First Nations in Canada should address Canadians

I had to chuckle when I read the recent complaints and threats from the native chiefs:

The prime minister’s decision to leave the meeting early wasn’t sitting well with some chiefs.

“We’re like a bunch of puppies – he says jump, and we’ve got to do it,” said Regional Chief of Alberta, George Stanley.

If they do not want to be treated like puppies, the chiefs should not be wheeling and dealing with statesmen.

If there was any merit to their complaints or demands, the native chiefs would present themselves like honorable men: publicly and openly addressing the Canadian people.

Native uprising? That will be the day.

“The world is watching.”

No, they are not.

“In today’s world that response will be more instantaneous.”

No, it will not.

My suggestion to the natives is to start their own media blitz.

Aboriginal elder-assisted parole board hearings

A non-aboriginal murderer gets to have a parole board hearing with aboriginal elders assisting the process and the problem this creates is:

Victims’ families have reported being intimidated by elements of the elder-assisted process — such as the convention that the hearing be conducted sitting in a circle.

I do not get it. It just does not make sense to get upset over this. Either sitting across a table or around in a circle, the convict is going to have a parole hearing whether we like it or not.

I hope this is not just racism against aboriginal culture.

Let Greece and the entire Eurozone default

The best thing that could happen to the Europeans is to have their nation-states default on their debt. The sooner it does, the better.

Unfortunately, there are people who are under the illusion that this can be stopped and insist on more bailouts. I believe that is misguided. Whether they like it or not, Europe will go into recession. It is not a question of if but of when the recession will occur.

In years to come, people will closely examine why the statesmen failed the proletariat. I have faith that future generations will be able to point to the printing of money as the source of malinvestment and recessions. There is no more boogeyman nor foreign invader. The source of the economic problem is found in government monopolization of money and the selective distribution of cheap money to the rich. Historians will have no choice but to link the century of warfare with the century of the failed central banking experiment.

The sooner the default, the sooner the economy can approach stability. Private investors will shy away from trusting government borrowing. Creditors will be more critical when they accept borrowers. Malinvestment will slow down and resources will be invested more astutely.

Back to the present.
The affluent Europeans will know what it is like to be economic refugees and they will feel for a long time in their own native land. Canadians should prepare themselves for massive immigration from Europe. We will be going back to our roots.

Time to decriminalize marijuana

If there is one good thing about the Liberal proposal to legalize and regulate marijuana, it is this:

“We were expanding the debate,” Lavoie told CTV’s Power Play in Ottawa on Monday.

I would like to see the debate expand towards decriminalization and end there. We do not need the regulation. Regulation is just a different way of making the same thing illegal.

Privatize marriage industry in Canada

Clearly, it is time to get government out of the marriage registration and recognition business. This latest debacle of two lesbians who want to divorce raising a stink is hilarious! Here we have them wanting a divorce but the government is telling them they are not married. You would think they would shrug their shoulders and take it as a win. “Yay! We do not have to bother paying for a divorce!” It saves them a hell of a lot of trouble but no, they are raising a stink about it. How ridiculous. I want to draw attention to a brilliant summation of the real problem:

What the anti-Harper yahoos forget is there good reasons for the residency requirements since a divorce involves dividing assets and the jurisdiction matters. If you remove the residency requirements then one spouse could file for divorce in the jurisdiction that maximizes their financial advantage at the expense of their ex-partner. The most fair way to resolve this is to use the jurisdiction where the couple resides at the time of divorce.

There may be some good that comes out of this absurd media stunt. People may realize that marriage recognition should not be a one-size-fits-all rule. There should be variation in marriage contracts. The government should not be monopolizing this industry. People want variety!

I have touched on this before:

Credit bureaus, better business bureaus and safety standards are business models to emulate. Just like your credit rating can be recorded, reported, amended and researched, your marital status can be registered in the same manner without the need for government. It does not even have to be very complicated. Private formal marriage registries can be as simple as a copyright office.

If governments do not abandon their control of marriage law,
then I will expect prenuptial agreements to become more common.

In 25 years from now, Facebook will corner the private marriage contract market.

US Dollar Hegemony and why we go to war

The Iranians no longer want to use the US Dollar in exchange for oil. That is what this is all about!

The artificial demand for US Dollars is slipping away. The Iranians need to be taught a lesson again and again and again until everybody is forced to use the American printed paper currency.

In fifty years from now, Economics 101 classes will dispense of the false label of fiat currency to describe modern exchange. Instead, they will use the more correct term: forced currency.

Ron Paul predicts the future

In 2002, not only did Ron Paul predict the recent future of American politics but he presented his prediction in nearly perfect chronological order:

Hat tip to The Council for the National Interest Foundation.

Rick Santorum: The Harvey Milk of the Republican Primary

Maclean’s Jaime Weinman draws our attention to a most interesting piece of non-satire. It would appear that National Review Online‘s Terence P. Jeffrey is worried that Rick Santorum is a sleeper agent for teh gays:

A profoundly instructive moment on this point occurred in Saturday night’s debate when Josh McElveen of WMUR-TV asked whether it ought to be legal for same-sex couples to adopt children.

The correct answer to this is: No. It was, is, and always will be wrong for any government to hand over in an adoption the custody of a child to a homosexual couple. A government that does so violates the God-given right of the child to be raised by a mother and father…

Yet when McElveen put his question to Rick Santorum, Santorum failed to give a coherent answer. Santorum seemed to say — although his exact meaning was unclear — that although he wanted a constitutional amendment to define “marriage” as the union of one man and one woman, the question of same-sex adoptions was up to state governments to decide…

If a homophobe can’t count on Rick Santorum to Protect The Children from show tunes and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy re-runs, then who can he count on?

Ever the model of level-headedness, NRO‘s Andy McCarthy counters:

… and Terence Jeffrey is wrong. Adoption, like marriage, is not a matter the Constitution commits to federal government control. It is, like the vast run of day-to-day issues, a matter to be determined by the states. There is nothing conservative about imposing federal government mandates on matters the Constitution gives the federal government no say over.

…

If Mr. Jeffrey wants a federal adoption standard imposed, then he should be arguing for a constitutional amendment banning adoptions by gay couples…

I guess a refuation based on constitutional technicalities is better than no refutation at all. ‘Twould have been nice, though, had someone at NRO objected to the substance (such as it was) of Mr. Jeffrey’s (vapid) blog post.

Perhaps, just perhaps, offering orphans a loving and stable home is a better option than shuffling them through the system, one’s prejudices aside.

No Free Trade from China

A while ago, I wrote about the perverted application of the theory of competitive advantage in a post called Everything we ignore about Free Trade. I want to be clear: I love free trade.

What I hate is the fact that free trade does not exist and everybody ignores injustice in the economy. Recent international events constantly demonstrate that we do not have international free trade. In China, local citizens are protesting the construction of a coal-fired plant where they live. The Chinese stooges who work for the government are beating them into submission.

There may be nothing that anybody can do to stop the evil Chinese government. However, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the cheap junk we get from Chinese factories demonstrates the benefits of industrialization for them and the benefits of free trade for us.

The truth is that we benefit from both outright theft and our ignorance of the truth.

Let her cover her face

I am 100% against the offensive and oppressive edict from the Conservative government that muslim women who, as an act of faith, choose to cover their faces must remove their niqab to take the oath of citizenship.

I have heard no good argument in favour of this measure. There are other ways of confirming identity, and their are other ways to accommodate the very few new Canadians with this particular religious conviction. This move is based neither in principle nor in necessity. The Tories have an axe to grind, and they don’t care if they chip away at our freedom of religion.

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