xenophobe. You bigot. You pig ignorant little Englander. You vermin. You scum.”

Although that attitude certainly helped to tip the balance, the most important reason we voted for Brexit is that politicians had no right to sign away the governance of the UK to a foreign entity, but that is what they did, while pretending it was about trade. They lied to us, and they tried to cheat us out of our country.

That is why we voted for Brexit, and it’s why we’re now being punished for our disobedience by traitors who refuse to secure the border and who are allowing our country to be flooded with millions of unwanted and incompatible immigrants and illegally invaded and occupied by an army of dangerous military age men in whose presence no woman or child is safe.

Forced mass immigration from hostile and barbarous cultures is punishment for Brexit. Our country is being purposely destroyed for not voting the way we were told.

June 14, 2026

“99% of Canadians are decent, law-abiding people”

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

John Konrad explains why, despite agreeing that the vast majority of Canadians are “decent, law-abiding people”, he wants to see the US/Canadian border closed:

Yes. 99% of Canadians are decent, law-abiding people. Friendly neighbors. Good trading partners. Nobody serious disputes that.

I DO NOT CARE

CLOSE THE BORDER

Public safety is not built around the 99%.

We do not have laws, police, and prisons because most people are good. We have them because a small minority can inflict enormous harm on everyone else.

The argument for border enforcement is not that Canadians are bad people. It is that even a small failure rate matters when the consequences are catastrophic.

Free and open borders are a wonderful thing provided both countries are willing and able to identify, remove, and deter the small percentage of dangerous actors who exploit them.

If one side stops filtering effectively, the burden shifts to the other.

And yes, that creates unfairness. When enforcement breaks down, restrictions fall hardest on the innocent majority: families, commuters, truckers, tourists, and businesses. No one should pretend otherwise.

But there is also unfairness in asking another country to absorb preventable risks because difficult enforcement has become politically inconvenient.

A secure border is not an insult to a neighboring nation. It is a hedge against failure.

That is their sovereign choice.

But the United States also has a sovereign responsibility: to reduce risks to its own citizens.

If a partner cannot or will not reliably filter threats, then verification at the border becomes the default. Not because the majority deserves punishment, but because governments exist to manage tail risk, not assume it away.

Open borders require mutual trust.

Trust requires performance.

But the real threat is not the 1% of evil bad actors. The real threat is the 1% of far left lunatics in your government who are facilitating and funding the 1% of criminals.

YOU. The ninety nine percent are the only ones who can demand election reform. YOU are the only check left on their power.

So I absolutely endorse punishing YOU as incentive to demand change now.

A full and total stop of VISAs, temporary and permanent, will cause real stress to your economy, it will make international and domestic travel more difficult, will unfairly hurt Canadians studying in USA, it will hurt many Americans too.

But it’s worth temporary extreme pain is a small price to pay for long term stability.

You are a frog slowly boiling in water. We have asked you to jump out of them pot but you refuse. You just croak “elbows up”

So our choice as Americans is to watch you die slowly or remove you from the pot and chop a leg off so you don’t jump back in.

I believe the latter is the only option. And I believe it’s the lore humane option knowing that the leg will grow back just fine.

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?

April 16, 2026

The EU has managed to revive smuggling as a viable career

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

We’ve all read reports on how bold and forward-focussed the European Union is, but do we give them equal credit for their diligent efforts to revive dying industries?

Title page of a book covering the trial of seven smugglers for the murder of two revenue officers. In the preface the author says “I do assure the Public that I took down the facts in writing from the mouths of the witnesses, that I frequently conversed with the prisoners, both before and after condemnation; by which I had an opportunity of procuring those letters which are herein after inserted, and other intelligence of some secret transactions among them, which were never communicated to any other person.”
W.J. Smith, Smuggling and Smugglers in Sussex, 1749, via Wikimedia Commons.

In late March, European Union (E.U.) officials announced they had taken down a five-country cigarette-smuggling operation and seized over 40 tons of tobacco products. The ambitious network reportedly transshipped the cigarettes far and wide to obscure their sources and destinations, while also hiding them in hidden compartments built into cargo containers. Why would smugglers go through such effort to move perfectly legal products, and why would the authorities care? In Europe, as in the United States, the answer is the same: sky-high taxes.

Smuggled Smokes in Hidden Compartments

In announcing its efforts against the smuggling network operating in Italy, France, Poland, Switzerland, and the U.K., the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which worked with international law enforcement agencies as well as police in all five countries, noted the smugglers used “maritime and commercial routes designed to evade customs inspections”, passed shipments “through Georgia, Kenya, the Netherlands and Turkey, in order to hide the true origin of the illicit goods”, and that “false bottoms were used as hidden compartments built into containers to conceal the tobacco”.

At the conclusion of the investigation, “enforcement activities were carried out at the Port of Genoa, leading to the seizure of close to 41 tonnes of manufactured cigarettes, with an estimated loss of customs duties, excise duties and VAT exceeding €10 million”.

Absolutely nothing motivates government officials like the extraction of taxes from the public. And lots of tax money is at stake when it comes to cigarettes.

Taxes Make Up Most of the Price of Cigarettes

This month, the Tax Foundation, which has a branch in Brussels, reported that “cigarette smokers in the European Union pay far more in excise taxes than they do for the cigarettes themselves”. Report authors Jacob Macumber-Rosin and Adam Hoffer wrote that excise taxes in the E.U., which are intended to deter smoking as much as to raise revenue, start at the equivalent of $2.11 per pack and that the “total excise duty is at least 60 percent of the national weighted average retail price”. Value-added taxes are tallied after excise duties are levied.

“The highest tax in the EU is levied in Ireland at €10.71 ($12.58) per pack of 20 cigarettes, followed by France at €8.09 ($9.51) and the Netherlands at €7.77 ($9.13)”, they added.

April 13, 2026

Young Canadians don’t have the resources to “buy their way out”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter points out the screamingly obvious fact that it’s insane to propose imprisoning young Canadians in a dying economy if they can’t scrape up half a million dollars to escape:

First, young Canadians don’t have shit. They definitely don’t have half a mil to pay the boomers in extortion fees so that they can leave the country.

Second, how are they planning to enforce this? Charge $500k for a passport? What stops the US from just offering amnesty? Ottawa can’t tell Washington what visas it can and cannot offer.

Third, and what makes this malicious boomerfap especially piquant, young Canadian professionals don’t leave because they especially want to. Wanderlust aside, most would prefer to remain close to family and friends.

They leave because they don’t have a choice. The Canadian state is set up to restrict opportunity to the point of nonexistence. Canada is a country that strangles ambition in the crib. As the old joke goes, if Musk had stayed in Canada he’d be a mid-level financial manager at CIBC (with any possibility of further promotion eliminated by the all-of-society DEI imperative).

Canada invests an absurd amount into educating its youth. It then refuses to allow them to use their training. So they leave. The University of Waterloo is one of the best engineering schools on the planet; virtually all of its graduates end up in the Bay area. Because the alternative is sitting on their hands or trying to get a job in the Ministry.

It would be a mistake to see Canadian investment in education as intended for the benefit of Canadian youth, by the way. Like everything else in Canada’s political economy, this is a subsidy to a Liberal Party client group, in this case the academics and administrators staffing the universities. The primary purpose of the universities is providing sinecures to liberals; the secondary purpose is indoctrination of the youth with liberalism; the third, to launder liberal ideas through intellectual channels. Whether the kids learn anything, or whether they can use whatever useful knowledge they acquire to (lol) better themselves or (lmao) “build the country”, is not a priority.

If it were not for the Laurentian Elite running the country into the ground, if young Canadians were not sabotaged at every step of their lives, then there would be no brain drain problem.

But as usual, boomerlibs would rather punish the youth to try and fix the problems the boomerlibs caused.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the progressive hellscape that Canada is becoming, here’s the wife of the Prime Minister boasting to the Liberal convention in Ottawa about how wonderful things are in Soviet Canuckistan:

It would make perfect sense for new grads to look for greener pastures, wouldn’t it? Which is why the Liberals want to force them to stay here, of course.

April 11, 2026

QotD: Kingdoms were not “nations” in the Middle Ages

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Medieval kingdoms and Early Modern states were both built around the personal holdings of individual rulers. For instance, to talk of “Austria” or “Burgundy” in the 1400s as states/countries/governments is to engage in a degree of anachronism. There was no Austrian state, merely the collection of lands either owned or controlled by whoever the reigning Habsburg was at the time. Likewise, Burgundy in, say, 1440 was not a coherent entity, it was simply the collection of lands that Philip the Good (Duke of Burgundy, but also Duke of Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg and Lothier, Count of Artois, Flanders, Charolais, Haniaut, Holland and Zeeland, and the Margrave of Namur). The “kingdom” was thus not a permanent, durable entity so much as a collection of possessions the same way my personal “library” is not permanent building but just a term for “books I happen to own right now”.

It is thus a bit odd that the regions of Westeros are seen by its inhabitants as being clear and unchanging. For instance, the Reach has borders, those borders do not move and everyone in those borders is loyal to House Tyrell. This is not how medieval rule works. The borders of, say, France, shifted over time (some places we consider “obviously” part of France were added only quite late, like French Flanders or Provence) as the ability of the French king to control those regions changed. For long periods of the Middle Ages, large parts of France were effectively controlled by the Kings of England (because they were also Dukes of this or that French duchy).

The idea that France, or Germany or Italy was a distinct, permanent entity with its own existence apart from a given royal family – more than just a space on a map – which comprised a people, their language and the government of those people, this is a modern phenomenon. Indeed, one may argue, it – that is, the nation-state – is the modern phenomenon.

Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-12.

February 23, 2026

Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire PART TWO

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 27 Aug 2025

This should have posted earlier this morning, but for some reason did not.

This is the follow up to last week’s discussion of grand strategy, looking at the reactions and criticisms of Luttwak’s ideas, followed by some of my own thoughts.

February 18, 2026

QotD: Defending the borders of the Roman Empire

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As Luttwak notes, modern historians and military theorists have a tendency to sneer at linear defense lines.1 In fact, some historians of ancient Rome actually blame the decline and eventual collapse of the empire on all the “wasted” energy spent building frontier fortifications. The argument against such “cordon” defenses is that for a given quantity of military potential, spreading it out equally along a perimeter and trying to guard every spot equally dilutes your strength. This makes it easy for an attacker (who picks the time and location of the battle) to concentrate his forces, create a local advantage, and break through.

The thing is, approximately none of this logic applied in the Roman situation. First of all, as we’ve already noted, a huge fraction of the threats the Romans faced were “low-intensity”: border skirmishes, slave raids, pirates and brigands, that sort of thing. Static fortifications, walls and towers, are often more than sufficient for dealing with these problems. Paradoxically, that actually increases the mobility and responsiveness of the main forces. If they aren’t constantly running back and forth along the border dealing with bandits, that means they can respond with short notice to “high-intensity” threats (like major invasions and rebellions) that pop up, and are probably better rested and better provisioned when the emergency arrives. So, far from diluting their strength, a lightly-manned series of linear fortifications actually enabled the Romans to concentrate it.

Secondly, those linear fortifications can also be very useful when that major invasion shows up, even if they are overrun. A defense system doesn’t have to be impenetrable in order to still be very, very useful. One thing it can do is buy time, either for the main army to arrive or for some other strategic purpose. The defenses can also act to channel opposing forces into particular well-scouted avenues of attack, or change the calculus of which invasion routes are more and less appealing. Finally, in the process of setting up those defenses, you probably got to know the terrain extremely well, such that when the battle comes you have a tactical advantage.

[…]

The third, and perhaps most important, reason why the Roman frontier fortifications were actually very smart is that they were carefully designed to double as a springboard for invasions into enemy territory. Luttwak coins the term “preclusive defense” to describe this approach. The basic idea is that an army can take bigger risks — pursue a retreating foe, seize a strategic opportunity that might be an ambush, etc. — if it knows that there are strong, prepared defensive lines that it can retreat to nearby. Roman armies were constantly taking advantage of this, and moreover taking advantage of the fact that the system of border fortifications was also a system of roads, supply lines, food and equipment storage depots, and so on. The limes were not a wall that the Romans huddled behind, they were a weapon pointed outwards, magnifying the power that the legions could project, helping them to do more with less.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.

  1. I, an ignoramus, assumed this was all downstream of the Maginot line’s bad reputation, but Luttwak says it’s actually the fault of Clausewitz.

January 25, 2026

Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire – Part ONE, the start of the debate

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 20 Aug 2025

Following on from videos about military planning under the Republic, and about forts and garrisons, today we will begin to look at one of the big debates in the study of the Roman army and the Roman empire — did the Romans plan in a rational and informed way how to secure and defend their empire for the long term future. In short, did the Roman emperors and their advisors have a Grand Strategy which informed their decisions. This time, we will think about how this all started, and in particular Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976), which really kicked off and did much to shape the debate.

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